Ferragamo Spring Summer 2026 landed at Milan Fashion Week with Maximilian Davis doing something more layered than the usual decade-raiding exercise: he went back to the 1920s, the very era in which Ferragamo itself was born, and built a collection around the tension between propriety and desire.
The show took place at the Portrait hotel in Milan, according to Fashionela. Davis has never been a designer who hedges, and this season he leaned further into the charge that has been building across his tenure at the house.
A Decade That Belonged to Ferragamo Too
The 1920s connection runs deeper than mood. According to Dailybloid, Davis revisited the decade’s eclecticism through his precise aesthetic, and the timing is pointed: the 1920s marked the birth of Ferragamo as a house. There is something deliberate about a designer returning a brand to the era of its own origins, using it as a lens rather than a costume.
The archival spark came from a specific discovery. Davis found a 1925 photograph of silent film star Lola Todd wrapped in leopard print, and from there he pulled at the threads of the Jazz Age’s “Africana” movement, exploring its exotic prints and textures. That single image gave the collection a concrete anchor in time rather than a vague vintage wash.
What the Ferragamo Spring Summer 2026 Collection Actually Looks Like
The opening look made the argument plainly: a double-breasted coatdress cinched into an hourglass by two stark belts, its utilitarian bones immediately visible. Strong outerwear followed (a green, croc-embossed midi, flared men’s car coats) before sheer layers arrived to complicate the tailoring. The hard-and-soft logic ran through the whole collection: translucent rubber against tough leathers, draped sheer silks cutting across structured shoulders.
Davis was explicit about the conceptual underpinning. “It was a period when clothing, and its structure, created a certain posture and propriety: the placement of a pocket could dictate how you would stand and behave,” he wrote in his show notes. “I wanted to take elements of that silhouette and modernize it for today.” The modernisation came largely through what he allowed to be revealed: underwear-baring pencil skirts, a body-skimming technical minidress, a generous run of latex.
Anok Yai closed the show in a glittering paillette-covered evening dress. Earlier in the lineup she wore a trench rendered entirely in blue latex, its fetish-coded shine sitting alongside the Jazz Age references without any apparent contradiction. Davis framed the collection’s women as subjects who were also agents: “I was inspired by the women of the era who were taking ownership of their own narrative: who were subjects of imagery but also traveled the world to create their own.”
The material contrasts, Davis explained, drew on surrealism as an art movement. Rubber and silk in the same look does have that quality of things that should not coexist doing exactly that, without apology.
Davis has built a reputation for textural work, and it has not gone unnoticed beyond the runways. Rihanna wore one of his pleated looks in Paris during the same fashion week. That kind of moment tends to confirm what the clothes are already saying about themselves.
What the Ferragamo Spring Summer 2026 collection keeps establishing, show by show, is that Davis is using the house’s own history as material rather than as wallpaper. The 1920s gave him the Jazz Age’s appetite for exoticism and print, the birth year of the brand, and a photograph of a woman in leopard print who knew exactly what she was doing. He worked with all three.
