For about three years, the most fashionable thing you could do was look like you had not thought about fashion. No logos, no colour, no visible effort. A beige coat, a cashmere jumper with nothing written on it, shoes that cost a fortune and announced nothing. That look has run out of road, and the thing arriving in its place is the loudest fashion has been since the 1980s.
If you have opened any autumn collection coverage this year, you have already seen it. Sharp tailoring with shoulders you could balance a tray on, saturated colour used in blocks rather than accents, fur both real and fake, gold, high-contrast prints, and texture piled on texture. Who What Wear’s roundup of the key autumn and winter 2026 trends describes the season as a lesson in maximalism after a stretch that felt deliberately muted. The runways did not drift here. They turned.
Where the swing came from
The name that stuck to this is boom boom, coined by the trend forecaster Sean Monahan, the same person who gave us normcore and vibe shift over the last decade. In an interview about the term, he places it partly in the return to offices and the way people started drawing lines again between work clothes and going-out clothes, after years when those categories collapsed into each other at home.
The reading most commentators give it is less comfortable than a trend report usually is. Boom boom is described as the aesthetic of visible money at a moment when money is less evenly spread than it has been in decades. The Italian magazine nss G-Club’s piece on the return of eighties excess makes the point that the decade being mined here was not actually a good one, and that dressing as though a boom is happening does not produce a boom. Whether you find that persuasive or overblown, it explains why this shift is being written about as a mood rather than a colour palette.
Quiet luxury deserved to die
Here is the part the obituaries mostly skip. Quiet luxury was sold as the tasteful option, the grown-up alternative to logo-chasing, and it was nothing of the kind.
The entire premise was that the garment signalled wealth to people who could recognise the cut and the cloth, and nothing at all to everyone else. That only works if the garment is genuinely expensive. A logo can be counterfeited or bought at a discount; the drape of a very good coat cannot. Quiet luxury was therefore the most exclusionary trend in years, precisely because it looked so modest. If you could not afford the real thing, participating meant wearing beige and hoping.
It also made a lot of people dress badly. Encouraging an entire generation to buy neutral, unstructured, deliberately anonymous clothing produced wardrobes with no personality and, worse, no fun. The pendulum was always going to come back. It usually does, roughly every ten to fifteen years, and it always arrives looking like an overcorrection.
How to wear it without buying a new wardrobe
The trap with a maximalist swing is that it appears to demand everything at once, and that is how people end up with a cupboard full of things they wear twice. It does not work that way in practice.
Change the silhouette before you change the colour. The single most current thing you can do this season costs nothing beyond a tailor’s fee. Structure is what has actually shifted: a defined shoulder, a nipped waist, a trouser with a sharp line rather than a slouch. A blazer you already own, taken in properly and worn with the shoulder sitting where it should, reads more current than a new piece in this season’s colour worn loose.
Go loud in exactly one place. The mistake is treating maximalism as a licence for everything simultaneously. One saturated coat over neutrals you already own. One print. One piece of gold jewelry big enough to notice. The rest stays quiet, which is what makes the loud thing land instead of turning into noise.
Use accessories as the entry point. This is where the shift is cheapest to join and easiest to reverse when it passes. Heavy gold chains, oversized cuffs, a belt that does something. Eyewear is the underrated one: a bold, sculptural frame changes a face more than a new coat does, and if you have only ever owned one pair of sensible glasses, it is worth knowing that a second frame is far less expensive than the first once you have your prescription and measurements in hand. Our guide to buying prescription glasses online covers how to get both.
Look at your mother’s wardrobe before you look at a shop. The eighties references being sold new this season exist in enormous quantity in vintage shops and charity shops, usually better made and at a fraction of the price. Strong-shouldered jackets, heavy gold-tone jewelry, saturated wool coats. This is the one trend cycle where the secondhand version is often the superior product, because the original decade did the silhouette properly and did not have to guess at it.
What to leave alone
Not everything in this swing is worth adopting. Head-to-toe logo dressing is back on the runways and it dates faster than anything else in fashion, because a logo pins a garment to a specific season in a way a shape never does. Fur, real fur specifically, carries an ethical argument you should make your own decision about rather than absorb from a street style gallery.
And be suspicious of the speed. The pace at which aesthetics are now named, monetised and discarded means several of the things on this season’s boards will look silly by next autumn. Buying into a trend at its loudest point is how you end up with the most regret per pound spent.
It is worth remembering who names these things and why. A trend forecaster identifies a mood, a magazine gives it a headline, and within a season the brands have a reason to tell you that everything you own is finished. Some of that is genuine observation about how people are actually dressing. Some of it is a sales cycle wearing the costume of cultural analysis. The way to tell them apart is to ask whether the trend describes a shape, which tends to be real and durable, or a shopping list, which tends not to be.
The useful version of all this
Trend cycles are more useful as information than as instruction. What this one is telling you is that the market has stopped rewarding invisibility, which means the clothes on shop floors for the next couple of years will have more shape, more colour and more character in them than they did. That is good news even if you have no interest in dressing like a 1987 trading floor.
Take the silhouette, which lasts. Take one loud thing, which is fun. Leave the rest, and let the pendulum keep swinging without you. It will be somewhere else soon enough, and the people who bought the whole look in one go will be the ones trying to sell it on.
