Close Enough to Touch: Amsterdam Fashion Week 2026

Banner image courtesy of Rhea

The show started with the crackle of a supermarket intercom. On Thursday evening Camiel Fortgens presented his SS27 collection inside an Albert Heijn supermarket after closing hours, with the shelf stackers still working.

Guests sat on folding chairs with water and snacks off the shelves. The models pushed shopping carts and carried half-filled baskets past the cheese and frozen-food aisles.

The clothes displayed were cotton shirts, thin transitional knits, bomber jackets, and denim. The pieces were reworked through unique washes and alterations: contrast stitching, raw hems, exposed construction.

In their second walk down the aisle, every model had gained a layer, much like you might as evening approaches. Fortgens’s collection seemed more interested in proximity than spectacle.

Across five days, from September 1 to 5, more than forty shows and presentations took place during Amsterdam Fashion Week. For the tens of thousands of guests, the recurring question was not how a collection reads from twelve rows back, but how close you’re allowed to get to it and for how long.

Bibi van der Velden and Jewelry on Wheels

On Thursday morning, a vintage Citroën HY van stood outside Rosewood Amsterdam, a luxury hotel where Bibi van der Velden has been House Jeweller since February.

The van is a traveling project that van der Velden describes as a mobile conservatory, filled with oversized and faintly surreal flowers, with her jewelry set among them: 18-karat recycled gold worked with less conventional fine-jewelry materials including mammoth tusk, malachite, ebony, and baroque pearls.

Van der Velden trained as a sculptor before she trained in jewelry. Her skills as a sculptor are on full display in another project in collaboration with Rosewood Amsterdam—a cart featuring marquetry in walnut, oak, and zebrano that rolls through the grounds and can be summoned by telephone.

Both the van and the cart are made with the attention to detail usually reserved for the jewelry they house.

Bibi van der Velden x Rosewood Amsterdam

Rhea, and a Wardrobe You Can Audit

The Amsterdam knitwear label, Rhea, founded by Roos Fleuren and Bridget Cumberworth, opened its Studio Pop-Up at Nieuwe Leliestraat 54 on Friday evening. The clothes on display were deliberately quiet, using simple materials like merino wool, cashmere blends, and Egyptian cotton.

Every piece carries a digital product passport built using the software Renoon, which provides information on material sourcing and production. Rhea states that it traces suppliers through Tier 3, meaning not only the factory but the mills, spinners, and raw material sources—a reach it describes as rare.

Amsterdam Fashion Week is in the second phase of its partnership with Copenhagen Fashion Week, and this edition ran the sustainability minimum standards as a pilot. The 2026 program states that the standards will become binding in September 2027

The EU’s Digital Product Passport act will be introduced around late 2027, with compliance roughly eighteen months after that.

Rhea is early, but the direction is clear. A supply chain rendered as a scannable document is a strange kind of intimacy: it hands you the garment’s history in full and brings you closer to its origins.

The Time to Look: Wandler and Arcatype

Wandler made an object out of the medium itself. For its Fashion Week 2026 capsule, the luxury handbag label founded by Elza Wandler in 2017 produced a limited-edition zine with the London magazine PUSS PUSS. The zine was presented across the closing weekend at KAMER, Wandler’s gallery and retail space in Amsterdam.

Wandler has said that leather glaze does not fundamentally change a bag but simply allows you to see more of it. The same could be said of the zine. Its accompanying shoot was staged with ceramic chairs by Rutger de Regt and glass flowers by Clara Swears, placing the bags in quiet dialogue with the surrounding objects.

Arcatype took on another variable, which is time. The discovery platform’s debut exhibition, A Space For Time, opened at The Gent on the Herengracht on September 1 and runs until September 20, carrying on through GLUE Design Week after Fashion Week has packed up.

Seventeen labels share the rooms, spanning apparel, interiors, and lifestyle, from Kentroy Yearwood to Prasklo. The labels were selected based on craft, character, and intention.

Tjeerd Marie is among them, which emphasized this point. The brand staged a runway performance about work pressure on Friday, and their debut collection has sat in a canal house for three weeks where anyone can view it.

Arcatype co-founder Bas Slootman calls the exhibition a space for slow conversation in the middle of a fast week and says people have returned a second and third time.

The return visit is the more useful measure. A show gives you a seat and a few minutes to view the collection. A room you can walk back into lets you form a second opinion, which is usually the one worth having.

Wandler x PUSS PUSS Magazine courtesy of Joan Braun at Bene Studio

Arcatype A Space For Time courtesy of Indigo Sum

Vrij Paleis, and a Building That Remembers

At the other end of the fashion economy, Vrij Paleis debuted its first runway show on Friday, followed by a weekend exhibition. Six graduating designers from ArtEZ University of the Arts, Amsterdam Fashion Insitute, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie stood beside their collections to explain the creative process.

The former Algemeen Handelsblad complex on Paleisstraat was vacated by the newspaper in 1977. Through the 1980s, artist Peter Giele ran the galleries Amok and then Aorta out of it. Vrij Paleis has held the site since 2018.

Putting graduate work into that room rather than a hired white box is a decision about lineage. The weekend exhibition was free and open to the public.

The Cost of Closeness

This edition of Amsterdam Fashion Week shortened the distance between the show and the place where the piece is finally handled and worn. This approach requires a delicate balance.

When the presentation happens inside the shop, van, canal house, or digital product passport, criticism has nowhere neutral to stand. Everything becomes an encounter, and an encounter is hard to argue with.

The city’s designers have earned the right to an unfiltered and intimate presentation of their work. The next thing to consider is how critique can remain productive in such close quarters.

Ahmad Abdallah is a creative media director and an alumnus of Vogue College of Fashion.