TheFashionDB

2021 in fashion

The screen became a room

2021 was fashion learning to live after a year indoors, with the old calendar still visible but badly warped. The industry wanted reunion, applause and the familiar theatre of bodies in a room, Covid kept insisting on distance, delay and contingency. Out of that uncomfortable stasis came the year’s most interesting formal experiments.

The strongest digital work treated absence as a material. Loewe’s "show in a box" turned remote presentation into something tactile and editorial, while Louis Vuitton, Paris menswear and couture made the screen feel less like an emergency exit and more like a legitimate stage. London went fully digital, Berlin built around virtual infrastructure, and Seoul used landmarks as civic mise en scene. The better houses understood the lesson: streaming a runway was the least imaginative answer to the problem.

By spring and summer, the appetite for physical return was unmistakable, but the old format came back with a palimpsest of new habits underneath. Prada’s Milan-Shanghai show, Shanghai’s hybrid machine and the wider phygital calendar suggested that fashion had not escaped the screen. It had taught the screen to behave.

January

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Friday

Calendar absence

The Row’s move towards January and June presentations showed an established luxury house treating fashion time as an adjustable business and image system, not an obligation fixed by the conventional calendar.

January

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Tuesday

Corporate move

Bottega Veneta deleted its Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts in January 2021, then launched the quarterly digital journal Issue in March. The move replaced constant brand-owned social posting with a slower mix of house publishing, press distribution, films, books and retail-timed releases without ending digital communication.

January

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Monday

Digital presentation

Berlin Fashion Week's January edition showed how a secondary European fashion capital could build a season around digital infrastructure instead of waiting for travel to resume. Streams, talks and virtual formats were not side features here; they were the week itself, which gave Berlin a distinct place in the year's wider experimentation.

January

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Tuesday

Digital presentation

Paris Men's Fashion Week opened the Fall/Winter 2021 circuit under lockdown conditions and pushed the digital runway further away from simple livestream substitution. By the end of the week, cinematic presentation had begun to read as a serious luxury format in its own right rather than a temporary patch.

January

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Thursday

Digital presentation

Paris Fashion Week Menswear

Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton film used the house's scale to legitimise the digital luxury presentation at the top end of menswear. What might have registered elsewhere as contingency arrived here as intention: a major brand treating the screen as a primary stage, not a consolation prize.

January

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Monday

Digital presentation

January couture week showed that digital presentation could still sustain hierarchy, craft and occasion at couture level. That was no small test, given how resistant couture might have seemed to the screen; Paris managed, at least for a moment, to make the format hold.

February

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Tuesday

Mandate

Copenhagen Fashion Week used its calendar to turn sustainability requirements into a condition of participation rather than yet another statement of values. The distinction is what earns it year-page space: the week was writing standards into its operating rules, not merely talking about them.

February

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Thursday

Corporate move

The CFDA's American Collections Calendar recast the US schedule around a decentralised framework rather than a single city-week model. It is a useful 2021 marker because it showed American fashion reorganising visibility, geography and legitimacy on different terms.

February

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Friday

Appointment

Pieter Mulier’s appointment on 5 February 2021 gave Alaïa its first named creative director after Azzedine Alaïa’s death and four years of studio stewardship. It reopened seasonal authorship under a designer whose architectural training and atelier experience could engage the house through construction rather than surface imitation.

February

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Friday

Digital presentation

London's all-digital edition demonstrated that a major fashion week could remain recognisably itself without physical runways, which was hardly guaranteed. Lighter on spectacle, the week still retained the city's usual experimental edge, oddness and pace.

March

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Monday

Digital presentation

Paris closed the Fall/Winter 2021 women's circuit by giving the digital runway its most fully realised big-house expression. The authority came not from pretending normality had returned, but from major brands making the screen feel, however briefly, like a legitimate seat of power.

March

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Wednesday

Debut

Paris Fashion Week Womenswear

Gabriela Hearst's first Chloé collection made sustainability an explicit part of the house's new authorship rather than a discreet supporting concern. The debut arrived with a clearer programme than many succession shows manage, tying image, ethics and direction into one legible opening statement.

March

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Wednesday

Debut

Paris Fashion Week Womenswear

Nicolas Di Felice's first Courrèges collection turned heritage revival into a contemporary proposition rather than a dutiful exercise in archive management. Amid a crowded season of transitions, the show stood out for giving the house an immediately legible new identity.

March

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Tuesday

Corporate move

The first joint FDCI x Lakmé Fashion Week edition turned institutional consolidation into a new presentation structure for Indian fashion. What emerged was not simply a revised banner for difficult circumstances but a more formal reorganisation of the local system itself.

March

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Wednesday

The AMIRI Prize launched in 2021 with funding and mentorship for emerging designers, extending the house’s role from fashion producer to an institution supporting new independent talent.

March

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Thursday

Obituary

Elsa Peretti’s death marked the loss of a designer whose work linked Halston-era New York glamour to Tiffany’s modern jewellery identity. Her passing returned 2021 to an older but still active design legacy, one whose forms remained deeply embedded in fashion’s visual memory and commercial life.

April

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Thursday

Farewell collection

Kris Van Assche's final Berluti collection on 8 April, followed by his departure on 21 April, gave a brief tenure a more legible closing sequence. Taken together, the two moments showed a heritage menswear house stepping away from one runway-driven strategy just as the wider calendar and its priorities were being reconsidered.

April

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Saturday

Obituary

Alber Elbaz's death on 24 April was one of the year's deepest losses, closing the life of a designer whose warmth and intelligence had shaped several eras of fashion rather than just one house. The absence ran through the months that followed and gave later tributes a very different emotional register.

April

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Monday

Departure

The departure ended a three-collection tenure whose final season had already turned succession into the subject of a digital film.

May

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Wednesday

Cruise • Resort

The Resort 2022 cycle marked the return of destination-show logic to luxury fashion after a period in which travel, spectacle and large-scale brand staging had all been sharply curtailed. More than any single collection, the cycle registered a system remembering one of its preferred ways of performing glamour, place and expense.

June

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Saturday

Debut

UNDERCOVER revived the UNDERCOVERISM name in June 2021 for a separate men's line beginning with Neoboy, adding a new layer to the house's already active mainline menswear.

June

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Tuesday

Event

June's Paris menswear season restored a visible charge of physical runway energy to the calendar after months of mediated fashion week. The live return did not erase the digital experiments that came before it, though it certainly reminded the industry how quickly audience, scale and atmosphere reclaim the room.

June

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Thursday

Event

Paris Fashion Week Menswear

Virgil Abloh's 'Amen Break' joined the live return to one of the year's strongest cultural statements in menswear. The significance lay not only in Louis Vuitton's scale, but in the fact that restored runway force was carrying argument, reference and emotion rather than empty noise.

July

July

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Thursday

Ceremony

Bianca Saunders's ANDAM Grand Prize marked a serious institutional endorsement of one of menswear's most closely watched younger voices. Awards do not automatically merit year-page space, but this one helped fix her rise within the industry's more formal machinery of recognition.

July

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Wednesday

Event

Paris Haute Couture Week

Balenciaga's return to haute couture reactivated one of fashion's most symbolic house names at the highest ceremonial level. This was not merely another slot on the schedule; it reopened a lineage and gave the year one of its clearest assertions of restored grandeur.

August

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Sunday

Event

Dolce & Gabbana's Alta Moda event in Venice announced the return of luxury fashion's spectacle economy with very little modesty about it. After so much restriction and digital substitution, the sheer scale of the exercise suggested that excess was fully operational again.

August

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Sunday

Event

Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda event in Venice marked a forceful return of luxury spectacle after a period of restriction and digital substitution. The city became part of the performance: water, palazzi, celebrity arrival and high craft worked together as a single image of Italian excess.

August

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Tuesday

Event

In August 2021, SHINYAKOZUKA began the numbered Issue sequence and shifted its principal collection communication towards physical, narrative runways. The opening of SMALL TRADES in March 2022 added a directly operated retail setting for the complete range, consolidating design storytelling and distribution without changing Kozuka’s authorship.

September

September

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Wednesday

Appointment

Camille Miceli's appointment restored visible authorship to Emilio Pucci after years without a clearly defined creative lead. It also suggested a more pointed image and commercial strategy for the house, making the hire feel more purposeful than routine archive maintenance.

September

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Tuesday

Ceremony

Nensi Dojaka's LVMH Prize win confirmed her emergence inside the global luxury talent pipeline and moved her from critical promise to institutional fact. It served as one of 2021's cleaner indicators of whom the system had decided to back.

September

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Tuesday

Award

The shared Karl Lagerfeld Prize gave KidSuper formal recognition from the LVMH Prize after its rapid Paris breakthrough. The award paired financial support with mentorship and preceded the label’s shift into larger physical shows and a consolidated Brooklyn headquarters.

September

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Wednesday

Event

New York's September season tested whether the city could restore live fashion-week relevance rather than simply reopen venues. The answer was hardly uncomplicated, but the week earned its place by turning the return itself into a public measure of New York's standing.

September

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Wednesday

Debut

Peter Do’s first runway on 8 September 2021 moved a six-season showroom and film practice into New York Fashion Week. The team bow made the label’s collective studio structure part of the public event.

September

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Sunday

Event

New York Fashion Week

Thom Browne returned to the New York schedule in September 2021 with a physical presentation, joining the city’s first substantial post-lockdown fashion-week season.

September

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Monday

Appointment

Nigo's appointment placed a designer formed by Japanese streetwear and music culture in direct dialogue with one of the earliest Japanese-founded Paris houses.

September

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Tuesday

Event

Milan's September season paired the live runway return with some of the year's most overt event-driven gestures, giving the city a particularly showy kind of regained confidence. What stood out was not restraint but Milan's willingness to turn the comeback into a sequence of declarations.

September

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Sunday

Brands collaboration

Milan Fashion Week Womenswear

Fendace turned collaboration between rival houses into one of the season's loudest runway events, and fashion was hardly inclined to resist. The stunt earns year-page space because it showed the mega-brand spectacle economy not just restored, but thoroughly delighted with itself.

September

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Monday

Event

Paris's Spring/Summer 2022 schedule restored the city's dominance through full-scale live spectacle and a renewed sense of event. By the close of the week, Paris no longer looked as though it were working out how to return; it was behaving like the capital again.

October

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Saturday

Event

Paris Fashion Week Womenswear

Balenciaga fused runway, red carpet and animation into one of the year's most discussed fashion spectacles, cheerfully ignoring the idea that those forms ought to remain separate. The result distilled 2021's appetite for fashion as total media event rather than simple seasonal unveiling.

October

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Tuesday

Event

Paris Fashion Week Womenswear

'Love Brings Love' turned Paris Fashion Week into an unusually collective act of mourning for Alber Elbaz, with tribute rather than competition setting the tone. It remains one of the year's most affecting industry moments because the grief was made public without surrendering beauty, discipline or form.

October

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Tuesday

Studio collection

Paris Fashion Week Womenswear

At the close of 'Love Brings Love', AZ Factory's design studio presented a 25-look homage to Alber Elbaz. The gesture deserves notice because it turned memorial tribute into a visible studio-collection event, rather than leaving the house's response at the level of sentiment alone.

October

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Thursday

Event

Seoul Fashion Week's digitally produced Spring/Summer 2022 edition showed how remote presentation could be folded into civic branding rather than treated as a stopgap. The use of palaces and landmarks gave the week broader cultural scale and strengthened Seoul's international claim at a moment when geography itself was being renegotiated on screen.

October

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Friday

Event

Shanghai Fashion Week showed how fully the Chinese market had developed fashion week into a hybrid machine of showmanship, commerce and media. By 2021, Shanghai no longer read as a regional counterpart to the western circuit so much as a fashion system with momentum, scale and operating logic of its own.

October

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Monday

Award

Chloé achieved B Corp certification on 18 October 2021 after an 18-month assessment. The certification made environmental and social governance a documented part of the house’s operating record, alongside a sustainability board, lower-impact material targets and fair-trade partnerships.

October

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Thursday

Final collection

Daniel Lee’s Salon 03 presentation in Detroit became the final collection of his Bottega Veneta tenure, giving the end of one of the period’s most influential luxury-house resets a highly staged, place-specific closing form. His departure, announced soon afterwards, was abrupt enough to reopen questions of succession and continuity inside a major Kering house while fixing the Detroit show as the last image of that chapter.

October

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Wednesday

Event

Lagos Fashion Week’s 2021 edition treated sustainability, circularity and community as working principles rather than decorative rhetoric. The event continued to present a fashion system being shaped through practical local frameworks rather than borrowed language alone.

November

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Tuesday

Debut

ERDEM formally launched dedicated menswear in November 2021 with the Spring/Summer 2022 collection. The line translated the house’s interest in British dress, tailoring, florals and historical character into a new category after the earlier H&M experiment, giving Moralioglu a second mainline field for silhouette and gender.

November

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Wednesday

Event

Sarah Burton and Alexander McQueen announced the Explore Programme with A Team Arts Education on 10 November 2021. House designers, textile specialists and embroiderers contributed to a skills programme for young people in London.

November

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Wednesday

Departure

Bottega Veneta and Daniel Lee announced a joint decision to end their collaboration on 10 November 2021. The abrupt succession followed Salon 03 in Detroit, but the house gave no cause and the final Lee-developed Wardrobe 03 collection was still released in December.

November

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Monday

Appointment

Matthieu Blazy’s appointment turned an abrupt departure into an internal succession. Already Bottega Veneta’s Ready-to-Wear Design Director, he carried studio knowledge into a new house-wide role while leaving Daniel Lee’s final developed collections under their original authorship.

November

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Tuesday

Closure

Atelier Haider Ackermann was declared bankrupt by the Antwerp enterprise court on 16 November 2021. The ruling formalised the collapse of the operating company behind the label and confirmed that subsequent person-led projects could not be treated as a continuation of its former wholesale business.

November

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Thursday

Final collection

The final UNIQLO +J launch kept a mass-market collaboration on the year page because the line had long since ceased to feel like a routine licensing exercise. Its end closed one of the period's clearest bridges between accessible retail and designer-led minimalist prestige.

November

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Wednesday

Event

Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci turned the founding family’s internal conflict and Maurizio Gucci’s murder into a major studio film. Its release renewed public attention around the house’s corporate history, while the Gucci heirs’ objections underscored the difference between dramatic interpretation, family memory and the modern company.

November

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Sunday

Obituary

Virgil Abloh's death on 28 November was the most consequential loss fashion suffered that year, ending the life of a designer who had redrawn the relationship between luxury, streetwear, art and Black cultural production. The shock travelled well beyond any one house and altered both the industry's emotional tone and its sense of what had been set in motion.

November

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Tuesday

Farewell collection

Louis Vuitton's Miami presentation of Virgil Abloh's Spring 2022 menswear collection transformed a planned runway into a public farewell of unusual scale. His final Louis Vuitton show entered collective memory at once as tribute and closing statement, a burden very few fashion events could carry with comparable gravity.

december

The room came back altered

By the end of 2021, fashion had recovered enough physical force to remember its own appetite for spectacle. New York tried to reassert itself, Milan turned the comeback into a sequence of declarations, and Paris resumed command with the sang-froid of a capital that rarely doubts its own weather system. Balenciaga returned to couture; Dolce & Gabbana staged Venice as maximalist opera; Fendace proved that the mega-brand stunt economy had survived the pandemic in rude health.

Yet the more durable story was structural. Copenhagen pushed sustainability into rules rather than mood music. The CFDA’s American Collections Calendar loosened geography. FDCI and Lakmé consolidated Indian fashion’s showcase logic. Lagos, Seoul and Shanghai showed regional systems shaping their own terms rather than waiting for western validation to arrive by courier.

The year closed under real loss. Alber Elbaz’s death gave "Love Brings Love" its emotional centre, and Virgil Abloh’s death in November changed the temperature of the whole industry. His Miami Louis Vuitton show became farewell and cultural reckoning at once. 2021 did not restore the old fashion system. It produced something stranger: a half-open door, a live room with digital wiring still humming behind the walls.

Spot a mistake or a missing event? TFDB’s year chronologies are edited, researched and regularly revised. Send us a correction or suggestion, if it meaningfully improves the record, we’ll credit your contribution.

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