You could name almost any type of glove and it will have appeared on the runway in recent fashion seasons. Opera gloves, fingerless gloves, rubber, mesh and satin – we saw them all during the SS26 and AW26 shows. It’s no surprise to see gloves on the catwalk; they’ve existed for thousands of years. But when they appear in bright yellow, the mind can’t help but jump to one reference: washing-up gloves, or Marigolds as they’re commonly known here in the UK. 

First sold in 1947, Marigolds soon became a kitchen staple in British households, with their recognisable colour evolving from the natural shade of latex rubber. Earlier this month, washing-up gloves made it to the Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty thanks to Emma Chamberlain, whose Valentino pre-fall 2026 look included a pair of long yellow gloves. “When I have the Oscars at 9 and the dishes at 11”, read one of the comments on Valentino’s Instagram post. 

Chamberlain isn’t the first celebrity to have worn rubber gloves on the red carpet. Last year, Julia Fox wore a pair of real, frilled washing-up gloves to the Grammys, while Lady Gaga was famously memed following the 2015 Oscars, when she wore a custom Alaïa gown styled with a pair of ruby red, heavy-duty gloves. 

During Paris Fashion Week’s recent AW26 season, just a few days before Chamberlain stepped out in her Valentino Marigolds, Sarah Burton delivered her third show as creative director of Givenchy. As one of the few female creative directors at a major luxury brand, Burton’s work often celebrates the complexity of women, prioritising comfort, ease and adaptability. For AW26, she gave us a Givenchy woman for every occasion, whether it was a satin gown suitable for the opera, a tailored suit for the office, or a pair of Marigolds for doing the dishes (even women who can afford Givenchy have to do the washing up sometimes). Burton’s gloves had been given the fashion treatment – they were exaggerated and bunched up around the wrists – but stayed true to that recognisable Marigold shade. 

Back in 2018, Raf Simons made headlines with his Calvin Klein SS18 collection. “These rubber kitchen gloves somehow cost $390,” wrote the New York Post, referring to a pair of pink arm-length gloves that Simons paired with a marigold yellow dress. It’s a trend the Belgian designer brought to Prada, where, alongside co-creative director Miuccia Prada, he showed vibrant gloves again at SS26. They came in electric blue, purple and pink, as well as satin yellow. 

In Copenhagen during January’s AW26 ready-to-wear shows, Danish designer Nicklas Skovgaard presented a collection inspired by the 1937 Danish film Mille, Marie og mig (Mille, Marie and I). Beyond the film reference, there were elements of the 40s and 50s too, with Vogue describing the show as “paper-doll-meets-Mad Men”. Here, there were two pairs of yellow gloves: one short biker-style pair, and one longer, lemon-yellow set. 

Perhaps the recent rise in yellow gloves on the runway is a mere coincidence, or perhaps it speaks to a wider trend. Since 2022, tradwives and their aesthetics have been slowly gaining prominence in the public eye. “If you’re somehow unfamiliar, a tradwife – a portmanteau of ‘traditional housewife’ – is a woman who eschews gainful employment in favour of full-time domestic labour such as cooking, cleaning, and raising children, living off whatever ‘allowance’ their husband or partner doles out to them like it’s 1954,” wrote Dazed’s deputy editor Serena Smith in 2024. 

As it always does, the cultural landscape soon trickled down into fashion too. Miu Miu’s SS26 collection seemed to mimic the tradwife aesthetic. Retro floral prints styled with clashing pinafores and frou-frou collars looked distinctly like 1960s waitressing garb. Post show, Miuccia Prada explained that the collection had been a tribute to working women everywhere, not only those working in the home: “the apron contains the real difficult life of women in history, from factories to the home.” 

Elsewhere, August Barron’s SS26 Real Housewives collection poked fun at the concept of suburban housewives, featuring dresses made from tablecloths and cardigans tied around models’ heads, à la Grey Gardens. We enjoyed the collection so much here at Dazed that we put it on our Winter cover. Thankfully, like Barron, there are several young designers working to subvert the housewife image. Swedish designer Petra Fagerström used her 2025 graduate collection to tackle the trend: “I want to create a woman who fractures the ideals of purity, passivity and cleanliness tied to the image of a traditional wife,” she told Dazed. 

Meanwhile, barely graduated CSM MA designers Amber Pickup and Lydia Chelovska both use fashion as a way to challenge feminine stereotypes. The latter, Chelovska, included an iron and a hoover in her graduate collection, while Pickup’s closing look, a wedding dress, read the words: “After the ‘I do’, I don’t cook, do laundry, do dishes, take out garbage,” the list goes on. 

Whether we like it or not, tradwives have infiltrated fashion. But refreshingly, there are more young designers parodying them than luxury brands are upholding their ideals. As for the washing-up gloves, is the trend concerning? On the surface, yes. But then, the celebrities wearing them – Emma Chamberlain, Lady Gaga and Julia Fox – aren’t exactly your stereotypical tradwives. In fact, they’re almost the polar opposite. Nara Smith, attending the recent Miu Miu show wearing an SS26 pinafore, should be much more alarming than Julia Fox ironically donning a pair of Marigolds at the Grammys. That being said, this is a trend that we’d be happy to see get back in the kitchen.