Quiet luxury is out; loud clothes are back for fall, and they are already in stores. The trade press calls it romantic maximalism: velvet, capes, plum and maroon, and the stiff braided Napoleon jacket.
The numbers behind it, from the forecaster Heuritech, count what buyers ordered into shops:
- Velvet jacket arrivals up 35 percent year on year; embroidered velvet up 58 percent.
- Cape mentions in fall arrivals up 217 percent.
- Plum arrivals up 175 percent across European retailers; maroon almost doubled.
The catch: those are last fall's figures, a leading indicator, not a done deal. You do not need to buy any of it new. Velvet and capes are everywhere secondhand, and the military-jacket trend started in thrift bins. Check the seams: dense velvet, shoulders that hold a cape, frogging that will not fall off.
