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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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The aesthetics of chaos – KIDILL Paris SS27
At Paris Fashion Week Men’s, much of the season unfolded within familiar territory. Soft tailoring, controlled proportions and muted palettes continued to shape the dominant conversation around menswear. Even collections that experimented rarely moved far from those established codes. KIDILL chose another direction entirely. Presented under the title CHAOTIC, Hiroaki Sueyasu’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection rejected…
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Pharrell’s expanding vision at Louis Vuitton
Few shows during Paris Men’s Fashion Week command attention quite like Louis Vuitton. Since Pharrell Williams took over the house’s menswear, each presentation has grown beyond the traditional runway, becoming a cultural event that reaches well beyond the fashion industry. The collections are designed not only to introduce new clothes, but to shape conversations across…
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The V&A exhibition – Schiaparelli effect
At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art arrives at a moment when fashion is increasingly expected to justify its place within culture. More than a retrospective of one of the twentieth century’s most unconventional designers, the exhibition asks a question that has followed fashion for decades without ever receiving a…