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Belgian designer Julie Kegels has been named the winner of the 2026 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, taking home the fashion industry’s most closely watched award for emerging talent at a ceremony held on 4 September 2026 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
Dior ambassador Jennifer Lawrence announced the win, which comes with a 400,000-euro endowment along with a year of tailored mentorship from LVMH teams covering areas such as sustainable development, communications, copyright, and legal matters, marketing, manufacturing, and financial management. Kegels now joins a list of past winners that includes Marine Serre, Thebe Magugu, and most recently, Japanese designer Soshi Otsuki, who took the 2025 prize for his oversized, Armani-inflected suiting.
Kegels was one of nine finalists selected for this year’s edition, chosen from a record pool of more than 2,400 applicants spanning over 100 countries, the largest applicant field in the Prize’s thirteen-year history. That initial wave was narrowed to twenty semi-finalists, who presented their collections to industry experts on 4 and 5 March at La Samaritaine in Paris.
Julie Kegels (Belgium)
Colleen Allen (United States)
Gabriel Figueiredo of De Pino (France)
Galib Gassanoff of Institution (Georgia)
Zane Li of Lii (China)
Petra Fagerström (Sweden)
Harry Pontefract of Ponte (United Kingdom)
Daniel del Valle Fernandez of the Vxlley (Spain)
Anil Padia of Yoshita 1967 (Kenya)
Anil Padia’s presence in the final marked the first time a designer from Kenya has reached this stage of the competition. LVMH Prize president Delphine Arnault said ahead of the final that the nine finalists reflected the Prize’s expanding global reach, pointing to entrants spanning the United States, Europe, China, and, for the first time, Kenya.
Kegels is a graduate of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied under Walter Van Beirendonck and Dirk Van Saene before interning at Meryll Rogge and at Alaïa under Pieter Mulier. She launched her eponymous womenswear label in 2024, showing off-schedule in Paris in 2025 before joining the official Paris Fashion Week calendar that September for the SS26 season.
Since then, her Antwerp-based brand has built a reputation for sculptural silhouettes and artisanal construction rooted in what she calls the “JK Woman,” a figure who moves fluidly between professional, private, and public identities within a single day. Her Fall/Winter 2026 collection, shown earlier this year at Paris Fashion Week, extended that idea through the concept of “quick change,” tracing the rapid shifts in roles women navigate over the course of a day.
Two other awards were handed out alongside the main prize. Chinese designer Zane Li’s Label Lii won the Karl Lagerfeld Special Jury Prize, the competition’s runner-up honour, presented by actress and producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas. The Karl Lagerfeld Jury Prize carries a 200,000-euro allocation and a year of LVMH mentorship and was renamed in 2019 in honour of the late couturier, who served on the Prize’s jury multiple times before his death.
Anil Padia’s Yoshita 1967 took home the Savoir-Faire Prize, presented by Louis Vuitton brand ambassador Urassaya “Yaya” Sperbund. Also worth 200,000 euros plus a year of mentorship, the Savoir-Faire Prize was introduced to recognise designers whose work demonstrates particular strength in craft and technical execution.
This year’s judging panel was the largest in the Prize’s history, expanding to seventeen members. The jury included Jonathan Anderson, Sarah Burton, Nicolas Ghesquière, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, Stella McCartney, Camille Miceli, Nigo, Phoebe Philo, Michael Rider, Pharrell Williams, and LVMH executives Delphine Arnault, Pietro Beccari, Jean-Paul Claverie, and Sidney Toledano.
Maria Grazia Chiuri returned to the jury this year in her new capacity as chief creative officer of Fendi, having sat out the 2025 edition following her departure from Dior. Beccari’s presence on the panel followed his expanded role as chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton and CEO of LVMH Fashion Group, the division that also oversees Fendi, Celine, Loewe, Givenchy, Kenzo, Pucci, and Patou.
Launched in 2013, the LVMH Prize has counted among its main prize winners Marques’Almeida (2015), Grace Wales Bonner (2016), Marine Serre (2017), Thebe Magugu (2019), Nensi Dojaka (2021), S.S. Daley (2022), and Soshi Otsuki (2025), each of whom went on to build an independent label following their win. Simon Porte Jacquemus, whose eponymous label, Jacquemus, has since become one of the most commercially prominent brands to emerge from the competition, won the Prize’s special award (a distinct, second-tier honour at the time) in 2015.
Beyond the three headline awards, the Prize also recognises three graduating fashion students each year through the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Graduates. Winners receive a 10,000-euro grant, as does their school, and are placed on one-year contracts within the creative studios of an LVMH house.
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