The Tamesis
We’ll soon be seeing Sia Arnika’s fall 2026 dual-temperature collection, one of her best collections yet that’s both cool and hot, with volume-exploding cinched jackets, athletic jumpsuits with trains, and slinky, bias-cut, floor-length dresses. Before we get to that, let’s talk about the current predilection for the doomy, dystopian prelude music played at her shows, and indeed played at many other shows in Berlin and elsewhere; an annoying, insistent electronic sigh that if you selected it to wake you up on your iPhone, you’d be called something like existential fear. Arnika kept repeating the tune as we waited for her set to begin, with the occasional unanswered phone ringing, and then as the show began, the music suddenly erupted into a beautifully shuddering soundtrack (she collaborated with a DJ named Europa) that included a sample of Black Box’s 1989 hit club classic “Ride on Time”: an unsettling and exhausting sound that suddenly transformed into a feeling of optimism and euphoria.
All this music talk might seem like a bit of a red herring, but in reality, it’s not, and she explained after the show that it wasn’t all that different for Arnika’s journey to realize this collection, which she discussed with her usual humorous candor: determination from the bottom up. “Last year, I was a little overwhelmed because it’s hard to be in fashion, especially right now,” Arnika said. “Lately I’ve been basically just trying to have fun. So, this collection, it definitely had that weekend feel; the anticipation of going out. I wouldn’t say that’s exactly what TGIF is,” she continued, laughing, “but yeah, it is.”
The great thing about Anika is that her design approach is both rational and intuitive, with a subjective conceptualism. It always felt like she was coming from a place of absolute honesty, both about herself and her motivations as a designer, and this season her intentions were clearer and her ideas more refined and fully realized. She was thinking about how to transform work clothes into going-out clothes: neatly pressed shirts suddenly transformed into jumpsuits; cardigans with frayed, tattered edges that were part of the collection’s broad fabric manipulation; office trousers with silvery seams that shimmered in the light; voluminous faux fur tails that appeared not just on clothes but on the chunky black leather work boots that provided the basis for many of her looks. “They started out as headwear a few years ago, and I just thought,” Anika said, “when you see a girl walking down the street wearing them, you notice her, you know? She’s fierce.” You can’t deny that.
