The September Issue
Quiet Luxury Is Over
Every fall, the fashion industry declares a host of trends, and every fall, I look back at a room I designed months earlier and see that we had already arrived at that same conclusion. Fashion and design have been running a symbiotic relationship for over a century, moving together between restraint and decadence, worked by the same hands and shaped by the same cultural moments. Right now, that relationship is swinging hard toward decadence.
In 1907, a Venetian designer named Mariano Fortuny created the Delphos gown, a column of hand-pleated silk so finely worked that women cast aside their corsets to wear this figure-hugging silhouette. Fortuny patented his pleating process and never told a soul how he achieved it. Over a century later, nobody has fully replicated it.
The house Fortuny built didn't stay in fashion. Today, Fortuny still exists, hand-producing textiles in that same Venetian workshop, using variations of the dyeing and printing techniques Fortuny invented. It just doesn't make dresses anymore. It makes upholstery and lighting. The same hand that revolutionized a gown now finishes a sofa.
Fortuny saw no real separation between dressing a body and dressing a room. For him, decadence in silk and decadence in a room came from the exact same instinct.
Passementerie, the trade of trim, tassels, and fringe, has served both fashion and interiors for as long as it's existed, and it's been around since ancient Greece. The same techniques that finish a hem have always finished a drapery panel. Today, Samuel & Sons carries that tradition forward as the leading passementerie house, still hand-crafting the tassels and fringe that show up in the rooms we create.
Long before anyone was writing trend reports, the actual supply chain behind fashion and interiors ran through the same workshops, using the same hands, making the same objects for two different customers. It’s tempting to say that interiors and fashion borrow from each other, but the term “borrow” implies two separate things influencing each other. The line dividing fashion and interiors has always been a little fuzzy, with them always co-existing in a way that they were never fully two separate things.
The Pendulum Effect
If you look at any decade, you'll find the same instinct expressed twice, once in a wardrobe and once in a home, almost always at the same time.
The mod movement of the 1960s put bold graphic patterns on dresses and directly onto wallpaper.
The 1970s brought fringe, macrame, and earth tones into fashion and into interiors simultaneously, no translation required.
In the 1980s, maximalist interiors reigned supreme: floral chintz, tasseled pillows, and layered antiques created rooms that felt like they’d been inherited (even when they hadn’t been). It was a response to the decade's fashion: more color, more pattern, more embellishment.
Then the pendulum swung hard the other direction. In 1995, architect John Pawson designed the Calvin Klein flagship store on Madison Avenue, a space so stripped down and minimal, it read as almost monastic. Pawson spent the following decades defining minimalist interiors globally, and Calvin Klein's minimalist fashion aesthetic and Pawson's minimalist interiors were, quite literally, designed by the same sensibility for the same brand at the same moment.
Designers in both industries are responding to the same moment, sometimes in the very same room, shaping cultural moods and ideas together.
Where Are We Now?
The current minimalist wave getting so much attention (muted palettes, pared-back wardrobes, the Carolyn Bessette Kennedy-coded outfits of the day) is a spike, sparked largely by one FX biopic and a very specific wave of late-90s nostalgia, not the kind of decade-long movement the 1990s produced. Open any social media app, and you’ll find 20-something-year-olds “educating” their followers on how to have a style that looks like “quiet luxury.” Trend spikes move fast, and they tend to burn out just as fast, and with everything spreading like wildfire, microtrends come and go almost by the day.
That positions us for a swing of the pendulum, and I’m predicting that it’s going to move heavily in the direction of decadence.
Decadence has deeper roots than the quiet luxury spike. Design and fashion keep returning to opulence long after any single show or cultural moment fades, and everything happening on runways and in fabric libraries right now tells me this swing away from minimalism has staying power.
What Fall 2026 (and Spring 2027) Looks Like
Fringe returned to runways this season with a more sophisticated point of view than its usual bohemian or 1970s-revival treatment. Designers used it as a tool for movement and controlled drama, letting it animate the body while keeping the silhouette polished. Some collections used it to heighten eveningwear into something closer to performance, while others let it soften tailoring or add dimension to more restrained pieces.
Embellishment told a similar story. Beading, sequins, embroidery, and brocade showed up across houses as different from each other as Dior, Chanel, Prada, and Givenchy, each using decoration to give clothing texture, emotion, and weight at a moment when stripped-back minimalism risks feeling severe. Erdem's take was described as romantic and heirloom-like, embellishment tied to memory and narrative, the same instinct behind passementerie that's been hand-worked and passed down for generations.
Erdem's fall 2026 collection leaned into dense fabric patchworking, tinsel fringe, and crystal embellishment set against historical references like panniered skirts.
Essentiel Antwerp arrived at a related place from a different angle: texture, beading, lace paired against bold, unexpected texture, a funky foil to historical opulence.
Runway to Room
Given the nature of interiors and fashion and our very close relationship, it should come as no surprise that for the past year, our studio has been planning interiors that feel very similar to these very same ideas.
In this current project’s design directive, our client wanted something that felt old world, but fresh. In the guest bedroom, we created a layered design featuring heavy woven upholstery, rich bouillon fringe, embellished velvet trim, and intense jewel-toned color. When we presented it, she said “This is so decadent.” (Mission: accomplished!)
Decadence Has More Staying Power Than a Microtrend
Twenty-two years of watching design cycles (and forty-seven years of watching cultural ones) have taught me something simple: the ideas that spread the fastest are almost never the ones that last.
A microtrend (like quiet luxury, copying Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s style, etc.) catches fire because it's cheap and easy to copy, and that's exactly what burns it out just as fast. The ideas that take three or four seasons to build momentum are the ones designers in fashion and interiors keep in their fabric libraries for decades and continue to return to for inspiration.
So, I’m calling it: Quiet Luxury is dead. Decadence is alive and well, and will be for some time. It's been building slowly across both industries for longer than a single season, and slow builds are the ones that stick.
Pay attention now, so you don't have to catch up later!
One footnote: I couldn’t help but smile with delight at the newest iteration of the Delphos gown, shown at Tory Burch Spring 2027:
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