alice + olivia by Stacey Bendet introduces Fall 2025 Shakespeare is in Love Collection

For Fall 2025, the US contemporary fashion brand 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 Stratfordupon-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 worldclass 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 costumemaking 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 delicately embellished gowns and trousers, 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.