Paloma Wool FW26 RTW
Paloma Wool recently presented at Paris Fashion Week, and it’s one of my favorites this season! Paloma Wool is a Barcelona-based artistic fashion project founded by Paloma Lanna (meaning wool in Spanish) in 2014. The aesthetic of the brand has changed drastically from its beginnings.
During its founding, Paloma Wool tapped into the “avant-basic” aesthetic, utilizing the checkerboard pattern, playful, candy-like colors, retro swirls, and other iconographies of this style. However, as Lanna’s personal style evolved, so did her work at Paloma Wool.
Images via Paloma Wool on Instagram, WWD, Hypebae, Fashion Week Online, and Pinterest.
The brand underwent a sleek makeover and began gaining attention on Instagram in 2020. Coincidentally, this was also around the time when the “quiet luxury” and “clean girl” aesthetics began taking off, and Paloma Wool's aesthetic is a major parallel, while still shaping its own path.
Paloma Wool is known for its minimalist aesthetic and cool-toned colors. Lanna’s AW26 collection, however, is the most playful of her works, exploring the new aesthetic of the brand. To start, some of the looks featured bags with stuffed animal dogs in them!
While there are many hints of the typical Paloma Wool style such as clean cuts, geometrical pieces, textured-focused, cool-toned colors, there were many parts of the runway that gave off a “grounded yet playful” feel. I view the stuffed animals as a nod to childhood. It’s as if Lanna is trying to communicate that even as we collectively grow up and things become serious (as seen through her corporate-looking outfits) it is important to remember and honor the inner child in all of us.
As a new mom, Lanna is known to love her motherhood and often incorporates her kids into her work. For example, at the end of her show, she walked out with her daughter. I think her taking on motherhood while simultaneously balancing her career as a fashion designer is why she is playing with such themes and patterns. Another major signifier of this ideology are the huge bows we see in a few of the looks.
Again, we see this adding to the level of playfulness and in this case it acts almost as a contrast. The outfit is relatively monochrome and dull except for this huge hot pink bow wrapped around the model’s body and arms.
The catwalk was lined with cyan blue confetti, a traditionally clinical, Paloma Wool-esc color that also adds to the quiet playfulness of her looks this season. Overall, I absolutely loved her AW26 collection and can’t wait for SS27!
