Bora Aksu Embraces the Beauty in Brokenness for Spring 2026

On Friday afternoon in a sunny London garden, Bora Aksu presented its Spring 2026 collection, inspired by the designer’s personal archive of vintage dolls. “I usually like to travel and go places and discover muses and build my collections around them,” Aksu explained backstage to Fashionista. “This time I thought, ‘Why don’t I look inward?’ I’ve been collecting dolls for years, but I have this passion for dolls that’s not all shiny and glamorous, but for the broken ones.”

Aksu detailed his mending process for these figurines and their accessories, but noted that throughout the years, he’s come to appreciate the beauty in brokenness — a perspective that ultimately jump-started this season’s moodboard. The designer took his go-to materials — such as tulle, lace and flow-y taffeta — and reimagined them as reconstructive tools within each garment. In Aksu’s mind, a unique lace trim or rogue ruffle acts as a sort of glue holding different pieces of a dress together, just as an actual sealant would do for broken pieces of porcelain.

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“It was not so much about the doll’s life, but about this whole kind of restoration of the beauty with the cracks,” he said. “We go through that [as humans], our heart is broken for so many years and times…but it doesn’t make us less than, it just makes us more beautiful. This collection is embracing that.”

Although Aksu’s use of hyper-feminine fabrics and aesthetics is not new, it takes on a more personal meaning in Spring 2026. In the show notes, Aksu described utilizing these lightweight, delicate textiles as a mode for representing a person’s life experiences. “One thing that really inspired me with doll’s clothes is, you kind of peel a layer and there’s another petticoat and then there’s another thing and there’s another thing,” Aksu said. “My idea is actually taking these layers out and then layering them in transparent fabric so you actually see all the different dimensions rather than just hiding them all underneath.”

Despite the collection’s somewhat dark theme of surviving, Aksu treated this idea as a celebration of being alive, still including his signature grayscale ensembles, but balancing them with other looks in vivid hues of yellow and pink (arguably his most significant use of warmer, more vibrant colors since Spring 2022).

“I just looked at [my past dresses] and said, ‘You know what? These kinds of shades have to be my color palette,” Aksu stated. “So I just followed that through.”

See Bora Aksu’s full Spring 2026 collection below.