Fringe is in for spring 2024, with designers offering glamorous options that showed some skin, or served as an almost jewelry-like embellishment. 

For his “Vibes” show, Giorgio Armani took inspiration from Pantelleria, the Mediterranean island where he spends his holidays, decorating tops, collars and dresses with swishy tassels beaded in marine blue and sea green. “The vibrations, the movement comes from color and the way the clothing is built to move with the body,” he explained to WWD London bureau chief Samantha Conti. 

Fringe was especially popular among the Italians this season. In WWD’s buyers report from Milan, Jodi Khan, vice president of luxury fashion for Neiman Marcus, noted a sense of lightness ran through their collections stemming from “artisanal details that create movement, such as fringe in various materiality.”

Khan, alongside Nordstrom’s Rickie De Sole, Tiffany Hsu from Mytheresa and Saks Fifth Avenue’s Roopal Patel singled out Prada’s hand-cut silver fringe overlay belt as the hero accessory of the season.

At Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy exalted the wonders of nature through leather fringes. During a collection preview, Blazy showed several photos of his pieces to WWD international editor Miles Socha, turning them upside down to demonstrate how they resemble cacti, or exotic flowers in full bloom. 

Alberta Ferretti got crafty as well with stripes that morphed from prints into ribbons dangling down on evening dresses. They created a “fluid and vertical” silhouette, wrote WWD Milan bureau chief Luisa Zargani. 

Car wash hems also shimmied down the runway at Alejandro Alonso Rojas in New York, and Givenchy in Paris, where Matthew Williams went “lighter on hardware and tough glamour,” according to Socha, who singled-out “pretty moments” from the show, like the dresses with glittering fringe layered under black georgette.

Hubert de Givenchy inspired Yohji Yamamoto to take a deconstructionist approach to the trend. Setting the couturier’s repertoire on a collision course with that of his contemporaries Chanel and Balenciaga, Yamamoto spliced together dresses, shirts and jackets in all-black, leaving strips of fabric and thread dangling. “I just wanted to make some young people looks,” he told WWD general assignment editor Lily Templeton.