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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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January sets the tone
Every fashion season begins long before most people realise it. January rarely arrives with the anticipation surrounding couture or the visibility of the September collections. Yet it is often the month that reveals where fashion is heading first. Before the headlines multiply and the calendar gathers pace, menswear introduces the ideas that will shape the…