2025 - The Year in Fashion

One word comes to mind when I think of 2025 – exhaustion. We are all tired. We are tired of doomscrolling, rage bait, making ends meet, the Middle East, inexcusable Russian aggression, shopping for Canadian-made products over U.S. imports, A.I., climate change,and whatever Donald Trump, in his blue suit and red tie uniform, has done today…

Fashion in 2025 responded to our BREAKING NEWS world by going ‘meh’ - everyone retreated into normcore clothing and calmer styles. There were still overdressed and underdressed celebrities on red carpets, and designers chucked some outrageous ideas down the runway, but even Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times wrote about the irrelevant stupidity of over-the-top couture.

‘Practical’ and ‘wearable’ were on the rise. Retro sneaker styles outsold futuristic designs, white T-shirts and blue jeans became a go-to for every day, and the puffer jacket became a fashion ‘classic’. Until the world calms the f*ck down, I expect fashion will continue to take a back seat to any headline dramas in 2026. This is already being hinted at by Pantone’s choice for colour of the year for 2026 – a shade of white called Cloud Dancer.

2025 will be remembered as the year Anna Wintour stepped away from Vogue, passing the shears to Chloe Malle - a social media savvy Millennial. It was also the year of the French jewel heist – the gems are likely now recut and the precious metals melted down... Ukrainian president Zelensky was ridiculed publicly for not wearing a suit to the White House by U.S. president Trump who himself made a wardrobe faux pas when he failed to wear black to the Pope’s funeral.

The worst look in fashion for 2025 was the '90s T.V. weather girl’ look of long hair, too much make-up, too high heels, and too short skirts being worn by working women – sex appeal has no business in business. The best in fashion for 2025 was seen on New York’s new mayor Zohran Mamdani and it wasn’t his mid-priced suits – it was his broad smile.

Vintage fashion continued to make headlines in 2025 with auction results for such classics as a plastic shopping bag, worn as a top in a 1990 Martin Margiela fashion show, that sold for over $20,000 U.S., and the first Birken bag made by Hermes for Jane Birkin in 1984 that sold for over $10,000,000 U.S.

For most people, vintage fashion provided style inspiration, like for 15 year-old Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux who was photographed sporting a retro look outside the Louvre minutes after the jewel heist, prompting online speculation that he might be the mastermind behind the robbery.

Fashion’s most famous loss in 2025 came with the death of Giorgio Armani who forever changed how men’s suits were cut in the late 1970s. Armani was arguably the last of the old school of designers leaving other recent passings to more contemporary avant-garde designers like England’s Pam Hogg, and Belgium’s Marina Yee.

Canada lost several of our fashion history footnotes this year: Steven Levy who created the Festival of Canadian Fashion in 1985; Herschel Segal, founder of Le Chateau; English born Sandy Stagg who in 1968 opened Amelia Earhart – one of Canada’s first vintage clothing stores; Real Bastien, half of the Montreal couture team Serge & Real; Inventor of his eponymously named durable hat Alex Tilley, and Deborah Kuchme, known for her professional women’s fashions in the 1980s.