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NEW YORK — I was in the process of getting a sunburn at a fashion show for the first time ever when I saw it. Jane Wade's spring-summer 2027 collection was coming down a makeshift runway on Pier 64 on Manhattan's West Side, and a model passed by without shoes on, her bare feet wet and covered in stray green blades of grass.
It was the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and guests were fanning themselves with anything available as the afternoon heat climbed to an alarming-for-September 81 degrees.
Allegations that the city's government had obfuscated the extent of air pollution after the World Trade Center attack had just surfaced; other headlines ticking across our phones in recent days had included an escalating trade war with our friendly northern neighbors and a researcher at a major artificial intelligence firm quitting over concerns that the technology might - cool cool cool - escape human control and destroy our species.
And I thought, I, too, would love to kick off my shoes and walk in the grass, maybe even right off this pier into the river. Just for a brief respite from my grieving city and my beleaguered country and my potentially doomed species on our overheating planet. The water, I thought idly now as a model walked by in a blue-gray bikini top and waterproof trail sandals, would feel so refreshing.
Rarely does such a cohesive, poignant theme emerge from any given New York Fashion Week. But this September, a surprising number of designers showed work that seemed to yearn for a breath of fresh air, for the obliviating embrace of the wilderness and the natural world.
Jane Wade, whose last few seasons have experimented with the familiar silhouettes of officewear and workwear, titled this decidedly more off-the-grid collection "The Riverbed." Models wearing hues that evoked river water, mud, moss and stone made literal the impulse to escape to the woods, carrying tents, towels, water bottles and camping backpacks. Tory Burch draped her models in feathered scarves that resembled elongated pine cones and sweaters that looked blanketed by soft, fuzzy lichens. Pipenco's runway show had perhaps the most overt sylvan connections: The theme, Muma Pădurii, was based on Romanian folklore, named after a witchlike shape-shifting guardian of the forest. Models walked with large branches fastening their capes and hoods and skirts emulating the delicate lattice of the bridal veil mushroom.
The Los Angeles label Rio's last two shows have been confrontational and political — direct responses to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and anti-immigrant sentiment — but this time around, designer Rio Uribe showed dresses adorned with leaves, vines and butterflies, skirts reminiscent of carnivorous plants, and men's ties made of driftwood in what fashion writer Max Berlinger called "a real 'touch grass' moment." Aknvas, helmed by Danish designer Christian Juul Nielsen, has lately explored boarding-school aesthetics and dark Danish fairy tales but found a gentler look for this spring: Models in pastel ruffles and floral fabrics carried wild bouquets of flowers and sticks, one even wearing a shirt that read "Nymph." Thom Browne, whose usually bookish-goth mega-shows are among the hottest tickets of every Fashion Week, incorporated ladybugs, beetles, bumblebees and dragonflies into his show, which revolved around a giant chrysalis that eventually transformed into a butterfly.
The emerging designer Caroline Zimbalist's spring collection used her signature bioplastic accents - heat-shrunken into unpredictable, organic-looking forms - to evoke insects' exoskeletons, as well as "butterfly wings, orchid petals, seeds, nuts and the rings of aged trees," she said. Insect populations are declining, Zimbalist told me: "One thing I look at is this decaying world around us and decaying corals, decaying life. … I was really drawn to the organic markings and the speckling and the trail marks of insects, and I was like, 'How can I replicate that?'"
Even those who weren't longing for the forest specifically were dreaming of escaping into the clean purity of nature. Lithuanian designer Aiste Hong incorporated her memories of the low-lying vegetation in the dunes on the coast of her home nation into a moss-colored burnout viscose dress with patches of fringe. Hong wanted "irregular, imperfect, real texture," she said. "A little rugged." Sandy Liang's spring collection was a love letter to playing outside and, as her show notes put it, "getting dolled up to run around," hence one skirt with a soccer ball print and another with a neat array of hiker pockets.
Everyone was out of office, really, or out of the country: Understated New York cool-girl label Khaite made a rare pivot with a romantic Venice-inspired collection; Ralph Lauren, fashion's poet of Americana, kicked off his sumptuous navy-and-white runway show with Andrea Bocelli's rendition of "Love in Portofino" and sent models down the runway in boater hats. Dennis Basso, appreciator of New York City's uptown girls and society ladies, wrote in his show notes that, actually, the Dennis Basso woman was entering a new era, and she "is equally at home in the world's most luxurious resorts or escaping to a remote destination completely off the map." Models wore linen dresses and lightweight summer tweeds.
Certainly, you might ask: Isn't everyone thinking about the healing, restorative ways of nature in the springtime? Didn't Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly address this once, like, pretty memorably?
But in fashion, that's not necessarily true. The avant-garde label Wiederhoeft's spring-summer 2027 show, for example, built a whole alternate world of interplanetary matriarchy (complete with a giant, "Ozymandias"-style statue of a head). Advisry's spring collection explores the tension between America's political role in the world and its cultural one. Highlights of last year's spring-summer 2026 New York Fashion Week included a techno-dystopian AI nightmare world brought to life by Private Policy, while Thom Browne and Area delivered alien encounters and a glittering ode to New York's nightlife scene, respectively.
These recent pretty gestures toward the earthly and natural might signal the arrival of a new and gentler fashion paradigm. Over in Europe, the divorce between the storied Spanish luxury brand Balenciaga and its longtime creative director Demna - a marriage that disrupted global streetwear and remade it in Balenciaga's noisy, severe, provocative image - and both parties' immediate reinventions thereafter could herald the end of a particularly freaky era.
Or, maybe, this moment just means that here in the United States, we've reached the point where we all feel like logging off, wandering into the woods and never returning.
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