Dressmaking in Disguise: Emilia Wickstead Fall/Winter 2026
For Fall/Winter 2026, Emilia Wickstead channelled 1920s androgyny through exacting tailoring and sculpted silhouettes.
Within the very ‘dressed’ and feminine frames of Emilia Wickstead’s expression, there’s an appetite for the opposite. This season, she set her sights on Fano Messan, the actress and sculptor associated with the Parisian avant-garde who embodied the 1920s’ taste for androgyny. It was a time when female authors had to hide behind male pseudonyms to get their works published, and when women – in the case of Messan – would dress up as men to study crafts like sculpture. Wickstead’s collection was inspired by the cosplay that defined Messan’s apprenticeship.
[Fano Messan] had to have a uniform. She
had to be a certain person. She couldn’t be
herself. She was surrounding herself with all
the surrealists, but she wasn’t allowed to be recognised. I wanted to show off her uniform as
I imagined it. But I wanted her to feel liberated. I wanted her to feel unravelled. I wanted her to feel herself.
Emilia Wickstead
“She had to have a uniform. She had to be a certain person. She couldn’t be herself. She was surrounding herself with all the surrealists, but she wasn’t allowed to be recognised. I wanted to show off her uniform as I imagined it. But I wanted her to feel liberated. I wanted her to feel unravelled. I wanted her to feel herself. I became entranced by this androgynous look. I started looking at a lot of female writers from the 1920s,” Wickstead said. The super-androgynous Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach graced her mood board.
Applied to the neat dressmaking that defines this designer’s practice, the androgyny was expressed partly in a lean towards a looser silhouette and fabrics familiar to the gentleman’s wardrobe. A full skirt morphed with a black tuxedo shirt with a white bib pulled over the shoulders beautifully illustrated the tension between the masculine and feminine. As did an almost equestrian black suit worn over a voluminous dress-like white wing-tip shirt. At the end of the day, though, the world of Wickstead is all about the precision in cut and sculpting that makes a person feel perfectly put-together. When it came to construction, this collection refined and amplified that idea.
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