After a marathon of shows marked by bright lights, pulsating soundtracks, and late start times (VIPs aren’t known for punctuality) the last thing any editor wants to do is end New York Fashion Week with more of the same. So whether it was by design or by coincidence, Amir Taghi’s inaugural runway presentation—intimate, relaxed, and held on the last days of shows—was an ideal way to close out the week.
“We’ve been toggling back and forth, thinking, ‘When are we going to do a show? Is it the right time? Should we wait?’” said Taghi after debuting his spring 2026 collection at the Hunter Dunbar gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “We’ve been doing lookbooks that are shot beautifully, and they’ve been working, but this season we ended up doing a show because we were able to invite our community.” That community is largely composed of clients who have supported the label since inception. They were just as delighted to fly themselves to New York as they were to be dressed in Amir Taghi for the runway show and a private cocktail party later that night.
“I’ve been designing collections for a while, but I would say the beginning of the brand was around 2020, right before Covid,” Taghi said. “In a lot of ways, everyone was freaking out, but for me and the brand, it provided the time to really discover who we wanted to be, who we were selling to, and our identity.” Taghi described his namesake range as “eccentric, textured, tailored, and nuanced”—aesthetics honed interning at Oscar de la Renta while the late designer was at the helm; studying at Central Saint Martins and Parsons; and later working in design at Monse, Proenza Schouler, and Adam Lippes.
“There are always four or five different starting points,” Taghi said of how his collections come together. For spring 2026, one of them was the headscarves women are required to wear in Iran, where Taghi’s family is originally from. Though the designer vehemently opposes the mandate, “it has kind of forced Iranian women to use scarves as a way to describe themselves,” he said. At the show, a black and white scarf-hem dress seemingly floated down the runway, while a colorful silk scarf was draped over a pair of trousers like a sarong and tied under the collar of a peplumed nappa leather jacket. An elongated single-button blazer, black suiting, and a structured cream bar jacket all pointed to Taghi’s affinity for menswear. “When my grandfather moved from Iran to the U.S.—to Houston, back in the 1980s—he gave my uncles seed money to open their own menswear store,” he said. “It was the time of Armani, Zegna and Versace, so growing up within that environment, I’ve always loved tailoring.
