12 New Fashion Ideas From the Pre-Fall 2022 Collections

This pre-fall season is the smallest we’ve covered on Vogue Runway in nearly a decade, with around 100 women’s and men’s collections in total. In the past, our pre-fall coverage has taken our critics around the globe. With Omicron spiking this year, some brands are trying to make the best of a difficult situation; others are on taking the season off. The independent Milan designer Marco Zanini said, “sometimes to carry on with reckless stubbornness is not as smart, wise, or brave as to pause and think.”

Even in the best of times, pre-fall has traditionally been a stop-gap season, one that’s more about selling than new ideas. But after two years of pandemic, even the idea of selling clothing has become abstract. At this point, what do shoppers want or even need? The suggestions here revolve around the notion of a useful, simple beauty. Warm textures, sunshine colors, and lots of sexy, essential black clothing are the season’s major storylines, with a bit of kitsch and fun coming in via the continued Y2K revival—now for the boys!—and a renewed interest in deconstructed denim and strange layering.

If the past is anything to go on, these clothes will become the backbone of our springtime and summertime wardrobes, accented by the sure to be big, crazy, and eccentric ideas on the fall 2022 catwalks next month.

Demented Denim

The denim revival is going strong this season, with brands like Diesel, Balenciaga, and R13 blowing up jeans to new proportions. Others, like Louis Vuitton menswear and MM6 Maison Margiela are rethinking denim completely, using trompe l’oeil techniques to evoke the structure of denim on cozier fabrics.