Style Notes – Romance Isn’t Dead – It’s back with a cold heart
- Designers are working on fall/winter 2025 collections and runways are showcasing a resurgence of romance in fashion, with lace emerging as a leading trend, transforming traditional aesthetics into modern interpretations.
- Designers like Chloé and Fendi are reimagining lace through fluid silhouettes and intricate detailing, blending softness with sophistication to appeal to contemporary tastes.
- Lace is being styled in innovative ways, from sheer maxi dresses to tailored pieces, indicating a shift towards a more versatile and edgy approach to this classic fabric.
Romance Isn’t Dead—Not If Fall’s Lace Trend Has a Say
After what has felt like a long period where stark minimalism and sharp tailoring has been the defining aesthetics at the forefront of fashion, romance is once again back in the spotlight. Softer silhouettes and feminine details are everywhere we look right now, but there’s one specific trend that’s leading the way for 2025’s return to romantic fashion, and that’s none other than lace.
All across the fall/winter 2025 runways, designers experimented with delicate fabric, deploying it as fluid sheer lace maxi dresses or using exacting measures to finish off slip skirts with a lace trim. At once dark and moody and soft and sensual, fall’s lace looks firmly take the often dated-looking fabric into an altogether fresh, modern era.
What’s Chloé up to?
At Chloé, that looked like sweeping sheer lace maxi dresses that designer Chemena Kamali imbued with her signature effortless insouciance by adding long pendant necklaces to them and sending the models out with minimal makeup and loose, beachy waves to balance the formality that’s usually associated with lace.
For her namesake house, however, Silvia Venturini Fendi took a much more polished and elegant approach to lace, sending out pencil skirts and lace-trimmed dresses that hit at the knee and were tucked into luxe fur coats.
Elsewhere, we saw lace trimming on sweeping maxi dresses at Saint Laurent and Alberta Ferretti, a detail that’s already defining the most popular dresses and skirts of this spring and summer, as well as sheer lace trousers at Stella McCartney.
One thing is already clear: these lace looks anything but traditional. Ahead, discover how the fall 2025 runways are giving the romantic fabric a rebrand and shop our top lace dresses, tops, skirts, and more.
Seán McGirr is really hitting his stride at the helm of McQueen
Irish designer Seán McGirr is really hitting his stride at the helm of McQueen. This season’s offering focused on the same tailoring the house is known for, but mixed int with a sense of extravagance and opulence that pays homage to the house that Alexander McQueen built.
That looked like a series of sweeping gowns, each punctuated by their own sense of drama, including the sheer lace number worn by Alex Consani that was layered over barely-there undergarments and finished not with a polished pump but with tough lace-up boots that also accompanied many of the more fanciful looks.
It wasn’t the only lace moment, as lace tights peeked out from underneath pencil skirts and high-neck lace blouses from underneath sculptural blazers.