The subject of conversation this Paris Fashion Week Men’s rarely strayed from the oppressive temperatures as a Europe-wide heatwave engulfed the city (with the mercury tipping 40 degrees, it was the epicentre of the weather phenomenon). Shows were moved from the heat of the day to early morning; venues came with paramedics on standby; and the endless flickering of fans provided the backdrop to almost every show. Marking the closing act of a sweltering fashion month, it left questions of how sustainable a fashion week is in the heat of mid-June, should this become the new normal.

And yet, the show went on. Across a six-day schedule, there were shows from fashion’s biggest houses – notably Saint Laurent, Dior, Celine and Louis Vuitton (the latter gauged the mood by making its show set a beach with an enormous ‘tidal wave’ at the end of the runway) – as well as those that define the cultural zeitgeist, like Rick Owens (his looks came with pre-installed air conditioning), Dries Van Noten (Julian Klausner’s ethereal lightness looked particularly attuned to the heat), and Willy Chavarria (the American designer talked finding joy in times of ‘chaos and darkness’). Elsewhere, Nick Wakeman hosted her debut runway show for Studio Nicholson, 16 years after its founding, and Kiko Kostadinov marked 10 years of his own eponymous label.

As the week concludes, Wallpaper* looks back over Paris Fashion Week Men’s to pick our highlights – from Jonathan Anderson’s ‘sampled and remixed’ collection for Dior (inspired by the music of Fred Again, who also soundtracked the show), to Michael Rider’s brilliant first menswear show for Celine, which closed out proceedings on Sunday.

Saint Laurent

Anthony Vaccarello has made the Tadao Ando-designed rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection gallery the location for his Saint Laurent runway shows for a number of seasons – a suitably monumental setting for the vision he has honed at the house over the past decade, one of cinematic sensuality and the uncompromising repetition of a single silhouette in a given collection. This season, the space was transformed by Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156, currently on display in the institution. The installation, one of a series of ‘fog’ sculptures by the Japanese artist, sees water vapour emitted from the floor, before being manipulated by a series of high-pressure pumps and nozzles for a 16-minute display (the technology was originally developed in 1969 alongside engineer Thomas Mee). ‘Fujiko Nakaya does not depict fog; she sculpts it,’ says art critic Anne‑Marie Duguet in the installation’s accompanying catalogue.

It set the scene for a collection in which Vaccarello explored the idea of ‘restraint as seduction’, the lingering fog around the models a symbolic gesture of the kind of undefinable desire that certain figures can provoke. ‘Nobody is trying to seduce you,’ he said of this season’s protagonist. ‘What makes them seductive is that they do not need to.’ Touchstones for this figure were ‘Marguerite Duras, whose writing found meaning in what remained unsaid; Tina Chow, whose legendary style embraced reduction rather than excess; and the fictional Mr Ripley, whose outward composure concealed a far more complicated interior life,’ as he explained via the accompanying notes.

It led to a collection defined by lightness and simplicity: there were featherweight ribbed knits that traced the contours of the body, shrunken waistcoats worn with nothing beneath, and the reemergence of the windbreaker, here in breezy hues of yellow and orange (Vaccarello said he imagined it as a collection which could be easily packed into a suitcase for travel). Tailoring this season remained broad across the shoulder, though had an easy, oversized line, while nods to the opulence of Yves Saint Laurent came in jewellery-like buttons and trench coats rendered in molten gold. Though the use of the luxurious hue was less about excess, Vaccarrello argued; rather, it was used to venerate the garment itself, ‘transforming the utilitarian trench into something extraordinary’. Jack Moss

Auralee

Auralee’s Ryota Iwai dealt with the expectation-versus-reality of the summer season in his S/S 2027 collection for his Japan-based label – the total vacation switch-off we fantasise about while on home soil, and then the slightly uncanny version of ourselves that actually shows up, still plugged in but perhaps a little more susceptible to chance.

Played out in three chapters: ‘The anticipation of departure, the sense of freedom that travel awakens, and the return to everyday life – subtly changed, soaking in the afterglow of the trip,’ looks became more relaxed as things progressed. What started as summery – but still smart – tailoring in office-appropriate blues and greys gave way into softer beach cover-up styles, brighter hues, and the addition of cute trinkets. India Birgitta Jarvis

Louis Vuitton

Pharrell Williams drew an unlikely yet astute comparison between surfers and dandies for Louis Vuitton’s S/S 2027 collection, noting their mutual reverence for performance, craft and travel. Where the dandy peacocks in a more urban context, the surfer commands the beach and rides the waves, but both are drawn by impulse and a certain non-conformity. In fact, ‘dude’, that enduring hippie slang which calls to mind tousled beach-waves and shark-tooth necklaces, used to mean dandy, once upon a time.

The two archetypes converged within Williams’ artfully staged show – a beach scene with real sand, boardwalk and an eight-metre-tall wave set within the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. Classic city pieces, including two-piece suits and collared shirts, were given the surf treatment with tailored jackets constructed in neoprene and what the brand described as ‘hand-spun’ textures. Blue was the prevailing colour, from flashes of ultramarine to dusty-shaded denim which appeared time-worn and sun-bleached. This was not just a tribute – Louis Vuitton has pledged its support to reef conservation projects and enlisted the help of competitors at the Tahiti Pro, taking place this August, to monitor progress. IBJ

Dior

This season, Jonathan Anderson drafted the British producer and musician Fred Again to soundtrack his S/S 2027 show, held at Paris’ Musée Nissim de Camondo, a decorative arts museum in the 8th arrondissement. Fred Again, who produced songs for artists including Skepta and Charli XCX, rose to prominence with his three-volume Actual Life mixtapes, an aural diary of the years 2020-2022 which comprised voice notes from friends, spoken word and samples, alongside his own music. Anderson said that Fred Again’s creative process had inspired his approach to this season, which he described as ‘sampling and remixing to carve out new meaning for what’s known’.

As such, Anderson presented a collection which traversed eras – frock coats and 19th-century embroidered met tattered denim, baggy polo shirts and leather pants – while transforming familiar garments as one might remix a record. This included the tuxedo, this season’s protagonist, which shape-shifted across the collection, reimagined in a draped, organza-like fabric printed to look like tailoring wool, elongated into a robe-like coat, or transformed into a windbreaker-style jacket with a toggle fastening at its hem. Elsewhere, moments of eccentricity and play that have defined Anderson’s approach at both Dior and Loewe before it continued to come to the fore, from shimmering metallic jeans and zig-zag tote bags to corsage brooches and skewiff bow ties. ‘Fashion has to be enjoyable,’ he said. ‘It has to be fun.’ JM

Rick Owens

As Europeans across the board reckon with heatwave-proofing their homes, debating the merits of windows closed versus windows open and so on, Rick Owens was typically one step ahead. The S/S 2027 collection not only incorporated Adidas’ ClimaCool technology, but was supplemented with in-built fans and ice elements, creating a ‘personal air conditioning system’.

This technology means that Owens may have just cracked the technique for wearing all-black through the warmer months – and, to prove it, the 72-look collection was almost entirely black with the occasional contrasting buff-tone. In addition to the signature Rick Owens sharply elongated silhouette, S/S 2027 offered more sporty options, including track pants (with Adidas stripe) and puffer coats – ones which literally puffed, thanks to the air circulating within. IBJ

IM Men

‘In Praise of Bamboo Shadows’, as IM Men’s S/S 2027 was called, celebrated every conceivable association of the plant. Its usefulness and versatility as a material was expressed through fabric made from a blend of bamboo fibres and organic cotton, on which graphic designer Rikako Nagashima had printed shadowy patterns. Its deliciousness as an ingredient came through in supple leather bags, inspired by chimaki, a Japanese dish of steamed bamboo leaves filled with glutinous rice.

Most important of all were the aesthetic and cultural associations. The patterns cast by bamboo forests, light dappled in beams, was translated in a Japanese dyeing technique called ironaki, and the repeated straight lines created by the plant found their echo in hand-pleated pieces. Papery textured outerwear ‘[drew] inspiration from the jūnihitoe (the twelve-layered kimono) worn by Princess Kaguya in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, one of the oldest Japanese folktales,’ and denim in graduated colour evoked traditional ink wash paintings. IBJ

Dries Van Noten

Julian Klausner’s latest collection for Dries Van Noten came with a warning prior to the show: guests could expect to be subjected to extreme temperatures in the Tennis Club de Paris showspace due to the heatwave which continued into Thursday evening. So much so, on arrival, two paramedics stood on standby, ice lollies were distributed to guests, and fans were left on the seats which stretched the length of the monumental space. Luckily, this is a house with an enormous amount of goodwill, one which has extended from the eponymous Van Noten – the designer exited his brand in 2024 – to Klausner, who has astutely evolved the Belgian house’s codes with a series of lauded men’s and womenswear collections.

His S/S 2027 menswear outing was equally beguiling, a masterclass in lightness and beauty that more than distracted from the venue’s heat (in fact, the collection’s diaphanous layers looked all the more appealing). The inspiration had come from L’Après-midi d’un faune (The Faun’s Afternoon), an 1876 poem by Stéphane Mallarmé in which a ‘dream-like creature’ wakes up in the woods having dreamt of dancing nymphs; in his slumbering state, he cannot remember if the scene happened or not. ‘I was moved by the haziness the verses depict, by the constant blurring between the real and the imagined and by the fluidity with which the senses and fantasy slip one into the other,’ said Klausner.

In the collection, this feeling was conjured in the reimagining of a ‘masculine wardrobe’ in delicate, sheer fabrications or adorned with embellishment – from a breezy parka decorated with transparent paillettes, to vividly printed silk trench coats and safari shirts – while colours moved from watercolour hues and sun-bleached pastels to inky black and navy. ‘The idea of sensuality guided many of our choices, colours and fabrications, rendering wardrobe staples as clothing that feels soft and intimate,’ Klausner continued. ‘Like a dream that vanishes upon waking up, I hope everything feels loose, delicate, easy to remove, ready to fly away.’ JM

Studio Nicholson

‘This is who we are,’ declared Studio Nicholson, the British brand that held its first runway show in its 16-year history as part of Paris Fashion Week Men’s. The collection doubled down on its position as a leader of discerning, minimalist style: high-quality fabrics presented with low intervention, expertly cut and relatively unisex. The S/S 2027 show included both men’s and womenswear, but the majority of Studio Nicholson pieces could be worn interchangeably – a shared wardrobe for tasteful couples.

Although this was their first show, in ways it also served as a retrospective. ‘The Sorte’ trouser, which has been a mainstay for Studio Nicholson since the very beginning, opened the show in navy gabardine, and slightly barrel-legged jeans (the brand is the well-established go-to for this cut) appeared multiple times throughout. There was an expansion in other categories, particularly accessories and shoes, which included, in true summer style, espadrilles, flip-flops and garden clogs. IBJ

Junya Watanabe

The number of collaborators listed in the show-notes for Junya Watanabe’s S/S 2027 collection totalled 17: from other clothing brands, including Carhartt, Kappa, and New Balance, to every fashion assistant’s bête noir… DHL. The multinational’s logo appeared on caps created by another collaborator, artist Kota Okuda, which were blingified with ostentatious gold chains and strings of pearls.

Costume jewellery ran through the collection, which closed the gap between traditional tailoring techniques and more recent sportswear tropes, with more than a sprinkle of 1980s references throughout. There was a stone-washed denim jacket, cropped short and worn on top of a Wall Street blue-and-white striped poplin shirt. Tracksuits were high-sheen and colour-blocked, and bouclé accents and the occasional exaggerated epoulette called to mind classic yuppie style, albeit with more swagger. IBJ

Willy Chavarria

Since transplanting from New York, Willy Chavarria’s Paris shows have become a highlight of the schedule – previous outings have included a near-religious experience in the American Church of Paris, while last season’s all-singing, all-dancing spectacular played out like a telenovela on steroids. This season, Chavarria chose Espace Niemeyer, the Oscar Niemeyer-designed former Headquarters of the French Communist Party, for the show, which took place under its futuristic subterranean dome. The setting felt apt: the utopian architecture provided a reflection of a collection that Chavarria said was about a search for joy amid a time of ‘chaos and darkness’.

Soundtracked by a quartet of musicians, he titled the S/S 2027 outing Comunión (flyers for the show posited it as ‘New Age Group Therapy’) and drafted a group of friends and collaborators, including Bella Freud and Romeo Beckham, to walk the runway. Their looks continued to hone Chavarria’s signature aesthetic, one which reimagines work- and sportswear silhouettes in expansive proportions (and with new elegance) while his growing womenswear offering riffs on mid-century silhouettes.

This season, vivid colours were inspired by the work of Louis Carlos Bernal, and bolstered the joyful mood, while an exposure of the body – T-shirts were pushed over the head to reveal models’ chests; shorts sliced so short that the pockets hung beneath the hem – lent a pulsating sensual undercurrent. ‘There are two strong feelings in this collection,’ he told Wallpaper*. ‘One is joy, colour, levity, and playfulness. The other is shock and awe.’ JM

Kiko Kostadinov

Kiko Kostadinov was in a self-referential mood this season, which he began by ‘looking back at the minimal geometric forms of the previous season and asking what could be challenged and pushed further’. With engineer-like precision, the collection emphasised structure and materiality, eschewing embellishment for a streamlined finish.

There was an air of Y2K cyber-core about the 33-look collection, which borrowed its colour scheme from the Apple iMac G3 range: turquoise, dove grey, grape. The canvas interventions of the late Italian artist Agostino Bonalumi were referenced through shape and drape, and through the use of internal boning to create ‘curved, rippling protrusions, emphasising a tension between softness and structure’. IBJ

Wooyoungmi

Madame Woo was searching for a universality in her research for S/S 2027, particularly what various cultures and geographies have in common when it comes to reading joyfulness in apparel. Her answer was threefold: ‘light, colour and the imprint of individuality’.

Light was articulated through surface treatments which gave garments an aged appearance, as if sun-bleached. Colour, mostly pastel but with occasional flashes of vivid chartreuse or tangerine, was applied liberally. And a sense of individuality came from pieces appliqued with playful, juvenile pictures, leather keyrings hanging from belts, and ties worn rebelliously around the head. Applying these principles imbued the 47-look collection with a feeling of levity which can be recognised the world over. IBJ

Celine

Taking place on the final day of menswear fashion month, American designer Michael Rider presented one of the collections of the season with his first standalone men’s show for Celine, held in an all-white showspace constructed in the Tennis Club de Paris. Honing an already distinctive aesthetic which is based on the idea of developing an evolving wardrobe – and combining an American preppiness with the Parisian insouciance synonymous with the house – Rider said he was thinking less about thematics, and more about what he (and his team) actually want to wear. ‘[It’s about] enjoying what we do in the studio, and desiring it ourselves, all of it, the clothes and the characters,’ he said.

Besides a multitude of great clothes (this collection will be much-imitated, particularly in its playful, thrown-on styling), what is striking about Rider is his ability to evoke a ‘Celine man’ (or indeed woman), despite the eclecticism in the looks on show. Much of this is down to his own belief in what he puts down the runway: a navy cummerbund over a red sweater, an enormous bag slotted into the crook of the arm, ballooning pants, a mix of the slouchy and the shrunken – these are familiar garments that he has somehow made feel entirely new. And, while the show might have presented these pieces in more unconventional combinations, take these looks apart and this is a wardrobe that can be adopted by a wide gamut of men. ‘It’s about building towards something bigger,’ he said. ‘Something with legs, and roots.’ JM

A minimalist, new virtual house design by Miami-based studio Oppenheim Architecture allows you to try-before-you-buy in an immersive experience that celebrates design and digital advances. Initiated by client Swiss frameless door and window specialists Sky-Frame, the project, which launches today (29 June 2026) explores the boundaries of digital design and virtual worlds through the practice's sophisticated aesthetic.

Take a taster tour of this virtual house by Oppenheim Architecture

The project is a subtly abstract house design - a single-level, long and linear residence clad in seamless glazing. The residence features a pared-down aesthetic (the Swiss manufacturer is famous for producing virtually frameless openings) and a sculptural timber and concrete look.

The design was developed as a somewhat 'infinite' design, conceived to allow the creativity to run wild and potential to be imagined. As a result, the house can be seen in two distinct settings - visitors can experience it in a sun-drenched Miami beach scenery, or a snowy Swiss peak, the Matterhorn in the distance.

'The brief was to create an experience that captures the essence of Sky-Frame: openness, continuity and a seamless connection between inside and outside. By collaborating with Oppenheim Architecture, we were able to explore these ideas without physical constraints and demonstrate the emotional power of architecture in an entirely new way,' says Andrea Zürcher, CMO at Sky-Frame.

'Evolving the original thinking, together with Beat and Rasem, into this virtual dream world, was a really fun experience right from the start. We enjoyed working creatively to build our own ‘dream house’, as much about the beautiful design, as the conceptual thinking - and we enjoyed the process of being the client!'

The idea is that prospective clients - customers, including contractors, designers, architects and the general public - can book an appointment for a private viewing, where they can explore the look and feel of Sky-Frame's product through Oppenheim Architecture's sleek design.

'The brief was deliberately open, which is both a gift and a discipline,' says Oppenheim Architecture's Beat Huesler. 'Sky-Frame asked us to design a house that was architecturally rigorous but not site-specific. A residence that could exist anywhere, yet feels entirely at home in each location. The only non-negotiable was the landscape: every space had to earn its relationship to the view. That is very aligned with how we at Oppenheim Architecture (OA) approach architecture more broadly. We started with two concrete planes and let everything else follow from that discipline - services hidden, structure quiet, the frame of the window becoming the frame of the world outside.'

'We value Oppenheim’s visionary architecture and their philosophical approach to light, space, and integration with the surroundings,' says Zürcher. 'When approached, they immediately understood both the challenge and the opportunity of the project. The collaboration was based on a shared perspective and mindset on architecture.'

The architects were also challenged and pleased by the project. Huesler adds: 'The freedom to design without the constraints of a real site, a real budget, or a real planning authority and then to discover that this freedom actually demanded greater discipline, not less. When you remove every practical excuse, you are left with pure architectural intention.'

'The collaboration with The Boundary also pushed us to think about how architecture is experienced sequentially, almost cinematically. Miami Beach and Zermatt - each setting asked the house to perform differently, and watching it hold its identity across all three was genuinely satisfying.'

oppenoffice.com

sky-frame.com

RH has arrived in London, and it's done so in style. The American luxury home furnishings brand – formerly known as Restoration Hardware – has chosen 7 Burlington Gardens, one of the city's most storied addresses, for its new flagship.

The project marks RH's first London outpost, following its 2023 debut at Aynho Park – a 400-year-old landmark estate in Banbury – and subsequent openings in Paris, Milan, Brussels, Madrid, Munich and Düsseldorf. But London, it seems, demanded something different in scale and ambition.

The venue is Uxbridge House, a rare surviving Palladian mansion designed in 1721 by Italian-born architect Giacomo Leoni for the 1st Earl of Darnley. Restored and reimagined alongside three adjoining landmark properties, it now houses what RH bills as the largest curated collection of luxury home furnishings in the world. Working with Foster + Partners, the brand has unified four buildings – spanning five levels and over 5,000 square metres – into a single destination encompassing retail, dining, design and culture.

Visitors arrive through a Roman Doric portico into the Architecture & Design Library, where herringbone floors of European white oak and museum-style plinths frame a collection of rare classical books. The centrepiece is a 1521 first Italian edition of Vitruvius' De Architectura, a foundational text of Western architecture. Through Leonardo da Vinci's later interpretation, its principles of proportion helped shape the design philosophy that continues to influence RH today.

A scenic lift designed by Foster + Partners – its shaft clad in champagne gold-finished steel and glass – connects all five levels. The Wine Bar and Tea Salon, finished in Bronze Amani Spanish marble, sits nearby, while deeper in the mansion the former banking hall has been reborn as the The Dining Room: a 136-seat restaurant where champagne-lacquered Roman columns rise nearly eight metres to a coffered ceiling hand-finished in gold leaf, tiered chandeliers of hand-blown Venetian glass suspended from mirrored skylights above. The menu leans into British classics like rib roast and fish and chips, cooked on custom Molteni rotisseries.

Upstairs, the first floor's historic Piano Nobile state rooms retain their elaborately decorated 18th-century ceilings by master plasterer Joseph Rose, now framing RH Interiors collections. The second floor is arguably more dramatic still. Designer and hotelier Anouska Hempel has created two spaces: the The Perch at RH London, with its smoked-glass aviary canopy, blackened églomisé walls and bar of pure Absoluto Nero marble, which opens onto a terrace garden of laurel trees, diamond-laid marble floors with water rills and grand glass birdcages evoking the domes of Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan. Nearby, the World of RH Lounge is anchored by a 360-degree hologram floating within a case of bronze and fluted mirror.

The third floor, meanwhile, has been transformed into a sheltered garden oasis beneath a massive ridged skylight of triangular glass panels and hand-selected European white oak beams, housing RH Outdoor among fountains, pleached plane trees and open fireplaces.

Situated opposite the Royal Academy of Arts, between New Bond Street and Savile Row, the location is as deliberate as everything else here. RH London is a store, yes – but it's also a statement.

Fans of the eco-conscious 1 Hotel chain will now have yet another reason for visiting Japan, with the latest addition to the brand’s portfolio in Tokyo’s Akasaka neighbourhood. Featuring 211 rooms, including 24 suites and three penthouse suites, a gorgeous pool and hammam, a dedicated gin bar and delicious Mediterranean-inspired cuisine, guests might find it hard to actually leave and go explore the city, though.

Wallpaper* checks in at 1 Hotel Tokyo, Japan

What's on your doorstep?

Located right in the heart of the city, 1 Hotel is within walking distance of fun-loving Roppongi, shopping in Azabudai Hills and a 20min stroll to the Imperial Palace Gardens, but with the pool, Hamman, excellent coffee at the Neighbors coffee shop adjacent to the reception, you might find it hard to leave the hotel altogether.

Who is behind the design?

Housed on the upper floors of the Akasaka Trust Tower, the interior design has been put in the very capable hands of Jun Aizaki of Crème. A stunning stone wall at the entrance on the ground floor sets the tone of the natural and eclectic palette of materials used throughout the space; distinctly Japanese Oya stone, reclaimed wood, handblown glass and hemp cord lamps. With a carefully selected variety of lamps and bespoke furniture, the design never gets repetitive, and there is a clear reference to the local setting (moss, bonsai, earthen walls) without the design being overly Japanese.

The room to book

Even the standard rooms feel spacious and inviting with ample use of subdued colours, wooden furniture and carefully selected lighting fixtures. The rawness of, for instance, the rough edges of the bathroom vanity, marble counters, reclaimed wood furniture and wood panelling adds an honesty to the sophisticated design that renders the rooms very cosy.

Staying for drinks and dinner?

The hotel’s main dining room, NiNi (a name meaning ‘two-two’ in Japanese), takes its inspiration from Mediterranean cuisine, while making abundant use of local Japanese ingredients, and is headed by Nikko Policarpio. Dinner offers fresh seafood dishes such as botan shrimp carpaccio, hamaguri clams (served with cucumber mignonette, yuzu kosho and olive oil Caviar), roasted scallops, homemade pasta (the zucchini ravioli being our favourite), simple charcoal grilled meat dishes (including chicken confit from Iwate Prefecture, pork chop from Yamagata and Tajima Wagyu) and a selection of vegetable side dishes.

Breakfast is the perfect blend of made-to-order mains (perfectly cooked omelettes, mushroom tartines, waffles, French toast, etc) and a carefully selected, but not overly complicated buffet.

Where to switch off

Guests can indulge in various treatments and massages (including hard-to-find in Tokyo couples massages) at The Bamford Wellness Spa, and are also given free use of the small but gorgeous pool and adjacent Hamman steam rooms.

The verdict

We love the stylish, honest and natural design throughout the hotel. Dining at NiNi is a treat, and with a well-selected wine and impressive non-alcoholic selection too, a new favourite addition to Tokyo’s vibrant dining scene. The rooms come with a well-stocked minibar and the pool and Hammam onsite, and delicious coffee at the hotel’s own coffee bar Neighbors, makes it hard to actually leave the hotel.

Book 1 Hotel Tokyo, 2 Chome-17-22 Akasaka, Minato City, Tokyo 107-0052, Japan. Rates from $550

'What I didn’t want to do was one of those collaborations where it’s just a matter of putting another name on the dial,' says Thibaut Guittard. 'For me a collaboration with an artist really has to make sense. If it’s going to be a piece of art in its own right, it has to be meaningful.'

Guittard, one time marketing manager for Audemars Pigeut in France, is the founder of Alto, launched three years ago and the only brand established to create watches specifically in collaboration with artists. Its first collaborative watch, just launched, is with the French contemporary sculptor Bernar Venet, known for his monumental, mathematically-precise pieces in Cor-Ten steel.

Its point of difference? The one-piece dial of the Art 01 - of which only 10 pieces will be made - comprises a micro-sculpture by Venet. The watches don’t make use of Cor-Ten steel - since the resulting magnetic effect would be detrimental to the performance of the movement - but of bronze, patinated in the same way using a process developed in-house by Alto.

The dial is also just 0.8mm deep, enough to register the shifts in light and darkness that Venet’s design requires - 'it’s also the volume aspect of the dial that makes it interesting,' Guittard argues - while keeping the watch’s weight to a minimum, and leaving enough room for movement and hands without the finished watch being too thick.

'It was technically very challenging, but the appeal to Venet was that work at such a small scale was in many ways a different proposition for him, while we look on art as perhaps the second biggest means of collaborative communication after sport,' says Guittard. 'These watches are likely for art lovers first. But since the art world tends to be about excluding people, a project like this is also a way for watch fans to be brought into the art world, to discover the artist.'

Alto is now lining up his next artist collaboration, but will first launch a smaller, thinner skeletonised watch - its second, in-house, 3D dial design - in September. By then it will also have been joined by other watchmakers launching artist collaborations: in August Ressence, for example, releases a watch designed in collaboration with Belgian artist Jules Wittock, who free-hand draws intricate mazes; follow a line from start to finish and it reveals a word.

The dial of Ressence’s Type 9 watch - in an edition of around 80 - will carry one of Wittock’s drawings, across the brand’s signature orbiting discs time display. Only at midnight will the display align to allow the word, written in Super-luminova, to be read in the dark.

'The fact is that a watch collaboration with an artist is always a more interesting thing than a collaboration with a retailer,' Ressence’s found Benoit Mintiens suggests. 'Working with an artist you invariably get something you wouldn’t think to do as a watchmaker, while the artist gets to work on something they wouldn’t normally do either, to work on a much smaller, moving canvas. The result is something different. Many watch collaborations are commercially-driven now. What you still get with an artist is a philosophical dimension to a new design.'

The meeting of these two minds is not always easy to pull off though, Mintiens stresses, not least when 'super-cool artists' fail to understand how their ideas may not be translatable into the parameters of watchmaking. 'It can’t be made at scale, or it would be way to expensive or, you know, they insist that it’s made out of translucent titanium,' Mintiens laughs. 'It can get a bit weird.'

Working with an artist can be a leap of faith, agrees Lewis Heath, founder of British sister brands Anordain and Paulin - 'you’re often not quite sure if an artist’s ideas will really be any good on a watch until you’re at the sampling stage,' he notes. And yet the results do typically stand out, which, in an increasingly crowded market of new watch releases, can be critical.

Paulin recently released watches in collaboration with the multi-disciplinary Glasgow artist John Nicol on a series of dials each hand-painted by him in a vibrant abstract style. Anordain has even worked with the artist Rachel Duckhouse - best known for her etching - on the look not a new dial, but of a new movement, seen through an exhibition caseback. Its next artist collaboration is already underway.

'The best thing about artist collaborations is that the artists tend not to know untying about watches,' says Heath, 'so their ideas don’t come coloured by what’s already out there.'

Studio RAP describes itself as ‘Architects of Bespoke Ceramics’. Since the Rotterdam-based studio was founded in 2016 by Lucas ter Hall and Wessel van Beerendonk, it’s been on the cutting edge of new ways of manufacturing. The studio has an array of in-house 3D clay printers, working on ceramic designs for façades, artworks and ornamentation in collaboration with architects and designers.

The latest artwork from Studio RAP is Powerwall, which the duo reckon is one of the largest robotically 3D-printed ceramic artworks anywhere in the world. Comprising 322 unique ceramic titles, each 3D printed through a layering process using a robotic clay printer, the artwork began life as an algorithmically generated form.

Powerwall graces the façade of a high-voltage transformer station, Switchstation Beverwijk. The inspiration behind the forms was patterns of electromagnetic energy – invisible, but dynamic, transforming the windowless utilitarian form of the transformer station, owned by Dutch grid operator TenneT and designed by Powerhouse Company, into a piece of urban artwork.

The 300-plus panels form an installation that’s 8m high and 5m wide, gracing the brick façade of Switchstation Beverwijk. The wave forms that appear ripple across the surface were originally shaped by an algorithm, then output as three-dimensional forms via the 3D clay printer. Each tile is then coated with a translucent turquoise glaze and fired, creating a surface that shimmers and shifts depending on time and day and point of view.

The ribbed effect on the surface not only accentuates the form, but lays bare the act of clay printing, where ribbons of clay are extruded along a path, stacking up on each to create an organic feel. The addition of the glaze adds a layer of unpredictability, with different thicknesses of the colour pooling in the depths of the folds.

‘The studio embraces the reality that ceramics shrink and warp during the firing process,’ van Beerendonk and ter Hall explain. ‘The intense heat of the kiln transforms the raw material, meaning the final piece is never an exact sterile replica of the digital model, but rather an organic, highly characterful architectural element.’ Creating the final assembly required that each panel be perfectly engineered with the correct tolerances and stability so that the artwork could be put together in situ.

Studio RAP’s work brings the Dutch ceramic tradition into the modern era – a recent project, New Delft Blue, was a pair of gates incorporating reinterpreted traditional porcelain. Other recent work includes Ceramic House in Amsterdam, with its 3D-printed façade.

StudioRAP.nl, @Studio.RAP

Bridging that gap between traditional London townhouse and the metropolis's rich offering of purely contemporary homes, Vabel Townhouse is the newest development created by Vabel – the design and development studio founded in 2009 by Daniel Baliti and Jeremy Spencer. The business has been making its mark on the capital with its design-led, architecturally rich projects, and the latest, set on the south end of Queensway, a stone's throw from Hyde Park, follows this creative approach to the T.

Discover Vabel Townhouse in London's Queensway

Inspired by the timeless nature of Victorian townhouses and terraces and following the rhythm of the street's massing and facade grids, Vabel Townhouse scales up the single-family home property into a boutique, just 28-home new build structure clad in elegant light brick.

Upon stepping inside, the visitor is greeted by a calming, block-surface and richly minimalist lobby. Warm, dark timbers balance out the vibrant, immersive pink and green stone on the floors and walls. It is all symmetrically placed in a manner that draws on the art deco grandeur of interiors such as Eltham Palace, around a contemporary fireplace, with a discreet reception desk to one side.

Upstairs, units range from one- to three-bedroom ones, including apartments and maisonettes. Two penthouses crown the top. Green spaces, from the rear garden (accessible to all, and leading to the residents' gym) to the planted roof at the front, where the building is set back, enrich the living experience, adding private outdoor areas which complement the nearby, public, leafy expanses of Hyde Park.

The Vabel creative team designed all interiors and crafted different iterations and moods with the first five of nine fully furnished apartments that Vabel Townhouse will offer. The high level of bespoke attention ensures every interior is brimming with personality - with not only joinery and built-in furniture and elements such as kitchens, but a lot of the furniture, too, being tailored to the specific project, or sourced especially.

'From the beginning, our ambition was to create homes that are differentiated and offer an elevated living experience. Every element of the design has been carefully curated to create a sanctuary of calm, but also to energise and inspire, from the architectural language of the building through to the bespoke joinery, natural stone, landscaping and interior finishes within each residence,' says Spencer, who is also the creative director at Vabel.

'What makes this project particularly special is the extraordinary level of attention to detail that has gone into every decision. As a fully integrated design and development studio, we have been able to oversee every aspect of the process, ensuring that the original vision has been nurtured through to completion without compromise. The result is a collection of homes defined by exceptional craftsmanship, beautiful materials and cutting-edge design – enriching the human experience.'

The scheme also features work by award-winning design consultancy Greenspace, which has completed a comprehensive brand and strategy programme for Vabel, refreshing its corporate masterbrand identity.

The project follows Vabel Lawrence in Seven Sisters, and is only one of the two projects Vabel has in Queensway. Further up the road, a second Vabel residential development is currently in the works.

vabel.co.uk

In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Second up: the tiny Microlino car, a lesson in design, driving and keeping things compact.

Carlo Ratti's 'Objectify' explores the Microlino

In a summer that promises to be scorching, what could be better than opening the door of a refrigerator and clambering inside? Welcome to the Microlino, two and a half metres long, one and a half metres wide, weighing less than five hundred kilos. Two seats, and a front door that opens on to the city as a fridge door opens on to a kitchen.

We are in Turin, at Cecomp, in the same industrial district that once produced the Fiat 500. If the original 500 motorised postwar Italy, the Microlino asks whether Italy still needs to be motorised quite so much, and with this much metal per person. Because today, on our roads, its nemesis reigns supreme, the SUV, two tonnes of sheet metal snarling itself up while searching for a parking space.

Call it the Ozempic of the automobile. A vehicle stripped of everything the twentieth century had prescribed. Reduced to an essential dose, a bubble, two seats, a door, and enough range to cross a city twice. Ozempic works by intervening in the feedback loop between appetite and satiety. The Microlino does something similar with the feedback loops of urban traffic.

Its design lineage is the BMW Isetta, the bubble car of the 1950s, which was itself an Italian invention, licensed to the Germans by Iso of Milan in 1955. The Isetta was famously the car in which postwar couples could sit closer together than in almost any other vehicle on the market. The Microlino continues that line of thought and discovers that the intelligent car might also be the most romantic.

The Microlino was conceived in Switzerland by the Ouboter family, designed in Italy by Icona, and finally assembled in Turin. Its cultural logic, however, is entirely Italian. The Fiat 500 compressed family life into three metres of steel. The Microlino compresses it into two and a half metres of aluminium and a fourteen-kilowatt-hour battery.

At the Senseable City Lab, we conducted a study called Unparking, which showed how the shift to shared autonomous vehicles could reduce the need for parking in cities such as Singapore by more than seventy percent. The Microlino reaches a similar conclusion, but by simpler means. It occupies around a third of a standard parking space. Three Microlinos beam in the space where one SUV sulks. Here, the parking problem is answered by shrinking the car itself.

After all, how much car do you really need to move through Italian cities, designed for human bodies, built before cars existed, and governed by streets once measured in feet and arms? For most journeys, the answer is simple: very little. The Microlino has understood that the city does not need a smaller version of the old automotive fantasy. It needs much less car. With the self-assurance of someone who has just completed a diet, it wants everyone to know.

About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti

Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: “Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?” Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.

Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: “Objects should keep us company.” Especially during this scorching summer.

carlorattiassociati.com

The boundaries between fashion, art and design can be blurry ones so it was no surprise when the Triennale Milano launched its own department dedicated to fashion in 2024, overseen by Luca Stoppini and former Wallpaper* Milan Editor Marco Sammicheli.

Established to research, archive and curate all things fashion-related, exploring the role it plays in the design world and promoting it in dialogue with schools and universities, the department’s latest project is a rethink of the Triennale’s uniforms in four key areas: for the cultural mediators who welcome visitors; for the security staff; for the team at Voce, the venue dedicated to music and sound; and for the staff at the two restaurants, Cucina and Terrazza.

To develop the creative side of the project, the Triennale brought on board former creative Gucci, Valentino and Tod’s creative director Alessandra Facchinetti, who took inspiration from workwear and the Bauhaus movement to develop a versatile, cross-functional design that fosters a sense of belonging, comfort and style.

‘My concept goes beyond that of traditional uniforms, which often lack identity and fail to create a cohesive image, in favour of a collection of garments and accessories aligned with the institution’s vision and values,’ says Facchinetti. ‘A uniform should not only identify the wearer, but also represent and strengthen the institution itself, striking a balance between function, practicality and aesthetics in a language that moves beyond role and becomes an everyday style code. The uniform serves as a visual and tangible expression of the museum’s identity, a recognisable and meaningful element that engages visitors and enhances their experience in shared spaces.’

Facchinetti chose to reflect on the very concept of the uniform, reinterpreting it to ensure recognisability without reducing it to a flat or generic design. Drawing on the geometric forms of the Triennale’s architecture, the visual identity of Cucina, with its Bauhaus-inspired graphic references, and the refined folding techniques found in traditional Italian table linens, the creative process gave rise to a distinctive signature triangular pleat that becomes the root of the uniform collection, appearing in pockets or on aprons.

The uniforms’ colour palette, meanwhile, nods to the tones of the Palazzo dell’Arte, the Triennale’s headquarters, ranging from the greys of the marble to the greens of the travertine. A burgundy vest was designed for the cultural mediators, with a colourful patch, in shades such as lime green and lilac, which can be attached to the pocket to identify different staff roles. Security staff uniforms are grey, as are those for Voce, though these also feature a fluorescent green print of the deconstructed Voce logo. The palette for Cucina is dominated by travertine green, paired with pearl grey, while Terrazza is dark brown, complemented by a warmer shade of grey. There are also separate designs for the catering and garden services.

The development and production of the uniforms was entrusted to Older Studio, the Danish-Italian company that specialises in forward-thinking uniform design. It translated the creative brief into the final product, overseeing the entire process from pattern making and prototyping to material sourcing and management of a fully sustainable supply chain. All materials used for the uniforms are woven and sourced in Italy, while each garment is produced in Europe and shipped in compostable packaging.

triennale.org

Nick Molyviatis spent his career in some of London’s most respected kitchens, including Kiln and Oma, before becoming co-owner of Singburi. For Zylia, he has teamed up with restaurateur Barry Karacostas, whose Cypriot heritage and two decades in hospitality informs the menu alongside Molyviatis’s Athenian upbringing. The result is a contemporary Greek-Cypriot taverna shaped by childhood memory, family recipes and professional experience – and a shared obsession with charcoal grills.

Wallpaper* dines at Zylia, London

The mood: Built on contrast

The idea for Zylia’s interiors took shape over several Cypriot beers in Nicosia. Architect and Red Deer co-founder Lionel Real de Azúa was being shown around Cyprus by Karacostas when the pair began talking about the contrast between sleek modern design and the pieces Karacostas had grown up surrounded by. ‘We wanted to bring together the confidence and elegance of the London hospitality scene with the warmth, generosity and familiarity of your giagiá’s dining table or local taverna,’ Real de Azúa says.

Delicate Lefkara lace sits against stainless steel tables and shelving, handwoven wicker bread baskets sourced from Limassol rest against stripped-back London brick, and a service counter is built from stone quarried at Gerolakkos. ‘Nothing is intended to feel nostalgic,’ Real de Azúa says, ‘but everything carries a sense of memory and patina.’ His reference point throughout was Diporto, the 139-year-old taverna in a basement near Athens Central Market. ‘The materials are simple, the proportions are right, and the beauty comes from authenticity.’

The other reference point came from the menu itself, with Molyviatis’s sheftalia – small, rustic, packing a punch – becoming a kind of metaphor for the design brief. ‘There’s a directness to both the food and the interior,’ Real de Azúa says of details such as traditional Cypriot tiles and green leather booths. ‘Warmth comes from texture, craftsmanship and use rather than embellishment.’

The food: Dip and mix

Those sheftalia appear as four chubby caul fat-wrapped pork parcels resting on sliced onion, parsley and sumac – but before that, order some bread, which arrives as a basket of oregano-flecked warm pitta to dredge through creamy-and-crunchy taramasalata with cracked carob rusk or smashed feta and yoghurt adorned with a roasted chilli pepper to mash up for heat.

Then it’s a case of pick-and-mixing your way through a selection of small plates such as Metsovone cheese balls slicked with honey, or a contemporary spin on spanakopita presented as a pastry stack of crispy hand-stretched filo, before hitting up the charcoal grill for a heap of chops (pork, beef or lamb), or the house special of milk-fed lamb shoulder kleftiko, a blanket of slow-cooked comfort food. Either way, a bowl of hand-cut chips is non-negotiable.

Wines are Greek, beers Cypriot and the cocktails a blend of cutting-edge mixology and Mediterranean ingredients: as creative a blend of heritage and here-and-now as the rest of this place.

Zylia is located at 6 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9HZ, United Kingdom

This project defies easy categorisation – it’s not quite a renovation, not quite a new construction, but something in between. Prague-based practice Facha Architekti has inserted a compact contemporary dwelling into the body of an old agricultural barn: structurally independent and entirely self-contained. ‘Box in a Barn’, as the project is aptly named, serves as a retreat for a client whose family works the surrounding farmstead.

Early conversations explored renovating the farmstead's existing residential wing, but the brief gradually evolved toward something much more interesting, with the goal of leaving the host structure completely unaltered: a new living unit placed inside the barn itself.

What makes the outcome so arresting is the refusal to soften the relationship between box and barn. No attempt has been made to modernise the surrounding structure, nor to make the new volume defer to it. The new insertion is unmistakably contemporary – a simple timber box clad in black asphalt, its form derived from the barn's geometry yet held in deliberate tension with it. The unit sits slightly elevated above the original floor, which continues uninterrupted beneath. At its threshold, a concrete plane flows inward from the courtyard, dissolving the boundary between interior, open barn and the garden of old apple trees beyond.

Inside, the approach is deliberately understated. Birch plywood dominates – its warmth and grain providing texture without ornament. A single built-in block of black-dyed MDF consolidates the kitchen, bathroom and storage into one element, keeping the remainder of the plan open and unencumbered.

Though conceived for seasonal use, underfloor heating and insulation make year-round occupation totally viable. The barn itself functions as a passive climatic buffer, moderating both summer heat and winter cold for the volume within.

Architecture is full of renovations and replacements. Moments of genuine adaptation are far harder to find. 'Box in the Barn' is simple in its premise – and wonderfully clever in the execution of that premise.

Larry Tchogninou is breaking away from the old ways of thinking. ‘At architecture school they basically taught us that everything has been done already, that it’s almost too late for new ideas,’ explains the Chicago-based designer. That’s why he started his own studio called Ruptur Vision, which marks a clear break from this mindset.

One of his recent pieces the ‘Knuckle Shelf’, which is currently on show at the Theaster Gates’s Stony Island Arts Bank, certainly doesn’t conform. Tchogninou brings a potent imagination to life: built out of necessity for more storage space, the form was inspired by the impression that books often leave on him.

‘There are some titles I’ve read that knock me out.’ Says the self-described polymath. ‘Oriki, by Nifemi Marcus Bello, or I make Shoes by Salehe Bembury.’ This sensation was translated into the shape of a knuckle duster. Constructed using Baltic birch plywood and aluminium sheets, the system features no hardware and uses friction-fit engineering.

Larry Tchogninou: one to watch

Born in 1998 in Cotonou, Benin, Tchogninou was drawn to architecture at an early age. ‘When I was around six years, old, my mum was building a house in the Cotonou suburbs; we would visit the site weekly and I was always in awe of how everything came together,’ recalls Tchogninou. After moving to Paris in 2014, where he finished his secondary school education, he went on to study at L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris-Val-de-Seine. Four years later, he moved to Chicago to join his mother, and studied architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology.

In 2019, Tchogninou participated in the NikeLab Chicago Recreation Lab, a summer mentorship programme led by the late Virgil Abloh. This is where he met his Points of Sail co-founder James Langford: together they design retail stores, both in Chicago and in Benin.

In the latter, they worked on a pop-up retail store called Tibi. ‘All the pieces that you see in that retail store are made in Cotonou. The silver stools are cast in aluminium,’ he explains. They were created by the same artisan that made his sand-casted citrus squeezer, ‘Beak’, forged in the shape of a swan’s neck and beak. ‘My favourite design object is the ‘Juicy Salif’ by Philippe Starck,’ he explains. Like ‘Juicy’, Tchogninou’s ‘Beak’ citrus squeezer is a conversation starter. ‘People don’t know what it is initially, but when I explain it to them, it sells like crazy.’

Tchogninou has an aptitude for the unconventional: when he worked with Serena Williams Design Crew in 2021 he created the ‘SWDC’ duffel bag, a soft lilac trapezoid sports bag, which collapses into a crossbody bag (it launched two years later).

In 2025, Tchogninou exhibited at the award-winning Benin Pavillion at the World Expo in Japan. Several of his creations featured, including an aluminium cast dish set, designed in collaboration with chef Philippe Sonou, who used it in the Masterchef UK finals. That piece was made in Benin, unlike the ‘Gbêhanzin’ egg holder Tchogninou makes himself in the US. ‘There’s a Chicago-based manufacturer called Sand Cut Sands who laser-cut the forms I then bend, break and rivet them.’

The egg holder is another item that people can’t always identify immediately, but this doesn’t scare Tchogninou, who believes that some pieces should be ‘disturbing’ as well as ‘comforting’. ‘We need both perspectives in design.’

London’s Spanish restaurant scene has never been more varied or more vital. The city’s love affair with Iberian food stretches back decades – from the early champions who first put Manchego cheese on the map, to the tapas bars of the Noughties that made small-plate dining a way of life – but what is happening now goes well beyond chorizo and calamares.

Today’s Spanish London spans Basque grills, no-bookings tapas counters and neighbourhood gems devoted to regional cuisines, all underpinned by a shared reverence for quality ingredients and the pleasure of eating well without spending a fortune. That, at least, is the idea, although the final size of the bill is likely to depend on the amount of Spanish wine consumed. Here are the eight best places in London to sort your jámon from your jerez.

The best Spanish restaurants in London

Alta

This elemental-looking two-floor restaurant (a sibling to Japanese Moi on the other side of Soho) brings the live-fire cooking traditions of northern Spain’s Navarre region to Carnaby Street. Upstairs, beautifully presented plates of artfully sauced dishes excel with vegetarian options – try the oyster mushroom with shiitake and pine nuts – though there’s also 35-day aged sirloin to share. From mid-June, downstairs has become the more informal Bar Alta for pinxtos and vermouth.

Alta is located at 9 Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London W1B 5PW, United Kingdom

Arros QD

Quique Dacosta holds three Michelin stars for his eponymous restaurant down the coast from Valencia and the chef brings the same serious approach to bear on Spanish rice cookery at this Fitzrovia dining room. The paella valenciana – chicken, rabbit, garrofón beans, artichokes, veal and herb stock – is a revelation for anyone who think paella is just prawns, and if the 10 other rice dishes don’t appeal, there’s Atlantic octopus cooked on the six-metre wood-fired stove.

Arros QD is located at 64 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8NQ, United Kingdom

Barrafina Dean Street

Cal Pep in Barcelona inspired this now five-strong group of tapas bars, but the no-reservations Soho branch is the most fun and closest to the spirit of Spain. Arrive before 6pm to avoid a long wait, but even if you do have to queue, there are few more pleasant ways to stand in line that with a glass of rosé cava in one hand and a plate of ham croquetas in the other. The straightforward cooking is based on quality ingredients: crinkly pimientos de Padrón, runny-yolked chorizo tortillas, or a fleshy-pink plate of gambas rojas.

Barrafina Dean Street is located at 26-27 Dean Street, London W1D 3LL, United Kingdom

Ibai

A Basque-accented steakhouse near Smithfield Market, Ibai specialises in Galician Blond beef from cows raised on grass pastures until the ripe old age of 16, by which point the meat has developed a rich pungency. Grilled over charcoal, it is the beefiest beef imaginable. Elsewhere are Cantabrian anchovies with arbequina olive oil and pâté Basque with truffle honey and grilled bread. The meat-importer owner’s smaller tapas bar Donostia and charcoal grill Lurra occupy opposite sides of Seymour Place in Marylebone.

Ibai is located at 90 Bartholomew Close, London EC1A 7BN, United Kingdom

Morito

This tiny offshoot of Sam and Sam Clark’s Moro grafts that restaurant’s North African sensibilities onto Spanish small plates. A handful of tables line the corridor-like space, but the counter is the place to sit – or at an outside table on vibey Exmouth Market when the sun is shining. Order the crispy chickpeas with chopped salad and tahini yoghurt.

Morito is located at 32 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE, United Kingdom

Pizarro

Extremadura native José Pizarro has established himself as Spain’s unofficial food ambassador to Britain and Bermondsey Street is his embassy. For breakfast there’s his all-day dining spot Lolo’s and tapas at his no-bookings José; Pizarro is the chef’s full-scale restaurant that moves from small plates to more substantial main courses including a signature presa Ibérica of acorn-fed pork shoulder. The room, with its L-shaped marble counter, open kitchen and Spanish tiling, manages to feel both neighbourhood and destination.

Pizarro is located at 194 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3TQ, United Kingdom

Sabor

At Sabor, Bilbao-born chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho distils her years of London experience into something more expansive than the standard tapas formula: a ground-floor counter where the classics are executed with contemporary flair, and a first-floor ‘asador’ devoted to regional cooking such as the showstopping Segovian suckling pig. The chef’s follow-up restaurant, Legado in Shoreditch, was awarded a Michelin star six months after opening in August 2025.

Sabor is located at 35-37 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BR, United Kingdom

Tranga

This long-running neighbourhood gem serves a daily-changing menu in which quality produce is given elegant treatment. Expect piquillo peppers stuffed with prawn bechamel and shellfish fumet, or a paella of Ibérico pork tenderloin, alongside a carefully chosen list of sherries and Catalan natural wines. The candle- and chandelier-lit interiors, strewn with vintage finds, are as attractive as the cooking.

Tranga is located at 61 Newington Green, London N16 9PX, United Kingdom

A sublimely minimalist Belgian penthouse by architecture studio Merckx-Holvoet is just the thing for those long, hot summer days when easy living and going back to basics are in order. The project, titled V Penthouse, was crafted in an existing unit by the Antwerp-based architects Marc Merckx and Sébastien Holvoet and their team, and blends contemporary chic with the glamour its established seaside resort, Knokke-Heist, is known for.

Explore this Belgian penthouse by the sea

The client, a couple and their two young children, came to the studio with the desire to create a coastal pied-a-terre, a space that can allow for carefree time over weekends and holidays. The project would acts as a refreshing counterbalance to their busy urban lives in a Belgian city the rest of the year.

As a result, the architecture team focused on opening up to the surrounding landscape and, at the same time, bringing hints of the context in. Compositions are framed towards large windows, which create long views of the beach and sea. Meanwhile, the project's materiality takes its cues from local, natural colours and materials, and the shifting hues of the North Sea.

To achieve the textures of its setting, in a refined, polished way that is befitting of 21st-century family life, Merckx-Holvoet clad the walls and floors of the main living spaces in a unifying way, using sandblasted Travertino Noce stone. The ceiling's plaster gives a subtly sandy finish.

Timber elements bring smoothness and warmth to the composition, such as the main, solid oak-built staircase at the heart of the home. Bespoke millwork also features in the kitchen cabinets and its generous island.

A balcony acts as an extension to the living space. When the glazing is drawn back fully, living room and outdoors become one, highlighting the long views across the North Sea waters.

The ultimate aim? The architects write: 'More than a temporary retreat, it becomes a quiet extension of the coast itself, a place shaped as much by atmosphere as by function.'

ericpetschek.com

In her homeland, a Björk summer is in bloom.

The National Gallery of Iceland is hosting two exhibitions celebrating the multi-faceted craft of the singer, musician, artist, conceptualist and fashion-forward being from another dimension.

‘Metamorphlings’ is a collection of masks created by James Merry, a Björk visual collaborator since 2009, many of them crafted for her tours and other projects. Echolalia presents three large-scale audiovisual installations. Two of those pieces, ‘Ancestress’ (a ‘lamentation… staged as a ritualistic procession of musicians andq dancers’) and nine-part choral work ‘Sorrowful Soil’, are elegies for her late mother, environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir. They were originally conceptualised around Björk’s 2022 album Fossora but are here ‘reimagined on a theatrical scale within a museum context for the first time’. Alongside those is a new piece, ‘Nerve Bloom’, offering a glimpse into the 60-year-old’s upcoming 11th album, her first studio collection since Fossora.

‘Through Björk, we celebrate brave and forward-thinking art that has, over the years, influenced the global cultural scene,’ says Lára Sóley, artistic director & CEO of Reykjavík Arts Festival, with the two exhibitions at the National Gallery ‘fill[ing] the spaces with an integration of music, craft, performance, technology and visual art’.

Describing ‘Nerve Bloom’, Björk says: ‘I don’t think of me as a visual artist. Because my heart is music. Everything I do comes from a sonic point of view. This is something I have called ‘sonic symbolism’, sound made visual, a reverse synaesthesia. When you listen to a song for the first time, it is like swallowing a whale, you need to feel the whole musical sculpture in one go. The structure of a song has always been extremely important to me. What shape it is. This is part of the craft of being a singer-songwriter... We are tune sculptors.’

Then, on 12 August 2026, there’s Echolalia: the rave. Björk hosts and DJs at the one-day event, coinciding with a solar eclipse, at Víðistaðatún in Hafnarfjörður. With the bill also including performances from Arca, Sideproject and Ronja, the rave marks the 40th anniversary of Smekkleysa (Bad Taste), the Icelandic collective and label that helped launch Björk’s omnivorous creativity.

Here, National Gallery of Iceland chief curator Pari Stave and Merry – an Englishman resident full-time in Iceland for 11 years – explain Björk’s big-time artistic sensuality.

Wallpaper*: Góðan daginn, Pari. What does ‘echolalia’ mean?

Pari Stave: The word refers to the repeating of words or phrases. It was a name given as a kind of umbrella title for the many different installations of Björk’s works.

W*: What was the idea behind Echolalia?

PS: Initially, Björk offered to show two video works, ‘Ancestress’ and ‘Sorrowful Soil’, that feature masks made by James. [Then] in time, she wanted to debut a new work, ‘Nerve Bloom’. As plans evolved further, she added videos of her live performances at Harpa from 2022 – collectively called Björk Orkestral – as well as single-channel videos made for certain songs – collectively called Avatars and Animations.

Taken together, the various installations and video works show the range of Björk’s creative collaboration with artists, some of whom she has worked with [during the course of] many years. It is important to note that she considers herself a singer-songwriter, but her reach extends into other media – often within the spirit of exploration and experimentation – by working with other artists.

W*: With ‘Ancestress’ and ‘Sorrowful Soil’, how are they ‘reimagined on a theatrical scale’?

PS: In the museum’s galleries, the scale of the video projections is cinematic, in the case of ‘Ancestress’, and the sound is optimised to the highest listening standards, so that in both installations the viewer has an immersive visual and aural experience of each work.

In ‘Sorrowful Soil’, each voice in a chorus of 30 choir members was individually recorded – in addition to Björk’s voice – and there is a speaker for each recording. So, as the viewers walk through the installation, they can hear each voice through a single, designated speaker, or hear the choir collectively, by standing in the centre of the room.

W*: What can you tell us about the piece based on ‘Nerve Bloom’, a new song from her next album?

PS: It’s an animation that combines analogue – traditional painting techniques – and technology: digital animation. Over a period of about seven months, Björk worked with the painter Natalia Kleszewska and the graphic artist Natalie Liu to create visual concept for the song. Paintings by Nathalia were animated by Natalie, using CGI technology.

The video components in the gallery include a layering of video, [such as] a large LED screen, a large-scale projection, and smaller projections showing details of the video on two-sided LED screens. The viewer is meant to view the installation from various angles but also align themselves with the centre of the video to observe the layering of images as they unfold.

W*:Takk fyrir for talking to me, James. What does your exhibition title ‘Metamorphlings’ signify?

James Merry: It’s combination of metamorphosis and -ling, a suffix often used for small creatures or beings. I've always tended to think of my masks as a family rather than isolated objects, connected through a kind of Linnaean evolutionary logic. Certain forms and motifs evolve from one mask to another, branching and mutating over time. So ‘Metamorphlings’ felt like an appropriate name, implying a small collection of shape-shifting creatures.

W*: You first met Björk in 2009 and began working with her as a research/personal assistant. What were some of your roles then?

JM: She had just finished the Volta tour when we first met and was in the early stages of developing what would later become Biophilia. So my role initially was as a research assistant, helping to gather and organise all the material she was absorbing that would eventually feed into that project.

W*: You started making masks for the Vulnicura tour. What were your brief/concept and materials for those masks?

JM: Björk’s visual direction centred on a sense of emotional emergency and the craft of embroidery as a form of repair, as well as a symbolic colour palette of healing lilac and urgent neon yellow. So I was really tapping into that and trying to create something that could function as a sort of protective veil – but at the same time feel romantic, organic and refined.

Many of those pieces were made while we were on tour. I would turn my hotel room into a studio and frantically try to create something new in the few days between each performance.

Putting together this retrospective made me fall in love with those pieces again. While I was restoring them, I could feel how they were made with such a burst of creative energy, so they got me feeling very nostalgic.

W*: Tell us, please, about the new mask you’ve created for ‘Metamorphlings’.

JM: The retrospective features over 80 of my masks, and I really wanted to include one new piece to debut at the opening. So I made a new work called Atenovx, as part of an ongoing series I am currently working on, inspired by Romano-Celtic archaeology of the later Iron Age. I had always been really fascinated by historical objects where timekeeping is embedded in the design – ways to track the cycles of the sun and the moon hammered into gold, and so on.

So I made this new piece to function both as a mask and as a working solar calendar, translating the cycle of the year onto the human face. Each month is marked with a gemstone, corresponding to the 12 months of our Julian calendar. The spring and autumn equinoxes align at the eyes, the winter solstice lies at the forehead and the summer solstice is represented by a pearl that rests in the mouth. A sequence of drilled holes marks each day of the year, through which a single pearl can be moved clockwise to track the passage of time.

W*: What is the magic of the mask?

JM: The ability to hide and reveal, both at the same time.

The National Gallery of Iceland, Fríkirkjuvegur 7, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland, until 20September. Tickets here. Rave information here

Certain names have shaped the current of design across the last century – designers who propelled mid-century modernism and postmodern provocation to Scandinavian craft and Japanese experimentalism. Those names have been immortalised in monographs that function as both physical histories of 20th- and 21st-century visual culture and beautifully crafted objects in their own right.

The titles listed below are an invitation to spend time inside a singular creative mind; together, they form an essential library for anyone who wants to understand how design arrived where it is today.

Seven essential books on the giants of 20th-century design

Paloma Wool was founded in 2014 by Paloma Lanna, and in its dozen years has steadily become something of a cult label. Having started primarily online, the Barcelona-based brand has gained fans globally, and in 2024 started showing its distinctive collections at Paris Fashion Week. After pop-up stores appearing regularly in various cities over the years, Paloma Wool is now establishing permanent spaces: last week, its store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles opened.

This is the brand’s fourth permanent location, after opening in New York, London and Barcelona. ‘Los Angeles has played a significant part in our story, so opening here felt like a natural evolution,’ says Lanna. ‘We had a temporary store on the same street two years ago, and from the very beginning, we felt at home in the neighbourhood. There was a real sense of comfort and belonging that made it difficult to imagine being anywhere else.’

Inside Paloma Wool’s Los Angeles store

The light-filled space was designed with longtime collaborator Max Milà, who has worked with Paloma Wool on other stores, each of which is a response to its unique setting rather than a replication of another. ‘This particular space immediately stood out because of its extraordinary natural light,’ says Lanna. ‘Depending on the time of day, the space feels and looks different, which brings a sense of movement and life to the experience. Even now, coming into the space each day feels like a genuine treat.’ The bright interior is stripped back, with its high ceilings exposed and white walls offering a contrast to lacquered black furnishings and metal fixtures, alongside bespoke lighting by Milà. It’s fitting for a brand whose pieces sit at the intersection of pretty and edgy, smart and relaxed. The overall effect echoes the DNA of Paloma Wool: pared-back yet featuring striking points of interest, and contemporary in a somehow timeless way.

The window of the Paloma Wool store on Barcelona’s Avenue Diagonal hosts installations by guest artists – most recently an intricate dollhouse by Petra Collins – and this tradition of creative collaboration continues at the LA store. A video piece by Carlota Guerrero shows live feeds from the store fitting rooms and the footfall outside on a series of screens, blurring the line between the public and the private. ‘What happens inside is visible from the outside, and what happens outside becomes visible from within, creating a continuous exchange between the two worlds,’ explains Lanna. Referencing both Guerrero’s personal photography practice and LA’s celebrity culture, ‘Retail Theatre’ is an unexpected upheaval of traditional window displays. Fittingly, to celebrate the store’s opening, the piece has been ‘activated’ this week by a series of familiar faces, including Isabelle Albuquerque, Rachel Sennott and Chloe Cherry.

Paloma Wool’s physical spaces are important ways of connecting with its community; as Lanna says, making ‘our online project tangible’. ‘While digital platforms have been essential to our growth, there is something irreplaceable about meeting people in person, sharing experiences, and creating meaningful interactions around the work,’ she says.

The unique space offers not just a backdrop for exceptional and interesting clothes, but Paloma Wool’s multihyphenate interests and unique perspective. ‘I want the space to be somewhere people enjoy spending time, rather than simply passing through. Whether someone is visiting with friends or simply enjoying a day to themselves, I hope they leave feeling they have had a meaningful and enjoyable experience,’ Lanna says. ‘More than anything, I hope people feel at ease here and leave with the sense that they have spent time in a thoughtful, warm, and inviting place.’

Paloma Wool, 8410 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles.

palomawool.com

Art deco architecture is as much a part of South Beach as sandy beaches and dancing on tables. The Delano Miami Beach has stood tall inside the same iconic building since 1947. After a six-year full-scale renovation, led by Elastic Architects, the latest reincarnation of the once hard-partying hotel – one of the most exciting recent hotel openings – brings its iconic luxury footprint back to Miami Beach with plenty of glamour and a more modern mindset that, while still convivial, puts wellness ever-so-slightly above late-night antics.

Wallpaper* checks in at Delano Miami Beach

What’s on your doorstep?

Located on Collins Avenue, the Delano sits in the middle of a stretch that’s seen the old guard flip – with The Shelborne by Proper opening last year and revamps of The Raleigh and the Shore Club (which soon fly the Auberge flag) coming down the pipeline. It’s also in a prime beachfront position, providing direct access to the Miami Beach Boardwalk and the Delano’s serviced beach area.

Who is behind the design?

The Delano is one of Miami’s most emblematic hotels. When it first opened, the sign read ‘nothing finer’. It also advertised air conditioning – a big deal back in the day; thankfully, now standard across the balmy Florida city.

Hotelier Ian Schrager, in collaboration with designer Philippe Starck, reignited the historic hotel into a sleek, scene-driven South Beach destination in 1995 and operated it for 25 years. The latest iteration, nay transformation, turned back the clock in some ways, honouring the hotel’s legacy, while also bringing it into the present. The design and management teams worked closely with the City of Miami Historic Preservation Division to stay on task. Aesthetically, there’s plenty to appeal to history buffs, from the terracotta floors emblazoned with the original emblem to the scene-stealing lobby, which shows off soaring columns and billowing fabric.

Despite its deep roots – and thoughtful choices that pay homage to its glam past – the Delano feels refreshingly on the pulse, thanks to its airy palette and impressive collection of works by Miami artists – including a mythical glazed stoneware relief by Nina Surel, oil paintings by Natalie Galindo and striking botanic sculptures by Alissa Alfonso that adorn the walls outside of Rose Bar.

The main pool area is now flanked by loungers and umbrellas, accented with lemon print underneath and playful fringe, plus a row of cabanas for VIP poolside hangs. Rooms are bright with crisp linens, light wood flooring and rugs evoking the soft sands below and large, ocean-facing windows. The dining concepts channel other vibe-driven destinations: the dynamic energy of Osaka, languid summers on Italy’s Mediterranean coastline.

The room to book

The Delano Miami Beach features 171 rooms and suites, decorated with crisp tonal hues, curved furnishings and oversized windows for gazing at the beach or the city skyline. For the ultimate in space and scenery, the swank 2,824 sq ft ocean-view penthouse offers unobstructed panoramas of the sandy shoreline and Atlantic waves from the three ensuite bedrooms, living and dining spaces and terrace.

If you’d rather soak in the social buzz, the two-storey poolside bungalows are the epitome of a Miami Beach holiday. Located just steps from the pool, each boasts a covered patio that effectively doubles as a cabana, allowing guests to enjoy food and beverage service without ever leaving the shade.

Staying for drinks and dinner?

It’s not a secret that Miami Beach is chock-a-block with great spots to eat and drink – a trio of them happen to reside at Delano Miami Beach, the result of a partnership with Paris Society, marking the group’s first restaurants in the United States. Gigi Rigolatto – a chic Italian eatery with outposts in Saint-Tropez, Paris, Dubai, Rome and Bodrum – brings its effortless elegance and coastal Italian cuisine to South Beach. Designed by Hugo Toro, the first-floor space, which extends from the air-conditioned dining room to the covered terrace, gleams with the sun-dappled warmth of plaster walls, carved wooden panels, archways and yellow Sienna marble. Signature dishes include seabream carpaccio, tomato salad, linguine alle vongole and grilled octopus.

On the fourth floor, at Mimi Kakushi, Elastic Architects and Pirajean Lees utilise wooden screens, textures, and hand-painted walls to transport Delano Members Club and hotel guests to Osaka, blending art deco-influenced design with modern dining. There’s an open sushi counter where chefs craft nigiri by hand as well as a menu of shareable Japanese plates such as tuna tartare topped with caviar, Wagyu and foie gras gyoza and miso black cod. The cocktail program, inspired by Sessue Hayakawa, celebrates the Japanese silent film star’s many on-screen characters through cinematic tipples and nonalcoholic options.

For a nightcap, the Rose Bar, just off the lobby, is back in all its glam glory, whether you belly up to the dusky-lit Rosso Lepanto marble bar for a Rose Old Fashioned or sip a Floral Negroni on one of the low-slung sofas that spill out into the lounge.

Where to switch off

Back in the Ian Schrager days, the basement was a nightclub. The glow-up, which taps into Miami’s wellness-oriented lifestyle rather than dance-till-dawn nights, replaces that more debaucherous after-dark fixture with a forthcoming wellbeing wing. There’s also a chic gym kitted out with tonal Technogym equipment and a fitness studio. Beachfront yoga sessions are also available to guests.

The verdict

Delano Miami Beach is a chic, grown-up – much-needed and welcome – addition to the South Beach scene. It’s a place where you can indulge in rosé by the pool, cocktails and late-night sushi. But there’s also a quieter emphasis on wellness. Guests might just as easily turn in early rather than stay out till dawn and rise for morning yoga. The service is friendly, warm, and young. Not inexperienced by any stretch, just vibrant and youthful. The Delano employs people who can match the fun, sunny energy of South Beach.

Book Delano Miami Beach, 1685 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139, United States. Rates: from $650

Each year, the Serpentine Summer Party is a highlight of London's social calendar. Held to celebrate the newly unveiled pavilion while raising funds for the gallery's year-round free programme, the evening has evolved into an all-encompassing work of art in its own right.

This year's edition, which took place on Tuesday 23 June, marked a new chapter for the annual fundraiser, with the architects behind the 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, Lanza Atelier, collaborating with New York-based artist and creative director Laila Gohar – fresh from her vegetable merry-go-round triumph at Salone del Mobile – to shape the evening's creative direction. Together, they conceived an immersive programme spanning architecture, furniture, food and performance, extending the pavilion beyond its role as a backdrop into the heart of the event.

Behind the scenes at the Serpentine Summer Party 2026

The Furniture

At the centre of the collaboration was Lanza Atelier's Spiral Bench, a modular seating system composed of individual timber elements that can be stacked, rearranged and expanded. Mirroring the geometry of the Mexico City studio's brick-walled pavilion, the benches also became stages for Gohar's culinary interventions, including servings of esquites and elotes. 'Like the spiral itself, an ancient symbol of creation, transformation and renewal, the bench grows organically through movement and conversation,' said the architects.

Inside the pavilion, Lanza Atelier also unveiled a limited-edition stool inspired by the distinctive curves of the Coco de Mer seed. Crafted from natural materials, the collectible piece continues the studio's ongoing exploration of organic form, artisanal production and nature-led design.

The Food

Meanwhile, Gohar's culinary programme brought an air of mischief and magic, with food 'appearing unexpectedly' throughout the pavilion in a sequence of edible encounters featuring corn, mole and chocolate. 'I've always been drawn to ingredients that carry entire worlds inside them,' she said. 'Somewhere between architecture, landscape, and banquet, the party becomes a living composition shaped by the people's movement.'

The party's guests – made up of leading figures from the worlds of art, architecture, fashion, design and beyond – discovered a corn station, mole and tamale bar, and chocolate bricks modelled on those used to construct the pavilion, alongside hibiscus, mango and guava sorbets. Signature drinks included ginger margaritas, Fire Palomas and jalapeño sodas.

Art Installations

Another highlight was The Weight of Air, a series of flowing silk fabric installations created by Gohar. Animated by the wind, the suspended forms echoed the pavilion's recurring spiral motif while introducing moments of movement throughout the site. 'Taking inspiration from the spiral and the serpentine line, the work uses fabric, air and motion to create a visual language of rhythm, movement and transformation,' explained Gohar.

Greeting guests on arrival, the installation acted as a welcoming gesture, accompanied by servings of aloo matar and warming chai, a subtle nod to Host Committee Chair Isha Ambani's commitment to championing Indian art, design and craft.

Continuing the playful mood, guests also got the chance to wander through the suspended yellow strands of Jesús Rafael Soto's Pénétrable BBL Jaune (1999; 2023 Edition). This immersive public installation by the Venezuelan kinetic artist is installed in the park next to the gallery and forms part of Serpentine's summer programme. 'It's everything Serpentine stands for: connecting artists, architects and audiences, here in the park, free and open to all,' said CEO of Serpentine, Bettina Korek.

While the pavilion architects have been increasingly involved in shaping the annual party, this collaboration marks the first time Serpentine has invited them to collaborate with an artist in bringing the Summer Party to life. In doing so, it further dissolves the boundaries between architecture, art, design and performance.

Nora Chipaumire (styled ‘nora chipaumire’) describes gadzi as an ‘organism’, a term she feels suits it better than ‘installation’. Live performance, sculpture, touch, sound, and moving images share one space, brought to life by people moving through it. ‘My organism holds energy,’ she says, explaining that the work is meant to be experienced physically, through the connection between body and space rather than as an object to view.

Presented as Tate Modern's Infinities Commission 2026, curated by Valentine Umansky and Francis Hardy, gadzi takes its name from gadziguru, the oldest and most powerful feminine presence in Shona cosmology, an indigenous African worldview. Drawing on the legends, stones, and soil of Zimbabwe, the work transforms Tate Modern’s Tanks into an immersive environment where visitors move through sculptural forms, sit on speakers embedded within them, and experience sound physically as it travels. Built from wood, wire, and cardboard, the monumental sculptures give new meaning to everyday materials. Over the past decade, Chipaumire's practice has increasingly focused on the stories and cosmologies of the Shona people, drawing on ancestral knowledge and looking beyond the colonial histories that shaped southern Africa.

Chipaumire rarely separates the physical from the philosophical and almost never speaks about the work as a collection of materials or disciplines. Instead, her work explores memory, landscape, and what it means to remain. At its core, gadzi is shaped by an understanding of the feminine rooted in ancestral belief, moving fluidly between installation and performance to give form to a philosophy that has long existed beyond ‘the very dominant Eurocentric ways in which we try to think about ourselves’.

Chipaumire is not interested in presenting the feminine as a metaphor but as a way of understanding the world, grounded in maturity, lived experience, and knowledge passed across generations. Now 61, she believes gadzi could only have come to life at this point in her career. ‘I'm old enough now to be able to tackle perhaps concerns that are outside of time, and also old enough as a woman to understand what is sacred about the feminine.’ She returns to this phrase almost instinctively, linking age not only to experience but to another way of understanding knowledge itself.

The same refusal to separate ideas from lived experience emerges when the conversation turns to sound. Chipaumire begins with the body: ‘Sound is vibration. It's breath. We are in sound as we breathe, as we speak. Every time we make our voice, and we open our throat, we are in sound, so this is a physical experience.’ Within gadzi, that physicality is carried by a monumental dub sound system embedded throughout the installation. Broadcast through ‘mountains of speaking wood’, the sounds of Chimurenga, both a revolutionary movement and Zimbabwe's celebrated musical tradition, meet the deep bass frequencies of dub. The handmade resonators acknowledge the ingenuity of African and African diasporic approaches to sound technology, where vibration is as significant as melody. ‘To me, sound is physical, is visceral, is the body, is inside of the body.’

Movement, for Chipaumire, is inseparable from sound and the act of listening itself; gadzi is experienced through the body before it is understood intellectually, allowing vibration, movement, and landscape to unfold together. Makeshift lights fashioned from repurposed petrol bottles cast a soft glow across the room, while moving images show the artist navigating the balancing rocks with care. ‘You can walk in and allow your heart to lead,’ she says. ‘This too is the highest form of thinking.’

On view until 23 August 2026, gadzi draws on Zimbabwe's balancing rocks to reflect on the longer histories of colonialism and extraction that continue to shape the present, but the commission refuses to be defined by absence or loss, turning its attention instead to what cannot be taken. ‘There are aspects of us that are not harvestable, that are not extractable, and it is this which I bring into this space. The refusal, the obtuseness to say, “And still we stand, proudly, with elegance.” You could not extract this beauty.’

Here, Chimurenga, literally meaning ‘revolution’, sits alongside dub and punk, allowing different histories of resistance to speak to one another through sound. ‘They are all sounds, different registers, different harmonisations of our collective no. Whether the dub coming from the New World, the Chimurenga coming from the old world, the punk coming from the centre of the so-called Commonwealth, they are all sounds, frequencies, volumes that are saying no.’

A series of live activations animate gadzi further with movement and sound. Tate Modern Lates on 26 June sees the commission spill beyond the East Tank with an evening of music, conversation, film, and workshops, followed by performances on 27 and 28 June. A monumental speaker installation, designed with Ari Marcopoulos and Kara Walker, occupies the Turbine Hall, celebrating the enduring legacy of sound systems within the museum.

Questions of identity give way to questions of power, asking not what it means to be African, Black or female, but how those identities came to exist in the first place. ‘These are constructions,’ she says. ‘We were the first resource to be extracted out of Africa. What is power? Is it the strength to extract and sell others, or is it this truth that we remain?’

Chipaumire is less interested in directing how the work should be read than in inviting audiences to move through it on their own terms, entering what she describes as an ‘energy exchange’ where understanding emerges through participation. ‘All the responsibility,’ she says, when asked what role art can play at a moment marked by displacement, extraction and environmental crisis. ‘The artist is the last intellectual, is the last philosopher who can tackle these issues.’

It’s a scorching day at Lacock Abbey, in the village of Lacock in Wiltshire, and, beneath the screeching of low-flying swifts, Martin Parr’s widow is in the National Trust property’s Manger Barn, discussing her husband’s final work. And his legacy.

‘This project, it really did resonate with him,’ Susie Parr says of ‘Lacock’, a series of portraits of English community and tradition, a year in the taking and curating, which the great photographer-documentarian completed shortly before his death at 73 on 6 December 2025. ‘He was also aware that he was not well. He kept saying, “I'm in the departure lounge." And this was a manageable, doable piece of work.

‘Very different from his fashion work,' Susie adds with a smile of these typical Parr portraits – vivid but unadorned – of shopkeepers and schoolchildren and scarecrows; of VE Day 80th anniversary parties and the Garden and Allotment Association Annual Flower Show; of prize-winning potatoes and best-in-class raspberries and a stout vicar bedecked in Union flags. ‘Martin was the most unlikely fashion photographer – he really hated fashion, actually! He really wasn't at all interested! But it did bring in money for the [charitable Martin Parr] Foundation.’

Across 2025, Parr travelled from the couple’s home in nearby Bristol to shoot in and around the abbey and the adjoining picture-perfect village. Susie and Dr Andy Cochrane – curator of ‘Lacock’ and of the abbey’s Fox Talbot Museum that’s hosting the year-long exhibition – think he must have visited around 30 times.

Parr was a photographer with an anthropologist’s eye, and Cochrane says that all his career-long themes ‘permeate through the work at Lacock: material culture; the daily life of people; and the conviviality, how people engage and get on with each other. That's all embedded in this photography.’

In multiple ways, the series is a carefully considered bookend to an extraordinary career. Parr had shot (briefly) in Lacock in 1988. As the one-time residence of scientist and photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77), Lacock Abbey is widely viewed as the home of photography, hence the National Trust’s on-site Fox Talbot Museum. And the new project became a perfect distillation of Parr’s perennial interest in what his wife calls 'the middle ground. He was drawn to the ordinary, day-to-day life of people, rather than the extremes of how people are behaving'.

Susie Parr and Dr Andy Cochrane tell Wallpaper* more.

W*: Susie, that 1988 visit to Lacock – how did that come about?

Susie Parr: We had been living in Wallasey in the early 1980s, and Martin did his [1983-85] work in [Merseyside seaside resort] New Brighton, The Last Resort, which was the work that shot him to fame. But he also got a lot of criticism for being a middle-class photographer photographing working-class communities.

So, he was thinking: ‘I need to photograph my own tribe.’ And we were thinking: ‘Where can we live to enable you to do this?’ I was the breadwinner at the time, and I got a job in Bristol. So we moved down here and he started that work. It was supper parties, cricket matches, private schools. Very different from the New Brighton work.

Visiting Lacock was part of that. He loved a summer fête and he came and photographed plant stalls, things like that, for a [1989, Thatcher-era] project about the middle classes called The Cost of Living. Those photos, some of which are in this exhibition, were for that project.

W*: So it was a kind of visual anthropology.

SP: Absolutely. He wasn't articulate about it. He just thought in images. He wouldn't be able to analyse his work in an intellectual way. He just had an anthropological approach to ordinary life.

Andy Cochrane: In one of the first meetings that we had at the foundation, Martin brought out an anthropological book that was written in the 1940s, with colour-saturated photography by John Hinde. It was about understanding a National Trust village, Luccombe in Somerset, as part of a Mass Observation project.

I think Martin always wanted to go there and photograph it, and then went instead to Chew Stoke [in Somerset for 1992 project A Year in the Life of Chew Stoke Village]. So there had [long been] a sense of trying to document a National Trust village.

W*: Did the villagers require much persuasion to let him into their homes?

AC: At first, a lot of people, if they're not into art or photography, were unaware of who Martin Parr is… But with Simon [Dunn], the vicar, we did a free screening of [2025 biographical documentary] I Am Martin Parr in St Cyriac's church and invited the village.

And, of course, as people were getting themselves photographed, and the foundation was printing them immediately and handing them back out to the village, it created a critical mass [of interest].

He was also keen to engage with community groups, the clubs, the church, the school. So he was going to all these events in the evening. He was in the yoga club and the photography club and the art club. And the pace that he worked was really impressive to see. He was moving at a pace that was a young man's game!

SP: He was so disciplined and hardworking.

W* And, apparently, disarming. As one of his clearly smitten subjects, Azar Watling of local business John Watling Bespoke Jewellery, says in the accompanying video showing in the museum, ‘he was a little bit cheeky’.

SP: His natural communication style was a bit to the point, blunt, no messing about, no small talk. But when he wanted to engage with people, he could be very funny and charming, with a little bit of banter. He could do that, but it wasn't his natural style.

W*: The village’s VE Day 80th anniversary celebrations in May 2025 must have been catnip for Martin, given everything it represents and the associated, flag-waving iconography.

SP: He did like a Union Flag, but he wasn't very happy about the way they'd been used recently, and all the St George's flags everywhere. He was always wary of the Brexit-y, Reform-y-type thing. But he was never politically critical of any group.

But flags were definitely an important iconography for him – there are so many photos of fetes with Union Jacks and bunting and everything like that. At his funeral, we recreated a country fête for the reception. We had lots of the kind of [food] from his photographs: sad cupcakes, rainbow-coloured cakes, lots of sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm.

W*: Did he like a cake to eat as well?

SP: He loved a cake! Favourite cake? Lemon drizzle, I’d say. Mine? I’m not a cake person, but... a nice fruitcake sometimes. He loved his cup of tea and a cake at 3.30pm. And the final picture in the [‘Lacock’ exhibition] book is his cup of tea and his plate with cake crumbs on it. For me, it’s a poignant full stop to the project.

W*: From a Lacock Abbey point of view – being the home of the beginning of photography – showcasing the final major commission from one of our greatest ever documentarians must feel particularly providential for the property and the National Trust.

AC: It's pretty neat and it’s pretty helpful. The [Fox Talbot] museum was set up in 1975. The National Trust didn't have the money for a museum then – doesn't now! – but they were helped by another internationally famous British photographer, Cecil Beaton. So last year was the 50th anniversary, and Martin was here at that time doing this project. And now with Martin, who’s bigger than Cecil, he’s set it up for the next 50 years.

It is so generous, for the village, the National Trust, and it's a gift to everyone to be able to see this work.

W*: How good a summation is this exhibition, in this place, of Martin’s interests, his eye, his instinct, his emotional feelings for Britain and its people?

SP: I was surprised when I saw it. It's actually very kind. And very different from [his other work]. Because he could have come in and done a number on the hordes of tourists who come to the Fox Talbot Museum. But he didn't. It’s a return to the much earlier, more elegiac way of working. More connection, more gentleness. So I think it's the perfect way to end for him.

W*: Do you mind if I ask, Susie, how emotional is it for you seeing this work displayed here? We're not that many months on from your husband's passing.

SP: I must say, I did get a bit choked when I was looking at the images to write my little introduction [in the book]. But I think I'm OK now. I'm sort of used to it.

I'm finding it really interesting to think about it, that he actually went beneath the façade of the model village to look at real people and real communities. So again, it's another thing to be very proud of about Martin, that he finished off in this way… This, for me, is a perfect rounding of the circle.

‘Lacock’ by Martin Parr, 27 June 2026 – 27 June 2027, Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire

nationaltrust.org.uk/lacock

It’s all about the collection. If we must be subjected to unwanted and extraneous objects to facilitate our digital lives – chargers, extension sockets, power packs, etc. – then let them at least be beautiful, harmonised and something that doesn’t look out of place in a calm desktop environment.

That’s the thinking behind two new productions from Daily Objects, Node and Loft (both currently available in India, not yet on the company’s US site). Designed by London-based industrial design agency Layer, the ecosystem offers up two different ways of charging. Node is a modular wireless platform, a desktop dock for a variety of different modules, available in either two- or three- bay configurations.

Node has four interchangeable modules, an array of functional but sculptural pieces that can be placed anywhere on the flat, puck-like charging surface and then used around the house. They include a Wireless Charging Phone Stand, Wireless Charging Disk, Apple Watch Charging Stand and Portable Lamp.

The intention is to distil charging needs down into a single-wire solution without compromising on flexibility. The phone stand has 25W fast charging and incorporates a 7800mAh battery, bringing a wireless and cordless overnight charging solution to the bedside table.

The disk is also fast-charge compatible but presents a more compact solution for earbuds, while there’s also a dedicated Apple Watch charging stand. Finally, Layer has added in a portable lamp, a lantern-like object with bright yellow carrying handle. An onboard battery provides eight hours of battery life away from the Node.

It’s joined by Loft, a desktop 65W charging station with twin plug sockets and twin USB-C outlets. The unit is available in four colours, Charcoal, Clay, Forest and Mandarin, all of which compliment the components in the Node system. Loft is designed to power four devices at once, including laptops and tablets. Ergonomically angled, it comes with a 1.5m braided cord with integral cable loop and a non-slip silicone base.

‘Charging your tech is one of the most repeated interactions in daily life, yet the products that enable it are often treated as background objects,’ says Layer’s founder Benjamin Hubert, ‘With Node and Loft, we wanted to bring clarity, flexibility and character to that experience and create a family of products to the fore, that work beautifully, feel intuitive to use, and establish a distinctive visual language for Daily Objects.’

DailyObjects.us, @DailyObjects_global, LayerDesign.com, @Layer_Design

This is the latest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s series spotlighting intriguing, innovative and industry-leading interior design.

Nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains in Sierra Madre, a 1947 adobe home – a traditional building method using sun-dried bricks of organic materials – has been reimagined. Removed from the noise and polish of Los Angeles, this neighbourhood is shaded by California oaks, eucalyptus and pine, and shares its hillside with bears. It's an unusual setting for a design story.

The home’s transformation began with a fire that destroyed much of the structure, leaving only the original adobe brick wall standing. Rather than rebuild from scratch, designer Kirsten Blazek of A1000XBetter chose to work with what remained.

‘The overall vision was to maintain as much of the original character and style of the home as possible, while making it more functional for modern living,’ she explains. New rooms were added – a kitchen, a primary suite, a family room – though the expansion was restrained. ‘We worked mainly within the original footprint,’ the designer notes, ‘only adding a small amount of square footage for the primary closet.’

On the original adobe side, the layout was left untouched. The hallway windows, original to the 1947 build and ‘one of [Blazek’s] favourite features’, were preserved. ‘I wanted the house to feel like a modern California hacienda,’ she says of her guiding aesthetic, ‘and embraced that through every colour choice and finish.'

That palette draws directly from the landscape. Dunn-Edwards paints in warm, grounded tones – including an exterior shade named ‘Wild Horses’ – echo the surrounding terrain and scrubland. ‘I very much gravitate to an earth-based palette,’ says Blazek, ‘and the location at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains made that feel completely natural.’

Recreate the mood

The interiors, meanwhile, speak to a lifelong passion. ‘I have a deep connection with the American Southwest and have long collected Native American and western-influenced art and objects,’ she says. Yet the rooms never tip into pastiche. Midcentury furniture – sourced from MidcenturyLA, Amsterdam Modern and Lawson-Fenning – grounds the collected pieces with clean, modern lines. Rugs from Pampa and Salam Hello add warmth underfoot; drapery by Zak and Fox frames the windows. ‘I never want my work to feel too referential,’ Blazek reflects. ‘I love midcentury lines, so there's a pleasing blend of both genres throughout.’

Among her favourite moments is the dining room fireplace – original to the house, but updated with dimensional tile from Lofa Tile. Nearby, a framed print by artist Mark Maggiori anchors the wall. ‘It's one of my favourite pieces,’ she says. ‘I was grateful to finally find the perfect place for it.’

Between the ancient craft of adobe and the clean geometry of midcentury design, this renovation represents both preservation and reinvention – a modern hacienda rooted in its land, its past and the strength of Blazek’s vision.

A new private home draws on the drama and natural feel of the Karijini National Park, set within the vast, open landscapes of Western Australia. The project, fittingly titled Karijini House, was designed by Tenille Teakle, design director at Studio Gritt. Her goal? 'To create a home that offers the same sense of solitude and connection to nature [as the national park],' she explains.

Explore a house inspired by Karijini National Park

The property is located in the Perth suburb of Wembley Downs. Inspired by the materiality, tactility and wild feel of the Karijini nature, the 409 sq m house (spanning two above-ground levels and a basement) features 7m-high rammed-earth walls and large glass windows that connect it to the outdoors at every turn.

Explaining the connection between her inspiration and the home's context and reality, Teakle writes: 'Horizontal banding in the imperfect and damaged face brick (weathered by age) evokes the carved Karijini rockfaces. The undulating texture of the rammed concrete walls echoes the tactility of the rockface. Burnished concrete floors and soffits are reminiscent of blackened sand.

'Upstairs the lighter hemp render and palette replicate the experience of re-emerging onto the plains from a hike down the gorge, being bathed in natural daylight, no longer in the dark and dank and mysterious. Large, banded iron boulders feature as architectural monuments, sparking curiosity and storytelling.'

The designer and her team sought to craft a home that feels like a sanctuary, a solitary cocoon, cool and calm – making the everyday appear like a holiday, even in Karijini House's dense urban and suburban broader setting. '[It evokes] the experience of traversing a gorge,' she says.

The creative team took into account sustainability principles, as well as questions around provenance and longevity. As a result, the home features recycled rammed concrete walls, repurposed second-hand local materials, and a rich green garden of native planting that allow the local wildlife to thrive.

Teakle highlights: 'To distil the Karijini experience into identifying features, they would be scale, grandeur, light and shade, horizontal banding and privacy.'

@gritt_studio

It has been 60 years since the work of Welsh-born, America-residing painter Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010) was exhibited in the UK. Born in 1916 in Llandudno, Sleigh found recognition for her arresting, realist works in her lifetime, yet never achieved the recognition of her peers.

It is an oversight Daniel Malarkey is keen to put right with his solo exhibition of Sleigh’s works, currently on show in Bloomsbury, London. The paintings here span the length of Sleigh’s career, tracing the development of a distinctive style that nodded to classical traditions but was idiosyncratically Sleigh’s own.

Studying at Brighton School of Art in the 1930s, Sleigh noticed the double standards enshrined in the education system early on, particularly in the life-drawing classes, which allowed female, but not male, nudes. She was to internalise these prejudices, reflecting and subverting them throughout her career.

Upon moving to London to study art, Sleigh met her future partner, the critic Lawrence Alloway, and relocated to New York City with him in 1961, where she remained until her death in 2010. There, the couple became part of a vibrant artistic circle, with members including Joan Semmel, Alice Neel, Miriam Schapiro, and Agnes Martin. Sleigh took a wider interest in the feminist artist movement, taking crucial roles in feminist collaboratives and considering a new representation of women.

While she enjoyed painting still lifes and landscapes, Sleigh was primarily a portrait painter, of herself, her partner Alloway, whom she painted more than 50 times, and group portraits of female artists, including Agnes Denes, Nancy Spero, and Howardena Pindell. Her male nude paintings were controversial, yet in their intimacy and great respect for their subject, they were entirely unlike anything else being created at the time. She noted: ‘I am primarily a portrait painter. In the past, portraiture and the nude were usually separate genres, but new expectations have been inspiring to me.’

Alongside a selection of still lifes, landscapes and a self-portrait now on show in London, there is The Bridge, created by Sleigh in 1963. In the flesh, her reclining nude comes brilliantly to life, eschewing idealism and embracing the female form in all its real beauty.

Sylvia Sleigh at Malarkey, 48 Russell Square, London, WC1B 4JP, until 15 July 2026

danielmalarkey.com

A new monograph published today makes the case for Miyako Ishiuchi as one of the most important photographers of the modern era. Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces, edited by Lena Fritsch and Yasufumi Nakamori, spans five decades of the artist’s career while placing unusual emphasis on Ishiuchi’s own voice. Alongside extensive reproductions of her work, the volume includes extracts from her earlier writings, an in-depth interview conducted by Fritsch and a newly commissioned essay by the photographer herself.

Born in 1947 and raised in Yokosuka, a Japanese port city shaped by the presence of an American naval base, Ishiuchi emerged within a photography world that was overwhelmingly male-dominated. She became one of the few women of her generation to achieve international recognition, developing a practice that challenged conventional approaches to documentary photography.

At the heart of Ishiuchi’s work lies the premise that history reveals itself through surfaces. Rather than documenting events, she photographs the traces they leave behind – scars on skin, worn clothing, crumbling apartments, lipstick tubes, dentures. In her images, objects and body parts become repositories of memory, carrying the imprint of lives that might otherwise go unrecorded.

Her breakthrough came with ‘Yokosuka Story’ (1976-77), a series made upon returning to the city of her childhood. Rather than producing a straightforward documentary account, Ishiuchi photographed streets, buildings and neighbourhoods marked by the proximity of the US naval base. She followed it with ‘Apartment’, a study of ageing interiors and decaying architecture that earned her the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award in 1979.

In the 1990s, Ishiuchi turned her attention to women’s bodies, producing close-up photographs of surgical scars and other physical marks – records of experience inscribed on flesh. This was followed by ‘Mother’s’, made after her mother’s death, in which shoes, dresses, cosmetics and dentures become vehicles for exploring grief.

Two later series extended this logic from the personal to the historical. For ‘Hiroshima’, Ishiuchi photographed the clothing and personal belongings of atomic bomb victims. Her focus was not the disaster itself but its intimate residue.

A similar sensitivity informed a project commissioned by the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. Ishiuchi photographed the Mexican artist’s most personal possessions – the corsets that supported her damaged spine, the dresses that became part of her public image, the medicines that sustained her and the cosmetics used to construct her iconic appearance. Kahlo’s belongings had been sealed away by Diego Rivera following her death in 1954 and remained hidden from public view for half a century; it was fitting that Ishiuchi – an artist preoccupied with what objects carry across time – was the one to photograph them.

Traces is the book that Ishiuchi’s career has always deserved.

The annual Cartier Prize for Watchmaking Talents of Tomorrow, spotlighting the best up-and-coming talent in the watchmaking industry, is a savvy indicator of who will be disrupting the industry in a decade.

For the prize’s 2026 iteration, the watchmaking apprentices and technicians were asked to create a watch inspired by the movements of a pendulum as it swings backwards and forwards, for the theme ‘Shifting the balance: Reading and understanding time differently’.

The students, from Switzerland, France and Belgium, took a non-traditional approach to the topic, with the 12 finalists developing their concepts over three months, supported throughout by their mentors.

The final designs were considered by a jury comprising Roy Davidoff, a specialist in vintage watches and co-founder of Roy & Sacha Davidoff SA; Pascale Lepeu, director of the Cartier Collection; Nathalie Marielloni, curator at the Musée international d'horlogerie; Pascal Ravessoud, vice-president of the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, watchmaking specialist and collector; and Kari Voutilainen, independent watchmaker. They selected six winners – three watchmaking apprentices and three technicians – who will receive a Cartier watch, with the first prize winner in each category also offered an internship with Cartier.

Aymeric Peters from Belgium won first prize in the Apprentice Watchmakers category, with the winning design meditating on suspended time. Joint second prize was awarded to Layla Sluysmans and Edouard Nicod, who considered ideas on slowing down and opposites, respectively.

Arthur Choquet won the first technician’s prize, with a creation that intertwined the importance of architecture throughout. Adam Deroche scooped second place, asking what would happen if time stood still, while Adrien Stefenelli took third prize for unpicking the echo.

For Cartier, the award is an essential part of supporting and mentoring young people in their passions. ‘This award is very significant to Cartier, as the maison has always felt it had a responsibility to inspire vocations and nurture talent in order to pass on its vision of watchmaking and its dedication to craftsmanship,’ says Karim Drici, Cartier chief operating officer. ‘It is exciting to see the passion of these young watchmakers: the competition provides a space for free expression and emotional exchange, where technical expertise, creativity, and innovation meet. ‘

Drici adds: ‘The prize, first launched in 1995 by the Cartier Watchmaking Institute and dedicated to young watchmaking students, is a direct expression of that commitment. It allows us to stand alongside those who want to pursue this career and will shape the watchmaking of tomorrow.

‘Through this prize, we want to give young watchmakers the opportunity to express themselves fully, from design all the way through to creating a timepiece. The goal is not only to showcase their technical skills but also their creativity, because both will define the future of watchmaking. Above all, the prize is about enriching their professional training. Observing these young talents makes us particularly confident for the future. Most are around 18-20 years old – and yet they demonstrate remarkable concentration, commitment, and maturity.’

cartier.com

Leica introduced the SL-System in 2015, an evolution of the classic L-Mount with a full-frame sensor and enough sophistication and quality to satisfy even the most demanding professional user. At the same time, the SL-System has proved an effective gateway into the Leica universe for those looking to elevate their photography and videography.

This is the new SL3-P, the latest SL-System upgrade, which is being launched alongside two new lenses, the Summilux-SL 50 f/1.4 ASPH. and APO-Macro-Elmarit-SL 100 f/2.8. Taken together, they offer an unbeatable and hugely flexible package that stays true to the Leica ethos while also prioritising ease of use and minimalist design.

A new 44-megapixel BSI full-frame sensor is paired with a new autofocus system, giving the camera the ability to shoot images at up to 176 megapixels, with a vast ISO range (50 to 200,000) to facilitate low-light photography. The autofocus blends phase detection, depth mapping and contrast detection, for instantaneous focus.

As a result, the Leica SL3-P can shoot continuously at up to 40 frames per second with full autofocus. It also supports 8K video, including the industry standard 8.1K Open Gate format and can produce 4K slow-motion footage at 120 frames per second.

The new camera and lenses are manufactured in Germany; they don’t depart from the firm grip of the Leica aesthetic, although on this particular occasion the red Leica logo is conspicuous by its absence. The body is metal, weather-resistant, and finished in sober black. L-Mount capability gives the SL3-P incredible flexibility, with the choice to use not just Leica’s own lenses but compatible glass from alliance partners.

Taking and managing photographs is handled by Leica’s crisp UI and the Leica Fotos App, which connects to the camera via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB-C. The unit can also be tethered to Lightroom Classic, or via Adobe’s cloud, further expanding the ways in which content can be managed and processed.

The Summilux-SL 50 f/1.4 ASPH is billed as the ‘world’s most compact autofocus lens with this focal length and a lens speed of f/1.4’, with a length of 75.5mm. It’s joined by the new APO-Macro-Elmarit-SL 100 f/2.8 macro lens, capable of delivering outstanding detail thanks to its close focus distance of 30cm. The camera is available now, with lenses coming later in the year.

Leica SL3-P, £5,150.00 / €5,990 (camera only)
Leica Summilux-SL 50 f/1.4 ASPH, £3,890.00 / €4,500.00
Leica APO-Macro-Elmarit-SL 100 f/2.8, £2,110.00 / €2,450.00
Leica-Camera.com, @Leica_Camera

Amble is a new mobility company out of Portugal, assembled by a team with a diverse range of specialism and a passion for industrial and mobility design. The team of four includes hotelier and entrepreneur José António Uva, industrial designer Julian Hoenig, Michael Tropper of London-based creative studio forpeople and Adrien Roose, one of the co-founders of e-bike manufacturers Cowboy.

Together, the four founded Amble as a bridge between off-road, quadricycle-style vehicles like golf buggies and fully street-legal vehicles for short-range mobility in small communities. Their debut product is the Amble One, a stripped-down, ultra simple electric buggy that’s also fully legal for road use in both the US and EU.

Amble One is built on a modular platform, so the passenger version you see here can be simply modified for cargo, light commerce and other use cases. The new company’s ambition is to have vehicles on the road for 2027, starting with hospitality orders with personal vehicles available the following year. The target start price is €20,000 / $25,000 plus local taxes.

The Amble One follows a long tradition of beach cars, island transport and remote mobility requirements. Rugged tyres give it light off-roading ability – perfect for gravel tracks and sandy lanes – while the canvas-toppped open framework is evocative of the classic Mini Moke and contemporary seaside-themed quadricycles like the Citroën Ami Buggy and Fiat Topolino.

According to Roose, ‘cars are engineered for speed, distance and efficiency. Yet many journeys are short, and for those journeys the car is often too big, too complex and too expensive. Amble is our answer: a new kind of electric vehicle designed for short-range mobility, where the journey becomes part of the experience.’ It’s not hard to imagine a fleet of Amble’s at António Uva’s own destination resort, the 780-hectare São Lourenço do Barrocal in Alentejo.

Then there’s the name, implying a journey without urgency and the opportunity to take in more of your surroundings. ‘Amble One is built to embody that idea in its open, simple design, with no unnecessary separation between interior and exterior, people and place,’ says Julian Hoenig, ‘No doors to close you in, no unnecessary screens to pull you away. It is about the people on board and how they enjoy the world around them.’

Michael Tropper describes the design approach as a holistic one, encompassing not just the way the materials – aluminium, leather, cotton and a cork-clad steering wheel – will patinate over time, but also the way in which the vehicle sounds and feels. ‘We believe that when you slow down, the world opens up, and your relationship to everything around you changes,’ he says.

Hospitality destinations eager to take a first bite include Amangiri in Canyon Point, Six Senses Residences Loire Valley and the Caribbean island of Mustique. ‘The best hospitality properties obsess over every guest’s touchpoint. Amble was built with the same thinking: a vehicle where the journey is part of the experience,’ says António Uva.

DriveAmble.com, @DriveAmble

Creating a make-up look is much like creating an outfit – you start with one element and build it out from there: lipstick or shoes; eyeshadow or jacket, etc. Yet the starting point for the world’s most famous living make-up artist, Pat McGrath (behind countless runway looks for major houses, from Louis Vuitton to Maison Margiela and Marc Jacobs, and founder of Pat McGrath Labs), is an unexpected one: the lip line.

‘Every look I have ever created on the Louis Vuitton runway begins with the lip line,’ says McGrath. ’It is where precision becomes art.’ No surprise, then, that her latest launch as creative director of Louis Vuitton Beauty is the LV Crayon, a lipliner that is shaped like the brand’s signature monogram flower and enhanced with peptides to smooth and plump lips.

Designed to be worn with the brand’s previous launches – the LV Rouge lipstick and LV Baume lip balm – the liners come in ten different shades, ranging from 190 Beige Atlas (a beige-brown inspired by the sun-warmed patina of an ancient map) to 896 Monogram Rouge (a deep bordeaux developed by blending a classic red with the brand’s signature monogram brown). Other notable shades in between include 193 Sépia Panorama, a deep, universal chocolate; 390 Pink Aurora, an electric magenta; and 490 Plum Comet, a rich purple with dark red undertones.

When it comes to wearing the pencil, McGrath recommends creating a look she calls ‘Blur Illusion’, which, she says is her ‘love letter to the lip. It is imperfect, it is romantic, and it is entirely addictive. Once you try it, there is no going back.’ To create, simply pair your preferred neutral lipstick with the corresponding liner drawn just beyond the natural lip line, then softly blur with a brush or finger at the edges to create a diffused finish. Another of her suggestions is combining one of the collection’s brown or nude liners with a pink gloss to create a classic 1990s lip, which McGrath calls ‘the greatest lip moment in history’.

No matter how it’s worn, the collection is, for McGrath, an extension of what she’s been doing with Louis Vuitton beauty since the beginning. ‘I have always believed that the most powerful tools in any make-up artist's kit are the ones that enhance without overpowering. The LV Crayon shades were built from that philosophy – the finest nudes and rosewoods, each one chosen with absolute precision, anchored by a fearless edit of iconic LV reds that bring the unexpected and deliver the drama.’

Imagine the Barbie Dream House was designed by an experimental Hungarian studio – the result might look something like Remise Rosa, a 2,500 sq m permanent timber complex in Zurich, conceived by Budapest-based Hello Wood.

The destination occupies a formerly abandoned railway site, breathing new life into it across three levels of open-air, year-round space comprising a restaurant, a beer garden, entertainment areas and relaxation spaces. Clad in an immediately arresting rosy pink, the structure makes no attempt to blend in – nor should it.

Behind the visual intrigue lies a rigorous technical framework. With Remise Rosa, the studio set out to demonstrate the extent of what timber can achieve in an urban environment. The entire structure is built from CLT (cross-laminated timber), chosen for its sustainability credentials – renewable, durable and well-suited to long-term urban use. Every component was manufactured to millimetre precision using CNC-based prefabrication, a process in which building elements are designed digitally and fabricated off-site before final assembly – allowing the entire complex to come together in just five months.

Hello Wood has been active in Zurich since 2019, steadily shaping its neighbourhoods through projects including Urban Surf, a timber-clad surfing venue inspired by coastal landscapes; June & Julie, a seasonal pop-up bar blending architecture with nature; and Fräulein Holle, a public installation inspired by the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

But Remise Rosa represents something more. For CEO András Huszár, it is ‘the culmination of [the studio's] journey in the market – a permanent landmark where architecture is not merely the backdrop to a business, but its heart and soul’: ‘[It shows] what is possible when timber architecture meets a truly visionary business goal.’

‘People feel special when they enter Remise Rosa; it's a space designed to bring out their inner child,’ adds lead architect Balázs Szelecsényi. ‘The project proves that visionary architecture can inspire, strengthen community and also be good for business.’

The space is unabashedly photogenic, turning heads and inviting exploration, and a reminder that serious architecture and genuine joy are far from mutually exclusive.

One of Airbus’ five BelugaST aircraft has been moved from the company’s industrial flight line to the Aeroscopia Museum in Toulouse, ending a working life that began in 1995. The aircraft, an A300-600ST registered as F-GSTD, will become a permanent exhibit at the museum, joining Concorde, the Super Guppy and the A380.

Airbus’s BelugaST joins Toulouse’s aviation hall of fame

Developed to replace the Super Guppy, the BelugaST became one of the most recognisable aircraft in commercial aviation. Its bulbous upper fuselage, short cockpit section and rounded nose gave it the unmistakable profile of a beluga whale – a resemblance Airbus leaned into with the aircraft’s name. For aviation enthusiasts, it has long occupied a special place in the spotting hierarchy: not the fastest, rarest or most glamorous aircraft, but one of the most rewarding to see.

The aircraft was built for a specific job: carrying wings, fuselage sections and other large components between Airbus sites across Europe. The fleet helped support the company’s move towards higher production levels, with each aircraft able to carry a payload of 40 tonnes – roughly the weight of an adult humpback whale.

Aircraft F-GSTD turned 27 years old on 18 December 2025. Its arrival at Aeroscopia follows Airbus’ announcement earlier this year that the BelugaST fleet would be retired. From mid-2027, component transport will be handled solely by the larger BelugaXL fleet, which already serves 11 Airbus sites around Europe.

The aircraft’s career extended beyond Airbus logistics. In 1997, a BelugaST set a world record for the largest payload carried by air, transporting a chemical tank for a merchant ship. Two years later, another aircraft in the fleet carried Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People from Paris to Tokyo. The BelugaST was also used to transport the Columbus module for the International Space Station, large telecommunications satellites and, in 2003, three Airbus Helicopters rotorcraft on a 25-hour charter flight to Melbourne.

aeroscopia.fr

It has been 11 years since Ilse Crawford launched her first collaboration with Ikea, marking a new chapter in the Swedish retailer's relationship with independent designers. Called 'Sinnerlig', the collection of cork and natural-fibre homeware translated Crawford's human-centred design approach into products available at Ikea's scale, and scooped her a 2016 Wallpaper* Design Award in the process. While some pieces from that first collection remain in production – including the popular bamboo pendant lamp – many sold out quickly, becoming collectors' items that now command several times their original price on resale sites.

Now, Crawford revisits the partnership with ‘Halgatt’, a pair of table lamps made from ceramic, linen and brass. Rendered in the earth-toned materials Crawford describes as 'classic', the designs embody the visual warmth and tactility that have long been hallmarks of her work.

One comprises a white stoneware block with a matching linen shade – square and architectural, tone-on-tone. The other pairs a dark cylindrical ceramic base with a beige linen shade. Both feature neat brass dimmer switches on their side. It’s the sort of understated design that you can imagine fitting into any interior, which, as Crawford explains, was her intention.

‘When I design lamps, I want them to bring warmth and life to a room,’ the designer reflects. ‘The challenge is to capture a classic's qualities – the right proportions, choice of materials and shade, and a timelessness that makes the lamp always feel relevant. My inspiration for “Halgatt” comes from how we live our lives. The lamps have a versatility that supports the decor rather than dominating it – and are just as suitable in the living room as in a dining room, a bedroom or a work area.’

Crawford, who began her career as the founding editor of Elle Decoration before establishing Studioilse in London, has built an international reputation for designs that prioritise human experience. From furniture collections and homeware to hospitality projects including Cathay Pacific's acclaimed airport lounges, her work is guided by a belief that good design should support everyday life through care, comfort, trust, soul, dignity, generosity and resourcefulness.

Writing in Wallpaper's February 2025 issue, Crawford reflected on these values: 'We believe that design is a tool for building new and better models for life and living. In the studio, we think about how we can “elevate the elemental”, by which we mean prioritising the tactility of the things we touch daily, optimising natural light and celebrating natural materials to support humane experiences.'

The Ikea x Ilse Crawford ‘Halgatt’ collection is available online and in UK stores, with the beige/brown ceramic lamp retailing at £35 and the white ceramic lamp retailing at £25.

In 1951, photographer Bob Mizer published the first issue of his quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. Posing as a bodybuilding guide, to comply with the strict obscenity laws of the time, Mizer’s richly illustrated production was one of the first aimed at a gay, male audience.

Inside, photographs of male bodybuilders were presented as artworks, rooted in realism, with each image accompanied by the corresponding model’s real name, age and vital statistics. An eclectic cultural canon launched the careers of artists and celebrities, including Tom of Finland, whose first drawings were published in Physique Pictorial’s pages, and George Quaintance and Dom Orejudos, whose work sat alongside early photographs of model and actor Joe Dallesandro and fitness coach Jack LaLanne.

The magazine, which ran for 39 years, has left a lasting impact, with artists including David Hockney and Robert Mapplethorpe citing it as an inspiration for their own work. In its celebration of the male body from a pop culture niche, it quietly and defiantly normalised a sensual male beauty.

Now, JW Anderson is the latest to pay homage, presenting an exhibition, ‘Spartacus,’ at his Soho, London store. The name is taken from the chosen pseudonym of the magazine’s illustrator, who was required to adopt a false identity – their true identity remains unknown.

JW Anderson has chosen 40 of Spartacus’ works, once privately owned by Mizer, and now able to view throughout the rest of Pride Month, up to 6th July.

JW Anderson presents: ‘Spartacus, Bob Mizer’s Pictorial Physique’ at the Soho, London boutique until 6 July

Lest you forget, Toyota’s origins lie in industrial weaving and textile manufacture. The company was built around Sakichi Toyoda’s automatic loom, invented in 1924, and it wasn’t until 1933 that the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works set up an automobile division. Toyota is now the largest auto maker in the world, a position it has held since 2008, innovating in both automotive and production technology.

In recent years, despite its early dominance of the hybrid car market (Toyota had sold over 15 million hybrids by the turn of this decade), the company has been a little lacklustre when it comes to committing to EVs.

Nevertheless, it hasn’t stopped turning out conceptual mobility visions, with urban areas a special consideration. From the tiny Toyota Land Hopper revealed at the 2023 Japan Mobility Show to the playful Kids Mobi concept shown two years later, Toyota seems committed to re-shaping the world of personal transport.

So where better to explore the interaction between next-generation mobility and people than in your own test laboratory? Woven City is a purpose-designed community in Japan’s Shizuoka prefecture, located close to Mount Fuji.

Described by the company as ‘a real-world test course for mobility innovation’, the ultimate aim is for this modest complex to serve as a place where Toyota’s experiments in mobility, autonomy, robotics and AI can be tried out in a full scale ‘live’ environment.

Comprising of clusters of offices and apartments on a triangular plot, Woven City is now in its initial phase. The idea for the complex stems from Toyota’s planned transition from a conventional car maker into an all-encompassing mobility company, a move it announced back in 2018.

The Woven City complex was unveiled at CES Las Vegas in 2020. The site was once home to the Toyota Motor East Japan Higashi-Fuji plant, once home to production of the first Toyota Century, the company’s enduring flagship (soon to become a more standalone entity). Today, it is overseen by a dedicated sub-company, Woven by Toyota.

Residents will be known as Weavers, while workers from Toyota and partner companies, startups and entrepreneurs will live and work alongside each other, part of a process known as kakezan, or multiplication, here meaning ‘the successful collaboration of diverse industries and individuals.’

Phase one began last Autumn, with 50 households currently occupied out of a total of around 300. Next up is the Inventor Garage, a hub/incubator space that Toyota hopes will be a cradle for next generation products, services and collaborations.

Right now, you can ride on the e-Palette autonomous micro bus,or see the diminutive Guide Mobi shifting goods. This ‘medium-sized, mid-speed autonomous transport robot’ is the modern equivalent of a mule, with the idea that autonomous systems will eventually co-exist with conventional road traffic and pedestrians.

Of course, the name Woven City is also closely linked to Toyota’s heritage - the company maintains working looms in the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology.

As the population of Woven City increases, Toyota hopes to catalyse innovation across four key areas - People, Goods, Information and Energy – with formal and informal partnerships taking technology into new and innovative directions.

Ultimately, Woven City will be the contemporary equivalent of a massive loom, knitting together various strands of today’s technological innovations into a cohesive whole.

Woven.Toyota

Waves crash against the side of the boat as the sun slips behind the clouds. Ahead, the jagged wall of mountains that frame our basecamp at Nusfjord Village & Resort fade into a distant smudge on the horizon. Our lines are cast sixty metres below the surface, each of us decked out in windproof flotation suits, weathering the choppy swell of the Vestfjorden in search of dinner.

Whatever we catch will be cooked by the chef back at the resort, but for me – a vegetarian and somewhat reluctant angler – I’m more interested in Svein, the fisherman guiding our trip who has been navigating these Arctic waters for the best part of sixty years. From the brine-scrubbed deck of Elltor, our 60-year-old fishing boat, he reels off stories that read like a Mark Jenkin plotline; weeks spent toiling on storm-tossed seas – all that rigging, baiting, icing. I ask about the biggest catch of his career. ‘A whale,’ he offers, casually, as if describing his breakfast.

What to see and do in Nusfjord, Norway

Fishing has been the lifeblood of the Lofoten Islands since the Viking Age. This archipelago of spindly crags that stretches into the Norwegian Sea from its tether to northern Norway once drew up to 30,000 seasonal fishermen during the region’s annual cod migration. Today, that number is much smaller, but the economic shortfall has been plugged by a recent boom in tourism. It’s no mystery why; so otherworldly are Lofoten’s landscapes that Norse mythology claims they were shaped by feuding trolls.

Between the eagle-scoured peaks of the region’s rugged mountains and the glassy fjords shadowed by orcas, it’s also one of the premier places on the planet to witness the northern lights, which the ancients believed were lit green by supernatural warrior women, the Valkyries.

Though while it may be nature that draws most people here, the islands’ bubbling cultural scene is starting to summon a different kind of traveller. Not least in Nusfjord, where a former salt house has been transformed into Salteriet, a contemporary art gallery displaying the work of HM Queen Sonja alongside a rotating roster of Norwegian and international artists. This year, the resort’s creative momentum accelerates as Stockholm’s Fotografiska takes over Nusfjord for a landmark photography exhibition ahead of the institution’s permanent opening in Oslo in 2027.

Founded in 2010, Fotografiska have established galleries in Stockholm, Berlin, Shanghai and Tallinn, each guided by the uniting belief that photography is the most influential, accessible and inclusive art form of our era. In Nusfjord, the exhibition is split across two historic sites. Across the ground floor of the village’s Salteriet gallery – where roe was once salted and dried – Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi presents A faraway shining star, twinkling in hand, a series of works that zone in on the beauty in life’s small moments, our temporality and oneness with nature. In a place like Lofoten, where people have lived at the mercy of nature for centuries, these works have a resonance that goes beyond their frames.

Elsewhere, in an old power station filled with relics from bygone times – vintage maritime radio transmitters, heavy-duty dials, and bulky cathode-ray fishfinders –Elizaveta Porodina’s project The Wall People features uncanny, dreamlike images that speak to the region’s mythological mystique. ‘It was the contrasts that struck me most,’ noted Caroline Krefting, owner of Nusfjord Village & Resort. ‘The rawness of nature against the refinement of art, the silence of the mountains meeting the pulse of human creativity.’

Creativity is everywhere in this peaceful pocket of the Arctic, from the made-over ‘robru’ fisherman huts to the sculptural spa built by the Oslo School of Architecture and Design that mimics the rocks it rests on. It shows up in the kitchen, too, thanks to a programme of culinary take-overs that invites global chefs to interpret the Arctic landscape on the plate. This May, for example, Swedish chef Niklas Ekstedt took advantage of the region’s famous midnight sun to create a four-day culinary immersion where guests were invited to join him and his team to fish, forage and cook together over fire.

This cultural boom is spilling out into other parts of the islands, too. To the east, the village of Henningsvær has repurposed its industrial heritage: an old caviar factory now operates as KaviarFactory, a sleek contemporary art gallery housing works by Warhol, Munch, and Melgaard, while Trevarefabrikken, a former fish processing plant, has found new life as a vibrant gig venue and creative hub (home to the popular Trevarefest music festival every July).

If you’re travelling by car, Artscape Nordland has five site-specific sculptures dotted across the islands and embedded in the landscape. The regional renaissance is set to grow later this year with the debut of Skrei in Storvågan, a museum dedicated to the deep cultural impact of the ‘fish that built Norway’, the Arctic cod. Masterminded by LPO Arkitekter, it marks Northern Norway’s most ambitious museum project to date, cementing the archipelago’s status as a top-tier cultural destination.

For the Vikings who once navigated these shores, the world was inherently enchanted. They didn’t seek salvation from the landscape or escape from strife. Instead, they marvelled at it and found purpose in responding to it. That spirit is alive and well in Lofoten, where nature and culture are parts of the same story, inextricably linked. Back on deck, the wind bites as Svein turns us around.

As we pull into Nusfjord’s colourful harbour, it’s clear that Lofoten is no longer just a place people come to witness the sublime expanse of nature. It is also a place to witness humanity answering back. As Bárbara García, chief executive officer of Fotografiska, puts it, photography – and perhaps culture itself – should travel as far as our curiosity does. And in Lofoten’s rugged perch at the edge of the world, curiosity has found a stellar playground.

Nusfjord x Fotografiska runs from 20 March to 31 October 2026

As trends in workspace and retail keep shifting, Cubitts, the British spectacle maker, unveils today (25 June 2026) its new headquarters – a home for the brand's entire operation. Set near King's Cross, on the edge of north London, the new HQ is titled The Yard, and brings together frame and lens making, creative, repair, consultation, exhibition and training under one roof, in a subtly spectacular space that blends from design, production and client-facing services and events.

Tour the new Cubitts headquarters in London

When he came across their current base, Cubitts' founder, Tom Broughton, had been mulling over the idea of a permanent home for his business for a while. The makers' previous studio and office were located in the area (Cubitts was founded in Kings Cross in 2013), but had far outgrown the available space – and given the brand's attention to detail and design-led aesthetic, it made absolute sense for them to have a bespoke home.

'We were constrained by the [old] space rather than enabled,’ says Broughton. ‘And here, I'm hopeful we will be enabled by [the new one]. We want it to be a space where you can be really proud to bring passers-by, neighbours, customers... It can be a place where people can spend time with each other.'

The new building occupies a former Victorian stables that once served the nearby Crosse & Blackwell vinegar brewery – the biggest in the capital. It had gone through different lives and uses since then and, when Cubitts came into the picture, it was in need of a refresh.

Keeping the original architecture's utilitarian, brick materiality, and warehouse-like character felt intuitive. It also aligned well with the sense of honesty, efficiency and calculated rawness that can also be detected in the spectacle brand's product.

Now, the project, on which Cubitts worked closely with studio 51 Architecture, is a mix of exposed period surfaces, refreshed historic details, colour pops, and carefully selected, tactile furniture – which makes the whole at once full of personality, comfortable and of its time.

Beyond style, however, Broughton's vision is indeed one of community, as he sees the new company's home as more than just a production facility or a set of desks. 'When we took on this [project], it was always like, how do we design it so it doesn't feel like an office? Which was why the office bit is a footprint of probably about 15 per cent of the building... The rest of it can be everything else that we want the [brand] to represent. Put the product at the middle. Have production under one roof.'

Enabling human potential through spaces that people want to inhabit in a meaningful way, fostering relationships and collaboration, was also a key driver: 'Our biggest cost by far is people. If you can create an environment where those people can flourish and work more effectively, it will pay for itself 100 times over. I don't think this is indulgent. I think it's necessary.'

In that spirit, everything is arranged around a central, double-height space – a kind of indoor 'plaza' – where a frame-making workshop operates: the business's heart. Also on the ground floor, around this area, are the company's production facilities and optical laboratory, which mix handmade elements and cutting-edge five-axis CNC machines.

A sequence of smaller, more cocooning areas offers space for private consultations, meetings and also room for the large Cubitts archive. Deskspace is upstairs, alongside a generous central kitchen and entertaining area – a fluid space Broughton hopes to use for the Cubitts community, from clients to creatives and locals. More rooms on the top level might develop into apartments for guests and residencies.

Beyond the architects, Cubitts collaborated with more designers, artists and makers from its broad universe, who were involved in different parts of the building, helping to craft a home that feels a collaborative effort – but also a true representation of the brand's ethos as a whole.

'[The paint specialist] chose the [yellow] colour [throughout the interior] to match the yellow from a dress worn by Brigitte Bardot from the late 1960s,' Broughton explains, elaborating on his discussions with paint maker Simon March. Meanwhile, artist David Shrigley created a large mural – a brightly coloured cockerel – on the building's side, marking its creative nature and public-facing intentions.

The mural, the open-door policy and the series of events Cubitts is planning for the next few months all indicate the brand's vision to not only set strong roots in its new home but also be an active part of the neighbourhood.

'There's a little bench built into the front. And we found out from the neighbours that locally, it has been called “the seat of wisdom”. And people just stop there and have a think,' Broughton says. It's an element, and a spirit, he intends not only to maintain, but to build on – fostering creativity and community, hand by hand, in Cubitts' new London home.

cubitts.com

Despite having produced songs for some of music’s biggest names – among them Charli XCX, Skepta and Ed Sheeran – the British musician Fred Again (stylised Fred again..) did not rise to prominence until the release of Actual Life, a three-volume series of mixtapes that served as an aural diary of the years 2020-2022. Alongside his own music, they collated samples from other artists, voice notes from friends, and spoken-word skits. ‘I just kind of amassed [the clips] over time,’ he said in 2022. 'The ones that poked out to me at different points were obviously because of what was going on in my life.’

This morning in Paris, Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson recruited Fred Again to soundtrack his S/S 2027 menswear show for Dior, his third men’s outing for the house so far (Anderson became creative director in 2025). A custom mix for the show, it featured the songs of KTNA, Mabe Fratti and Jamie T, as well as original vocals from Christine and the Queens, pulsating from speakers surrounding the halls and gardens of Paris’ Musée Nissim de Camondo, where guests sat on traditional French chairs or on benches tiled to look like black disco balls (the show’s invite was also a Dior-branded disco ball in black).

Besides soundtracking the show, Anderson said that Fred Again’s musical process inspired the collection’s construction – one of ‘sampling and remixing to carve out new meaning for what’s known,’ as he described. In practice, this meant a shuffling of eras – 19th-century embroidery met distressed denim, for example – but also a shifting of a garment’s context. For this, the tuxedo was the protagonist: Anderson reimagined it in an organza-like fabric printed to appear like tailoring wool in the breezy opening looks, while other tailored jackets came in loosened proportions or were transformed into the silhouette of a blouson.

The choice of the historic venue, Anderson explains, also reflected this idea of the ‘remix’. ‘It’s about juxtaposing the historic and the contemporary and bringing Fred Again’s music into this typically quiet place,’ he says. ‘The opportunity to show here is special because the building is about to be restored, so it’s in this interesting in-between phase.’

The museum – which Anderson had first encountered during an exhibition of the work of British artist Edmund de Waal in 2021 – is the former home of former home of Moïse de Camondo, a French banker, who established a major collection of 18th-century decorative arts during his lifetime. ‘I became fascinated by its story, particularly in the context of Dior,’ he says. ‘I loved the idea of bringing the new into this historic space. And as we know, Monsieur Dior loved the 18th century.’

‘I think in some ways he was similar to Moïse de Camondo – they were both interested in reinvention as much as preservation,’ he continues. ‘The museum is currently in a phase of restoration. I like the slightly undone nature of it and how that connects to the collection – there’s this aspect of finding beauty in the imperfect.’

Follow our live coverage of Paris Fashion Week Men’s here.

Eight years after closing Restaurant André in 2018 at what he called ‘a moment of perfection’, the Taiwanese chef André Chiang is back in Singapore. He has chosen to return inside one of Asia’s most mythic addresses: the former Raffles Grill at Raffles Singapore, a high-ceilinged room that has hosted coronation dinners and colonial galas since 1887. That year – the hotel’s founding – gives the 42-seat restaurant its name, and its culinary conceit: a menu that moves through time rather than through courses.

Wallpaper* dines at 1887 by André

The mood: whimsical grandeur

Inspired by the idea of a leafy, tropical conservatory, the Bangkok-based interior designer Bill Bensley has kept the room's colonial bones – arched colonnades, original herringbone parquet – while imprinting his trademark extravagance into every surface. Towering metal-foiled Traveller's Palms rise toward a trompe-l’oeil glass ceiling complete with powder blue sky and wispy white clouds hand-painted by Bensley, whilst mechanised punkah fans, their blades cut in the shape of great green hearts, flap slowly overhead.

A curved glass cabinet at the entrance displays the hotel's silverware collection, including antique pieces buried in the hotel grounds during the Japanese occupation and unearthed after the war; and at the far end, a raised semicircular bar – its stools monogrammed, its marble top deep enough to dine at – accommodates walk-ins and solo diners. The room is unapologetically theatrical, and no one minds at all.

The food: time, unravelled

Chiang spent over a year in Raffles Singapore’s archives, rifling and leafing through sepia menus from the hotel’s past. What he found was quietly startling, not least wild rose ice cream, turtle soup as a Victorian luxury, and Duck Apicius roasted with ancient Roman spice. The result of all this gastro forensics is a menu that Chiang has conceived as a time machine in which each course represents a different era, and each table, depending on what is ordered, sits in a different year on the 1887-to-present continuum.

In practice, this means an intriguing trawl through nearly 60 dishes – Victorian, Singaporean and Chiang's personal signatures all present simultaneously – that dismantles the conventional tasting sequence entirely. For those who prefer a guide, three formulas named after French cultural figures – Monet, Eiffel, and Bernhardt – offer a curated path through the labyrinth.

But the invitation to roam freely is the point. A preview tasting yielded Légumes en Vessie Sarah Bernhardt – vegetables cooked inside a pig's bladder using a Belle Époque technique all but vanished from contemporary kitchens – alongside a more contemporary East-meets-West Blanquette de Bak Kut Teh and a Green Curry King Oyster Mushroom that needed, besides sheer culinary chutzpah, no historical justification at all. ‘You can stop anywhere you want,’ Chiang says. ‘Mix and match. Decide which time period you want to go to.’

Unlike his previous restaurants, which he tends to close just at the height of their fame and move on, 1887 by André is conceived as something more permanent – a place, he says, that generations of diners can keep coming back to.

Appropriately, the kitchen is helmed day-to-day by Ben Wang and Roy Kuo, both trained and seasoned by Chiang at RAW in Taipei, a restaurant he ran, he says, as ‘a gallery, a museum, an exhibition hall’ whilst staging seasons of grand classic French cooking and VR dinners before closing it at the end of 2024. A culinary academy will open in its place later this year.

For a chef who returned his stars, closed his restaurants at their peaks and built a cooking school, 1887 by André feels less like a comeback story (which, of course, it is) than an act of custodianship – for a city, and a culinary culture, he has never really stopped calling home.

1887 by André is at Raffles Singapore, 1 Beach Road, Singapore 189673

Thirty years on from the launch of the Land Rover model that dominated the compact SUV market in the late 1990s and early 21st century, Freelander is returning as a standalone brand with the backing of longstanding Jaguar Land Rover joint venture partner Chery.

The top five Chinese carmaker by global sales – already behind the UK smash hit brands Jaecoo and (to a lesser extent) Omoda – isn’t going slow with the project either. Pitching the new marque as a 'British Premium Intelligent All-Terrain Brand' it plans to launch six Freelander models inside five years in left- and right-hand drive configurations and across 90 markets, including the Middle East, European Union and the UK.

The Freelander has a laudable model history, trailblazing a more soft-surfaced exterior style of compact SUV with more passenger car-like interior creature comforts, in contrast to more rugged 4x4s (like the then very boxy and offroad-focused Land Rover Defender).

Launched in 1997, it quickly became Europe’s top-selling 4x4. And while it could still handle the rough stuff it boasted simpler ways to tackle such terrain, as the first vehicle in the world to offer the patented ‘hill descent control’ feature now commonplace across more serious SUV segments and beyond.

After two generations the model was discontinued in 2015, as other models from the JLR group such as the Range Rover Evoque became more popular. But a letter of intent between JLR and Chery in June 2024 announced the revival of the Freelander name – and this time as a brand in its own right.

Crucially for its credibility, a very significant Land Rover and Range Rover designer, Phil Simmons – with a CV including the 2001 Range Rover Mk3, 2017 Velar and 2018 Evoque Mk2 – was behind the new Freelander brand’s design relaunch.

Early in 2026 a teaser image of the Concept 97 vehicle was shown, to reference the Freelander’s original launch year and in late spring the brand officially launched with its first production model – the Freelander 8 – at the large and impressive Museum of the China Sculpture Institute in Wuhu, home of Chery International.

Wallpaper* was on hand to witness both the Concept 97 vehicle colourfully lit up at the Wuhu museum’s entrance and the five-metre-long Freelander 8 inside, the brand’s first showroom-ready car. In a private ante room where press cameras weren’t allowed there was also a full-size model of the next slightly smaller Freelander production car to follow, to show the consistency of design direction.

All three vehicles are more impressive than expected and in keeping with the original Freelander, including details like its ‘castle-style' body, interlocking headlight elements (from the Mk2), triangular rear side windows, dual peak bonnet and high ‘command’ driving position.

To keep things more 2026 than 1997 the Freelander 8 will offer nine switchable terrain modes, dual-chamber air suspension and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8295P chip, able to power up to eight displays at once in an ultra-responsive fashion.

The cabin of the six-seater Freelander 8 wasn’t available to jump inside just yet, but what we could discern through the windows revealed a smart and restrained interior with a large central screen and a full-width surround view driver display at the base of windscreen.

Reclinable ‘zero gravity’ seating will also be part of the kit list, to allow owners to rest better while recharging – as the SUV is set to offer full-electric, plug-in hybrid and range extender power units.

The brand will initially be built in China and exported around the world and likely to be priced well above current Chery export brands Jaecoo, Omoda and Lepas, but also well below Land Rover and Range Rover models, to avoid any clash. Sales are due to start from late 2026.

CheryJaguarLandRover.com, LandRover.co.uk

A few short years ago, the industrial district of Certosa was one of Milan's forgotten corners. A neglected neighbourhood on the city's northwestern fringe, it was a landscape of former factories, warehouses and industrial buildings. But in a metropolis developing as rapidly as Milan, few areas of the city and its immediate outskirts have remained untouched. Today, thanks to an ongoing wave of regeneration, the post-industrial district is home to newly built offices, hip cafés and restaurants, and, most recently, the latest addition to Milan's burgeoning nightlife scene: Duro Club.

Duro Club, Milan's latest nightlife opening

Housed inside a former cement factory, the club was designed by Gianluca Bocchetta and Rosella Castagnotto of Turin-based Velvet Studio. Their aim was to 'preserve the building's original Brutalist character,' says Castagnotto, 'while completely rethinking the existing layout and circulation.' Fortunately, the brief from the owners was largely logistical. 'They told us how many people the club needed to accommodate, that it required a chill-out area and an outdoor smoking terrace,' she says. 'Beyond that, they gave us complete freedom.'

The pair drew heavily on the building's industrial past, retaining much of the exposed concrete while introducing stainless steel, coloured tile and mirrored surfaces. The mirrors are concentrated along the central corridor that runs the length of the building, punctuated by porthole-like openings that offer glimpses into the main dance floor and the adjoining aubergine-coloured lounge. 'We wanted to play with viewpoints,' says Castagnotto. 'The mirrors and openings create this interesting "see-but-can't-see" effect.'

At the end of the corridor lies the dance floor, an expansive room with warm parquet flooring inset with white squares that echo the colour-block lighting installation overhead. 'The white squares make it feel as though the light is projected onto the floor,' explains Castagnotto, who collaborated with ILTI Luce on the lighting design. 'But we didn't want the lighting to dominate. It had to be more about shadow than illumination.'

Near the far end of the room, a rectangular concrete-and-stainless-steel island serves as the bar — a monolithic centrepiece surrounded by built-in benches that provide a moment of respite without disconnecting from the energy of the dance floor. Opposite, the DJ booth appears to have been carved into the wall like a bunker. A projecting steel frame forms a rectangular aperture from which the DJ surveys the scene below. On either side, a pair of semi-private booths offer more intimate vantage points while remaining partially concealed from the crowd.

Duro Discoteca is the latest venture from brothers Marco and Riccardo Augeri, the entrepreneurs behind Da Orient, the vintage store-turned-cocktail bar in Milan's Chinatown. While Da Orient has become synonymous with the city's aperitivo culture, drawing crowds of stylish young Milanese onto Viale Montello each evening, Duro is conceived as a destination for late-night dancing and experimental electronic music.

'It has a Studio 54 spirit,' says Castagnotto of the club, which opened in April. 'People arrive dressed up and aren't afraid to be extravagant. It's not the typical Berlin club where everyone wears black from head to toe. Here there's colour — it’s very refined.’

It’s exactly a decade since the epic foot-shooting exercise of Brexit was set in motion. A new design exhibition, ‘The Other Side: Ten Years after the Referendum’, features the work of ten creative practitioners, including graphic designers, type designers, artists, architects and product designers, offering up a graphic view of the current state of play.

Curated by GraphicDesign& and designed by LucienneRoberts+, a team consisting of Lucienne Roberts, John McGill, Rebecca Wright, the show is at Pentagram's Osh Gallery in London’s N1 until Friday 26 June 2026.

The raw material is of particular interest. As Lucienne Roberts explains, ‘In 2020, GraphicDesign& published The Other Side: An Emotional Map of Brexit Britain. The book reads ‘Remain’ in one direction, flip it over and the focus is ‘Leave’. Included are the voices of 26 Leave and 24 Remain voters from throughout the UK. Every MP received a copy.’

It’s safe to say the publication didn’t rock nearly enough boats. Hence the existence of a number of unsold copies. ‘Our distributors got in touch, asking if we would like the few remaining copies of the book pulped,’ Roberts continues. ‘[We decided] we’d like them to become something new. Here are the results of this decision. We sent ten designers, ten (or more) copies of the book, inviting them to make a personal response to this poignant anniversary. “Feel free to draw or write on them,” we said. “Do cut, shred or pulp them.” Here is what happened next.’

Here are the results, and the creatives’ personal insights on Britain ten years post-Brexit.

‘The Other Side: Ten Years after the Referendum’

Hugh Miller: The works draw on post-Brexit financial data, referendum statistics and political contradiction to explore the consequences of separation and nationalism. The paper suit is made in collaboration with Harris Elliott – it’s a symbolic stand-in and a surface for statistics, headlines and contradictory political narratives.

How do I feel about Brexit now? Brexit still feels like a bad dream come true. A decision shaped by false promises that left us worse off, still burdened by red tape. It exposed the corruption of those meant to serve us. In today’s political landscape, hope and optimism feel increasingly distant.

Michael Marriott: [My work is] a small side table for a cup of tea / glass of wine / etc. My first thought was how to make something useful, something that would extend the life of the book, too. A small side table seemed like a good idea. It’s made using offcuts that I had in the studio already, so it’s all 100 per cent recycled – which is more sensible than Brexit!

How do I feel about Brexit now? Still amazed it was seen as a reasonable thing to do. Still annoyed by the complete stupidness of it.

Stefanie Posavec: For Leavers, achieving Brexit must have felt like birthday and Christmas rolled into one. Riding high on hubris and fantasies of ‘British sovereignty’, everything seemed possible. Ten years on, reality has set in and the party’s over, leaving the rest of us (and future generations) to clean up the mess.

How do I feel about Brexit now? I became a UK citizen only four years before Brexit began. I still have a red EU passport (my first UK passport) and, when I look at it while waiting in long EU border queues, I feel both bereaved and cheated.

Lucienne Roberts, John McGill: Our ten books carry the message ‘HELLO HELL’, legible from both sides of the table. The incisions into each book reveal some of the more poignant pages within. Glimpses of Farage, Boris and an SOS projected onto the White Cliffs of Dover, trigger feelings as powerful now as they were then.

How do we feel about Brexit now? We felt sad then and even sadder now. In the book, writer on human behaviour Ian Leslie describes the vote as akin to a marital breakdown, with neither version of the UK hearing the other. Ten years later, no one is unscathed and, if anything, miscommunication prevails.

STORE: With this work, we represent those too young to vote in 2016. Facilitating in-depth conversations with other young people, we want to give them a voice. We are exploring paper pulping and paper pressing to construct spaces that can facilitate these conversations. Shown here are seats used to give voices and space to this overlooked group.

How do we feel about Brexit now? In the last ten years, three million people have become eligible to vote. We are three of those people. Our opinions weren’t sought at the time of the vote. Now, we face the repercussions of Brexit and the disproportionate effect it will have on our lives.

Sarah Boris: Remain Together is a series of ten artworks using the words ‘Remain’ and ‘Together’ found in the books. The pages are painted in colours from various European flags, leaving only the chosen words visible. These pieces act as tokens of hope in these divisive times.

How do I feel about Brexit now? I was born in London to French parents, so I feel European. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the EU stood for peace and togetherness. The UK left, nothing positive materialised, division grew. Now, we must listen to each other and vehemently oppose the far right.

Marianne Mueller, Mia Mueller Kneer: Eurotrash shows the five prime ministers connected with Brexit operating a standard office shredder. Like these pieces of legislation, The Other Side’s deliberation – to remain in or leave the EU – has become redundant in the face of ‘Brexit done’. Reduced to shreds, the remains of the books now lie discarded like trash on the gallery floor.

How do we feel about Brexit now? Brexit has affected us deeply, both personally and professionally. It has been a catalyst for many significant shifts, from becoming dual nationals to moving countries, opening a new office and shifting school systems to remain within the EU. For us, Britain was the ultimate model for a cosmopolitan society, a sentiment spoiled by Brexit.

Ella Krispel: I use weaving to reinsert what has been lost, or deliberately stripped away, from charged subjects like Brexit. For this project, I wanted to explore the aesthetic attributes of historical artefacts, of relics from another time. As it developed, I wanted to situate Brexit in history, to see it at a distance. The imperfect documentation, fragmented narratives and incomplete framing of the piece mirror the fragility of memory and knowledge over time.

How do I feel about Brexit now? I challenge people when they claim Britain has been harmed by immigration. The response is often, ‘But you're not an immigrant!’ They are unaware this reveals misguided beliefs about the identities of immigrants and definitions of immigration. Brexit didn’t create such views, but it did solidify them, with current media and policymakers deepening the damage.

Rebecca Wright: Using the cut-out letterforms from HELLO HELL, the companion piece by GraphicDesign&’s Lucienne Roberts with John McGill, I have sought to take something left behind and turn it into something hopeful. Brexit changed how I felt about and understood my sense of home. It shattered my belief that we were a country where all of us could feel welcome and where we were welcoming to others. But, ten years on, despite everything, a stubborn hope of home remains…

How do I feel about Brexit now? Still sad but also determined. I do not believe that Brexit accurately reflects or should define who we are as a nation, or our core values.

YiMiao Shih: I wrinkled pages [of the book] with watercolour – a literal soaking – as I depicted a variety of British scenes. Then I used torn pages to make paper pulp reliefs embedded with stitched imagery. In these, I revisited the fictionalised Rabbit Referendum of my project Rabbrexit Means Rabbrexit (2019), tiny embroideries that draw on myth.

How do I feel about Brexit now? My version of post-Brexit reality doesn’t scream positivity. In the aftermath, the right wing gathered traction. I fear they will continue to stoke division, while differing echo chambers deepen it further.

‘The Other Side’ runs until Friday 26 June 2026, 11am-4pm, Osh Gallery, The Old Sorting House, 46 Essex Road, London N1 8LN

@oshgallerylondon, graphicdesignand.com, @graphicdesignand_, luciennerobertsplus.com, @luciennerobertsplus_

Frida Kahlo’s reputation precedes her. Even those who aren’t familiar with her work will recognise her ubiquitous portrait, the aura of which has been in danger of eclipsing her work. It is an oversight Tate Modern is keen to rectify with the major new exhibition, ‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’, which pairs Kahlo’s work with that of her contemporaries and later artists, including Kiki Smith, Judy Chicago and Ana Mendieta. The move cements Kahlo’s place in the art canon, and it seems appropriate that an artist so taken over by legend and myth should share exhibition space with those who respect, acknowledge or have been inspired by her.

It is a shame Kahlo’s work has been outshone by her celebrity, as, in its strikingly surreal composition, it is sharply emotive (although Kahlo rejected the surrealist label itself). She created around 150 works in her lifetime, a third of which were self-portraits. More than 30 of these representations are here, tracing the way Kahlo’s self-perception developed, fractured and rebuilt itself throughout her lifetime, running parallel to the health troubles that plagued her.

Born in Mexico City in 1907, Kahlo established an aesthetic entirely her own, after a difficult start that saw her suffer from polio as a child and, later, chronic pain for the remainder of her life following a near-fatal bus crash. It left her fragmented, a sum of her political, physical and spiritual sides that united to create a magnetic private and public persona.

This fluidity takes shape in the portraits in the exhibition, and we vividly see Kahlo secure in her Mexican identity, documenting her experience as a disabled woman, commitment to social activism and influence on LGBTQI+ art.

Despite André Breton’s identification with and deep admiration for the artist – he called her work ‘a ribbon around a bomb’ – Kahlo consistently rejected surrealism, the movement he co-founded, as a definition of her art, arguing her works were rooted in reality, rather than dreams. Still, many works in Tate Modern’s show overlap with the surrealists’ fantastical view of life, intertwining religious motifs and folklore and fraught with natural imagery – from spider monkeys to tangled vines and thorns – symbolising both the endless pain and deep spirituality that accompanied Kahlo throughout her life.

‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’ is at Tate Modern from 25 June 2026 until 3 January 2027, tate.org.uk

This is something rather special. The new Morgan Midsummer Coupé is the next stage of a collaboration between Italian design house Pininfarina and purveyors of hand-hewn sports cars from Worcestershire. It follows on from 2024’s Morgan Midsummer barchetta, fifty of which have been built and delivered over the past couple of years.

The Midsummer Coupé continues this blend of exotic design and handcraft, only this time in the form of a fixed head coupé. This time the commission is even rarer, with only nine cars being made available worldwide, in addition to this, Car 0, the so-called ‘artist’s proof’.

Morgan describes their approach as ‘contemporary coachbuilding’, and there’s certainly a lot here that wouldn’t be possible in a conventional car factory, let alone on the regular Morgan production line. Even though the Malvern Link facility already goes above and beyond what’s possible, the Midsummer Coupé is a showcase of technology and craft.

The latter is most evident in the hand-formed centre body, manipulated and shaped on the traditional English wheel system for hundreds of hours to achieve the precise curves and radii that shape the body. Panels are joined by solid aluminium riveting, a method dating back to early aircraft manufacturing. Digital scanning is used throughout the process to ensure complete accuracy.

The car also sits on an aluminium chassis, Morgan’s own new generation CXV Aluminium Platform – as seen in the Supersport and new Supersport 400, as well as the machine-billeted aluminium A-pillars.

What differentiates the Midsummer Coupé from its production siblings is the glazed roof and rear profile. The tapering tail sweeps up and over the passenger compartment, with four individual glass panels bisected by a line of chrome.

The treatment is both classically elegant and in keeping with the familiar Morgan aesthetic and cutting edge, in that the fixed glass panels are bonded directly into the aluminium roof structure, adding stiffness and saving weight (the car is on 2.5% heavier than a Supersport with a hardtop).

This fixed-head format is very different in character to the open-top and removable hard-top Morgan, as well as the completely open original Midsummer. A large luggage compartment will no doubt be supplied with specially fitted luggage in at least a few of the nine customer cars.

In practical terms, this also makes the Midsummer Coupé even better suited to everyday use than the Supersport, already one of the most practical day-to-day Morgans ever made. It also allows for some newly crafted components that depart from traditional Morgan details. These include the door handles integrated into the aluminium belt line, and the streamlined side window graphic, with a droppable window section.

The Coupé sits on 19-inch forged aluminium wheels that can take a contrasting paint colour, while the interior of Car 0 has a teak and pale leather trim inspired by nautical design. Future configurations will be completely determined by the customer. The Midsummer features the new Morgan gear selector seen in the Supersport 400 (the car has a BMW engine and gearbox). Roof-mounted window switches and teak-inlaid sun visors attach to an aluminium rail.

Jonathan Wells is Morgan’s Chief Design Officer. He describes the Midsummer Coupé as ‘the culmination of an extraordinary creative journey. What began as a celebration of coachbuilding, craftsmanship and collaboration has evolved into one of the most ambitious and rewarding projects we’ve ever undertaken,’ he continues, ‘Working alongside the team at Pininfarina, together with our own designers and engineers, has been both a privilege and immensely rewarding. Midsummer Coupé marks the closing chapter of that remarkable collaboration, but it also represents a defining moment in Morgan’s coachbuilding story.’

Car 0 is just the start. The nine cars that follow offer customers a rich canvas for their own tastes, guided by Morgan’s team. All cars will bear the Pininfarina Fuoriserie emblem (‘out of series’); beyond that, they will ‘share a common foundation yet [be] entirely unique in their execution.’

As Morgan’s Managing Director Matthew Hole explains, ‘the Midsummer Coupé began with a conversation. A client came to us with an idea and, rather than asking how closely we could meet that brief, we asked ourselves how far we could take it. Special projects [give us] the opportunity to apply our skills in different ways. Working closely with each client, we can explore new ideas, refine new techniques and continue to develop the knowledge that defines Morgan coachbuilding today.’

The approach that will increasingly shape more and more output from the Pickersleigh Road factory as Morgan invests in skills and options that only it can provide thanks to the scale of the production process and the close integration between design, engineering and manufacturing. There are very few companies who can create this kind of richly evocative automotive special project.

Morgan-Motor.co.uk, @MorganMotor

Louis Vuitton men’s creative director and polymath Pharrell Williams presented the brand’s S/S 2027 collection yesterday evening (23 June 2026), against scenography also designed by himself. The enormous construction – which stood at eight-metres high and over 37-metres wide – was conceived to look like a tidal wave, and featured real water provided by the Eau de Paris corporation, which manages the city’s aquatic network. Following the show, the water will be discharged into Paris’s famous sewer-system, in a closed circuit. Cascading into pools of water evocative of a beach, it gently misted guests who watched on in the still warm evening sunshine.

Pharrell Williams continues his run of bold sets for Louis Vuitton, with a larger-than-life tidal wave

The set concept echoed a collection inspired by international surfing communities, and, fittingly, stood in the open air under blue skies. The ground at Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris had been covered with fine sand for the occasion, and will later be repurposed for ‘beach’ volleyball on the campus, and was bisected by a boardwalk-style runway.

Ideas of renewal and regeneration extend beyond the perimeters of the show and its materials, with Louis Vuitton pledging support to Coral Gardeners as part of its sustainability roadmap, to further reef restoration efforts in French Polynesia – not only an important environmental campaign but one which will directly benefit communities who live and work in the South Pacific. World Surf League athletes will take part in monitoring the restoration efforts during the Tahiti Pro competition this August, giving the brand a vital opportunity to hear direct feedback on the project from those the most emotionally connected to it.

The wooden seating was reused from last season’s show, which took place around an architectural ‘hotel’ designed in collaboration with Tokyo-based Not a Hotel, set within the parkland of the Bois de Boulogne and named ‘Drophaus’ for the structure’s affinity with a droplet of water. Audacious set design has become a Williams signature during his tenure at the house, with the S/S 2026 edition even becoming the subject of a documentary, which charted his process of research in India all the way to the execution of a supersized version of Snakes and Ladders co-created by Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, at the Centre Pompidou.

louisvuitton.com

What happens when brutalist and modernist references unite? Coy Yiontis Architects’ Glenblaith house is the answer – a quirky concrete residence in the prestigious Manifold Heights neighbourhood in Victoria, Australia.

Tour Glenblaith, a residence where brutalism and modernism collide

The single-storey residence was designed as a ‘forever home’ for a professional couple. Its façade is smooth, geometric and mysterious, with a timber entry that acts as a moveable screen to slowly unveil its introverted core.

‘The client approached us after following the work of the practice for over ten years,’ explains the firm’s director, George Yiontis. ‘Armed with magazine clippings of our previous projects, there was a clear focus on the courtyard house typology and use of robust, natural materials.

'Concrete and timber were the protagonists in the vision of their new home, integrated with a prominent and lush landscape to satisfy her green thumb and provide a focus in retirement years.'

The home's anchor is the 4.8m oculus, a subtle nod to midcentury design hinting to the fluid curvature of The TWA Flight Center and architect John Lautner’s 1979 Hope Residence. This architectural ode foreshadows the intricate design codes within the rest of the home.

Yiontis notes, ‘The building’s appearance from the street is unassuming but different; the low-lying concrete form is recessed from its fenceless boundary and the lush front yard contrasts the endless stretch of newly volume-built and post-war neighbours with their pitched roofs and fenced, manicured lawns. While conforming to planning guidelines, the house is an anomaly in the streetscape.’

In this context, Glenblaith was conceived to challenge the traditional conventions of suburbia and its landscape. The architecture firm made sure to utilise unorthodox materials and small nooks to keep an element of surprise.

The monolithic concrete columns frame the large atrium-cum-courtyard space, complete with a lily pond, offering a central green utopia with the residence. Beyond this, the house is divided into separate wings; one intimate, one for living and entertaining.

Other unexpected design details include a small alcove in the bedroom, which has been utilised as a desk space, while a window has been artfully barricaded with an intriguing brick pattern, allowing the shadows to dance on the floor below.

Coy Yiontis Architects has redefined suburbia, stepping away from the white-picket-fenced, cookie-cutter mould, and presenting a new benchmark for living: a vibrant garden house that doesn’t shout or demand attention, but is slowly discovered and enjoyed.

coyyiontis.com.au

Your latest cartographic assignment from Blue Crow Media is this map of modern Rome, a guide to over 50 examples from among the eternal city’s best-known and most impressive 20th-century architecture.

Mappa di Roma Moderna has been edited by the architect and author Jacopo Costanzo, while Stefano Perego has contributed original photography, showing these buildings in their contemporary state. The folded map is the newest addition to a long-running series of architectural city maps and monographs – see also BCM’s guide to Brutalist Boston and Concrete Montreal amongst many others.

Rome’s contemporary gems are spliced into a cityscape that’s evolved over millennia, with the outer suburbs better represented with contemporary work. One of the cradles of both modernism and rationalism, the city has an impressive collection of contemporary churches and public infrastructure, as well as large-scale housing by the likes of Carlo Aymonino, Mario De Renzi and Studio Passarelli.

Other highlights include Luigi Moretti's Palazzina Girasole, the Palazzetto dello Sport by the famed structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, and Sir Basil Spence’s British Embassy. Blue Crow’s maps are a must for the modern architectural tourist, providing insight and context into the major 20th century works that have shaped European cities, whilst also highlighting overlooked gems that are due for a revival.

Ikea just launched its latest PS collection, and it's full of playful surprises. An initiative started in the 1990s, PS is Ikea's way to engage with experimental design within the domestic realm. 'We decided to take a long hard look at ourselves. Sure, we made furniture, but was it design?' Reads a note introducing the concept. 'The world around us had started making interpretations of Scandinavian design, but with ridiculously high prices. Wasn’t it time to make Scandinavian design accessible to a lot more people than just those with really fat wallets? This was our opportunity.'

What followed were three decades of experimenting with the possibilities of affordable furniture within the home, with concepts including 'The Democratic Home', 'Inspired by History, Designed for Today' and the latest iteration, 'Playful Functionality'.

Ikea furniture is here to play

'Central to Ikea PS is the idea that simplicity doesn't have to be boring, but that it can reveal design in its purest and most engaging form,' says Maria O'Brian, creative leader at Ikea. 'My hope is that through interaction and surprise, this simplicity gives way to discovery, with objects that have multiple functions and unexpected details that make people happy.'

Happiness seems a thread running through the collection, with pieces designed for interaction and smiles. From a rocking bench to an inflatable armchair, masks for your wall and adjustable furniture, there is a lot to like in this colourful and carefully conceived series.

'Too much design is treated as precious and untouchable,' says Ikea designer Mikael Axelsson, the mind behind the cleverly conceived inflatable chair. 'I wanted to create the opposite response, with something that engages your interest and curiosity. When furniture invites play like that, it becomes something you use and live with fully, that brings joy into the everyday.'

Here are some of our favourite pieces from Ikea's new collection.

Ikea Play: Wallpaper* favourites to buy now

A joint project between artist Rana Begum and Steve Webb of engineering firm Webb Yates sees a pink, fenced sculpture erected in the heart of London. Fabricated in collaboration with open-access workshop BLOQs, with materials lent by Albion Stone, No.1616 Fence (2026) is a timely response to the 2026 London Festival of Architecture's theme, 'Belonging'. The sculpture is reflected and refracted by the wide windows of the central London brutalist architecture landmark Space House, offering a moment of quiet contemplation on what it means to belong, and indeed to not belong.

Explore Rana Begum and Webb Yates' installation for LFA 2026

The piece is the latest in a series of collaborations for Begum and Webb. As with their previous installation in Verbier, No. 1387 Fence, the pair set themselves the challenge of erecting their sculpture with minimal environmental impact, by using a base of materials native to the site. In Verbier, these were logs; in London, Portland stone.

Webb explains: 'So much art has a big lump of concrete under the ground… Here, the context is the City of London and Portland stone. We have a good relationship with Albion Stone, so they lent us a block. The reason [the sculpture is] clamped [to the plinth] is so the block isn't cut or broken [...] there's no welding or cutting, everything can be taken to bits.' He continues, 'We’re trying to do something that brings a lot of joy, but actually isn't wasteful or impactful.'

On the origins of this body of work, Begum explains: 'I think for me, when I'm making (the work), it wasn't about identity, it wasn't about culture, it wasn't about religion. I realised one of the things I've been really driven by is this idea of the infinite. Like, how tall Steve can get this to go, but I love that you can play with the idea of the infinite. You can push the boundaries of some of the limits of engineering as well as this visual splendour that you have with material and sculpture and spaces.'

Begum and Webb are quick to highlight that the making of this sculpture goes beyond just the hands of an artist and an engineer, with many other actors involved; namely, Arnauld Nichols, director of BLOQs (the UK’s largest open-access factory) and Sam Kennedy of Commissioned by You, a studio that operates from the facility. Says Nichols: 'We've been around for 14 years. We call ourselves a pay-as-you-go factory, and we're there to provide anyone access to really good manufacturing equipment and workspace.'

With more than 1,000 small and medium businesses, BLOQs boasts a network of users working at all types of scales. 'Our whole mission is, don't tie people down to creativity, let them do [manufacturing] when they need it. [We offer] machines that are normally unaffordable to small, medium, or even large businesses; you put amazing modern tech together with new or existing talent, and then that brings great stuff.’

This way of working couldn’t have been a better fit for Begum and Webb’s site-specific, temporary installation. 'It's a combination of vision and sign-off and delivery, when no one's doubting each other,' affirms Begum.

With uncharacteristically hot and stormy weather expected for the month of June, when LFA runs, Webb Yates had to conduct climate-related stress tests and even consider the possibility of people climbing on the piece – a totemic-like sculpture that commands a moment of pause, pushing the gaze upwards to see how it contrasts with the giant skyscrapers that enclose it.

On the theme 'Belonging', Webb says: 'Belonging had a slightly sinister edge to me. And I think with the vision, the fencing, our collaboration is [about not belonging]. You know, we're working together across fields and across fences and barriers, and we're going where we don't belong.'

ranabegum.com

webbyates.com

As the mercury rises this month, we’re expecting to see unprecedented temperatures at Paris Fashion Week Men’s, and, accordingly, brands including Dior and Rick Owens have moved their showtimes to earlier in the day for much needed respite from the afternoon heat. In addition to the prospect of early-morning outdoor events, or hopping from one air-conditioned show space to another, there are many fashion moments to look forward to: Saint Laurent will make its return to the the start of the schedule, showing on on day one, and there are menswear debuts to come from Meryll Rogge, Michael Rider at Celine, and Sarah Burton at Givenchy. In anticipation of Grace Wales Bonner’s Hermès debut next January, the brand has opted for a presentation this week, rather than the usual show, and Paris Fashion Week Men’s regulars from Lemaire to Comme des Garçons are also on the schedule.

Here, follow our real-time look at Paris Fashion Week Men’s S/S 2027 – from behind-the-scenes glimpses to access to the shows, presentations and parties, alongside runway reviews – as seen through the eyes (and iPhones) of the Wallpaper* editors. Stay tuned.

Saint Laurent’s S/S 2027 show is staged amid Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156

The opening act of Paris Fashion Week Men’s is Saint Laurent, staged in the Tadao Ando-designed rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection art gallery (the gallery has been a venue for the house’s runway shows for a number of seasons). For S/S 2027, it is backdropped by Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156, an installation which turns the space into a ‘landscape of fog’. ‘Nakaya does not depict fog; she sculpts it,’ writes Anne‑Marie Duguet of the Japanese artist in the exhibition catalogue, with the work on display to the public until 14 September 2026. JM

Saint Laurent opens Paris Fashion Week Men's with effortless seduction

Opening Paris Fashion Week this evening, Saint Laurent’s S/S 2027 menswear show was staged amid Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156, currently on display in the Tadao Ando-designed rotunda of Bourse de Commerce – Pinault collection.

The collection itself had a mood of sensual ease: featherweight knits traced the line of the body, while arms were exposed in shrunken waistcoats and classic men’s underwear reimagined in leather. Typically broad shouldered tailoring – a signature of creative director Anthony Vaccarello – came with jewellery-like buttons, and the windbreaker returned, here in colourful technical taffeta. Closing the show was a series of looks in molten gold fabric.

Vaccarello said he was thinking about the idea of restraint as seduction, turning away from the constant need for drama and noise. ‘Nobody is trying to seduce you,’ he said via the collection notes. ‘What makes them seductive is that they do not need to. JM

Louis Vuitton brings the beach to Paris 

Continuing the run of bold sets which have come to define Pharrell Williams’ menswear shows for Louis Vuitton, tonight’s staging saw the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris transformed into an inner-city beach, complete with sand and a larger-than-life tidal wave cascading with water. Models emerged from a tubular structure at the centre of the swell, and walked down a wooden, boardwalk-style runway. IBJ

The Dior show invite is a disco ball

Under Jonathan Anderson’s tenure, Dior’s show invites have become collectible objects – from plates of porcelain eggs to miniature versions of the green metal chairs found in Paris’ Tuileries gardens. For his third menswear show, taking place this morning in Paris, the invitation is a black disco ball, delivered to attendees in a grey and white Dior box. JM

The Dior breakfast? Perfectly packaged strawberries 

Shifted from its usual afternoon slot to 9am this morning to protect guests from the heat, Jonathan Anderson’s latest show is taking place in the grounds of Musée Nissim de Camondo on Rue Monceau. Guests were welcomed into the museum’s gardens where personalised fans sat on each seat and strawberries were served in individual Dior boxes. JM

The story behind the Louis Vuitton set

Louis Vuitton men’s creative director and polymath Pharrell Williams presented the brand’s S/S 2027 collection last night, against scenography also designed by himself. The enormous construction – which stood at eight-metres high and over 37-metres wide – was conceived to look like a tidal wave, and featured real water provided by the Eau de Paris corporation, which manages the city’s aquatic network. IBJ

Continue reading here: Surf’s up! The story behind Pharrell Williams’ tidal wave set for Louis Vuitton

'Sampled and remixed' classics at Dior

This morning in the grounds of Paris’ Musée Nissim de Camondo, Jonathan Anderson showed his latest menswear collection for Dior – a wardrobe of ‘sampled and remixed’ classics, ‘skewing conventions, juxtaposing ideas from different eras and replicating what already exists in unexpected ways,’ as the Northern Irish designer described.

The inspiration came from British musician, DJ and producer Fred again.., who provided the show’s custom soundtrack, featuring songs from KTNA, Mabe Fratti and Jamie T, alongside original vocals by Christine and the Queens.

Cue loosened up tuxedos (one transformed into a hybrid blouson, others came in ultralight fabrications printed to give the appearance of tailoring wool), shredded denim, shrunken ceremonial jackets and metallic ‘jeans’ and shorts, while accessories included colourful zig-zag totes, bow ties, and ‘disco ball’ boots. JM

Meryll Rogge debuts menswear

It’s a year of big debuts for Belgian designer Meryll Rogge, who unveiled her first collection at the helm of Marni in March, and today shows menswear under her own label for the first time. Taking a typically pragmatic approach, the S/S 2027 presentation, held at the ambassador for Belgium's Paris residence, celebrated ‘the wearer’s fundamental role in revealing the brand’s aesthetic, rooted in the everyday realities of fashion.’ So – how does a Meryll Rogge man style himself? Folded, piled, layered and assembled: bomber jackets, floral prints with contrasting collars, knit pieces paired with striped poplin bloomers. An eclectic embrace of masculine and feminine styles. IBJ

Acne Studios is here to dress the Personality Hire

Jonny Johansson was thinking about office hierarchies this season – not necessarily the explicitly understood pecking order, from C-Suite to intern, but the unspoken. ‘I have been studying people as far back as I can remember,’ the Acne Studios founder and creative director said, continuing: ‘Lately, I have been fascinated by individual expression at the office, which can function as a kind of everyday social experiment.’ Who commands the space versus who is in charge comes down to more than just title.

For today’s presentation, Acne Studios played upon the idea of disparate people with their own set of references and backgrounds coming together in one space, in ‘a scenario in which their personal uniforms coalesce like a master remix.’ At the more casual end there was denim (of course), paired with graphic T-shirts – some featuring trompe l’oeil ties – and sweaters which at first glance appear cable knit, but were actually ruched and crimped. There was a vintage-tinge in places, ice-cream shades, sporty blousons and Cuban heels. ‘The attire flourishes that would ordinarily denote age or status no longer apply in this office mash-up,’ the notes said. ‘From this constructed vision emerges a composite look in many forms – each one transcending the office walls and reclaimed as an attitude above all.’ IBJ

Solid Homme explores ‘the tension between the natural and the artificial’

Solid Homme took guests to the lab for their S/S 2027 presentation, in which models walked through a space filled with hydroponic chambers – terrariums where plants are grown in mineral-rich solutions rather than soil – a comment on humanity’s ‘hubristic ambition not simply to understand nature, but to reconstruct it.’

The collection itself was outdoorsy, but without being bucolic. Technical fabrics in hues of violet and canary yellow, perforated surfaces, and shapes inspired by field equipment (note: windbreakers and boonie hats). IBJ

The story behind the Dior soundtrack

Despite having produced songs for some of music’s biggest names – among them Charli XCX, Skepta and Ed Sheeran – the British musician Fred Again (stylised Fred again..) did not rise to prominence until the release of Actual Life, a three-volume series of mixtapes that served as an aural diary of the years 2020-2022.

This morning in Paris, Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson recruited Fred Again to soundtrack his S/S 2027 menswear show for Dior, his third men’s outing for the house so far (Anderson became creative director in 2025). JM

Continue reading here: Dior’s Jonathan Anderson on why he chose a historic Parisian museum for his Fred Again-soundtracked menswear show

Rick Owens gets wet 

Moved from its usual early afternoon slot to 10am, Rick Owens’ latest menswear show unfolded on the already sweltering forecourt of Paris’ Palais de Tokyo – the designer’s longtime venue of choice in the city. This morning, an enormous ramp had been erected across the forecourt’s front pool, from which fountains looped dramatically over the runway (and provided guests and models alike with a welcome spray of mist).

This season, the American designer said he was thinking about the idea of training: ‘We are all processing menace, some of us arm, some of us train,’ he wrote in his usual letter to attendees prior to the show. Central to this was a new collaboration with Adidas, seeing the sportswear behemoth’s Climacool sweatsuit reimagined in Owens’ singular style. This included a series of ‘inflatable’ looks, their billowing forms achieved by fans installed inside – ‘when worn with an ice vest, they create a personal air conditioning system,’ he elucidated. In close to 40 degree heat, they sounded tempting. JM

Sarah Burton’s menswear debut for Givenchy

At home in Givenchy’s Paris headquarters on Avenue George V, Sarah Burton today presented her first menswear collection as creative director of the house, which she joined in September 2024. The presentation comes off the back of a surprise campaign for the collection, which was photographed by Juergen Teller and released this week – starring talent including Don McCullin, Don Letts, and Danny Fox.

The collection was presented in dialogue with a triptych of works of British artist Rachel Whiteread, and elements of her treatment of surface and colour were interpreted through the garments, particularly in the butter-soft leather pieces, rugby shirts and wide-leg trousers, in solid blocks of pink or forest green with the gentlest of folds. Classic Burton-isms could be read through precisely tailored jackets with slightly nipped-waists and sharp shoulders, as well as in the painterly florals which appeared as both print and embroidered elements. ‘I wanted this to feel very personal and intimate, and to reflect the conversations that I have with the friends of the house,’ Burton said. IBJ

A closer look at Dior’s latest menswear collection

Details from Dior’s proposition for going out out dressing at the Musée Nissim de Camondo, show venue turned showroom: satin bow-ties, multi-colour zig-zags and oversize knits shot through with sparkles. IBJ

IM Men looks to bamboo for inspiration

Earlier this morning, IM Men – part of the Issey Miyake umbrella of brands – presented a S/S 2027 collection which looked to bamboo for inspiration. The initial inspiration came from a visit to Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs which drew them towards the institution’s collection of East Asian art – ‘misty bamboo forest landscapes in ink wash paintings and the intricate layering of branches and leaves created by the paper stencils used in katazome kimono dyeing,’ as the notes described. In the collection, this led to criss-crossing bamboo-style hats and chest pieces, while other pieces took the reference more lightly: like a series of dyed wash denim, designed to evoke the the traditional ink wash paintings, or a series of motifs by designer Rikako Nagashima, derived from images of the shadows cast by bamboo. JM

Julian Klausner continues to delight at Dries Van Noten

Despite the soaring temperatures inside the Paris Tennis Club – its greenhouse-like construction required ice lollies, water, hundreds of fans and two paramedics on standby to keep guests cool – Julian Klausner continued a thrilling run of collections at Dries Van Noten, with an ethereal S/S 2027 menswear offering that paid homage to the eponmyous house founder’s grasp of colour, print and embellishment (Klausner took over from Van Noten in 2025).

The idea of lightness was at the heart of this latest outing, with Klausner marrying diaphanous layers – sheer organza jackets, silk cargo pants, tabard tops left open to reveal the back, and the like – with sunset and sorbet hues (some matching the strawberry, violet and lemon lollies on offer prior to the show), and plenty of embellishment (clear paillettes, floral embroidery and feather headpieces added richness without weight). Footwear was also a highlight – the leopard-print lace-ups and beaded sandals elicited coos of approval from the longtime Dries fan who sat to my left. JM

Behind the scenes at Dries Van Noten

Wallpaper* went backstage to speak with Julian Klausner following the Dries Van Noten S/S 2027 show – watch here.

Junya Watanabe puts his riff on streetwear

This morning at Le Trianon in Montmartre, Junya Watanabe opened proceedings with a collection which put his distinctive riff on streetwear, collaborating with a slew of other brands – among them Kappa, Needles and New Balance. The sweatsuit was a recurring motif, with versions spanning classic Watanabe black and more vivid hues of yellow, green and burgundy, while signature elements of deconstruction – from shredded tweed jackets to back-front-jeans – were layered throughout. Bold, jewellery-like embellishment completed the look, from a multitude of chains to crystal brooches studding American sporting caps. JM

Studio Nicholson hosts its first-ever runway show

This afternoon, in the historic Hôtel d'Évreux on Paris’ Place Vendôme, Studio Nicholson founder Nick Wakeman hosted the first-ever runway show for her London-based label in its 16-year history. ‘I want the crowd to appreciate our journey and the brand’s provenance,’ Wakeman said of the choice. ‘I want people to see the clothes move; I like the idea that it’s live and not just another static image.’ Choosing an intimate, salon-style presentation, the collection was an evolution of the look Nicholson has honed since the brand’s founding: a minimalist, ‘no tricks’ approach where fabric quality is foremost and ‘clothes are believable and fit for purpose, but not boring,’ as she described. Comprising both men’s and womenswear, the result was a comprehensive wardrobe of Studio Nicholson classics – including the Sorte trouser, which has been in production for the last 16 years – alongside some new additions, like a fisherman’s-style jacket and boxy, safari shirt. JM

Hermès evokes the spirit of the Gaucho

Hermès’ design team looked to the folk figure of the Gaucho – the itinerant, wild horseman of the South American frontier – for today’s presentation (not the usual runway show, while the brand is between creative directors, with Grace Wales Bonner making her debut at the helm in January 2027). Gently tapering slacks were worn slightly high-waisted, bombacha style, and the classic Hermès silk scarf was styled with a nod to a rustic neckerchief. The palette was redolent of sedate, dusty plains – earthy browns and muted teal, with an occasional flash of lavender – but tempered with more playful prints of cacti and jumping fences. IBJ

Backstage with Willy Chavarria

Willy Chavarria tells Wallpaper* the story behind his S/S 2027 collection

‘This season there was a lot of conversation about how we find joy and levity in this time of chaos,’ says American designer Willy Chavarria of his S/S 2027 collection, shown yesterday in the dome of Paris’ Espace Niemeyer on a cast which included Bella Freud and Romeo Beckham.

In the latest of Wallpaper’s Ground Report series, we caught up with Chavarria at his studio before the show to discover the story behind the collection, which was titled Comunión. ‘There are two strong feelings in this collection,’ he says. ‘One is joy and colour, the other is shock and awe.’ JM

One hundred years of Lanvin menswear

It’s the centennial year of Lanvin’s menswear line, and the surrealist milieu of Lanvin’s eponymous founder was on creative director Peter Copping’s mind this season. The couturier's relationship to the artistic movement – which celebrated its own centennial in 2024 – was more subtle than her contemporary Elsa Schiparelli, but, according to the show notes for S/S 2027, she dressed members of the loose group of artists and poets including Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. This connection was communicated through discreet subversions of menswear classics: tailored trousers which pool around the ankle, a silk pyjama set modified for daytime, tasseled dress scarves styled with safari jackets. IBJ

Soshiotsuki debuts at Paris Fashion Week Men’s

‘A usually strict father allowing himself to loosen up, just slightly, while on holiday,’ was the central image of 2025 LVMH Prize winner Soshiotsuki’s debut Paris Fashion Week show – the atmosphere of a fantasy resort encouraging the patriarch to let go a little, to resist the impulse for perfection. This was told through a collection made from mostly original fabrics, manufactured in Japan, and constructed to give ‘the impression that gravity has naturally caused the garments to collapse’. IBJ

Backstage at Studio Nicholson

Yesterday afternoon, in the historic Hôtel d’Évreux on Paris’ Place Vendôme, Studio Nicholson founder Nick Wakeman hosted the first-ever runway show for her London-based label in its 16-year history.

Speaking to Wallpaper* for our Ground Report series, Wakeman said the collection was something of a ‘greatest hits… these are my codes, my design language’. Across both men’s and womenswear, it meant a comprehensive wardrobe of Studio Nicholson classics – including the Sorte trouser, which has been in production for the last 16 years – alongside some new additions, like a fisherman’s-style jacket and boxy safari shirt. JM

Wooyoungmi’s S/S 2027 collection was about dressing with joy

Opening the final Sunday of Paris Fashion Week Men’s, Madame Woo looked towards the Korean concept of ‘heung’ for her latest Wooyoungmi show – an expression which captures a mood of ‘joy, spontaneity and rhythm,’ as the Seoul-based designer described via the collection notes.

Cue a collection designed to lift the spirits: colourful hoodies were faded as if the wearer had been lying out all day in the sun, clashing patterns were mixed in a single look, and leather charms hung off belts, their shapes evoking gwaebul norigae pendants, historically worn with the hanbok as protective talismans. JM

At Celine, Michael Rider is creating the clothes he loves

Taking place at the Tennis Club de Paris this afternoon, Michael Rider hosted his first dedicated menswear show for Celine – a continuation of the American designer’s distinctive aesthetic at the house so far, one which melds Ivy League prep (Rider was at Polo Ralph Lauren before Celine; he is also an alumnus of Brown University) with a Parisian insouciance rooted in the house’s codes. Rather than a specific theme, Rider instead said he was simply developing the Celine man’s wardrobe: ‘[It’s about] enjoying what we do in the studio, and desiring it ourselves, all of it, the clothes and the characters.’ Cue a collection of eclecticism and ease: ballooning trousers, metallic leather jeans, colourful cummerbunds, and a multitude of low-pro shoes, sandals and sneakers featured as part of the highly desirable line-up. ‘[It’s about] building toward something bigger,’ he said. ‘Something with legs, and roots.’ JM

Sacai closes out the week

And with Sacai, Paris Fashion Week Men’s comes to a close. ‘The new classics’ offered just what it promised, colliding ‘the rigid, historically conservative codes of traditional tailoring with the vibrant, non-conservative energies of contemporary culture’. Voluminous panel pocketed suit trousers were juxtaposed with tie-dye rugby shirts, and a roomy tailored jacket was hybridised into a duffel with the addition of toggle-and-rope fastenings. Shown concurrently with womenswear, the collection also debuted the brand’s first collaboration with Birkenstock, new footwear which comes from ‘layering and exchanging elements across archival styles.’ IBJ