The Fall 2023 ready-to-wear shows wrapped at the start of March, and the bigger picture had finally come into focus: “quiet luxury” was no longer a niche fashion-Twitter conversation but the dominant aesthetic of the season. The Row, Khaite, and Loro Piana set the tone in their quiet collections, Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy doubled down on his craft-as-luxury thesis at Milan, and Paris closed the month with the kind of restrained, expensive minimalism that signals a real cultural shift. We spent the fashion-week month watching how the houses argued with one another, and these are the collections, designers, and ideas that defined the start of 2023’s fashion conversation.
NYFW Fall 2023: Khaite continues to lead
Khaite‘s Catherine Holstein delivered the New York week’s strongest collection again — long, lean tailoring in deep grays and chocolate browns; oversized leather coats that felt closer to outerwear-as-architecture than to fashion; and a styling palette of black tank tops, slim trousers, and pointed ankle boots. The collection cemented Khaite’s position as the American answer to The Row.
Around Khaite, Tory Burch continued her label’s pivot toward a quieter luxury vocabulary, showing pared-back tailoring and slim knits with a small embellishment palette. Proenza Schouler‘s Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough showed an unusually quiet collection rooted in jersey, crepe, and a single muted color story. Thom Browne‘s Fall 2023 was a typically theatrical version of his school-uniform vocabulary, and was a reminder that New York could still deliver capital-S spectacle when it wanted to.
Milan: Bottega Veneta and Gucci’s last-Michele season
Bottega Veneta‘s Matthieu Blazy delivered the Milan show that everyone had been waiting for: a Fall 2023 collection that built directly on the trompe-l’oeil-leather thesis of his earlier seasons, with hand-painted prints, perfectly-tailored jackets in butter-soft suede, and a closing parade of ankle-grazing leather coats. The collection’s bag of the season — the Andiamo, a sleeker successor to the Sardine — was on every editor’s wrist by week’s end. Blazy’s three-collection run at Bottega had decisively earned him the position of Milan’s most-watched designer.
The Milan story was complicated by the fact that Gucci‘s show was Alessandro Michele’s last full collection for the house, after his departure was announced in late 2022. The Fall 2023 collection — designed by the in-house team in the transition window — leaned into Gucci’s archive without trying to extend Michele’s vision, and the room read it as a respectful pause rather than a creative statement. The wider question of who would replace him would not be answered until Sabato De Sarno was named in late January as the new creative director, with his first collection scheduled for September.
Around the marquee names, Diesel‘s Glenn Martens continued his surreal Y2K-revival energy with a show that doubled down on distressed denim, oversized accessories, and the kind of styling that had become Diesel’s signature under his direction. Prada‘s Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons collaboration entered its third year on a confident note. Milan was, again, the city making the loudest argument.
Paris: Saint Laurent and Loewe
Anthony Vaccarello’s Fall 2023 show for Saint Laurent continued the brand’s deep commitment to slim, 1990s-coded silhouettes — sharp shouldered jackets, narrow-leg trousers, and a precise palette of black, brown, and bone. Loewe‘s Jonathan Anderson delivered one of the season’s most-applauded collections — sculptural dresses that played with proportion and surrealism, including the now-meme-worthy heel-as-balloon and pixelated leather pieces.
The Schiaparelli Couture Spring 2023 collection from the previous month — Daniel Roseberry’s controversial faux-taxidermy lion, leopard, and wolf head dresses — was still the most-discussed Paris fashion conversation through March. The Fall 2023 ready-to-wear that Schiaparelli showed was a more restrained version of Roseberry’s vocabulary, but the cultural after-burn from January’s couture show kept the brand at the center of the season’s discourse.
Off-White and Burberry: the second collections
Off-White‘s Fall 2023 collection — designed under Ibrahim Kamara’s art-and-image direction following Virgil Abloh’s death in late 2021 — was the brand’s second post-Virgil RTW outing and showed a brand still finding its voice. The collection played to streetwear-and-tailoring crossover that had been Abloh’s signature, but the editorial response noted that the new direction felt more cautious than confident.
By contrast, Daniel Lee’s second collection for Burberry was an emphatic statement. After his Fall 2023 debut in February — with its iconic Equestrian Knight Design rebrand and the heavy use of Burberry’s blue-and-yellow archive check — Lee had decisively repositioned the British heritage house away from the post-2018 Riccardo Tisci era and toward a stronger British-Yorkshire identity. The collection showed serious crafted outerwear, the new B-monogram bag in multiple iterations, and a clear thesis: Burberry was a British luxury house, not a global luxury one, and that distinction was going to be the brand’s competitive advantage.
The “quiet luxury” thesis settles in
The over-arching season story was the consolidation of “quiet luxury” as the dominant aesthetic vocabulary for 2023. The Row’s Olsen-twin-led collection at Paris was the purest expression — black tailoring, brown leather, no logos, no embellishment. Khaite, Loro Piana, and Brunello Cucinelli were the affordable-quiet-luxury options below it. Bottega Veneta and Loewe carried the same philosophy at the more dramatic end. Brunello Cucinelli‘s cashmere-everything aesthetic kept its hold on the Italian-luxury basics conversation.
The cultural context for the moment was the HBO show “Succession,” which was airing its final season through March and April 2023. The show’s costume design, led by Michelle Matland, had been making the case for sober, expensive, logo-free dressing as the visual language of real money. By the time the show wrapped in May, the wider fashion conversation had completed its pivot: visible luxury was out, the kind of quiet wardrobe choices that signaled deep wealth without announcing it were in. We expected the aesthetic to dominate red-carpet and editorial conversations through the rest of 2023.
The Fall 2023 shows closed in early March, and we had a clear thesis for the year: quiet luxury had decisively replaced loud-logo dressing, the legacy houses were betting on craft over showmanship, and the next generation of creative directors at Burberry, Off-White, and Gucci were each going to be measured against a new, much higher bar. We will see you on the first Tuesday of April for the rest of the spring beauty conversation.