Macro Trend: Garden Society

the Return to True Luxury

Something has been quietly building, and if you've been paying attention, you've probably felt it too. Across fashion, design, and culture, there's a collective turning away from spectacle and towards something more rooted and permanent. To call it an aesthetic would be to undersell it. Rather it is a philosophy, and the Macro trend we call Garden Society.

This isn't about florals having a moment. It's much deeper than that. Garden Society is really a conversation about value. What does luxury mean when we strip away the excess? The answer, right now, seems to be: cultivation, craft, and the beauty in tending something well with patience. What you nurture nurtures you back.

What we find so fascinating is how many different creative voices are arriving at the same place from completely different directions.

#1 The Garden as Manifesto: Pamela Anderson's Rules

Few cultural moments have illustrated this shift more powerfully than Pamela Anderson's "Rules of the Garden". Filmed at her childhood home on Vancouver Island, and produced with her skincare brand Sonsie, the piece went quietly viral last year for good reason. For a woman whose image was so thoroughly defined by spectacle, the garden represents a complete reorientation of values. Her rules — no hovering, handle everything with love, never aim for perfection, let the mess become the magic, always look below the surface — are not really about gardening at all. They are instructions for a life lived in opposition to the culture that made her famous.

In an interview with Architectural Digest, she described her garden as "Provençal". Wildflowers, herbs, and vegetables growing together in an intentional tangle, combining the rules of gardening with her "whimsical nature." There is no separation, in her telling, between the garden and the self. The land is not a backdrop. It is the practice.

This is exactly the register that Garden Society operates in. Not the manicured formal garden of old luxury, symmetrical, performative, and controlled, but the wilder, more honest garden that acknowledges mess as part of the magic. Anderson's public reclamation of her own narrative through soil and slowness resonates because it mirrors what so many consumers are quietly doing themselves: stepping back from the curated surface and asking what's growing underneath.

The garden, here, becomes a framework for authenticity, and authenticity has become the rarest luxury of all.

#2 The House of Dior and the Theater of the Garden

For his AW26 womenswear collection, Jonathan Anderson did not pitch the customary white tent in the Tuileries. He built a greenhouse around the Bassin Octogonal — enclosing one of Paris's most historic ponds within a vast glass pavilion and scattered lifelike water lilies across the water's surface. Just beyond the garden wall is the Musée de l'Orangerie, home to Monet's monumental water lily murals. The proximity was not accidental. All of it was in conversation.

What makes this show such a rich entry point for Garden Society is that it draws on the garden as more than a single idea, but as three distinct versions simultaneously. Together they make an argument about why the garden and fashion have always belonged to each other.

The first is the Tuileries as historic stage. Most people experience it today as a pleasant place to walk between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, but its origins are far more theatrical. Originally commissioned by Catherine de' Medici in the 16th century and redesigned under Louis XIV, the garden opened to the public in 1667 with a dress code. You had to be wearing a sword or a robe to enter. From its very beginning, the Tuileries was a place where Parisian society came not just to stroll but to perform. To see and to be seen. To communicate wealth, taste, and standing through the very clothes on their backs. In that sense, it was the original fashion week. Choosing to build his greenhouse there wasn't a backdrop decision. It was a statement: fashion and the garden share the same essential logic. Both are theaters of self-presentation. Both use beauty as a language.

The second is Monet's garden, which is a different thing entirely. Monet didn't paint the garden as it was. He painted it as it felt. The water lily series, dissolves the boundary between the flower and its reflection, between the surface of the water and the sky above it. What you're left with is nature as impressionistic and emotional. Not the garden you can walk through but the garden that lives in memory and feeling long after you've left. When Anderson filled the Bassin Octogonal with artificial water lilies that mirrored the paintings in the Orangerie just steps away, he was invoking that emotional register. The garden not as performance but as feeling. Nature as it exists inside us, not just around us.

The third is the garden in the clothes themselves. This is where it all comes together. Oversized ruffles mimicked flower petals in full bloom. Chiffon evening gowns resembled lilies on the verge of opening. Water lilies ran as a continuous thread through the whole collection in accessories and prints.  Anderson has spoken about water lilies and their ability to disturb the surfaces they inhabit — floating serenely on top while their roots reach all the way down into the dark. That tension between the decorative and the structural, between what is visible and what is hidden beneath the surface, runs through every piece in the collection and it runs through fashion itself.

What Anderson achieved at Dior AW26 is a kind of layered presentation on what the garden actually is — not one thing, but many. A stage. A feeling. A living design system. The Tuileries tells us the garden is where we go to perform. Monet tells us the garden is where we go to feel. And the collection tells us that fashion, at its most considered, has always been trying to do both at once.

#3 Jacquemus and Origin as Luxury

No brand has brought the garden, the farm, and the harvest into modern luxury quite like Jacquemus. Simon Porte Jacquemus grew up in Salon-de-Provence in a farming family, carrots on one side, artichokes and spinach on the other. That background shows up clearly in his SS26 collection Le Paysan (The Peasant). He staged the show at L'Orangerie du Château de Versailles, a space originally used to protect and grow fruit and trees for the château. The setting says it all. This collection is about land, family, and the beauty of simple things, told in a way that still feels elevated and modern. A love letter to rural life.

The campaign felt especially personal. Shot in warm, golden light with a slightly grainy, old film feel, it pulled directly from his childhood, recreating family photographs. A boy in a straw hat at a table covered in flowers. Watching his mother get ready. Linen dresses caught in everyday moments. Beans being prepped for lunch. Right before the campaign launched, he shared a real photo of himself in almost the exact same pose - collapsing the distance between archive and mythology in a really striking way.

The accessories made it even more literal. Leather charms shaped like lemons, carrots, strawberries, garlic, and cherries hung off the new Le Valérie bag, named after his mother. In stores, crates of real produce filled the space, alongside stations where pieces could be personalized with cutomers’ initials. The market stall and the luxury store became the same space.

What Jacquemus does so well is make origin feel like luxury. Not as a concept, but as something tangible.

#4 Loewe and the Surrealist Garden

If Jacquemus comes at the garden through memory, Loewe approaches it with a kind of quiet surrealism. Under Jonathan Anderson, nature isn’t just inspiration, it becomes something slightly strange, a little humorous, and completely elevated. The idea is simple: take something ordinary and treat it like it’s extraordinary.

You see this clearly in Paula’s Ibiza. What started as a seasonal collection became a whole language. Artichokes on packaging, bees and flowers turned into charms, leather goods, sunglasses and jewelry. The garden isn’t referenced from afar, it’s fully lived in.

The Tomato Clutch from 2025 says it best. It started as a meme, someone posted a beautiful heirloom tomato and pointed out it looked like a Loewe bag. Anderson didn’t just respond, he made it real. A molded nappa leather clutch shaped exactly like a tomato, down to the curves and the stem acting as the clasp. It sounds playful, but that’s the point. Fashion and produce were already speaking the same visual language, he just followed it through.

That same energy carried into everything around it. A tomato shaped hot air balloon floating over Cappadocia. Campaign images pairing bags with fruit, vegetables, and sea objects like surreal still lifes. Accessories that felt pulled straight from a garden but treated like collectible objects. It’s a reminder that Garden Society doesn’t have to be serious. It can be witty, a little absurd, and still deeply considered.

We see a more refined version of this in the Spring 2025 show in Paris. The collection opens with a sculptural bell shaped dress, printed with gray florals that feel almost architectural. From there, everything pushes the idea further. Sheer corseted gowns with exposed structure. Florals that feel less decorative and more like force. Shapes that don’t just sit on the body, they reshape it.

This is where it clicks. At Loewe, the flower isn’t something you add at the end. It becomes the starting point. The structure. The idea itself.

That shift matters. It shows how Garden Society moves beyond surface level references. It’s not just about using botanical prints. It’s about letting nature define the form, the mood, and the way a piece comes to life.

Why it matters

Across each of these moments, a greenhouse in the Tuileries, a carrot farm at Versailles, a tomato balloon over Cappadocia, a wildflower garden on Vancouver Island, a single current runs. Garden Society is a value system. It is a turning away from the digital and the instantly gratifying, and toward something that requires actual presence, patience and care.

What it's really asking of designers is to dig deeper. Not just into the archive or the trend report, but into their own stories. That's what the strongest work in this space has in common: it comes from somewhere real. Jacquemus didn't reference a vague idea of Provence, he referenced his family’s carrot farm, his mother’s name, and his actual childhood. Jonathan Anderson didn't just gesture at water lilies, he built a greenhouse around them. Pamela Anderson didn't adopt a garden aesthetic. She went home and grew one.

That level of specificity is what people are responding to right now. There’s more intention behind what we choose to live with, wear, and invest in. People want to know where something came from. Who made it, and why. What it holds beyond the surface. In a world where almost anything can be generated and scaled instantly, the handmade, the traceable, and the deeply considered carry a different kind of weight.

For designers, this is both an invitation and a raised bar. Garden Society asks not just what your work looks like, but what it means. Not just what you're referencing, but what you're actually connected to. The prints, the palettes, the textures, the surfaces — they can all be beautiful. But the ones that resonate, the ones that get saved and shared and sought out, are the ones that feel like they grew from somewhere. Like someone tended them into existence.

The garden has always been generous to those who tend it. That still holds. It gives back in proportion to what you put in, and right now, people are ready for exactly that kind of work.

What we nurture nurtures us back.