ICONS Only

What makes an OUTFIT live on in HISTORY? Which outfits CHANGED the way we THINK about GETTING DRESSED? Bazaar assembled a team of EXPERTS to determine the 25 MOST ICONIC LOOKS of all time.

Four cities per season. Hundreds of shows per city. Double-digit looks per show. It all amounts to thousands of new runway looks every year. And hundreds more appear on the red carpet and in the streets, where they’re photographed and then broadcast across the world. On social media, millions post their daily dressing rituals, which are then liked and commented on by millions more. We are bombarded with fashion in an endless scroll of outfits. How, then, does a look stand out? What makes it imprint into our collective consciousness and, sometimes, even change the way we dress?

For our annual Icons issue, we sought to not only figure that out but also anoint the most iconic looks throughout history. We started with the nipped-waist jacket and full skirt from Christian Dior’s debut collection in 1947, a revelatory silhouette that ushered in a return to femininity after the ravages of World War II. When she saw it for the first time, legendary Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow declared it the New Look. It changed fashion forever.

To determine the fashion moments that deserve a place alongside Dior’s watershed New Look, we assembled a brain trust of industry experts, including fashion historian Valerie Steele, stylist and model Dara, image architect Law Roach, Moda Operandi’s cofounder and chief brand officer and artistic director of home for Tiffany & Co., Lauren Santo Domingo, Ssense director of content Steff Yotka, and Lewis’s founder and editor Jeremy Lewis, as well as our own editors. We debated the merits of hundreds of looks. For each one, we asked, did it become a part of the culture? Are we still thinking about it? Did it shift the way we got dressed? Then we narrowed the results to 25 on these pages and a definitive 50 on the Harper’s Bazaar site. Here are our picks, in no particular order.