Why Is Moss Having a Moment?


There’s a different kind of Moss taking over the runway: the fuzzy green one you typically find on the forest floor.

This month, the Miu Miu, Hermès, and Louis Vuitton shows in Paris all featured set designs that incorporated moss or grass. At London Fashion Week, the Thevxlley fall 2026 show by Daniel del Valle—who is a florist by day—featured a breastplate-style top adorned with plants, like a wearable terrarium. Some of the greenery was real, while some was artificial. Meanwhile, the Vuitton “neo-landscape” was designed by Severance production designer Jeremy Hindle, lending it an uncanny quality.

All of this vegetation may be a sign, as some online have joked, that we’re feeling a collective urge to “touch grass,” or log off and spend time outside. It could also be an attempt to create a whimsical approximation of the real world, like a living playground. Either way, fashion’s green thumb is on full display. Of course, as Vogue’s senior archive editor Laird Borrelli-Persson tells me, this is far from the first time that a designer has set their show among the wild flora.

To name a few: Chanel’s spring 2010 show was set in a barn, with models walking on grass and hay (“a romp in the hay,” indeed). For Dries Van Noten’s spring 2015 show, models walked on a carpet by the Argentinean artist Alexandra Kehayoglou, specially made to look like a mossy forest floor. Dior built an elaborate garden maze for their spring 2017 couture show, and Collina Strada held its spring 2022 show at the Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm.

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Photo: Villa Eugénie, courtesy of Hermès

These days, fashion designers aren’t the only ones with moss on their minds, however. In recent years, moss seems to be a, well, growing trend in floral, interior, and landscape design, too. Where it was once seen by many as a backyard nuisance, it’s now being included as an intentional part of gardens, as people incorporate it into interior decor with moss rugs (both real plant and textile) or art forms like Kokedama (Japanese moss balls).

“Moss is definitely having a moment,” says floral designer Brittany Asch, the founder of Brrch, who has made work for Adele, Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty 2018 fashion show in New York, Mansur Gavriel, Glossier, Sandy Liang, Gucci, and more.

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