Edward Enninful's The 90s: Art and Fashion at Tate Britain has taken most of this autumn's attention, and divided the critics doing it (we rounded up the reviews last week). It is far from the only fashion exhibition worth a journey this season. Museums in London, Paris, New York, Vienna and North America have opened shows that look at dress from unusually specific angles: one coat, one colour, one woman's wardrobe, one toy.
These are the eight we would plan a trip around. Dates and prices are taken from each museum's own listings and were checked on 21 October 2026.
London: the trench, up close
The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon (V&A South Kensington, until 3 January 2027) is the smallest show here and possibly the most useful. Timed to Burberry's 170th anniversary, the free display sits in the museum's rarely opened Prince Consort Gallery, which, the V&A notes, once held fabrics from its textile collection in mahogany cabinets.
It runs in three parts. "Invention" starts with Thomas Burberry's development of cotton gabardine in 1879. "Craft" takes the coat apart: the hand-finished collar, the House Check lining, the storm flap and the detachable throat latch. "Creativity" brings together 19 runway looks from the past two and a half decades, including work by Christopher Bailey and Daniel Lee. Among the archive pieces is a Burberry coat that belonged to the couturier Hardy Amies.
"As we mark 170 years of the house, we are thrilled to partner with the V&A," said Carly Eck, Burberry's brand curator, in the announcement, adding that "a myriad of objects from the brand's Archive will be publicly exhibited for the first time". The display is also a preview of something larger: the V&A says its fashion galleries will reopen as The Burberry Gallery in autumn 2028.
Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends (National Portrait Gallery, until 7 February 2027) is a photography show, but fashion runs through it. Walker, whose pictures have appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, W and i-D, presents some 250 new portraits made over five years celebrating queer activism, community and love, in a setting designed by his long-time collaborator Shona Heath. The second half turns to "the transformative power that fashion, makeup and performance have long held for Queer people", in the gallery's words, with sitters including Jean Paul Gaultier and Michaela Stark. Curator Susanna Brown calls it "the most ambitious and important project of Tim Walker's career".
Paris: two museums, two kinds of history
A Wardrobe of One's Own: Dissident Femininities in the 19th Century (Palais Galliera, until 14 February 2027) is the season's most substantial piece of scholarship. With almost 500 works, it traces how nineteenth-century women appropriated the male dress codes of the day (trousers, tailored suits, cravats, top hats), from working women in suits and boots to the artistic and lesbian circles of Paris around 1900.
At its centre is a wardrobe never shown before: the clothes of the painter Rosa Bonheur, presented in their entirety. The museum has also gathered 150 amateur photographs, seen for the first time. The exhibition is curated by Émilie Hammen, the Galliera's director, with Marine Kisiel, head of its nineteenth-century fashion department; the museum's exhibition page credits Chanel as a supporter.
Across the city, Look! 40 Years of Fashion at the Museum (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, until 4 April 2027) marks the fortieth anniversary of the Musée des Arts de la Mode within its walls. Forty silhouettes in the museum's nave stand for four decades of exhibitions, from Christian Dior, couturier du rêve to the surreal worlds of Elsa Schiaparelli. The more original part of the show is what surrounds them: sketches, embroidery samples and patterns, and the conservation, storage and mounting work that turns a garment into a museum object. Curators Bénédicte Gady and Sophie Lemahieu present it as the "two lives" of clothing, before and after it enters a collection.
New York: dolls, taken seriously
Doll Dressing (The Museum at FIT, until 3 January 2027) asks a question that sounds frivolous and turns out not to be: how have dolls influenced fashion? Curated by Dr Colleen Hill, MFIT's senior curator of costume, it brings together more than 170 objects, with fashion dolls shown beside full-size garments by Balenciaga, Comme des Garçons, Maison Martin Margiela, Marc Jacobs, Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Moschino, Anna Sui and others.
The museum traces dolls as "miniature fashion models" back to the fourteenth century. Highlights include an eighteenth-century fashion doll lent by Colonial Williamsburg, Margiela's autumn/winter 1994 collection, which enlarged doll clothing to 5.2 times its original size, and Jeremy Scott's paper-doll Moschino of spring 2017. Admission is free.
Vienna, Denver and Toronto
True Colors: Viennese Fashion across Four Centuries (Wien Museum, until 28 March 2027) draws some 350 garments from the museum's fashion collection to tell a cultural history of colour, from the tightly regulated eighteenth century to "our colorfully anarchic present", as the city's tourist board puts it, and to show how closely clothing and power are entwined.
DIVA (Denver Art Museum, until 31 January 2027) is the exclusive US stop for the V&A's touring exhibition on performers and their costumes, with about 250 objects spanning nearly 100 performers, from Josephine Baker, Sarah Bernhardt and Maria Callas to Cher, Rihanna and Taylor Swift. The museum says it has "evolved the show for an American audience".
Sunday Best (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, opened 7 October) spotlights "the power of Black style", tracing migration, activism and self-fashioning in Black diasporic communities from the 1880s to the present through fashion, art, ephemera and film. It is making its world debut in Toronto and was organised with the Philadelphia Art Museum.
At a glance
| Exhibition | Museum | Until | Admission |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon | V&A South Kensington, London | 3 Jan 2027 | Free |
| Tim Walker's Fairyland | National Portrait Gallery, London | 7 Feb 2027 | Ticketed; members free |
| A Wardrobe of One's Own | Palais Galliera, Paris | 14 Feb 2027 | €14 (€12 reduced); under-18s free |
| Look! 40 Years of Fashion at the Museum | Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris | 4 Apr 2027 | Ticketed |
| Doll Dressing | The Museum at FIT, New York | 3 Jan 2027 | Free |
| True Colors | Wien Museum, Vienna | 28 Mar 2027 | See museum |
| DIVA | Denver Art Museum | 31 Jan 2027 | See museum |
| Sunday Best | Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto | See museum | See museum |
Opening hours vary, and several of these museums close one or two days a week, so check before you travel. For London, the Fashion and Textile Museum's Ossie Clark + Celia Birtwell (until 11 April 2027) makes a natural pairing; we look at that partnership in a separate piece. For permanent collections, see Casadi's guide to fashion museums.
Featured image: David Iliff (Diliff), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped for this page; the cropped version is shared under the same CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.
