Gold Takes Centre Stage Across Autumn’s Most Luminous Collections
From Anthony Vaccarello's final Saint Laurent bow to the surrealist visions of Daniel Roseberry at Chanel, this season's most covetable designs gleam with precious metallic lustre. Harvey Nichols curates the season's most gilded moments.
AI-assisted voice playback. Starts only when you choose Play.
Metallic gold has emerged as autumn’s defining colour, a thread woven through the season’s most distinctive collections with remarkable consistency. What began as a deliberate editorial impulse has crystallised into something altogether more significant: a collective celebration of radiance and liberated elegance across the industry’s most celebrated houses.
Anthony Vaccarello’s final collection for Saint Laurent comprised 49 gold dipped designs, each one parading beneath an illuminated Eiffel Tower in a moment of ceremonial grandeur. Drawing inspiration from 1920s speakeasies, the collection embodied a sense of liberated freedom, golden gowns moving with the ease and sensuality of an era defined by cultural rebellion and unconstrained joy.
Daniel Roseberry’s autumn/winter 2026 collection for Chanel, titled ‘The Sphynx’, took a more surrealist turn, pairing luminous gold with surrealist accessories and sequins crafted from recycled compact discs, a technique that transformed everyday detritus into something unexpectedly precious. Ralph Lauren, meanwhile, demonstrated gold’s remarkable versatility by pairing it with a restrained palette of white and blue, allowing the metal to shimmer rather than dominate.
Thierry Mugler’s latest chapter in its ‘Trilogy of Glorified Clichés’, titled ‘The Commander’, explored power dressing through exaggerated shoulders and cinched waistlines rendered in shiny gold tones and complementary metallics. At Cult Gaia, an ode to the women who came before was expressed through luminous jacquards, molten inspired finishes and sculptural accessories that caught light with sculptural precision.
Antonin Tron’s debut collection for Balmain remained true to the house’s ‘film noir’ theme, employing a predominantly dark palette punctuated by eye catching looks in gold and green, allowing those precious moments to resonate with particular intensity against shadow and restraint.
Imagery courtesy of Harvey Nichols (@harveynichols).
