The water at the base of the runway was ankle-deep, cold enough to make the models hesitate. At Rick Owens’ Spring Summer 2026 show in Paris, they descended stone steps and walked directly into a shallow basin, their hems darkening as fabric absorbed water in real time. The effect—part baptism, part transformation—felt like the season’s thesis statement, but it was far from the only religious reference on the season’s runways.
The return of sacred iconography to fashion has been building momentum across multiple seasons, but the Spring and Autumn 2026 collections saw it reach a critical mass. Willy Chavarria placed pearl rosary beads and cross-emblazoned tailoring at the centre of his FW25 show, framing the religious references as both heritage and protest within the Chicano experience. Tolu Coker threaded Yoruba spiritual beads through her London presentation, placing wooden prayer beads directly into her models’ hands as they walked.
Pop culture has tracked in parallel. Chappell Roan performed at the 2025 MTV VMAs as Joan of Arc, complete with crossbow and flaming castle gates. Rosalía’s operatic masterpiece ‘LUX’ built on religious imagery like a procession, braiding Catholic iconography with classical music. Lorde’s fourth album ‘Virgin’ invoked the symbol of the Madonna in its title and its visual language. The convergence of runway and mainstream culture around these references suggests something deeper than aesthetic coincidence.
The cultural conditions that produce this kind of symbolic turn are rarely simple. In an era of climate anxiety, political polarisation, and a pervasive sense of institutional decline, the visual language of faith offers a vocabulary for transcendence and community that secular fashion rarely provides on its own. Whether the trend deepens or disperses depends on whether designers find new references within the sacred canon or exhaust the current well. For now, the baptisms continue.
