The 14 Best Art, Design, and Fashion Books of 2026

The MoMu’s Antwerp Six show may just be the must-see fashion exhibition of the year. Curated by Geert Bruloot, a contemporary of the Six and the first person to stock Margiela Tabi shoes, the show takes us inside the Belgian designers’ groundbreaking rise and enduring impact. It was created in direct collaboration with Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Marina Yee, each of whom designed their own sections. The accompanying monograph is the permanent representation of the unmissable show. It’s a collector’s item for anyone who loves the antiglamour conceptualism of the Six plus One and craves a deeper look into their evolution(s).

For many, photographer and director Petra Collins defined the dreamy feminine lens of the 2010s. Her pastel stories of girlhood felt like miniature cinematic universes, pushing against the consumptive quality of the dominant male gaze through a sparkling and lushly emotive language. Collin’s newest release, STAR, tells the story of a fictional pop star and her most obsessive fans. It’s a rumination on stan culture, celebrity, and how we navigate shifting identity in an increasingly high-pressure world. It’s also a visual whirlwind of a photo book, full of high-impact images. It even has its own soundtrack, crafted by Collins and her boyfriend, for a full movie-style experience.

The Roman architect, designer and artist Achille Salvagni is best known for the lavish modernist interiors and bespoke pieces he’s crafted for clients like Jeff Koons, Tom Ford, and Gisele Bündchen. His custom, limited-edition furniture is sculptural yet functional—and handmade from the kinds of opulent materials you might imagine Ford and Gisele favoring. Salvagni’s new book, Achille, delves into his greater creative philosophy (exploring objects like his 2016-designed Spider chandelier), while diving into references from classical Rome to Art Deco, midcentury modern Italian and more.

She may not be a household name today, but in the 1980s, Kembra Pfahler rattled the Lower East Side, shocking and inspiring New York’s feminist underground with viral, triumphantly transgressive performance work. Her new eponymous tome traces her path to rebellion, with essays by Anohni and Jeffrey Deitch, tales of the early days of Rick Owens and DIY filmmaking, and loads of powerful photography showing Pfahler’s uncompromising embrace of Kabuki theater, the occult, new brands of femininity, and bondage-laced visual codes.

A companion to Sofia Coppola’s love-letter-turned-documentary, Marc by Sofia, brings us behind the scenes of Jacobs’s creative life. It’s an incredibly intimate work, full of hundreds of Polaroids, photographs from Jacobs’s Parsons days, and a telling of Jacobs’s story that reads like a conversation between friends—because it is.

The latest book in Assouline’s Ultimate Collection traces Venice’s cultural impact through a visual wonderland of images. Photographs from Helmut Newton, Cecil Beaton, and beyond are featured; Venetian historian Alberto Toso Fei leads us through the city’s founding to Peggy Guggenheim’s years, the invigoration of the Venice Biennale, and the most current happenings. Photography sits alongside art from rare books and private collections.

It’s been a big year for Tracey Emin, with her landmark exhibition A Second Life bringing 40 years of her confessional, rawly autobiographical practice to the Tate Modern’s halls. My Heart Is This shows Emin opening up as she discusses her relationship to painting with delicate candor; she explores the impact on her practice after he mother passed, her own cancer, and what drawing means to her.

The V&A’s current exhibition visualizes the development of Elsa Schiaparelli’s groundbreaking, surrealistic couture with a special focus on the designer’s time in England. Schiaparelli: Anglomaniac picks up where the show ends. The book is a celebration of the house’s current creative director Daniel Roseberry, but it’s also a window into the creative processes of so many of his U.K. collaborators and admirers. Everyone from Dua Lipa to Nick Knight and Nadia Lee Cohen muses on the Texan designer, the future of couture, and how their work intersects. The imagery is the highlight—it’s all about pushing the fantasy and capturing the fully imagined world Roseberry brings to life.

Out July 28, 2026.

Later this year, the seminal performance artist Marina Abramović turns 80 with a Park Avenue Armory takeover presenting her largest-scale work to date. In anticipation, she’s inviting us into some of the most intimate, strange, and mystical moments of her adventurous life. Long Life, Short Stories is a collection of snapshots—from the story of how she lost her virginity to the time she cut garlic with John Cage, and what it felt like to get kicked out of the Venice Biennale in ’95. The monograph is full of rich, humorous and diary-style details, along with sketches and striking images of the artist at work.

For 25 years now, photographer Nick Haymes has turned his lens on himself and his family, shooting thousands of images of messy, playful, and sometimes volatile domestic moments. Chronograph puts together several hundred of these, a mix of staged and documentary photographs that are moving and full of vibrant, spontaneous moments.

Out this August.

Californian skateboarder-turned-photographer Jerry Hsu has spent the past decade and a half documenting the darker sides of Los Angeles youth culture, capturing black-eyed teens; kids walking by the highway, cigarette in hand; and buildings on fire. There’s a feeling of optimism underlying the almost electric fatalism of these works—tied together by a Larry Clark-like ability to shoot straight to the heart of the raw and every day.

Out September 3, 2026.

The Detroit-born, Harlem-based artist Ming Smith has been photographing her community since the early 1970s, when she graduated from Howard University, moved to New York, and began capturing moments of everyday interiority alongside luminaries like James Baldwin, Grace Jones, and Sun Ra. This Dashwood and Speciwomen publication shows Smith’s rarely seen color photographs—most for the first time. Smith digitized thousands of negatives to select the 200 works shown in the book: images that play with abstraction, collapse the distance between the subject and photographer, and sit alongside contributions by Arthur Jafa and others.

Out October 23, 2026.

Ask any editor—a Chanel runway show is an event. Who can forget the time Karl Lagerfeld invited guests into a subzero box complete with a massive iceberg imported from Scandinavia (fall 2010)? Or when he transformed the Grand Palais into a Chanel-branded supermarket, replete with shopping carts and shelved merchandise? Matthieu Blazy’s debut show brought the cosmos down to earth. Then, there are the now-iconic ’90s productions, so many of which have entered fashion’s collective nostalgia. Flammarion’s new monograph, Chanel Shows: Fashion Mise-en-Scène, unpacks this magical world. It’s a meaty tome, featuring decades of imagery, insider stories, and an introduction by Tilda Swinton.

Out October 27, 2026.

The dusty pinks, warm oranges, and sumptuous yellows of Luis Barragán’s modernist homes have become shorthand for the Guadalajara-born architect’s emotional resonance and dedication to Mexican craft and tradition. Now, Casa Luis Barragán is giving us a look inside Barragán’s private intellectual world, treating his library as a living archive that lends rich context to the architect’s serene and sensual structures. The book is a real treat for fans of Barragán’s distinct offerings.

Out December 8, 2026.