In an age where fashion has collapsed into pure product, the anti-garment re-emerges as an act of disavowal against the endless churn of aesthetic surplus. Rather than a trend, the anti-garment is more of a lifestyle, a refusal of polish, of ease, and of disposability disguised as luxury. Designers like Soma Faitanin, Dilara Findikoglu, Rick Owens and Matières Fécales have inhabited this space during the fashion week run, opening up a broader cultural consideration to why fashion’s so-called misfits are defining the scene. Through gestures of erosion, performance, anti-commercialism, and non-tokenistic representation, this mode of making unsettles the smooth surface of fashion’s industrial machine.
Soma Faitanin, one of the most compelling new voices to emerge this season, grew up handling vintage pieces in their father’s warehouse. That early intimacy with garments—creased, stained, and stitched with the weight of their previous lives—inflects everything they makes. “I want the clothes to feel lived in,” she says. “Like personalised characters.” On the runway, each look feels less like an outfit and more like a ghostly inhabitant. Models move through an industrial soundscape like phantoms, their clothes bearing visible traces of fatigue and survival. “You walk into the show and see the characters and assume they’ve always been there,” Faitanin adds.
This is fashion as contagion, closer to Artaud’s vision of theatre as a plague rather than to luxury commerce. The energy loops between character and audience, transforming both in real time. “When the show ends, the characters disappear, but the audience is left questioning whether what happened was real or imagined,” Faitanin reflects. The anti-garment lives in this liminal space, between performance and disappearance, presence and afterimage. It rejects the smooth repetition of commercial fashion, where garments are produced to fulfil a stable expectation. Instead, Faitanin’s work occupies a live and unstable field, one where fashion is allowed to breathe, rot and vanish.
Matières Fécales, the Montreal-born, Paris-based designer duo, approaches this impulse with equal ferocity in their second show in the French capital. Garments appear deconstructed and frayed, traditional silhouettes such as the suit or heel reimagined into stranger, less practical forms. This is most evident in the online storm critiquing their heel collection made in collaboration with Christian Louboutin, a pointed homage to the duo’s early signature pleasers, elongated with silicone extensions. I remember them wearing those shoes back in their Montreal days, when I’d spot them at Eva B’s, the city’s vintage hotspot, sifting through loose chains and battered handbags to reconstruct for Depop. Six years on, they have ascended into the upper reaches of high fashion, yet their work still hums with that same mutant energy, a potent signifier of the anti-garment’s return. These clothes are not made for comfort; they are made in the name of fashion itself, a pivotal aspect of the anti-garment we seem to have collectively forgotten.
As designer Hannah insists, the label is often assumed to be “edgy” or “gothic,” a lazy shorthand that conflates edge with black. But her favourite colour is pink. The work is not about darkness so much as voltage. In the wider post-pandemic landscape, this performative turn signals a palpable exhaustion with commerce. The runway has, finally, become a stage again. This emphasis on performance is central to the language of the anti-garment. What binds these designers is not a shared aesthetic but a shared strategy: they turn the runway into a site of rupture rather than display. The garment stops functioning as a product and begins to operate as an environment.
Rick Owens has long built this language through what can only be called architectural dramaturgy. In his Spring/Summer 2026 Temple show, models descended from a towering scaffold, traversed over water, then waded through a fountain. In a deliberate nod to his underground beginnings, the designer dresses his silhouettes in slashed leather, and formed into porcupine-like protrusions, sheer fabrics and metallic shoulders and structural elements anchoring the pieces to a sculptural frame. Owens’ staging makes the built environment complicit — concrete staircases, fountains, scaffolds, all absorbed into a sacred geometry of fashion.
Dilara Findikoglu’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection, Cage of Innocence, approached the anti-garment through a raw and almost feral dramaturgy. Bags bulged with tufts of grass, packets of half-open cigarettes and crushed berries. Models were slicked with mud, their hair intentionally dishevelled by Eugene Souleiman, evoking a kind of post-ritual disarray. The venue, London’s Worshipful Company of Ironmongers, founded in the medieval era, was a deliberate symbolic gesture, repurposed to imagine what it might mean to shatter those same iron enclosures.
Corsetry and lace were cut open, leather straps hung loose, garments were less worn than endured. “I wanted to give voice to the memories and experiences of women past and present,” read Dilara’s show notes. The mud-streaked limbs, the dirt-stained textiles and the unkempt hair each refused polish and passivity. The designer describes this body of work as “escaping,” moving beyond darkness and surface glamour. Within the larger framework of the anti-garment, her work exposes rather than preserves, staging the collapse of innocence as a concept rather than safeguarding it as a state.
Casting is never secondary. It is the fourth tenet of the anti-garment—after decay, theatricality, and anti-commercialism—becoming a powerful assertion of value and identity in every show. For Faitanin, with casting led by Tre Koch, the vision centred on a regal yet rustic energy, blending punk and industrial textures with a deliberately wide spectrum of bodies, ethnicities and genders. “So people can all see themselves in this world,” Soma said. Matières Fécales carried this spirit onto their runway, bringing together people of all genders, races, body types and abilities, including top model Colin Jones, disability advocate Nikky Lilly in her runway debut, cabaret performer Dragoness Lola von Flame, and Russian actress Renata Litvinova. Against the brittle uniformity of mainstream runways, these casting choices reject tokenism. They remind us that fashion’s most powerful gesture may simply be to let everyone belong in its imagined world. “We want our brand to give people courage to see something within themselves that they might be scared to release. This is who we are,” Hannah said.
Of course, the anti-garment is also camp. It is queer. The drama, the exaggeration, the refusal to behave — it’s all part of a long queer lineage in fashion. That almost goes without saying, which is precisely why it’s so easy to forget to name it, or feels cliché to do so. This spirit of self-recognition is at the heart of the anti-garment. It is not only a question of who walks the runway but what kind of world those bodies help to imagine.
To call these designers anti-commercial misses the point entirely. In a system addicted to speed, surface, and endless replication, slowness, decay, and theatrical excess emerge as forms of critique. The anti-garment does not posture, it performs, resisting through matter itself, its fray and deterioration interrupting the smooth flow of consumption. Contrary to the lazy assumption that the anti-garment is exclusively gothic or nihilistic, these designers show how it can be light, even romantic. Owens and Faitanin work in creams and neutral tones, while Dilara and Matières Fécales lean into pinks, roses, and cherries, a palette that proves rustic sweetness can be far more confrontational than the obviousness of black. This is not the gothic of aesthetic cliché, but of something more subversive.
The anti-garment matters because it embodies time, decay, identity, and resistance. It slows fashion down, grounds it, forces it to acknowledge its own defaults and clichés. In doing so, it reveals fashion’s most radical possibility: not endless newness, but the beauty of what falls apart.