10 New Fashion Exhibitions for Fall 2026
Fashion exhibitions this autumn move well beyond the familiar designer retrospective. Across London, Paris and New York, museums are looking at the dressed body from different angles: the social codes of colour, the politics of women’s dress, the construction of celebrity, the craft behind couture and the relationship between fashion and art.
These are the ten new exhibitions worth making time for this fall.
LONDON
The 90s: Art and Fashion
Tate Britain, London / 8 October 2026 – 14 February 2027
Edward Enninful's first major curatorial outing brings together more than 100 works by nearly 70 artists, photographers and designers — Alexander McQueen, Corinne Day, Juergen Teller and the Young British Artists among them — to argue that 1990s Britain didn't just produce a fashion moment but a shared visual language across disciplines.
The premise is a strong one: bringing McQueen’s fashion together with Sarah Lucas’s sculpture and Corinne Day’s photography makes visible the raw, confrontational current that ran through British art, fashion and photography in the 1990s. Given Enninful lived the period he's curating, from i-D's fashion desk to British Vogue's top job, the show should carry an insider's eye that a purely academic survey can’t often manage.
Tim Walker: Fairyland — Love and Legends
National Portrait Gallery, London / 9 October 2026 – 7 February 2027
Celebrated fashion photographer Tim Walker turns his attention to artists, writers and activists connected to queer culture, using elaborate sets and theatrical staging to examine identity, performance and self-invention. Here, the constructed world around the sitter is as important as the portrait itself, making artifice part of the subject.
It also places his fashion photography in a wider context: the elaborate worlds he created for magazines were never simply settings for clothes, but a way of exploring how people construct and project an image of themselves.
The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon
V&A South Kensington, London / 21 September 2026 – 3 January 2027
Timed to Burberry's 170th anniversary, this free display in the V&A's rarely opened Prince Consort Gallery traces the trench from Thomas Burberry's 1879 invention of cotton gabardine to its present status as shorthand for British style. Rare pieces from the Burberry archive sit alongside the museum's own holdings, including a coat once owned by Savile Row tailor Hardy Amies, shown publicly for the first time. What makes the display worth the detour is its attention to construction rather than iconography: storm flaps, epaulettes, belts and the House Check lining began as functional answers to wartime weather before they became a visual signature. Fashion history rarely gets this granular about hardware, and the coat is better understood for it.
Ossie Clark + Celia Birtwell
Location: Fashion and Textile Museum, London / 2 October 2026 – 11 April 2027
The Fashion and Textile Museum revisits the partnership that, more than any other, gave late-1960s and early-1970s London its silhouette. Clark's bias-cut tailoring gave movement to Birtwell's botanical and historical prints; Birtwell, in turn, designed her textiles with the cut of the garment already in mind. Seen together rather than in the usual separate biographies, the two bodies of work read less as designer-and-collaborator and more as a single practice split across two hands — a useful corrective for anyone still treating British textile design as secondary to the garments it ends up on.
PARIS
A Wardrobe of One's Own: Dissident Femininities in the 19th Century
Palais Galliera, Paris / 26 September 2026 – 14 February 2027
In the nineteenth century, some women began to break with conventional dress, adopting trousers, riding habits, tailored suits, cravats and other elements of male attire as their lives and social roles changed. The Palais Galliera explores this shift through the wardrobe of Rosa Bonheur, the celebrated French painter, presenting her clothes alongside paintings, fashion imagery and amateur photographs. From working women and artists to the lesbian circles of Paris around 1900, the exhibition shows how changing ideas about femininity were expressed through dress, and how clothing could give women new ways of moving through public life.
Look! 40 Years of Fashion at the Museum
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris / 30 September 2026 – 4 April 2027
Forty garments mark the anniversary of the Musée des Arts de la Mode, but the more interesting subject here is what happens to a dress after the runway: drawings, patterns, embroidery samples and conservation records sit alongside the finished pieces, tracking acquisition and restoration as their own discipline. A smaller show than the Palais Galliera's, and pitched more at people curious about museum practice than about any single house — but a useful reminder that preserving fashion is specialist work in its own right.
NEW YORK
Doll Dressing
The Museum at FIT, New York / 16 September 2026 – 3 January 2027
Doll Dressing traces the relationship between dolls and fashion from the eighteenth century, when miniature figures circulated new styles between cities, to contemporary designers including Marc Jacobs, Patrick Kelly, Lanvin, Jeremy Scott for Moschino, Martin Margiela and Anna Sui.
What begins as a history of fashion communication develops into a broader look at the doll as a design device — a way to reduce, distort or exaggerate the human figure. The exhibition shows how that artificial body has given designers a surprisingly durable means of thinking about proportion, femininity and the clothes themselves.
SAN FRANCISCO
Azzedine Alaïa: Sculpting Fashion
Legion of Honor, San Francisco / 21 November 2026 – 11 April 2027
The first major US retrospective of Alaïa's work, and reason enough on its own for a West Coast detour. Roughly 80 garments, plus pieces from his own collection of historic couture, concentrate on the mechanics of his method: jersey, leather and other unforgiving materials worked and reworked until they followed the body with the precision he was known for. His early training in sculpture gets the usual mention, but the clothes make a stronger case than any biography could — cutting, fitting and adjusting, repeated until the three-dimensional form was exactly right. Paired with the Paris show on Alaïa's African influences opening the same season, this is shaping up to be a genuine Alaïa year.
DENVER
DIVA
Denver Art Museum, Denver / 4 October 2026 – 31 January 2027
Originally developed by the V&A and now making its exclusive US stop in Denver, DIVA examines how performers turn clothing into part of their public persona. Moving from opera and Hollywood into popular music, the exhibition looks at what happens when a garment has to perform as well as the person wearing it — catching the light, commanding a stage, surviving movement and creating an image that can be reproduced through photography and film. It makes costume a central part of the machinery of celebrity, rather than simply a record of what famous women happened to wear.
VIENNA
True Colors: Viennese Fashion across Four Centuries
Wien Museum, Vienna, Austria / 1 October 2026 – 28 March 2027
True Colors uses fashion to tell the history of colour as a social language. Moving through red, green, white and silver, black, yellow and gold, blue and multicoloured dress, the exhibition traces how colours have signalled status, gender, power, belonging and rebellion across four centuries.
A red garment could suggest authority, sexuality or emancipation; yellow could mark wealth in the form of gold thread or, at other moments, exclusion and disgrace; blue shifted from associations with women and the Virgin Mary to the masculine world of military and workwear. The clothes make visible how little of colour’s meaning is inherent: its significance changes with technology, politics and social convention.
From puce and mousy brown to lemon yellow and scarlet, a kaleidoscope of often-forgotten shades and meanings unfolds. Every color carries a story.
