The Spring/Summer 2025 runway shows concluded a year of fashion weeks that started with wearability. Quiet luxury, “old money aesthetics,” simple salable products, and the shift of creative director hires away from singular geniuses to proven company men (always men) left the industry on shaky footing. To say “we’re so back” after the SS25 collections would be an overstatement, but fashion’s pendulum has swung back to clothing that delights and inspires. It’s trying to, anyway.

“A lot of people have talked about the fashion universe righting itself,” Lauren Sherman told me on her podcast Fashion People, adding, “we saw a bunch of creative director appointments where the designers were, like, commercial and the idea was that they were gonna sell even more stuff than they sold before.” That, in fact, isn’t what happened. The tenure of Gucci’s replacement for Alessandro Michele, Sabato De Sarno, has coincided with a 20% downturn in the business.

The Washington Post’s fashion critic Rachel Tashjian reviewed De Sarno’s SS25 collection more bluntly: “These are luxury basics for luxury basics.”

Indeed, the wack blandness of many of the flagship SS25 collections looked less compelling than ever across shows in New York, London, Milan, and Paris. A year ago, we sold ourselves on wearability; today, that’s the least of our concerns. Instead, fashion needs designers to sell ideas—and it needs executives to believe that ideas can power a business. “If you have a really creative person making awesome stuff, sometimes that stuff’s sellable, sometimes that stuff’s not, but you can sell other things,” Sherman explained. “You have to actually give people something to think about.”

The designers who sparked thought are the ones worth recalling after the shows concluded. At Prada, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons abandoned themes in favor of creating individual characters on the catwalk: a party girl evading the rain in a mirrored dress and anorak. An uptown doyenne popping by the bodega in a leopard-print car coat and shoved-on sneakers. A starlet in a kelly-green bodysuit and sheer prairie dress. The effect was strange, confusing even, but highlighted the brave iconoclasm of the Prada brand—and its loyal customers.

That spirit of wardrobing characters continued at Saint Laurent, with its big-suited Yves impersonators giving way to brocade-clad dilettantes, an embrace of the dualities of style. Bally curved hemlines across its punk leather jackets and its prim jeans to create an eclectic effect, and Louis Vuitton painted a scene of artsy women in tunics, one-legged pants (a surprising breakout trend this season), and golden fringe skirts who, while having little in common with each other, had a lot in common with the breadth of the LV customer. Bottega Veneta, Valentino, sacai, and Chloé all found new ways to vault forward their ideas about a woman’s style, either pristinely weird like at BV and sacai, or nostalgically chic like at Valentino and Chloé. Independent brands like Kiko Kostadinov and ALL-IN found quirky ways to channel a muse (space-age pilots and uptown girlies, respectively) as an avenue to create diverse collections of coveted, provocative, and dynamically designed items.

Another big idea beyond a clever cast of weird and wonderful characters was a new embrace of sexuality. From Balenciaga’s bodysuit lingerie to Chopova Lowena’s cancan girls revealing their knickers, designers the world over found ways to make sexy silly, or cute, or courageous. From Alaïa’s austere vamps to Ashley Williams’s kawaii cuties, all had some sinful undies to show off, even more so at Miu Miu, where bodysuits were layered in crystal belts and bralettes were half wrapped in sweaters, the models in a perpetual state of getting dressed.

That’s a more optimistic take on the now than the perpetual state of unease that Rei Kawakubo evokes at Comme des Garçons. In one of the most awesome and arresting presentations, Kawakubo darted between migrant crises to female body horror to the resplendent release of poufed white clouds. It was scary, suspenseful, utterly weird, and when a model stepped out in a midriff-revealing two-piece set of blobs, oddly sexual. That’s Comme’s expertise: clothing that challenges you, haunts you for weeks, and drives you into its stores and its temples to ideas (Dover Street Market is essentially a manifestation of Kawakubo and her husband Adrian Joffe’s obsessions) to question and consume. The DSM stores will celebrate their 20th anniversary next year—that’s 20 years of ideas turning into sales. CEOs, are you keeping up?

The best example of anyone keeping up with the times is Jonathan Anderson. At LOEWE he masterfully pushed craftsmanship to new extremes with hand-pulled silks and portraits printed on feathers. Wire-hemmed dresses danced around shins and sneakers and Julia Nobis took a stroll in feather bloomers and a crisp, knotted polo top. With their oversized brogues and clean, idyllic faces, the LOEWE models looked angelic but unplaceable, like heroines of a civilization just about to exist. Isn’t that exciting? Seeing something you can’t quite place yet? Being at the beginning of something, being at the center of a new equation of fine art, celebrity, craft, and cool? That’s what makes Anderson the ideal designer for our times—and the ideal candidate for any other major design job.

“I think if you’re going to do a show, there has to be a purpose to the show,” he told reporters after his JW Anderson show in London. “Life is not always about business.”

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