Everyone’s Tired, So Fashion Is Slowing Down

By Akanksha Kamath 

After years of micro-trends and online noise, a gentler way of dressing is emerging- rooted in nostalgia, taste, secondhand finds and the spaces between the digital and the real, says Akanksha Kamath.

I’m writing this while listening to Hilary Duff’s This Is What Dreams Are Made Of, which feels almost too on the nose given that this is a story about how we’re about to dress in a year that arrived without any real ceremony. I don’t know about you, but to me, the arrival of 2026 felt like one circular leap from 2025 into something that doesn’t yet have a personality, or a uniform, or even a clear emotional temperature. Just a quiet collective realisation that we’re still here — slightly exhausted, deeply online, cautiously hopeful — and that what we wear next might say more about our inner lives than anything else. 

Because if fashion over the last few years has been about performance and virality, what’s emerging now feels markedly different – more interior, almost tender.

Nostalgia, for one, has returned — but not as irony or Y2K cosplay. This time, it arrives with emotional strings attached.

Charli XCX’s recent Wuthering Heights-esque visual world, all sheer whites and haunted pastoral romance, felt less like a reference and more like a mood: ghostly, feminine, unguarded. Around the same time, Hilary Duff performed in London, surrounded by confetti and ribbons, singing to a crowd that collectively reverted to their childhood selves for ninety minutes straight. Watching thousands of grown adults scream lyrics from another lifetime felt oddly profound. Of course everyone left wanting denim corsets and cargo trousers again. Of course nostalgia suddenly felt wearable.

Even the V&A’s Marie Antoinette exhibition reads, in hindsight, like a cultural breadcrumb. Her berets, lace, bows, sugared pastels, purples and pinks signal not extravagance but longing — a soft ache for girlhood, for ornament, for emotional excess without apologising.

Designers are already speaking this language. Simone Rocha continues to romanticise fragility. Chloé, under Chemena Kamali’s boho-nomadic revival, is leaning into memory dressing. Cecilie Bahnsen’s silhouettes feel like feelings. Dilara Findikoglu, Roksanda, Emilia Wickstead — and in India, Eka and Pero — are all circling the same idea: femininity not as performance, but as refuge.

Which brings us neatly to something else brewing beneath the surface of 2026: the return of taste.

We are drowning in things. Content. Clothes. Brands. Drops. Micro-trends arriving and expiring before you’ve even opened the tab. The churn has reached a point of near suffocation — the next scarf, the next vest, the next algorithm-approved “essential”.

Recently, a video surfaced on my feed comparing high-street clothing today with pieces made ten or even twenty years ago. The creator dissected seams, linings, tailoring, sizing — and the conclusion was bleak. Clothes today are cheaper, thinner, and rushed. Designed not to last, but to circulate… and then end up somewhere far away from our bodies, beached somewhere far out of sight.

Which is perhaps why 2026 feels poised to crown a new kind of authority: arbiters of taste.

Not influencers, not hype beasts — but people with depth. Someone who knows couture archives intimately. Someone who understands a niche weave from a specific region of South India. Someone who can contextualise, not just consume.

We’re already seeing this instinct take root, or more like bubbling back up, in India, with patrons of culture stepping forward — from the Maharani of Baroda unveiling her extensive Raja Ravi Varma collection, to Princess Gauravi Kumari hosting craft-led gatherings in Jaipur. Taste, once again, is becoming cultural capital.

This renewed obsession with discernment also feeds into the quiet return of the It girl.

In 2024, It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin by Marisa Meltzer, offered a precise dissection of what actually makes an It girl. The key revelation? She cannot crown herself. She must be anointed by others. And she must exist at the intersection of culture — not just beautiful, not just wealthy, not just visible, but emotionally legible.

Jane Birkin herself was the original bag charm girl. Her Hermès Birkin worn down, stickered, scribbled on, softened by life. Long before bag charms became a trend cycle, she understood that style lives in use.

Which is why last year’s obsession — charms, trinkets, brat green, white vests, lighters clipped to bags — wasn’t random at all. It was instinctive. A search for personality in a sea of sameness.

Every generation has its It girl. Alexa Chung understood this fluently. And today, we’re watching new figures emerge quietly within our own circles – women who set the tone. I think a modern It girl that has come up front and centre might actually be Bhavitha Mandava of Chanel fame. She’s perfectly modern, digitally-friendly and a Chanel girlie. What more can an It Girl-to-be ask for, really? 

Hand in hand with taste culture comes another shift: found culture.

Secondhand luxury has become survival strategy for anyone trying to dress well without financial implosion. Vestiaire. eBay. Archive hunting at 2 a.m. The thrill of discovery replacing the dopamine of newness. 

Interestingly, this is extending even into nostalgic searches for 1980s and ‘90s original prints of fashion editorials and campaigns by brands. In an FT article that dissects the phenomenon, one Commes des Garcons vintage printed look book was being offered on eBay for $1,000. There’s an urge for raw creativity, before the polish of AI and ChatGPT. 

But the next phase will demand more from brands themselves. Authentic buy-back programmes. Archive resales handled with integrity, not artificial scarcity or inflated pricing. Circularity, but without the marketing theatre. Because the consumer is now too informed — and too tired — to be sold morality without substance.

At the same time, fashion is turning outward — literally — towards nature. A kind of touching grass moment for all of us who are terminally online.

Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Couture debut and Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel couture offering both suggested the same thing: we’re craving earth. Mushrooms, pastoral fantasy, Disney-like innocence, feathers, wings, angels, surreal creatures stepping gently into the city.

Schiaparelli’s scorpions and birdlike forms grounded fantasy in the real world, while Blazy leaned into childlike wonder. Anderson’s message felt clearest of all: in an accelerated industry smoothed over by AI perfection, returning to nature feels like a search for real, raw creativity.

Which leads to perhaps the most fascinating shift of all: the human trace.

Millennials experimented with style in bedroom mirrors, magazines, MySpace photos and low-res digital cameras. Today’s youth experiment somewhere else entirely — through avatars, skins, virtual wardrobes and role-play identities. Platforms like Roblox and Twitch are not escapism as much as they are dress rehearsals.

At BoF Voices, I met founders building fashion AI platforms directly inside Roblox. Entire generations are learning silhouette, proportion and identity digitally first — long before clothes ever touch the body. Style is being tested virtually, then translated physically. This is a generational distinction we’re only beginning to understand. Recently, while watching Love Island Australia (don’t judge), one contestant talks about Ariana Grande as her skin on a popular game online: Fortnite. It’s interesting how a digital world can offer exploration of self and identity through style and dress, and how this could manifest in how we dress IRL.

Clothes seem to be shifting towards things that feel familiar and lived-in rather than overly constructed, with slouchy knits, ribbed tanks, soft cardigans and denim that doesn’t try too hard. Ballet flats are back too, for their comfort of course, but also perennial existence. These are fits that sit close to the body and feel instinctive, the kind you might wear while lying on your bedroom floor listening to music, without really thinking about who might see you. Jewellery is moving in a similar direction, with charm necklaces, lockets and heart motifs feeling personal and sentimental, as though they’ve been passed down or picked up along the way rather than deliberately styled. Bags are softer and worn close, more companion than statement, while beauty feels easier too — brushed-out hair, lived-in makeup, a hint of shimmer, if you like. At the same time, people seem to be pulling back from social media, choosing absence from time to time, over constant presence. 

In that sense, 2026 doesn’t feel like a year for reinvention so much as adjustment — a turning down of the volume, a return to instinct, and a way of dressing that feels truer.