Stacey Bendet has never been shy about her enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, and for fall 2026 she made it the explicit foundation of her collection rather than just a background tool. The parallel she drew backstage at the Surrogate’s Court in lower Manhattan was direct: the AI moment we’re living through, she argued, resembles the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age it produced — a period of excess, transformation and newly minted wealth expressing itself through extravagant ornament.

The collection lived up to the title. Extreme embellishment ran through almost every piece — rhinestones, beads, embroidery and lace applied with the kind of maximalist conviction that doesn’t apologise for itself. AI played a specific role in making it happen: the technology was used to take sketched and rendered prints and translate them into photorealistic versions that could then be executed as embroidery. “We used AI to take things that we had sketched, rendered, and worked on for prints, to then make into these photo-real versions,” Bendet explained. The result was a level of ornamental detail that would have been considerably harder to achieve through traditional processes alone.

The Gilded Age framing was somewhat loosely interpreted. Leopard print and high-low silhouettes are not exactly nineteenth-century staples, and there was a distinct 2010s quality running through the collection alongside the historical references. But Bendet was clear about what she was really after: “I wanted to bring back the whole concept of the ‘going-out top,’ whether it’s in crystal, corset, or one shoulder.” Many of those tops were styled with corset trousers and pinstripe pants — a nod to the era’s fondness for workwear as club attire.

The period did genuinely surface in some pieces. A black jacquard column dress with a detachable train carried real period weight, and a dress finished with an enormous white bow at the back read as Bendet’s interpretation of the bustle — theatrical, knowing and entirely in the spirit of the collection’s unapologetic indulgence.