When you first step into Norma Kamali’s Fall/Winter 2026 showroom, you’re met with waves of leather and cheetah print. 

A fixture in the fashion industry for the last half century, Kamali showcased her newest designs in a West Village exhibition on Friday. Guests were free to move through and interact with the designs modeled by faceless gray mannequins, snapping Instagram shots and running their hands over smooth leather and soft faux fur.

By the time the showroom officially opened at 10 a.m., the room was crowded as overlapping chatter reverberated off the walls, only getting louder as the morning went on. Just an hour later, the room was almost too packed to move. In place of live models, a giant LED screen displaying a rotating set of images of a model in various poses stood at the front of the room — a common practice at Kamali’s shows, according to the brand’s audio-visual technician Sam Swanson. 

“It’s basically like the kind of video screens you see in Times Square,” Swanson told WSN. “There’s a computer running software behind it.”

The ready-to-wear collection took on a disciplined palette of black, gray, white, brown and red, layered with leather, animal prints, faux fur and lace. Kamali’s designs relied heavily on structured yet exaggerated silhouettes, with large shoulders that created the illusion of a small waist. 

These designs are part of Kamali’s broader lifestyle collection, which aims to create accessible, timeless pieces at less-than-luxury prices through the use of synthetic materials like pleather. Each season, Kamali chooses an accent color to contrast with the neutral base — this show featured a bright, bold red that she described as the “most popular neutral pop color in fashion history.”

Ranging from floor-length pleather jackets to oversized hoodies that reach the mid-thigh, the pieces were diverse in formality. The collection maintained a resolute stability — for example, the dramatic faux-feather coat weighted at the shoulders and cinched at the waist never gave the impression it could swish or turn. In contrast to the rural camouflage and army green of last year’s Fall/Winter collection, Kamali’s 2026 looks are professional and metropolitan. 

“She’s a New Yorker through and through, you see that with the collection — it’s very New York street style,” Megan Feda, Kamali’s executive assistant, told WSN. 

Many of Kamali’s designs were responses to turbulence in the fashion industry. According to Marissa Santalla, her public relations manager, Kamali is specifically wary of upheavals in the fashion world, including the shuttering of major brands such as Forever 21 and tariffs impacting consumer spending. 

“I start this collection with a serious question: ‘What makes fashion worth purchasing at a time when the industry has serious challenges?’” Kamali said in a pre-recorded introduction. “Trends create wasteful trash, no matter how inexpensive they may be.” 

Instead, the designer aims to offer lasting pieces that appeal to a diverse client base across ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. Pieces in this collection range from $50 casual sweats to $700 hyper-formal pieces. 

“Trends are not typically something we’re looking for — we’re typically ahead of them,” Santalla told WSN. “It’s really just based on enormous history, and the way she designs these collections are purely based on being inspired by herself and her massive catalog of designs.”

Contact Sam Donagi at [email protected].