Every season during New York Fashion Week, designers try to find new ways to stand out from the crowd. For Spring/Summer 2026 shows, the competition was on. For KidSuper, who wanted its latest show to be less exclusive than the usual NYFW event, this meant staging a show with over a thousand guests in Brooklyn. For others, like Tanner Fletcher, it meant brilliantly merging theater and stage production with a full-on runway show. Sergio Hudson smartly cast Love Island star Olandria Carthen to walk the runway, catching the eyes of the reality TV show’s loyal fans.
But as always, over the course of several jam-packed days, some unhinged moments were happening across New York. Some were the kind to make guests think deeper and reflect on current matters, like AI’s ever-expanding presence. Others felt off-kilter.
Here’s the most surprising moments I experienced at NYFW this September.
Random runway shows that just… happened, featuring Raising Cane’s
Beyond the official Council of Fashion Designers of America calendar for New York Fashion Week, there are always a plethora of other events, parties, and runway shows going down at the same time. And every season, they seemed to get more surprising. This fall, Raising Cane’s – yes, the fast food spot known for its chicken fingers — hosted a catwalk and cast none other than this year’s breakout Love Island star Olandria Carthen. The brand recruited Joe Ando to design a series of looks to complement its menu. Brooks Nader and Livvy Dunne also strutted down the runway.
Collina Strada Spring/Summer 2026 felt so weird
Collina Strada, founded and creatively led by Hillary Taymour, had its models walk down the catwalk alongside a “shadow” version of themselves, inspired by foundational (but famously racist) psychologist Carl Jung. On paper, it might sound like an interesting idea to do a runway theme that digs deeper into the “unruly double we repress,” per show notes, but it did not manifest that way. At first glance, Collina Strada’s Spring/Summer 2026 looks might appear like an ensemble of white models paired with Black models trailing behind them. That’s not the case: “shadows” are actually wearing black mesh morph suits. Why is this still a total flop?
Taymour claimed the show was a sartorial attempt to bring Jung’s ideas about our shadow selves to life. But by essentially just making the clothes and skin black on every “shadow,” her take was just surface-level. Going a bit deeper into Jungian psychology, one learns he sometimes conflated people of African descent with the shadow, all the negative of the subconscious, thanks to his ideas that Black people were more primitive. Rather than Taymour using her skills to focus on transforming her typically colorful clothes — as was used to distinguish the “shadows” in Jordan Peele’s Us movie — she could not envision a shadow without darkening its skin.
Uneasy is exactly how Alexis Bittar’s beauty pageant show wanted you to feel
As soon as jeweler Alexis Bittar’s presentation kicked off in the Abrons Arts Center theater in New York City’s Lower East Side, there was a palpable sense of unease. Tense music, an applause stagehand, and the eerie host (played by Nik Pjeternikaj) successfully emulated something (David) Lynchian. Bittar did much more than just show his newest bejeweled pieces. The host “embodies unchecked patriarchy,” and opposite him were contestants that represented innocence and having to “navigate through the impossible pressure of perfection, ” he said in a statement. “I purposely cast each contestant to represent a U.S. state where trans rights are currently under assault.” States included South Carolina (portrayed by Vivian Jenna Wilson), Alabama (Dylan Miller), Louisiana (Gia Love), and more. Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, Carrie, and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut also inspired the NYFW showdown.
Libertine’s collection about beauty and love boasted many motifs of war
Libertine’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection was essentially an ode to John Keats, using a line from his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” poem — “beauty is truth” — as a mantra. “In a world increasingly defined by chaos, division, and noise, we return to the radical, unifying force of beauty,” the post-show release says. “This collection is rooted in the idea of a love revolution.” Despite that, the show opened with symbols of war: a fife and drummer inspired by 1776 (when the U.S. gained independence) marched down the catwalk. Amid a runway of coats bedazzled with Shakespeare and flora-inspired looks, the brand also revealed its own sparkly take on the Zouave jacket, a piece worn in Northern Africa by colonial French soldiers. Sure, through fashion, one can reclaim and repurpose the symbolism of old garments, but it must be convincing. The choice just felt interesting for a show trying to emulate a “love revolution.”
AI’s fashion takeover continues at Kate Barton
It feels like every season, designers increasingly find ways to incorporate AI on the runway, whether it’s seen as controversial or cute. Across the Spring/Summer 2026 shows, Kate Barton took the cake. The designer opened her show with an AI model, in partnership with Fiducia AI, that then transformed into someone real. Per the designer’s post-show release, she wanted to create an “uncanny tension” in her guests.
“This collection is about questioning preconceptions — my own included — about shape, print, and the ways we separate sportswear, fashion, and eveningwear. I wanted the runway to feel like a passage into another dimension, a space where these oppositions not only coexist but create something unexpectedly alluring,” she continued. This, after all, comes in the wake of uproar after Vogue’s August 2025 issue featured a Guess ad with an AI model.
