It’s a well-known adage for writers: Write what you know. For Parson’s graduating class of 2026, the same could be said of design. A senior thesis, unlike a designer collection, should contain not just a demonstration of skill but an element of self-reflection and biography—in addition to demonstrating what you can create, the clothes should also serve as a précis as to who you are and what you stand for.
Take Meiting (Christina) Zhang, who showed a confident collection built around school uniforms from her native China. There, they are intended as means of order and uniformity, but she reimagined them as vehicles of self-expression, using pressure-shaped felted, hand-knit wool to create shapely jackets and separates that stood away from the body and came in high-contrast primary colors. Olivia Colley, meanwhile, drew on her childhood memories from the American South for inspiration—namely, Savannah’s draping Spanish moss and Chinoiserie motifs popular in summer decor. She turned them into charming skirts and dresses that used tangles of dried flowers as embellishment or on a dead-simple cotton sundress with hand-painted porcelain prints and fluttering petal embroideries.
Vy Le, from Vietnam, tapped into her country’s ebullient Đạo Mẫu religion, which is centered around female deities and queer culture. She took a draped Mother Goddess coat, worn during traditional rituals, and crafted it in dense layers of silk, Chantilly lace, and hand-painted sequins, all trapped under a translucent layer of cotton tulle that she hand-sewed with her friends. While the coat was a cacophony of texture and color and was cut to appear falling off the body, she explored the same process in a neat sleeveless shift that had, by contrast, a contained, elegant clarity. “I wanted it to be dramatic yet romantic,” she explained. “And represent queer culture, drag queens, and burlesque dancers.”
Other highlights included the heavily reworked American and military garments from Devlin Ebisu; the memory-inspired contrast of clean sportswear and romantic dresses by Cameron Jean Hall; Ziv Liu’s fluid shapes that can be yanked and pinched into arresting new forms by drawstrings; and the wonderful patchwork melanges of crochet, lace, and other knits from Turkish-American designer Mayra Tuncel, who was inspired by a bag of textiles gifted to her by her grandmothers.
Presented at the airy Glasshouse in far west midtown, this show proved that Parsons—which has trained American talents like Marc Jacobs, Anna Sui, and Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler (and, now, Loewe)—remains a forceful engine for minting the next generation of designers. Other takeaways of note: while social media may well be under the spell of sleek ’90s minimalism, this class often favored shaggier silhouettes and cutting techniques that resulted in an undone, frenzied quality. The spirit of Galliano’s decadent, subversive glamour felt very present, in a good way. Also: if fashion these days can feel quite serious, there was a welcome spirit of fun in the students’ work.
“One of the most important things that we are asking our designers to think of is what type of industry they want to create,” said Deshon Varnado, assistant professor of fashion design at the school. While collegiate shows can sometimes feel like an audition for students looking to filter into the existing fashion system, Varnado saw it differently—especially in light of current industry upheavals. “They know that right now, with what we’re going through politically, is an extreme state of fashion,” he said. “But I think they are at a unique time where they have the opportunity to enter the workforce and say, ‘this is what we want the future of fashion to look like.’”