Story by Editor-at-Large CAROLINA OGLIARO
At New York Fashion Week, Joseph Altuzarra unveiled a collection that thrived on tension. SS26 was not about offering easy beauty or escapist romance, but about confronting fashion’s ability to live in paradox. In a moment where clarity is often demanded, Altuzarra instead embraced ambiguity, pairing severity with whimsy, elegance with disquiet.
The show opened with a jacket sculpted to near-architectural precision worn against voluminous balloon trousers, a reminder that tailoring remains Altuzarra’s anchor. But almost immediately, the rigor softened, florals appeared, painted as if mid-brushstroke, and swan motifs circled across dresses like half-remembered dreams. Skirts were structured on hula-hoop silhouettes, simultaneously playful and unsettling, as if daring us to question where the silhouette ends and spectacle begins.
Materials were chosen as emotional instruments. Stiff satin, deceptively simple, shifted under light like armor one moment and liquid the next. Hand-painted silks evoked intimacy, while feathery knits added a fragile, almost nervous texture. Faux-fur trims were not nostalgic but precise, used to sharpen the mood rather than embellish. Even accessories carried the same duality, Origami bags newly encrusted, slingbacks with knife-sharp precision, boots pulled thigh-high in leather that spoke of defiance as much as seduction.
The color palette read like a state of mind: grounded in deep blacks and earthy browns, then fractured with pastel interruptions, a visual metaphor for fragility breaking through resilience. Nothing here was arbitrary. Each piece seemed to test how far contradiction could stretch before collapsing.
What lingers most is not a single look, but the philosophy underscoring the show. Altuzarra does not present femininity as fixed; he shows it bending under pressure, reasserting itself through reinvention. This collection, at its core, is not about fantasy but reflection. It acknowledges instability, political, social, and emotional, and turns it into form, texture, and rhythm.
Altuzarra SS26 is therefore not a retreat into beauty, but a confrontation with it. It suggests that in 2026, fashion’s strength lies not in uniform answers, but in garments that embody duality: armor and vulnerability, romance and rigor, play and provocation. The unease is intentional, the contradictions deliberate.
