Ashley Williams Spring 2026: Uniforms for Utopia

What does a utopian wardrobe look like?

Ashley Williams sees it in shades of cotton candy pink, baby blue, and cozy kitchen colors of peach, cinnamon and mint. In Williams’ perfect world, there are offbeat accessories, too, including a necklace made from a broken china plate, chunky bracelets shaped like toilet rolls and a tiara fashioned from tiny pink bedposts.

The designer said she was thinking about a place where “all labor is endowed with love” and people are kind, caring and responsible just because they want to be. Imagine that for a moment. She described it as an idyllic life, but not a perfect one, and said she was eager to explore the relationship between the two.

Her collection was fun, and filled with easy shapes, including button-front house dresses, nurses’ uniforms and nightgowns brightened up with rose prints or childlike sketches of domestic scenes done in a sugary palette of My Little Pony colors.

Some of those dresses came with prim white collars, embroidered pockets or ropes of colorful popper bead necklaces. (Williams said she plans to produce the jewelry with the Chinese brand Yvmin, which specializes in surreal designs).

Tailored suits came with swingy box pleat skirts or teeny minis with ripply hemlines. Williams paired them with wooly, knee-high socks or leg warmers and shoes that fused the functional with the glamorous. Kitten heels came with Velcro straps across the top, recalling medics’ footwear, while ballerina flats were square-toed, sturdy – and sparkly.

While the utopian idea was original – and utterly appealing – some of these pieces nodded to designs from brands such as Prada, Miu Miu and Vivetta whose past collections have exalted the uniform, and trained a lens on the domestic space.

Still, Williams imperfect perfection looked pretty swell.