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As years go, 2016 has been one of the roughest. It’s been so all-around awful, in fact, that Fuck2016 has become not just a popular hashtag, but a T-shirt—$19.99 and going fast at lookhuman.com! With slogan tees all over the runways, why didn’t a designer think of that?

Fashion, of course, has had trials of its own. New York upstarts Suno and Ohne Titel shuttered. Designers still in business worried about shoppers acclimatized to seasonal 80 percent markdowns, an unsustainable model if ever there were one. And then there’s the now-he’s-in-but-next-season-he’s-out creative director cycle, a trend even more troubling in light of the ongoing celebrification of fashion.Zendaya is a designer now? Meanwhile, talents as remarkable as Alber Elbaz, Stefano Pilati, Peter Copping, Marco Zanini, and Francisco Costa are unattached to houses.

Despite all this, there were moments of pure, unfettered joy of the sort that only fashion can deliver.

Even in the dark of January, even in the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks that stunned the city, Paris is beautiful. At the Spring 2016 haute couture collections, designers from Karl Lagerfeld to Donatella Versace to Elie Saab opened their shows with all-white looks. It was a coincidence, surely, but to me it felt like a mutually agreed upon sign of solidarity and of soldiering on. Even more hopeful was the message about sustainability Lagerfeld seemed keen on spreading atChanel with embellishments that incorporated recycled paper, organic yarn, and, yes, wood chips. That same week, the Amsterdam-based designer Ronald van der Kemp came at his environmentally friendly offering a different way, using secondhand or otherwise cast-off materials for his limited-edition leather flares, pencil skirts, and tailored jackets. Trash couture? People are buying.

See-now, buy-now talk dominated the ready-to-wear shows in February and early March, with a small minority of designers presenting capsule collections on the runway available for immediate sale. (The trend gained steam later in the year with mega-brands like Burberry, Tommy Hilfiger, and Tom Ford presenting entire in-season collections.) Good for business? Maybe. Good for creativity? That’s iffier. At the end of New York’s Fall 2016 shows, editors cheered for Marc Jacobs, who really and truly let his freak flag fly with his shades-of-gray ode to the “ghosts of New York.” Lady Gaga even made a runway appearance. I especially appreciated Jacobs’s on-color-scheme gray HRC sequin tee.

In a year in which we never stopped asking ourselves “What Should a Fashion Show Be Now?” Iris van Herpen took the prize for the most innovative (and Instagram friendly) presentation. For her Fall 2016 show, the Dutch designer installed giant optical light screens and hired models wearing her 3-D-printed and 21st-century chain-mail dresses to shimmy and sway in front of them, while the hypnotized crowd snapped photos. If experiential moments like this aren’t the future of the runway, they could be the future of store windows. No surprise, Van Herpen was one of the featured artists at “Manus x Machina,” this year’s Costume Institute exhibition devoted to extraordinary clothing made using a combination of hand and machine techniques.

2016 marked the 10-year anniversary of Scott (The Sartorialist) Schuman’s first Fashion Week dispatches on Style.com, so it felt like the right time to revisit street style’s early halcyon days with Schuman, Phil Oh, Tommy Ton, Adam Katz Sinding, et al. The photographers were incredibly candid about how the scene surrounding the fashion shows has changed. It’s not a circus out there; it’s a high-stakes red carpet. Still, Vogue Runway’s Phil Oh manages to find some sublime moments amidst the chaos.

In April, Paco Rabanne creative director Julien Dossena invited me to join him on the fashion jury at the Festival d’Hyères, alongside Pierre Hardy, the young photographer Coco Capitán, and Candy Magazine’s Luis Venegas. In my book, the 31-year-old South of France event is the model fashion competition, as energizing for the jury, which spends a long weekend deliberating with the Mediterranean glittering in the background, as it is for the aspiring student designers. We gave the prize to Japan’s Wataru Tominaga, whose collection was a mashup of Madame Grès, Issey Miyake, and native Kenyan dress; I can’t wait to see where he winds up.

I found myself in Rio in May, three months before the Olympics. Louis Vuitton shuttled upwards of 500 people there for a Resort 2017 show in the shadow of the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, an architectural masterpiece perched on a cliff that looks like it could have landed from space or emerged from the sea. Nicolas Ghesquière’s sporty, scuba-influenced cut-out and cut-away multicolor dresses absolutely lived up to the setting.

There’s no debating that 2016 was a big year for Beyoncé. Hello, Super Bowl! I won’t forget her CFDA Fashion Icon Award acceptance speech. Dressed in Givenchy pinstripes and an epic wide-brimmed hat, she recounted her earliest days in Destiny’s Child, when “high-end labels didn’t really want to dress four black country curvy girls,” going on to encourage designers to harness the power of fashion: “Y’all are fairy godmothers, magicians, sculptors, and sometimes even our therapists. . . . You have the power to change perception, to inspire and empower, and to show people how to embrace their complications, and see the flaws, and the true beauty and strength that’s inside all of us.” Yes, Bey, you slay.

Only Karl Lagerfeld and the magicians at Fendi could stage a show at Rome’s Trevi Fountain. The Italian house restored the historic site to the tune of $2.4 million, and its haute fourrure show in July functioned as a rechristening of a sort. Nobody got wet, but Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and the model gang did walk on water, via a clear Lucite runway. The real marvel, though, was the collection itself. The 5,000 hand-cut holes that turned a rose-color Persian lamb of a long dress into lace. The absolutely miniscule squares of mink that took 1,200 work hours to stitch together mosaic-style into a magical forest scene. It was truly breathtaking.

The September shows gave me my first first taste of live TV, or live video at least, as a host of Vogue Runway’s Facebook Live designer interviews, along with my colleagues Luke Leitch and Edward Barsamian. Instagramming the Keeping Up with the Kardashians crew shooting our crew filming Edward talking to Kendall and Kylie Jenner has to go down as my most meta moment of 2016. By the way, that video has 1.5 million views, and counting.

I preferred Demna Gvasalia’s March Balenciaga debut to his second outing for the label in October. Fall’s slouched-on parkas, stirrup pants, and even the sculptural tailoring seem easier to assimilate into my personal wardrobe than the neon spandex leggings he proposed for Spring will be. That said, you gotta love the guy’s audacity. Backstage at the Spring show there was such a feeling of excitement, it was kinetic. The heat is undeniably with Demna now, he is leading fashion into 2017.

Spring 2017 was a big one for debuts: Anthony Vaccarello at YSL, Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior. Bouchra Jarrar at Lanvin. But nobody impressed quite as much as Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino, who had the genius idea of collaborating with the legendary Zandra Rhodes on graphics for his diaphanous, handkerchief hemmed fairy-tale dresses.

This year, we lost legends James Galanos, Sonia Rykiel, André Courrèges, and Bill Cunningham, as well as Richard Nicoll, who at just 39 had decades of promise ahead of him. We packed Carnegie Hall for Bill’s October memorial, but there’s still a hole in my Sunday mornings, and those of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers, where Bill’s weekly dispatches used to be.

One of the most satisfying projects we’ve undertaken at Vogue Runway is the digitizing of pre-2000 fashion shows. This year my indefatigable colleague Laird Borrelli-Persson led three such endeavors, uploading the 1990s collections of the über-influential designers Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada, and Calvin Klein, the lattermost an especially timely addition to our archive given Raf Simons’s womenswear and menswear debut at Calvin is set for next February. There’s much more to come in this department in 2017!Read more at:formal dresses sydney | bridesmaid dresses