The trend data source most
fashion insiders are sleeping on.

Pinterest is not the first platform that comes to mind when you think about trend data — and that is precisely why it is one of the most interesting sources available right now. Unlike Instagram or TikTok, where content is distributed through algorithmic feeds and engagement is largely passive, Pinterest functions as a visual search and discovery engine, which means that the data it generates reflects something fundamentally different from likes or shares. When someone searches for an outfit idea on Pinterest, they are actively planning, saving, and in many cases, shopping. That distinction matters enormously if you are trying to understand where consumer demand is actually heading rather than what is generating noise on a For You page.

The platform has also been growing at a pace that the industry has not fully registered yet. In Q1 2026, Pinterest reported 631 million monthly active users — its tenth consecutive quarter of double-digit user growth — alongside revenue surpassing $1 billion for the first time, up 18% year on year. More than 80 billion searches happen on the platform every month. And in a move that signals where the company sees its future, Pinterest committed $4 billion to Amazon Web Services through 2031, its largest infrastructure deal to date, specifically to accelerate its AI and visual search capabilities.

The technology underpinning all of this is built on convolutional neural networks and multimodal visual-language embeddings — the same class of image recognition that powers the platform’s Lens tool, which allows users to photograph an object and surface visually similar results in real time. Pinterest processes over 250 million visual searches monthly and refines its recommendations continuously through user feedback. It is, in other words, a platform that understands images at scale in a way that most competitors do not.

All of which is to say: when Pinterest publishes a Summer Trend Report drawing on the search behaviour of 631 million users, it is worth reading carefully as a dataset.

What I have done here is take their Summer 2026 Trend Report and layer my own analysis on top of it, cross-referencing the trends they identify against Google Trends data to validate which signals are genuine consumer intent and which are editorial noise. The trends that appear in this report are the ones that passed that cross-reference. If you work in buying, forecasting, brand strategy, or any role where getting the season right matters, treat this as your pre-summer bible — because by the time these signals are obvious, it will be too late to act on them.

THE MACRO SIGNAL

Five trend categories.
One decade.

The report's overarching frame is that sports are moving from the sidelines into street style — athletic codes becoming a shared cultural language that influences how people dress, socialise, and show up. That is a coherent read of the data with the World Cup as backdrop, but it is not the whole story. When you look at the specific search terms driving each trend category, a more precise pattern emerges: sport is the cultural wrapper, but the aesthetic underneath is almost entirely rooted in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Micro shorts, low-rise silhouettes, windbreakers worn as polished sets, capri trousers, F1 references, 90s minimalism — the decade is present across every single category in this report.

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Brands face a different kind of disruption nowadays: products they have already sold find a second life without them. The infrastructure being built around that second life is what has allowed this market to evolve this fast. That infrastructure is AI, and the B2B wholesale layer – connecting secondhand supply with retail demand – is where that transformation is happening first and fastest.

WHAT THE DATA IS TELLING US

Consumer intent has shifted.
Secondhand is now the starting point.

Before examining the technology, it is worth understanding the scale of the behavioural shift already underway.

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This week I wanted to talk about something that I absolutely love, as you know… The data analytics world. I got inspired by the question that gets repeated the most in my DM’s: How do I become a fashion data analyst? What did you study? How can I get into the fashion world? I’m going to answer this properly — the roles, the skills, the tools, the path in. All of it, here… And, of course, my way in.

The one thing I won’t promise is that any specific degree or background automatically gets you there. I’ve seen journalism graduates outperform data science PhDs in this space. I’ve seen people with zero fashion background become the sharpest fashion analysts in the room. What I can tell you — with complete certainty — is what the people who do get there all have in common: they started before they were ready.

This pic below are some of the messages I receive (I love them).

BEFORE WE START

This job title existed five years ago, but it was not as well-known. However now the infrastructure, the tools, and the appetite for this work have never been bigger, and the timing has never been better — but also never more competitive. What that means in practice: the bar for standing out is higher, but the tools to clear it are more accessible than ever.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

What actually is a data analyst?
And how is it different from the rest?

“Data analyst” gets used as a catch-all for three very different disciplines. They overlap, they borrow from each other — but they are not the same job. Knowing which one you’re actually aiming for will save you months of going in the wrong direction.

“What I do sits somewhere in the middle of all three. Which, it turns out, is exactly why I had to build the role rather than find it”

NOW, APPLY IT TO FASHION

The roles that actually
exist in this industry.

Once you know which discipline you lean toward, you can map it to the fashion-specific roles that actually appear on job boards — and a few that don’t yet but should.

IF I WERE STARTING AGAIN

The tools.
In order.

You do not need all of these at once. You need them in sequence, with a real project forcing you to use each one as you go. Here is the honest order I’d do it in — and what nobody tells you about each step.

WHAT DATA TO USE TO PRACTICE WITH

Put the tools into practice. Kaggle has fashion datasets — Zalando, H&M, ASOS. Google Trends is free and underused. Vogue Runway is publicly visible. Resale platforms like Vestiaire and Depop show you live pricing signals. You don’t need proprietary data to do meaningful work. You just need curiosity and a question worth answering.

Use Claude (this is my favourite platform) to guide you, to learn, to automate, it’s soooo fun and interactive, you can build super impressive systems that will help you showcase your skills.

TWO BOOKS I RECOMMEND

Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic — the best book on turning analysis into something a decision-maker acts on. And Deluxe by Dana Thomas — to understand the industry you’re proposing to analyse. You can’t interrogate a system you don’t understand.

My path into fashion data analytics.
I didn’t plan it, just jumped in.

I studied a dual Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Advertising. Not data science, not statistics, not computer science. And for a long time, I thought that meant I was starting from the wrong place.

What I didn’t realise yet was that storytelling — the ability to take something complex and make it legible, to understand what a decision-maker actually needs to hear — is exactly the skill that separates a mediocre analyst from a great one. The technical side I could learn. And with AI nowadays, that’s even more true today than it was when I started. But the narrative instinct is what most people genuinely can’t do.

After graduating, I started working on the shopfloor at Zara. Not the plan, I just couldn’t find a job. A role came up internally as a commercial analyst, and I applied. And that’s where everything shifted. I was suddenly sitting inside the data behind every single decision based on what was being sold in Zara stores. Which collections were selling more, which items, which styles, where they were located on the shopfloor, markdowns, promos — data. Every single decision was based on it, whilst most of the fashion industry around it was still running entirely on gut feel.

“I was sitting inside the data behind every decision I’d watched get made on the floor. The fashion industry around it was still running on gut feel”

So I decided I wanted to know more about how to understand data. I found a Master’s in Big Data in London and did it while working full-time during COVID, which meant I studied more than I ever had in my life, and applied everything in real time. By then, I’d moved into a finance company, which taught me something I didn’t expect: how to communicate data to completely different types of audiences. Fashion customers think differently from financial ones. Financial stakeholders think differently from creative directors. Learning to translate the same analysis for completely different rooms — that skill travels everywhere. It also taught me I hated finance, which was useful information to have (lol).

What I didn’t know at the time: working in a technical role within fashion pays significantly more than a traditional fashion role. That information would have been useful earlier. Through persistence and being visible on LinkedIn, I landed my first official data analyst role at YOOX NET-A-PORTER Group as a Senior Data Analyst. I was terrified.

There I realised that a company with access to extraordinary data was making decisions based on what buyers felt would be a hit. Data existed, but nobody was listening to it. I’ll write a full piece on the intricacies of working inside fashion at that level — but that experience is ultimately why DFB exists.

From YNAP to Farfetch. And in January 2026, I started building The Data Fashion Brief — a data-driven fashion intelligence newsletter, and the resource I kept wanting that didn’t exist. So I made it.

THE PART NOBODY TELLS YOU

Every job I’ve ever gotten,
I got by doing the thing first.

I know recent graduates have it harder now — macro factors, AI, a job market that has genuinely shifted. But I want to be honest: it was never easy. There were always thousands of people applying to the same roles. The problem of standing out hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the tools to stand out have never been more accessible.

Applying through portals alone is a waste of your time. So what I’d recommend is that you start by doing something. Speak your ideas, put yourself out there, find the role, then find the hiring manager — not HR, the actual hiring manager — and reach out directly. Email them, DM them, follow up, be persistent, and I assure you that that approach will get you into rooms that a CV submitted through a portal never will.

One thing nobody says clearly enough: your first job and your ideal job are almost certainly not the same thing. That’s fine. A good first role teaches you specific things that will catapult you into the next one. Take it seriously, become genuinely excellent at something specific, and be the person who knows everything about one particular thing. That expertise becomes your leverage for every move after it.

THE ACTUAL ADVICE

• Expose your work. The person who shows their thinking out loud will always beat the person who waits until it’s perfect.

• Tell your story. You are the only person with your exact combination of background, obsession, and perspective. That is the differentiator.

• Be cringe. Post the video. Post your take. Post the half-formed idea. Cringe is just confidence before the audience catches up.

• Do the thing. Don’t wait to be hired to do fashion data work. Build the thing. Analyse the thing. Publish the thing. The job follows the work, not the other way around.

• Create, improvise, learn, improve, master. In that exact order. Never in reverse.

• Be extremely proactive. Reach out. Pitch. Propose. The people who get the interesting roles are the ones who asked for them before the role existed.

• Never wait until you’re ready. You will never be ready. Start anyway.

• Be consistent. In a space where most people post twice and disappear, showing up every week is a competitive advantage in itself.

To every single person who messaged me

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There is a problem with how fashion talks about trends. Every season, the industry produces thousands of trend reports and an endless stream of editor opinions. That gets amplified by whatever is going viral on TikTok — and the truth is the algorithm manufactures its own evidence. Suddenly, the trend is real because everyone agrees it is, until it isn’t. And by then, you have already invested in it.

Most of this is noise, some of it is signal, but the problem is that without data, it is almost impossible to tell the difference in real time.

So this is the series where I analyse what is really going to become a trend and what will vanish before you even notice — so you don’t waste your money getting carried away by micro-trends (we are against those).

This week the focus is: Louis Vuitton and Fendi Cruise 2027, plus a cross-collection read across all five houses (Chanel, Dior, and Gucci, read part 1 below)

But first, what is the Cruise or Resort collection? The industry term is Cruise collection, but Resort is what consumers search — expensive, logistically complex, and entirely optional shows held at destination venues months after the main season. Only the houses with enough money and creative confidence bother.

Cruise / Resort collection is a commercial and strategic commitment made 12-18 months in advance. So when a designer chooses a fabric or silhouette for Cruise, they are not reacting to what just went viral, they locked that decision before the TikTok viral cycle even started. That is why Cruise is a better signal than Fashion Week — the noise cannot get in.

And that context matters. Luxury is being forced to rebuild trust after years of price hikes with nothing to show for it. Consumers are building wardrobes, not chasing trends — and the resale market growing three times faster than firsthand is the proof. These new creative directors are the industry’s answer: new creative energy over price escalation.

Let’s get into it.

CONTEXT

The season that moved
to America — and why.

Before Louis Vuitton and Fendi, it is worth pausing on what this Cruise season represents as a whole, because the context matters for everything that follows.

Cruise 2027 is the most geographically concentrated season in recent memory, and that concentration is not accidental. Dior showed in Los Angeles, Gucci took over Times Square in New York, Louis Vuitton staged their show at the Frick Collection in Manhattan, and the season is not over — Hermès is presenting in Los Angeles in June, and Zegna follows shortly after.

The US is the market these houses are actively courting, and the data backs up why: while China remains in recovery and Europe is flat, the US is the only major market where LVMH recorded growth; Hermès grew 12% in North America, and Prada grew 15%. Even Ferragamo, which has had a difficult few years, posted 15.5% growth in North America last quarter.

But the Cruise season extends beyond these five houses. Max Mara is showing in Shanghai — a deliberate choice that signals confidence in a market everyone else appears to be hedging against. And then there is Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut at Fendi, which is the most talked-about creative development of the season. Three debut creative directors across Chanel, Dior, and Gucci in the first edition. Now Chiuri at Fendi. The industry is mid-reset, and Cruise 2027 is where we are seeing what that reset actually looks like in practice.

THE METHODOLOGY

Cruise is where you find out
what trends can become real.

So I built a simple two-step validation system. First: every runway image was processed through an image recognition API to identify recurring visual elements — if a silhouette, fabric, or detail appeared consistently across houses, it was flagged as a candidate trend. Second: each candidate was cross-referenced against Google Trends search data to confirm whether consumer interest was actually moving.

Every look from Cruise 2027 was analysed for fabric, silhouette, and colour, then tested against 12 months of search data. The question was simple: did consumer interest hold after Fashion Month ended, or did it drop the moment the runway conversation stopped? What held is real, and what dropped was noise.

THESE ARE RESULTS BEFORE GETTING INTO THE REAL TRENDS

Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027

Fendi Cruise 2027

Rest of the major catwalks here: Chanel, Dior & Gucci

The Rule

HOUSE ONE

Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton is the anomaly of this Cruise season, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

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Fashion is an industry with only one constant: change.

Not long ago, fast fashion revolutionised retail, doubling production between 2000 and 2015, and now brands face a different kind of disruption – and it is precisely a consequence of the overproduction and those products they have already sold, which are finding a second life without the brands that made them.

Vinted is now the third largest fashion retailer in the UK, behind only Primark and Next, ahead of Zara, H&M, Shein and ASOS, and in France, it is already number one, ahead of Amazon. In 2025, Vinted generated €1.1bn in revenue, with gross merchandise value growing 47% year-on-year to €10.8bn and its valuation rising 60% to €8bn.

Globally, secondhand clothing sales are forecast to hit $289bn this year – 105% growth from 2021, expanding at twice the pace of the overall clothing market and set to reach $320-360bn by 2030.

A clear and significant commercial opportunity that brands not yet positioned for it are already losing ground on.

The numbers tell a story that is hard to ignore.

THE GEOGRAPHY

The US is ahead.
Europe is following fast.

The US is the world’s largest resale market, representing roughly 40% of global secondhand apparel revenue, built on decades of thrift culture and a digital infrastructure – ThredUp, Poshmark, The RealReal, StockX – that normalised resale long before European platforms scaled, and where 93% of consumers purchased a secondhand item in the past year and 48% of younger consumers now look to secondhand first when shopping for apparel.

In Europe, Vinted is the infrastructure that made it mainstream, dominant in France and the UK, high-growth in Germany, Italy, Spain and the Nordics, taking a market that existed in charity shops and flea markets and putting it on a phone.

The search data makes the shift visible across both markets.

The consumer has clearly moved, and the question is whether the industry has.

WHY SECONDHAND IS WINNING

It is not what brands think.
And that is commercially dangerous.

The industry framed secondhand as a sustainability story, but that framing was always incomplete and it is now commercially dangerous.

To understand how deeply perception shifted, I looked at how secondhand fashion was talked about — across academic research, market reports and consumer communities — before and after Covid. What came back was a complete vocabulary swap. The words associated with shame and compromise were replaced almost entirely by words associated with identity, discovery and aspiration. Bubble size reflects how often each term appeared across the sources, not a mathematical score (chart below).

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There is a problem with how fashion talks about trends. Every season, the industry produces thousands of trend reports and an endless stream of editor opinions. That gets amplified by whatever is going viral on TikTok — and the truth is the algorithm manufactures its own evidence. Suddenly the trend is real because everyone agrees it is, until it isn’t. And by then, you have already invested in it.

Most of this is noise, some of it is signal, but the problem is that without data, it is almost impossible to tell the difference in real time.

So this is the series where I analyse what is really going to become a trend and what will vanish before you even notice — so you don’t waste your money getting carried away by micro-trends (we are against those).

This week the focus is: Chanel, Dior, and Gucci Cruise 2027. Next week: the remaining houses.

But first, what is the Cruise or Resort collection? The industry term is Cruise collection, but Resort is what consumers search — expensive, logistically complex, and entirely optional shows held at destination venues months after the main season. Only the houses with enough money and creative confidence bother.

Cruise / Resort collection is a commercial and strategic commitment made 12-18 months in advance. So when a designer chooses a fabric or silhouette for Cruise, they are not reacting to what just went viral, they locked that decision before the TikTok viral cycle even started. That is why Cruise is a better signal than Fashion Week — the noise cannot get in.

And that context matters. Luxury is being forced to rebuild trust after years of price hikes with nothing to show for it. Consumers are building wardrobes, not chasing trends — and the resale market growing three times faster than firsthand is the proof. These three debuts are the industry’s answer: new creative energy over price escalation.

Let’s get into it.

You can also read the AW26 Fashion Week Month edition here

THE METHODOLOGY

Cruise is where you find out
what trends can become real.

So I built a simple two-step validation system. First: every runway image was processed through an image recognition API to identify recurring visual elements — if a silhouette, fabric, or detail appeared consistently across houses, it was flagged as a candidate trend. Second: each candidate was cross-referenced against Google Trends search data to confirm whether consumer interest was actually moving.

Every look from Chanel, Dior, and Gucci Cruise 2027 was analysed for fabric, silhouette, and colour, then tested against 12 months of search data. The question was simple: did consumer interest hold after Fashion Month ended, or did it drop the moment the runway conversation stopped? What held is real and a what dropped was noise.

THESE ARE RESULTS BEFORE GETTING INTO THE REAL TRENDS

Chanel Cruise 2027

Dior Cruise 2027

Gucci 2027

The Rule

TREND 01 — CONFIRMED

The suit is the only trend
that never needed a moment — +920%.

Tailoring appears at every single house: Chanel at 28%, Dior at 28%, Gucci at 35% share of collection* (chart below). Three designers with completely different creative languages arrived at the same anchor.

And the search data is unambiguous (chart below) — “tailored suit women” sat at searches indexed* of 9 before Fashion Week*, rose to 21 during the shows, and hit 100 in April. That is not a spike. That is a structural shift in consumer behaviour. The suit was real before Fashion Week confirmed it, and it is more real now that Cruise has doubled down.

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I started this with a full-time job, zero subscribers
Here's what the data actually showed me...

Hi, I’m Carmen. Data analyst at one of the biggest fashion marketplaces in the world, and founder of The Data Fashion Brief. Eight months ago I decided I was tired of seeing “trends decoded” on social media with no methodology, no data, no evidence — just someone’s opinion dressed up as analysis. So I started translating fashion through a more scientific lens. First on Instagram and TikTok, then on Substack in February 2026.

3.5 months later: +5,000 subscribers, +8,000 Substack followers.

Here’s exactly how it happened — and what the data actually showed me along the way.

A note before we start

I almost didn’t write this. Showing the numbers feels a bit vulnerable. But the people in my inbox kept asking — so here it is, unfiltered.

01 · THE ASSUMPTION

What I assumed would work.
As a data analyst, I run on hypotheses.

My hypothesis was simple: better content equals faster growth. So I put hours into catwalk breakdowns, brand analysis, trend decodes backed by data (& still do, ofc). I assumed the analysis would do the work.

It didn’t. Or at least, not in the way I expected.

What I didn’t understand yet is that content on Substack has two jobs — and they require completely different things. Getting someone to discover you is a different problem from making them stay and I was only solving one of them.

The writing is what makes people stay, but getting them there is a different problem entirely.

The storytelling is what makes them discover you, the analysis is what make them stay.

02 · THE GROWTH ENGINE

What actually drove growth (how I got discovered):
Notes.

Between February and March 2026, my subscriber count went from a few hundred to several thousand. That growth was almost entirely driven by Substack Notes.

One Note in particular changed everything:

“Dear Substack, please connect me with the people who love fashion but want to understand the business behind it. The ones who watch a show and wonder what the data says. The ones who see a queue outside Chanel and ask why, not just wow”

That Note drove between 20 and 104 new subscribers per day for weeks. On its single best day, it brought in 104 new subscribers from a piece of content that took me less than five minutes to write.

My most researched long post from the same period? 37 signups total.

BTW, this is not an argument against long-format content. The posts built credibility and gave people a reason to stay, but Notes were the engine that brought people in.

The Notes that performed best for me fell into three categories:

If you take one thing from this section: write Notes like you’re talking to one specific person, not broadcasting to a crowd. The ones that felt most personal performed best without exception.

03 · THE ANALYTICS

What converted vs
what just got views.

I track EVERYTHING. One pattern emerged that completely changed how I think about content strategy:

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THE STORY

A subway platform.
A master’s degree.
A Chanel ambassadorship.

In the summer of 2024, Bhavitha Mandava was on a Brooklyn subway platform finishing her master’s degree at NYU and not looking for a modelling career. A scout noticed her, and within two weeks Matthieu Blazy — then at Bottega Veneta — had cast her in a show. Eighteen months later, she is Chanel’s first Indian House Ambassador.

The fashion industry called it a fairy tale. It was actually a carefully sequenced strategy.

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From macro to micro:
Why the unknown face is the new strategic asset.

Mandava grew up in Hyderabad, India, in a Telugu family where academic achievement was the path forward. She earned an architecture degree, then moved to New York for a master’s in Integrated Design and Media at NYU. Modelling was not the plan.

That story, and the person it belongs to, is precisely why Blazy chose her. Under his direction, Chanel has moved away from the polished, untouchable archetype toward something more grounded: clothes that look like they belong to a woman with a life, a commute, a desk, a degree. Mandava – an architect-turned-model who was studying for her finals while walking fashion weeks – is the face of that vision. Her ease on the catwalk, her academic background, her unfamiliarity with the industry’s hierarchies: all of it reads as authentic in a way that cannot be manufactured.

THE SEQUENCING

Three milestones.
One patient strategy.

What Chanel executed was a micro-discovery strategy: identifying unknown talent before it carries a price tag, then using each public milestone to measure audience response before committing to the next level of investment. The sequencing is the point.

Google Trends data for “Bhavitha Mandava” shows near-zero search interest across the entire first half of 2025. The Métiers d’Art moment produced the first significant spike, peaking at index 100 in the week of December 7th. Her parents then posted a video that had approximately 26 million views, people were amazed by the discovery.

A second spike followed in January 2026 when she closed Chanel’s Haute Couture show as the bride – the look traditionally reserved for the designer’s ultimate muse. The House Ambassador announcement came in March 2026, precisely when search interest had proven sustained across three distinct cultural moments.

WHAT THIS MEANS IF YOU ARE NOT CHANEL

The mechanism is transferable.
The cost of entry is not.

Brands spending on macro influencer partnerships are paying for audiences that have already been priced in. Micro-discovery inverts this: you find the talent before the market does, build the relationship around genuine alignment, and let community response determine how far you take it.

The Mandava case shows that a single resonant cultural moment can generate more earned media than a paid campaign — provided the story is genuine and the sequencing is patient. Mandava now sits in the same ambassador roster as Margot Robbie and Timothée Chalamet, but her path there cost a fraction of theirs and generated more organic conversation than either.

BEFORE THE FASHION

The most searched festival
in years — and one reason why.

Google search interest for Coachella peaked at its highest ever on April 14, 2026 — up 127% on the same point last year. The festival has not generated this level of search volume in at least five years. The main cause that impacted this was Justin Bieber walking onstage with a laptop, opening YouTube, and playing Baby to 100,000 people. That single moment drove a +3,400% spike in search for “Justin Bieber Coachella”.

It is worth noting because it sets the context for everything that follows. Coachella 2026 arrived with more eyes on it than any recent edition and the fashion, as a result, had a larger stage.

THE OUTFIT DATA

Basics are the uniform.
Archive is the statement.

Off-duty basics appeared in every single celebrity look from weekend one as the look itself. Micro bottoms showed up in 42% of outfits, sporty accessories in 36%. The dominant Coachella formula of 2026 is maximum skin exposure.

But the more interesting story is what sits on top of that foundation. The Y2K (Year 2000) and archival pull: sheer or lace pieces appeared in 24% of looks and generated the majority of the conversation. Kendall Jenner in white basics grounded with The Row and Ann Demeulemeester, Kylie in a vintage John Galliano S/S 02 Dior blouse over unbuttoned denim, Hailey Bieber in a 1998 Galliano slip dress once worn by Fran Drescher on The Nanny. Later, Kylie again in an archival Chanel spring 2005 lace crop top.

THE COLOUR DATA

The palette tells the same
quiet luxury story.

Together, neutrals and desert tones account for over 70% of the palette. The festival that once ran on jewel tones and tie-dye is now operating in colours that could slide directly into a quiet luxury editorial. Bright pops (lime, orange, hot pink) account for just 4%, used strategically to stand out rather than as a base.

WHAT THE DATA IS SAYING

Looks like you didn’t try.
But you absolutely did.

Coachella used to be fashion’s most maximalist weekend. The data from weekend one tells a different story this year. The dominant look is effortless basics plus skin exposure. The secondary story is controlled Y2K femininity: archival pieces, lace, and early 2000s references. What is disappearing is the heavy boho, the maximal styling, the fringe and flower crowns that once defined the festival.

Boho is not dead, it appears in around 6% of looks, enough to acknowledge the heritage.

THE TAKEAWAY

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THE METHODOLOGY

How I validated
a trend from a look.

Every season, the industry produces thousands of catwalk images, hundreds of trend reports, and an endless stream of editor opinions about what is going to be a trend. Most of it is noise, some of it is signal, but the problem is that without data, it is almost impossible to tell the difference in real time.

So I built a simple two-step validation system. First: every runway image from AW26 was processed through an image recognition API to identify recurring visual elements across collections. I.e., if a silhouette, fabric, or detail appeared consistently across multiple houses, it was flagged as a candidate trend; second: each candidate was cross-referenced against Google Trends search data during Fashion Month to confirm whether consumer interest was actually moving.

Five trends passed the first filter, and four passed the second.

THE OVERVIEW

Fashion Week month
trends in data.

The chart below shows all five trends on a single timeline. The pink band marks Fashion Month. That is what real trend momentum looks like when the runway and search data align.

Lace and sheer are the clear outliers — both moving at a rate that separates them from the rest. The suit is the quiet anchor, always present, always searched. Fur has been a consistent trend across the last year and continues strongly into Fashion Month. Pointed shoes barely registers in search volume compared to the rest — though looking at the trend in isolation it is still a significant bump. We will come back to that.

TREND 01 — CONFIRMED

Lace — +300%
The data’s biggest winner.

Seen at: Dior, Saint Laurent, McQueen… — Lace appeared across every price point and every silhouette at AW26. It was present in SS26 and continues to be very strong into AW26. From full lace gowns at Dior to delicate slip dresses at Saint Laurent, the runway consensus was unanimous in a way that rarely happens across competing houses in the same season.

TREND 02 — CONFIRMED

Sheer — +259%
Not a micro-trend, a movement.

Seen at: Chanel, Valentino, Miu Miu — sheer dominated AW26 in a way that felt less like a styling choice and more like a collective creative direction. Sheer is aligned with the romantic cultural shift we are transitioning into — a movement I explored in depth in my article below.Romance Is Trending And Is A Reaction Of An Emotionless Age

TREND 03 — CONFIRMED

Fur — +76%
The comeback nobody
wants to admit they want.

Seen everywhere, in every form — fur, both real and faux, came back with confidence at AW26 as a texture woven into coats, bags, and accessories throughout the collections. It’s giving: the bigger, the better. The return was deliberate and consistent across houses.

TREND 04 — CONFIRMED

The suit — +60%
Fashion’s most consistent
data point.

Seen at: Miu Miu, Saint Laurent, Gucci — every show had its own interpretation of the suit. Since Saint Laurent became the hottest brand of the year based on Lyst’s latest ranking, the suit has become a representation of an era: the women’s era. Strong, independent, confident — the suit represents that. In any form: oversized shoulders, fluid tailoring, worn with nothing underneath — the power suit redefined for 2026 in a way that felt genuinely new.

The +60% spike is the lowest of the confirmed trends — but the baseline was already high. That consistency is its own data story. It is the most reliable trend in fashion precisely because it does not need a runway moment to exist.

TREND 05 — Not yet confirmed

Pointed shoes —
The runway says yes,
The data says not yet.

Seen at: Dior, Saint Laurent, Valentino, Prada — pointed toe shoes were on many AW26 runways: kitten heels, stilettos, knee-high boots — all with the same sharp elongated toe. By runway consensus alone this should be the trend of the season. However, during Fashion Month it emerged but did not yet land in huge search. This is still a trend I predict will have a major impact across the year. Watch this one in six months. The search spike will come — it just has not arrived yet.

THE PREDICTION

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THE PROBLEM

Chanel had a crisis
nobody was talking about.

For several seasons before Matthieu Blazy’s appointment, Chanel faced a quiet but serious problem. The brand’s loyal customers — the women who had been buying Chanel for decades — were struggling to justify spending $8,000 and upwards on collections that no longer resonated. The product had drifted and the house codes were there, but the conviction wasn’t.

Sales were not collapsing because Chanel is too large, too structurally embedded in the luxury market, and too dependent on fragrance and beauty for that. But the fashion authority — the intangible quality that makes a luxury customer feel they must have something — was eroding. Editors were not spending their own money, stylists were not calling in the looks, meaning that the house was present but not urgent.

This is the context Blazy walked into. His brief was not simply to design clothes, it was to rebuild the desire that a house of Chanel’s scale requires to justify its price positioning — while doing so without breaking the codes that a 110-year-old brand cannot afford to abandon.

THE DESIGN MOMENT

In two collections, he caught
the house up to 2026.

Blazy’s achievement at Chanel is that he made it feel necessary again. His SS26 debut caught the industry’s attention; the AW26 collection — shown during Paris Fashion Week in March 2026 — confirmed that what happened in the first season was not an accident.

He refreshed the house without breaking a single code: the tweed is still there, the intertwined Cs are still there, the essence of what Karl Lagerfeld built over four decades is still legible in every look, but the energy is different — more precise, more contemporary, more confident in the brand’s own intelligence.

The Google Trends data makes the inflection point visible. Search interest began climbing from the moment his first collection was announced. It has not returned to pre-Blazy levels since.

THE STRATEGY

Five months of
engineered desire.

The queue outside Chanel stores did not happen spontaneously. It was the final act of a communications strategy that had been running for five months — and the timeline makes the mechanics visible.

THE DATA

$55.8M — what does
that number actually mean?

Media Impact Value is a metric created by Launchmetrics that assigns a monetary value to every piece of media coverage a brand receives — editorial mentions, social posts, influencer content, celebrity appearances, press articles, everything counted and weighted.

In plain terms: if Chanel had tried to buy the same level of attention they received during Paris Fashion Week through paid advertising, it would have cost $55.8 million. They did not buy it, they did not pay for most of it. Matthieu Blazy earned it.

Three levers and one outcome.

The Chanelmania story it is three strategic levers pulled in sequence — and the timing of each is as important as the decision itself.

PREDICTION AND RECOMMENDATION

THE CONTEXT

Fashion Month exists
& Paris absorbs it.

Every February and September, the industry goes through the ritual: New York opens, London edges forward, Milan shows up, Paris closes. Four cities, hundreds of shows, thousands of looks. One fashion calendar.

The calendar implies a competition, and the data helps me decode it.

Paris Fashion Week AW26 generated 25.5 million social media mentions and 406.3 million traditional media mentions. New York, London, and Milan — combined — did not come close. Milan, the second largest fashion week by global profile, generated just under 5 million social mentions. That is roughly 19.6% of what Paris produced. London and New York trail further behind.

This is a structural gap that has been building for years, and the numbers from AW26 are simply the clearest expression of it we have seen yet.

THE HOUSES

This season, Paris rewired
its own power structure.

The 83% figure is the headline, but the story inside that number is about four houses navigating extraordinary transitions at the same time — and the way each of those transitions generated its own wave of attention, layered on top of the already dominant Paris signal.

You rarely see four major houses simultaneously in transition during a single Fashion Week. Each of these stories — a first collection (for AW26), a second statement, a final bow, a return — generates its own sustained media cycle independently. Stack them in the same city, in the same week, and you understand why the mention volume hit the numbers it did.

THE APPOINTMENT THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING

Jonathan Anderson at Dior is the most strategically significant move of 2025.

Anderson arrives at the world’s largest luxury fashion house after a tenure at Loewe that turned a relatively niche Spanish leather goods house into one of the most-discussed brands in fashion. He did it with a clear, recurring aesthetic logic — intellectual surrealism executed with craft — and a content instinct that made each collection inherently shareable.

At Dior, he is working at incomparably larger scale. Christian Dior S.A. generates over €9 billion in annual revenue. While Loewe was a brand project, Dior is a business operating at the top of the luxury pyramid, with an accessories category, a beauty division, a fragrance portfolio, and a wholesale network that runs across every major market in the world.

His first collection set the tone. The social media response was immediate and polarised — which, for a brand of Dior’s scale, is precisely the right signal. You do not need universal approval when you have universal attention.

THE EXIT MATTERS MOST

Pieter Mulier leaves Alaïa.
And no one has replaced him yet.

Mulier’s departure, announced January 30, is the season’s sharpest brand risk story. In five years, he more than doubled the size of the house. He built a retail network that grew nearly fourfold to 20 freestanding stores. He created the mesh ballerina flat and the Teckel handbag — two of the most-copied, most-worn products in the premium fashion market. He won the CFDA International Designer Award in 2025.

His farewell campaign, shot by Steven Meisel, was a formal homage to his own tenure. His final collection showed March 4. The house has not named a successor and the in-house studio is managing continuity for now.

The industry consensus is that Mulier is heading to Versace — now under Prada Group ownership, with Raf Simons (Mulier’s long-time mentor) operating as co-creative director of Prada itself. The circularity is striking. But until that move is confirmed, Alaïa faces the exact challenge that every mid-sized luxury house dreads: a post-signature-director period where the brand identity must hold without the person who built it.

The mesh flat and the Teckel will keep selling. The question is what comes next — and who decides.

THE ANALYSIS

Three reasons Paris keeps
pulling further ahead.

The 83% is not luck. Here is what is actually driving the gap — and why it compounds every season.

THE PREDICTION

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But this fever is (thankfully) dying, and the data confirms it: according to Google, worldwide “Romance” searches are now +170% up vs October last year. This wasn't a seasonal Valentine’s spike; the acceleration began in late 2025 and has surged into 2026, suggesting it’s a sustained cultural pivot.

Okay… but why now?

Because we have reached the limit of the optimised life.

Human connection has been treated like a marketplace rather than a sanctuary. In order to understand why romance is surging, we must zoom out and look at the cultural fatigue that has been quietly building up for years.

First of all, we live in an emotionally unavailable era. It was “cool” to be detached. In line with this, the rise of dating apps has created a false sense of infinite options viewing commitment as an opportunity cost. This leads to a culture of keeping things casual that leaves individuals feeling like there is something wrong with their needs.

Secondly, social media has set an unattainable standard of perfection. Not only that, there is a new phenomenon: the rise of AI-generated content. We are surrounded by automated visuals perfectly composed. This “perfection” is making us doubt the very trustworthiness of what we see. In fact, by 2026, consumers are beginning to actively reject the optimised. They find it homogeneous, predictable, and emotionally flat - a state the industry is calling “AI Fatigue”. This is where the shift happens: when everything becomes automated, the rebound is imperfection. And there is nothing more imperfect, more chaotic than love. <3

In this landscape, imperfection becomes a luxury. Romance cannot be automated; it requires time, attention, and true presence - things an algorithm cannot replicate. Suddenly, those qualities feel rare and, in 2026, rarity is what drives desire.

The great aesthetic pivot

Before this, the world was minimalist and frictionless (Quiet Luxury, beige interiors, autotune pop). Now, the pendulum is swinging toward maximalist emotion. We are moving away from the clean girl aesthetic and toward something burdened with feeling.

The Catwalks Reflect This Shift

Look at 2026 collections seen across Couture or Fashion Week:

• High Victorian collars and poetic structure at Dior

  

• Nature motifs and delicate craft at Chanel couture

  

• Dramatic emotional couture at Schiaparelli

  

Across houses, we’re seeing:

• Visible presence

• Historical references

• Emotional intensity

• Garments that feel composed

Romance in 2026 has gone from pastel, corny, or naive to structured and almost devotional.

Music Is Echoing the Same Mood

And this is where it gets interesting. Rosalía is leaning into intensely romantic, almost operatic emotional storytelling, and vulnerability and heartbreak as performance. Even her visual codes: halos, angelic symbolism feel mythic and aspirational.

Olivia Dean is rising with nostalgic, soft romantic songwriting, intimacy, tenderness, and warmth. The kind of music that feels handwritten rather than autotuned.

Sincerity is trending.

Film & Series Are Reinforcing It Too!

• A new season of Bridgerton coming soooon.

• Wuthering Heights is building anticipation: the aspirational media narrative around Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi is blurring fiction and feels strategic, like a PR move.

• “Men who yearn” is no longer ironic and it’s become aspirational.

We’re romanticising:

• Emotional availability

• Devotion

• Ritual

• Intention

In a culture where ambiguity became normalised, emotional availability now feels exceptional.

The Economic Layer

There is also a macro layer. Romantic aesthetics historically rise during periods of uncertainty. Today’s uncertainty is layered: AI acceleration, digital saturation, economic instability, polarisation, identity fragmentation. The world now feels synthetic and coded, and culture is leaning into narrative, ritual, and emotional structure. In contrast, romance offers reassurance and meaning.

So is romance actually back? The data suggests it is:

The catwalks reflect it, music amplifies it, pop culture normalises it.

In 2026, commitment is the ultimate status symbol. It’s no longer about how many options you have, but how much presence you can give to one.

Fashion, as always, is just the ghost of the psychological shift before we can fully articulate it. We are trading the “optimised life” for the “meaningful” one.

So… take notes, gentlemen. The men who yearn... earn.

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Schiaparelli opened Paris Haute Couture Week with a show that delivered its signature theatricality, but the data reveals a collection driven less by excess, and more by control.

Using runway imagery from Vogue Runway, I analysed every look in the collection and built a model tracking how often specific fabrics, silhouettes, details, and colours appeared. Each percentage reflects the share of looks featuring that characteristic.

Here’s what actually defined the show.

Fabrics: transparency leads

Transparency is the backbone of the collection.

• Sheer / tulle / organza: 47%

• Embroidered / beaded mesh: 40%

Nearly half the looks rely on see-through construction, shifting focus from surface decoration to the body and its structure beneath.

Silhouettes: body-led, not oversized

Despite the drama, silhouettes remain disciplined and vertical.

• Fitted columns & sheaths: 43%

• Corseted / torso-focused shapes: 37%

Volume appears, used as emphasis rather than the default.

Details: sculpture over ornament

Decoration isn’t subtle, but it’s intentional.

• 3D sculptural embellishment: 53%

• Sheer layering on skin: 47%

More than half the collection treats embellishment as architecture, turning garments into objects without losing wearability.

Colour palette: restraint as strategy

Colour is tightly controlled to let form and texture dominate.

• Black & deep charcoal: 28%

• Antique gold metallics: 26%

Skin tones and muted accents fill the rest of the palette, reinforcing a sense of cohesion rather than visual noise.

The takeaway

Schiaparelli SS26 may read as extravagant at first glance, but the data tells a different story. This is couture built on repetition, structure, and restraint where drama is engineered, not improvised.

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And as always, I turned to data to see whether it quietly confirms what culture already knows.

Fashion tends to remember designers emotionally. We talk about muses, silhouettes, or eras. But we rarely ask whether influence can be measured, sustained, and observed over time.

So I asked a simple question:
Does Valentino’s relevance fade with time, or does it resurface at moments that actually matter?

To explore this, I looked at Google search interest for “Valentino” from 2004 to 2026 and mapped it against the brand’s key moments.

A quick clarification!
Search volume measures attention, memory, and cultural presence. Those moments when people feel compelled to actively look for a brand.

A brand that entered the data already legendary

By the time search data begins in 2004, Valentino is already a fully established symbol of couture authority.

Founded in Rome in 1960, the house had spent decades dressing royalty, Hollywood, and political power. Valentino Red was already a global symbol long before digital culture accelerated fashion cycles.

That’s why the early data looks the way it does.
From 2004 to 2014, there’s no explosive growth phase, just steady presence.
And in luxury steady presence often means power.

2008, a defining year for the brand

One of the clearest inflection points appears in 2008, when Valentino Garavani presents his final couture show and retires after 48 years at the helm (n.1 on graph above.)

Valentino’s last show in Rome is often remembered as one of the most emotionally charged moments in fashion history. Rooted in Rosso Valentino, a colour the house had owned so completely it became inseparable from its identity, the farewell was super theatrical. A closing that reflected the brand itself.

The data mirrors this approach: search interest rises, but it remains controlled.

There is a spike, but it’s not dramatic. And that’s precisely what makes it interesting.

In fashion, founder exits typically produce a sharp peak followed by a rapid drop in attention. The story ends, and interest moves on. But here, it doesn’t.

That moment is reinforced a year later with the release of the documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor. Which shifts from designer to cultural reference, extending attention beyond fashion insiders and anchoring his legacy in collective memory.

Stability as a signal

In the years after Valentino steps back, search interest doesn’t collapse. This is one of the most telling signals in the entire dataset.

Flat data is often mistaken for stagnation. In luxury, it can mean resilience. The brand no longer depends on the physical presence of its founder to remain relevant.

This period also marks a crucial transition behind the scenes. Creative leadership passes to insiders Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, who prioritise continuity over disruption (n.2). When Chiuri later leaves, Piccioli takes over as sole creative director, carrying the house forward with a deep understanding of its codes.

This is where Valentino quietly shifts from being designer-led to truly brand-led.

2015-2026: the steady growth period

From 2015 onwards, attention starts to grow again through selective modernisation.

Accessories play a key role here (n.3). The rise of Rockstud becomes one of the first icons of the house, helping Valentino expand beyond couture without diluting its identity. Cultural visibility increases, the brand opens new entry points for younger audiences while keeping its core codes intact (n.4).

Later, symbolic moments like Pink PP, under Piccioli’s direction, act as accelerators (n.6). Which reminds the world that the brand still knows how to speak in symbols.

2026 and legacy activation

January 2026 brings the most emotionally charged moment in the dataset: the death of Valentino Garavani (n.8).

The takeaway

What Valentino Garavani built is low-volatility luxury.

The data tells a clear story:

• attention that returns rather than disappears

• relevance that resurfaces at moments of meaning

• a brand that survives leadership change, trend cycles, and time itself

In fashion, true legacy is measured by how reliably it is remembered when it matters.

Valentino passed that test long before his death.
The data simply confirms it. <3

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I’m so happy to be writing my first post on Substack. I’ve been hearing it’s making a comeback, and honestly… I couldn’t resist opening an account.

Who am I?

My name is Carmen. I live in London and work in the analytics space, currently at FARFETCH, previously at YOOX-NET-A-PORTER and Zara (Inditex), always on the more technical side of fashion (and always in style).

I absolutely love numbers and fashion, an odd combination for some, but completely natural to me. My mind works as a hybrid, half nerdy, half creative. I love understanding the stories behind decisions, but through a logical lens. Writing is also my favourite way of making sense of everything that lives in my head.

So… what does a data analyst do in the fashion industry?

Simple, we solve strategic problems by telling stories with data.

Here’s what it looks like behind the scenes:

1. A problem arrives.

2. I break it down into smaller, clearer parts.

3. I look at the rational side, the data that can guide the solution.

4. I ask myself a ton of questions and build hypotheses.

5. I answer them by analysing the data, small questions first, to solve the big one.

6. I stitch everything into a clear, logical story.

7. I turn it into a simple, engaging presentation that anyone, technical or not, can understand.

At the core, I’m a deeply curious storyteller. I’m obsessed with understanding people, behaviour, motives, and the why behind every decision.

Why is this role important in fashion?

Honestly, it’s important in every industry, but fashion is a particularly interesting one.

Historically, fashion has relied heavily on instinct, gut feeling, and creative vision. That intuition is powerful. But on its own, it doesn’t give companies what they need to grow, allocate budgets, or measure strategy in a scalable way.

So here’s the big question:

How do you bring logic into an industry built on emotion, aesthetics, and creativity?
How do you add structure without killing the magic?

And the solution is clear.

You use data to explain, clarify, and guide decisions on efficiency.
You translate “gut feeling” into frameworks that businesses can act on, without losing the creativity that makes fashion what it is.

That’s what I do.

And that’s exactly why The Data Fashion Brief was created.

In my spare time, I apply this same lens to fashion news, business decisions, brand strategies, and industry trends. I detangle them logically, crunch the numbers, and tell the strategic story behind what’s really happening.

And now… I’ll be doing that here too.

If you’re curious about how fashion and data meet, welcome.
I’m so happy you’re here.

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