Seeing Spots? Here’s How Polka Dot Became This Season’s Hottest Print

Fashion loves a full-circle moment. It thrives on repetition, on the unearthing of what once was and insisting it now feels fresh - no, urgent. What goes around comes around is not so much an aphorism as it is fashion’s entire operating system. The decades re-emerge with clockwork precision; trends boomerang back into relevance whether or not we asked for them. Skinny jeans stage quiet revivals. Vertiginous wedges teeter back into view. And coin belts? They never truly died, they just lay dormant, awaiting the next Ibiza season.

And then there are the stalwarts: prints and pieces that don’t so much return as reconfigure, shape-shifting enough to pass as new. Chief among them? The polka dot. That most dappled of motifs, long the domain of the twee, the nostalgic, the Kate Middleton-core. But lest we forget, polka dots had their modern awakening with that Zara dress in 2019, a democratically priced, polyester-blend spectre that still haunts our dreams.

But 2025 has declared amnesty. The polka dot is no longer the preserve of mother-of-the-bride outfits and Royal Enclosure dress codes. Instead, it’s been recontextualised by the chronically online, the fashion-savvy, the women who wouldn’t be caught dead near a fascinator. The once-fusty print has gone feral.

Exhibit A: Hailey Bieber in dalmatian-spotted capri pants. Yes, capris, the marmite hemline of our times, spawning a spike in both animal-adjacent prints and calf-grazing trousers. It’s enough to make a fashion editor clutch their pearls. Then there’s Lily Allen, wearing a feather-festooned, polka-dot 16Arlington gown to the Serpentine Summer Party, a look equal parts heiress and heroine, with a hint of Studio 54.

Elsewhere, the dot has proliferated, cropping up on sheer mesh midi dresses, slinking across slip skirts, clustering chaotically on asymmetric tops. No longer prim, never proper. Think less Pretty Woman, more post-ironic Peggy Moffitt. And crucially, not all dots are created equal: the new wave favours irregular spacing, distorted shapes, painterly prints. Your nan’s navy-and-white number? Retire it (or rework it).

Dresses remain a gateway dot-drug, but consider the less obvious routes, too. An oversized, spotted bomber, a dot-laced pair of tights, even a sharply cut suiting ensemble riddled with pinprick patterning (ok, that might be a bit hardcore). It’s not about polite prettiness, it's a bit of offbeat whimsy in a world that increasingly dresses in beige.

So go on. Get spotted.

Shop: Our Favourite Polka Dot Pieces

Henrik Lischke is the senior fashion features editor at Grazia. Prior to that, he worked at British Vogue, and was junior fashion editor at The Sunday Times Style.