In 2025, the Fashion Museum Bath will add to its permanent collection a striking representation of the year’s cultural and sartorial landscape through a carefully selected dress and menswear ensemble. The museum, renowned for its yearly Dress of the Year tradition since 1963, invited fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley to choose pieces embodying the spirit of 2025.
Cartner-Morley described the honour of participating in the selection, which involves identifying garments that not only exemplify design excellence but also resonate with the social and cultural currents of the time. The Dress of the Year initiative was established by the museum’s founder, Doris Langley Moore, to maintain a living archive of fashion, blending historical significance with contemporary relevance. The museum’s collection includes iconic pieces from designers such as Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen, along with culturally significant items like Naomi Campbell’s hazmat suit from the pandemic and Meghan Markle’s dress worn during her 2021 Oprah interview.
For 2025, Cartner-Morley highlighted the prominence of “naked” dresses—gowns notable for their minimal coverage and transparency—as a defining trend. Her selection is a daffodil yellow sporty mesh dress featuring visible retro underpinnings, taken from Julia Fox’s debut collection for Givenchy. The choice reflects both a notable moment in fashion, marking Fox’s emergence as a female creative director in a male-dominated field, and a dialogue between historical and modern design aesthetics. The dress’s playful kicker hem and vibrant shade further embody the year’s spirit.
On the menswear side, Cartner-Morley paid tribute to the late Giorgio Armani, who passed away in September 2025. Armani was widely credited with revolutionizing modern menswear by pioneering the smart-casual style prevalent today, promoting gender-fluid dressing, and advocating for timeless, sustainable fashion long before environmental concerns reshaped the industry’s priorities. The selected menswear ensemble comes from Armani’s final collection, showcased posthumously at Milan Fashion Week in an emotionally charged presentation. It features soft shoulders, fluid silhouettes, and layered looks that combine effortlessness with refinement, encapsulating Armani’s enduring influence.
Beyond the garments themselves, Cartner-Morley emphasized the importance of fashion as a reflection of the zeitgeist. While 2025 was marked by significant global events—from California wildfires and political showdowns to cultural milestones and social upheavals—fashion captures the subtler, everyday emotions and attitudes of the time. The Dress of the Year selection aims to preserve this nuanced cultural memory, offering museum visitors a lens to understand not only what people wore but how they lived and felt during that period.
Currently, the Fashion Museum Bath is closed for renovations, with plans to relocate to the city’s historic post office building by 2030. In the meantime, its extensive collection, including the Dress of the Year, remains stored in Wiltshire and accessible online. The 2025 selections will soon join the ranks of garments that have become emblematic of their eras, representing the fusion of aesthetic innovation and cultural narrative.