Why Tassels Are Suddenly Everywhere

2 min read

Of all the major style moments that dominated summer 2026, a certain decadently tasseled jacket may have topped them all. In The Devil Wears Prada 2, Miranda Priestly wore the museum-worthy, hyper-embellished Dries Van Noten tassel jacket straight from the fall/winter 2025 runway in an elevator scene and in a meeting at Runway. The jacket is now headed to auction next month, as Christie’s hosts a sale of clothes and accessories directly from the film. The tasseled wonder, with chunky, colorful, expressive features, is exactly the kind of lush, sensorial, handcrafted touch that fashion seems to be craving at a time when everything feels increasingly digital and even more fast-paced than it’s ever been before.

In our AI-obsessed, algorithm-dominated mode, a slew of textural tassels kind of feels like a rebellion. As for the aforementioned Dries Van Noten jacket, newly named creative director Julian Klausner presented the collection inside the extremely opulent, ornate, chandelier-dripping Opéra Garnier in Paris. He said that he wanted every piece to be seen within the context of the Opéra, and the little piece of outerwear certainly felt like a wearable piece of theater in more ways than one.

It’s almost as if giant tassels represent visual joy and bringing people together on a very human level, simply by being viscerally so busy, over-the-top, and clearly made by human hands. “As a fashion-forward woman, I rarely, almost never, get catcalled on the streets,” says the collector Yulia Fomenko, who owns the Dries Van Noten tassel jacket. “One day, walking by the Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side, I was wearing my jacket, and a bunch of construction workers started yapping at me—‘Ma’am, I love your jacket!’ ‘This is such a cool jacket!’ And this is not a singular occurrence with this piece. I love when non-fashion people love a fashion item so much—it simply transcends industry and is universally beloved by almost everyone I meet while wearing it.”

Dior Couture fall/winter 2026.

Alaïa spring/summer 2026.

Dior x Sheila Hicks.

Other designers are giving clothes a Big Tassel Energy treatment too; there were Alaïa’s zesty, bright-colored skirts in shades of lime green dripping sprays of enormous tassels. Jacquemus showcased a black-and-white jersey dress with a casual take on the tassel, knotted and swinging from the maxi-length hemline as the model walked through the cavernous space. And last but not least, Jonathan Anderson’s Dior showed us tassel-ified handbags with artist Sheila Hicks’s silk jumbo tassels in 2025, and beautiful, majestic tasseled fans courtesy of artist Lynda Benglis, stuck on dresses, at the most recent Dior couture show in Paris. Chloé, Loewe, and Bottega Veneta have all touched on tassels in recent collections too.

Off the runways and in the real world, as we transition from late summer into fall, the tassel persists in the form of fringe and tassel-beaded necklaces and earrings. Just call it a mini microdose of fashion euphoria.