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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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Palais Galliera – 18th century fashion
There is something deceptively familiar about 18th-century fashion. Corsets, panniers, elaborate fabrics, powdered hair and ornament have become so recognisable that they can almost be read at a glance. They appear across cinema, photography, contemporary collections and popular culture, often long after the historical context that produced them has disappeared. La Mode du XVIIIe siècle…
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Luxury fashion’s creative reset
Luxury fashion has spent the past two years changing faces. Dior, Chanel, Gucci, Balenciaga, Loewe, Bottega Veneta, Givenchy and several other major houses entered new creative eras within an unusually compressed period, turning what might once have been treated as individual appointments into something closer to an industry-wide reset. By 2026, however, the fascination with…
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Paris Fall/Winter 2026 – Reading the season
Paris rarely moves in one direction. Across nine days of shows and presentations, ideas overlapped, contradicted one another and occasionally arrived at remarkably similar conclusions. Fall/Winter 2026 was no exception. After the wave of creative director debuts that transformed the previous season, this edition felt less concerned with introductions and more interested in what might…