Women’s Fashion remains one of the largest categories in the department store mix, and its overall weight barely moved in 2025-26. Everything inside it did. The contemporary and premium tiers now dominate the segment map; buying strategies are being divided between digital and physical; denim is pulling department stores in opposite directions; and the presentation standards once reserved for luxury are increasingly being set by mid-market chains.

Luxury under pressure, contemporary in command

The defining structural feature of Women’s Fashion in 2025-26 is the dominance of the middle market. Across IADS members, the contemporary and premium segment accounts for 31% of the Women’s Fashion business on average, followed by high-street and mid-range at 22% and advanced contemporary at 21%.

The direction of travel is broadly shared. Bloomingdale’s anticipates that affordable luxury and designer, together with contemporary and premium, will be the largest segments within two years. Breuninger is moving toward affordable luxury and advanced contemporary, and TSUM Kyiv already identifies affordable luxury as its strongest segment, with contemporary gaining ground. Tryano (Chalhoub Group) is more precise still, pointing to the €400-€800 bracket as the corridor where sell-through is strongest. Across markets as different as these, the same names recur among members’ best sellers: Sandro, Maje, Max Mara and Self-Portrait in contemporary, Victoria Beckham, Ami Paris and Jacquemus higher up the ladder.

At the top end, the situation is different. El Palacio de Hierro has redirected part of its buying budget toward affordable luxury entry price points to offset the decline at the higher end, while its contemporary and premium business continues to grow. At Galeries Lafayette, luxury remains central to the flagship’s business despite the current challenges, and the response has been to elevate the environment rather than retreat from the segment: the premiumisation of the Haussmann flagship is complete and is being rolled out across other French stores.

Depth or newness: the answer depends on the channel

One of the most debated questions in Women’s Fashion buying is whether to concentrate purchasing power on proven brands or to diversify into newness. IADS members have reached different answers and, more importantly, different answers for different channels. Breuninger, whose Women’s Fashion business is predominantly online, offers the clearest articulation: depth belongs to digital, where customers search for familiar brands and expect a well-stocked assortment, while newness belongs to physical stores, which must generate excitement and give customers a reason to come. The two are not competing priorities but separate domains.

Others are adapting. After a year of concentrating its buying on proven brands, El Palacio de Hierro is rebalancing its assortment to preserve its role in surprising and inspiring customers. TSUM Kyiv arrived from the opposite direction: carryover products stopped selling from 2024, prompting the department store to inject newness into long-established brands with the selectivity that operating under wartime conditions demands.

Patience is what makes newness work. A consensus emerged that three seasons is the realistic minimum before a new brand delivers significant results, with Boyner putting the horizon at two to three seasons, and El Palacio de Hierro committing to at least three buying cycles while investing in visibility through marketing and e-commerce support. Bloomingdale’s adds an operational dimension that buying decisions alone cannot solve: new brands are routinely placed in less prominent areas of the floor, where even a well-chosen brand struggles to build awareness. Its response has been to create dedicated “launch pads”, permanent spaces giving emerging brands the exposure their sales potential requires.

Denim: one category, two opposite realities

The denim picture is divided. El Palacio de Hierro and TSUM Kyiv see denim decline, with premium brands losing traction. In response, the latter has refocused on fewer premium brands, stopped carryovers, and shifted to new looks at clearly premium price points, making the investment in quality visible and deliberate.

Bloomingdale’s experiences the opposite. Denim demand is growing both in-store and online, and premium denim labels such as Rag & Bone, Frame, Mother and Agolde have delivered explosive growth in the US market, with price increases absorbed without customer resistance. This is attributed to four factors: achieving critical mass in the assortment; making every store a genuine denim destination; embracing fit diversity beyond the skinny silhouette, so that customers feel they need one of each style rather than a replacement for the last; and deploying trained denim specialists on the floor, since denim is an intimidating category to shop and guidance through fits, rises and washes converts. As IADS partner and retail analyst Newstores observes, the terrain is structurally difficult, with Zara developing credible options at low price points and heritage brands such as Levi’s multiplying city-centre flagships.

Online growth turns returns into a structural cost

The members’ average online share of Women’s Fashion rose from approximately 20% in 2024 to nearly 22% in 2025, making returns a structural cost rather than an operational nuisance. El Palacio de Hierro has harmonised all size guides to eliminate returns caused by inconsistent sizing, resulting in a clear decrease in return rates since then, and has replaced its single return rule with category-specific policies, though size exchanges remain. The decisive factor was communication: the policy was presented as information rather than restriction, with clear signage at every cashier point and online before purchase, and customer reaction has been positive.

Owning the floor, when everyone else raises their game

Mid-market and high-street retailers now apply luxury presentation techniques directly, on a simple principle: the more that is taken out, the more value accrues to what remains. The fourth floor of Zara’s Calle Serrano flagship in Madrid, named El Apartamento, reads as a contemporary art gallery that happens to sell clothes; Bershka in Ibiza brings holographic screens and lifestyle merchandising to the mass market. This democratisation of the premium store experience is a challenge for department stores: differentiation is harder when every competitor raises its presentation game.

Newstores’ prescription is direct: department stores must own their environment and own the brands they stock rather than allowing brands to dictate their point of sale. John Lewis has brought Topshop back as a shop-in-shop strictly on John Lewis’s terms, controlling what goes where, how it is lit, and how the space connects with its surroundings. Selfridges applies the same logic in its rotating Corner Shop, where brand-name visibility is deliberately reduced so that customers notice Selfridges first.

The pressures in Women’s Fashion are real, and the responses are equally concrete: segment repositioning, channel-specific buying, patient brand building measured in seasons rather than weeks, and floor ownership wrested back from brands. The department store’s enduring advantage in the category lies in its capacity to hold complexity together, depth and newness, digital and physical, the established and the emerging, within a single curated environment that no algorithm, marketplace or mono-brand boutique can replicate.

About Newstores

Newstores is a service that delivers daily information about stores that have just opened, been refurbished or remodelled. It analyses what this means for the market and where it points in terms of trends and the direction that retail is taking. Newstores provides a global view of what’s happening from Seoul to London, and from Mexico to Dubai. Issuing four annual trend reports detailing the major moves, Newstores helps retailers make informed decisions. Newstores is compiled, edited and written by John Ryan, a retailer and journalist with more than 30 years of experience, covering all categories, from food to fashion.

Contact: johnhilldown@aol.com 

About IADS

The International Association of Department Stores (IADS) is the only expert body specialising globally in the department store retail format. Consisting of leading department store members worldwide, the Association serves as an international network that facilitates exchange and communication among its members. It also conducts research to address the current challenges of department stores and provide actionable insights for its members.

Today, IADS permanent members include Almacenes Siman (El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica), Beijing Hualian Group (PRC), Bloomingdale’s (USA), Boyner (Turkey), Breuninger (Germany), Chalhoub Group (UAE), Centro Beco (Venezuela), El Corte Inglés (Spain), El Palacio de Hierro (Mexico), Falabella (Chile, Colombia and Peru), Galeries Lafayette (France), John Lewis & Partners (UK), Lifestyle International Holding (Hong Kong), Magasin du Nord (Denmark), Manor (Switzerland), The Mall Group (Thailand), TSUM Kyiv (Ukraine). These retail leaders are joined by a network of other department stores and retail companies as corresponding members.

Together, the IADS members, all key players in their respective markets, create a landscape of diverse business models and cultures, representing more than €41 billion in combined annual turnover, achieved through over 563 stores with 257,000 associates in 32 countries.

Through its activities and partnerships with Retail Hub, RH-ISAC, and Newstores, the Association remains constantly up to date on its members’ questions and challenges. It generates solution-driven problem-solving processes for its members, preparing them to face the future of the retail industry.

Press Contact: IADS, press@iads.org

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