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Hunting past seasons
Runway seasons, creative directors, provenance and forgotten collections are becoming part of the way people shop. As access to fashion history expands, the archive is no longer reserved for museums, houses and specialists. A vintage designer label once told a shopper most of what they needed to know. Today, it may only be the beginning.…
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Alaïa, African influences
At the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris, a new exhibition traces the presence of Africa across decades of the couturier’s work, revealing an influence carried through childhood memories, materials, colour and some of his most recognisable experiments with the body. Azzedine Alaïa made his career in Paris, but part of his visual language had been…
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Fashion’s summer intermission
Between the final couture show and September’s crowded fashion calendar, the industry appears to slow down. But fashion’s summer pause has become less an absence of activity than a change in where that activity takes place. By mid-July, fashion begins to look unusually quiet. The sequence that started with resort collections and continued through Pitti…
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Sustainability, past the buzzword
Fashion talks about sustainability differently than it did five years ago. The promises have become quieter, the vocabulary more cautious and the easy solutions harder to defend. Behind that change in tone, however, the industry’s environmental reckoning is becoming more concrete. There was a period when sustainability seemed capable of becoming a fashion trend in…
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Copenhagen Fashion Week SS27
Twenty years after its beginnings, Copenhagen Fashion Week entered Spring/Summer 2027 with returning Danish names, a growing international presence and collections that challenged the familiar image of Scandinavian fashion. Copenhagen has spent years being described as fashion’s unofficial fifth capital. It is a flattering label, but one that increasingly feels beside the point. Spring/Summer 2027…
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Who gets to be a fashion capital now?
Paris, Milan, London and New York still command the international calendar. But Florence, Copenhagen, Seoul, Tokyo and Rome suggest that fashion influence no longer depends on a single model of what a capital should be. For much of the modern fashion industry, the map has appeared remarkably stable. New York opens the international womenswear circuit,…