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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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Paris high jewellery, July 2026
From the human hand at Boucheron to Chaumet’s sensory botany and Messika’s exceptional blue diamond, the July 2026 high jewellery collections transformed memory, matter and movement into objects that may never exist twice. A gemstone can hold light for an instant, while a jewel can hold a gesture for generations. In Paris this July, those…
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Designers to know before September 2026
September has a habit of reorganising fashion’s attention. New collections arrive almost continuously, established houses dominate the schedule and a handful of emerging names suddenly seem to be everywhere at once. By October, some will feel considerably less unfamiliar than they did a month earlier. This year, several designers are entering that period with unusual…
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Menswear has a body problem
At the Spring/Summer 2027 menswear shows, the male body seemed to be pulled in opposite directions. Some of the season’s narrowest tailoring appeared on exceptionally lean frames, while elsewhere exposed skin and abbreviated silhouettes drew attention to bodies shaped by muscle. One ideal was elongated and almost weightless, the other visibly built. Between them, surprisingly…