From Shame to Chic, Fashion Turns the Morning-After Look Into a Trend

At Diesel’s February runway show during Milan Fashion Week, models walked in clothes that looked hastily pulled on after a wild night, with smudged smoky eyes and messy hair. That presentation helped cement a growing fashion trend for fall-winter 2026-27 called the “Walk of Shame,” a look built around returning home in the morning still wearing the previous night’s clothes, often wrinkled or inappropriate for daytime.

Diesel creative director Glenn Martens said the collection was about “waking up somewhere with no idea what happened the night before, and being the most fabulous person ever.” He described the line as “from Walk of Shame to Walk of Fame,” and showed layered jersey shirts and sculptural knits made by boiling and shrinking oversized sweaters. The article also cited a recent TV example in Ryan Murphy’s “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette,” where Bessette improvises an outfit for work after sleeping over at Kennedy’s Tribeca apartment, using his white button-down shirt with a black skirt.

Other major houses have embraced the same tension between glamour and disarray. Valentino showed lingerie under a long fur coat, Saint Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana used lace looks inspired by seductive underwear, Gucci exposed lace bras beneath tailored jackets, and Chanel sent a model in a burgundy leather coat over a beaded fishnet dress at its Métiers d’art show in New York’s subway.

The piece says the trend is part of a wider deconstruction of elegance, in which luxury and carelessness coexist. It also notes that “Walk of Shame” was long used to shame women for staying out overnight, while male designers are now reclaiming the idea as something glamorous. Former Gucci collaborators Tom Ford and Carine Roitfeld shaped that 1990s aesthetic into “morning-after glamour,” and today’s revival is tied to nostalgia, resistance to social media perfection, and a Gen Z preference for authenticity over polish.