Fashion Month Delivered Real Clothes Over Spectacle, and Designers Stopped Trying to Copy Each Other

After seasons of over-the-top presentations and derivative design, this fashion month favored wearable, interesting clothes made by designers confident in their own aesthetic rather than copying competitors.

Summary of Sex, Skirts, and Saint Laurent. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:08:34 — There was noticeably more practical, wearable clothing on runways this season compared to recent years, with collections designed for actual women to wear rather than pure spectacle.
• 00:10:25 — The overall vibe and energy of Fashion Month was significantly improved, with good weather, happy designers, the right mix of people in audiences, and genuinely excellent clothes creating an optimistic atmosphere.
• 00:12:02 — Consumers are buying interesting, beautiful clothes rather than boring or ugly items, signaling that if people are spending money, they want something worth the investment.
• 00:16:54 — Fewer designers are trying to emulate successful peers like Jonathan Anderson or Demna; instead, brands are building on their own aesthetics, which is more effective and authentic.
• 00:33:00 — Prada delivered an authoritative, directional collection with wearable pieces including straight skirts, leather jackets, and interesting prints that felt like what people actually want to wear.
• 00:35:46 — Miuccia Prada succeeds because she balances creative freedom with commercial viability, understanding that fashion must work as both art and business simultaneously.
• 00:43:34 — Fashion discourse has become oversaturated with psychoanalysis of designers’ personal struggles and CEO dynamics; observers want to evaluate the actual clothes rather than speculate about designers’ emotional states.
• 01:02:02 — Virginie Viard’s Chanel collection feels innocent and pure in its approach to fashion, using accessible design ideas like no-bra styling and princess-inspired dresses that somehow feel subversive rather than cheesy.
• 01:05:38 — This season produced four collections where editors genuinely wanted to make purchases—Prada, Celine, Jill Sander, and Chanel—because the pieces were so compelling and well-designed.

In depth

Why this season felt different: real clothes and better vibes

Sherman and Ottenberg both argue this was the best-feeling fashion month in roughly a year and a half, but their reasoning is more interesting than the verdict itself. Ottenberg’s benchmark isn’t the clothes alone but the whole atmosphere: good weather, designers who seemed happy, audiences that felt right, and a general sense of ease that he contrasts explicitly with the period right after the big 2023-24 wave of designer musical chairs, when nobody was settled into their new houses and the only currency was rumor 00:10:4300:10:51. He’s careful to separate two different kinds of good season — the rare one where the clothes are seismic and the mood is electric, and this one, which he calls pumping rather than magic, a real but lower-grade positivity 00:11:1800:11:18.

Sherman supplies an economic logic for the shift in wearability. She recounts a conversation with a veteran designer who second-guesses the continuation of their own label every season, and notes that this particular season’s sales were unusually strong — her explanation is that shoppers aren’t after boring safe product, but they’re also not chasing shock for its own sake; they want something beautiful and interesting enough to justify spending at all, a reaction against the 2023-era appetite for buying almost anything because money was loose 00:11:4500:12:0200:12:30. Ottenberg confirms he’s hearing an identical sentiment from people in the industry, specifically that buyers are now rejecting merchandising logic in favor of runway pieces nobody initially expected to sell 00:12:4000:12:5000:12:58.

What’s left unresolved is whether “good” and “magical” are the same thing, and the two disagree on this by the end. Sherman concludes flatly that fashion isn’t likely to be revelatory again, that its nature has changed permanently 01:07:2101:07:28. Ottenberg pushes back, insisting he still believes a show will move him to tears again before he dies, even as he concedes it hasn’t happened in a long while 01:07:5101:08:00. Neither one resolves it; it’s framed as an honest, open disagreement rather than a rhetorical flourish.

The Prada formula: why one house keeps winning

Both hosts independently name Prada the best show of the season, and they spend real effort diagnosing why it works when so many comparably resourced luxury houses don’t. Their descriptive case is concrete: directional silhouettes, a wearable straight skirt, strong leather jackets, confident prints, and a standout chunky-heeled peep-toe shoe that both say they intend to actually buy 00:33:0000:34:2000:34:48. Ottenberg frames the appeal as a rare alignment of coolness and usability — clothes that are influential and desirable but also something you could put on tomorrow 00:32:4200:32:52.

Sherman treats the deeper question — why Prada and Miu Miu outperform peers of similar scale and recognition — as something she’s actively reported out, canvassing executives, designers, stylists and analysts for an answer 00:35:1300:35:27. The explanation she settles on, attributed to someone who worked inside the company, is structural: Miuccia Prada retains real control of the company and explicitly wants both creative freedom and commercial success, refusing to treat those as competing goals 00:35:4000:35:46. She cites Tim Blanks’ recent interview with Prada as capturing this same idea 00:35:57.

The takeaway both hosts draw is almost prescriptive — that the industry’s broader lesson this season is refusing to separate art from commerce, and that collections failing to find an audience are often ones built as pure statement or pure product rather than both at once 00:36:4100:36:48. Sherman adds a caveat of her own taste that complicates the story slightly: she doesn’t personally buy Miu Miu, yet still considers its shows essential, suggesting the formula’s success isn’t purely about converting every viewer into a customer but about sustaining desirability at every price point in the group 00:36:2700:36:27.

Fewer imitators, more originals

A recurring observation is that designers this season were noticeably less interested in copying the style of whichever peer currently dominates the conversation — previously Jonathan Anderson or Demna — and Ottenberg argues this shift is itself responsible for a lot of the improved mood, because imitation reliably reads as hollow and doesn’t work commercially 00:16:5300:17:0000:17:05. Sherman agrees and extends the point using Eckhaus Latta as a test case: a decade-plus-old American label she believes has only recently hit full stride, with communications and product finally matching its long-standing critical reputation 00:15:5900:16:0500:16:42. The two debate, without resolving, whether Eckhaus Latta should eventually take over a major European house — Sherman floats the idea that the designers have the talent for it, while Ottenberg struggles to name which specific house would actually suit their sensibility, landing only on the idea that it would need to be somewhere wanting expensive, unpretentious clothing rather than reinvention of an existing codebook 00:15:3400:15:4900:16:14.

A more pointed piece of evidence for the anti-imitation thesis comes from comparing Loewe and Chanel directly: both independently used sheer skirts with beaded hems the same season, without either copying the other, which Sherman reads as proof that ideas are genuinely circulating in the air among serious designers rather than being lifted wholesale 00:17:5600:18:1000:18:12. The exception that proves the rule, in her account, is that the brands still doing visible Chanel-style knockoffs tend to be the ones in decline or without a real point of view to begin with 00:17:3400:17:4100:17:45 — meaning imitation isn’t gone everywhere, just concentrated among weaker houses.

Exhaustion with designer psychodrama

Sherman is unusually direct about having hit a wall with the ongoing public litigation of whether specific designers deserve their jobs, using the running commentary around Jonathan Anderson at Dior as her main example — she likes the collection itself but says she’s tired of every conversation about it collapsing into speculation about his state of mind rather than an assessment of the clothes 00:43:3400:43:4000:44:15. Her reporting complicates the narrative anyway: a senior executive at a rival house told her he’s envious just walking into the Dior store because of how well it’s merchandised, even as online chatter keeps treating the brand as troubled 00:43:5900:44:04.

Ottenberg generalizes the same fatigue to Demna’s relaunch at Gucci, framing it as a contest between the designer’s own confident, defiant point of view and a loud online commentariat eager to declare winners and losers — while stating plainly that he is always going to side with the designer over the noise 00:42:1900:42:4000:42:48. Both agree the stakes being assigned to these men are wildly disproportionate: these are, in their words, disciplined professionals running businesses, not a figure like Yves Saint Laurent in genuine personal crisis, and treating ordinary professional pressure as tabloid drama says more about an audience craving narrative than about the designers themselves 00:44:5600:45:0500:46:04. Sherman adds that she thinks observers overdramatize because it gives them something to project onto when their own lives feel uneventful 00:46:0400:46:10 — a claim offered half as analysis, half as a shrug.

Two kinds of ending: Saint Laurent’s farewell and Chanel’s innocence

The emotional high point of the season, by the hosts’ own account, was Anthony Vaccarello’s Eiffel Tower show for Saint Laurent, understood in hindsight as a farewell even though it wasn’t billed as one. Sherman had already sensed a shift over several seasons — where the clothes had gone from playful and repetitive to tightly focused in a way that read, to her, like a designer signaling dissatisfaction before any rumors broke publicly 00:46:3900:46:5100:47:05. The show itself registered as unmistakably final: Charlotte Gainsbourg performing live or lip-synced (neither host is sure, and Sherman says she’d rather just believe it was real) 00:48:4000:48:53, models visibly crying by the end, and both hosts crediting Vaccarello with something rarer than good design — an instinct for predicting what ordinary people will actually wear next, citing his earlier popularization of pairing a track jacket with a skirt as proof he can still move the street, not just the runway 00:50:0500:50:1700:50:22.

Chanel’s show, by contrast, is framed as the season’s purest expression of unembarrassed fantasy rather than finality. Ottenberg and Sherman both single out the collection’s innocence — no-bra styling, pistachio-toned color shifts, cinched boxy jackets, a reworked vintage Chanel handbag, and an overtly princess-like, almost childlike silhouette that, paradoxically, Sherman says a friend read as subversive rather than merely cute 01:02:0201:03:0601:06:4501:06:54. Both describe it as one of only a handful of collections this season that actually made them want to buy something, alongside Prada, Celine, and Jil Sander 01:05:3801:05:43.

Taken together, the two shows bookend the larger argument the episode keeps circling: that designers succeed, emotionally and commercially, precisely when they stop managing anxiety about relevance and simply commit to a singular vision — tender and strange at Chanel, elegiac and self-assured at Saint Laurent — which is also why Sherman and Ottenberg end on their unresolved disagreement about whether fashion can still produce that kind of feeling reliably, or whether this season was simply an unusually good version of something more modest 01:07:2101:07:4501:08:00.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.