Like it or not (and plenty of people do not), artificial intelligence is not going anywhere. The discourse is loud, the anxiety is real, the creative-industry handwringing is nonstop—but Stacey Bendet? Fully on board. Last season she called the current wave of tech innovation an “inspiration revolution.” This time, she went further and built an entire collection on it, very confidently naming it The Gilded Age.
Like it or not (and plenty of people do not), artificial intelligence is not going anywhere. The discourse is loud, the anxiety is real, the creative-industry handwringing is nonstop—but Stacey Bendet? Fully on board. Last season she called the current wave of tech innovation an “inspiration revolution.” This time, she went further and built an entire collection on it, very confidently naming it The Gilded Age.
Being one of the few genuinely young, emerging designers on the CFDA calendar already puts Kate Barton ahead of the curve. But this season she leaned into that advantage—hard—especially on the tech front. For her fall 2026 appointments, she skipped the traditional showroom shuffle entirely and turned the whole thing into an experiment in augmented reality and AI. Upstairs, guests scrolled through images of the collection on a model set against an AR backdrop, courtesy of Amazon.
It was the night before Valentine’s Day, and Christian Cowan had hearts in his eyes. Like, fully. “I just really, really, really love this collection,” he said, and you could tell he meant it in that slightly stunned way—like he surprised himself. He talked about approaching it differently than anything he’s done before, which, coming from him, feels both dramatic and… kind of brave. The biggest shift? Time. Actual time. The luxury of not sprinting headfirst into the abyss. Standing in a stairwell in a West Chelsea studio before the show, Cowan admitted it’s never been harder to be a young, independent brand right now, with the cost of everything—production, rent, air, existence—going up, up, up.
During the pandemic, a Y2K revival came and went; however, 7 for All Mankind’s newly appointed creative director, Nicola Brognano, is not ready to give the renaissance up just yet. Though 7 for All Mankind is generally known as an accessible mall brand, Brognano wanted to use styling to widen the label’s possibilities.
