From now through the new year, museums from New York and London to Milan and Paris are treating fashion as far more than clothes. The season’s exhibitions move freely between couture, photography, film, celebrity, and art, with highlights including a 20th-anniversary celebration of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette at Versailles, Tim Walker’s deeply personal new queer portrait series, and the first U.S. retrospective devoted to Azzedine Alaïa. Elsewhere, dolls, divas, Dalí, Burberry trenches, and ’90s rebellion all get their turn under the spotlight. Consider it a particularly rich season for anyone interested in how fashion reflects—and helps shape—the culture around it.
Style Is The Body Thinking | SAIC Galleries, Chicago
Martin Parr, Mexico (Donuts), 2002–03
Bringing together pieces by more than 50 artists working across painting, photography, film, sculpture, and installation, Style Is The Body Thinking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s public galleries highlights a distinctive sensitivity to style that runs through contemporary figurative art. In works by Peter Hujar, Ebony G. Patterson, Gillian Wearing, and others, clothing, grooming, and self-presentation are integral to how subjects are seen and understood. Marilyn Minter draws on high-gloss beauty imagery in her portraits of women she admires, while Martin Parr lets clothing help shape the frame itself, as in a tightly cropped photograph of a Mexican doughnut vendor whose pink daisy-print dress echoes the glossy pastries she is selling.
On view: August 31–December 5, 2027
Doll Dressing | Museum at FIT, New York
Prada Fall 2011
Opening on the heels of New York Fashion Week, Doll Dressing traces the long relationship between dolls and fashion. An 18th-century fashion doll on loan from Colonial Williamsburg shows how the latest styles once circulated in scaled-down form, not unlike the tiny mannequins Emily Adams Bode Aujla used to present her fall 2025 and spring 2026 Bode collections. The influence also runs in reverse, with designers turning Barbie Land style into runway fashion, like a circa-1964 Balenciaga babydoll dress, Undercover’s spring 2003 paper-doll dress with trompe l’oeil tabs, and Loewe’s spring 2023 balloon pumps that blew Barbie’s signature heels up to surreal size.
On view: September 16–January 3, 2027
The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon | The V&A, London
Burberry trench coat, Fall 2025
Continuing Burberry’s 170th anniversary celebrations, the V&A opens a free display dedicated to the house’s iconic trench on the same day as Burberry’s London Fashion Week show. Archival material, including a midcentury catalog showing a woman in a Burberry trench walking her dog, appears alongside 19 runway looks spanning Christopher Bailey through Daniel Lee, among them a spring 2013 pink metallic silk trench and a fall 2025 purple baroque fringed coat worn by Naomi Campbell. Together, they chart the transformation of Thomas Burberry’s weatherproof gabardine coat with distinctive House Check lining into one of fashion’s most instantly recognizable luxury items.
On view: September 21—January 3, 2027
Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola | Château de Versailles, France
Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst on the set of Marie Antoinette
To fete the 20th anniversary of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, shot on location at the Château de Versailles, the French palace is offering a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the cult classic. Staged at the Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s private domain and the setting for Kirsten Dunst’s memorable fitting of custom Manolo Blahnik court shoes in the film, the exhibition brings together mood boards, costumes, set elements, and reconstructed spaces to reveal the visual references behind Coppola’s Ladurée-colored dreamscape. Exhibition sponsor Cartier has its own ties to Versailles: Louis Cartier mined the palace’s 18th-century decorative arts for inspiration, helping shape the maison’s delicate Garland style.
On view: September 22— January 24, 2027
Dalí and Fashion | Palazzo Reale, Milan
André Caillet, Gala wearing Elsa Schiaparelli’s shoe-hat inspired by a Salvador Dalí design, 1938
Timed to Milan Fashion Week, the Dalí and Fashion show at a royal palace-turned-exhibition space next to the Duomo pays tribute to Salvador Dalí’s role in pioneering the fashion collaboration. In the early 1930s, Dalí showed at Pierre Colle’s Paris gallery, where Christian Dior was a partner before going into fashion, and later painted The Endless Enigma while staying at La Pausa, Coco Chanel’s Riviera villa. His most fertile exchange was with Elsa Schiaparelli, producing the Lobster Dress, Tears Dress, Skeleton Dress, and Shoe Hat, which translated Dalí’s Surrealist motifs of displacement, trompe l’oeil, and anatomical distortion into couture. His jewelry experiments are on view too, including the Eye of Time brooch-watch.
On view: September 24—January 31, 2027
Look: 40 Years of Fashion at the Museum | Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris
The curatorial team and the president of the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs (UCAD) with a Charles James gown, on the occasion of the reopening of the Museum of Fashion and Textiles, 1997
During Paris Fashion Week, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs marks 40 years of fashion exhibitions with a greatest-hits look behind the scenes of its landmark shows, from Yves Saint Laurent: 28 Years of Creation in 1986 to Paul Poiret: Fashion Is a Feast, which closed this past January. Forty iconic silhouettes by designers including Chanel, Dior, Christian Lacroix, Valentino, and Schiaparelli fill the museum’s vaulted nave, set on platforms shaped like sewing patterns beneath a light installation that traces strands of thread overhead. Surrounding vignettes reveal the work that goes into mounting each exhibition, from documentation research and textile conservation to scenography and poster design.
On view: September 30—April 4, 2027
Azzedine Alaïa: Sculpting Fashion | Legion of Honor, San Francisco
Alaïa Spring 1986 haute couture
Co-organized by Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco curator Laura Camerlengo and Fondation Azzedine Alaïa director Olivier Saillard, the first U.S. Alaïa retrospective explores the role American editors, buyers, models, and celebrities played in turning the Tunisian-born French designer into an international star. Eighty looks from 1982 to 2017 trace a relationship that began with an early WWD discovery piece by Bill Cunningham and led to Alaïa’s first runway show at Bergdorf Goodman and a 1,000-person Palladium extravaganza sponsored by Barneys. He returned that support in kind, taking Americans in Paris Stephanie Seymour and Veronica Webb under his wing as the supermodel era took shape.
On view: November 21—April 11, 2027
Rafael Pavarotti: Photographer | Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
Also opening during Paris Fashion Week, Rafael Pavarotti: Photographer is the first major museum show devoted to the Belém, Brazil-born, Paris-based fashion photographer. More than 200 images trace his vividly saturated, highly stylized vision across portraits of Rihanna, Harry Styles, and Beyoncé; campaigns for houses including Dior, Ferragamo, and Off-White; and editorials. Tropical flora and the intense hues of the Amazon recur throughout his work, including in an image on view from W’s 2021 “Birds of a Feather” shoot, where Adhel Bol alights in a fluttery yellow Balenciaga coat against one of Pavarotti’s signature color-soaked backdrops.
On view: October 2—May 2, 2027
DIVA | Denver Art Museum, Denver
Tina Turner performing in the Bob Mackie Flame Dress, 1978
The Denver Art Museum is the exclusive U.S. venue for the touring V&A exhibition that spotlights fashion’s role in creating larger-than-life performers, from Maria Callas to Taylor Swift. Along with a stage ensemble worn by the OG diva and two costumes from The Life of a Showgirl, the exhibition features Bob Mackie stage looks worn by Tina Turner and Cher, Lady Gaga’s periwinkle Valentino haute couture gown with a dramatic floor-sweeping train from the 2019 Golden Globes, and the faux-ermine Viktor & Rolf haute couture dress Lizzo sported in New York in 2021 with a sash embroidered, “Don’t be a drag, just be a queen.”
On view: October 4—January 31, 2027
The 90s: Art and Fashion | Tate Britain, London
The ’90s were a wild time for British art, with Young British Artists including Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst, and Sarah Lucas embracing zoological materials ranging from elephant dung to taxidermied sharks and raw chickens. Fashion was equally provocative: Vivienne Westwood exaggerated the body into her “ants on stilts” silhouettes with cinched waists and padded bustles, while Alexander McQueen staged catwalk spectacles of biblical proportions involving floods and fire. That same irreverent spirit ran through i-D and Dazed & Confused, where photographers Juergen Teller and Corinne Day helped define the decade’s raw, anti-fashion aesthetic. Curated by Edward Enninful CBE, The 90s: Art and Fashion puts these parallel creative movements in conversation.
On view: October 8—February 14, 2027
Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends | National Portrait Gallery, London
Chappell Roan, W Magazine Volume 3 2025
Known for his fantastical fashion photography, Tim Walker unveils Fairyland, a new body of work that may be his most personal yet. Reclaiming “fairy” as a term of pride, Walker spent five years creating 250 portraits celebrating queer life, including a “queeristocracy” inspired by Tudor portraiture and featuring pioneers such as London Gay Liberation Front cofounder Andrew Lumsden and musician and activist Tom Robinson. Elsewhere, Walker explores the transformative power fashion has long held for LGBTQ+ people through portraits of Jean Paul Gaultier, Hunter Schafer, and Frank Ocean, as well as Chappell Roan photographed in Chanel haute couture last year for a W cover.
On view: October 9—February 7, 2027
C.Z. Guest: Portrait of an American Style Icon | SCAD FASH, Atlanta
C.Z Guest, 1962
Co-curated by Stefano Tonchi and Ariel Stark, C.Z. Guest: Portrait of an American Style Icon is the first exhibition devoted to the personal style of a Truman Capote Swan and muse to Salvador Dalí and Diego Rivera. Drawn from her wardrobe donated to SCAD by her daughter, Cornelia Guest, the show features looks by American greats including Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera, Mainbocher, and Adolfo alongside Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, and exhibition sponsor Max Mara. Photographs and illustrations by Slim Aarons, Cecil Beaton, and Andy Warhol round out the portrait of a woman whose easy elegance was unparalleled.
On view: October 15—February 21, 2027
The Nue Black Aesthetic | Design Museum
SIGNAL-3, Trauma Chair, and Recovery Chair by Samuel Ross
Referencing the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s and the New Black Aesthetic of the 1980s, The Nue Black Aesthetic surveys a new generation of Black creatives shaping the future of design across fashion, furniture, architecture, and ceramics through work that embraces multiplicity and nuance rather than a singular idea of Black design. Highlights include Rachel Scott’s Femme gown from her fall 2026 Diotima collection, created with the Estate of Wifredo Lam, which translates the Afro-Chinese-Cuban painter’s 1948 Femme-Cheval canvas into sculptural hand-applied intarsia; Mudbelly Ceramics founder Phoebe Collings-James’s Born in Flames vessel; and A-COLD-WALL* designer Samuel Ross’s Trauma and Recovery chairs.
On view: November 6—August 8, 2027
