Diesel’s fashion show at Milan Fashion Week in February looked like the aftermath of a long, chaotic night. Models walked the runway in clothes wrapped around the body with deliberate carelessness. Their smoky eye makeup looked as if it had been left over from the night before. Their hair was messy. The air seemed heavy with sex. What was once treated as a moment of embarrassment has now become a full aesthetic.
The fall-winter 2026-27 shows cemented one of fashion’s fastest-growing trends: the ‘walk of shame,’ a phrase describing the morning-after return home from a party, date or intimate encounter, still wearing last night’s clothes, often wrinkled, disheveled and out of place in daylight.
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A pioneer of the trend: Tom Ford’s fall-winter 2024-25 show
(Photo: AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
"This collection is about waking up in a place, with no idea what happened last night, and you are the most glorious person ever," Diesel creative director Glenn Martens said of the inspiration behind the collection.
The clothes included double-layered jersey tops tossed casually over the body and sculptural knits created through boiling and shrinking oversized sweaters.
"When you sneak away from the hotel room of the person who you don’t know, you are truly at your best. These are super-wearable pieces for successful living, the essence of Diesel", Martens said. Or, as he put it in a video interview with Vogue’s Instagram account, the move is from “walk of shame” to “walk of fame.”
A TV version of the same idea appeared in the recent Ryan Murphy series "Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette". In one scene, Carolyn Bessette spends the night at John F. Kennedy Jr.’s apartment in Tribeca, then has to improvise an outfit for work the next morning.
(From: Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette)
The solution is Kennedy’s white button-down shirt, worn quickly and paired with an elegant black skirt. Murphy’s decision to linger on that moment is no accident. In the series’ interpretation, this is how one of Bessette’s most recognizable style signatures was born: the white button-down shirt she would go on to wear at every opportunity.
A deliberate tension between luxury and sloppiness
Martens is not the only designer to move from the bedroom to the runway. At Valentino, a model appeared in lingerie under a long, thin furry coat. At Saint Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana, models walked in lace garments inspired by seductive lingerie.
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Dolce & Gabbana’s fall-winter 2026-27 show
(Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
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Dolce & Gabbana’s fall-winter 2026-27 show
(Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
At Gucci’s cruise show, lace bras peeked out from tailored jackets, after the fall-winter 2026-27 show featured models dressed in gestures to the 1990s, blurring the boundaries between day and night.
Even Matthieu Blazy at Chanel did not ignore the trend. In the Métiers d’art collection shown last December in the New York subway, a model walked in a long burgundy leather coat covering a beaded fishnet dress.
It is part of a broader deconstruction of elegance, in which luxury and sloppiness exist in the same look, creating a deliberate tension. The result is a kind of beauty that does not try to hide imperfection, but instead emphasizes it.
An aesthetic of real life
For years, the phrase “walk of shame” carried social judgment, especially toward women. The assumption was that there was something shameful about a woman spending the night away from home. The phrase reflected a double standard: sexual behavior that was considered legitimate, and sometimes even admired, in men was often criticized or condemned when associated with women.
By reframing that moment as an image of confidence rather than embarrassment, designers, all of them male, are reclaiming the phrase and turning it into something glamorous, defiant and visibly unashamed.
In the 1990s, Tom Ford did this unapologetically with stylist and fashion editor Carine Roitfeld, who described her fashion heroine as a woman who “leaves home in the evening and returns the next morning in the same clothes.”
The visual language the two created for Gucci during that decade, the golden age of the fashion house, has recently become the subject of renewed nostalgia, whether authentic or part of a marketing effort by the brand to restore its former glory and revive sluggish sales.
That style was often described as “the glamour of the morning after”: the look of a woman returning home at dawn with slightly wild hair, smudged makeup and clothes hanging on her body with intentional carelessness. Roitfeld herself described the aesthetic she developed as one that sought to make a woman “even more beautiful” precisely in her improper, unpolished moments.
Film, music and television helped shape that image. W magazine described the return of this 1990s fashion trend as part of a broader wave of nostalgia for the period, and as a desire to disconnect from obsessive documentation on social media. It is a little like walking around with a hickey on your neck while trying, at the same time, to show it off and hide it.
Sex and dating columnist Karley Sciortino said the “walk of shame” style reflects “romanticization and being jealous of a period of time that was just inherently more spontaneous and messy.” “When I was in my 20s, we would go out, get drunk, and not be documenting anything", she told W Magazine.
The current style tries to strip the “walk of shame” of the moral baggage attached to it. For Gen Z, a generation that often prefers authenticity over perfection, disarray, fatigue and the traces of the night before are no longer necessarily embarrassing. They can feel natural, even desirable. It is an aesthetic of real life, not one mediated to us through social media filters.