I got my first deck of tarot cards after scrolling through Trevor Ballin’s instagram page one night, bored in bed. I really only got the cards because I thought they were beautiful — the intricate designs, the vibrant colors, the way each contains a story within a story. I couldn’t resist.
The more I played with the cards, the more I realized how captivating they were. Each one seemed to offer an entirely different world, populated by figures, symbols, and stories that felt at once familiar and impossible to fully understand. At first, I was interested in just looking at them. It was enough for me to view the cards merely as art, as things that were separate from me yet somehow intricately tied to parts of me I didn’t quite understand. But the more I looked into Ballin’s work and Instagram page, the more I began to wonder less about tarot and its role in my life, and more about what tarot’s role in fashion was. Was there something about tarot and fashion that I had initially overlooked?
After all, fashion has always been interested in telling stories. A garment can communicate an identity, evoke a particular feeling, or offer a glimpse into the person wearing it. Tarot operates through a similar visual language, using archetypes and symbolism to make sense of the human experience. Increasingly, designers and creatives are finding ways to bring these two worlds together. From Dior's tarot-inspired haute couture to Gabriela Hearst's use of the Major Arcana as a creative framework, the cards are finding a home far beyond the fortune-teller’s table.
But why? Why tarot? As we all know, fashion has never been particularly good at sitting still — there is always another season to anticipate, another trend to predict, another creative director tasked with imagining what comes next. The fashion industry, then, is wrought with chaos, a barrage of shifting pieces that are inherently impossible to pin down and understand in-full without extra guidance. One would think that the more conventional tools of inspiration and guidance would be leaned on more in this heightened age of tumult. But no — fashion is looking towards the mystical for inspiration, having designers do things like translate the Major Arcana into full-on runway collections. While the aesthetic appeal of a little mysticism is undeniable here, fashion’s growing fascination with tarot might have less to do with the cards themselves and how they might offer inspiration, and more to do with what the cards come to represent: the desire to understand ourselves, imagine our futures, and find meaning in an increasingly uncertain world. And if fashion is looking to the cards for a little divine intervention, perhaps there is no better place to start than with the people turning to them for answers.
For industry veteran Trevor Ballin, tarot and fashion are hardly separate pursuits. A knitwear designer at Celine, Ballin has cultivated a second identity as fashion’s go-to tarot reader, becoming something of a spiritual confidant to the fashion industry’s creative elite. His Instagram account offers a glimpse into this intersection, documenting readings with figures including Jonathan Anderson, Michael Rider, and other personalities across fashion and entertainment. But he’s no fortune-teller or dream-sayer — he is a person deeply invested in telling the stories of people’s lives through the cards. In W Magazine’s “Behind the Scenes: Trevor Ballin,” readers get a glimpse at Ballin’s people-focused and story-focused approach to tarot. Rather than using the cards to predict the next big trend or determine who might land the next creative director role, Ballin sees tarot as a way to tell someone a story that feels relevant to their life in that particular moment. “I don't think I’m psychic,” he says. “But I can tell someone a story that’s relevant to their lives and that they need to hear in that moment.”
In a 2026 Vogue feature, “Fashion's Love Affair With Tarot Is in the Cards,” Ballin furthers this connection by describing his work and tarot as a shared exercise in storytelling. Both, he suggests, involve examining the present while creating a desire for the future. It is an observation that feels particularly fitting for fashion. Designers are constantly asked to envision what people will want to wear months, sometimes years, before those desires have fully taken shape. Tarot, meanwhile, offers a different approach to anticipating what lies ahead. Rather than relying on trend reports or consumer data, it invites its reader to interpret symbols, consider possibilities, and look inward not through trend-watching, but through feeling. In an industry that has made a business out of predicting the future, Ballin’s approach makes us wonder if a little uncertainty and following our intuition is exactly what fashion needs to move forward.
Christian Dior, too, had a relationship to the mystical and applied it to his own career in fashion. His fascination with divination became a recurring point of reference for Maria Grazia Chiuri during her tenure at the house. For Dior's Spring 2021 Haute Couture collection, Chiuri took the relationship between the mystical and fashion a step further, building an entire fashion film around the Major Arcana. Directed by Matteo Garrone, the film follows a young woman through a mysterious castle, where she encounters personifications of the tarot cards and, in turn, different aspects of herself. The collection becomes less about dressing a character than about exploring the many characters one might contain. The Lovers, The High Priestess, and Death are no longer simply images printed onto a garment; they become part of a larger narrative about identity, transformation, and desire.
And designers are not the only ones finding creative possibilities in the cards. In 2020, Vogue profiled Georgian artist David Apakidze and his project, “The Last Tarot,” a deck that reimagined the personalities of Tbilisi’s fashion scene as characters from the Major Arcana. Local designers and creatives became cards like the Empress, the Devil, the High Priestess, and the Fool, dressed in their own designs and transformed into living interpretations of the cards. Apakidze was not just borrowing the imagery of divination; he was using its archetypes to tell the story of an entire creative community. The result suggests that fashion, much like tarot, has the ability to turn individuals into symbols and everyday personalities into something approaching mythology.
Perhaps this is where the relationship between fashion and tarot is most interesting. Getting dressed is, in many ways, an exercise in becoming. A change of clothes can mean a change of attitude, an assumption of confidence, or an attempt to inhabit a version of yourself that feels out of reach. We have all dressed for a particular occasion, mood, or imagined identity. Sometimes the outfit comes first and the personality follows. Tarot operates through a similar language of archetypes. The Empress, the Magician, and the Fool, say, are not necessarily people we aspire to become literally, but representations of qualities and experiences we might recognize in ourselves.
Consider the difference between dressing like The High Priestess and dressing like The Fool. One might suggest a wardrobe of restrained silhouettes, veiled references, deep colors, and an almost untouchable sense of mystery; the other could be expressed through experimentation, unexpected combinations, and the willingness to dress without knowing exactly where the look will lead. Neither interpretation needs to be literal. In fact, the more interesting styling possibilities emerge when the symbolism is translated rather than replicated. Tarot gives fashion a set of emotional and visual starting points, allowing clothing to communicate something beyond trend or taste.
There is also something particularly timely about this renewed interest in the mystical. In a culture increasingly shaped by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and the constant availability of information, the appeal of practices built around intuition is not only understandable, but necessary. We have become accustomed to having our preferences predicted and our habits tracked. Tarot offers an alternative kind of reflection, one that leaves room for interpretation and genuine connection to feeling rather than insisting on a definitive answer or outsourcing our human capabilities to machines. Vogue’s coverage of the growing interest in witchcraft and tarot among younger generations points to a broader desire for spiritual connection and a sense of agency amid a world that wants nothing more than to take that agency away from us.
Still, perhaps the most compelling thing about tarot is that it resists being pinned down to a single interpretation. The Death card, for example, is not necessarily a prediction of literal death, but is commonly understood as an ending, a transition or possibility of renewal. The Fool is not simply foolish; the card represents beginnings, openness, and the willingness to take a risk. These meanings leave room for contradiction, something fashion has always understood. A garment can be romantic and unsettling, familiar and strange, protective and revealing. It can communicate several things at once, depending on who is wearing it and who is looking.
Maybe that is why the cards have found such a comfortable place in the fashion world. At its best, fashion does not simply tell us what to wear. It gives us a language through which to explore who we are, what we value, and who we might become. Tarot offers a similar invitation, asking us to look at the symbols in front of us and decide what they mean for ourselves and no one else. Neither can promise a clear picture of the future, and perhaps that is the point.
