With a front row filled with bold faced colorful personalities and personal styles, the designer Johnson Hartig sent down a jubilant and exuberant spring 2026 collection for his label Libertine. There on the front row watching the ensembles walk down the gravel path of the Elizabeth Street Garden were pop legend Cyndi Lauper in a dizzying dotted pantsuit and cotton-candy-blue spiky hair, the designer Zandra Rhodes sporting a fuchsia bob, Martha Stewart in a gray coat appliqued with various pins and emblems, and the actress Christina Hendricks wearing a trench coat emblazoned with zany dogs.
When Johnson showed his previous collection around this time last year, at this exact same venue, the future of Elizabeth Street Garden was uncertain. It was to be demolished to make way for a housing project. But protests and a rallying cry from the community helped saved this slice of paradise in Nolita in Lower Manhattan. And perhaps, as a gesture of the triumph of beauty over profit, of gardening gestures over commercialization, Johnson sent down a collection that celebrated joy and, yes, beauty.
Each of the guests in attendance, a confluence of the worlds of fashion, interior design and media, found a print out of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” on their seats. It is a poem best known for the line “Beauty is truth…” and this is featured prominently in the collection. It is printed and abstracted in old English typeface on khaki coats and separates, and in modern monochrome on an oversized hoodie.
Garden themes ran rampant in the collection. From coats, dresses, and suits with hollyhocks, topiaries and collages of various flora and foliage. Some of these outfits came festooned with airy feathers. In fact, one dress was covered entirely in feathers in shades of lilac, lavender and periwinkle. The major standouts were the cabana-striped ensembles in a jumble of colors. Think summer on the Riviera with mega doses of glamorous ease. Johnson also has a line of fabric and wallpaper and you can easily these stripes, as well as the gorgeous florals, translating — for lack of a better word — beautifully into interiors.
“Today, more than ever, beauty is not an indulgence — it is a necessity. As vital as air and water, it is the balm for our bruised humanity. In a time when so much feels broken, creating beauty is a quiet act of resistance — a calm, clear protest. It is how we remind ourselves — and each other — of what is good, what is true, and what is worth preserving,” wrote Johnson in his show notes for the collection. And this collection is an unabashed ode to all that is beautiful.