It’s here! The 2026 Oscars weekend has arrived, and while some of my VF colleagues can’t wait to see who will take home those highly coveted little gold statuettes, I’m more focused on what they’ll be wearing to do so.
As things in fashion-land go, at the same time as awards season picks up, so do fashion weeks around the world. The year starts with the menswear collections in early January, with couture following shortly after. And that’s all before the main event: the womenswear shows in New York, London, Milan, and Paris that wrapped earlier this week on Tuesday—well technically on Wednesday with Alessandro Michele’s off-calendar Valentino excursion to Rome. Since January, I’ve seen 114 runway shows to be exact, and have visited an exorbitant amount of showrooms to discover even more collections. That’s a lot of fashion, and thankfully much of it was very good.
One of my favorite things to do at a fashion show is imagine how a look will translate outside of the context of the runway. Will a celebrity wear it on the red carpet? Will someone buy a top and pair it with, say, some classic jeans, or perhaps not purchase any of it and rather imitate the look with what they have at home? (To be frank, this last one is me—those luxury prices are high!)
Oscars weekend is fashion’s red carpet Super Bowl. With dinners and parties and soirées of all kinds, there are many places to be, and lots of clothes to be worn. In that spirit, I’ve decided to collate a few of the runway looks I’ve seen that I think might pop up this weekend. The number one caveat here is that many of the dresses we’ll see on the Oscars red carpet will be custom designs—still, they’ll be based on runway looks, which means that they will at least spiritually fit into this list regardless.
As I’ve started to edit this list, many of the dresses I had anticipated to see have already been worn, be it the Willy Chavarria gown that Hannah Einbinder wore at the 2026 Actor Awards, or the Schiaparelli couture dress that Demi Moore donned that same night. Most impressively though, if I do say so myself, when I sat at Sarah Burton’s latest show for Givenchy last Friday, I saw a sheer little black dress I thought would make a great number for someone to wear over the weekend. I jotted it down in my notes from that collection.
