This past February, when fashion houses, including Prada, Simone Rocha and Coach, sent models down their runways with unkempt, frizzy hair, some wondered if the fashion industry, just like them, had essentially given up. As one TikTok viewer commented on footage of the limp, matted ponytails at Prada: “Finally something attainable.”
Depression hair, as it’s snarkily been called on social media, has been percolating in the collective psyche for a while: There were wayward strands freed from updos at Miu Miu’s fall 2023 show; a wild tangled, mane was an essential element of Charli XCX’s Brat Summer look in 2024; and at this year’s Met Gala, guests like the actresses Rachel Zegler and Gwendoline Christie arrived with hair that looked deliberately unbrushed. Now it seems fashion has gone all in.
For the Collina Strada fall 2026 show, the brand’s founder and creative director, Hillary Taymour, and the hairstylist Mustafa Yanaz mixed lank locks with wild flyaways. The thinking behind that look, says Taymour — whose collection included pieces accented by lace, ruffles and animal prints — was that “when you’re wearing something that’s a lot, undone hair makes it feel less offensive.” At first, Yanaz tried rubbing balloons against the model’s heads but found the static overwhelming. Instead, stylists simply mussed their hair by moving their hands in slow circular motions, like a young child clumsily petting a dog. For Taymour, pulling off such an unstyled style is all in the attitude. “Your face has to look like you don’t care or it doesn’t work,” she says. The Attersee founder and creative director Isabel Wilkinson Schor (a former T editor) concurs. “It’s about a desire to create something that is slightly off and never too perfect,” she says of her spring 2026 look book, which features models who seem as if they’d just stepped off a very breezy beach.
The idea that trying too hard is deeply uncool is, of course, nothing new. In the ’90s, it was the central dogma of the grunge era. Back then, unwashed hair and tattered clothes were a rebound from the logo-heavy, sleek perfection that had previously dominated fashion. Similarly, the current just-rolled-out-of-bed look might be seen as a pendulum swing away from looksmaxxing, big blowouts and heavily filtered social media photos.
Guido Palau, who styled the windswept ponytails at the Prada show, describes the look as “weirdly bourgeois” and designed to keep people guessing. “If you’re wearing the most beautiful cashmere jumper and it costs a fortune, you want people to know but not to know,” he says, and messy hair works the same way. “There’s a kind of inverted snobbery.” Palau knew Carolyn Bessette Kennedy when she worked at Calvin Klein and confirms that she was notorious for not brushing her hair. “Carolyn’s hair was such a thing,” he says. “It oozed confidence.”
