Dracula’s Garden Party: Romantic Vampire Style Guide for Spring 2026
A warm-weather guide to dark feminine dressing past daybreak
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
The Romantic Vampire does not vanish with the sunrise; she adapts. As daylight lengthens and the air grows warm goth hiss, her style remains darkly elegant.
Designers across SS26 couture runways have reworked dark feminine staples with a lighter hand, softening leather into something that feels more romantic, elevating black lace from reading “lingerie” to “ladylike” and using colour with intention. The result is a gothic vocabulary that feels fluid and wearable, translating shadowed glamour into looks suited for twilight dinners and sunlit courtyards.
With Dracula: A Love Tale arriving this month, the appetite for dark romance undeniable—what SS26 offers is the translation: a field guide to dressing with dark devotion that survives the daylight.
Dressing the Unruly Heart: Wuthering Heights and Brontëcore Fashion De-Coded
The Brontë sisters wrote love as something wild, all-consuming; a force that unsettles neat-and-tidy lives rather than completing them. Wuthering Heights stands as the most feral expression of this philosophy, where love is not a destination but a state of emotional exposure, impossible to contain and destructive to ignore.
That unrest sits at the heart of the latest cinematic interpretation of the story, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, where costume, loosely historically inspired, becomes an extension of emotional volatility, translating internal turmoil into silhouettes that move as though the wearer cannot remain still.
The same sensibility surfaced across the Spring/Summer 2026 runways, where designers returned to feeling as a governing principle, allowing clothes to amplify emotion.
Below, we’ve pulled key looks from the film, alongside SS26 runway references and market fashion pieces, to translate this dark romantic language into something you can wear now.
Eyes on Me: Lash Essentials That Command Attention
A dark feminine lash edit designed to lead the look
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
A captivating look begins with the eyes. Before colour sets the mood or contour shapes the face, the gaze establishes presence, deciding how a look enters the room and the affect it has once it does.
Lashes are the beating heart of a powerful gaze, framing expression, sharpening intention and determining whether the look, overall, reads romantic, severe, playful or sultry. This edit gathers our favourite lash essentials for six gothic archetypes, designed to empower the eyes to lead with authority.