Joy was a word writ large, capitalised, in Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee’s discussion of their latest Vaquera show. Joy is something you often feel at a Vaquera show, the clothes barrelling out on oddball models, wildly cut around their bodies and proposing ideas of beauty that are expressive, individual and utterly real. Although the label retains a cultish appeal, you see plenty of people wearing Vaquera – they tend to be young and obsessed with fashion, much like the designers themselves.
Vaquera have been going since 2013 – which gives them a decent chunk of history to reflect back on, which is something of the mood of the Spring/Summer 2026 season, given the number of designers tasked with spectacular revivals of aged and established fashion empires. Vaquera aren’t there yet, but they were in a retrospective mood, looking at the energy of their own early presentations and translating it to new clothes.
There was also, generally, a sense of fashion – they showed on a raised white catwalk, highly polished, with drapes at the back, like a piss-take of a traditional couture-ish presentation. “We moved to Paris this summer – iconically the centre of ‘good taste’. But what does that mean?” asked DiCaprio and Taubensee. The clothes also seemed to play with those ideas, with ball gowns and cocktail dresses, glittering piles of crystal jewellery, a few neat suits and a foray into riding attire straight out of the Hippodrome d‘Auteuil. Vaquera does mean cowgirl, after all – this seemed like her Parisian equivalent. Expertly styled with bunched-up clothes and flyaway collars and piles of accessories, throughout there was a sense of an inversion and twisting of ‘proper’ codes of dressing, an infectious and truly joyful nose thumbing at the rules of dressing.
Joy is also a perfume – well, it was. Devised by the couture house of Jean Patou in 1930, it was then the most expensive perfume in the world, launched at a time when global markets had crashed and the Great Depression was edging into cultural consciousness. Ring any bells? Vaquera opted to launch their own perfume with this show, created in collaboration with Comme des Garçons, who support their label. Backstage, they said their fragrance – Classique Perdu, or lost classic, was inspired by the smell of car interiors, rotting 1990s perfume strips and “the air conditioning in your dad’s Honda.” Well, what else would a Parisian Bois de Boulogne cowgirl with a penchant for overblown satin dresses and junk jewellery wear to a couture show?
