amsterdam fashion week 2026 turns the city into a stage

AMSTERDAM BECOMES THE RUNWAY

Amsterdam Fashion Week returned from September 1 to 5, 2026, spreading more than 40 shows, presentations, exhibitions, talks and workshops across the Dutch capital. Rather than concentrating the programme around a single venue, this year’s edition continued to treat Amsterdam itself as part of the fashion week, moving between museums, historic buildings, shops and unexpected everyday settings. The programme brought emerging designers together with established names while entering the second phase of AFW’s partnership with Copenhagen Fashion Week, which introduces its Sustainability Requirements framework into the selection process ahead of a full rollout in September 2027.

The week began by bringing fashion into dialogue with material and spatial design. Amsterdam Fashion Week’s opening dinner gathered 130 guests inside a monumental canal house on Kloveniersburgwal, where designer Sabine Marcelis collaborated with natural-stone company SolidNature on the setting. Marcelis designed bespoke stone candleholders that ran along communal tables, framed by translucent curtains and soft lighting, turning the dinner itself into a carefully composed installation. The event introduced an edition in which the boundaries between fashion, objects, interiors and experience remained deliberately porous.

ULKUHANBATUHAN | image by Olivia Witmond

FASHION, MEMORY AND EVERYDAY LIFE

That looseness also appeared in designers looking directly at Dutch identity. At the monumental Molen van West, Ruben Jurriën presented Maak Nederland weer Gezellig!, mixing embroidery, comic drawings, oversized denim, reinterpretations of the Dutch clog and the recurring figure of Toetie, a childhood plush toy turned superhero. The collection approached national symbols through affection and humour rather than nostalgia, while asking what ideas such as kindness, familiarity and gezelligheid might mean today. Elsewhere, The New Originals transformed Nxt Museum into something closer to a gathering than a runway for Home Is Where the Heart Is. Created with filmmaker Ebeneza Blanche, the presentation combined streetwear, live music, performance and film while connecting the Amsterdam platform’s community with stories of migration, family and belonging.

Other presentations used clothing to explore less tangible states of presence. Under his label Jinchoe, Youngjin Choe returned to the Rijksmuseum passage after winning Lichting in 2025, presenting Shadow Stepping as an investigation into destruction and reconstruction. Dense black outerwear, exaggerated layers, displaced panels and obstructed faces gradually shifted towards earthy colours and white, giving physical form to the idea of carrying darkness rather than erasing it. DEFIJTER&VANBRUGGEN, meanwhile, looked back to the nineteenth-century flâneur and flâneuse for De Belofte van Buiten. Exaggerated tailoring and sculptural silhouettes inhabited a set filled with furniture, street lamps and domestic objects, where models eventually sat, read and watched the audience, turning physical presence itself into part of the performance.

Ruben Jurriën | image by Resa Steenvoorden

WHEN THE SUPERMARKET BECOMES A RUNWAY

Perhaps the clearest example of AFW26’s interest in collapsing fashion into ordinary life came from Camiel Fortgens, who staged his SS27 show inside an Albert Heijn supermarket at Stadionplein after opening hours. Models pushed shopping trolleys and carried baskets through aisles of cheese, frozen food and soft drinks while employees continued stacking shelves. Against this deliberately mundane backdrop, Fortgens’ familiar vocabulary of cotton shirts, denim, bombers and layered outerwear revealed exposed seams, raw hems, reversed construction and apparently accidental combinations. The intervention was almost invisible: rather than transforming the supermarket into a fantasy, the clothes absorbed the gestures, repetitions and small imperfections of everyday use.

The runway became more overtly symbolic for ULKUHANBATUHAN, whose Mens, erger je niet transformed the familiar Dutch board game into a system of uneven rules. Designers Ülkühan Akgül and Batuhan Demir treated models as pieces moving across an imaginary board, using distorted proportions, sculptural hats, upcycled escalator brushes, wooden structures and garments covered with bells to address patience, conformity and unequal starting positions. Across AFW26, such experiments suggested that the most interesting runway might no longer look like a runway at all. From a supermarket aisle to a windmill, museum or domestic interior, Amsterdam Fashion Week used the city as a testing ground for how fashion can communicate through space, performance, material and collective experience, as much as through clothes themselves.

DEFIJTER&VANBRUGGEN | image by Olivia Witmond