Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Volume 5 of B.H. Magazine. To get your copy (and access to future issues), subscribe here.
The biggest spectacle during fashion week wasn’t a runway show. It was a wedding. A $50 million extravaganza that commandeered Venice amid local protests, ultimately rubber-stamped by a (digital, to be fair) Vogue cover – fashion’s ultimate authority.
When billionaire Jeff Bezos, the world’s fourth-richest man, married Lauren Sánchez – surrounded by helicopters and a Rolodex of A- through D-list celebrities after a week of extravagance, including, without a hint of irony, docking his $500 million, 413-foot yacht Koru in Cannes so Sánchez could accept an environmental award – it confirmed what this season’s menswear collections had already suggested: restraint, discretion, and, most importantly, taste are out. Gauche is the new luxury.
Fashion rarely speaks in plain truths – menswear even less so than womenswear. There are only so many hidden messages to be conveyed in a combination of jacket, shirt, and pants, after all. But the same week as the Bezos-Sánchez wedding, the collections in Paris and Milan held up a mirror to the current culture in a way that revealed every pore and ingrown hair on its chin.
Brands that might once have flirted with nuance came in hot, resurrecting a blend of ‘80s and ’90s Wall Street clichés. A fantasy of excess that comes from wealth. Bigger, bolder, brassier, brasher. No brand said it outright, but the collective mood was clear: stealth wealth has left the building, and the new baroque is holding court.
Plenty of trend analysts have predicted the preppy revival, but the current state of affairs feels beyond collegiate colour. This is the aesthetic of good old-fashioned greed. Gordon Gecko would be proud.
Celine, under new creative lead Michael Rider, channelled both the Philo era and Slimane’s long-legged provocateurs, but filtered through a preppy fever dream of Ivy League throwbacks and exaggerated power shoulders – a hangover from his days at Ralph Lauren. Scarlet bombers, grass-green tailoring, and charm bracelets piled up like heirlooms found in a vintage store curated by a trust fund kid on the brink of rebellion.
Armani’s return to The Gigolo silhouette was less revival, more reincarnation. Washed silk shirts tucked into pleated pants, jackets cut loose and louche, everything was imbued with an oily, cinematic glisten – power dressing rebranded as eternal elegance. It was a 116-look exercise in visual memory. Armani knows the line between seduction and sleaze is razor thin. This season, he leaned in.
Meanwhile, Pharrell Williams’ slow departure from the hip hop and street culture that marked the beginning of his tenure at Louis Vuitton seems almost complete. The brand indulged in maximalism, thinly disguised as mindfulness. Seven-layer coats, denim suits dyed in Damier brown, embroidery edged in silver and stone, ostensibly Indian-inspired, but unmistakably about flash. Beneath the talk of travel and refinement was a very LVMH kind of ostentation.
Vuitton doesn’t do subtle. It does scale. And this season, the scale was biblical.
The silhouette shift was industry-wide: narrowness replaced by swagger, tailoring recut for theatrics. And in every case, the suit was no longer a tool of discretion. Preppy codes reemerged as costume. Dior, Celine, even Dolce & Gabbana dabbled in prep tropes. Argyle, crested blazers, go-to-hell pastels. Dolce & Gabbana upped the ante with an entire pyjama section. Who couldn’t think immediately of Hugh Hefner, eternally at leisure, watching this? It’s the perfect wardrobe for the Nepo Baby who never needs to waste time on work.
Before I’m accused of crying poor – literally – I’m all for a healthy dose of trashiness. It keeps the culture moving and the beige banality of quiet luxury has made cashmere feel suffocating. But even trashiness can be done in good taste. Or at the very least good fun. Vivienne Westwood’s tailoring, ordering a 7 and 7 after dinner, gold Casio watches and service station sunnies. Taste, in the traditional sense, is irrelevant.
But what do we call this new moment? It’s not logomania. It’s not streetwear. And it’s definitely not “quiet luxury,” which died somewhere between the final season of Succession and the Bezos-Sánchez wedding. If that was the funeral, this season was the afterparty.
The modern incarnation of baroque garishness is entirely about display, not craft. It borrows codes of class and power, from preppy, aristocratic, tailored and distorts them into something more lurid, more theatrical. It’s ’80s wealth redressed for digital performance. Money is the aesthetic now.
The result is fashion unburdened by good intentions. There’s no performative minimalism here. No sustainability talk, no inclusive narratives. Just exquisite things, priced out of reach, made to be seen and never touched. Its luxury returned to its purest function: to separate, to elevate, to provoke envy.
The industry won’t say this out loud, but Spring/Summer 2026 has made it clear – this isn’t fashion for the people, it’s fantasy for the few. And finally, it’s done pretending otherwise.
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