Attending fashion week amid *gestures broadly* can bring about a sense of cognitive dissonance that’s challenging to navigate for many showgoers and designers alike. Joseph Altuzarra gets it.
For Spring 2026, the designer put a surrealist spin on his signature modern, luxurious wardrobe staples, bending “classic tropes of femininity — florals, feathers, fur, lace” and bending them “into strange, heightened expressions that reflect the dissonance of our time,” per the show notes.
As with each season, the designer chose a book that aligns with the collection’s themes to gift to all attendees; this time it was “The Memory Police” by Yōko Ogawa, a dystopian, Kafkaesque sci-fi novel in which authoritarian forces are able to make an entire society forget about the existence of certain objects or concepts.
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Altuzarra’s surrealist spring wardrobe is achieved through material manipulation and texture: three-dimensional florals embroidered erratically onto fluid dresses, knitted fringe made to look like feathers, unsettling bird motifs draped like scarves. Billowing paper-thin hoop-skirted dresses, oversized outerwear and genie pants bring about unexpected proportions.
Still, these adventurous touches never detract from the classic wearability for which the designer is known. Altuzarra’s usual intimate venue — a simple-yet-elegant showroom in New York’s historic Woolworth Building — also helped ground the collection in a modern reality.
See every look from Altuzarra’s Spring 2026 collection below.
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