The Coolest Thing a Brand Can Do? Less.
As fashion month continues, standout shows have shown that when you strip away unnecessary bells and whistles, you make a more lasting mark.
“If your eye is not drawn to one place on a garment, that’s how you know it’s finished,” says Clare Waight Keller. It’s my third time flying across countries to interview the renowned luxury designer turned Uniqlo creative director, but this time feels different.
Having just completed her first full year as creative director at Uniqlo, she has come to New York City at the tail end of fashion week—alongside global brand ambassadors Cate Blanchett and Roger Federer—to celebrate new LifeWear launches, the type of elevated basics the Japanese brand is known for. Sitting across from me in a West Village boardroom, she’s wearing a grey men’s sweater vest, a satin brown skirt and a slouchy navy blazer.
To illustrate her point, she explains the way she’s put her outfit together: mixing boyish with feminine and getting the proportions just right so it feels “modern, fresh and effortless”. She has on two thin gold bracelets and two gold rings. Her hair—a brownish blonde—is wavy and tousled. She appears makeup-free; her nails have a glossy, clear coat.
What Keller is describing is something that feels harder and harder to find. As New York Fashion Week came to a close, seasoned runway critic Cathy Horyn lamented the lack of “knowing” design. “We’ve seen a great deal of desperate design, kitchen-sink collections with a bit of everything, with an abundance of ruffles and extreme shapes,” she wrote for New York Magazine. “The industry is just a big washing machine, churning and churning, and relatively few designers seemed to have the presence of mind to actually do less on their runways.”
But that’s exactly what Clare Waight Keller is doing. Her Fall 2025 collection is full of forest green, sand and burgundy. It’s got classic pleats, cashmere knits and oversized jackets with the right amount of structure. No one detail shouts out at you; it’s all simply very good. “Everything has to have a purpose, and nothing should be superfluous,” she says of the Japanese design philosophy for Uniqlo. “It always has to have some sort of function or an aesthetic reason. Like, it creates a beautiful line or it finishes things off nicely.”
Toteme, Photo via Launchmetrics/Spotlight
Indeed, the coolest fashion week presentations demonstrate the ability to know when something is finished, and stop there. Toteme presented an array of crisp white separates, with precisely folded collars and satisfyingly draped knits. At Tory Burch—the unofficial It girl show of NYFW—models walked in low-slung skirts and boxy blazers. Even the more outré concepts—like a sheeny red leather skirt paired with a brown chemise—didn’t feel overwrought, because they weren’t crowded with add-ons. COS told a similar story, with buttery-soft cashmeres, angular jackets and slouchy trousers in a charcoal palette.
COS, photo by Isidore Montag
“For me, less has always been more,” COS Design Director Karin Gustafsson told me after the show. “It’s about the quiet power of subtle details, beautiful materials, and silhouettes that inspire confidence without demanding attention.”
A throughline for all of them? The ability to produce an excellent t-shirt. To Clare Waight Keller, who has designed couture for Givenchy and, most famously, Meghan Markle’s wedding dress, this casual basic is her biggest focus these days—along with making the right pair of jeans.
“It’s the quintessential in everybody’s wardrobe,” she says, adding that she studies how to make these pieces look and feel their best. “For the last year or two, we’ve seen a really cropped, boxy shape on t-shirts. Now, they’re shrinking in much closer to the body, and we’re seeing the sleeves come up to the top of the shoulder. I say jeans and a t-shirt are a must-have in every wardrobe. But really, it’s the right jeans and t-shirt.”
Like other standout designers this season, Clare Waight Keller emphasizes the ability to pull back and let quality speak for itself. “I think through a lens of distilling something down to the essential: refining things until there’s nothing else you can remove,” she says. “You should keep the purest of forms, you keep the integrity of the shape, but you really consider every detail so that it’s incredibly balanced.”
As fashion month continues, we’ll see which brands can pull that off.
Natalie Michie is the Fashion & Features Editor at FASHION Magazine. With a pop culture obsession, she is passionate about exploring the relationship between fashion, internet trends and social issues. She has written for Elle Canada, CBC, Chatelaine and Toronto Life. In her spare time, she enjoys reading and over-analyzing movies on TikTok.