(cite index="23-1">Johnny Depp joins a tradition of artists who have played with tarot, including Salvador Dalí, who spent a decade crafting his dreamlike pack, and Mexican painter Leonora Carrington, who populated her cards with mythological creatures. In July 2024, Castle Fine Art launched Depp's collection of four tarot-inspired paintings: The Lovers, The Emperor, The Empress, and Strength. (cite index="21-1">"I've always been tremendously curious about the tarot," Depp said. "There's a great art to the cards themselves, dating back to forever ago — and the unseen art of reading the cards."

The series is not decoration. Each painting carries a specific autobiographical weight. The Empress is modelled on Vanessa Paradis — (cite index="22-1">the visual inspiration behind the artwork is Depp's painting used for the cover of Paradis' 2007 album Divinidylle. "I know who she is inside. She's kind of everything that I could never be." The Emperor, eyeless but with red lips, (cite index="20-1">recalls a 17th-century French monarch and was inspired by a work Depp made while filming Jeanne du Barry in Versailles — his first major role since the Amber Heard trial. Strength replaces the traditional lion with an elephant and is inscribed with the words: "Why do you want to fight with something that doesn't want to fight with you?"

When the Morgan Library & Museum in New York devotes a major two-part exhibition to a subject, that subject has arrived. Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions opened June 26, 2026 and runs through October 4 — (cite index="28-1">around 380 works tracing the history of the tarot from its origins in Italian courts of the Renaissance to its influence on art in the 20th century and today. The exhibition catalogue sold out almost immediately. A reprint is due at end-September.

(cite index="26-1">The show charts tarot's transition from a rarified game of skill on the Italian peninsula to an international symbol of the occult, taken up by the likes of Aleister Crowley and the Surrealists — including André Breton, who in the early 1940s joined Victor Brauner and Max Ernst to produce a supremely surreal take on a tarot deck.

Fashion has a tarot history that most people have forgotten — and Alice + Olivia has been at the centre of it longer than almost any other brand. (cite index="39-1">At NYFW in 2016, Alice + Olivia by Stacey Bendet debuted an entire collection inspired by tarot cards — a presentation set against the mystic gardens of Bomarzo in Rome, where the collection "represents the power of positivity and the ability to connect with one's higher self." The Hoodwitch's Bri Luna was there to read tarot for guests. That was a decade ago. The brand hasn't stopped since.

The tarot runs through Alice + Olivia like a thread: the Lovers Tarot Card Clutch (a metallic gold beaded minaudière depicting the card), the Alfie Tarot Card Print Button-Up (a georgette shirt with the cards printed across the silk), and countless other pieces across multiple seasons have made the brand's relationship to tarot as consistent as its relationship to colour and pattern.

This August, when the brand threw its Legends Capsule Collection launch party in Southampton — (cite index="34-1">hosted at the brand's Southampton location with Rowan and Grier Henchy and Brooke Shields in attendance, DJ set by Alexandra Richards, LALO and Avaline cocktails — the entertainment included tarot card readings by Zenobia Simmons. When your launch party naturally includes a tarot reader, the tarot is no longer a theme. It's just the atmosphere.

There is a specific moment in a cultural trend's lifecycle where it receives institutional validation — the point where it stops being a subculture and gets treated as a legitimate subject of enquiry by the publications that shape mainstream taste. Vogue covering tarot with the same earnestness as it covers spring collections is that moment.

Vogue Adria's annual tarot horoscope for 2026 — (cite index="50-1">the full year read card-by-card through the zodiac by contributor Andrea, known on social media as Space Tiger, who pulls four cards per sign covering the year's theme, emotional landscape, and seasonal guidance — is not fringe content in a fringe publication. It is a Condé Nast editorial product, treated with the same production care and reader expectation as any fashion feature. Meanwhile, an independent design team launched a Kickstarter for The Vogue Tarot — (cite index="53-1">a reimagined deck celebrating the divine feminine through the iconic lens of Vogue magazine, with every card assigned to a woman who has graced the cover — from supermodels and singers to activists and actresses — each one embodying the archetype she represents with unforgettable style and soul.

Fashion's interest in tarot is no longer confined to seasonal print motifs. It has become a framework for how editors, stylists, and creative directors talk about clothes — the archetypes of the Major Arcana mapping onto the fashion system's own archetypes of power, transformation, and self-invention with a precision that feels less like a metaphor and more like a mirror.

Some things are so obviously right that wanting them into existence is halfway to making them real. Sonny Angel — the Japanese blind box figurine brand that has become the defining collectible of a generation, with its cherubic baby angels in thematic headpieces — and tarot are a perfect match on every level. The aesthetic overlap is immediate: Sonny Angel already plays in exactly the symbolic, archetype-driven language of the Major Arcana. The Fool wandering into the unknown. The Star radiating gentle hope. The Moon with its layered, dreamy uncertainty. Any one of them could walk off a card and into a blind box.

The community clearly agrees. The fan art is already everywhere — The High Priestess in Sonny Angel's signature rounded style, The World wrapped in a laurel wreath, The Hermit holding a tiny lantern. The demand is not quiet. And Sonny Angel's track record of unexpected, culturally fluent collaborations (the zodiac series, the limited-edition seasonal drops, the artist editions) suggests this is exactly the kind of partnership the brand would consider.

The case goes beyond aesthetics. Blind box culture and tarot culture share a fundamental mechanic: both are structured around the experience of not knowing what you'll get, and finding meaning in what arrives. Every time someone pulls a blind box, they're performing a version of a reading — the anticipation, the reveal, the interpretation of what it means that this figure came to you today. The intersection is not accidental. It is the same human impulse expressed in two different objects.

The current tarot obsession didn't arrive suddenly. It has been building for years through a confluence of forces — and 2026 is the year they all crested at the same time.