The Spring 2021 collections were the strangest fashion-month showings most of us could remember. Most of these clothes had been previewed in September 2020 in a NYFW that was largely digital, half-hybrid and quietly experimental — designers were not holding traditional packed-house runway shows, not flying editors in, and not pretending the world was the same as it was the season before. By the time the actual Spring 2021 collections were arriving on shop floors and ecommerce in March, the conversation had shifted. The clothes themselves had to make sense for an in-between life — half remote, half tentatively returning — and the lookbooks were coming on phones rather than from front rows. We’ve been watching what stuck, and pulled together the houses that genuinely had something to say this season.
Marc Jacobs experimented with format more than anyone else
Marc Jacobs’s response to the no-runway season was the most ambitious of the major American brands. Rather than mount a full Spring 2021 ready-to-wear show, the house leaned into experimentation with its sub-brand Heaven by Marc Jacobs — a Y2K-leaning, Gen-Z-targeted line designed by Ava Nirui — and rolled out the season as a series of campaign moments rather than a single runway. The main Marc Jacobs line itself stayed quiet through Spring 2021, with the brand’s bigger swing reserved for the fall collection later in the year. The main-line Daisy fragrance kept doing its quiet steady work as the brand’s commercial anchor, and the Heaven boutique pop-ups in New York and Los Angeles became unexpectedly defining cultural references for what 2021 fashion was going to look like. It was a study in how a heritage brand could behave in an era when traditional fashion calendars genuinely could not function the way they used to.
Tom Ford’s digital season felt as crafted as the in-person ones
Tom Ford’s Spring 2021 collection arrived as a digital film and lookbook in September 2020, and the ready-to-wear hit stores in spring exactly when planned. Tom Ford doubled down on the polish his brand had always traded on — clean tailored separates, satin, impeccably finished evening pieces — and refused to use the season as an excuse to look casual or apologetic. The collection’s strongest pieces were the satin column dresses and the streamlined tailoring that, even rendered as a digital experience, felt like clothes meant for a life that was returning. The brand also continued to lean on its beauty division as a reliable bridge to its loyal customer — the lipstick line and the fragrance category never paused — and Spring 2021 felt like a brand betting that polish and craft would still mean something on the other side of the strange period we were in. By March, the pieces from this collection were among the early prestige delivered on shop floors, and they looked exactly like the digital film had promised.
Tory Burch and Brandon Maxwell built quiet, optimistic American collections
Tory Burch‘s Spring 2021 collection was deliberately wearable — preppy-but-relaxed, lots of refined knits, mid-length skirts and tailored shorts — and the lookbook leaned into the kind of “going out for a casual lunch” vibe that exactly matched what we were actually doing in early 2021. The pieces had been shown in a hybrid format in September, and they hit the floor in March looking entirely sensible and very buyable. Brandon Maxwell took a more romantic line — the brand showed Spring 2021 outdoors at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in September 2020, and the collection’s emphasis on long, quietly grand silhouettes was almost defiant. Both brands were among the small handful that committed to a coherent ready-to-wear story for the season, and both had collections that arrived in stores looking exactly the way the previews had suggested. They were the bets you could actually buy in a season where buying-from-photos was suddenly the norm.
Christopher John Rogers turned a season’s quiet into a breakthrough
The biggest American breakthrough of the Spring 2021 season was Christopher John Rogers, whose joyful, riotously colourful collections had been building critical momentum through 2019 and 2020 and finally hit a public-cultural moment in January 2021 when Vice President Kamala Harris wore his ensemble for the inauguration. The Spring 2021 collection that had been shown digitally in September 2020 — full of high-volume gowns, bold stripes and unrestrained colour — landed in retail at exactly the right cultural moment. Rogers had won the CFDA’s American Emerging Designer of the Year award in 2019, and Spring 2021 was when the rest of the country caught up. The season’s bigger story was about American sportswear stalwarts holding their ground; the genuinely electric story was about a young Black designer in Brooklyn whose clothes refused the muted palette the lockdown era kept pushing on everyone. We were grateful for the colour.
The houses that stepped back, and what it meant
The Spring 2021 season was also defined by who didn’t show. Ralph Lauren skipped a traditional NYFW Spring 2021 show entirely, citing the impossibility of doing the brand’s signature large-format event safely. Calvin Klein continued to operate without a permanent creative director after Raf Simons’s departure two years prior, and the pre-collection arrived with the brand’s traditional minimalist American sensibility but no head-of-house authorship behind it. The takeaway from a season’s worth of skipped or downsized shows was that the traditional September-to-March fashion calendar had stretched almost past its limits, and a number of American houses were going to need to rethink how they showed anything at all. Spring 2021 was the season that broke the format. The Fall 2021 collections, which would show in February 2021 in mostly-digital formats, would be the season we’d find out what the new format actually looked like — and which of the brands we loved would still be inside it.
Summer’s fashion calendar will be lighter — June and July are jewellery moments, with Resort and Pre-Spring activity in between — and we will see you for the summer jewellery roundup on the third Tuesday of June.