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.