Get to Know the 9 LVMH Prize 2026 Finalists
The impressive pool of 20 semifinalists competing for the annual LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers has been carefully narrowed to just eight names. The group hails from all walks of life, representing a variety of design techniques, business acumen, and technical skills. The one thing they have in common? A jury of industry all-stars saw something special in their work.
But the hard part is hardly over. On September 4, these eight designers will gather once again when the jury hands out the main Prize alongside the Karl Lagerfeld Prize and Savoir-Faire Prize. Last year, it was Soshiotsuki who received the big honor, with Steve O Smith, and Torishéju taking home the other two trophies, as well as the money and mentorship programs attached.
You may already recognize some of the names on the finalist list. Colleen Allen, Zane Li, and Julie Kegels have all been featured in the pages of W, while Daniel del Valle Fernandez made quite a stir last season with his debut collection for Thevxlley. But there are many brands still waiting for their moment in the spotlight, and the Prize could provide just the kind of support necessary to take their businesses to the next level. It’s never too early to familiarize yourself with tomorrow’s icons.
Colleen Allen
Designer: Colleen Allen
Location: United States
Specialty: Womenswear
Fans: Carey Mulligan, Hannah Einbinder, Lily Allen (no relation), Greta Lee, Mikey Madison, Ayo Edebiri
In just four seasons, Colleen Allen has managed to become a New York fashion darling. Really, though, it happened faster than that. Following Allen’s debut during the spring 2025 season, editors immediately took notice. Initially a menswear designer, Allen was introduced to womenswear during her time at The Row. Now, she is designing for her eponymous label, delivering seasonal collections that very carefully skirt a fantastical line. She’s often inspired by the mystical and spiritual, but she distills these ideas into distinctly modern collections. While some of her clothing can undoubtedly be described as “witchy,” what is more evident is the sense of a self-empowered woman dressing herself. A jacket is fitted at the waist and boasts Victorian-era hook-and-eye closures down the front, but its construction in fleece makes it contemporary (and a front-runner for your next hike). Her use of color has also been lauded, as she dabbles in poppy orange, saffron red, royal purple, and chartreuse. She picks her colors with care each season, the orange first entering due to its association with spiritual awareness. Most recently, Allen expanded into the accessory category with the release of bustle handbags, which can be worn under the arm or under the skirt. It is likely the first sign of major growth in the brand’s future.
De Pino
Designer: Gabriel Figueiredo
Location: France
Specialty: Womenswear
Fans: Lady Gaga, Hailey Bieber, Caroline Polachek, and Dara Allen
Gabriel Figueiredo staged his first runway show for his label De Pino during Paris Couture Week—a statement in itself. Amid the fait-main stalwarts came this young French label characterized by exaggerated silhouettes that provide a cheekiness to an otherwise sophisticated design language. Figueiredo is a student of fashion. Yes, he is a graduate of the Brussels visual arts school, La Cambre, from which he gained a master’s degree in fashion design in 2017, but his education extends beyond the purely academic setting. Figueiredo references icons like Lady Gaga and Martin Margiela (he’s done embroidery work for Maison Margiela), along with Tumblr, Style.com, and Nicolas Ghesquière’s Balenciaga days. In many ways, his designs embody this sense of nostalgia, but viewed through the eyes of a craftsman. “There’s definitely a childish vision of fashion,” he told W in 2024 after his debut. “It’s a mix between these really extreme sophistications, but also something childlike and fun.”
Institution
Designer: Galib Gassanoff
Location: Georgia
Specialty: Womenswear, menswear, and genderless
Galib Gassanoff could be considered a bit of a hometown hero. For three seasons, the Georgia-born designer has been championing the traditional craft and history of his country. For fall 2026, this meant employing weavers for three showpieces. They produced beautiful rugs, each of which required as many as 85,000 knots made from bouclé and felted double-face wool. The pieces brought color to a mostly neutral collection, as three models ended the show in beautifully crafted designs that were very obvious in their origins—rugs that had been draped on models in an obvious, yet still artistic way. Elsewhere, camouflaging was more central, as skirts and dresses made from shoelaces danced down the runway, creating incredible texture that needed to be studied to reveal its true nature. Fabrication is one of Gassanoff’s strengths, and he usually allows textiles to lead the way in his process, which has proven successful. But Gassanoff’s inspirations also carry weight. For fall 2026, the designer looked toward Georgian and Azerbaijani history—specifically, the story of women’s suffrage and political independence in those countries. Between the heaviness of history and the cheekiness of art and craft, Gassanoff has been able to thrive.
Julie Kegels
Designer: Julie Kegels
Location: Belgium
Specialty: Womenswear
When designing, Julie Kegels always thinks about women. That sounds like an obvious approach, but it’s the detail in which the Belgian designer considers her customer that makes the act unique. “I always have a group of women in mind, and they appear in different guises, in different stories,” she told W in 2025. “I think, Okay, this is for a woman who works at the library, is passionate about tennis, and loves to eat mango—I really get into the details.” The specifics are often where contrasts can be found. A working woman is one thing, but if she’s a working woman with three children who loves to spend her off days at the roller derby, she’s dressing very differently from her single-minded counterpart. And it’s within these contrasts and juxtapositions that Kegels finds inspiration. For three seasons (she launched in 2024), Kegels has been slowly amassing a fan base with her twisted classics. Last season, that meant a silk shirt dress imprinted with a shadow or a jacket featuring a cropped, rounded hem that gave the look of a woman walking with her hands on her hips. Kegels has mastered the art of surprise, but not at the expense of the clothes, which still boast an impressive level of wearability. “What I really love—and this is when things get interesting for me—is when something is a bit weird.”
Lii
Designer: Zane Li
Location: China
Specialty: Womenswear and menswear
Fans: Jennifer Lawrence, Ayo Edebiri, Greta Lee
Perhaps you’ve seen Jennifer Lawrence or Ayo Edebiri in an untraditional, layered fit recently—one that resembled a high-fashion take on the Joey Tribbiani moment in Friends when he asks, “Could I be wearing any more clothes?” Well, the women were dressed in Lii, one of the hottest brands of the moment. Founded by Chinese designer Zane Li after his graduation from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Lii rejects the fragility of fashion and instead focuses on the durable. This often means creating dresses and blouses from more traditional menswear fabrics. His inspirations of 1990s American sportswear and Cristóbal Balenciaga are clear within his work. Those seem like disparate ideas, but they encapsulate Li’s design ethos effectively. “People think that if you wear something ladylike or something old-fashioned and traditional, then you’re uncool,” he told W last year. “But I don’t think that way; I want to explore the possibility of putting practicality into glamorous dressing.” Li works with his husband, stylist Jason Rider, who helps with all aspects of the brand outside of designing. Together, the two have built Lii up to a fashion darling, one that mixes architecture and elegance with utility.
Petra Fagerström
Designer: Petra Fagerström
Location: Sweden
Specialty: Womenswear
Fans: Charli xcx
Petra Fagerström is creating fashion for the future by looking back. The Swedish designer uses traditional craft techniques to create modern designs. She launched her brand last year after graduating with her master’s from Central Saint Martins, and only just showed at fashion week for the first time. The theme for that collection stemmed from her experiences ice skating growing up in Gothenburg, an activity she gave up when she got into designing. The sartorial life of a skater was represented with sequins and fur trims, but also a warm-up top that could be an ancestor of the Dior Bar jacket. There is an understanding of fabrication, as well as a youthful excitement still prominent within Fagerström’s work. She utilizes an impressive technique of ironing and stitching to create optical illusions that blur right before one’s eyes. In an interview with Vogue, Fagerström spoke of her interest in cultural archetypes and if they “can be transformed into something sharper and more powerful, while rejecting the aspects of being a woman today that frustrate me.” That is clear in her first collection, but we will have to see where Fagerström takes the brand (and if the Prize will provide a boost to those endeavors).
Ponte
Designer: Harry Pontefract
Location: United Kingdom
Specialty: Womenswear and menswear
There’s an artistry in Harry Pontefract’s work. Some of it is immediately obvious, like a woman in his recent collection, Series Five, who’s surrounded by a dress of stockinged limbs in what could double as a museum-worthy sculpture. Other times, it’s more subtle, like a well-tailored suit with a charcoal-like glean, an effect that occurred when it was painstakingly colored in with pencils. The process took hours, which isn’t unique for Pontefract. And while he might work on a couture timeline, the results are impressively simple and wearable, something on which he prides himself. Of course, that isn’t true of everything (the stocking look may be hard to wear to the store). Pontefract understands that he sits within a space of juxtoposition “between art and fashion,” as he describes it to Vogue. And thus far, that placement has been a successful one for him. It’s Pontefract’s ability to combine the everyday with the unexpected that has turned him into a designer to watch.
Thevxlley
Designer: Daniel del Valle Fernandez
Location: United Kingdom
Specialty: Genderless
The line between art and fashion is even further blurred at Thevxlley (pronounced “the valley”). Daniel del Valle Fernandez grew up in Pilas, a small town near Sevilla, and moved to London at 19. He worked in floristry to make ends meet, so it’s no surprise that flowers seem to be a large theme of his work these days. They popped up repeatedly in The Narcissist, the collection he showed during London Fashion Week in February. Fernandez described the work as “a catalogue of obsessions.” It seems his focus was more so on those items—bread, ceramics, flowers—with their wearable nature becoming an afterthought. Fernandez pulled from his upbringing for the collection. His father is a baker, ceramics are ubiquitous in Southern Spain, and he even used his mom’s wedding dress. He was not traditionally trained, but learned from the craftsman whom he grew up around. The result is a physical manifestation of Fernandez’s creativity. A wooden corset acts as shelving for dozens of mini vases, while a dress is a still life blooming with wax flowers. Nothing is as it seems. A shirt is a vase, is a basket, is a loaf of bread. It’s confounding and strange, beautiful and funny. It’s fashion for art’s sake.
Yoshita 1967
Designer: Anil Padia
Location: Kenya
Specialty: Womenswear
Yoshita 1967 is all about craft—specifically the kind that hails from the cultures in which Padia was raised as an Indian boy growing up in central Kenya. After a short stint at Central Saint Martins, Padia went to Paris, where he spent time at Paco Rabanne, Y Project, and Jacquemus. There, he shaped his boyhood creativity into something more tangible. An early goal of Yoshita was to highlight often-overlooked skills from his upbringing. Because of that, all the crochet and embellishment details in his work are done by hand, a slow but rewarding process. A look through Padia’s debut collection, Temple Road, which showed at Paris Fashion Week, will find these techniques coming together in spectacular form. Brightly colored crocheted dresses are dotted with mirrors or little bells; the latter pops up throughout Padia’s work. “They are my obsession, because they hold so many layers at once: culture, dance, heritage, family memory,” he tells One. It’s a fitting symbol for Yoshita, which seems to encompass all of those things.
