Spring 2025’s Top Trend Is Ruffles on Everything

I can’t pinpoint exactly when and where it hit me, but once I saw it, I started noticing it all over: Everything has a ruffle on it now. 

From the “What’s New” section at Bergdorf to the latest drop from Mango, you’re hard-pressed to find a top that doesn’t have breezy flair, or a dress without gauzy layers. The “when” and “where” of this trend may be hazy, but the genesis is crystal clear. 

In February 2024, Chemena Kamali presented her first collection as Chloé’s creative director. It was a homecoming for the German designer, who began her career at the French fashion house under Phoebe Philo in the late 2000s and returned to it as design director during Claire Waight Keller’s tenure. Her intimate knowledge of the brand, its heritage, and its influence was made abundantly clear in her inaugural show—one of the strongest, most talked-about debuts in recent memory.

From the gate, Kamali established a clear aesthetic: cascading sleeves on dresses and tops, sheer tulle layers, delicate lace paired with strong denim or leather, and lots and lots of ruffles. In subsequent collections and celebrity red carpet moments, Chloé has continued to build out the look, which is confident, feminine, and confidently feminine. It’s also very familiar—reminiscent of ‘00s Glastonbury It girl street style and downtown pap shots. All it took Sienna Miller sitting front row at Kamali’s first show to confirm it: Boho chic was, indeed, so back. 

As we know, timing is everything. And recently, we’ve seen how a singular brand can come to dictate the broader fashion landscape. A few years ago, we were overwhelmed by the resurgence of mini skirts—emphasis on the mini—in the wake of Miu Miu’s Spring 2022 collection, which became an instant street style star and Internet phenomenon. You can trace many a recent trend, everything from well-worn loafers to layered polos to bedazzled underwear-as-pants, back to Miuccia Prada, who has been on fashion obsessives’ mood boards for decades now. This Miu Miu moment feels especially pronounced when, as many have already pointed out, everything looks the same. 

More broadly, Miu Miu solidified the return of Y2K in fashion. Once that cycle came and went, we instinctively moved onto what comes next, trend- and time-wise: the boho-meets-indie-sleeze of the mid-00s. This set the stage for Chloé to take the mantle of the mono-brand takeover. What we’re seeing now is the Chloé-fication of fashion, if you will. 

Of course, ruffles are about the equivalent of florals in the grand scheme of spring trends—not groundbreaking. And their recent stronghold arguably began even earlier, with Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent, an equally influential brand trend-setter—and where Kamali worked right before returning to Chloé. (There are no coincidences!)

Ruffles have now cemented themselves in the sartorial spotlight thanks to Kamali’s Chloé. We’re one year out from the designer’s first collection and six months from her most recent hitting retail floors. This timing aligns with the production cycle of other brands taking inspiration from it. In short, fashion’s about to be frillier than ever.

On Thursday, a little over a year after her Chloé debut, the designer presented her Fall 2025 collection on the runway in Paris. It’s less ruffle-forward, but they’re still a prominent part of the assortment—a sort of grounding, familiar element that’s established as but one tool in her aesthetic arsenal, tying her work together. They embellish the sleeves and hems of sheer dresses, accentuate the curve of a short balloon sleeve, cascade down skirts, create a peplum shape with lace, line the neckline of a cropped blouse and highlight the waist of a low-rise bottom. 

This Fall 2025 showing also confirms that the trend cycle continues to run on schedule. If we’re following these revivals chronologically, the boho-redux we’re seeing now in fashion was not only inevitable, but right on time. Kamali pushes it forward, modernizing silhouettes from the era like the cropped fitted jackets (rendered in pretty pink florals and rich blue velvets), thick leather belts styled low on the waist, layered statement necklaces over lace-adorned pastel slip dresses, and furry scarves (for style, not function). Alexa Chung walking was just the icing on the cake. 

“As I started working on this collection, I felt that moving forward is just as important as honoring the past,” Kamali wrote in the show notes. “It is about continuing to explore, to redefine and to evolve the Chloé woman’s state of mind.”

The collection, she continued, “reflects how our thoughts and memories define who we are and how our emotions at different stages of life flow into what we do. I thought about how we romanticize the past through an intuitive lens, blending traces of tradition and historical fragments, pieces passed down through generations, what we once loved with what we love today. The memories of bygone eras. I was inspired by the contradiction of the lavish and opulent with the more paired down realness and instinctive ease of the Chloé woman.” 

It’s not just Chloé that’s looking to the ruffle-covered past: Launchmetrics, which calculates a brand or trend’s media impact value (MIV) based on factors such as press coverage and celebrity, found that, boho peaked in Q3 of 2024, when mentions of the trend rose 80% compared to the previous quarter—16% of which were related to Chloé in some way from January 1, 2024 to February 28, 2025.

On Vestiaire Collective, searches for “boho” have doubled in 2025 compared to the year prior. The secondhand luxury retailer has an established relationship with Chloé, which is part of its Resale-as-a-Service program. Within this vintage brand assortment, searches for the seminal Paddington bag—a fixture on the arm of mid-aughts celebrities after it was introduced in 2005 by then-designer Philo—have multiplied five times over since 2024. Seems like someone tipped off Kamali, who brought it back prominently on the Fall 2025 runway (carried on the crook of the elbow, wrists turned upwards, natch).

Kamali’s Chloé clothes are about freedom of expression and movement, giving you the room to express yourself physically and not feel limited by clothes. Yes, there’s suiting, but it’s never tight or constricting, following curves and allowing for some breathing space. Capes act almost like armor, a protective layer that moves through the world with you, confidently and authentically. It’s the antithesis of (or an antidote to) the “boom boom” aesthetic, with its ‘80s corporate boss energy, sharp shoulders, and ties. It gives you permission to let go and just live. 

People want an escape right now, an optimistic balm for living in post-unprecedented times, where the headlines are scary and the reality often scarier. The free-spirited, easy-breezy energy long associated with this aesthetic—plus its comforting familiarity—offers that. And sometimes, that’s exactly what we need.