Gabriela Hearst fans out a deck of tarot cards face down on the table and plucks one out at random. “Look!” she exclaims, holding up a card showing a blue chalice emerging from a lotus flower, radiating waves of energy: “the Ace of Cups.” Since Hearst began her daily tarot reading, the Ace of Cups—which she interprets as “self-love, loving what you do, working from a place of no fear”—regularly appears in her spread.

The designer’s fascination with tarot began at 18, when her mother gave her a deck as a gift. But she began pulling cards daily in the lead-up to her spring 2026 show, which depicted each of the Major Arcana—the 22 named cards that represent life’s journey—from the Hanged Man wrapped in a leather cord to Death in a fringed Western jacket. But tarot isn’t just a creative inspiration. “It’s an exercise to reprogram,” she explains. When faced with a negative card (she often pulls the Seven of Pentacles, which to her represents failure and reassessment), she tries to distill meaning. “You have to follow a dharma and accept what comes in front of you,” she says.

Hearst is far from the first designer to take a deep dive into tarot. Fashion’s most famous of practitioners, Christian Dior, turned to the cards during World War II, when his younger sister, Catherine, was imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and Maria Grazia Chiuri tapped into that tarot legacy throughout her tenure at the house. In her spring 2017 debut, she embroidered Major Arcana motifs onto delicate tulle skirts and dresses; later, she replicated iconography from the Visconti-Sforza deck for her spring 2021 couture.

A new exhibition at the Morgan Library, “Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions,” encompasses both tarot’s Italian Renaissance origins (the Morgan owns the 15th-century Visconti-Sforza deck, which is split between the Morgan and the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and is among the oldest and most complete of the surviving Renaissance tarot decks) and its contemporary iterations. Claire Gilman, one of the exhibit’s curators, notes that tarot revivalism is often born out of periods of instability. “It’s in these moments of uncertainty [that] we look to other ways of understanding our lives that lie outside of standard methods,” Gilman says. Hearst agrees: “We need this connection to know that there is something bigger than us.”

Whatever the reasoning, tarot has never been more popular among the fashion set: Daniel Lee splashed the iconography of the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck across Burberry’s spring 2026 collection; Colleen Allen channeled artist Leonora Carrington’s surrealist cards (particularly the Empress’s and High Priestess’s rich palettes and austere silhouettes) for her fall 2025 offering. And beyond the runway, Dior’s Jonathan Anderson and Celine’s Michael Rider both seek guidance from their friend and tarot reader Trevor Ballin—himself a designer at Celine.

Ballin sees the cards and design as intrinsically linked. “You’re examining the present and trying to create desire for the future,” he says. “That’s why so many people in fashion are really drawn to tarot. It’s storytelling.”