New York, NY – For Fall 2025, alice + olivia by Stacey Bendet unveiled a production of unprecedented theatricality: a textured, romantic, and fantastical collection inspired by the world of William Shakespeare and costumes of The Royal Shakespeare Company. With stage worthy flourishes like lace collars and cuffs, the collection takes the characters and finery of the great playwright’s beloved stories and reimagines them for modern women and occasions.

Stacey Bendet infused Fall 2025 with elements of romance and drama to evoke the characters, language and imagery of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. The intricate fabrications and regal silhouettes in the collection were developed from a dream starting point: the costumes that brought the most famous plays in the world to life. The design story began in Stratford- upon-Avon, a medieval English town renowned as the 16th-century birthplace of William Shakespeare, and home of The Royal Shakespeare Company. There, the alice + olivia design team immersed themselves in Shakespeare’s world, with special access to the RSC’s world-class theatre archive and costume hire collections; featuring historic costume items from the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1879 to the present day.

Visiting the Royal Shakespeare Company’s costume workshops, the largest in-house costume- making department of any British theatre, there was opportunity to glean inspiration from millinery and jewelry, armory, dyeing and footwear, all showcasing the costume-makers’ remarkable artistry, craft and embellishment.

This immersion in the RSC’s costume tradition comes through in the dramatic silhouettes of Fall 2025’s 16th-century inspired lantern skirts and capes, lace ornamented cuffs and collars, and jacquard illuminated with touches of gold. Literary references to Shakespeare’s poetry and plays are chicly incorporated into the clothes, from an embroidered skirt of sonnets, to a Lady Macbeth inspired black velvet full-skirted corset dress, and a Shakespeare themed ball gown. In the mix with velvet party dresses, are lace bodysuits and modern mini tweed skirt-and-blazer sets, the details that come to life for today’s Juliets.

“The beauty of this collection exemplifies how we can learn so much from the past to create in the present. “ – Stacey Bendet, CEO and founder of alice + olivia.

Denim jackets with bouquets of brooches, corsets styled with jeans, and suede stretch and latex leggings give the alice + olivia Shakespearean fantasy a modern, rock-and-roll baroque feel. Each luxe texture, from pearls to velvet, bows and applique, could inspire a sonnet. Famous lines of dialogue are cleverly threaded through the embroidery and prints in the collection, from The Merchant of Venice’s “All that glisters is not gold,” to A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s “Though she be but little, she is fierce.”

Many more quotes were incorporated into the Fall 2025 presentation’s sets, staged with each room a luxe set representing a Shakespearean play or serving as an homage to his work. Moving from the blooming set of A Midsummer Night’s Dream through to Juliet’s balcony looking over her garden, to quintessential Shakespearean banquet and apothecary, another homage to Romeo and Juliet, all contain the collection’s glowing characters. There is an elaborate gold backdrop that invokes The Merchant of Venice, and the ornate world lands on a final Shakespeare quote from All’s Well That Ends Well: “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”

Modern Juliet inspired hairstyles featured big, jeweled braids adorned with cascading flowers, crafted by lead stylist Matthew Curtis. For makeup, T Cooper designed a clean-face look with glistening gold eyes and a bold Lady Macbeth red lip. Kate Somerville added stage-worthy shimmer to the body by blending moisturizing cream with gold flakes.