Happy Clothes: Fashion Returns To Maximalism

Here’s an end that we’d be glad to dance to. After two long years, quiet luxury has finally been laid to rest. Well, for now, anyway. And cause of death? A seeming shift that’s happening on a cultural level back to fashion that incites emotion, drives dopamine and calls for maximalist flavour.

In hindsight, the writing has been on the wall for some time now. Quiet luxury started around the early months of 2023, when Gwyneth Paltrow made the courtroom her personal catwalk, parading a series of outfits that were as sombre as legal dress codes require, yet retaining a sense of chicness that felt like a breath of fresh air.

There were full-skirted suits and conservative pumps on display for the world’s paparazzi to lap up. Paltrow’s quiet luxury streak was a lightning rod for fashion at the time as well, given the immense buzz that the show Succession had generated in its final season. Here was a television series built on the drama of rich people fighting moneyed problems, all of them togged in IYKYK threads by Brunello Cucinelli, Loro Piana and Max Mara. The third—and arguably the most important ingredient for quiet luxury’s popularity boost—was the social media girlies who began to adopt “old money” and “tradwife” aesthetics as their go-to in dressing. Out with the uniqueness, and in with the camel cashmeres and the white tennis sneakers.

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Yet, with the spring/summer 2025 runways, it seems abundantly clear that quiet luxury has played its hand, and is ceding the throne to maximalism.

“Our 2025 trend report signals a return to maximalism and daring styles. More will be more,” says Sydney Stanback, the global trends and insights lead at Pinterest. Indeed, a look at the report pulls up a rich tapestry of trends that says everything except “blend in”. According to the report, cherry red and rococo-core are set to dominate the year with a spike in searches of more than 300 percent and 5,000 percent respectively.

Melissa Marra-Alvarez, the curator of the 2019 exhibition “Minimalism/Maximalism” at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York sees it as a pendulum swinging back and forth, saying to CNN that “if we look back at fashion history, we can see alternating periods of minimalist and maximalist aesthetics in fashion. It is the back-and-forth nature of these two opposing aesthetics that propels fashion forward. Every time an aesthetic re-appears it is not only expressing the social and political climate of the moment—it is also reacting to what came before it,” Marra-Alvarez added, “For this reason, it’s never the same iteration of minimalist or maximalist expression. It evolves every time.”

“I love the chaos. I’ve never felt more liberated,” Krystal Yang gushes. Yang was part of BAZAAR’s list of Most Stylish Women in 2024, and she has a penchant for bold colour, over-the-top textures and maximal looks. “It makes me feel happy and free. Maximalism and nostalgia trends are also fuelling dopamine dressing. The resurgence of Y2K, ’90s, and ’80s aesthetics is bringing the past into the future, flooding fashion with bold colours, prints and expressive styles.”

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At the end of the spring/summer 2025 fashion month last September, the BAZAAR Singapore team caught up to discuss our impressions of the fashion season, and what we each took away from the shows we witnessed. The operative word? Joy.

Indeed, there seemed to be a heavy gravitational pull towards the concept of clothing as a form of happiness and celebration. Gone were the incognito threads that could have blended in between any of the main players in the quiet luxury game, and back on the runway was a flurry of colour, of texture, and of everything that makes fashion so frivolously fun to love once again.

“Dopamine dressing is about choosing pieces that make you feel good and instantly lift your mood. The right outfit can shift your energy, boost your confidence, and set the tone for your day. It’s really about dressing in a way that feels joyful and empowering,” says personal stylist Moushumi Khara. Khara creates fashion content for her over 300,000 followers, and is known for her unabashed embracing of bright colours and fun silhouettes.

Early in the season, at the Simone Rocha show in London, I overheard two showgoers comparing their Simone Rocha-designed Crocs shoes, and how one of them became the centre of attention on the subway ride over to the show venue. Once-scorned, these platform sandals, often decorated in lashings of pearls, crystals and other Jibbitz, have elicited a resounding approval from Gen Z customers.

But it wasn’t just Rocha’s audience that embraced all things maximalist, because on the runway, the English designer matched their energy too. The focus of the collection was the carnation flower, and the delicate petals of the flower were translated into giant poufs of gathered tulle hanging off the models’ elbows or as tutu skirts that reached out so much it almost touched our hands. The clothes felt light, bravely fun and a welcome shift from the wintery-black uniformed crowd.

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Crossing into Milan, there was more happy gold to unearth at the Prada show. Miuccia Prada and her co-conspirator Raf Simons have been debating the role of technology in a creative space like fashion, and this season, they took aim at the idea of algorithm-dictated dressing. To them, just like the basic emotions of joy or sadness, creativity and personal style is an innate and human part of our existence. So why look like everyone else, when you were born to stand out from the pack?

And stand out, they did. Even in the simplest of looks—say a sweater with a pair of ribbed knit leggings or a worsted argyle knit top tucked into a pencil skirt—something magical happened. The prim pencil skirts Mrs Prada built her reputation on were embellished to the hilt with bugle beads, mirrored paillettes or S&M-style jump-rings. The sunglasses, bug-eyed and attached to silk scarves for some, were comically cosmic and sure to fly off the shelves and turn heads on your morning commute.

Then, in Paris, we saw Alessandro Michele debut his first ready-to-wear for the House of Valentino. Michele, as we know is wont to do, didn’t shy away from making plenty of statements for his first runway outing. Ruffled dresses reminiscent of the excessive glamour from the ’80s strutted out next to tent-like gowns that were covered in glittering embroidery and pelts of faux fur.

Even the accessories were glaringly prominent: dramatic millinery with long quills of pheasant feathers, crystalised nose rings, and curious cat clutches. Under Michele’s direction, the collection was a welcome burst of energy that reminded the fashion world why we fell in love with his designs in the first place.

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Marc Jacobs, who showed his spring/summer 2025 collection at the New York Public Library in February, pulled off looks that carried a sense of childlike wonder. Bulbous shapes—something that Jacobs seemed to reference from Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons’ iconic “Lumps and Bumps” collections—was his main focus. Tops were padded and inflated to comical proportions that made the models look like life-sized playdolls. Textures were rife in this collection: a leopard-spotted coat with an abbreviated hemline, as well as a duo of seemingly 2D dresses covered in magnified sequins that felt cheeky and exuberantly daring.

In Jacobs’ show notes, he highlighted that “with precious freedom we dream and imagine without limitation”, and he also talked about how his clothes were aimed to confront the realities we live in with “curiosity, conviction, compassion, and love”. It was a strong reaction to the times, cultural agendas and political maelstrom we now live in, and Jacobs’ balm for the chaos is this: embrace your dreams, indulge your curiosities, and dress to make yourself happy.