There’s something about looking in the rearview mirror—even season after season in fashion—that gives us a bit of clarity. And it’s about that time: on Sunday, the biggest celebrity names will turn out on the Golden Globes red carpet and set the tone for many of our choices in the year. My hope is that if style in 2025 revolved around a breakneck speed competition for virality and the repackaging of self into a new kind of perfection (was it a coincidence that The Substance was a major player last awards year?), that in 2026 the fashion on the red carpet kicks off a quest for individuality.
We’ve already started to see some of the most interesting characters in Hollywood dressing the part: Teyana Taylor in a vertiginously cut Tom Ford dress by Haider Ackermann to the Time 100 Next gala late last year—the kind of sartorial irreverence only she could propose as black tie. And Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner in ping-pong ball-orange, upped the ante of how stars can leverage fashion to promote a film by way of a viral look. These two know well how to be famous, and understand how many eyes are on them when they step out together—why not embrace the circus? (There’s also Meg Stalter and Paul W. Downs, who meme-fied Chalamet and Jenner at the Critics Choice Awards earlier this week—yes, please, more fun!)
Jacob Elordi in Bottega Veneta at the 2026 Critics Choice Awards.
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Paul Mescal in Gucci at the 2026 Critics Choice Awards.
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Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner in custom Chrome Hearts.
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Paul W. Downs and Meg Staler recreate Chalamet and Jenner’s looks.
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Alternatively, Jessie Buckley is embodying the movie star in her own, subtle and sophisticated way by wearing mostly black and white and offering resistance, in a sense, to the sartorial spectacle of the red carpet. Buckley, who is styled by Goldberg this season, has been wearing custom Dior and Chanel and The Row—the most coveted of labels. She looks great, but most of all looks like herself. How fabulous. The same could be said of Jacob Elordi and Paul Mescal, who look every bit the leading man without the gimmick of the internet boyfriend—no red carpet thirst traps or attempts at standing out for no reason at all. They look good, sexy; Elordi in a leather tie and Mescal in tuxedos worn over silky knit v-necks, both at the Critics Choice Awards. Even those behind the camera are coming as they are: see Chloé Zhao, in witchy and ethereal Lanvin and Rodarte frocks.
Jessie Buckley in Chanel at the 35th Annual Gotham Film Awards in December, 2025.
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Chloé Zhao at the 2026 Crtiics Choice Awards.
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In the last year, the conversation around fashion could be neatly packaged into two separate bundles.
Within the industry, it was a time of disruption: close to two dozens of luxury fashion houses, including giants like Christian Dior, Chanel, and Gucci and small-but-mighty favorites like Loewe and Dries Van Noten changed their creative leads, altering the fashion landscape and the way in which we will dress moving forward. Giorgio Armani, one of the industry’s last-remaining working patriarchs, died in September at 91; and the Prada Group, which owns the Prada brand and Miu Miu, purchased Versace after Donatella Versace’s exit from the helm of the label she safeguarded and spearheaded for close to three decades following her brother Gianni’s murder in 1997. Fashion, in an emotional sense, is moving into 2026 without the work of two of its guiding lights.
From the outside looking in, fashion grappled with the rise of newly ever shrinking bodies. Thinness, now commandeered by Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs, refashioned the style landscape as models, actors, influencers, and even athletes were downsizing to new extremes. Clothes on the runways mostly shrank to accommodate to these standards of yore, which had been challenged by the body positivity movement of the late 2010s but were now being resurrected and revitalized. The number on the scales and measuring tapes seemingly mattered more than ever before, and if that wasn’t enough, but the adage “age is just a number” took literal meaning: The popularization of deep plane facelifts, and the conversation around the wealthy looking decades younger, took a toll on fashion, too. The new luxury is not just what’s in one’s closet, but how youthful and tiny that one can pay to look.
