From catwalk to high street

Purple has become the defining shade of the autumn/winter 2026 season. Balenciaga, Celine and Valentino all sent all-purple designs down their runways, and the colour has since travelled far beyond the shows.

This season's version is known as "royal purple" - a vivid take on a colour long absent from a fashion landscape dominated by neutrals. Celebrities have picked it up too:

• •Jennifer Lawrence and Zoë Kravitz have been seen wearing purple off duty
• •Naomi Ackie and Nicola Peltz have worn it on the red carpet
• •Cos, H&M and Asos are selling purple knitwear and accessories on the high street

Fashion insiders frequently style the shade against red, and Vogue recently declared that autumn's "coolest colour clash" had arrived.

Why forecasters saw it coming

The trend was no accident. In 2024, the trend forecasting agency WGSN predicted that a shade it called "fresh purple" would be fashionable this autumn.

Sara Maggioni, WGSN's head of womenswear, links the shade's rise to a shift in mood: "[We are seeing] a growing appetite for brighter, more expressive shades," she says, describing a move away from quiet luxury. She adds that fresh purple works across physical settings and virtual worlds - a "phygital" quality suited to digital imagery and immersive environments as much as to real life.

A colour with a royal past

Purple's association with status is centuries old. Kassia St Clair, author of The Secret Lives of Colour, says the colour has long been linked to the wealthy and powerful.

• •Tyrian purple is associated with the Romans, whose dye came from the secretions of molluscs gathered near the ancient city of Tyre
• •The method for making that dye was lost as the mollusc population declined and the Byzantine empire collapsed in 1453, yet purple's reputation survived
• •In 1856, chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally created a bright purple liquid while searching for a malaria treatment, producing mauve - the first chemical dye
• •Queen Victoria and her granddaughter Princess Eugenie wore mauve, and the satirical magazine Punch claimed everyone in London had "caught the mauve measles"

Even without that history, St Clair argues the link endures: "We do still have a simmering cultural awareness of the associations between purple and power".

The tricky colour that suits the dark

Not everyone was converted at first. Daisy Murray, fashion commerce editor at Grazia, admits it took a lightbulb moment: "A couple of months ago I loathed it," she says, before a punchy purple finally made sense to her.

Designers have long regarded purple as "tricky" precisely because it is hard to ignore - a quality that may now be part of its appeal. And it fits the season. "[Red and purple are the] colours of autumn and winter – think heather and rosehips," says Murray. "There's something about purple that really suits dark evenings," adds St Clair, who finds the shade hard to imagine in beautiful spring light.