Why Is Moss Having a Moment?

The runway has a different type of moss: the fuzzy green moss usually found on forest floors.

Miu Miu, Hermès and Louis Vuitton’s fashion shows in Paris this month all featured set designs incorporating moss or grass. At London Fashion Week, Daniel del Valle (a florist by day) showed off a bustier top decorated with plants like a wearable terrarium at The Vxlley Fall 2026 show. Some green plants are real and some are artificial. Meanwhile, the designer of Vuitton’s “new landscape” is severance pay Production designer Jeremy Hindle gave it an incredible quality.

As some people online joke, all this vegetation could be a sign that we’re feeling a collective urge to “touch the grass,” or to quit and spend time outside. It could also be an attempt to create a whimsical real world, like a living playground. Either way, fashion’s green thumb is on full display. Of course, as FashionLaird Borrelli-Persson, senior archives editor, told me that this isn’t the first time a designer has set a show among wild flora.

To name a few: Chanel’s spring 2010 show was set in a barn, with models walking on grass and hay (literally “playing in the hay”). At the Dries Van Noten spring 2015 show, models walked on a carpet designed by Argentinian artist Alexandra Kehayoglou that was specially crafted to look like a moss-covered forest floor. Dior built an elaborate garden maze for its spring 2017 show, and Collina Strada staged her spring 2022 show at Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm.

Photo: Villa Eugénie, courtesy Hermès

But fashion designers aren’t the only ones with moss on their minds these days. In recent years, moss seems to be, well, grow The same goes for trends in floral, interior and landscape design. It was once seen as a backyard nuisance by many, but now it is intentionally incorporated as part of the garden as people incorporate it into their interiors with art forms such as moss rugs (both real plants and textiles) or kokedama (Japanese moss balls).

“Moss is definitely having a moment,” says floral designer Brittany Asch, founder of Brrch, who has designed for Adele, Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty 2018 show in New York, Mansur Gavriel, Glossier, Sandy Liang, Gucci and more.