Romance Isn't Dead—At Least, Not If Fall's Top Trend Has a Say

After what has felt like a long period where stark minimalism and sharp tailoring has been the defining aesthetics at the forefront of fashion, romance is once again back in the spotlight. Softer silhouettes and feminine details are everywhere we look right now, but there's one specific trend that's leading the way for 2025's return to romantic fashion, and that's none other than lace. All across the fall/winter 2025 runways, designers experimented with delicate fabric, deploying it as fluid sheer lace maxi dresses or using exacting measures to finish off slip skirts with a lace trim. At once dark and moody and soft and sensual, fall's lace looks firmly take the often dated-looking fabric into an altogether fresh, modern era.

At Chloé, that looked like sweeping sheer lace maxi dresses that designer Chemena Kamali imbued with her signature effortless insouciance by adding long pendant necklaces to them and sending the models out with minimal makeup and loose, beachy waves to balance the formality that's usually associated with lace. For her namesake house, however, Silvia Venturini Fendi took a much more polished and elegant approach to lace, sending out pencil skirts and lace-trimmed dresses that hit at the knee and were tucked into luxe fur coats. Elsewhere, we saw lace trimming on sweeping maxi dresses at Saint Laurent and Alberta Ferretti, a detail that's already defining the most popular dresses and skirts of this spring and summer, as well as sheer lace trousers at Stella McCartney.

One thing is already clear: these lace looks anything but traditional. Ahead, discover how the fall 2025 runways are giving the romantic fabric a rebrand and shop our top lace dresses, tops, skirts, and more.

Irish designer Seán McGirr is really hitting his stride at the helm of McQueen. This season's offering focused on the same tailoring the house is known for, but mixed int with a sense of extravagance and opulence that pays homage to the house that Alexander McQueen built. That looked like a series of sweeping gowns, each punctuated by their own sense of drama, including the sheer lace number worn by Alex Consani that was layered over barely-there undergarments and finished not with a polished pump but with tough lace-up boots that also accompanied many of the more fanciful looks. It wasn't the only lace moment, as lace tights peeked out from underneath pencil skirts and high-neck lace blouses from underneath sculptural blazers.

Three seasons in, and Chemena Kamali has already turned Chloé into a mega-hitmaker, with the fashion crowd clinging onto every detail that comes down her runways. It's not merely an aesthetic, but entire world. For fall, the modern bohemian woman the designer has been carefully curating is stepping into her soft side. Ethereal dresses made from delicate lace and ruffles flowed alongside sheer silhouettes and multitiered hems. In fact, lace was everywhere on this runway—along the hem of a blush-toned skirt, combined flawlessly with pastel-hued silk, and in tiered ruffled maxi dresses that were finished with scalloped edges.

Fendi was another major source of lace looks, but instead of a soft and naive type of romanticism, Silvia Venturini Fendi's vision was one of maturity and self-assuredness. The looks embodied the kind of glamorous and wealthy woman that those in Milan would call a sciura. Lace pencil skirts were married high-neck lace blouses and fur stoles and lace-trimmed slips peeked out from beneath the hem of satin dresses where they flowed over stockings and pristine pumps.

Leave it to Saint Laurent to make a cool-girl version of lace that just oozes sex appeal without even trying. Despite the vivid technicolor palette that much of the fall collection was doused in, the back half of the runway featured sweeping ball skirts that were styled with leather bomber jackets or lace-trimmed tanks, giving them an instant air of lived-in luxury.

Staged just after the news broke of Matthieu Blazy's appointment as creative director, Chanel's fall collection came instead courtesy of the Creation Studio in the lead-up to Blazy's mark. It was filled with Coco Chanel's classic codes of bows, ribbons, and pearls, so the house's take on lace was naturally much more prim and proper by comparison to the season at large. Look 63 was comprised of a long cardigan dress made from intricate black lace and finished with thick velvet trimming and black ankle boots.

If Saint Laurent's lace was all about its sex appeal and Chloé's was all about its dreamy innocence, then the lace-trimmed gown that appeared in Alberta Ferretti's fall collection occupied the perfect middle ground between the two: a fluid bias-cut satin gown with a deep V neckline finished with a panel of sheer lace. It's the ultimate proof that when done well, less is often more.

With designers across the aesthetic spectrum each putting their own distinct spin on lace, it was none other than Maximilian Davis at Ferragamo whose lace paneling across the bust of a simple sheer knee-length number felt the most unique and true to the designer.

If there's one overall takeaway from how the fall collections are teaching us to style lace in 2025, it's that a hint of the romantic fabric is often all that's needed. At Nina Ricci, a lace panel peeked out ever so subtly from a luscious purple velvet jacket and the combination of the two textures was executed flawlessly.

While much of the lace looks came in moody black, deep brown, and milky white, Gucci's palette was distinct in its saccharine hues of bubblegum pink, lilac purple, and butter yellow that came in lace-paneled silk dresses and lace-trimmed slip dresses.

Finally, it was at Stella McCartney where lace transformed from its pure romanticism to something more forward: lace leggings. Or were they trousers? Certainly they weren't tights. Whatever your definition, the lace bottoms mark a new evolution in lace tights and even Capri pants we've begun to see last winter, and their tonal olive-green shade matching the belted jacket is a styling idea I'm already expecting to see come September.