We're in Distinctly Unromantic Times—Here's How I'm Building a Dreamlike Wardrobe

Monica Ainley is a Who What Wear UK Editor in Residence and a Paris-based fashion and culture writer and broadcaster. She is the co-creator of the influential Fashion: No Filter podcast and the culture podcast Fanfare. Monica also authors Mon Review, a weekly dispatch on aesthetics, literature and contemporary rituals.

Lately, an eccentric urge has been dominating a once-minimalist corner of my fashion brain. Well, not that lately. Probably since the pandemic, if I’m honest. I simply no longer have the urge to dress like I’m about to spend the day in front of a screen. In fact, I’ve grown allergic to it. During lockdown, I swore to myself that once we were free, I’d never wear a boring outfit again. Then, AI began quietly colonising our lives, and I found myself drawn to intricate fabrics and prints that require human savoir faire. When yet more global conflict broke out mid–fashion month not long ago, my romantic fate was sealed. In strange, uncertain and deeply unromantic times, the instinct is to lean on fashion for optimism, and occasionally, to escape.

My British granny always said that during the war, she and her friends obsessed over stockings. "In the Wrens [the Women's Royal Naval Service] we talked about them constantly," she once told me. Silk, seams, colour. Small luxuries mattered. It was, in its own way, the psychology of softness as armour. Fashion has always served this purpose in moments of upheaval.

Consider Marie Antoinette, history’s original fashion influencer. Sent to Versailles as a teenager and trapped in an unhappy political marriage, she built an entire aesthetic universe around herself: powdered hair, gauzy gowns and elaborate pastoral fantasies at the Petit Trianon. Excessive, certainly. But also escapist. Today, with a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum re-examining her legacy, it feels worth asking whether fashion wasn’t, for the former Queen of France, a form of protection as much as indulgence.

In French, the word "sublime" is thrown around with abandon. Attend Paris Fashion Week, and you’ll hear it daily, murmured approvingly in show queues or backstage after a particularly beautiful collection. As in English, it signals something elevated. However, the word carries deeper philosophical implications as well. From the Latin sublimis, meaning lofty or uplifted, the concept was famously explored in the ancient treatise On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus. In it, the sublime describes artistic expression so powerful that it overwhelms the audience with a sense of awe. Centuries later, Immanuel Kant expanded the idea, arguing that the sublime occurs when we encounter something so vast or powerful that the imagination falters.

For the Romantic poets (writers like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge), this experience lives in nature itself: towering mountains, violent storms, endless skies. Beauty, yes, but sharpened by scale and danger. Nature was no longer simply thought of as a pleasant backdrop, but a commanding presence capable of humbling the human observer.

Perhaps this is precisely what we’re missing today. Ours is a screen-centred age, largely lived indoors and tragically devoid of windswept hair. We all need, from time to time, a long walk up Arthur's Seat. But maybe we also need a little romance in our clothing. After all, who in the history of literature dressed with more flair than Lord Byron?

The Romantic fascination with nature’s emotional force found an echo on the runways this season. Across the fashion capitals, designers captured something close to the atmosphere of the landscape itself. At Dior in Paris, Jonathan Anderson staged his autumn/winter 2026 show inside a greenhouse in the Jardin des Tuileries, complete with water lilies inspired by Claude Monet; a dreamlike promenade through flowers and water. In London, designers such as Simone Rocha and Erdem explored a softer, more gothic romanticism, featuring gauze, lace and shadowy florals that felt like wandering in a garden at dusk.

On the Paris schedule as a whole, the mood shifted toward something more elemental. At Hermès, Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski explored the tactile language of the outdoors through earthy tones and quietly rugged materials. Meanwhile at Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghesquière turned the runway into a rolling green topography, with models weaving between sculptural mounds resembling abstract hills. The effect felt faintly pastoral; fashion’s own gloss on a William Wordsworth landscape, where nature becomes monumental.

At Dries Van Noten (my long-term obsession), the spirit of escape felt younger and more restless: clothes that looked like the wardrobe for a romantic flight into the wild; equal parts coming-of-age reverie and great escape. A little messy, like how we dressed at uni, but with a worldly dollop of sophistication and a slightly tongue-in-cheek take on femininity.

I found myself longing for this same mix of beauty, awe and emotional intensity the Romantics once called "the sublime". So moved was I by these headwinds that I began dreaming of my spring wardrobe. For the first time in decades, it may even include a transparent lace blouse, or even (maybe) a ballet flat. The mood has already filtered far beyond the runways. Romantic dressing is appearing across luxury houses, contemporary brands and the high street alike. Designers like Erdem, Chloé and Dries have long mastered this poetic sensibility, whilst contemporary brands and retailers are leaning into lace-trim slips, ruffled dresses and delicate camisoles.

The result is a kind of wearable romanticism: clothes that suggest drifting through a meadow just as the rainclouds part and spring sunlight breaks through, even if the setting is a city street. My own interpretation will probably land somewhere between shepherdess and Lord Byron himself: a little windswept, slightly dramatic tailoring and always ready for a spontaneous escape.

Keep scrolling to discover what I’ll be wearing to channel romance and escapism this spring.

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