Located in Beverly Crest, Los Angeles, the Sheats-Goldstein Residence is one of John Lautner’s most cinematic homes. So screen-ready, in fact, it provided the backdrop for Jackie Treehorn’s house in The Big Lebowski, as well as numerous other films, music videos, and fashion spreads, including the July 2026 issue of Wallpaper*, which saw photographer David William Baum and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes capture the Pre-Fall 2026 season’s most striking looks in the home.

Much of this is down to its unique construction; designed by Lautner in 1962, it features a geometric, cantilevered roof which dramatically traverses interior and exterior. When the home was gifted to LACMA in 2016 by businessman and basketball fan James Goldstein – who acquired the house in 1972 – the institution’s CEO, Michael Govan, praised its ‘extreme choreography’. ‘You come through [the entranceway] corridor, you hear that sound of water, you have the plant material... and then, you have this clam shell opening to the view,’ he said. ‘I think that so many buildings have been influenced by it.’

Pre-Fall 2026 fashion photographed at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, Los Angeles

More recently, Kristopher Conner and James Perry, of LA firm Conner + Perry – responsible for the renovation and upkeep of several of the city’s modernist buildings – have overseen works at the residence. Most notably, the creation of the Goldstein Entertainment Complex, which sits under a new tennis court as part of the estate and features a nightclub, offices and a spa. ‘It is an evolution of the visual language established by Lautner in the original house,’ says Kristopher Conner of the raw concrete, glass and stainless steel composition.

‘I’d always wanted to shoot at the home – I’m a big Lautner fan, and it’s such an architectural landmark of LA,’ says Jason Hughes. ‘For the clothes, we wanted them to be a juxtaposition to the building’s futuristic, angular lines. So the pieces have a feeling of romance, but still very sculptural, and sleek – dealing with this idea of shape.’

‘On the day it poured with rain – something rare in Los Angeles, and far from the sun-soaked views of the city we had imagined backdropping the shoot,’ he continues. ‘But despite this, and warnings of mudslides in the hills, the rain adds something atmospheric to these pictures – an unexpected view of a much-photographed city.’

Discover the full shoot below.

Model: Julia Bergshoeff at DNA Models. Casting: Evagria Sergeeva. Hair: Kelly Peach a WSM using Oribe. Make-up: Inge Borg at Call My Agent using Dior Forever Foundation and Dior Capture Le Sérum. Set design: Max Jezek at WSM. Local producer: Katie Binfield. On-set producer: Danielle Quigley. Photography assistants: Keith Bennett, Cés Martinez. Fashion assistants: Lucy Proctor, Mónica Garate. Production assistant: Sarah Hallal. Set assistant: Carter McNeill. Retouching: Emily Chan, Zach Liebenson. Special thanks to Kristopher Conner and James Perry, from Conner + Perry Architects, and the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, Los Angeles.

From a distance, the new Alaïa store in the heart of Miami’s design district looks to be painted a warm pastel pink. A closer look reveals that the exterior and many surfaces inside are clad in diminutive mosaic tiles, creating unexpectedly intricate textures. The choice is both a nod to Miami’s art deco history and entirely fitting for the brand, given how Azzedine Alaïa built a legacy for his namesake house of creating clothes that appear effortlessly sensual, belying their often complex, sculptural constructions.

Inside Alaïa’s serene new store in Miami’s design district

‘We wanted to create a dialogue between the identity of Alaïa and the character of Miami,’ says Ruxandra Halleröd of Swedish design studio Halleroed, who worked with the maison on the store. This Miami opening marks the fifth collaboration between Halleroed and Alaïa, which has involved working closely with former creative director Pieter Mulier. ‘From the beginning, we had many conversations about Azzedine Alaïa’s legacy and what we felt was truly archetypal for the brand,’ says Halleröd. ‘One of the ideas we developed was translating the femininity of Alaïa’s clothing into architecture in a restrained, minimal way. This resulted in a language of soft, curved forms combined with sharp rectangular geometries, creating a tension between the two.’

In the Miami store, this language unfolds in pale pink throughout, a nod to one of Alaïa’s signature shades. (In other stores by Halleroed, recognisably Alaïa design elements like laser-cut patterns are referenced in repeating circular features.) Contrasting with the soft hue, metallic and leather textures appear intermittently. The store is arranged over different levels, with areas dedicated variously to footwear, accessories, and ready-to-wear – the last defined by abundant mirrors and softly bright lighting, creating an airy yet intimate space. As in other outposts, the late Mr Alaïa’s reverence for design is reflected in a collection of exceptional furniture in the new Miami store. The selection brings together both vintage and modern pieces, by the likes of Reinhard Müller, Philippe Starck and Ron Arad, and was curated by interior designer Martin Brûlé.

Elsewhere, bespoke planters created by renowned botanist and longtime Alaïa collaborator Patrick Blanc add greenery to the interior and exterior. ‘For us, Miami is also defined by its lush tropical vegetation,’ says Halleröd, ‘so we integrated abundant planting into the architecture itself, allowing it to become part of the spatial experience rather than simply decoration.’ As well as being a link to the city, Blanc’s work is something of an Alaïa signature too: one of his ‘vertical gardens’ covers a large wall in the courtyard of the house’s sprawling flagship on rue de Marignan in Paris.

‘What we find most special is the way the architecture feels almost alive,’ says Halleröd of the Miami store. ‘Curved forms seem to grow organically out of the ground, the columns and the façade, becoming display elements, seating and oversized planters.’ The overall effect encapsulates Alaïa: a meeting of tradition and modernity, where unconventional design codes abound, the sensual is prioritised, and apparent simplicity is the result of complex consideration. The result ‘creates a fluid relationship between architecture, furniture and landscape, making the entire space feel like one continuous sculptural composition’.

The new store is at 171 NE 39th St, Miami

Paris Fashion Week culminated yesterday, marking the end of a month-long season of shows that has seen previous stops in New York, London and Milan.

With a nine-day schedule standing at nearly double the length of its counterparts, Paris remains the defining city of fashion month – not least because it comprises shows from fashion’s heavyweight houses, among them Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent (to name just a handful).

After last season’s debuts dominated the S/S headlines, A/W 2026 was about the sophomore show, as designers settled into their positions as creative directors. Without the weight of expectation, we saw some brilliant shows – notably Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Michael Rider at Celine, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe, and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel (all were showing their second ready-to-wear collections).

Here, reported by Wallpaper* fashion & beauty features director Jack Moss and contributing writer India Jarvis, we pick the standout shows that defined the week.

The best of Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026

Dior

Jonathan Anderson staged his A/W 2026 runway show for Dior in Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries, constructing a circular show set around one of the park’s ponds (for the occasion, it had been populated with Monet-esque lily pads, meticulously constructed to look like the real thing), while the invitation comprised miniature versions of the park’s signature green metal chairs. Across the pond’s centre ran an elevated runway, echoing the line of the Tuileries’ Grand Allée, a historic promenade since the park opened to the public in 1667 after a renovation by Louis XIV. It led to a collection about ‘seeing and being seen’, a contemporary imagining of the promenade, ‘[where] a walk in the park becomes a performance’. Cue a ‘panoply of Parisians’ in eclectic, time-hopping attire, from the woozy ruffles of the Belle Époque (here transformed into mini dresses with bouncing trains) to plays on bourgeois tropes, such as fabrics that recalled heritage tweeds, blazers with golden buttons, and shearling jackets reimagined with wave-like hems. What was most striking, though, was a feeling of levity: lily-pad-adorned footwear, polka-dot motifs and crystallised denim were both playful and pretty. ‘Dior has this giant past, and I had to start there,’ Anderson said. ‘Now I feel free to release it from that.’ Jack Moss

READ: Jonathan Anderson’s latest Dior show was a walk in the park

Saint Laurent

A cinematic offering from Anthony Vaccarello unfolded in a simulacrum of a sleek, modernist home; at its centre, a sized-up recreation of a bust that lived in Yves Saint Laurent’s own apartment. Through it strode this season’s Saint Laurent heroine, her heavy-smoked eye and slick, side-parted hair a nod towards Helmut Newton’s Paris Vogue photograph of a model in Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Le Smoking’ tuxedo on Rue Aubriot in 1975. Indeed, tailoring was central to the A/W 2026 collection: eight trouser suits opened the show, while various other iterations appeared throughout (including Vaccarello’s own riff on the tuxedo, worn by model Loli Bahia, who walked exclusively for Saint Laurent this season and closed the show). Here, the silhouette was sloped across the shoulder and narrowed at the waist – though not constricted – for a riff on the power suit that was more ‘insouciant shrug than swagger’. As a counterpoint, Vaccarello looked towards the ‘troubled heroines’ of Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams, as well as Romy Schneider in the 1971 film Max et les Ferrailleurs (she was this season’s protagonist, he said), to capture an ‘elegance tinged with ennui… the beauty of intimacy and vulnerability’. To capture this mood, a series of slips and dresses came in lace coated in silicone, while enormous fur coats had a vivacious confidence. Jack Moss

Dries Van Noten

For many of us, the stylings of awkward adolescence are best not dwelt upon – after all, who looked or felt their best as a teenager? Evidently, Julian Klausner takes a more romantic view of this impressionable time, but, then again, Klausner was likely a more sophisticated brand of teenager than most. In any case, this was the impression given by his A/W 2026 collection for Dries Van Noten, which was inspired in part by a visit to Lycée Carnot, and the memories of being an adolescent ‘work-in-progress’. The Lycée is a Rive Droite public school with alumni including Gilles Deleuze, Guy Debord, and Daft Punk, and its Gustave Eiffel-designed great hall has been the backdrop for numerous Paris fashion shows over the years – in other words, a suitably rarefied and creatively rich starting point.

The 61 looks at Dries Van Noten asked that most teenage question: who am I going to be today? For the confident moment, a navel-bearing button-up knit with a vibrant silk skirt. When a suit of armour is required, a protective duffel coat that does the talking for you. Or maybe one day the mood might be scholastic – collegiate blazer and pleated skirt, but always, always customised, an embellishment here, a contrasting trim there. ‘Just like a pixelated picture, the more one gets far from that time of endless questioning, the clearer it becomes,’ Klausner said, a metaphor he extended through prints with digitally warped 17th-century Flemish still life paintings. Opulent, mature fabrics and finishings were styled with a youthful irreverence best summarised by the final lines from Gala Dragot’s vocal performance, which soundtracked the show: ‘Don’t be too serious... Wear a collar... Keep it blurry though.’ India Jarvis

Acne Studios

If Dries Van Noten was an homage to the experimental attitude of youth, then Acne Studios marked its 30th birthday year with a collection that declared (as one does at 30): I know exactly who I am. A/W 2026 was an affirmation of the house’s irreverent signatures, such as a revival of the particular 1996 cut of jean that made their name, and photographic elements that nod to the brand’s unconventional marketing style, including the bi-annual Acne Paper.

The setting for this season was a succession of intersecting cuboid rooms that, viewed simultaneously from the end of the runway, appeared like a Josef Albers work made three-dimensional. According to Jonny Johansson’s show notes, this was conceived ‘like an enfilade of salons … the portals marking what has come before, and what might follow’. Where a salon in the Parisian tradition might mean a bringing together of clashing or complementary ideas, at Acne Studios, the determination is to blur those boundaries as much as possible. Standout looks saw cropped aviator jackets worn with skin-tight jodhpurs and desirable point-toe pumps, Prince of Wales check jackets worn over one shoulder, and larger-than-life portraits of art school students, taken by Paul Kooiker, printed onto stiff pencil skirts and draped dresses.

Alaïa

Late last year, just after the completion of the Italian house’s sale to Prada, it was announced that Dario Vitale would be leaving his position as creative director of Versace (he lasted a single, but impactful season), to be replaced by Belgian designer Pieter Mulier. It meant that this season’s Alaïa show, watched by designers Matthieu Blazy and Raf Simons, was to be his last: the swansong of a five-year tenure defined by commercial expansion and critical success (he has also established a coterie of model muses, many of whom walked this final show, and will likely follow him to Versace). Held in an intimate showspace in the former Fondation Cartier – Mulier said he wanted it to recall a 1990s pre-iPhone runway show – the collection itself eschewed his more recent experimental silhouettes in favour of stripping things back to the essence of the house, from simple body-contouring tank dresses to lean tailored overcoats, stretch knits, and peplums and ruffles (the last flourishes rendered in Mulier’s contemporary, streamlined style).

‘This collection is about clothes to wear. What is a jacket? What is a dress?’ he said backstage after the show. ‘It’s basically a vocabulary of the last five years. It’s what I learned at Alaïa, that I’m giving to the next designer. It’s like leaving the keys on the table. At Alaïa, I learned precision, editing and [that] real luxury is not what we all think. It is a perfectly cut jacket.’ Jack Moss

READ: Pieter Mulier delivers a swansong collection at Alaïa: ‘It is a vocabulary of the last five years’

Rabanne

Of all the distinct fashions of the long 20th century, it could be argued that 1940s style is the hardest to reference without veering into the territory of costume. Perhaps it’s because boxy tailored silhouettes and victory rolls are so much associated with the vast canon of British war movies, or perhaps because austerity-driven ‘make do’ dressing is antithetical to contemporary fashion at either end of the high-low scale. It’s a testament to Julien Dossena’s eye, then, that for Rabanne A/W 2026 he incorporated patently 1940s-inspired styles – T-bar heels, tea-dress florals, and clashing knitwear – without evoking even a hint of reenactment.

After all, Rabanne has always been a house noted for its futuristic bent. Unconventional, industrial materials, like metal and plastic, are at its very heart, and remained so this season alongside those more vintage ideas – coming together in a collection that the brand called ‘a little louche’. This take on modernist femininity was told through blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpses of a slip through an unbuttoned blouse, a hint of lace underneath a more conservative skirt, and pussybows left suggestively undone. Dossena told Wallpaper* post-show that the character he wanted to build with these contrasts was that of ‘a resistant woman’, and that for him, there was a suggestion of retro-futurism with the 1940s-derived shapes (for example, hair pulled into sculptural pompadour styles was less Vera Lynn and more replicants in Blade Runner). India Jarvis

Rick Owens

What might the cyberpunk cousin of Marlene Dietrich wear for a night on the town? It’s a question that could only be answered by Rick Owens – whose A/W 2026 collection was an homage to the ‘dignified sequence of her life stages’, all shot through with classics from his own particular design language. Think body parts augmented through prosthetics and sci-fi silhouettes in a post-apocalyptic landscape heavy with dry ice and punctuated by magnesium-bright beams of light. Presenting the collection as the second part of ‘Tower’, which premiered during the men's collections, Owens drew from Dietrich’s qualities of ‘steeliness’ and ‘grit’, and interpreted them as sheath-like dresses, abundant piles of faux fur, and flight jackets.

Just as the German star’s enduring legacy was in part a product of her striking collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, Owens is an artist quick to credit the rich input his work receives from his creative partners. This season, much attention has been lovingly devoted to name-checking the hands through which his raw materials pass – from the third-generation, family-run mill in Como, Italy, which weaves a high-performance fibre called Kevlar (purportedly five-times stronger than steel), to the Veneto-region wash house committed to reducing water waste, which treats industrial indigo canvas. India Jarvis

Loewe

Presented on a bright-yellow runway populated by German artist Cosima Von Bonin’s plush figures of clams, octopi and dogs, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s sophomore Loewe collection was a welcome jolt of energy on the Friday morning of Paris Fashion Week. ‘What is fashion but an open field for endless creative play?’ said the American designers, whose poppy A/W 2026 collection translated their colourful beach-ready debut for the winter months, resulting in a riot of curvy dégradé shearling parkas, 3D-printed slips and shaggy-hemmed dresses with trailing trains. Other elements had a sporting feel – like face-shielding sunglasses, boldly coloured anoraks and chunky riffs on half-zip ski sweaters – while inflatable elements meant garments could be transformed in size and proportion (a lobster-claw-shaped pump, shown at the re-see the following day, will be sold separately).

Such experiments were made possible by the abilities of the Loewe atelier, particularly when it came to leather: bouclé overcoats were made from intricate loops of leather yarn, while the gradient shearlings were treated ‘in the same manner as poodle grooming’. ‘As we began [creating] our second collection, we were struck by a simple truth: for us, the act of making is, at its core, an expression of joy – an intellectual, process-driven pursuit charged with playfulness,’ said the designers. ‘The path taken matters as much as the end result. It is the idea of play as rigorous experimentation and problem-solving, moving between instinct and experience, between a devotion to craft and its endless opportunities for innovation.’ Jack Moss

Issey Miyake

For Satoshi Kondo, the role of designer is as much about relinquishing control as it is wielding it. Knowing when to hold back, not to overstep the mark, to let the materials speak for themselves. This was the credo he brought to the fore for Issey Miyake’s A/W 2026 offering – a characteristically Japanese recognition of innate, simple beauty.

Titled ‘Creating, Allowing’, the collection navigated this specific tension understood by designers through pieces where the artist’s hand was inserted sparingly, never tampering with the true essence of the fabrication, only enhancing. At its best, this looked like expanses of cloth cut with technical lines that left their impression on the negative space, like the wine-coloured single-breasted coat with inbuilt cape that the model held up over her shoulders to exaggerate its rectangular construction. The innate movement of the house-signature pleats was used only intermittently and, instead, dramatically inflexible lacquered washi paper was introduced through breast plates, bodices and belts – creating a contrast between motion and restriction. Kondo’s intention with this was that the most important impact was made through the human frame, by ‘minimising design intervention and leaving the form-making to the wearer's own body’.

As for the space itself, the Carrousel du Louvre was transformed with a layer of silvery sand and ‘finely shredded aluminum foil, [serving] as a device for the interaction between "material", "people", and "clothing"’. This surface became marked and patterned as the models moved across it, another allusion to Kondo’s metaphor of ‘considered disruption’. India Jarvis

Lanvin

This year marks the centenary of menswear at the house of Lanvin – a celebration that filtered into the season’s womenswear outing through nods to the boyish silhouettes that characterised interwar ladies’ fashion. It was a time when overtly feminine curves were flattened into straight lines from bust to waist, creating an elongated, athletic outline that came to epitomise the emancipated New Woman.

Peter Copping, who took the reins at Lanvin in late 2024, imagined ‘a dialogue between generations’, which came together beautifully to meld the concerns of Jeanne Lanvin’s customers in the 1920s with those who shop the brand in the present. What do they have in common? Evidently, a love of opera – gloves were cuffed and elbow-length, and belted opera coats were voluminous enough to be worn over an evening gown, and trimmed with faux fur. They wear hats (Jeanne Lanvin’s first foray into fashion was as an apprentice milliner), with A/W 2026’s borrowing from cloche shapes but with exaggerated sou’wester-style brims. They favour a dash of restrained glamour. If some of the cuts leaned slightly austere, they were countered with an opulence of fabric and finish: hand-embroidered bead droplets, inky velvets, laser-cut fringes.

Lanvin is the oldest French maison still in operation, its HQ still in its original site – therefore, the weight of its legacy must hang heavily over every designer who takes its helm. Its founder insisted on le chic ultime, a phrase that surely needs no translation, and which is no small order. It is a comfort that, for every moment of reinvention it undergoes, Lanvin is still a place that women can go to for guaranteed elegance. India Jarvis

Givenchy

The idea of individual style was a throughline of Paris Fashion Week, one expressed by Sarah Burton with her third collection for Givenchy – the former Alexander McQueen designer’s most liberated outing yet (and, as a result, her best). ‘How can we put ourselves back together in the world we’re living in?’ was the question Burton asked this season, elucidating after the show that she was thinking about the multiplicities of a contemporary woman’s life (as such, it found a companion with the Prada show in Milan, where Miuccia Prada asserted that ‘as a woman, your life is layered – each day demands not only a shifting of clothes, but a richness of identities within yourself’). So there was some typically brilliant tailoring (Burton is known for her prowess in the medium, and has recently brought over her tailoring team from Alexander McQueen), though also more vivid expressions of style – a dress, hanging from razor-thin straps, in bright yellow leather; shimmering leopard spots that burst into tassels; silk T-shirts that had been refashioned by Stephen Jones into headpieces – as well as oversized riffs on carpenter jeans, off-the-shoulder bombers, and high-collared white shirts. ‘I wanted to make it feel very personal,’ said Burton. ‘Each woman is her own person, each silhouette is her own character.’ Jack Moss

Junya Watanabe

Junya Watanabe lets the clothes do the talking. The A/W 2026 collection was accompanied by show notes that came to two single sentences: ‘The Art of Assemblage Couture explores form born from pure creative instinct, free from conventional notions of dressmaking. Through the direct presentation of raw materials, this approach expresses the surrounding social environment.’ This succinct summary belied a frenzy of ideas, which played out over one of the most entertaining shows of the week.

Classic couture silhouettes were fashioned from a mish-mash of consumer goods and mass-produced garments. The opening look, worn by Irina Shayk, comprised a gown in a 1950s prom style, constructed from gloves, with a mesh flounce. A puff-sleeved dress, with a squared neckline and a central slit that showed a silver interior, appeared to be made from a gold Mylar blanket – its creased folds still visible, like it had just been ripped from its packet. Another dress used kitschily patterned curtains, pinch pleats and all, for its full, trained skirt, while its bodice was made from – what else? – scrap number plates.

So far, so Watanabe, but this season offered more in the way of spectacle than just unconventional materials. In a more choreographed display than usual, Watanabe called in the services of Poland-born movement director Pat Boguslawski. He directed a languid yet melodramatic routine for Watanabe’s models, who threw garments onto chairs with tango-inspired passion, and turned their heads with the kind of simpering doe-eyed expressiveness of silent movie starlets. This reference was reinforced through Eugene Souleiman’s hair design, sculpted curls slicked to the foreheads and cheeks in the manner of Josephine Baker, and glam make-up by Isamaya Ffrench – winged, heavy-lashed and sometimes tear-streaked eyes. India Jarvis

Celine

It hasn’t taken long for Michael Rider to define a signature look at Celine: a preppy, uptown-inflected uniform that feels like a vision of Parisian style through American eyes (Rider had worked at Celine previously, under Phoebe Philo, though more recently headed up US label Polo Ralph Lauren). And it has worked: his collections thus far have felt like you could wear them off the runway and straight onto the street, full of clever riffs on quotidian pieces that will no doubt be much copied by lesser brands (they have also been full of great accessories, from abundant charm bracelets to colourful handbags and slipper-like loafers). For A/W 2026, Rider continued his upward trajectory with a show held at the Institut de France amid a series of beautiful modernist speakers in wood and metal, presenting a collection that favoured perennial style over ephemeral trends. ‘Celine is a style: a mix of old and new that feels urgent and dreamy,’ said Rider. ‘Making the things we all dream of finding and wearing.’ And in among this ready-to-wear wardrobe (in the truest sense), flourishes of the playful and the romantic emerged, from enormous sequins and flashes of animal print to feathered headpieces and bold punctuations of colour. ‘Putting on clothes, a look, can change the day – [it can] change how we walk and feel,’ said Rider. ‘I love that.’ Jack Moss

Hermès

Staged on a runway of moss and soil (strangely, a trend of the week, later seen at Miu Miu and Louis Vuitton), Nadège Vanhée’s latest outing for Hermès saw her conjure what she called a ‘liminal realm’ between dawn and dusk, earth and space. It lent the collection an alien, otherworldly feel: models emerged from glowing orbs and looped around the Garde Républicaine show space on an inky runway, which also inspired the clothing’s palette of deep blues, greys and black. Mashing up the equestrian codes that remain at the heart of Hermès – here, sliced-away jodhpurs-cum-cycling shorts, dressage blazers and knee-high leather boots – with lean, futuristic silhouettes, it was a clever hybrid of the past, present and future, a liminal realm of Vanhée’s own. Ostrich and leather jump suits, with contrasting knit sleeves, were the season’s show pieces – the result of the house’s superlative leather atelier, they straddled sex appeal and function – while visible zips added an almost sci-fi feel, running down the front of dresses or slicing across the chest of a jacket. Prints came via AM Cassandre, an art deco artist, and saw clouds intersected by a geometric structure – a reflection of Vanhée’s own juxtapositions between the graphic and the elemental. Jack Moss

Comme des Garçons

A strong Comme des Garçons collection saw Rei Kawakubo find solace in her favoured colour, black, which – save for a brief interlude in bright, candy pink – made up the majority of the A/W 2026 collection. And, while recent collections have seen Kawakubo grapple with tumultuous world affairs, the choice of the colour was not necessarily to represent grief or mourning – instead, the Japanese designer said it captured the expansiveness of the creative process. ‘I have come to realise that, after all, black is the colour for me,’ she said in a typically brief statement issued to the press. ‘It’s just the strongest, the best for creation, and the colour that embodies the rebellious spirit. And has the biggest meaning: the universe and the black hole.’ Indeed, the use of a single colour allowed Kawakubo’s typically provocative forms to come to the fore: this season, pillow-like constructions draped in semi-sheer black tulle, undulating pile-ups of shirred ruffles and tassels, or saucer-shaped protusions that looped around the upper body. Like any Comme collection, it was a Rorschach test – revelling in the unfamiliar, Kawakubo always challenges you to draw your own conclusions. Jack Moss

Balenciaga

Of all the creative directors at the nascent stages of new tenures, Pierpaolo Piccioli might have one of the steepest mountains to climb at Balenciaga. In the 16 years he spent at Valentino, prior to taking this new position in the spring of 2025, he demonstrated a Cristóbal Balenciaga-worthy approach to dressmaking that prioritised proportion and colour. But while Piccioli was sending out breathtaking confections of ballooning silk taffeta at Valentino, Balenciaga the brand was being injected with a new edge, at the hand of Vetements-founder Demna, whose zeitgeist-defining designs were laced with subversion and irony. How to bring the grandeur and romance that are Piccioli’s calling cards, without alienating the new demographic of customers who flocked to the brand under Demna?

For this season, his second collection, Piccioli pinned his hopes on a collaboration with Sam Levinson – the creator of Euphoria, the teen drama responsible for making internationally recognised stars out of its cast, which includes Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, and Hunter Schafer. Audiences at the Balenciaga A/W 2026 show were treated to a preview of clips from the HBO show’s third series (airing publicly in April), which played on screens across the venue; its interplay of light and dark was found running through the collection, which Piccioli had titled ‘ClairObscur’. The collection itself was a largely black affair, in light-catching high-gloss fabrics, punctuated by the occasional neon-toned print that harkened to Euphoria's colour-saturated visual style. If Euphoria – boundary-pushing, youth-orientated, and ever so slightly contentious – feels more spiritually within Demna’s wheelhouse than Piccioli’s, the High Renaissance references (‘ClairObscur’ is a play on clair-obscur or chiaroscuro, the artistic style beloved by Mannerist painters, which manifests as dramatically contrasting tones to create intense depth) brought proceedings firmly back into Piccioli’s world. India Jarvis

READ: Balenciaga taps Euphoria’s Sam Levinson for A/W 2026

Jean Paul Gaultier

After the shock factor of his debut last season – one which divided both critics and online commentators with its barely-there silhouettes and trompe l’oeil prints of nude bodies – Dutch designer Duran Lantink seemed to hit his stride this season, using his eye for the surreal and the sculptural to create a disruptive cast of archetypes, from the raver to the cowboy. Marlene Dietrich (or, more specifically, a treasured mesh T-shirt printed with the filmstar that Lantink had found in a vintage shop) was one figure on the moodboard, inspiring the clever opening tailoring, which came with jutting folds and sculpted lapels, while also being printed on a dress installed with dry ice (a nod to her favoured vice – cigarettes). The designer said she was a master in subverting tropes: ‘dominant, sexy and graceful, the ultimate hybrid’ – a mood that informed the shape-shifting collection. Tailoring metamorphosed into tech-y sportswear, trompe-l’oeil bodysuits of artist’s dummies were overlaid with lingerie, and puffer jackets became bodysuits. ‘It’s a spirit that suits the house of Gaultier, a place where the world is perpetually turned upside down,’ said Lantink via press notes. ‘Feminine and masculine, inside out, vintage and new, underwear as outerwear, technical and tailored all at once.’ Jack Moss

Chanel

Matthieu Blazy said that his sophomore ready-to-wear collection began with a quote from house founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. ‘Fashion is both caterpillar and butterfly. Be a caterpillar by day and a butterfly by night,’ she said. ‘There is nothing more comfortable than a caterpillar and nothing more made for love than a butterfly. We need dresses that crawl and dresses that fly.’ It seemed an apt description for Blazy’s own vision for Chanel thus far, one which elevates the quotidien through expressive acts of craft, and finds joy in both the functional and the glamorous. These are special clothes, no doubt (as anyone who has had the chance to see them up close can attest), though they are designed to be worn, not simply exalted. As such, he will no doubt be satisfied by the busy shop floors earlier this week as his debut collection landed (it was an ongoing fashion-week talking point), and more so to see those purchases worn by attendees to the show on Monday evening (and not just by the usual high-spending customers, but editors and stylists alike).

Staged amid a series of vast primary-coloured cranes – Blazy is, after all, still in the process of constructing his Chanel – the designer’s A/W 2026 collection was a brilliant and comprehensive exercise in wardrobing, which, to borrow Coco Chanel’s categorisation spanned the ‘caterpillar’ (roomy blazers, tweeds reformulated into lumberjack-style overshirts, simple jersey dresses), but also the ‘butterfly’. The latter came in an extraordinary stream of lustrous, colour-sturated looks at the end of the show, loaded with embellishment – appliqué flowers, lace and beads – and matched with models’ pastel-coloured or metallic hair. Over the 78 looks, there was a multitude of iterations of the Chanel woman, and the accessories to match (from gleaming metallic court shorts, to squashy crescent-shaped bags that recalled croissants). ‘Chanel is day, Chanel is night. It represents the freedom to choose between the caterpillar and the butterfly whenever you want,’ said Blazy. ‘I wish to create a canvas for women to be unapologetically who they are and who they want to be.’ Jack Moss

READ: Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore Chanel collection is made for ‘women to be unapologetically who they are’

Louis Vuitton

Nicolas Ghesquière staged his A/W 2026 collection for Louis Vuitton amid a show set by Severance production designer Jeremy Hindle, seeing rolling green hills – like those found in pastoral landscapes – abstracted into a series of sharp, futuristic peaks. The collection itself had a similar rationale, drawing inspiration from nature – ‘mountains, forests, plains’, and the clothing traditionally used to live among such elemental landscapes – and reimagining them through a series of Ghesquière’s typically idiosyncratic, time-travelling silhouettes. The idea of expedition seemed a throughline – supersized-wide-shouldered jackets, shearling hats and furry-hooded duffel coats seemed primed for protection, while bags hung on leather staffs like bindles – though there was a ceremonial feel to garments, which recalled traditional rural dress (though, in Ghesquière style, they were mashed up in such a way that the references were hard to place). ‘It is not an escape from our realities, but an echo of them,’ said Ghesquière of the vivid collection, which also featured the ‘urban pastoral’ works of Ukrainian artist Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko. ‘[It is] a new folklore, for the future.’ Jack Moss

Miu Miu

Miuccia Prada has long interrogated a woman’s place in the world: how they move through it, and a wardrobe that feels reflective of their needs. For A/W 2026, she was thinking about the ‘smallness of the body’ – not in its physical proportions, but in opposition with the vastness of the world around us. It feels like a response to our current era of overload: the runway at Palais d’Iéna was covered in a layer of soil and moss, a reminder that beyond the pomp and ceremony of luxury fashion, we are simply humans living in communion with the earth (as a seatmate commented, perhaps this was her instruction to ‘touch grass’). ‘I am obsessed with the smallness of the body – in a human sense, the contrast between ourselves, our bodies and the vastness of that which surrounds us,’ she said. ‘Who we are, and the scale and magnitude of what we have to face. This collection is not about fragility – there is a confidence, and a strength. But always about a confrontation between a human and the expansiveness of the world.’

As such, the collection segued between moments of strength and intimacy: for the former, enveloping trapper hats, hiking shoes and sporty shearling-lined parkas, for the latter, slip dresses, satin shoes and bejewelled embellishment. There felt something of the 1990s to it: not only in the more minimal looks, which intersected the middle of the show, but in that contrast between glamour and utility (a parka over a mini dress; a studded handbag; a block heel), and also the appearance of Chloë Sevigny, a longtime house muse who first walked for Miu Miu in 1996. She was joined by a coterie of ‘individuals’ on the runway, from models Gemma Ward and Kristen McMenamy to the actress Gillian Anderson, who closed the show. Jack Moss

READ: Miu Miu’s all-star cast for A/W 2026 featured Gillian Anderson and Chloë Sevigny

So the story goes, in 1936, when the Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim displayed a cup and saucer covered in gazelle fur as part of an exhibition at New York’s MoMA, such was the impact of the surrealist object that a woman fainted right in front of it. ‘She left no name with the attendants who revived her – only a vague feeling of apprehension,’ reported the New Yorker of the incident at the time.

This is fur’s visceral power: when worn, it becomes a heady meeting place of signifiers – luxury, wealth, power, but also protection, armour against the elements, an ancient and primal urge to be swaddled in the spoils of the hunt. It can provoke equal outrage and desire, but also an underlying perversity – the surreal wrongness of wearing another’s skin, one which Oppenheim‘s work duly captures. ‘[It is] one of the perverse and pleasing sculptures of the 20th century,’ wrote the critic Andrea K. Scott.

And, Oppenheim’s legacy lives on: as part of the recent Frieze week in London, the buzzy Irish-Australian artist and jeweller Leo Costelloe presented a deer-pelt-covered jug as part of his exhibition ‘Kitchen’ at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ. He called it his ‘ode to Meret Oppenheim’, part of a series of works which mind the ‘fantasy and unease’ of the domestic realm. ‘I’m naturally drawn to themes that tread the line between aspirational fantasy and desperate reality,’ he told Wallpaper*.

Fur was all over the A/W 2025 runways, too – in illusory form, at least. For the past decade, fashion’s luxury houses have largely done away with the use of fur in their collections: in 2021, the Kering group – which owns Bottega Veneta, Gucci and Balenciaga, among others – banned fur, alongside brands like Prada, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana and Valentino. Whether evoked through hyper-realistic imitation furs, cleverly manipulated shearlings (shearling is a by-product of the meat industry, rather than farmed) or fluffy fronds of feathers, it was the undeniable material of the season, appearing on both the men’s and women’s runways.

In the collections, designers mined fur’s connotations, suggesting at once a heady, bygone glamour, but also a want for protection against the elements – whether real or existential. At Prada, which featured shearling ‘fur’ trapped under layers of clear plastic or erupting into strange protrusions at the neckline of a coat, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons said the material evoked the ‘raw glamour’ at the heart of the collection. ‘Glamour was something we were attracted to, instinctively, and its connection to femininity,’ said Mrs Prada at the time. ‘We asked ourselves – what is feminine? What is feminine beauty? What is femininity today? It is a constant questioning, an examining of femininity – what does it mean?’

Here, as selected by the Wallpaper* style team, ten imitation fur and shearling pieces – from classic coats to bandeau tops and accessories – which capture the raw, twisted glamour which ran through the A/W 2025 collections.

‘Alexander McQueen was all about the waistline,’ said Irish creative director Seán McGirr following his A/W 2025 collection for McQueen, which carved out the waist in dramatic fashion. It would be a trend that ran through the season: architectural tailoring was nipped at the waist or narrowed with wide-leather belts, suggesting not constriction but a new power silhouette (as such, it was often teamed with a wide shoulder, superhero-style). At Sarah Burton’s Givenchy debut, jackets were meticulously sculpted at the waistline (‘to cut, shape and proportion. It’s what I feel, how I work, and want to do,’ she said), while Kim Jones’ swansong at Dior Men looked towards the pinched-waist Bar Jacket for inspiration.

In keeping with this mood, the belt became the accessory of the season, with iterations at Prada, Jil Sander, Saint Laurent, Brioni and Sacai worn to reshape the body – whether over gowns or blazers, or cinching the waist of an overcoat. But the statement belt has been bubbling under for some time: at Miu Miu’s S/S 2025 show, looping and stacked-up chain belts were akin to strings of jewellery, while other designers – from Hodakova to August Barron and Craig Green – have created iterations that are studded, charm-adorned, painted with florals or furry to the touch. As such, they provide the perfect flourish to an otherwise simple outfit, channelling an au courant desire to adorn ourselves and our accessories (see: the unstoppable rise of the bag charm).

Here, as selected by the Wallpaper* style team, are ten statement-making belts to add drama to any outfit.

Themes of glamour, danger and seduction ran through the A/W 2025 collections – from Saint Laurent’s thigh-high leather boots to ‘fur’ coats, animal prints and sculpted tailoring. As seen in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper* (on newsstands now), we capture the season’s sensual new mood in 12 objects and looks for men and women.

Power trip (top left)

Tropes of glamour – from bullet bras and brooches to red lips and fur coats – were riffed on by designers in unexpected and imaginative ways. At Alaïa, towering shearling ‘fur’ coats looped around models’ necklines and tassels jutted from skirt waistlines, while vast corsages sat flush to the neck. ‘The message is about singularity, individuality, the eternal strength and resilience of women, empowering them through their clothes,’ said creative director Pieter Mulier. ‘That inspired Azzedine, and it always inspires me – the strength of beauty.’

Thigh high (top right)

An imagined meeting between Robert Mapplethorpe and Yves Saint Laurent sparked Anthony Vaccarello’s menswear collection for Saint Laurent. Clashing the carnal desires of Mapplethorpe’s photography with the ‘bookish’ classicism of Yves Saint Laurent’s Parisian uniform, it was defined by thigh-grazing leather boots worn with 1980s-inspired tailoring. Referencing a ‘Robin Hood’ boot created by Yves Saint Laurent in 1963, they were perhaps the season’s most talked-about accessory, finding fans in Alexander Skarsgård and Pedro Pascal.

Buffer zone

The proliferation of faux fur – or fur reproductions in cleverly manipulated feathers or dyed shearling – suggested a desire for protection, whether against the elements or something more existential. Enveloping ‘yeti’ coats were most appealing in their hefty weight and size, from those at Dolce & Gabbana – evoking the thrown-on style of off-duty models – to Sportmax’s shaggy monochromatic overcoats. ‘Hyper-reinvention – where the ordinary becomes extraordinary,’ said the Italian label of the collection.

Swan song

After a five-year tenure, Kim Jones held his closing act as artistic director of Dior menswear amid a dramatic monochromatic mişe-en-scene that saw models descend an enormous optic white staircase and onto the runway – a play on the staircase at the house’s Avenue Montaigne address. Silhouettes took inspiration from the streamlined proportions of Christian Dior’s 1954 H-Line couture collection, while ribbon-like eye masks were tied at the back with a bow, evoking those found on the bottles of the Miss Dior fragrance.

Magic eye

Awaiting the arrival of incoming creative director Matthieu Blazy, Chanel has used recent collections to reinforce its most distinctive codes. For A/W 2025, it did so through a collection designed to ‘alter perceptions’, reimagining Chanel emblems using tricks of the eye – whether trompe l’oeil bows or a series of surreal accessories blown up in size or shrunk into miniature. These included a huge version of its signature pochette, a tiny quilted handbag, and this Borrowers-style string of pearls, one of which flips open to make a bag.

Dark arts

‘A menacing elegance’ is how Anthony Vaccarello defined the mood of his menswear collection for Saint Laurent, with its sense of danger, inflected with hints of kink. There was also Prada’s patchworked leather tailoring and raw slices of shearling ‘fur’; Lemaire’s leather foulards, worn as headscarves; and elongated trench coats and leather gloves at Ferragamo. The latter was presented by Maximilian Davis on a darkened runway strewn with red roses, a nod to the sensual staging of Pina Bausch’s Nelken, performed by the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

Wild ones

Designers embraced a wilder side this season, with Duran Lantink’s collection sporting a heady collage of zebra, leopard and tiger prints, some painted directly on to the models’ bodies, while Peter Copping’s Lanvin debut – an ode to the louche 1920s eveningwear of founder Jeanne Lanvin – featured oversized leopard-print coats with a soft, shaggy finish. At Sacai, Chitose Abe looked towards more fantastical realms, conjuring up the monsters of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are with brightly coloured flourishes of dyed shearling.

Hat trick

The hat is having something of a renaissance, appearing in various guises on recent runways. Signalling a move beyond the casual spirit of a cap or beanie, designers instead delighted in the nostalgic elegance of more classic millinery. At Sportmax, it was something between a pillbox and a panama, at Duran Lantink, there were amped-up versions of the trapper and woolly hats in his signature sculpted form, while Loro Piana featured a play on the cloche hat, a style synonymous with the liberatory dress codes of the 1920s.

Pump action

The pointed, heeled pump has been an archetype of femininity since its rise to prominence in the 1930s, a moment that coincided with the growing influence of Hollywood. Interpretations of the pump appeared throughout the collections, though it was those at Prada that proved most intriguing, featuring raw-cut edges as a riposte to perfection. Co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons noted it was part of an interrogation of femininity. ‘We asked ourselves, what is feminine beauty?’ said Mrs Prada. ‘It is a constant questioning.’

Carry all

This was the season of the XXL bag, perfect for transporting the necessities of contemporary life. Hermès offered up a new take on its ‘Haut à Courroies’ bag, which, in its roominess, can double as a weekend bag or plane carry-on. Stripped of the usual hardware, the various straps and clasps were replaced with ghostly embossing, as if a trace of what was there had been left behind. It came as part of a collection that artistic director Véronique Nichanian described as ‘a play between front and back, inside and out, visible and invisible’.

Body work

Stella McCartney staged her show at the ‘Stellacorp’ HQ – a surreal simulacrum of an office, complete with spinning chairs and desks, which was eventually invaded by underwear-clad pole dancers. Titled ‘Laptop to Lapdance’, playful juxtapositions ran through the collection, which saw the corporate uniform, from pencil skirts to blouses, shot through with a frisson of perversity. Collections from Acne Studios, Balenciaga and All-In presented similar riffs on office attire, the latter inspired by Mike Nichols’ 1988 movie Working Girl.

Take shape

Men’s tailoring this season was sculpted in silhouette, with a focus on the waist. Kim Jones’ final collection for Dior Men included a tuxedo-style riff on Christian Dior’s Bar jacket, while at Wooyoungmi, a reconsideration of eveningwear saw a carved waistline on a jacket adorned with 3D-appliqué flowers. Madame Woo, who staged the show in the opulent surrounds of Karl Lagerfeld’s former residence on Rue de l’Université, said she was thinking about ‘ideas of proper dressing’, reimagining formalwear in louche and sensual style.

Models: Hollie-May Saker at Models 1, Tristan Watkins at Menace Models. Casting: Dean Goodman. Hair: Anna Chapman at Julian Watson using Bumble and Bumble. Make-up: Kirstin Piggott at Julian Watson using Charlotte Tilbury. Manicure: Hayley Evans-Smith at Saint Luke using Byredo. Interiors: Olly Mason. Digi tech: Laura Heckford. Photography assistants: Tom Porter, Ed Philips. Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor. Interiors coordinator: Archie Thomson. Production: Victoria Watkins at Birdhouse. Production assistant: Melina Grace Bryant. Retouching: Aly Studio.

A version of this story appears in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The search for the perfect swimwear provides one of summer’s biggest conundrums – a seemingly endless play off between aesthetics, function and fit, with one element so often coming up frustratingly short (sometimes literally).

There are a handful of brands, though, which approach swimwear with either architectural precision (Eres and Alaïa both fit this bill), a true sense of summertime ease (think: Orlebar Brown, Frescobal Carioca), or with a sense of glamour and play (Hunza G, Chanel and Lido). Each is a trustworthy option for beach attire this summer.

All of them feature in this guide of the world’s best swimwear brands – for both men and women – collated with help from the Wallpaper* style team (who in turn have consulted trusted friends). Rounding out the list are a handful of more sporty labels – including Nike Swim and the perennial Speedo – which will seamlessly transition from workout to seashore.

The world’s best swimwear brands, according to Wallpaper*

Eres

There are a few reasons Eres is the leading name in swimwear. The first is its unparalleled understanding of what looks and feels good on the female form. Suits are masterfully cut to flatter the body's curves and lines, while uncomfortable padding and wires are nowhere to be found.

The other reason is the brand’s exclusive materials, which not only sculpt the body but are also comfortable, quick-drying, and durable enough to endure a hundred swims in the roughest waters. Founded in Paris by Irene Leroux in 1968, the brand hit its stride in the 1970s, and it continues to draw inspiration from the decade with sleek silhouettes, graphic patterns and a rich, jewel-toned colour palette.

Available eresparis.com.

Orlebar Brown

Orlebar Brown doesn’t create swim shorts; it creates shorts you can swim in. At least, that was the idea that inspired the brand when its founder, Adam Brown, was denied entry to a restaurant because he didn’t look smart enough after a day spent at the beach. Since 2007, the Chanel-owned brand has created men’s swimwear that looks luxurious enough to get you through any door. Its swim shorts come in a variety of lengths and styles – alongside a full warm-weather wardrobe of shirts, linen jackets and pants – but the most reliable choice is always the Bulldog, which comes in an array of prints and features trouser details like metal side-fasteners on the waistline. Or, for something more colourful, opt for its recent collaboration with Coya Beach Club, which draws on the Andean-inspired palette of the Ibizan seaside spot with a vivid striped pattern in shades of terracotta, ocean blue, and white.

Available selfridges.com.

Hunza G

If you’ve been anywhere near a body of water in recent years, chances are you’ve seen a Hunza G bathing suit (or if you’ve seen Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts’ white and blue dress in the opening scene is a Hunza G design). The brand’s signature crinkle fabric suits have been around since 1984, but its relaunch in 2015 has made it the mainstay choice for cool women everywhere. Like Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please line, Hunza G’s crinkle fabric is designed to be universally flattering, with an extraordinarily stretchy composition that conforms to a wide range of body types, while playful fabrics and silhouettes keep things interesting. ‘You can swim in the clothing pieces and sit at lunch in the same items – dry minutes later. It’s swimmable ready-to-wear,’ says Georgiana Huddart, founder and creative director.

Available at selfridges.com.

Vilebrequin

Vilebrequin’s swimwear reflects the laid-back elegance of its Saint Tropez hometown. The brand’s signature swim trunks are meticulously designed, from the rear pockets that are hand-placed to ensure the pattern lines up, to metal eyelets that drain excess water and prevent ballooning, to the barely-there feeling of its mesh lining.

Yet, perhaps the best thing about Vilebrequin’s suits is their durability. Each style is designed to be worn, repaired and passed on from one generation to another, making for a trusty summer companion that will see you through rough sea waters or lazy days by the pool. Beyond its signature swim trunks, the brand also sells equally high-quality swimwear for women and kids, alongside a wide range of resort-focussed clothing and accessories, like towels and hats.

Available harrods.com

Burberry

Burberry might be best known for its winter-wear – after all, its signature garment, the trench, is designed for protection against the elements – though under creative director Daniel Lee, who began in 2022, its swimwear has become increasingly ubiquitous within style circles. This is largely thanks to those which bear the house’s signature check, adorning shorts, bikinis, swimsuits and swim briefs, with accompanying campaigns shot everywhere from London lidos to the beaches of Jamaica. The brand all collaborated with Hunza G (above) for 2026, creating iterations of its crinkle swimwear featuring the checkered motif.

Rudi Gernreich

Rebellious is the best word to describe Rudi Gernreich, the man, and the brand. In 1970s Los Angeles, Gernreich was already operating a successful fashion brand when Los Angeles County made it illegal to tan or swim naked at any of the city’s beaches. Gernreich's response was both a brilliant bit of marketing and a stroke of creative genius: the thong bikini.

The creation garnered a storm of attention and eventually gave birth to the bikini’s underwear counterpart, but Gernreich was not just a showman. His swimsuit designs are modernist masterpieces, with asymmetrical necklines, graphic cut-outs and bold block colouring. As out fashion features editor, Jack Moss wrote ahead of the brand’s relaunch in 2022, for Gernreich, these designs ‘arose not just from a desire for shock and publicity, but a deep-founded belief in the liberatory power of clothing’.

Decades later, the anarchic spirit of Gernreich can still be felt in every one of them. No matter how much the world has changed since Gernreich unveiled his bikini, that (very) little piece of clothing still has the power to shock.

Available rudigernreich.com.

Alaïa

The Parisian fashion house Alaïa is known for designs that celebrate the female form with figure-hugging silhouettes and flexible fabrics. It makes sense, then, that under the creative direction of Pieter Mulier, the brand has been able to seamlessly transition into swimwear. It is, perhaps, as close to couture as swimwear could ever get with elegant draping, ruching, cut-out details, in-built hoods, bolero-style waterproof jackets, asymmetrical necklines and other impeccably designed creations. All the suits are made in Italy and come in the rich, block colours the brand is known for, including its signature black and red.

Available maison-alaia.com.

Speedo

Is there any brand more synonymous with swimwear than Speedo? Probably not, and that’s because the brand has been changing how we swim since 1921, when it launched the world's first non-wool suit, which allowed for a greater range of motion in the water than ever before. Other innovations include the first nylon swimsuit, the first made-to-measure sculpting suits and the first suits made out of chlorine-resistant fabric. More Olympic Gold Medals have been won in Speedo than any other brand, but you don’t have to be an athlete to wear its designs. A black Speedo one-piece or swim trunks are a timeless addition to your summer wardrobe, while the brand’s ‘Jetstream’ collection looks back to the brand’s roots with vintage-inflected motifs in signature tones of navy, white and red (above).

Available at speedo.com.

OAS

OAS combines the cool minimalism of Scandinavian style with the vibrant colours, bold prints and sinuous silhouettes of Southern Europe. Founder Oliver Adam Sebastian began the brand after years of bringing back suitcases filled with espadrilles he bought in Barcelona to his Scandinavian friends. Eventually, Sebastian decided that since the summer shoes were nowhere to be found in his hometown, he would start making them himself. Not long afterwards, OAS was born and quickly grew to include a range of other summer styles like swimsuits, sarongs, button-up shirts for men and women. Particularly notable is the brand’s Dye Studio, located in their former Stockholm office, where garments are dyed and reworked by hand into chic, idiosyncratic designs.

Available from oascompany.com.

Nike Swim

If there’s a brand that knows how to dress for sporting activity, it's Nike. And while the American behemoth might be closely associated with sports like basketball, track, football and the like, its swimwear designs are just as high-performing. That said, a recent focus on the Nike Swim line has seen the brand filter such technical innovations through a more style-conscious lens – whether through a bold colour palette or playful design details, without compromising the sports-ready performance of the suits.

Available from nike.com.

Frescobol Carioca

The ethos behind Frescobol Carioca swimwear is suggested in its name – Carioca (a demonym used to refer to residents of the City of Rio de Janeiro) and Frescobol (a racket sport popularised on the city’s beaches in 1945). With its range of brightly coloured swim trunks, elegantly tailored linen shirts and breezy drawstring trousers, Frescobol Carioca channels the exuberance of the South American city and the dapper elegance of 1940s style. Each suit is made from quick-dry materials with flexible cuts that make them ideal for beach sports. A recent collaboration (above) saw the brand unite with coffee machine manufacturer La Marzocco on a capsule collection which combined espresso cups and swimwear for a refreshed take on the morning ritual.

Available from mrporter.com.

Chanel

You can't get much chicer this summer than wearing a swimsuit made by Chanel. Capturing the sense of irreverent Parisian style and ease which runs through the house’s ready-to-wear collections, Chanel’s swimsuits and bikinis have a playful undercurrent, evoking styles that walked the runway in the 1990s. The house’s latest Chanel Coco Beach 2026 collection – designed by new creative director Matthieu Blazy – features striped and two-tone swimsuits with a nostalgic feel, while accompanying accessories comprise straw and raffia bags, crab-shaped earrings and even a ‘CC’ emblem surfboard.

Enquire at chanel.com.

Lido

Italian brand Lido was born out of the desire to create sustainable swimwear that didn’t sacrifice style. Named after an island near Venice, each Lido design is made in Northern Italy using fast-drying fabrics, with colours and shapes inspired by the local region. Highlights include the Undici bikini, a flattering high-waisted style, and the Uno one-piece, with cross-over back straps and deep scoop neckline. Meanwhile, for men, a recent launch of a dedicated menswear line sees classic shorts and trunks – all with SPF protection inbuilt – in hues of red, forest green and navy.

Available net-a-porter.com.

CDLP

Swedish brand CDLP launched in 2016 with the aim of revolutionising men’s underwear through minimalist designs and sustainable, breathable fabrics. These days, the same meticulous approach applies to the brand’s swimwear, which includes swim briefs, boxers and trunks for men, as well as bikinis and one pieces for women. Many of the designs are made from Econyl, an innovative nylon fibre created from landfill and ocean plastic waste that is both durable and quick-drying. Particularly noteworthy styles include the Bermuda Swim Shorts, which are made from matte dry nylon poplin with a belt closure, and the simply named ‘Swimsuit’ for women, a one-piece style with a high neckline and cross-back adjustable shoulder straps.

Available from ssense.com

Drawing on an eclectic roster of references, high jewellery this year unites historical techniques with rainbows of precious stones. Whether cutting sharp geometrical silhouettes or undulating forms, a bold high jewellery accoutrement calls for statement clothes. Clashing patterns, oversized collars and billowing tops - here are the best partners for a very special collection.

A version of this article appears in the April 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

With just 70 lean mannequins, one brief CNN news report and two xeroxed press releases, curator Olivier Saillard gets to the heart of something fashion has forgotten: it’s about clothes. ‘You can make images of course, but, first, you make clothes,’ he says.

His show at the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris, where he has been director since 2018, focuses on the kinship between two of the most potent talents of the 20th century: Azzedine Alaïa and Thierry Mugler. ‘It is also about this idea that you can do the same work. You are friends, you can do something together. It is fashion with four hands,’ Saillard says.

‘Azzedine Alaïa - Thierry Mugler: 1980-1990 Two Decades of Artistic Affinities’ at Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, Paris

A ‘smoking’ tuxedo jacket and pants in black barathea from Mugler’s A/W 1979 ‘Spirale futuriste’ collection opens the exhibition. The look was designed by Alaïa. It has a wide, flat shoulder and a triangular lapel that peels down the front of the body. Mugler was so pleased with the jacket he included Alaïa’s name within the show notes, a copy of which is framed and on display. Next to it, Saillard places Alaïa’s 1988 jumpsuit in black wool knit with a velvet collar; where Mugler’s design is straight, Alaïa’s is curved, what was flat, now swoops.

On 10 September 1982 Alaïa staged his first ever fashion show of body-fitting leather, jersey and chiffon clothes upon invitation by Bergdorf Goodman. Mugler travelled to New York to help translate his interviews with journalists, build the runway and set the rhythm for the show. Together, they shaped the look of the 1980s.

Mugler’s legacy is one dripping in extraterrestrial glamour but his quieter, more rigorous day clothes are rarely placed into the spotlight. From his A/W 1988 ‘Les infernales’ collection, the hem of a suit jacket in black wool peels up at the hips. Then, as if in some sort of response, hems become unfurled and cut longer in Alaïa’s black wool twill suit three years later.

Saillard says: ‘Today we are always thinking about opposites, opposing one designer over another, but I love this idea that they share something. Azzedine and Thierry were two artists who admired the same things.’

The exhibition presents a selection of different costumes, coats, eveningwear and tailoring as a guessing game – you cannot see who designed what. ‘I had the impression that Thierry had an influence on Azzedine, but I didn't know to what extent. We have a few of Azzedine’s collections before the 1970s when he worked as a much more intimate, traditional couturier and it's very far from this. Thierry gave the key to Azzedine to become a fashion designer,’ Saillard says.

Speaking to Laurence Benïam in 2020, Mugler said about Alaïa: ‘He was a trouble-maker magician, he had the eye and the technique. I was amazed by what he was doing. His extraordinary passion for couture, and his total freedom. He had the childlike aspect of an artist. Originally, he was a great academic cutter. He followed the great tradition.’

Although their tastes might have evolved as the decades went on, their work clearly shared a dialogue. Alaïa was the minimalist, perhaps more in line with Balenciaga. There is a sharpness and clarity in his line that Mugler isn’t as concerned with. Mugler’s pleats in a daytime ensemble from S/S 1988’s ‘Eté africain’ collection add volume to the body where Alaïa’s silk dress from the same season turns the pleats into something more sinuous and supine.

The purity in the staging at Fondation Azzedine Alaïa intensifies the absence of imagery. Although so much of both designer’s legacies are memorialised in photographs, Alaïa – as a label – didn’t produce its own campaigns. ‘No, no, no! He never did publicity! Fantastic photographers like Peter Lindbergh, Paulo Roversi, William Klein and even Mugler himself photographed his designs enthusiastically and made some beautiful images, but Azzedine considered these as the work of someone else – not his. And I love this attitude,’ Saillard says. ‘There is a time for doing clothes, and a time for doing images. And that’s perhaps not the same now.’

‘Azzedine Alaïa - Thierry Mugler: 1980-1990 Two Decades of Artistic Affinities’ runs until 29 June 2025 at Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, 18 Rue de la Verrerie, 75004 Paris

Paris Fashion Week A/W 2025 took over the French city this week with a packed schedule of runway shows from industry titans – among them Dior, Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent, Chanel and Givenchy, the last marking the much-anticipated debut of former Alexander McQueen designer Sarah Burton.

Her opening gambit for the storied Parisian house took place on Friday morning (7 March 2025), seeing Burton draw inspiration from a cache of long-hidden patterns by house founder Hubert de Givenchy, reimagining his signatures for the woman of today. ‘I want to address everything about modern women,’ she said. ‘Strength, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, feeling powerful or very sexy. All of it.’

Elsewhere, Haider Ackermann made his debut at Tom Ford on Wednesday evening (5 March), having succeeded Peter Hawkings earlier this year; Julian Klausner held his first show as creative director of Dries Van Noten at the Opéra Garnier (also on Wednesday), while Alessandro Michele unveiled his sophomore ready-to-wear collection for Valentino in a surreal, red-hued ‘public bathroom’ (those awaiting Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, though, will have to wait until September for his official arrival).

A handful of intriguing younger names also populated the schedule, including LVMH Prize-winning designers Duran Lantink and Hodakova, while the usual contingent of Japanese designers – among them Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe and Noir Kei Ninomiya – presented typically thought-provoking collections on Saturday (8 March 2025).

Here, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss – with additional reporting from Orla Brennan – unpacks the best of Paris Fashion Week A/W 2025.

Saint Laurent

A ‘simplicity of silhouette – as if created with a few pencil strokes’ is how Anthony Vaccarrello described his masterful A/W 2025 collection for Saint Laurent, which replaced Louis Vuitton this season as Paris Fashion Week’s finale. Now adept at visual spectacle – sleek, monolithic runway sets have become a hallmark of his tenure – Vaccarrello staged this season’s show on what he called ‘a grand onyx oval’, the oil-slick black runway surrounded by panels of mineral rock.

The collection itself was an exercise in singularity, the mining of a silhouette over and over: from the broad shoulder and raised neckline of the collection’s opening looks (this season achieved without use of padding, but instead through the garment’s construction) towards enormous full skirted-gowns, which despite their grandeur, recalled nighties or slips (‘I really liked this idea of elasticity, of movement—all to give a sense of freedom,’ he said). A richness of fabric and colour enlivened these singular looks, from guipere lace and richly-hued satin to a plasticky animal-print material achieved by dipping printed cigaline silk into resin. It made for a transfixing closing act. JM

Miu Miu

Earlier this month in Milan, Miuccia Prada – alongside co-creative director Raf Simons – presented an A/W 2025 Prada collection titled ‘Raw Glamour’. ‘We asked ourselves – what is feminine? What is feminine beauty?’ the designer said at the time, conjuring a dishevelled elegance which confronted notions of conventional beauty. At Miu Miu, the designer – here working solo – continued that interrogation of womanhood with a collection which saw her evoke the symbolic markers of feminine dress, from fur stoles and pointed bras to handbags and heels. ‘These accessories of femininity – bras, furs, brooches – they are things we have had forever. Are they relevant today? Do they lift us up?’

The resulting collection captured a mood of bourgeois Milanese glamour: oversized overcoats were worn with a ‘fur’ stole thrown over the arm and ladylike handbag nestled in its crook, delicate ribbed socks worn with shuffling brown loafers, while blazers were pinned with brooches on each side of the chest. ‘I don’t see these things as clichés,’ she asserted backstage, though they were presented here in disruptive manner: from the pointed bra tops which jutted outwards from beneath delicate, sugary knits, to the construction of the tailoring which was folded strangely at the chest or cut to fall purposely off the shoulder (other jackets were cropped as if sliced in half).

Played out in a surreal showspace covered in girlish yellow moiré on a cast which included actress Sarah Paulson and musician Cortisa Star, these ‘accessories of femininity’ were recast as objects of power – a provocative pitch for independence from the perception-shifting designer. ‘We need femininity in this difficult time to lift us up,’ she said. JM

Kiko Kostadinov

Laura and Deanna Fanning staged their A/W 2025 show for Kiko Kostadinov in Brasserie Mollard – a 130-year-old restaurant on Rue Saint-Lazare covered in its original Belle Époque gilded tiling, where guests were seated around white linen-covered tables as if about to have lunch. The charm of the largely unchanged eatery set the perfect scene for the identical twin design duo’s latest collection, which explored the ‘rakish’ spirit of discovering yourself in a new city. Their muse for the season was Vali Myers, an Australian dancer who moved among Paris’ bohemian set in the 1950s, imagining her ‘gallivanting bravely through the city as the sun rises, just a topcoat thrown over a slip’.

The resulting collection was one of the sisters’ sexiest yet. Taking shape around vintage women’s underpinnings, pointed bras and structured crinolines gave the body an angular sensuality, while a louche softness emerged in lingerie-informed abstract paisley appliqués, liquid darted blouses, and ultra-thin knitwear layers that clung close to the skin. Always offsetting the girly with something rougher, the Fannings looked to the rebellious Teddy Girls – working-class teenagers in 1950s London who wore Victorian-era menswear – and the masculine layering of the modern ‘tomboy’. Suiting and shirting came in skew-whiff shapes and piratey stripes, baggy Japanese denim was splattered with paint, and rounded batwing jackets and tiny cigarette trousers were fastened with rope. Textures and colours, meanwhile, were eccentrically mashed – mohair, moleskin, and alpaca came in primary colours merged with earthy tones – while accessories took on ‘personalities’, from a doctor’s bag to a sprite’s pointed cap.

A display of depth and originality, the collection affirmed the sister’s confidence in the Kiko Kostadinov woman they have been building together since 2018 – one that has been embraced by a devoted community of women around the world. ‘We are thinking of women taking up their bodies, being sexual and monumental, strong minded and soft,’ they said following the show. ‘Finding a path for oneself in the in-between of opposites, the way only a woman can.’ OB

Chanel

A monumental installation by Canadian designer Willo Perron, evocative of an unfurled black ribbon – a perennial Chanel signature – backdropped the house’s A/W 2025 collection. Designed by Chanel’s ‘Creation Studio’ as the house awaits the arrival of Matthieu Blazy (the former Bottega Veneta designer will not present his first collection until September), it was a collection designed to ‘alter perceptions’, whether through size and proportion, or illusory tricks. This was largely achieved through reimagining Chanel emblems – from pearls, ribbons and bows to quilted handbags and tweed suits – in imaginative ways, whether enormous pearl necklaces worn like a sash (they were actually handbags), shimmering trompe l’oeil bows, or cleverly layered tweed ‘three pieces’, comprising a shrunken jacket, wrap skirt and loose-cut trousers worn at once. The idea of illusion continued in degradé ‘denim’ shirts and jeans in printed chiffon, while sheer tulle overlays – sitting over tailored jackets and dresses – had a spectral effect. The result was a collection both playfully surreal and reassuringly Chanel, the perfect placeholder as we await Blazy’s much-anticipated ready-to-wear debut next season. JM

Louis Vuitton

Presenting to just 400 guests – a relatively intimate showcase by Louis Vuitton standards – Nicolas Ghesquière staged his A/W 2025 collection for the house at L’Étoile du Nord, the headquarters of France’s national railway, just next door to Gare du Nord train station. ‘Recreating the bustling atmosphere of a Parisian train station – where fleeting moments are shared between strangers, weaving a tapestry of stories’, the designer explained of the roots of the collection, which played out in a set by Es Devlin, featuring rows of colourful metal seating – a surreal play on the furniture of waiting rooms or train platforms – while film projections of the shadows of travellers-on-the-move appeared around the upper windows of the building’s atrium.

As such, the collection itself comprised a series of characters one might encounter at a train station – albeit with Ghesquière’s eclectic, postmodern sheen. There were colourful raincoats and anoraks, some with a sporty Louis Vuitton logo; business-like trenches and pussybow ties; futuristic ‘uniforms’ recalling those of conductors or attendants; while expressions of old-world glamour, from twisting turban headwear to glittering fur coats and flouncy ruffled dresses recalled what Ghesquière called ‘the excitement of 19th-century rail travel… [a world of] adventure and enchantment.’ Bags, unsurprisingly, were a highlight – slouchy holdalls, slung over the shoulder, met violin and hat cases, blanket bags and vanity boxes – while the cover of Kraftwerk’s 1977 album ‘Trans-Europe Express’ became a motif throughout the collection.

‘The euphoria of discovery… the exhilaration of travel,’ Ghesquière described of the show, which culminated in the models watching over the space from the atrium’s balconies. ‘The enthusiasm of departure or the comfort of return.’ JM

Sacai

This season, Sacai’s Chitose Abe was thinking about the rituals of dressing with a collection titled ‘One Tender Moment’. Namely, the idea of ‘wrapping’ – how we wrap fabrics around our body for warmth, protection or comfort. As ever, this was achieved through adept pattern cutting (she worked as a pattern maker for both Comme des Garçons and Junya Watanabe before starting her own label), with garments which twisted and looped around the body, like the blazer transforming into forms reminiscent of capes or enormous scarves. The silk foulard was a symbolic motif of the collection’s thrown-on mood, transforming into twisted handkerchief dresses or inset into jackets. Meanwhile, flourishes of adornment – from faux-feather appliqué to oversized paillettes – gave the collection an insouciant, sensual glamour, which Abe said was also reflected in the evocation of Man Ray’s teardrop works in ‘photo stitch’ embroidery. ‘[They] highlight the lips and the eyes – the purest essence of sensual beauty,’ she said. JM

Rokh

Rok Hwang designs his clothes for shy girls – women who might not be the loudest in the room, but who want their wardrobe to relay a certain strength about who they are. This season, the Korean-American designer and Celine alum (Hwang was at the brand during the Phoebe Philo years) explored the idea of ‘Fractured Motion’, applying his signature style of deconstruction and poetic drape to a muted, chalky wardrobe that played with ideas of fragility. Guests were invited to a crumbling French maison to see the show unfold, its rough grandeur setting the stage for a collection that balanced structure and spontaneity. Rather than lean into pure romance, Hwang subverted the tropes of classic tailoring, turning rigid forms into fluid sculptures. Wool coats bloomed into floral shapes, sculptural dresses clung and collapsed in unexpected ways, and layered fabrics gave the feeling of perpetual motion. A series of body pieces were Hwang’s most theatrical – strict, corset-like structures with unravelling edges, and illusion pieces that made models’ torsos resemble the marble busts of Rodin. A love letter to the sensitive souls who have supported his brand since he launched in 2016, this was Hwang at his most experimental and refined. It was about ‘tradition and boldness silently told,’ he said of the collection following the show. OB

Valentino

Alessandro Michele brought his flair for the theatrical to his sophomore ready-to-wear outing for Valentino, which unfolded in a specially constructed showspace at Paris’ Institut du Monde Arabe. Evocative of an enormous public bathroom – cubicles ran around the edge of the room, as did sinks and mirrors – the red-hued space provided a surreal but cinematic backdrop for a show exploring ‘ideas of private and public, surfaces and depths’ (Michele called the set ‘Lynchian’). Titled ‘Le Méta-Théâtre des Intimités’, the designer explained in his typically esoteric show notes (references included the philosophers Romano Màdera and Ludwig Wittgenstein), that this was a show about intimacy as performance: before the models emerged from the swinging cubicles, we saw glimpses of feet from beneath the door, as if the person inside was stood in the nude.

It set the stage for a sensually charged collection from the designer: undone lace body suits were inset with narrow satin bras, 1970s-style dresses in clashing shades of red and pink, while thrown-on ‘fur’ coats had a hedonistic glamour. If not stripped back – Michele remains a maximalist at heart – there felt like new clarity to this collection, pulling back some of the more extraneous flourishes of last season towards a harder vision of glamour. Indeed, the collection felt like it was unfolding in the bathroom of a nightclub, with models prowling the space, checking their outfits in the sink mirrors, before disappearing away back into the cubicles. What they were doing inside – and with whom – was left to the imagination. ‘The deepest intimacy is theatre,’ Michele concluded, having put on his own thrilling – and seductive – show. JM

Akris

The vaulted main hall of Le Collège des Bernardins, a former Cistercian refectory, was flooded with blue light for Albert Kriemler’s latest Akris outing, which celebrated the evocative power of the hue. Titled ‘The Blue Hour’, the designer called it ‘a story of clarity, of euphoria, of blue – blue in nature, blue in spaces, blue in artworks, just blue,’ which began by thinking about the moment ‘when day and night cross.’ As such, garments melded codes of day and eveningwear: a macintosh-style jacket, sliced away at the waistline, was reimagined in rich midnight-blue velvet, a ribbed-knit sweater worn with a floating organza skirt, while a zip-up hoodie was adorned with hundreds of iridescent blue paillettes. Feathers were a motif that ran throughout, whether sprouting from a high-heeled pump or in blue and black waves across the collection’s closing look. Kriemler said he wanted them to ‘evolve with movement, continuously changing as they follow the body [and] right to the next party.’ JM

Balenciaga

Demna staged his latest collection on a darkened, labyrinthine runway with ‘multiple entrances and exits’ which the Georgian designer likened to the way you can lose yourself in the creative process. Though having established such a design signature of the house, namely a subversive take on wardrobe archetypes, this was a collection which saw Demna continue, clear-minded and defiant, down his own path. He called the collection, which attendees viewed from up close (everyone had a front-row seat), a study of ‘standard dress codes, and what it takes to twist standard fits and garments into a fashion context… a sociological observation of the wardrobe.’ As such, the catalogue of looks – which moved between sharp, corporate attire, twisted sportswear (a collaboration with Puma featured) and dishevelled eveningwear, with lace and polka dot dresses hiked up to reveal the leg – felt like a revisiting of Demna’s greatest hits, albeit here with new rigour (he talked about a ‘pursuit of the golden ratio… a rethinking of standards’). Highlights included a series of furry-hooded puffer jackets whereby the quilting had been cleverly reworked to recall the shape of a corset or bodice, or tailoring with deep, in-set creases – reminders of the designer’s potent ability to reimagine the familiar anew. JM

Duran Lantink

Duran Lantink invited guests down to an office space – soon to be fashion-favourite design studio Bureau Betak’s new HQ – lined with cubicles to see his A/W 2025 runway unfold. One might have expected a collection of grey office-core formality to have appeared, but that would have been too on the nose for Lantink. Instead came a series of brash, sculptural creations that played with animal prints and ideas of ‘bad taste’. Moving away from the padded bubble forms that have defined previous seasons, more tapered silhouettes used the body as a framework for dramatic character-building; jackets in zebra-print pony hair rose up to the earlobes, velvet leopard print hugged heads in balaclavas and legs in flared trousers, and snakeskin fabric became alien-like neck-swallowing bodysuits. Taking his signature three-dimensional sculpting to wry new territories, the LVMH Prize-shortlisted designer self-titled the collection ‘Duramnimal.’

Mixed in with these jungle prints, a storyline of absurdist Americana ran through battered varsity jackets, camo prints, padded trapper caps and oversized denim that was constructed to have the illusion of floating in front of models' hips. Having his fun with small town Southern aesthetics, one pair of jeans even took the style of assless chaps. But it was the opening and closing looks that were the most talked about – Mica Argañaraz in an Action Man-style latex six-pack torso, and a male model with waxy, swinging boobs. ‘I love the idea of women as action figures,’ the designer said in explanation. ‘I think everyone should feel empowered to create their own identity and not feel restricted by anything.’ OB

McQueen

During his tenure at McQueen thus far, Irish designer Seán McGirr has largely found inspiration on the streets of London – his adopted home city where he arrived to study at Central Saint Martins in the early 2010s. This season, in a more intimate presentation, his third collection for the British house, he said post-show that he was thinking about ‘Victorian London… particularly Charles Dickens’ Night Walks, conjuring a nocturnal dandy ‘who walks on the streets until dawn’. Historical inflections came in raised ruffled collars, capes and carved waistlines, while extreme elongated footwear – recalling the shape of a winklepicker – lent a strangeness to the silhouette. In a continuation of the crystallised finale looks of last season, the collection was heavy on embellishment, from bejewelled facemarks to scores of surface adornment on leather jackets and dresses, or the gilded embroidery on the frock coat which closed the show.

Another reference was Oscar Wilde, a writer McGirr said he grew up with as a teenager and who is synonymous with the figure of the dandy. ‘To me, dandyism is the ultimate act of adornment; deeply personal, playful and transgressive. It raises questions of character and identity, idealism and gender,’ said McGirr. ‘I wanted to explore the enduring relevance of the dandy’s radical spirit in our modern world.’ In this translation of past to present, McGirr also spent more time in the McQueen archive this season, paying particular attention to Lee McQueen’s hourglass-shaped tailoring. ‘McQueen is all about the waist… I wanted to rework [that] in a way that made sense for today.’ JM

Comme des Garçons

Rei Kawakubo’s latest runway show was a declaration of independence. ‘Recently we feel that big business, big culture, global systems, world structures maybe are not so great after all,’ she issued in a brief statement on her A/W 2025 show, presented in Paris on Saturday afternoon. ‘There is also strong value in small. Small can be mighty.’ She is proof: now over half a century since she founded the convention-defying label in Tokyo, Japan in 1973, Comme des Garçons provides alternative to the luxury fashion conglomerate, shepherding a small umbrella of designers (among them Junya Watanabe and Noir Kei Ninomiya) and incubating several more (the designers behind Vaquera, one of those labels, were in attendance at the show). As such, the collection’s opening felt like a send up of the corporate uniform: tailoring fabrics, from Prince of Wales check to pinstripes, were reimagined into Kawakubo’s strange, undulating forms. That off her chest, the rest of the collection looked towards tropes of femininity, from ruffles, pleats and floral motifs (the latter as a 3D adornment on the inside of a tartan dress, which the model held open as she walked) to textures of velvet and satin. As ever, it was a free association of ideas from a designer who, at 82 years old, remains one of fashion’s most liberated – and independent – voices. JM

Hermès

Upon entering the low-lit Hermès space, the feeling underfoot was like stepping onto a particularly plush material – though, as your eyes adjusted, the spiralling runway was actually covered in a soft layer of soil. It set the stage for a ‘determined’ collection from Nadège Vanhée, who in lieu of thematics described the collection’s mood as ‘sculptural, resilient, seductive… [the woman] moves forward, never looks back. She has everything she needs.’ So out stomped her largely leather-clad cast in riding boots and high-heeled brogues, the latter’s perforations also appearing as leather piping on sculpted dresses and mini shorts. Leather was a focus throughout – an expression of the house’s extraordinary command of the material – from enveloping reversible overcoats to a stripped-back riff on the biker jacket and pin-sharp tailoring, or the sensual line of a ribbed wool and leather dress. In its movement between the everyday – albeit reimagined in hyper-luxurious style – and a pulsing undercurrent of sensuality, it was the latest chapter in Vanhée’s ongoing interrogation of womanhood at the house. Now in her tenth year, it is a vision that looks more desirable than ever. JM

Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood

Andreas Kronthaler was feeling sentimental this season. ‘This collection is about honouring the place I have lived for more than 30 years: London,’ he said ahead of his A/W 2025 show, which – if not a touch ironically – was held in Paris yesterday afternoon. His ode to the city began with the anchors of every Westwood collection – knitwear and tailoring – which the designer subverted through a series of witty, swashbuckling silhouettes that channelled the distinctive creative language he shared with his late partner, Vivienne Westwood, for three decades.

Heritage fabrics were pushed to new realms of invention, so that Harris tweeds came in a carnival of shades and stripes, deep blue Yorkshire wools were transformed into fuzzy bodysuits, and bolshy Scottish tartans appeared in Clueless-esque wonky suiting. Ties, meanwhile, were so exaggeratedly long they skimmed the knees. Elsewhere, a love letter to Westwood’s style of drape, cut and corsetry ran through the designer’s more feminine looks, where cowl necks and boning exposed bare chests, and silhouettes roved between Victorian to Grecian and bohemian.

Drawing inspiration from a lengthy list of figures the brand admires – among them Quentin Crisp, Gertrude Stein and Rihanna – the result was a collection that unified a hodge-podge of characters and sensibilities. Not unlike the subcultural melting pot of London itself, Kronthaler’s school of A/W 2025 was a place where an office-punk, windswept chiffon goddess, padded 1980s ski instructor, and a bodiced gothic bride (who closed out the show) could happily coexist. ‘Vivienne taught me the love of tailoring and knitting,’ said Kronthaler. ‘The formality it gives you is a framework to express yourself. There’s nothing sexier than a suit.’ OB

Noir Kei Ninomiya

Until 2019, Noir Kei Ninomiya showed his raven black collections in stark white rooms – just natural light, no music – with the idea that others could see the clothes ‘deeply and simply’. Things have changed quite substantially since then. Yesterday morning, guests of the Comme des Garçons designer’s A/W 2025 show were welcomed into a darkened space that was lit solely by the glow of UV, illuminating the outfits of the oft-too serious front row like dancers in a neon rave.

The collection that followed was, as ever with Kei Ninomiya, an expression of unrestrained invention. Soundtracked to glitchy electronica, the opening looks had the colour and cheer of a kindergarten crafts room; bulbous plastic shapes resembled squishable toys in gashapon vending machines, an assemblage dress of massive bows had the texture of multi-coloured pipe cleaners, and dozens of yarn pom poms were adjoined into a modish ultra-mini dress topped with a mushroom stool matching hat. Designing from impulse rather than reference, the designer summed up the collection in a typically mysterious fashion – ‘a kind of feeling that is uncertain and hard to understand.’

While the Japanese designer has, in recent years, introduced a more vivid palette, his most enduring fascination remains in the language of black – as reflected in the closing looks of his A/W 2025 collection. Showcasing his gift for adorning the body in unconventional materials ‘to achieve expressions impossible with just fabric‘, this time resin was the star of these monochromatic creations. Taking on alien proportions, balls of shimmering fronds exploded from the body, while inky tailoring saw spines of spiky white plastic that glowed under the UV sprout and spiral from jackets. It made for a spectacle of sensory overload that only Kei Ninomiya could have produced. ‘Black is just the word, but it really has a meaning, very strong and very beautiful, and very deep,’ he once said of the beloved shade. ‘It has such a feeling.’ OB

Junya Watanabe

After a rugged Junya Watanabe MAN show earlier this year – which largely riffed on tropes of classic American sportswear – the Japanese designer was back to a more experimental mood for his latest womenswear outing, shown in a stripped out former shop on Paris’ Rue Auber. ‘I'm fascinated by creating clothing that appears to be unrealistic. This time, I created everyday clothing from a cubist perspective,’ he elucidated, explaining the collection’s protruding spikes or sharp, geometric surfaces, which transformed pieces like the leather biker jacket or trench coats into surreal – but undeniably Watanabe-esque – forms. Others had enormous pitched shoulders, or became strange hybrids, like a pair of lace-up leather boots which became the sleeve of a jacket. Another inspiration was the musician Jimi Hendrix, which lent the collection a rock and roll inflection, from amped-up fuzzy jackets and shades to python-print pants and garments crafted from hair and wigs. JM

Victoria Beckham

This season, Victoria Beckham found inspiration close to home – within the four walls of her own dressing room, to be precise. Unveiled in a stark runway space in Paris yesterday evening to a sultry soundtrack that moved between jazz and trip hop, her A/W 2025 show was about the ‘tricks’ and ‘happy accidents’ that shape the way we put on clothes every day. Doubling down on the flattering cuts that are the backbone of her brand, the resulting collection roved freely between dress codes, as if pulled instinctively from every rail of the wardrobe. Raincoats and parkas were exaggerated or cropped, exposing body-hugging garments that took cues from the knicker drawer. Elsewhere, Beckham played with the ways women might borrow their boyfriend’s clothes and adapt them, so that masculine shirting was rolled up at the sleeve and oversized trousers were cinched at the midriff. Winking at the make-up tutorials she films at home, silk dressing gowns were reconstructed into lustrous evening dresses, while the designer’s initial-emblazoned bathrobe was slashed into pussy-bowed smoking jackets in terry-cloth towelling. It was a love letter to spur-of-the-moment dressing that was firmly rooted in Beckham’s own personal language of chic – clothes that she and the brand’s customer have worn, and will wear, time and again. OB

Issey Miyake

Since the late 1980s, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has invited members of the public to hold specific objects – from plastic buckets and chairs to stacks of oranges – for a minute or so (Wurm discourages specificity on timings). A practice the artist has returned to over the decades, Wurm’s ‘One Minute Sculptures’ see the ‘participating viewer become part of the sculpture for an ephemeral time,’ as a blurb on the artist’s website describes. On Friday afternoon in Paris, Wurm staged his latest edition of ‘One Minute Sculptures’ as the backdrop to Issey Miyake’s A/W 2025 runway show. Held at the Carrousel du Louvre, a group of performers were invited to interact with Issey Miyake garments, stretching them into strange, body-like forms for the duration of the show – an apt reflection of the playful spirit of the Japanese label, which has long been fascinated by fabric and form.

The collection itself was titled ‘[N]either [N]or’, seeing head designer Satoshi Kondo look towards the ‘ambiguity and many in-betweens’ of Wurm’s project for a collection that was rooted in the ‘freedom of wearing [clothing] in one’s own way and the exciting possibilities that are yet to be discovered within the garments’. As a result, there was a spirit of play in Kondo’s clothes – trompe l’oeil prints of Issey Miyake knitwear ran along undulating plissé gowns, blown-up paper bags became colourful strappy tops, and clever new heat-pressed knits made structured, paper doll-like silhouettes. A liberated use of colour, evocative of Wurm’s photographs, ran throughout.

It was a collection that continued Kondo’s recent winning streak. His garments have the illusion of spontaneity, though they are actually the result of several months – even years – of fabric experimentation and craft. ‘Issey Miyake was tenacious and stubborn. It’s something that echoes with me, too – that tenacity, that perseverance,’ Kondo told Wallpaper* in the recent March 2025 Style Issue. ‘He continued until he found something really original. It’s a mindset. When you want a really beautiful flower, you don’t go to the florist, you go out into the forest.’  JM

Givenchy

Sarah Burton’s first collection for Givenchy began with the discovery of a cache of pattern pieces, stuffed in brown envelopes and hidden behind a wall at the former Givenchy maison at 8 Avenue de Vigny, found during a recent renovation. Created by Hubert de Givenchy, they date back to 1952, the year he founded the eponymous house. For the former Alexander McQueen designer – who is known for a meticulous hand when it comes to cut and make – they sparked the exploration of contemporary womanhood which unfolded at the Givenchy salon on Avenue Georges V on Friday morning. ‘It’s my natural instinct to go back to pattern-cutting, to craftsmanship,’ she explained, noting that each garment was fitted at least three times on the body before walking the runway. ‘To cut, shape and proportion. It’s what I feel, how I work, and want to do.’

It led to a collection that eschewed theatrics for clarity and purpose, though not without flourishes of glamour and romance. ‘I want to address everything about modern women,’ she said. ‘Strength, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, feeling powerful or very sexy. All of it.’ So there was precise tailoring, carved narrow at the waist and wide at the shoulder (edges were left raw as if to suggest an act of construction), trapeze-shaped overcoats, and roomy leather shirts and jackets, while eveningwear moved from intricately embroidered opera coats tied with enormous obi-style bows towards bouncing layers of lemon yellow tulle, flared ballet skirts and tuxedo-inspired tailoring, sliced at the waist or turned back to front. Meanwhile, in splashes of the surreal, tops and dresses were constructed from make-up powder cases and tangles of jewellery.

It was a strong start which, despite its sheen of modernity, was nonetheless rooted in Hubert de Givenchy’s archival designs. In the sunlit salon – which is also the historic site of the house’s couture atelier – the intimate guest list perched on symbolic piles of pattern pieces, like those discovered hidden on Avenue de Vigny. ‘To go forward, you have to go back to the beginning,’ Burton said. ‘To me, that’s about the atelier. It’s the heart and soul of Givenchy.’ JM

Chloé

Chemena Kamali continued to hone her breezy, bohemian vision for Chloé – one that recalls Karl Lagerfeld’s free-spirited early collections for the French house – though this season, the German designer talked about seeking ‘evolution… to redefine and to evolve the Chloé woman’s state of mind’. There was certainly a more opulent feel to the collection, which borrowed from bourgeois dress codes – namely a proliferation of ‘fur’ (like most designers this season, it was actually shearling with the illusion of fur), whether as nipped, patchworked jackets, trims or stoles, while heritage overcoats, ladylike chain handbags and Mary Jane footwear struck a similar mood.

They were welcome additions to the Chloé uniform, which this season felt more grounded in everyday wear – Kamali talked about a finding mood of ‘realness and instinctive ease’ in flared jeans and leather trousers, as well as the eclectic, thrown-on styling. That said, there was still fun to be had in the romantic gowns in the millefeuille ruffles of taffeta and lace which have become the designer’s signature. ‘I thought about how we romanticise the past through an intuitive lens, blending traces of tradition and historical fragments, pieces passed down through generations, what we once loved with what we love today,’ she described. JM

Rabanne

It is astounding how fur – albeit in faux or shearling iterations – has dominated this season’s runways, emerging time and again across the four major cities. No doubt it speaks to our desire for protection against the elements, both real and existential – an idea that will surely be unpacked by commentators in the coming weeks. It was at Rabanne Julien Dossena conjured some of the most arresting ‘furs’ of the month so far, spanning knit gowns with tassel-like ‘tails’ around the hem, sliced shearling skirts and tabard tops, and bombastic fur coats lined with shimmering, tinsel-like fabric – at once glamorous and primitive. Dossena called the juxtaposition one of preciousness and protection: opposing impulses which also met in clear plastic raincoats worn over gleaming chainmail dresses, or the hardy, outdoorsy wools and leathers clashed with delicate beadwork or sequins. These tonal shifts were intriguing and beautiful, confirming Dossena’s status as one of Paris’s most consistently impressive designers. With another stellar collection under his belt – and having served over a decade at Rabanne – the question lingers: will Dossena be one of fashion’s next big moves? JM

Rick Owens

Held in one of the vast interior wings of Paris’s Palais de Tokyo – a longtime show location for the designer – Rick Owens called his latest womenswear collection ‘Concordians’, the same title as his menswear show held earlier this year. It references the industrial Italian town of Concordia, just outside Venice, where Owens produces the bulk of his collections each season.

Having travelled there for over two decades (in various dwellings, from a couch in his office to a ‘serial killer hotel’ and now his own apartment), the town’s relative banality has become a part of his and his team’s creative rhythm: ‘a studious isolation… almost bleakness. This cloistered life seems to be what it takes to be able to focus on reaching for something weird and wonderful.’

The spoils of that isolation were on show here in a collection which channelled a subversive, Owensian glamour: whether the ‘chain-linked’ laser-cut leather dresses which appeared on the body like scales or feathers (a collaboration with Parisian designer Victor Clavelly), towering, broad-shouldered overcoats in wool or leather, or, in another continuation of the menswear show earlier this year, ‘megacrust’ denim, whereby the fabric is intricately layered with bronze foil and wax. ‘I want to depend on fewer things but make them as supernatural as possible,’ he said after the menswear show, and here he seemed to retain that focus – this was a collection which was undeniably Rick Owens, though here evolved through extraordinary craft and make.

Iggy Pop’s ‘Mass Production’, which soundtracked his very first show 23 years ago, made a nostalgic return – another suggestion that Owens was digging deeper into his label’s rebellious roots. ‘We won’t legally be able to use it on YouTube,’ the designer said, ‘but it’s a song that yearns for the weird and wonderful, as much to me now as it did back then.’ JM

Schiaparelli

What would the world be like if we woke up tomorrow and there were no men? How would women dress? These musings are usually the stuff of playful debate over the dinner table, though yesterday in Paris, Daniel Roseberry brought them to life with a high-glamour A/W 2025 collection for Schiaparelli. Observing ‘that the women I know rarely, if ever, dress for men… when they do dress up, it’s for other women, and it’s women’s praise that matters to them,’ the American designer imagined how women would remember masculine archetypes in an alternate reality where they ‘inherited the earth’.

The resulting collection, which Roseberry titled Lone Star, pulled from his fantastical couture offering in January, as well as old Hollywood tailoring and gunslinging Western tropes that paid tribute to his upbringing in Texas. Balancing ideas of dominance and tenderness, his women appeared in decadent velvets, voluminous furs and sheeny satins in silhouettes that played with juxtapositions: feline second-skin dresses, demure oversized 1940s suiting and spangled cinched-waist drama fit for the red carpet. Southern charm came in waves of bow-legged denim, leather fringing, cowboy boots and low-slung belts that were accentuated through the house’s gilded codes. It was, he says, a tribute to the strong women in his life.

‘In this post-social media era – when many of us have become weary of and disgusted by living our lives through the screen – many of us are asking what makes life meaningful,’ Roseberry said in a letter to attendees. ‘I’ve spent the past few months speaking less and listening more. I wanted to make things that can inspire. The women in my life are lone stars – there’s no one else like them, and there could never be. I hope they, and all women, feel the same about these clothes.’ OB

Tom Ford

Haider Ackermann made a confident start to his tenure at Tom Ford, which he described as an attempt to capture the mood of seduction which he sees as foundational to the label. ‘I hope I seduced you all,’ the designer said backstage after the show, which instilled the uninhibited glamour synonymous with the label – founded in 2005, just after the eponymous designer’s departure from Gucci – with something more louche and darkly romantic, a hallmark of Ackermann’s own work at both his now-shuttered label and Berluti, where he was briefly creative director. Comprising both men’s and womenswear, the collection deftly shifted between daywear – largely in leather and largely black – towards showstopping eveningwear in the bold, painterly hues with which Ackermann has become synonymous. A sinuous yellow gown was hiked up above the hip on one side, another came in striking green satin sliced seductively along its back (a particularly Haider-esque gesture), while a lilac dress was adorned with shimmering tassels. For men, tailoring was pin-sharp, with smatterings of sparkle a nod to the more overt glamour elsewhere. It ended with a standing ovation – the intimate show was packed with Ackermann’s friends and well-wishers – while Tom Ford himself gave a seal of approval with a warm embrace at the show’s close. JM

Acne Studios

Acne Studios latest collection played out amid a surreal skyline conceived by the set designer Polly Philp, whereby totemic metal ‘skyscrapers’ were interspersed with tapestry-covered ‘rocks’ by design duo Front, inspired by the natural landscapes of Sweden. This clash, between nature and the city, provided the impetus of Jonny Johansson’s latest collection, which saw the designer imagine his protagonist wandering from the windswept Nordic north and into an urban cityscape for ‘a dynamic juxtaposition of two worlds; an exercise in contrasts.’ As such, garments which suggested an overt glamour – like a power-shouldered body suit – were imagined in soft, teddy-bear like fabrics. Indeed the bear, inspired by a rewatch of Björk’s Human Behaviour video (the musician had ‘curated’ a newly mixed version for the soundtrack), became a trope, with the construction of a teddy bear’s limbs inspiring the blown-up proportions of tailoring and outerwear, as well as an enormous paw-like boot.

Alongside were pieces which conjured the surreal femininity Johansson has been honing in recent seasons – a dress covered in trailing ribbons and bows, crinkled leather pussybow shirts, hazy trompe l’oeil prints – while a sense of the homespun recalled the designer’s own roots in northern Sweden. ‘A Nordic upbringing develops a deep connection to nature. Nature and urban cities have always had a relation that fascinates me,’ he said. ‘It is the tension and contrast between the two of them that I have tried to portray within this collection.’ JM

READ: Acne Studios has created a surreal skyline for its A/W 2025 runway show

Stella McCartney

Stella McCartney was in a playful mood this season, holding her runway show in the surreal ‘Stellacorp’ headquarters, a simulacrum of a corporate office complete with spinning chairs and computer desks. Even more surreal were the handful of male and female pole dancers who emerged at the show’s finale, a nod to the collection’s title, which was ‘Laptop to Lapdance’. ‘A bold day-to-night wardrobe for the working woman,’ described McCartney of the collection’s roots, which saw her imagine the season’s protagonist heading from a day in the office to a night out on the town in typically irreverent fashion. Part Working Girl – power shoulders were a definite feature – the collection swayed between double-breasted tailoring, pencil skirts and office blouses (worn with a hefty dose of irony), and party wear, from tasseled jeans to T-shirts which read ‘Slippery When Wet’. And, while it made for a moment of much-needed escapism, McCartney remained fastidious about sustainability, with 96 per cent of the collection crafted from conscious materials (and, as ever, 100 per cent cruelty free). This included some impressive versions of python and ostrich skin, here crafted from the innovative Yatay M, an alternative leather made from mycelium. JM

Dries Van Noten

In the first of two debuts of the day – Haider Ackermann would present his first Tom Ford collection later that evening – Belgian designer Julian Klausner heralded the start of a new era at Dries Van Noten, taking over from the eponymous founder who made his exit last June. Having worked at he house since 2018, and arriving with the full blessing of Van Noten himself, the show at the Opéra Garnier was less about a full-scale revolution than it was about a steady transition from one designer to the next.

The show’s setting was a clue to the inspiration: Klausner imagined his protagonist for the season dashing through the gilded opera house grabbing pieces of fabric and wrapping them around her body intuitively, tied with shoelaces. As such, there was a sense of improvisation to the silhouette: a halterneck top appeared crafted from a handful of silk scarves, while dresses wrapped cleverly around the body, as if thrown on in haste. Opulent fabrications – sometimes clashing – nodded towards Van Noten’s own mastery of texture and print, though here there was bolder eclectism, like a series of garments adorned with hundreds of different curtain ties, or the amalgam of paillettes, animal prints, checks or brocade.

‘Looking back, I realised I made this collection in a very instinctive way,’ he said after the show. ‘I went towards things I always loved. I thought about the fact that the first time I fell in love with fashion was as a child playing in the costume box, just grabbing things that you love, combining them, mixing them. Dries wanted me to feel the freedom of doing it alone.’ JM

Courrèges

Nicolas Di Felice said he wanted to mine a feeling of optimism this season at Courrèges, despite what he admits are increasingly ‘uncertain times’. Set to a remix of Chantal’s 1990 house classic ‘The Realm’ and centred around a flurry of pink confetti cleverly conceived by French set designer Rémy Briere, Di Felice called the runway ‘a place to unite, to gather – a safe space for joy and togetherness’ akin to his beloved raves (the Belgian designer grew up in the 1990s rave scene, a constant touch point of his work).

It lent the collection a looser, more intuitive feel: a series of dresses, which wrapped cleverly around the body, were based on the idea of throwing on a scarf (the silhouette ran throughout, and was also inspired by the elongated rectangle shape of a streamer), while enormous ostrich feathers became tops (the musician Arca was already wearing one front row). Meanwhile archetypal garments – like the tank top, or the biker jacket – were twisted at their seams into intriguing new proportions, often with the illusion that they were slipping off the body.

‘This collection started from the first time I was pessimistic in my life, which was not like me at all, last season,’ Di Felice explained backstage, noting that photographs of confetti by the artist Dan Colen had brought him back to life. ‘So this [collection] is the total opposite. I found myself so happy, full of joy, an optimist again.’ JM

Alaïa

Marking a return to Paris after showing at New York’s Guggenheim Museum last season, Pieter Mulier staged his latest collection in the Alaïa atelier on Rue Servan. Populating the space were a series of monolithic heads in roughly hewn unfired clay by the contemporary Dutch artist Mark Manders. Mulier said he was drawn to the works for the way they appear to stand outside of time or place: ‘Manders’ work fascinates me – each of his sculptures seem itself a work either in progress, or marked by the passage of an imaginary time, reminiscent at once of many different cultures,’ he said. ‘And that idea of a non-linearity – of space, and of time – was inspiring.’

The idea of non-linearity – of garments which traversed time and space, a ‘beauty outside of any era or geography, free of boundaries’ – ran through the standout collection. Referencing at once ancient deities (on his Instagram prior to the show, he posted a carved Bronze Age figure of a woman, captioned ‘Modern Venus’) and the archival designs of house founder Azzedine Alaïa (notably, a focus on hooded silhouette and pleats), the resulting garments were what Mulier called ‘kinetic sculptures’. Romantic flourishes came in heart-shaped cut-outs and flower-like pom poms at the neckline, while looping gowns – held in place with twists of metal – continued the ‘gravity-defying’ silhouettes of last season.

‘The message is about singularity, individuality, the eternal strength and resilience of women, empowering them through their clothes,’ Mulier continued. ‘That always inspired Azzedine, and it always inspires me – the strength of beauty.’ JM

Dior

The idea of metamorphosis was at the centre of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s latest collection for Dior, an idea reflected in a theatrical mise-en-scène by the experimental American theatre director Robert Wilson which recreated the dawn of time in his symbolic style (from jagged glaciers that rose from the floor to a pterodactyl which zoomed across the space). Grazia Chiuri’s collection had also begun with something elemental, at least in fashion terms: the white shirt, which she linked with Gianfranco Ferré, who led the house in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and who was an influence here.

The foundational garment became a jumping off point for an exploration of historic dress codes, layered under corsetry or dramatically ruffled and elongated at the cuff, chiming with the Elizabethan-inflected frock coats, ruff-inspired pearl necklaces and flared-waist crinoline gowns elsewhere (Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and its time-travelling, gender-shifting protagonist, were another inspiration). Meanwhile, tough black leather met playful faux-ermine stoles, while slouchy parka-style outerwear prevented the collection from feeling like costume. Grazia Chiuri also reintroduced the John Galliano-era J’Adore Dior T-shirt, including a version given new life with patches of delicate lace. ‘A femininity that imagines possible futures by mixing evocations of a past,’ the designer described. JM

Stay tuned for more from Paris Fashion Week A/W 2025.

‘I want to create clothes that carry this idea of a modern beauty,’ Alaïa creative director Pieter Mulier told Wallpaper* a year after he began his tenure at the French house, which the late Azzedine Alaïa founded in the early 1980s. ‘[A link] between now and then, between the past of Alaïa, and its future.’

Released this month, a new book gives a rare glimpse behind the scenes of Mulier’s time at the house so far – including access to the legendary atelier, which has long been the bedrock of Alaïa (the house is known for its sensual, sculpted silhouettes, which are often constructed with an architectural sensibility).

‘Alaïa by Seklaoui’: behind the scenes at Alaïa

The book is the result of a collaboration with French photographer Anthony Seklaoui, who for the past three years has documented the working process behind Mulier’s acclaimed collections, from design meetings to garment development, to meticulous fittings on models’ bodies and backstage reportage photography of the shows themselves. Mulier says it captures the ‘raw beauty’ of the creative process.

‘This book is a mapping of the feelings culminating in a show,’ describes Mulier, praising Seklaoui’s ‘sensitive yet journalistic eye’. ‘It records the hands, minds and crafts coming together to create the secret chemistry of a collection.’

The book is divided into various sections, each relating to one of Mulier’s collections for the house – culminating in last September’s New York show, which took place on the Frank Lloyd-Wright-designed spiralling staircase of the city’s Guggenheim Solomon R Museum. Together, the designer calls these his ‘first chapter’ at Alaïa. (He will show his next collection during the upcoming A/W 2025 women’s fashion week in Paris, which will presumably herald the start of ‘chapter two’.)

‘Anthony has a remarkable eye, one that can extract the beauty from the chaos,’ Mulier continues. ‘The book is a tribute to our friendship, but most of all to those who contribute to the magic of a collection coming to life. The ateliers, the teams, the production, the girls walking in the show – all those who are part of the Alaïa circle.’

The book, titled Alaïa by Seklaoui, arrives as the fourth part of Alaïa’s ‘Dialogue’, a series of ‘artistic and cultural projects’ led by Mulier that see the house reimagined through the eyes of various creatives and institutions. The first saw him outfit the dancers of Paris’ Crazy Horse revue show, captured in movement by photographer Sam Rock.

‘I have always wanted Alaïa to represent more than just clothes,’ he said at the time. ‘This is how Azzedine looked at Alaïa. He was such a visionary, that from the very start, he imagined Alaïa as a whole. As a space where fashion opens up to art and beauty. And this vision remains today. Because I believe that fashion only makes sense if it connects with its time. With the world.’

Alaïa by Seklaoui, £125, is available now from Alaïa boutiques, maison-alaia.com, and selected distributors. A larger version, in special display box, is available in limited-edition numbers.

maison-alaia.com

As seen in the March 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper* (on newsstands now), we explore S/S 2025’s defining trends – from illusory trompe l’oeil to transparent layers and gravity-defying spiralling silhouettes – through 12 arresting looks and accessories, for men and women.

Trompe l’oeil (top left)

‘Truth and pretence, the real and the unreal,’ said co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons of their S/S 2025 menswear collection, which was filled with trompe l’oeil illusions – a response, no doubt, to our disorienting post-truth era, where nothing is quite what it seems. Their womenswear collection followed a similar track: like this coat, its surface printed to give the effect of faux fur.

Cut-outs (top right)

Bold acts of construction have long defined Florentine house Ferragamo, whether the vertiginous ‘Rainbow’ wedge heel – created for Judy Garland in 1938 – or the sculpted surface of the ‘Wanda’ bag. Current creative director Maximilian Davis picked up the mantle for S/S 2025, using the house’s atelier to extraordinary effect with leather mesh jackets and skirts cut to the shape of Ferragamo’s historic ‘Gancini’ motif.

Reimagined plaid

Plaid made something of a return this season, with designers evoking the humble material to suggest a mood of teenage rebellion – a nod to plaid’s longtime synonymy with grunge and punk. At Acne Studios there were enormous plaid bows on skirts (‘the familiar, twisted,’ said creative director Jonny Johansson); nipped-waist checked shirts were infused with a mood of refinement at Bottega Veneta; while at Loewe, Jonathan Anderson placed floating layers of plaid over baggy chino-style pants – part of the designer’s ongoing interrogation of wardrobe archetypes.

Hybrid accessories

The mashed-up accessory – like this futuristic sneaker-cum-penny loafer by Fendi – was a throughline of the season, with designers proposing strange and surreal hybrids that appeared as one thing but were actually another. They seem fit for our online era: the effect is reminiscent of the kind of dizzying juxtapositions you find when whizzing through a social-media stream at speed.

Spiralling silhouettes

The spiralling staircase of New York’s Guggenheim Museum inspired the construction of Pieter Mulier’s latest Alaïa collection, where dresses looped around the body to gravity-defying effect. In a shift from Paris to New York, Mulier presented the collection at the Frank Lloyd-Wright-designed landmark, echoing a similar transatlantic trip Azzedine Alaïa took in 1985, showing at the city’s Palladium nightclub.

Puzzle-piece construction

Nicolas Ghesquière’s latest womenswear show for Louis Vuitton took place on a raised runway constructed from a puzzle-like collection of the house’s signature trunks in an array of finishes and hues. Such playful amalgamations continued in the collection itself, which featured a series of sandals constructed from chunky, bolted-down straps of leather, some adorned with coins and crystals.

Blown-up tailoring

‘The joy of looking, discovering and dressing,’ said Matthieu Blazy of what would be his final collection for Bottega Veneta (he was named artistic director of Chanel last December), hoping to evoke a sense of childhood wonder. Cue animal motifs, colourful tasselled wigs and blown-up silhouettes, as if a child was playing dress up in their parent’s closet. ‘We need joy. We need this moment for ourselves, and continue to play.’

Shifted waistlines

Recent seasons have seen the American designer Tory Burch – once the poster girl for all-American preppiness – take a more experimental approach with freewheeling collections rooted in fabric and form. For S/S25, clever construction sees knee-length skirts hover away from the waist for an unexpected silhouette – the type of twisted classic that has now become Burch’s forte.

Brown

If brown has been something of an overlooked shade on the runway, in recent seasons designers have begun to embrace the hue for its suggestion of nostalgic sartorial elegance – particularly its richest shades of chocolate and chestnut. Like this trench coat by Paul Smith, part of the designer’s reminiscence on Soho’s Italian coffee bars of the 1960s and their famous patrons, from Lucian Freud to Francis Bacon.

Transparency

‘The paradox of lightness through craftsmanship,’ said Nadège Vanhée of her latest outing for Hermès, presented amid a set constructed from raw artist’s canvases. Impossibly lightweight layers of sheer fabric suggested the initial brushstrokes of a painting, while also proposing a mood of feminine sensuality, long a hallmark of Vanhée’s collections for the Parisian house.

Open arms

Jonathan Anderson described his latest menswear outing for his eponymous London-based label as ‘irrational clothing’, a nod to the surreal blown-up silhouettes, supersized knits and balloon-like protrusions of fabric. Though, as is his knack, the strangeness proved seductive, like a series of oversized gilets that proposed arms-out dressing as the mode du jour.

Deconstruction

The ritual of dressing, of putting on your clothes in the morning and removing them at night, was the inspiration behind Victoria Beckham’s S/S25 collection. ‘Observing the physical relationship between skin and garment,’ led the British designer to pieces turned inside out or deconstructed – like a series of sliced-away tailoring, as if still in the process of creation.

Models: Loka Lindaregard at Models 1, Reuben Larkin at Linden Staub. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Mayuko Nakae using Oribe. Make-up: Faye Bluff at Of Substance Agency using Ilapothecary. Manicure: Sabina Uzunovic at Snow Creatives using Nailberry. Photography assistants: Guillaume Mercier, Julie Robinson. Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor. Production assistant: Archie Thomson.

A version of this article appears in the March 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

For renowned designer Azzedine Alaïa it was a dream to open a store on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré in Paris. The historic address in the 8th arrondissement known for its array of galleries, luxury boutiques and government buildings, is now home to the third of a trilogy of Alaïa flagship stores in Paris, an embodiment and realisation of Tunisian designer’s dream, and legacy.

The opening, which coincides with Paris Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2025 and the upcoming haute couture week (when it will hold its official opening), follows the renovation of Alaïa’s London flagship which was completed with the opening of a top-floor bookshop and café. The Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré retains the same balance of being both exclusive and inviting: inside you will find the hidden location of Le Café Sant Ambroeus, an outpost of the Milanese restaurant tucked away on the store's mezzanine. Echoing Azzedine Alaïa’s hospitable nature (he was known for hosting impromptu gatherings at his home and atelier on 7 Rue de Moussy) the restaurant welcomes guests for a bite of contemporary dining.

Inside Alaïa's new Paris store and secret restaurant

Much like the restaurant’s sweeping pastry selection – from chocolate and hazelnut sponge cake infused with dark rum syrup, to an airy lemony sponge with a speckled vanilla custard – Alaïa’s new flagship interiors look delectable. The design was approached with a sculptor’s hand and mastered by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (founders of 2025 Charlotte Perriand Award-winning SANAA), in collaboration with Alaïa’s creative director Pieter Mulier. Offering a symbiotic relationship between art, design, and fashion, like with his other stores, Mulier said he approached the interiors as if furnishing a home.

Details include a metallic curved table by Ron Arad, Philippe Malouin’s ‘Mollo’ armchairs, which are comprised entirely of foam with no hard internal structure, and a series of sculptures by American artist Diamond Stingily. Taken from the body of work Elephant Memory, the blend of hair and steel chains is visually tactile, and unexpected in the gallery-like space.

The ground floor is centred around four transparent tubular rooms, and balances privacy and fluidity. Soft ballet-pink flooring cushions your every step through the space, while pillowy buttercream furnishings are dotted in each corner. The architecture guides visitors to the centrepiece: a cascading staircase that nods to Alaïa’s signature curved and crisp lines, and spirals through the heart of the store, a visually tiered sorbet of creams and blush-pink steps (a similar feature can also be seen in Alaïa’s Bond Street flagship, and is swiftly becoming its architectural trademark).

The soft curvature of the interior space takes its design codes from Alaïa’s body-contouring dresses and architectural approach to construction (Azzedine Alaïa was known as the ‘king of cling’, and Mulier’s own designs continue this fascination with form). Alaïa’s repertoire of colours, particularly nude and blush tones are elegant and ethereal, and seemingly float within the space in a mirage of reflections. The Tunisian designer used to put women at the heart of creation, endlessly seeking the essence of femininity, a key element that Mulier wants to continue. As he previously told Wallpaper*: ‘It’s what I want to keep and protect: Alaïa’s family spirit, which makes the house so special.’

Alaïa's new store is located at 15 rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, 75008 Paris, maison-alaia.com

Discover more of the world's best-designed fashion stores

Last June, British designer Craig Green opened up his London studio to show his latest collection after a two-year absence from the runway. He admitted that such an intimate show was scary – ‘It’s like someone painting a runway through your house,’ he said – but it also felt liberating. Here was the site of Green’s fashion experiments, a creative lab of endless enquiries into fabric and material; all that intricately moulded leather, the glimmering candy wrapper-like fabrics, or the various constructions designed to hang off the body like contemporary sculpture. In the past decade, these have evoked sails and lilos, medical equipment and horse-riding stirrups, even contorted dummies used for martial arts practice.

For this show, his S/S 2025 offering, Green felt like a designer in full flight, riffing on archetypal menswear garments in imaginative style: a series of ‘biker jackets’ were made in collaboration with Danish leather brand Ecco and constructed in colourful jigsaw puzzle-like layers of ‘shooting and protective patches’. The resulting pieces were strange and seductive, the result of hours of experimentation and meticulous assembly. ‘The childish idea of taking an engine apart to see how it works,’ Green said of his process, which is one of enquiry and curiosity. Walking back out of his studio into London’s Docklands – currently in its own state of reinvention, surrounded by looming cranes and construction sites – the excitement for his return was palpable.

Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025: the fashion winners

Indeed, the show spoke to a wider mood in fashion, whereby its most intriguing designers are eschewing the pedestrian in favour of experimentation and high-minded design. It is a riposte, no doubt, to the so-called era of ‘quiet luxury’ and ‘stealth wealth’ – that post-pandemic moment of stratospherically expensive cashmere sweaters and swaddling silhouettes – and a response to the frenetic, tremulous times in which we live. The resulting collections spanned the thrilling (John Galliano’s triumphant Artisanal show for Maison Margiela), the unexpected (Rick Owens’ 200-strong old Hollywood epic featuring his parading white-clad ‘army of love’) and those that mined a feeling of childlike wonder, like Matthieu Blazy’s colourful S/S 2025 outing at Bottega Veneta, which took place amid a menagerie of leather beanbag animals. ‘I wanted to feel the primal pull of fashion once more,’ said the designer. ‘The joy of looking, discovering and dressing: the power of wow.’

Our Design Award winners – which include Green’s ‘biker jacket’ and a purposely crumpled overcoat from Blazy – were also chosen for their wow factor. Transcending the everyday, they are clever, sculptural, sometimes weird; each relies on process, craft and construction. When selecting the pieces, we were in part led by the thinking behind Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ S/S 2025 womenswear collection for Prada, which the designers described as a rallying call against the internet algorithm; the way it silos us into bubbles, smoothing our tastes towards pure hegemony (‘we like things because people tell us to like them,’ said Mrs Prada backstage). Instead, they wanted to create a collection that rejected the ‘derivative and expected’ through 49 unique looks, a riot of colour and silhouette. ‘We thought of each individual as a superhero – with their own power, their own story,’ said Simons.

We’ve also rejected the derivative and expected. We were seduced by the work of Duran Lantink and Ellen Hodakova Larsson, both awarded at the 2024 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers for their distinct viewpoints. The work of the Dutch-born Lantink – with its smooth, bulbous protrusions, like inflatables have been snuck under the surface of his garments – is bold and challenging in the way it transforms the body but remains rooted in everyday garments. He is confident that he will see them worn on the street (and his growing stockist list seems to agree). Swedish designer Larsson works with deadstock garments, turning the earnest connotations of upcycling on their head and conjuring up a surreal glamour with pieces made from discarded objects (we chose a dress made from stitched-together faux fur hats).

Other winners include Francesco Risso’s S/S25 collection for Marni, which reimagines elegant midcentury silhouettes in paper-like fabrics evoking fur and feathers, as if twisted fashion illustrations come to life. Like Blazy, it spoke of a primal desire to dress up and play, and was one of our highlights of the season. Another was Nicolas Ghesquière’s show for Louis Vuitton, which kicked off with a runway, formed from the house’s trunks, rising from the floor, its liberated mood reminiscent of high-voltage 1980s shows. The collection riffed on the same era: bold wide-shouldered jackets, flourishes of tulle, pirate-style pants, and a vibrant mash-up of print and adornment. Or the one-legged trousers, featured here, which loop cleverly around the lower body and introduce an intriguing new silhouette.

Construction is always on the mind of Satoshi Kondo, who is leading Issey Miyake into exciting new realms while retaining the pioneering spirit of the house’s namesake. This season, he looked to washi, inspired by the traditional handmade Japanese paper’s ability to fold and be shaped that reminded him of playing with origami sheets as a child (the dress we chose, with its undulating silhouette, recalls crumpled paper). Victoria Beckham’s collections also saw her experiment with forms, including a dress that saw fabric laid over twisting, wire-like rods. It’s exciting to see a designer refusing to rest on their laurels or take the easy route.

It has undoubtedly been Jonathan Anderson’s year, though. At both Loewe and his eponymous label JW Anderson, he proved his ability to shift the eye, to endlessly interrogate the way that we wear and perceive clothing. His S/S 2025 womenswear collection for Loewe featured featherweight dresses crafted over bouncing cage-like constructions, the delicate wires intricately welded together by hand, alongside elongated dress shoes, and feather T-shirts hand-painted with the work of Van Gogh and Manet, a play on ‘band merch’.

At JW Anderson, he said he wanted to intuit ‘where the next decade is going’, with a purposely reduced collection of sharply flared skirts and garments printed with extracts from an essay by British art critic and Bloomsbury Group member, Clive Bell. Anderson explained post-show that it explores ‘the idea of art and design and how they sit together’, though he elaborated that he was less interested in the essay’s content and more in ‘the modernity of text on a white page’. ‘There needs to be a narrowing of things,’ he continued. ‘[This collection] is about the idea of taking a blank page and starting afresh.’ For Anderson – and indeed the rest of the designers assembled here – the possibility of that blank white page seems endless. The question is, where next?

Find all the Wallpaper* Design Awards winners in the February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Models: Awek Gak Chol at Titanium Management, Arthur Del Beato at Milk Management. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM Hair: Tobia Bartolini using Oribe. Make-up: Michelle Dacillo at Agency 41 using Laneige. Manicure: Cherrie Snow at Snow Creatives using Boy de Chanel Le Vernis and Chanel La Crème Main. Photography assistant: Michel Bewley Fashion assistant: Nathan Fox. Production assistant: Archie Thomson. Digi tech: Alexander Brunacci.

During his lifetime, Azzedine Alaïa was well-known for his hospitality. At Paris’ 7 rue de Moussy, the site of his home and atelier, he would host impromptu gatherings at his kitchen table, cooking for guests as his beloved Saint Bernard, Didine, would circle round his feet. Hosting everyone from supermodels to artists, musicians and writers, the intimate salons were his expression of curiosity and friendship.

‘My grandmother, Manou Bia, managed everything in our kitchen, and there was always an extra cutlery at our table in case someone would show up unexpectedly hungry,’ he once said.

Inside Alaïa’s new London café and bookstore

It is in this spirit that Pieter Mulier, the current creative director of the house, opens a new café and bookstore on the upper floor of the house’s London, Bond Street store. Set around a central aluminium table – encouraging ‘cultural exchanges and a spirit of conviviality’ between guests – the modernist interior plays host to Violet Cakes, the Claire Ptak-run bakery that was founded in east London.

Perhaps best known for the lemon and elderflower wedding cake she created for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Ptak is inspired by her native California and time spent at Alice Waters’ legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. ‘Consistently informed by art and fashion, Violet has long served as a place in which to linger and create,’ states Alaïa of the choice.

Alongside, the third-floor space will also host a bookstore, curated by London-based Claire de Rouen, a longtime haven of rare art, photography and fashion books. The ever-changing roster of titles can be perused in the library-like space, which is populated with armchairs and a long table, like those found in reading rooms.

The new space completes the renovation of the gallery-like flagship, which has seen Mulier curate a roster of contemporary art to sit alongside his collections, including pieces by Sarah Lucas, Sterling Ruby and Marc Newson. It speaks of the Belgian designer’s attempt to define a ‘modern beauty’ at the house, ‘between now and then, between the past of Alaïa, and its future’, as he told Wallpaper* in 2022.

Alaïa, 139 New Bond St, London W1S 2TL.

maison-alaia.com

London fashion has always been defined by a mood of eclecticism, where the establishment – the meticulous precision of Savile Row, Knightsbridge’s gleaming department stores – meets the convention-breaking, from the punkish glamour of Vivienne Westwood to Alexander McQueen’s savage beauty, or the playful, idiosyncratic approach of Jonathan Anderson.

When it comes to shopping in the city, you will find a similarly diverse offering – from big-name boutiques and classic department stores to the best in vintage, alongside the sleek and experimental – which continues to draw international shoppers off their phones and onto the streets. Here, Wallpaper* selects the very best fashion stores London has to offer.

A guide to the best fashion stores London has to offer

Dover Street Market

Moving from its eponymous Dover Street address to Haymarket in 2016 – a short walk from the busy Piccadilly Circus – Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe’s conceptual fashion market remains London’s most thought-provoking boutique. Across the vast 31,000 sq ft space, Dover Street Market London shoppers will find not only pieces from the various Comme des Garçons lines (Kawakubo is also the founder and creative director of the Japanese label), but an array of brands spanning streetwear, luxury houses, and the international avant-garde, as well as plenty of rising talent. ‘People’s expectations rise and you have to rise with them. The question is how do we make DSM even more surprising and create something that you don’t expect?' Joffe told Wallpaper* when the store opened. Indeed, traversing the labyrinthine space, which unfolds over five floors, reveals hidden displays and spaces – head all the way to the top and you’ll be rewarded by a London outpost of the Parisian Rose Bakery, where cakes and pastries line the steel countertop. Read more.

18–22 Haymarket, London, SW1Y 4DG.

london.doverstreetmarket.com

Alaïa

Fashion and art unite in Alaïa’s sleek London flagship, seeing a changing roster of artists – including Sarah Lucas, Thomas Ruff, Steven Shearer and Sterling Ruby – line the space’s gallery-like white walls (the selection is curated by creative director Pieter Mulier). Meanwhile, in an echo of house founder Azzedine Alaïa’s meticulous eye for interiors, Marc Newson’s ‘Pelota’ lamps, chairs by Gerrit Rietveld, Gio Ponti and Franco Albini, and tables by Shiro Kuramata populate the two-storey space, providing a satisfying backdrop for Mulier’s latest clothing and accessories collections. Another nod to the late Azzedine Alaïa comes in an industrially designed kitchen on the second floor – a reference to the late couturier’s Paris home, where he would memorably host home-cooked dinners for his creative milieu of friends and muses. Read more.

139 New Bond St, London, W1S 2TL.

maison-alaia.com

Climax

Though not a fashion store per se, Climax bookstore has become a favourite with fashion industry insiders – so much so, it has collaborated with Heaven by Marc Jacobs and, most recently, Chopova Lowena on a capsule collection. Founded by former Dazed editor-in-chief and current Acne Studios chief marketing officer Isabella Burley, it promises an array of rare and out-of-print tomes, focussing on photography, erotica and counterculture, as well as objects and ephemera. ‘It's about us not just being seen as a second-hand bookstore but having a world, a kind of universe around us that encompasses many different things, not just books,’ Burley told Wallpaper* after opening a New York Climax earlier this month (September 2024). ‘I think books are the foundation of Climax and what we've been trying to do, but it's really fun to think: what is Climax beyond that?’ As such, as well as collaborations, Climax is also a burgeoning publishing house, with Martine Syms and Del LaGrace Volcano monographs in the works.

Climax Books HQ, 5 Wardour Mews, London, W1F 8AL.

climaxbooks.com

Sunspel

While Sunspel has always been a spot for those seeking the best in basics (such is the brand’s appeal, it was the undergarment of choice for Daniel Craig’s James Bond), a relatively new store on Jermyn Street takes the process of honing the world’s best T-shirt one step further. Alongside the usual product range, those visiting the store – which is situated on a street synonymous with made-to-measure style – can have a bespoke T-shirt made, cut to their body shape and requirements (whether a slightly shorter sleeve, higher neckline, or particular colour of cotton). After being measured in-store, the T-shirt will be made in the brand’s historic Long Eaton factory. Also in the store is an ongoing exhibition space, showcasing both the brand’s history and hosting intimate events for the Sunspel community.

23 Jermyn Street, London, SW1Y 6ST.

sunspel.com

Harrods

Steadily approaching two centuries in business, the 1849-founded department store Harrods is a stalwart of London shopping, long attracting hordes of tourists to the Knightsbridge address – whether seeking teddy bears, tea or tote bags, and particularly so when the 19th-century exterior is illuminated for Christmas with its signature rows of string lights. Though recent years have seen Harrods shake off its somewhat stodgy reputation, as it has drafted in a slew of big-name brands for blockbuster takeovers – among them Dior (a gingerbread world for Christmas), Louis Vuitton (complete with an enormous Yayoi Kusama), and Burberry (a blue-lit facade and Burberry-clad porters). This is alongside a promised £200 million renovation of the store’s fashion areas – including an already-completed lingerie and sleepwear area designed by David Collins Studio with all the marble and gleaming glass you would expect, and a near-encyclopedic menswear department on the lower ground floor.

87-135 Brompton Road, London, SW1X 7XL.

harrods.com

Celine

A ‘carnival of materials, furniture and art’ is how Wallpaper’s Dal Chodha described the Hedi Slimane-designed Celine outpost on London’s Bond Street. Indeed, the gleaming space features opulent panels of marble, white walls and neoclassical mouldings, alongside a selection of contemporary art and furniture that reflects Slimane’s singular vision as creative director of the house, which combines classical French luxury and savoir-faire with a countercultural flair. For a truly intimate encounter with the store’s catalogue of artworks, seek out the men’s fitting room which features the 1670 oil painting Portrait of Maximilien de Bethune Duc de Sully of the Flemish school – surely a changing room first. Read more.

40 New Bond Street, London, W1S 2RX.

celine.com

Rellik

Located on west London’s Golborne Road in the shadow of the Ernő Goldfinger-designed Brutalist Trellick Tower, vintage store Rellik is the domain of Fiona Stuart, Steven Philips and Claire Stansfield, who have long sourced some of the city’s most unique vintage finds – from punk-era Vivienne Westwood to rare Maison Martin Margiela, Azzedine Alaïa, and John Galliano, as well as 1930s underwear, costume jewellery and millinery. A spirit of anarchy still defines the small, busy store, though it has become beloved by establishment names from Kate Moss to Kim Jones, and was recently taken over by Valentino for the house’s vintage exchange project.

8 Golborne Road, London, W10 5NW.

relliklondon.co.uk

Balenciaga

Step in Balenciaga’s Bond Street store and you might be mistaken for thinking you have stepped into a site that is still in construction. Indeed the raw concrete walls – each one painstakingly ‘distressed’ by hand – were made to recall ‘the warehouse, the carpark, the emptied gallery – places that have hosted a palimpsest of activities,’ said Niklas Bildstein Zaar and Andrea Faraguna of the Berlin-based studio Sub, who collaborated with Balenciaga creative director Demna on the space. It makes shopping akin to walking onto a film set, leaving you to wonder what is real and what is fake, all the way down to the patina of rust on enormous concrete girders. Demna calls it ‘raw architecture’, and it makes for a shopping experience like no other. Read more.

24-25 New Bond Street, London, W1S 2RR.

balenciaga.com

The Row

The Row’s London outpost is an exercise in refinement: which other store in London greets you with one of James Turrell’s glowing orbs in the entranceway? Elsewhere, a tasteful array of objects and furniture adore the airy space, a reflection of the design-focussed universe Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have curated at their 2006-founded label. Located just off Mount Street – an afternoon of shopping in itself – it makes for a serene haven in which to peruse the brand’s men’s and womenswear collections, which marry ascetic design with enveloping fabrications and flourishes of craft and play. And it's only getting better. But so is demand – with searches up 93 per cent on Lyst, we advise befriending store staff to get a heads up on new arrivals.

5 Carlos Place, London, W1K 2EY

therow.com

Aries

Aries founder Sofia Prantera envisages the skatewear brand’s Soho outpost as a kind of ‘library’ for its community, hosting not only its collections but an outpost of Paris café Paperboy, a bookstore, and a vast basement which can be transformed for events and screenings. Meanwhile, the store design echoes what she calls the ‘temple and the rat’ ethos of Aries (a reference to Fergus Purcell’s playful graphics for the brand), seeing the brand traverse the worlds of luxury design and streetwear. Here, a marble staircase references Carlo Scarpa’s Venetian architecture, while sparse concrete floors, strip lighting and scaffold poles meet luxurious Italian furniture. ‘[Since the beginning], our identity is all about this duality – the elevated temple and the decay of the rat,’ Prantera told Wallpaper* when the store opened. Read more.

31 Great Pulteney Street, London, W1F 9NN.

ariesarise.com

Baraboux

Sarah Faisel, owner of the east London-based vintage store Baraboux, has fashion in her blood. Named after a fashion business run by her mother – which then sold leather goods and handbags – Faisel has since turned Baraboux into a fashion archive which collates a sleek edit of pieces which lean towards 1990s minimalism (in stock currently, S/S 1990 Prada capri shorts, a Maison Martin Margiela ‘sock boot’ from A/W 1999, and plenty of Helmut Lang). Housed in Hackney’s Netil House (by appointment only), Faisel says that ‘in a world of excess, Baraboux aims to provide just what you need: nothing more and nothing less’.

Netil House, 1 Westgate St, London E8 3RL.

baraboux.com

JW Anderson

Soho is not the typical address for a fashion store, though Jonathan Anderson – lover of the strange and the idiosyncratic – is no ordinary designer. Housed next door to the ‘Las Vegas’ amusement arcade in a former corner shop, the JW Anderson store features gleaming neon lights (a nod to its neighbour) alongside sleek shelving housing the brand’s famed accessories, like the Bumper bag. A more enveloping basement level features curtains of fabric and rough plaster walls, which 6a architect Tom Emerson (who designed the space) says is ‘how you might finish a London basement that you would never expect anyone to see'. ‘As much as everyone is consumed with the online experience, it's still important to have a physical space,’ Anderson told Wallpaper when it opened in early 2020. ‘It's kind of like porn somehow. Everyone can get porn online but they still come into Soho. Everyone can get fashion online but they will still come into Soho.' Read more.

2 Brewer Street, London, W1F 0SA.

jwanderson.com

September, so said legendary American Vogue editor Candy Pratts, is the January of fashion. Following a brief summer break after the conclusions of menswear and haute couture – which took place over June and July – Women’s Fashion Week S/S 2025 arrives in New York next week on September 6 2024, with subsequent stops in London, Milan and Paris. Think of it as a new fashion term.

The schedule is now set, with a few surprises along the way. Among them, the news that Pieter Mulier will show his next Alaïa collection in the city on September 6, heralding the start of fashion month. It is over four decades since the house’s eponymous founder, Azzedine Alaïa, first showed in the American city, when he presented a collection in September 1982 to an audience which included Andy Warhol and Paloma Picasso. No doubt Mulier – who has garnered plenty of high-profile devotees of his own – will draw a similarly starry crowd. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren will show the day prior with a special show in the Hamptons on September 5. London-based label Cos has also announced a return to New York, having shown last season in Rome.

Elsewhere, it will no doubt be the season of debuts: chief among them is the much-anticipated arrival of Alessandro Michele at Valentino, who will show as part of Paris Fashion Week. Eyes will also be on Givenchy, Chanel and Dries Van Noten which – at the time of writing – are each without creative directors.

Here, everything Wallpaper* knows about Women’s Fashion Week S/S 2025.

Women’s Fashion Week S/S 2025: what to expect

New York Fashion Week S/S 2025 (6 – 11 September 2024)

New York Fashion Week S/S 2025 will begin – unofficially – on September 5, as American fashion behemoth (and member of the Wallpaper* USA 400) Ralph Lauren presents his latest collection in an exclusive show in the Hamptons, the beachside Long Island locale which has long played host to the rich and famous. ’The Hamptons is more than a place,’ said Lauren in a statement. ’It’s a natural world of endless blue skies, the ocean, green fields, and white fences, rusticity and elegance with a quality of light that drew artists here decades ago. It has been home, my refuge and always an inspiration.’

The day afterwards, Pieter Mulier will show his latest Alaïa collection in New York, four decades after Azzedine Alaïa first showed in the city in 1982. It will be his second time showing outside of Paris – an intimate show at the designer’s brutalist home in Antwerp, Belgium took place in 2023 – and will no doubt be one of the highlights of the schedule. ’A city close to Pieter Mulier’s heart and the maison’s,’ said Alaïa on Instagram. It will be accompanied by ‘a series of exclusive moments’ which will take place in the city from 6–8 September. Meanwhile Cos – which last season showed at Corsie Sistine in Rome – will return to New York with a show on September 10 in Brooklyn. ‘New York is a dynamic city with so much character – it’s a place of inspiration, full of interesting and creative people,’ says the brand’s design director Karin Gustafson. Another new arrival is Off-White, who under creative director Ib Kamara will swap Paris for New York, showing on the afternoon of Sunday 16 (the title of the show is ‘Duty Free' and will take place at Brooklyn Bridge Park). Nanushka will also debut at the week, showing on the afternoon of September 7.

Elsewhere, expect a continuation of the Tory Burch renaissance as the designer presents her S/S 2025 collection on the evening of Monday 17, while New York stalwarts Coach, Michael Kors and Carolina Herrera will all show during the week. Wallpaper* USA 400 members Willy Chavarria and Peter Do, the latter showing his third collection for Helmut Lang, will round out the schedule, alongside rising names Zankov and Diotima. Tommy Hilfiger has also confirmed a spot on the week’s schedule, having initially been absent. He will show his latest collection at 6.30pm on Sunday 16.

London Fashion Week S/S 2025 (12 – 17 September 2024)

Beginning slightly earlier this season to avoid a clash with Milan Fashion Week (which starts this season on September 17), London Fashion Week will continue its 40th birthday celebrations with a packed schedule comprising the usual slew of energetic, emerging labels amid a smattering of more well-established names. Of the latter, Burberry will remain the chief draw for international editors visiting the city – Daniel Lee will show his fourth runway collection for the British label – while JW Anderson will present another agenda-setting collection on Sunday morning, his usual slot.

Other names showing this season are Simone Rocha, Roksanda, Erdem, Ahluwalia and Aaron Esh, alongside a new edition of London-based incubator Fashion East (participants are yet to be announced). Watch out for Derrick – Luke Derrick’s burgeoning London-based label had plenty of buzz last season for its sleek, contemporary riff on men’s tailoring – and Nensi Dojaka, who returns to the schedule after a hiatus. Feben will also return to London, having shown last season with the support of Dolce & Gabbana in Milan. Look out too for the rebirth of Kent & Curwen, with the British label having been purchased by Chinese golf brand Biem.L.Fdlkk Garment in 2023.

London Fashion Week will also have a new home this season, the central Newgen space moving from Old Selfridges Hotel back to 180 Strand.

Milan Fashion Week S/S 2025 (17 – 23 September 2024)

Milan Fashion Week will run a day longer this season, part of a re-jigging of the fashion month schedule led by Camera della Moda, the week’s organising body. ’I’m very satisfied with this synergetic effort by the four main players on the fashion circuit,’ said the organisation’s president Carlo Capasa. ’[We] had for some time been asking for an extension of the Milan Fashion Week, given its calendar of over 200 appointments.’

As such, the week will begin with Fendi on September 17, the Roman house presenting its S/S 2025 collection at 3pm (this time, the show will take place on a Tuesday, as opposed to its usual Wednesday). Elsewhere, expect a continuation of Prada’s ‘fairytale ravescape’ set which it revealed as its menswear show in June (the house’s womenswear sets usually riff on their menswear predecessors ), alongside similarly blockbuster shows from Gucci, Versace, Ferragamo, Dolce & Gabbana and Bottega Veneta.

Absent from this season’s schedule is Tom Ford – after the departure of creative director Peter Hawkings earlier this month – and Giorgio Armani, the latter showing in New York off-schedule in October. Also currently absent are MSGM and Blumarine (David Koma will show his debut as creative director next season), while Central Saint Martins graduate Susan Fang will show with the support of Dolce & Gabbana on Sunday morning.

Paris Fashion Week S/S 2025 (23 September – October 1 2024)

No doubt the biggest moment of Paris Fashion Week will be the arrival of Alessandro Michele at Valentino, who will present his first runway show this September (the ex-Gucci creative director’s first collection for the house, titled ’Avant les Débuts’ was revealed in a surprise lookbook drop this past June). ‘It’s an incredible honour for me to be welcomed at Maison Valentino. I feel the immense joy and the huge responsibility to join a maison de couture that has the word “beauty” carved on a collective story, made of distinctive elegance, refinement and extreme grace,’ said Michele in a statement issued after his appointment in March 2024. He will show on the afternoon of Sunday 29.

A number of other houses – among them Givenchy, Dries Van Noten and Chanel – are currently without creative directors. Givenchy is absent from the schedule (the new creative director will likely debut in February 2025), Dries Van Noten is slated to show on the afternoon of Wednesday 25 (it will be the first show since the eponymous creative director exited in June), and Chanel will retain its usual spot on the morning of Tuesday 1 October. An otherwise busy schedule – as has become the norm for the city – will include shows from Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Rick Owens, Dior, Saint Laurent, Hermès and more. Balenciaga, meanwhile, will show on the evening of Monday 30, shifting from Sunday morning.

In other news, Paris label Coperni will host its S/S 2025 show on October 1, 2024 at the so-called happiest place on earth – Disneyland Paris. Founders Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer have said the collection will blend ‘magic with reality, paying tribute to the beloved Walt Disney Animation Studios movies of our childhood’. Meanwhile Ganni, the stalwart of Copenhagen Fashion Week, will shift to Paris this season, following the appointment of Laura du Rusquec, previously of Balenciaga, as CEO this past April.

Stay tuned for more from Women’s Fashion Month S/S 2025.

Azzedine Alaïa was one of the most gifted designers of his generation, the last of the greats to completely master each stage of designing and producing a garment; a virtuoso in cutting a garment to a woman’s body. The Franco-Tunisian arrived in Paris in 1956 aged 21, designing for a private clientele that included Greta Garbo, Louise de Vilmorin, Arletty, and Cécile de Rothschild.

He would show his first ready-to-wear collection in 1980, rising to prominence in the 1990s as the so-called ‘king of cling’. He went on to dress Tina Turner and Grace Jones and propelled models Naomi Campbell, Tatjana Patitz, Stephanie Seymour, Farida Khelfa, and Cindy Crawford to superstardom.

What is lesser known is that Alaïa was also a prolific collector of haute couture, a fact that only came to light after his death in November 2017.

Inside ‘Alaïa / Grès. Beyond Fashion’ in Paris

‘Alaïa’s archive of 19th and 20th-century couture is the third largest in France, after the Palais Galliera and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs,’ says prolific fashion curator and director of Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, Olivier Saillard.

‘It was an obsession for him,’ said Carla Sozzani, Alaïa’s close friend of 40 years (the pair were interviewed together by Wallpaper* in 2012), founder and president of Fondation Azzedine Alaïa and of the 10 Corso Como concept store in Milan. ‘He was always buying, buying, buying. It began when he bought Balenciaga’s entire archive in 1968.’

He bequeathed a legacy of more than 15,000 haute-couture pieces to the foundation. This includes 700 creations of French couturier Madame Grés, who worked from the 1930s to her retirement in the late 1980s.

‘Alaïa /Grès. Beyond Fashion’ juxtaposes two couture master talents in the skylit gallery of Alaïa’s Rue de la Verrerie maison, which also houses the Azzedine Alaïa workroom, archives, bookshop, café and just-opened restaurant. Sixty of Madame Grés’ gowns are exhibited here for the first time.

The similarities between the two are astounding. Both were self-taught, honing their craft in real time. Both disregarded the fashion calendar, presenting their collections only when they were ready. Both favoured a monochrome palette of black, white and bone, occasionally integrating crimson, bordeaux, midnight, ultramarine, celadon and nude. They shared a love of simplicity, of pureness of line.

‘I love clothes that are beautiful and timeless, without useless details or decorations, or in colours that date them too fast,’ said Alaïa. ‘The simplest clothes are the hardest to create.’

Both completely mastered the selection and potential of fabrics, velvet, silk and jersey in particular.

‘You can tell the soul and character of a fabric by touching it,’ said Madame Grès. ‘When I drape a mannequin in silk, for example, the fabric responds in my hands and I try to understand and judge its reactions. That's how I give the dress the outline and shape that the fabric itself would like to have.’

Most tellingly, both started out studying sculpture. ‘I wanted to be a sculptor. Working with fabric or stone is exactly the same thing for me,’ said Madame Grès, whose real name was Germaine Émilie Krebs, choosing the ‘Grès’ pseudonym for its ‘sandstone’ meaning.

Both used pleating, draping and sensual fabrics to accentuate the female body, the hourglass proportions (or ‘bombshell’, as Alaïa’s incumbent designer, Pieter Mulier, names it) between the breasts, waist and hips.

‘When I was in Tunis, I went to the École des Beaux Arts and I decided to study sculpture because of my fascination with the curves of the body,’ said Alaïa. ‘Then I discovered fashion.’

Alaïa emulated Madame Grès’ Grecian pleating and draping, adding a more contemporary edge with leather straps, chainmail, and his signature metal eyelets. He was not alone; Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto also drew inspiration from the couturier’s couturier, Yamamoto naming his S/S 2005 ready-to-wear collection after her.

The legends identifying side-by-side pieces seem interchangeable, which lends the exhibition to a fascinating game of ’guess the designer.’

’Madame Grès is perfection in eveningwear,’ says Carla Sozzani. ‘Alaïa is perfection in everything.’

‘Alaïa / Grès. Beyond Fashion’ runs until 11 February 2024 at Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, 18 Rue de la Verrerie, Paris.

fondationazzedinealaia.org

Azzedine Alaïa was a master of construction and form, perhaps best epitomised by his signature black dresses – an archetype of womenswear, honed season after season by the late couturier, sculpted to the wearer’s body and rigorously engineered. ‘An essential of everyone’s wardrobe, an emblem of the Alaïa vocabulary,’ says the house. 

Released this month, a new capsule collection by Pieter Mulier – the Belgian designer became creative director of Alaïa in February 2021 – ‘revisits and reintreprets’ the black dress with 11 new designs that each provides a riff on the house’s distinct codes (flared skirts, sculpting technical knits, leather, hooded details, among others). ‘Eleven pure shapes, created for all bodies,’ Alaïa says of the project.

‘Simple, sensual, elegant’: the Alaïa black dress capsule

The various designs are captured by Italian fashion photographer Paolo Roversi, who previously collaborated with Mulier in July 2021, shooting a number of Alaïa ‘archetypes’ – a bodysuit, a corset bet, a corolla skirt –  just prior to the designer’s debut collection. Here, Roversi photographs the 11 designs on various women; a sparse white backdrop places impetus on body and silhouette. ‘[Roversi’s] vision emphasises the infinite possibilities offered by the 11 black dresses,’ says the house. ‘They sublimate every silhouette, matching anybody’s curves.’

Indeed, Mulier has previously spoken about a desire to create a ‘democratic’ fashion house – ‘that’s how I want to build the future of this legendary house; I can’t change everything – and I don’t want to,’ he said in the Wallpaper* Style Issue earlier this year (read our full Pieter Mulier interview). ‘But I want to try and give Alaïa to a bigger audience, to make it more inclusive.’

A focus on the body remains central to Mulier’s approach, which he describes as a pursuit of ‘modern beauty’. ‘Beauty, body, sex – [Alaïa] is the only place where you can use the word sex without being vulgar. It’s sex that comes from the heart, from the inside, where beauty belongs and can be found.’

The capsule collection is available now in Alaïa boutiques and at maison-alaia.com.

Until Pieter Mulier was named creative director of Alaïa in February 2021, he was largely known only by fashion insiders; he was a right-hand man, the confidante and creative partner of fellow Belgian Raf Simons, whom he first worked for as an intern at the latter’s eponymous label in the early 2000s. Their partnership would continue during Simons’ tenures at Jil Sander, Dior, and finally Calvin Klein, where, in 2016, Mulier was made global creative director to Simons’ chief creative officer (there, after the presentation of each collection, they would take their bow as a pair). Two years later, they exited the American behemoth together. Mulier cited ‘fashion burnout’. ‘At some point, I started asking myself: who buys all this?’ he said at a talk last year in Antwerp.

In 2014, Frédéric Tcheng’s documentary Dior & I (see W*192) provided a glimpse into this rare and enduring creative partnership, capturing the eight-week period Simons was given to create his debut couture collection for the historic French house. Simons is mercurial, at times conflicted; Mulier is diligent, well-mannered, smoothing the link between Simons and the atelier (Mulier speaks French, Simons only a little). In one scene, each member of the atelier is asked to select a look from the collection to create – a recognition of the emotional resonance of couture, whereby each garment is forever linked to the singular hand that made it, and the singular body that it was made for.

After the show, Simons takes his runway bow in tears; Mulier, watching backstage, is equally moved. ‘I’m only doing couture now,’ he whispers with a smile to one of the atelier team.

Seven years on, in July 2021, Mulier was ready to take his own place in the spotlight, presenting his first collection for Alaïa during haute couture week in Paris. Simons was there too, but this time he sat front row in support (no less emotional, Simons was again in tears during the show’s finale). It was a special moment for Mulier, but also for the house – presented in a brief respite from pandemic restrictions, it marked the first show since the death of Azzedine Alaïa in 2017. The show was held outside, on Rue de Moussy, the narrow Marais street that runs alongside the Alaïa headquarters, a jumble of adjoining buildings around a courtyard housing a sculpture of a woman’s breast (by César Baldaccini, a longtime friend and collaborator of Alaïa). There’s a store, a three-room hotel, a vaulted showspace, and what had been the Tunisian designer’s personal residence in his lifetime. Such is the late Alaïa’s imprint, Mulier calls it ‘the cathedral’.

The show itself began with a letter – left on attendees’ chairs in lieu of traditional collection notes – providing a heartfelt address from Mulier to ‘dear Azzedine’, which paid tribute to the couturier, a ‘thank you... to express [to] you my sincere respect, and recognition for the work you did’, he wrote. ‘Four years after your final presentation, today, on the fourth of July, I feel honoured to be presenting this collection. I tried to be faithful to your creative approach. I even tried to get into your mind... but that’s impossible. I have so many questions. So many things I imagine. You. Passionate, stubborn, charming.’

It was a moment of reverence for one of fashion’s great iconoclasts, who rejected the industry’s churning desire for newness with collections that focused not on ephemeral trends but a dogged pursuit of beauty, often presented off-schedule and always on his own terms. Born in Tunis, Tunisia, in 1935, the young Alaïa attended Tunis’ School of Fine Arts before later travelling to Paris to take up a job at Christian Dior in 1957. In 1979, he started his eponymous label, having built up a network of high-profile clients across the city. He showed his first collection in 1980.

Alaïa approached design with a sculptor’s hand, using cloth as his medium; the resulting collections were defSpela Kasal ined as much by technical feats of construction – years-in-development stretch fabrics, moulded and laser-cut leather, internal corsetry, elements reminiscent of industrial design – as his innate understanding of sensuality and glamour (he is variously deemed ‘the king of cling’ and ‘the last couturier’). A 2015 exhibition of his work at Rome’s Villa Borghese placed his gowns alongside the marble statues of Bernini and Canova, but Alaïa was most delighted to see his clothing on women’s bodies, particularly those whom he loved – moving, breathing, living.

Alaïa was particularly fond of company; famously, he would host dinners around his kitchen table at Rue de Moussy, his beloved dogs alongside, for members of the atelier, friends, and luminaries of the worlds of fashion, art and music (often he would leave after the meal had finished and head back to the studio to work until the morning). ‘He used to gather people of all walks of life around him,’ says Mulier, speaking from his home in Antwerp, where he retreats each weekend to escape Paris. ‘He used to put women at the heart of creation, endlessly seeking the essence of femininity, with a benevolent eye and respect. That’s what I want to keep and protect: Alaïa’s family spirit, which makes the house so special.’

Mulier previously noted the ‘human scale’ of Alaïa as one of the reasons he was lured to the job, despite purportedly being offered roles at larger houses. He references Alaïa as a ‘small ship’, a tightly-knit team, many of whom worked under Alaïa himself, carrying with them unique – and often surprising – knowledge of construction, fabric and form. ‘I like the idea of working with a small but devoted team of highly skilled technicians and dressmakers. It’s a reminder of the purest form of fashion,’ he says. ‘It’s a big problem if you make clothes without knowing the people who will help you to build them. And also without knowing who is wearing them. The women who wear Alaïa are not static works of art, but are active in society, working, running, busy with children. I want to create clothes that carry this idea of a modern beauty, always in movement.’

When Mulier arrived at the maison, he called himself a ‘caretaker’; now, just over a year on from his appointment, he says he feels a stronger desire to ‘evolve’ Alaïa, to create a ‘modern’ Parisian house, without ever straying too far from its foundations. ‘I think Alaïa isn’t huge, and that is what makes it so special. You don’t have to make a compromise in terms of creation.’ He says he wants to make Alaïa more ‘democratic’, to open its doors to the world. ‘That’s how I want to build the future of this legendary house; I can’t change everything – and I don’t want to. But I want to try and give Alaïa to a bigger audience, to make it more inclusive.’

Mulier remains an avid student of the Alaïa archive, having spent ‘countless days and nights’ teaching himself the intricacies of the house’s unique design language in order to reinterpret them for the present day (he notes a particular focus on the years 1983-1996, ‘when the clothes invented by Azzedine were revolutionary works of art’). Richemont, the Swiss luxury goods conglomerate that owns Alaïa, gave Mulier the rare gift of time in the run-up to his announcement as creative director; for several months prior, he had been quietly honing his vision in a series of presentations to executives at Richemont and the house. During those months, he ordered various archival pieces from the internet, fascinated by the construction of each garment, much of which is hidden from view when worn. He notes that such details appeal to his architectural sensibilities – Mulier studied not fashion but architecture, at Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels. He was also struck by the enduring modernity of each piece. ‘They can still be worn today – that’s what I want to continue to create, clothes that will stand the test of time.’

If Mulier’s debut collection was one of reverence, his sophomore outing (dubbed Summer Fall 22 and presented this past January) sees the designer crystallise his own vision of the house – no full-scale revolution, to be sure, but an allowance to pursue his own conception of beauty, his obsessions and desires. He describes the collection as a dialogue, ‘between now and then, between the past of Alaïa, and its future’. Part of this was a bolder expression of sensuality from the designer; Mulier says that to him Alaïa is ‘beauty, body, sex – and it’s the only place where you can use the word sex without being vulgar. It’s sex that comes from the heart, from the inside, where beauty belongs and can be found.’

As such, the body is the core of the collection, with new proportions emphasised by the designer – he notes, in particular, a wider-cut shoulder exuding ‘confidence’ – while other garments have the illusion of floating on the body. Gowns, descending into ruffles, recall Alaïa’s 1980s Spanish dresses, here used for a play on volume, while a series of sheer-knit bodysuits sit flush to the body, demonstrating an impeccable mastery of shape and form. Tailoring – wide, oversized, worn resting on the shoulder – references a meeting between Alaïa and Greta Garbo, leading him to create a cocooning overcoat for the actress (‘big, bigger, biggest, with a collar to hide behind’, the notes described). A final artistic flourish comes in a collaboration with the Picasso Foundation, the abstract motifs on the artist’s ceramics adorning a series of dresses that rise up over the face like a mask. Mulier says these pieces provide a link between Alaïa, who was friends with the artist’s son Claude Picasso, Mulier himself, who designed the various pieces, and the ateliers, who were able to reimagine a great master’s work through craft and cloth.

‘Experimentation is essential, and can be done only with a strong connection to the ateliers. It’s what I learned when I started to work for Dior with Raf – thanks to them, you can bring a concept to life entirely by hand,’ he says. ‘These people are as creative as the creator, because you give an idea, you explain to them a little bit of what you want, or you make a sketch, and then all the rest is them putting their heart in it. This relationship between the creator and the hands of the ateliers is the soul of couture.’

In celebration of the opening of Maison Alaïa's London flagship this evening, we reached into our archives to reread a fascinating interview between Azzedine Alaïa and his close friend Carla Sozzani.  Here, we present an englightening conversation between the pair – who cultivated a friendship which lasted over 30 years – before Alaïa sadly passed away last November.

When Azzedine Alaïa was a boy in Tunisia in the 1940s, his grandmother set a place at the dinner table for each member of the family every evening, plus extra places for any unexpected guests. Her grandson perpetuates the tradition to this day by hosting ‘open house’ lunches and dinners for friends and colleagues in the cavernous kitchen of his 18th-century hôtel on rue de Moussy in Paris’ Marais district.

Before Alaïa moved in, 5 rue de Moussy was being used as a warehouse by the nearby BHV department store, but originally it was the childhood home of one of his heroines, Louis XV’s chief mistress Madame de Pompadour. ‘I love telling people: “You are invited Chez La Pompadour,”’ he laughs. Now, it houses Alaïa’s apartment, his design studio and ateliers, the cabines where he fits his dresses, his boutique, and a large space where he throws parties and stages fashion shows, though the latter only happen when he feels like it, which isn’t very often; there was an eight-year gap before the last one in July. His work from the last decade is being showcased, however, in an exhibition, ‘Azzedine Alaïa in the 21st Century’, currently on at the Groninger Museum until 6 May.

Refusing to show unless he wants to is part of Alaïa’s mythology, as is the exquisitely fabricated, babelicious style he has perfected over the years; his enviable archive of vintage fashion by Vionnet and Balenciaga; his uniform of black Chinese jacket and velvet slippers; his jaw-dropping collections of contemporary art and design; and those ‘open house’ meals. Designers Marc Newson and Martin Szekely often pop in, as do supermodels who happen to be in town. (They call him ‘Papa’.)

A regular guest and close friend for more than 30 years is Carla Sozzani, owner of 10 Corso Como, the gallerycum-bookshop-cum-fashion-store-cum-restaurant-cum-hotel in Milan, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year.

Wallpaper* caught up with the pair, along with Alaïa’s magnificent St Bernard, Didine, around the famous rue de Moussy kitchen table.

Wallpaper*: When did you two first meet?
Azzedine Alaïa: A long time ago, although it feels as though we’ve known each other since birth. It was in the early 1980s. Carla was an editor at Vogue Italia and she invited me to come to Milan with my collection. I always read Vogue Italia and loved her work. I was very impressed by the quality of it. So when she said, ‘Come to Milan,’ I ran there. Something clicked between us straight away. Some things happen like that. We have been friends ever since.
Carla Sozzani: I had been told about Azzedine by a woman I worked with at Vogue Italia, Françoise Havan, who said, ‘There’s a man in Paris who is doing unbelievable things in leather.’ And I thought, ‘I’ve got to see this.’ When I did, it was l’amore a prima vista – love at first sight.

W*: And how often do you see each other now?
AA: All the time, once a week minimum.
CS: It’s me who does the travelling. I come to Paris for work most weeks and always see Azzedine while I am here.
AA: And I go to Milan sometimes. I went there in September for Corso Como’s 20th anniversary celebration. Two days of parties – it was wonderful! Before then, it had been a long time since I had visited Milan. Though, from time to time, Carla and I travel together to other places. Maybe an opportunity will arise for us to go to Venice or New York. Or we will go to South Korea or Japan. We never stay for long. Five days is the maximum. There is always too much work for me to do here in Paris, and for Carla in Milan, but it is always fun to travel with her.

W*: Has Alaïa always been part of Corso Como since the beginning?
CS: Well, I started out in 1990 with an art gallery, not with fashion. We began with an exhibition of photography by Louise Dahl-Wolfe. My plan was to have a gallery and a bookshop for art and design, but I missed fashion too much, so in September 1991 I started to sell pieces by the fashion designers whose work I really loved.
AA: It’s still the same. To this day she only sells the things she loves. People go to Corso Como because it’s always interesting. It is not just a store, it is Carla’s world. It has a special spirit. I discovered contemporary design chez Carla. The first time I found furniture that really interested me was when I saw her exhibitions of Marc Newson’s and Tom Dixon’s works in the early 1990s. Every time I go to Carla’s I discover something new.
CS: My inspiration was my work as a journalist. I decided to run Corso Como as a living magazine. As an editor at Vogue Italia, I’d had readers, and now I have clients at Corso Como. The first labels we sold were Alaïa – it is the basis of everything we have ever done – Comme des Garçons, Prada’s first womenswear collection and Martin Margiela. At the time, minimalism was very important in fashion. Everything was very, very simple. It was the period when Margiela and Helmut Lang were starting out. They had a huge influence on other designers.

W*: If minimalism was the dominant theme in fashion 20 years ago, what is it today?
CS: Cut. The quality of the cut is very important and it has to be interesting. Fashion has become very expensive and people are taking time to think before they buy. They want to express their personalities in whatever they wear, and a good cut enables them to do that. But it’s not easy to cut really well. Very few designers can do it. There is Azzedine, of course, and Comme des Garçons. John Galliano knows how to cut. Alexander McQueen did, too. I first met him when he was working for Koji Tatsuno in London, cutting jackets in a tiny place on Mount Street. 
AA: For me, the cut is incredibly important. It is fundamental and always has been. When I first came to Paris, I went to the École des Beaux-Arts and I chose to study sculpture because of my fascination with the body, then I discovered fashion. It’s odd, but my collections have been similar in style since the start. There have been subtle changes. The forms aren’t quite the same now, the lines and proportions are slightly different, but my work has always been in the same spirit and always all about the cut and the body.

W*: Is it possible for designers today to develop as distinctive and consistent a style as you have done?
AA: Yes. Look at Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga. You can see his personality in his work. There’s something very personal in the shapes, the mix of materials and the style of construction. There are other designers who are successful commercially, but he stands out because he has such a clear vision of the woman he wants to dress and he has developed a technique of making clothes that belong to him. Comme des Garçons is very strong, too. And Junya Watanabe. And Alber Elbaz. You can see his spirit in his work at Lanvin. But it is more difficult for designers to develop their own style now.

W*: And is it still possible for a young designer to open their own fashion house and work independently as you did for many years?
AA: I would never advise a young person not to try, because every era has its problems and if you are really determined you will always find a way, but it would be very, very difficult. When I started out in 1981, you didn’t need very much at all. I made a tiny collection in my apartment on rue de Bellechasse, where I’d been running my couture business. A journalist from Elle came and asked if she could photograph a jacket. Andrée Putman [the French interior designer] bought a coat and took it with her to New York. People kept stopping her and asking where she had bought it, so Barney’s came to see me. Then Bergdorf Goodman came and placed an order. I didn’t know what to do because I had nothing, nothing, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to make enough pieces, but Thierry Mugler said, ‘Just do it.’ Somehow I did. Everyone helped. The models. My clients. In those days, you could improvise. Lots of other designers started out in the same way. Today it would be much more difficult. If you’re not in a big group, you are lost. There will be no media coverage. You won’t be able to finance production. Fashion has changed.
CS: Even buying fabric is complicated when you have to order it months in advance. Distribution is a problem, too. In the 1980s, there was just Europe, North America and Japan. No Russia. No China. No South America. Now the market is immense and so are the collections. Designers have to produce so many lines and so many pieces every season. There is so much pressure on them.

W*: And how has the globalisation of the fashion market affected Corso Como? These days the same labels seem to be sold wherever you go in the world?
CS: I do feel sad when I go to Terminal 5 at Heathrow and see the same boutiques there as on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré or Bond Street. It dilutes everything. At Corso Como, we have to try to do something different. With the collections, it’s a question of editing them to reflect my point of view. Also, I want to do more collaborations with brands that interest me. We’ve already done them with Liberty and Swatch, which has been fun. It’s also good to do re-editions in fashion, as we did with Pierre Cardin, Courrèges and Paco Rabanne. I would love to do a collaboration with Azzedine. He always says no, but one day he’ll say yes.

W*: The Alaïa label was independent for many years, then owned by Prada and now Richemont. Some designers haven’t been able to cope with the loss of their independence. Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang both left their labels after selling them. How have you adapted to working within such large companies?
AA: In my head, I’m always free and that’s what matters to me. Every time I have worked with someone, I have come away with good memories. The relationship with Richemont works well. I can understand why Martin Margiela left fashion. It was the right decision for him. But for me, my work is a pleasure. Also, I only do the things I enjoy. I have no interest in menswear, for example, so I don’t do it. Occasionally I have made pieces for male friends, based on their personalities – a suit for Marc Newson on his wedding day and a kilt for Philippe Starck – but that’s all. And I don’t particularly like perfume, only very light scents. We are working on a perfume now and it will be like that. But I love, love, love making dresses. And I have so much more to learn. Every morning I wake up and think: ‘What will I learn? Who will I meet?’ I still feel like an apprentice.

As originally featured in the March 2012 issue of Wallpaper* (W*156)

Related: Jony Ive remembers Azzedine Alaïa

The ‘Azzedine Alaïa in the 21st Century’ exhibition at the Groninger Museum includes, left, a dress from winter 2010; and a top and skirt from summer 2010; right, a tailcoat from summer/autumn 2003.

Left, one of Alaïa’s three hotel suites, part of his rue de Moussy abode in the Marais in Paris. Right, Alaïa’s shoe store on the same site was designed by Marc Newson.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Azzedine Alaïa and 10 Corso Como