Why Fashion Is Rethinking Glamour Now
As overt excess loses its charm, beauty feels more powerful when it is personal, mobile and lived-in.
By Aaron Kok - published
Glamour has always had a weakness for height. High heels, shine dialled to the max, a penchant for the dramatic. It loved an entrance, preferably with a little suspense and for much of fashion history, to be glamorous was to be elevated from ordinary life and the ground was something to rise above. Reality, one suspects, was non-existent.
That old fantasy still has its pleasures now, and nobody is calling for the retirement of the gown, or the bedazzled but somewhat useless evening bag that holds nothing except a lipstick and the vague promise of a good night. Fashion would be a sadder place without the occasional piece that exists purely to elate and make life feel more beautiful than it is. Still, the mood has shifted, and right now? The glamour that feels most modern does not hover above the world but moves through it. It has a foot in real life, sometimes even both feet.
Dries Van Noten’s fall/winter 2026 collection fuses rich textures with earthy tones and utilitarian surfaces.
You can see it in the way clothes are being styled. An evening dress feels newer with flat sandals, and a tuxedo loosens up when it is worn with jeans that can handle the commute. Jewellery has more pizzazz when it meets a windbreaker, or a dramatic skirt gains attitude when it is worn with a bag large enough to suggest the person carrying it has places to go after dinner. The point is not comfort alone—let’s face it, comfort won that argument years ago—but as dress codes collapse and we find a collective realisation that suffering in shoes is a little silly, the more interesting shift is that practicality has become part of the seduction.
This evolution is playing out vividly on the retail front lines. Brigitte Chartrand, chief buying and merchandising officer at Net-A-Porter, confirms that this high-low hybridity is exactly how women are approaching luxury today. “There’s a definite shift, with women mixing high and low—they’re pairing intricate, emotional pieces with denim and wardrobing staples,” Chartrand observes.
At Prada’s fall/winter 2026 show, pieces felt completely lived in as models showcased precious silk tulle slip dresses worn with chunky ribbed knits and cargo coats.
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Modern glamour now needs to be able to move. It needs to sit, walk, travel, maybe even sweat a little, and still look right at dinner. It has to cross terrains and thresholds, which also means that the old idea of polish that so often relied on control—settings, surfaces and behaviour—gives way to today’s new proposition of polish that lets a little life in.
This feels especially pointed now, in a world where obvious displays of excess can read as tone-deaf before they read as fabulous. Between rising costs of living, economic and political headwinds and a general sense that the world has become far more complicated than we’d like it to be, glamour has had to develop better instincts. The appetite for beauty remains, and in fact, it may be stronger than ever. People still want romance, fantasy and ceremony because life, frankly, has not become less exhausting but rather, what has changed is the kind of glamour it yearns for has to feel emotionally intelligent. Conspicuousness feels brittle, logos can feel gauche, and excess for its own sake leaves one wanting subtlety.
No, the new glamour is quieter in its signals, though not necessarily lesser in impact, but it is less concerned with proving status and more interested in expressing taste, presence and a sense of self.
Claudia Li Johnson believes that glamour has taken on a more intimate and personalised feel in recent times.
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Stepping Off the Pedestal
Claudia Li Johnson, co-founder of bags and accessories label Vin and a content creator, grew up with the ritual of dressing well. Her family, she relates, treated fashion as an art form, with the idea that one should meet the world with intention. That inheritance has stayed with her, though her idea of glamour today has expanded beyond the traditional vocabulary of diamonds and gowns.
“Anything can feel glamorous if it’s worn with conviction,” she says. For Li Johnson, even loungewear can take on glamour with the right styling. Modern glamour, she adds, feels “much more personal now.”
And this idea of personal glamour matters, because it loosens the grip of the old rules. There was pleasure in the code, but also stiffness previously. Now, the best looks tend to have an interruption: something useful, sporty, practical or slightly off. These little blips are what keeps “glamour” from turning into costume. Head-to-toe perfection can feel oddly dated now, like you’re waiting for a velvet rope that may never appear. Full polish still has its place, of course, but it often feels most alive when something breaks the spell.
Even on the festival grounds of Coachella, Chi Gibbs brings glamour in a flirty blue number.
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Chi Gibbs, designer of Sonoma and a content creator, describes her own approach to glamour as playful, elegant and comfortable. “Our everyday lives aren’t that glamorous, but it’s important to inject a little bit of style into them,” she says. For Gibbs, the appeal lies in pieces that allow her to feel stylish while still feeling true to herself.
That last part is crucial, because essentially, the concept of grounding glamour is not an aesthetic of resignation. It is not the tyranny of effortless dressing, where everyone looks expensive, tasteful and faintly boring. Rather, it is shininess with a pulse, found in clothes that make you feel something.
People want to be less trapped by the performance of a veneered image they are too tired to actually live. The desire to get out, move, wander, reset and feel the weather again has begun to reshape the way glamour is imagined. Perhaps that has also been the fodder that has fed the popularity of softer tailoring, day-to-evening separates, weather-ready layers and clothes that can be dressed up or down without losing their shape. Versatility has become desirable because modern life refuses to stay in its lane.
The great grounding of glamour is best seen at Chanel’s Métiers d’art 2026 show, where ballgowns and tees collide in a New York City subway station.
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Beauty in Motion
Chartrand echoes this demand for real-world utility, noting that a packed schedule has completely rewritten what shoppers expect from high-end investments. “The expectation has definitely shifted and our customers are looking for pieces that can work across different parts of their lives,” she says, pointing to labels like Dries Van Noten as a prime example of this balance.
On the runway, the idea has been unfolding with clarity. At Chanel’s Métiers d’art 2026 show, Matthieu Blazy placed the House’s craft inside the New York subway. It was a clever move, almost too perfect as a metaphor: the subway is democratic, chaotic, occasionally unpleasant and deeply alive. It is one of the least precious spaces imaginable, which is precisely why Chanel looked so compelling there. Ball gowns—worn with cargo pants or sunglasses—did not lose their glamour under the fluorescent-lit grit. That is the thing about glamour’s new grounded phase: it understands that beauty can handle reality and often improves with it.
Once rarefied and the epitome of glamour, Dior’s couture takes on a new reality in the witty hands of Jonathan Anderson.
Jonathan Anderson’s Dior has been exploring a similar tandem. There is something potent in seeing the Maison’s language interrupted by the everyday charge of couture chunky knits worn over exquisitely-worked skirts, or slacks that speak of ease and bodily comfort side by side with bell-shaped dresses.
At Bottega Veneta, Louise Trotter’s fall/winter 2026 collection offered another version of this grounded proposition. Inspired by the everyday women of Milan, her work embraced lived-in exuberance and a kind of daily sartorial drama. Milan is a useful reference point here because the city’s take on glamour has rarely been about fragility, but where elegance can look brisk, opinionated and faintly impatient. Trotter’s Bottega understands that glamour does not always announce itself by standing still.
Paying homage to the no-nonsense sartorial approach of everyday Milanese women, Bottega Veneta’s Louise Trotter brought evening-ready textures into day-worn ensembles.
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Cecilie Bahnsen has long understood this balance between romance and reality. Her work is often described through its hyperfeminine codes, yet she never seems trapped inside the fantasy. When we asked how she finds the balance, Bahnsen says that “beauty and function have to go together. A piece can have beautiful details and fabrics, but it still needs to be easy to move in, part of a wardrobe and part of the everyday”.
At press time, Bahnsen had also launched a collaboration with Uniqlo, a particularly apt development that speaks to this inflection point. Few things ground glamour more decisively than making a designer’s ethos available to the public at large. The collaboration takes her language of romance and filters it through the logic of everyday dressing: graphic tees, mummy-and-me matching attire, and her signature ruffled skirts trimmed down to be worn on the train or at the park rather than just only for special occasions.
From left: Cecilie Bahnsen’s fall/winter 2026 is a celebration of femininity within a modern world, where frou frou shapes are contrasted with anorak jackets and elastic cables. Bahnsen also translates her signature romance into a collaboration with Uniqlo.
For Gibbs, the broader shift reflects a cultural movement towards authenticity and individuality. People are seeking styles that resonate with who they are, she says, both in fashion and in everyday life. After years of hyper-polished fashion fantasies, there is a desire for things that feel human.
And that word—“human”—may be the simplest way to understand why glamour’s grounding stage feels right for the now: it allows imperfection and personality to sit inside beauty without apologising, and for women to meet life in a way that feels beautiful and honest.