Haute Couture Week, which represents the lofty pinnacle of the fashion calendar, has had an injection of energy in recent seasons: in January, Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson made their debuts in the medium at Chanel and Dior, respectively. Joining them for A/W 2026 were Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga, and Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier, who both presented opening haute couture acts at their respective houses this past week. Both were vivid, contemporary riffs on the historic art – haute couture requires garments to be made by hand to the specific contours of a client’s body, taking thousands of hours of handcraft – with bold silhouettes, architectural construction, and, in the case of Piccioli, a liberated use of colour.

Here, reported from Paris, Wallpaper* breaks down the shows that defined Haute Couture Week A/W 2026 – from Blazy’s couture fairytale at Chanel to Anderson’s Lynda Benglis-inspired outing at Dior, as well as a brilliant Paris debut from London-based label Standing Ground.

Dior

For his second haute couture collection for Dior, Jonathan Anderson looked towards the American sculptor Lynda Benglis for inspiration. Particularly, her process of ‘knotting, pleating and moulding’, which here inspired the collection’s free-flowing, abstract silhouettes – from molten plissé gowns and metallic hats, to collaged skirts which referenced Benglis’ Georgia on My Mind (the 2018 work saw her cast glitter paper over chicken wire structures). Another reference was her Zanzidae: Peacock series, which was inspired by the birds she witnessed while staying at the Sarabhai family estate in Ahmedabad, India during the 1970s (she would return to the Gujarat city throughout her career). Recalling ceremonial fans, the vibrant works were reimagined on crumpled silk gowns, adorned with appliqué flowers and beads.

READ: At Dior Couture, Jonathan Anderson makes artist Lynda Benglis his muse

Schiaparelli

Daniel Roseberry’s haute couture collections have become incubators for the American designer’s more outlandish ideas, from robot babies to gowns adorned with enormous lion’s heads (memorably worn the next season by Kylie Jenner to watch from the front row). His A/W 2026 collection, shown at Paris’ Petit Palais, had begun with a trip to Barcelona to see the buildings of Gaudí, and, though there was certainly an influence from the Spanish architect’s surreal forms – as well as a vivid use of colour, more distinct than in recent seasons – Roseberry said that he was reticent to constrain the collection to prescriptive themes.

Instead, he found his creative stride when entering what he calls ‘the void’ – a space of unrestrained creativity and experimentation – prompting a journey which seemed to take him to the depths of the Mariana Trench, or the undiscovered realms of outer space. As such, the invitation was a tentacle, cast on metal; in the collection, the tentacle motif informed a latex jacket with protruding antennae, while frilled, spiked and heavily beaded surface details recalled the alien sea creatures that reside at the ocean’s darkest depths. And, just as those cast their own glow, some looks were installed with in-built lighting systems, the kind of fantastical, imaginative sleights of hand that continue to enchant the house’s dedicated haute couture clientele.

Chanel

Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore Chanel couture collection began with the discovery of a book of fairytales in the library of house founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. The leatherbound volume accessorised the collection’s first look, held in the model’s hand, used by Blazy as a jumping-off point for pieces which referenced childhood fairy tales – from Puss in Boots to Jack and the Beanstalk (indeed, the Grand Palais show space had been invaded by enormous growing vines and flowers, as well as mirrors and vases sized up for a giant).

True to his vision for Chanel – one of wit and whimsy – pieces were embedded with fantastical details, from buttons that went from ugly duckling to swan to pumps with a golden egg for a heel, while lightness was evoked in ethereal layers of organza, mousseline and guipure lace (a riff on the house’s signature tweed suit, for example, was reimagined in sheer mousseline). However, Blazy said it was not just pure fantasy: a series of sleeker looks, in black, provided a more grounded counterpoint. ‘Gabrielle Chanel climbed the ladder to find her golden goose by making clothes for real women. Her clothes were never parodies. They were rooted in life,’ he said. ‘Chanel couture is not just about the big “wow”. Chanel couture is about the details.’

READ: Matthieu Blazy conjures a haute couture fairy tale at Chanel

Giorgio Armani Privé

Silvana Armani, in her second Armani Privé outing for the house – she took over the house’s haute couture line from her late uncle, Giorgio Armani, in 2026 – sought a mood of evening-time sensuality with a collection titled ‘Boudoir’. Rendered largely in tones of inky blue and midnight black, with the occasional interlude of leopard print, the collection riffed on the fluid Armani silhouette in seductive style: masculine tailoring came in satin and was decorated with gleaming shards of embellishment, while gowns came in liquid organza (an Armani Privé signature) or dramatic plumes of feathers, carefully stitched onto sheer bodysuits in a feat of handcraft. Silvana Armani said she was imagining the ‘boudoir as an intimate, deeply personal space’, one of personal rituals and pleasures. With it, she captured the essence of haute couture, which in its focus on tailoring designs to individual clients’ bodies, is an intimate ritual of its own.

Standing Ground

Michael Stewart of London-based label Standing Ground operates on his own schedule; last showing at London Fashion Week in 2024, he has since worked directly with clients who purchase the elongated, body-contouring gowns – part Azzedine Alaïa, part Alien – for which he is best known. This season, he chose to show as part of Haute Couture Week, presenting an A/W 2026 collection at the Irish Embassy on Avenue Foch in the 16th arrondissement. It felt like a fitting shift: Stewart is known for meticulous handcraft and works with private clients rather than wholesale retailers.

It made one of the season’s standout collections: the salon-style format left guests just centimetres from his exacting creations, which evolved a signature aesthetic originally drawn from the regal proportions of the standing stones of his native Ireland. Sculpted high-neck jackets were installed with channels of hand-fed beads under their surface (a signature technique, also used on the collection’s gowns), while draped gowns in velvet and satin saw Stewart experiment with a freer silhouette. One addition to the team was legendary corset-maker Me Pearl – known for his work with John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood – who added further rigour to Stewart’s already immaculate silhouettes.

Jean Paul Gaultier

The Dutch designer Duran Lantink is known for his surreal forms, which transform and manipulate the shape of the body in oftentimes provocative ways. And, while his debut collection as creative director Jean Paul Gaultier prompted heated online debate – particularly bodysuits printed with naked bodies, or the padded appendages which shot out from models’ breasts – his sophomore ready-to-wear collection, inspired by the severe uniform of Greta Garbo, showed his eye for truly inventive tailoring, and situated him as a fitting heir for fashion’s enfant terrible.

His debut couture collection for the house, presented at the Jean Paul Gaultier headquarters, continued this vision with a series of architecturally impressive pieces that drew on the Gaultier archive in surreal style. Panniered dresses shot out streams of tulle; sculpted body suits distorted the body, as if being viewed in a funhouse mirror; while twisting gowns appeared to have been crafted from the twisting necks of flamingos (one inspiration was the surrealistic costumes Gaultier created for Le Défilé, Régine Chopinot’s 1985 ballet). ‘It’s [a house] so built of freedom and playfulness,’ said Lantink. ‘I think Jean Paul is really interested in letting me be free to do my own take on the amazing history of the house.’

Balenciaga

Pierpaolo Piccioli has more than proved his mettle in the art of haute couture: his couture collections for Valentino are some of the most celebrated in recent times, recognisable for a liberated use of colour and abundant use of fabric. With his new role at Balenciaga, he drew on a similar spirit, presenting a series of vivid silhouettes in the grounds of Université Paris Cité in the blazing midday sunshine (such was the brightness of the scene, guests were told to ‘bring sunglasses’). Drawing on several of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s best-known gowns, what is striking about Piccioli’s haute couture is that despite the several thousand hours of handwork and oftentimes vivid embellishment that go into each piece, it feels entirely effortless – and thus, modern.

Haute Couture Week represents the rarified pinnacle of the fashion calendar, taking place each year in January and June or July in Paris. To be considered a couture house – and show as part of the official schedule – you must adhere to a series of rules set by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (FHCM). Notably, garments must be made to order for clients using a dedicated couture atelier of over 15 staff and 20 technical workers, with participants showing more than 50 designs twice a year (several of fashion’s biggest names, including Chanel, Dior and Armani, have couture arms, and present during the week). The FHCM also chooses a series of guest designers to show each season, while off-schedule events take place across the city – including the presentation of high jewellery collections in showrooms in and around Place Vendôme.

Held this season from 6-9 July, the A/W 2026 edition of Haute Couture Week looks set to be defined by a pervading newness: Pierpaolo Piccioli and Duran Lantink will show their first couture collections for Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier respectively, while Olivier Theyskens – formerly of Rochas, Nina Ricci and Theory – will debut his new label, Boloria. Meanwhile at Chanel and Dior, Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson, respectively, will host their sophomore haute couture collections, after lauded debuts earlier this year. Rounding out the schedule are shows from Schiaparelli, Armani Privé, Viktor & Rolf, as well as a debut on the schedule from London-based label Standing Ground.

In anticipation, we break down all the moments to look out for at Haute Couture Week A/W 2026.

There will be debuts at Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier

On Wednesday 8 July, there will be a duo of debuts at two of haute couture’s major houses: Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier. At the former, Pierpaolo Piccioli will show his first couture collection for Balenciaga, taking the mantle from Demna, who reinstated the house’s haute couture arm in 2021 (the Georgian designer’s couture collections were critically acclaimed in their subversion of the historic medium, with memorable moments comprising haute couture ‘jeans’ and runway appearances from Kim Kardashian, Nicole Kidman and Dua Lipa). Piccioli is no rookie when it comes to haute couture, though: his memorable collections for Valentino were some of the most lauded of recent times.

At Jean Paul Gaultier, Dutch designer Duran Lantink will host his first haute couture show at the house, having presented two ready-to-wear collections at Paris Fashion Week in recent seasons. Expect the unexpected from the boundary-pushing designer: his debut was a polarising take on the French house’s codes, featuring bodysuits printed with the naked body. ‘I’m trying to break free of what’s considered good taste,’ he told Wallpaper* in our March 2026 Style Issue.

As well as sophomore shows at Chanel and Dior

Last season was marked by its blockbuster debuts: there was something of a fashion arms race as Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Jonathan Anderson at Dior showed their first couture collections (both for the houses, and personally, having previously worked at Bottega Veneta and Loewe respectively, which do not have couture offerings). Both presented different – but equally beguiling – debut collections, with Blazy striving for impossible lightness (memorably, a pair of ‘jeans’ were cut from featherweight organza) and Anderson conjuring a series of bold sculptural forms, inspired by the contours of Magdalene Odundo’s ceramics, which bloomed with floral adornment. ‘You realise that that's why we love clothing – it's this idea of the make,’ Anderson said of his first experience in the medium. ‘Couture is really a dying craft; it’s nearly instinct. There are only a few houses doing it. So in a weird way, it’s about protecting that.’

London label Standing Ground will join the schedule

The acclaimed Irish designer Michael Stewart, who started his label Standing Ground in 2022 after graduating from the Royal Academy of Art, has never been one to stick to the typical fashion schedule. In fact, he hasn’t shown on the runway since 2024, preferring instead to either present via cinematic lookbooks or simply work directly with the clients who purchase his designs. This season, Stewart will show as a guest of Haute Couture Week on the evening of Monday 6 July, a decision that tracks with the designer’s vision: his elongated, columnar silhouettes are painstakingly constructed by hand and to the wearer’s body, in an echo of the couture atelier. Winning the Savoir Faire award at the 2024 LVMH Prize, expect a continuation of his distinctive aesthetic, which marries the graceful forms of ancient standing stones with a more futuristic sensibility, where body-clinging contours and ectomorph-like protrusions have an HR Giger-esque bent.

Fendi will show in Rome

Maria Grazia Chiuri will host her first haute couture show for Fendi not in Paris – where the house has shown traditionally, and did so under previous creative director Kim Jones – but in Rome, the home city of both the designer and the house. Taking place on 9 July (many editors will fly straight from Paris to Rome for the show), it will unfold at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – a nod to both Chiuri’s longtime collaboration with the art world, and the location of a new exhibition, ‘After, a Creative Journey. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985’. Marking just her second outing for Fendi, after a debut ready-to-wear show in Milan in February, the event will see guests move straight from show to exhibition preview, ahead of the latter’s opening to the public the next day, on 10 July.

Olivier Theyskens will reveal his new label, Boloria

The Belgian designer Olivier Theyskens, who began his eponymous label in the mid-1990s before roles at Rochas, Nina Ricci and Theory, is often seen as one of fashion’s most prodigious talents, forging a darkly romantic aesthetic that borrowed from historical costuming with an industrial edge (Madonna was an early fan, wearing a memorable corseted yellow dress for the VH1 Fashion Awards in 1998). On the eve of Haute Couture Week, 5 July, Theyskens will make his return, debuting Boloria, a new label led by the designer. Fellow Belgian Willy Vanderperre shot the teaser images for the brand, which is based in Antwerp and intriguingly funded by Weareone.world, a Belgian company that runs the Tomorrowland music festivals. What to expect? ‘[The] distinctly Belgian values – sensitivity, integrity, emotional resonance – that have always inspired Theyskens’ work and approach to fashion,’ said a statement when the news was revealed earlier this year.

A landmark Maison Martin Margiela auction will take place

For the wealthy few, Haute Couture Week is one for shopping: fashion house’s top-spending clients attend to shows to select the looks that they will purchase over a given season (they are then remade to the exact measurements of their body, and oftentimes in an edition of one). But, for those after something even rarer – or, at least, a definitive piece of fashion history – an unprecedented auction will take place on 9 July at 2pm in Paris, featuring 200 pieces from legendary Belgian designer Martin Margiela’s personal collection (known for staying entirely anonymous, he founded his highly influential eponymous house, Maison Martin Margiela in 1988, before leaving in 2009). Held in collaboration between Paris’ Maurice Auction and London’s Kerry Taylor Auctions, it will span clothing, photography and ephemera. ‘These objects are like holy relics of fashion; they’re part of a great mythology, which is a real dream for an auctioneer,’ Kerry Taylor Auctions’ Alex Baddeley told Wallpaper*.

READ: This auction sees Martin Margiela’s personal archive go on sale for the first time: ‘These are the holy relics of fashion’

In the 20 years since Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen founded The Row in 2006, the pair have proved increasingly adept at reimagining the quotidian in ultra-luxurious style. This is particularly true when it comes to their sought-after footwear, with everything from the humble jelly shoe – reminiscent of those sold in seaside towns to traverse rocky beaches and coves – to spa slippers and hiking sandals getting The Row upgrade (and thus making them ubiquitous within style circles, which have long looked towards the Olsens as fashion soothsayers).

The same is true of this riff on the flip-flop sandal, a style that the pair have presented in various iterations in recent seasons. Evoking the hardy beach sandals of the 1990s, this latest version is reworked in the pair’s considered, pared-back style, complete with a grosgrain strap, leather toe divider and a soft leather footbed – robust enough to prove their utility all summer long, whether padding along hot city streets or wandering beachside.

Indeed, the thong flip-flop – a once-derided summertime accessory – will continue to prove ubiquitous in 2026’s warmer months, favoured for its clean, minimal line and synonymy with the 1990s and early 2000s, an era which, in fashion at least, proves ever-present.

Alongside The Row, the flip-flop appeared across the S/S 2026 collections: at Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut for Balenciaga, flocked thong flip-flops came with a padded sole and jewel adornment (the illusion was that of a 1990s toe ring); at Prada men’s, they were a hyper-colourful riff on the rubber-and-foam beach flip-flop (think: Prada’s take on the Havaiana, rendered in leather); while at Auralee, they came with equally brightly hued soles, a testament to designer Ryota Iwai’s reputation as a master colourist.

A version of this article appears in the June 2026 Travel Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

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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

Last night (7 March 2026), Pierpaolo Piccioli presented ‘ClairObscur’, his second collection for Balenciaga, and a collaboration with Sam Levinson, creator of HBO Original’s multi award-winning teen drama Euphoria.

The collaboration played out across screens at a show space on Avenue Champs-Elysées, which featured preview clips from the series’ third season, which will air to the public in mid-April. In attendance for the A/W 2026 event were stars from HBO’s catalogue, including Rachel Sennott (I Love LA) and Hudson Williams (Heated Rivalry). ‘The installation and experiential space represent a refraction and reflection of principles central to Levinson and Piccioli – of truth, compassion, affinity and above all humanity,’ a statement from Balenciaga detailed.

Balenciaga's Euphoria collaboration

Euphoria – which catapulted its cast, including the likes of Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, and Hunter Schafer to fame when it first aired in 2019 – is known for its striking visual style. Its second series was shot entirely on 35mm film, and its mundane setting of a nondescript American high school is elevated through distinctive lighting which adds to the show’s emotional realism. In particular, its dreamy quality is conveyed through the use of saturated coloured light.

Appropriately then, ClairObscur took its essence from ‘​​a search for the tension between darkness and light’, which in high art is also known as clair-obscur or chiaroscuro, and tends to manifest as dramatically contrasting tones to create intense depth.

Piccioli described the rationale behind his choice of Levinson as creative partner, as being for his ‘ability to convey a sense of our realities, through a prismatic representation of human fragilities and strengths. This show is a way of weaving stories together, leaving space to imagine a multitude of possibilities. It is about always finding the light in the darkness.’ He also praised Levinson for his skills in being about to ‘see without judgement… there is no vanity in his approach,’ Piccioli said.

On the collaboration and its themes, Levinson commented that: ‘Without Obscur, the Clair would be flat and blinding; and without the Clair, the Obscur would swallow everything into darkness. I think Euphoria has always been about characters searching for that balance of light and dark, attempting to find the harmony that exists within and the wonder of being alive’.

Piccioli was announced to lead the house founded in 1919 by Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga, in May of last year, following the departure of Demna Gvasalia to Gucci after ten years as creative director. The Italian designer had previously been at the helm of Valentino, since 2008, where he was known for his experiments in colour and volume.

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balenciaga.com

For the S/S 2026 season, the spotlight fell on 15 creative directors. After many months of abrupt departures, sudden arrivals and judicious role-swapping at Dior, Chanel, Balenciaga, Celine, Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Carven – plus new placements at Versace, Jean Paul Gaultier, Mugler, Maison Margiela, Loewe, Jil Sander, Area and Proenza Schouler – those in question unveiled debut collections to an audience that had eagerly coined this unprecedented shift as ‘fashion’s great reset’. But every new beginning comes from another beginning’s end, as the saying goes. And across these debuts, it was the past that would define the future.

However, it was neither sycophantic nostalgia nor a simple rehashing of familiar codes that swept the runways. As the show notes written for Jonathan Anderson’s inaugural ready-to-wear womenswear collection at Dior stated: ‘Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box. Not to erase it, but to store it, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories.’

Anderson, who bade farewell to Loewe in March 2025 after 11 years at its helm – a period in which he transformed the languishing Spanish brand into a zeitgeist-defining institution – chose Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries as the location for his highly anticipated reveal. Conceived by longtime Anderson collaborators, director Luca Guadagnino and production designer Stefano Baisi, the white cube-like set featured a pyramid at its centre, on which a video by Adam Curtis was projected. The British documentarian had applied his signature collaging technique to archival recordings of every creative director who had preceded Anderson. And the collection itself also traversed the house’s illustrious history. But whether a restructuring of the Bar jacket, its flared waist manipulated into a blossoming bow, or the cleverly skewed, shrunken proportions of the New Look silhouette, signature Andersonisms (abstracted shapes, off-kilter detailing, surrealistic millinery) made it clear that an ‘inevitable change’ had arrived.

At Celine, Michael Rider followed a similar tack for both his spring 2026 resort collection, which marked his debut, and the ready-to-wear that followed. Speaking backstage after the first presentation, the designer stressed that Celine’s new chapter wouldn’t be marked by ‘a sense of erasure’. He said, ‘There was a foundation to build on. That, to me, felt modern, ethical, strong.’ So, in both offerings, Céline Vipiana’s quintessential silks and entrenched house prints melded with a pinch of Phoebe Philo (oversized shoulders and soft draping, for example), with whom Rider worked during her tenure at the house. There was also a touch of Hedi Slimane’s youthful Parisian sensibility: denim jeans, leather biker jackets and a nod to the dress codes of the 1960s Left Bank. Equally, the Washington DC-born Rider, a former creative director at Polo Ralph Lauren, was claiming Celine as his own with design tropes belonging to preppy Americana: oversized varsity jerseys, leather lace-up pumps and white socks, and knits emblazoned with the brand’s equestrian logo.

At Maison Margiela, Glenn Martens said his S/S 2026 ready-to-wear offering would see ‘new design suggestions appear alongside reintroductions and evolutions of archival ideas’. Like Martin Margiela and the house’s late co-founder Jenny Meirens, Martens is Belgian, and his avant-garde approach was honed at Antwerp’s Royal Academy before taking the reins at Y/Project and Diesel. In the wake of former creative director John Galliano’s lauded era of dramatic spectacle, a gritty ambience returned. For the runway show’s soundtrack, Martens referred to Martin Margiela’s S/S 1990 presentation (held in the Paris suburbs, where local children ran freely among models’ Tabi-clad feet), while his collection put a slant on deconstructed tailoring, slashed and reworked denim, and slope-shouldered leather outerwear, worn by open-mouthed models, their lips stretched using metal mouthpieces evocative of the house’s signature four-stitch motif.

A sort of fashion relay took place at Gucci, Valentino and Balenciaga between Alessandro Michele, Pierpaolo Piccioli and Demna: Michele, formerly at Gucci, handed the baton to Demna, previously at Balenciaga, a house that Piccioli now heads up. For Gucci’s S/S 2026 presentation, Demna chose to save the runway for March this year, instead opting for a lookbook shot by Catherine Opie, titled La Famiglia. ‘La Famiglia is a study of the “Gucciness” of Gucci, an expression of the brand as a mindset and a shared aesthetic language,’ he said. Heritage – the Horsebit loafer, the Bamboo bag, the GG monogram – were now viewed through shades of previous creative directors Michele, Frida Giannini and Tom Ford, with Demna’s unmistakable witticisms the mark of fresh design territory.

Piccioli’s proposition for Balenciaga began with Cristóbal Balenciaga’s ‘minimalist maximalism’, taking the 1957 Sack dress as a starting point from which to unfold history. ‘It would be stupid to deny who has been here before: Demna, Nicolas Ghesquière, Cristóbal,’ he said of the collection, which infused his trademark romanticism with voluminous, cocooning shapes, peppered with a more austere, Ghesquièrian aesthetic.

Matthieu Blazy left Bottega Veneta towards the end of 2024, with Louise Trotter announcing she would be exiting Carven to replace him. Blazy was quickly named as Chanel’s new creative director. Both showed their first collections across September and October. And at Bottega Veneta, Trotter, in her words, ‘return[ed] to the beginning to find the present’. ‘The language of Bottega Veneta is intrecciato. And it is a metaphor,’ said the designer of her vision for S/S 2026. ‘It is two different strips [of leather] woven together that become stronger – the two things make a stronger whole.’ Bottega Veneta is rooted in Italian craft, and Trotter explored this with flair, manipulating fabrics in a continuation of Blazy’s love of movement and texture. Backstage after the show, Trotter also said that one of her inspirations for the collection was Laura Braggion, Bottega Veneta’s first female creative lead, who worked for the house from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

‘I was imagining her journey,’ she said. ‘Her freedom of being an Italian woman, an archetypal Italian woman, moving to New York. And what that experience meant. It was a liberation for her. And that’s what I wanted to capture – a feeling of liberation.’ In billowing trench coats, skirts and dresses, and the undulating, glistening fringing of ombré skirts and ‘sweaters’ formed from recycled fibreglass, the feeling was palpable.

And then, Chanel. Blazy’s invitation to the French fashion house marked the first time that a designer outside of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld’s inner circles would enter its ateliers (Virginie Viard, who had worked closely with Lagerfeld from the 1980s up to his death in 2019, would step down for his arrival). So whether to maintain or disrupt the status quo was a predicament for Blazy. ‘Either we do a clean, modern, by-the-codes, by-the-book Chanel show, and it’s a first step. Or we do this show as if it was our last,’ he told The Business of Fashion. ‘I took the last option. Let’s do a show as if it were the last one.’ Against a vast interplanetary set – an ode to Coco Chanel’s fascination with the cosmos – Blazy cast any staid or fusty remnants of Chanel aside. In their place, lightness and liberation; a breath of fresh air. ‘Above all, there is an idea of freedom, of a new universal dress and a borderless blending of styles,’ he said. ‘The inheritance of not just one Chanel woman, but rather, of Chanel women.’

Across 77 looks, there was a subversion of tailoring, with cues borrowed from Boy Capel, Coco Chanel’s English lover, with whom she would sometimes share a wardrobe; there was also a reimagining of the classic 2.55 bag, which appeared softer, as though crumpled under the weight of history. In a continuation of the trompe l’oeil trickery that Blazy was so fond of at Bottega Veneta, tweed was, in fact, not tweed at all, but thousands of tiny glass beads. The final look – a louche ecru silk T-shirt worn with a cascade of confetti-like organza flowers in the shape of a floor-length skirt – was met with rapturous applause.

The S/S 2026 season has seen fashion grapple with a wider question that it has, perhaps, been trying to avoid in recent years: in a culture of short attention spans, what does ‘newness’ even look like? The answer, for now at least, doesn’t seem to lie in the ‘gimmick’ or the ‘redux’, but in acknowledging the design methods of those who came before as a means to move forward. It’s a return to the art of making clothes and the importance of knowing history well enough to alter it.

A version of this story appears in the March 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + now. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Model: Bernie Ross at Elite Model Management Actor: Vaslov Goom at Birdston Talent Management Casting: Lucy Rogers Hair: Michael Harding at Blend Management using Oribe Make-up: Sandra Cooke using Chanel Denim Collection and No.1 de Chanel Body Serum Manicure: Megan Cummings at Snow Creatives using Dior Manicure, Le Baume and Vernis Digi tech: John Cronin Photography assistants: Louise Oates, Tamibe Bourdanne Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor Production assistants: Archie Thomson, Ady Huq, Indy Davy Photographed on location at The Lanesborough, London.

Balenciaga has unveiled its new leather goods factory in the heart of Tuscany, which enabled its first in-house production in Italy. Titled ‘The Plant’, the luxury house's production hub was built on one core principle: regeneration. The project was led by Metrooffice Architetti, an architectural firm based in Florence, and represents the reuse and adaptation of an existing industrial complex.

Inside The Plant, Balenciaga's new production factory

Located in the village of Cerreto Guidi (in the countryside west of Florence), the former Enny leather factory was founded in the 1960s by Giovanni Battista Cappellini, a leading figure in post-war Tuscan entrepreneurship. The factory was known for crafting leather handbags, which were shipped across Italy and abroad.

As production declined, the factory – comprising three key elements, built between the 1960s and 1980s – was abandoned. For Balenciaga, Metrooffice founders Fabio Barluzzi and Barbara Ponticelli embraced the chance to breathe new life into the site.

The architects worked closely with the client to highlight its history, make design choices based on sustainable reuse where possible, and create a cohesive architectural language.

They restored the exposed reinforced concrete, which remains as a gentle nod to the past, and installed a new roof, composed of two superimposed slabs, replacing an excessively high original. The complex now feels lighter and less jarring against the Tuscan landscape, its series of horizontal planes making it appear to be ‘suspended among the olive trees’, according to the architects.

The first part of the building to be developed was turned into a training centre, and is home to open-plan workspace, with a cutting area, as well as offices.

The renovation of the main plant followed, the heart of the whole project, which unfolds over several levels. The basement offers parking, while the entrance level hosts the reception, offices, an auditorium, storage areas, changing rooms, and a cutting department.

The next level is dedicated entirely to production and comprises a large, open space free of internal columns. Above this, a glazed lobby leads to a garden and the training centre. A connecting structure known as ‘The Bridge’ has been redesigned to accommodate the canteen and kitchen facilities.

New material choices reflect the project’s contemporary vision. Exposed concrete, grey resin floors, glass and aluminium are complemented by visible technical systems and acoustic panels that define the space.

The Plant is designed to evolve over time, paying ode to the site’s history while starting a new chapter.

metrooffice.it

In fashion, 2025 was undoubtedly the year of the debut: over the course of the year, more than 15 designers showed their first collections for the industry’s major houses – including Jonathan Anderson at Dior and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel – marking the start of a definitive new era in style.

For his own debut show at Balenciaga in October in Paris, former Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli delivered the year’s most intriguing invitation: a portable tape player and a pair of wired headphones, which, when played, reverberated with the sound of a beating heart.

Wallpaper* Design Awards: Balenciaga’s cassette-player invite is our ‘Best Heartwarmer’

The effect was two-fold. On the one hand, it captured the anticipation and pressure such high-profile debuts involve, on the other, it was a symbol of Piccioli’s always heartfelt approach to design – one defined by a generosity of fabric, a bold use of colour and a veneration of handcraft.

‘The heartbeat is the rhythm we share, the pulse that reminds us we are human,’ he wrote in a letter released just before the S/S 2026 show. ‘For every heartbeat there is a name, a moment, a gesture. This collection comes from that place of love and connection. It is as much mine as it is of those who lived it with me – in every way. Perhaps with a different pulse, but always with the same soul.’

READ: Pierpaolo Piccioli makes Balenciaga debut ‘from a place of love and connection’

Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The invitation for Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut show for Balenciaga was a Walkman and a cassette tape, which, when played, reverberated with the sound of a beating heart. Its pacing thud could perhaps be read as a sign of nervous anticipation – earlier in the week, Jonathan Anderson used an Adam Curtis short film to capture the weight of expectation these big-house debuts place on designers – though with Piccioli, the heartbeat spoke to something more elemental.

‘The heartbeat is the rhythm we share, the pulse that reminds us we are human,’ he wrote in a letter released just prior to the show, which took place yesterday evening. ‘For every heartbeat there is a name, a moment, a gesture. This collection comes from that place of love and connection. It is as much mine as it is of those who lived it with me-in every way. Perhaps with a different pulse, but always with the same soul.’

Pierpaolo Piccioli puts poetic stamp on codes of Balenciaga

At Valentino, where he was creative director from 2008 – first alongside Maria Grazia Chiuri, from 2008-2016, and then solo until his departure last year – his collections were defined by this heartfelt approach, where expressions of contemporary romance met a generosity of silhouette and a vivid use of colour, inspired by both the women around him and the work of house founder Valentino Garavani. This was perhaps most evident in his haute couture collections, which distilled his vision: one even took place on the Spanish Steps in Rome, a theatrical, kaleidoscopic display that saw gowns bloom with roses and feathers, or adorned with sequins. The names of the seamstresses who created each gown were stitched into the lining – a reminder of the intimacy of their craft.

It has made him one of fashion’s best-loved designers, a reputation further bolstered by his personal charm and affability. So as guests arrived at last night’s show, held in the cross-shaped lobby of Kering’s HQ on Paris’ Rue de Sèvres (the luxury conglomerate that owns the house), there was a palpable sense of anticipation, and plenty of goodwill. His supporters were out in force, including longtime muse Anne Hathaway and, in a surprise showing, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle. The appearance marked her first fashion show since marrying Prince Harry, and a rare appearance on European soil.

Though despite the occasion, there were no signs of nerves here. Instead, the designer looked to the house’s archive with a laser focus, honing in on Cristóbal Balenciaga’s 1957 ‘Sack Dress’, a loose, trapeze-like cut that opposed the waist-defining shapes of the era. Reinterpreting this silhouette in his clean, contemporary style, Piccioli played with its proportions, shortening the shape into tunic tops worn with slim press-front trousers, or elongating into a gown (the original style falls just beneath the knee). ‘Not homage, but recalibration,’ read the collection notes. Everyday components of a woman’s wardrobe – from shirting to overcoats – were also reimagined through references to the house’s archive, twisted and transformed by a manipulation of volume, with cocooning and ballooning shapes appearing throughout.

Elsewhere, flourishes of embellishment provided a throughline to Piccioli’s previous work, from appliqué flowers to the feathered hem of a dress, as did a vivid use of colour. Meanwhile, tougher looks in black leather – like a series of T-shirts and capes slashed just below the chest – and shielding bug-eye sunglasses were a nod to his subversive predecessor, Demna (the handover between the pair has been amicable, with Piccioli attending Demna’s final show earlier this summer).

The show ended with a standing ovation for the deep-feeling designer, who once again led from the heart – the only way he knows how. ‘What brought me here has been a journey [of] emotions, pushing me forward with force-not only teaching me, but revealing parts of myself I hardly knew,’ he said. ‘[I] ‘embraced unpredictability, the endless days, and the act of working with the heart – letting it lead, learn, and act on its own.’

Catch up on live coverage of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2026 here.

Fifteen years ago, Balenciaga archivists began searching for a first-edition bottle of ‘Le Dix’, the maison’s debut fragrance, which arrived at the house in 1947, a decade after Cristóbal Balenciaga moved to Paris’ 10 Avenue George V. Created by master nose Francis Fabron, the perfume took its name from this 8th arrondissement address, and was contained in a widely recognisable ridged flacon (a design used commercially up until the 2000s). Or, so it was thought. During the laborious hunt for this rare piece of Balenciaga history, sketches by its founder were discovered depicting another design entirely, eventually confirmed to be the true first edition of ‘Le Dix’. A while later, the only 1947-dated ‘Le Dix’ bottle in existence was located, from a private collector based in America.

Here, the foundations of Balenciaga’s ambitious new fragrance line are laid. Launching today (10 September 2025), ten perfumes recount the story of the maison’s history through olfaction, each held in a near-exact copy of this singular bottle, characterised by a ‘globular’ stopper, hand-tied with a ribbon, and rectangular-walled glass base. Even the cracked patina of its lacquered label and original embossed signature are almost faithfully replicated through high-precision 3D scanning. (Holding a mirror to this process, Balenciaga tapped artist Katerina Jebb, noted for her use of scanners in her work, to create the collection’s campaign).

The juice inside the 1947 bottle had darkened and partially evaporated. But still, it captured the chypre, or animalic, notes of the perfume as it was then. These notes have been analysed and reconstructed for a 2025 iteration of ‘Le Dix’. A celebration of the iris, this contemporary reimagining recalls a powdery lipstick twisted from its bullet, melded with facets of leather. The nine other fragrances joining ‘Le Dix’ traverse darkness and light, from ‘No Comment’ to ‘Incense Perfumum’. The former – a ‘mysterious’ fougère built around Spanish cypress – draws inspiration from Cristóbal Balenciaga’s notoriously private character; the latter, a smoky tribute to the couturier’s obsession with the colour black, is like stepping inside a Velázquez painting, with ritualistic incense oils, cedarwood and Spanish labdanum resin.

Further nods to Balenciaga codes are found in ‘Cristóbal’, a distinctly original take on an oud. ‘Cristóbal’ is overpowering but cocooning, much like the garments created by its namesake. ‘To Be Confirmed’, pays tribute to Balenciaga’s Tulip silhouette via an abstract blend of jasmine, ylang-ylang, tea leaves, and bergamot, while ‘Muscara’, which reads a little like a smokier version of ‘Le Dix’, is inspired by the dramatic, kohl-rimmed eyes of haute couture models walking Maison Balenciaga in the 1960s. ‘100%’ brings the story of the house (almost) up to the present moment; a sample of this multifaceted rose perfume formed the show invite for Demna’s final A/W 2025 collection in March.

Kering Beauté, the three-year-old fragrance and cosmetics arm within Balenciaga’s parent company Kering, is behind this ambitious and meaningful design project. ‘Previously, many Kering fragrance brands operated under external licences,’ a Kering Beauté spokesperson explained during a preview of the perfume collection earlier this year. ‘While respectful of past efforts, we at Kering Beauté wanted a complete overhaul, to wipe the slate clean and rebuild its often overlooked perfume legacy from scratch, truly aligning it with the ethos of Balenciaga fashion, as it once was in the 1950s and 1960s.’

Balenciaga opens a new chapter written by Pierpaolo Piccioli next month, with the Italian designer showing his first collection for S/S 2026 during Paris Fashion Week. What Picciolo and Kering Beauté have planned is, of course, yet to be seen. But reigniting the historically symbiotic relationship between fashion and beauty for today is an exciting place to start.

The Balenciaga collection of fragrances are available from 10 September 2025 at select stores worldwide, including the Balenciaga perfume store located at 10 avenue George V, Paris 75008, and on balenciaga.com.

‘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.

A wild, animalistic mood permeated the A/W 2025 collections, where a frenetic collage of clashing animal prints, slices of faux fur and shearling, and fronds of feathers suggested a need for escape and release. This was the starting point of the cover shoot for the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, an exploration of the uninhibited, subversive glamour which ran through the season, where tropes of luxury were twisted, or turned on their head.

Photographed by Austrian image-maker Nicole Maria Winkler and styled by Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes, the shoot sees model Costanze Van Rosmalen – who made a memorable runway debut at Prada’s A/W 2025 show, titled ‘Raw Glamour’ – inhabit a surreal domestic scene, a hallmark of Winkler’s work (for Wallpaper’s March 2025 Style Issue, she created a liminal apartment complete with disorientating trompe l’oeil wall coverings, part of an ongoing collaboration with set designer Kim Harding).

‘What I find exciting is creating deconstructed settings which emphasise the model’s performance for the camera. It doesn’t feel like her natural habitat but a constructed scene,’ she says. ‘In this instance, the double-height stage resembled a domestic set-up – a living room complete with sofa and TV and a bed on top. In another setup our model Constanze casually speed-walked on a treadmill wearing thigh-high Acne Studios boots – one of my favourite moments.’

‘Faux animal furs and reptile skins were really prevalent this season,’ adds Hughes. ‘For this shoot, I liked this idea of clashing them to create these surreal hybrid combinations, layered up in a single look. They are also textures synonymous with traditional glamour and luxury – we wanted to play with them to create a modern way of dressing up.’

Explore the shoot below.

The September 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Representing the very pinnacle of Parisian fashion – a dizzying haze of gowns, celebrity attendees and theatrical presentations designed to tempt a handful of wealthy clients – Haute Couture Week arrives next Monday in the French capital with plenty of moments to look out for. Because, while haute couture remains the preserve of the ultra-rich, its focus on superlative savoir-faire and fantastical design means there are true fashion thrills to be had – ones that so often filter down into the style zeitgeist.

Notably, these include the arrival of Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela – following the highly lauded tenure of John Galliano – and the swansong of Demna at Balenciaga before he border-hops to his new role at Gucci in Italy. There will also be the final Chanel collection to be designed in-house before the arrival of Matthieu Blazy, who will debut during ready-to-wear week in September, and the reveal of ‘new beginnings’ at JW Anderson. Elsewhere, Dior will press pause on showing at haute couture week (new creative director Jonathan Anderson will make his debut in the medium next January), alongside Valentino and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Here, Wallpaper* breaks down five of Haute Couture Week A/W 2025’s expected standout moments – stay tuned for live coverage, beginning next Monday on wallpaper.com (7 July 2025).

Glenn Martens will show his first collection for Maison Margiela

Though he has big shoes to fill – predecessor John Galliano’s ten-year tenure at Maison Margiela provided some of the most memorable runway moments of recent times – Glenn Martens comes with the goodwill of the industry, after a stellar tenure at Y/Project (he also is creative director at Diesel, a role he will continue alongside Maison Margiela). With the runway show scheduled for Wednesday evening as couture week’s final act, little has been revealed about what we can expect – neither Martens nor Maison Margiela have posted any kind of teaser – though expect a focus on deconstruction (a hallmark of both Maison Margiela and Martens’ work) through a subculture-inflected lens. ‘I feel extremely honoured to join the amazing Maison Margiela, a truly unique house that has been inspiring the world for decades,’ Martens said after the appointment, which was announced in January after Galliano’s departure.

READ: Glenn Martens is headed to Maison Margiela as the house’s new creative director

A new vision for JW Anderson will be revealed

Fresh off his acclaimed debut collection for Dior – which saw him ‘decode and recode’ the house’s archive – Irish designer Jonathan Anderson is undertaking a similar act of reinvention for his own label, JW Anderson, which remains based in London. He will reveal his new vision on Monday afternoon in Paris, having teased ‘new beginnings’ on Instagram for the past weeks – including a newly refreshed store design, labels, packaging, and what looks like an edit of homeware (from jugs and chairs to JW-branded trowels). Seeming to err towards a mood of British craft and timelessness, the glimpses of clothing have followed a similar track, from woollen plaid kilts and striped polo tees to cable-knit sweaters and workwear jeans. Though a sweater collaboration with Berlin-based queer artist Dean Sameshima, reading ‘Anonymous Trade’, confirms that the frisson of subversion that has long defined Anderson’s work remains.

Demna will hold his Balenciaga swansong

It has become increasingly rare for creative directors to have the opportunity to host a ‘final show’ after their departure from a house – in recent seasons, exits have largely taken immediate effect, with the reins being handed straight over to a successor or in-house design team. For Balenciaga’s Demna, his transformative tenure at the house is being celebrated by a final haute couture show, unfolding in the original restored haute couture salon on Tuesday (this is likely because he is moving to another house in the Kering roster, Gucci, rather than one under a competitor conglomerate). Expect a typically contemporary vision of haute couture from the Georgian designer, a medium that has perhaps been the highlight of his decade at the house. ’We’ve become numb to the beauty of the world. Why don’t we see the beauty anymore?’ he told Wallpaper* of his haute couture approach. ‘We need it to survive.’

READ: ‘What is beauty?’: Balenciaga’s Demna on creating thoroughly modern haute couture

Dior will take a pause from showing

Though Anderson hosted his opening act at Dior last week – showing his inaugural menswear collection for the house on Friday afternoon – fans of the newly refreshed vision will have to wait a little longer to see his first haute couture collection, which represents the pinnacle of Dior’s oeuvre (after all, the house’s namesake Christian Dior is arguably the most famous couturier of the 20th-century). Taking a rare pause from the schedule, Anderson is expected to make his couture debut next January for S/S 2026, though Dior is not entirely without a haute couture collection – Maria Grazia Chiuri’s final Cruise show in Rome included a number of couture looks, which will likely be offered to clients this July in a series of private appointments.

The couture heavyweights will show throughout the week

Rounding out the schedule will be outings from a trio of haute couture heavyweights: Schiaparelli, Chanel and Armani Privé (Valentino will not show, having shifted to a once-a-year schedule for couture, while Jean Paul Gaultier awaits the arrival of new creative director Duran Lantink). At Schiaparelli, American designer Daniel Roseberry will continue to hone his sculptural, theatrical vision for the house – which has amassed a legion of devotees and spawned a ready-to-wear line – while at Chanel, it will be the final outing for the in-house design studio before Matthieu Blazy’s tenure begins with a debut womenswear collection in September. Meanwhile, at Armani Privé, after Giorgio Armani did not appear for his final bow at his menswear shows in Milan – a note from the house said he was recovering at home after a recent hospitalisation – guests will hope the designer will be back in full health for the presentation, which takes place on Tuesday evening.

After a smattering of off-schedule shows in London this past weekend, including outings from Martine Rose and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy, Men’s Fashion Week S/S 2026 officially commences today in Florence (17 June 2025) with the opening of the 108th edition of the city’s historic menswear fair. In surging mid-30s heat, this season’s guest shows will include a no-doubt colourful outing from Homme Plissé Issey Miyake at Villa Medicea della Petraia on the slopes of Monte Morello on Wednesday evening, before eyes turn to Milan on Friday, seeing the latest collections from Prada, Giorgio Armani and Dolce & Gabbana shown amid a slew of presentations, showrooms and (much-needed) aperitivo.

The final stop is Paris, where – despite a packed six-day-long schedule – it is Jonathan Anderson’s debut show for Dior which will absorb the fashion world’s attention (the former Loewe creative director is now overseeing Dior’s menswear, womenswear and haute couture). Indeed, when the Wallpaper* style editors and contributors were straw-polled on what they were most looking forward to this menswear month, everyone put his inaugural collection for the Parisian house at the top of their list. But there was plenty more – read on for everything the Wallpaper* editors are looking forward to at Men’s Fashion Week S/S 2026.

Men’s Fashion Week S/S 2026: what the Wallpaper* editors are looking forward to

Jason Hughes, fashion and creative director

Like most people in fashion, I’m most looking forward to Jonathan Anderson’s debut at Dior on the Friday of Paris Fashion Week – I was a big fan of his work at Loewe, where he created such a universe around his clothing. I own a lot of pieces he designed there, so I’m excited to see what he has in store. If it’s anything like his work at Loewe – or indeed his work at eponymous London label JW Anderson – it will shift the fashion needle, and have us all wanting something new.

In Milan, it's all about Prada: you can always expect the unexpected from Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, from the show set – which in recent seasons has included dripping goo, sci-fi tunnels and surreal officescapes – to the clothes themselves. Elsewhere, I've been impressed by London-based designer Kiko Kostadinov in the last couple of seasons. His idiosyncratic approach to pattern cutting and colour always veers towards the strange, in the best possible way. He’s showing his latest menswear collection on the final Sunday of Paris, closing out Men’s Fashion Month.

Jack Moss, fashion features editor

One of my highlights has actually already happened: a surprise off-schedule show from British designer Martine Rose this weekend in London, held among a maze of ruffled boudoir curtains in an empty job centre close to west London’s Edgware Road (on a lower floor, Rose had curated a market from her creative community of designers, record sellers and magazine publishers). Befitting the show set (‘our version of a salon’), Rose said that the collection was about finding beauty in the unexpected, seeing her trademark underground style (queer and cruising culture have been a longtime reference) softened with flourishes of lace, satin and silk, while silhouettes were shrunken to the body. ‘Everything feels a bit cinched or too tight, a bit awkward but still sexy, I hope,’ she said after the show, tequila already in hand. It was. Weird, sexy, desirable, and entirely on her own terms, it was my favourite collection of hers in some time.

Elsewhere, I'm of course excited for Jonathan Anderson’s Dior debut (who isn’t?), while in Milan I join Jason in looking forward to Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ latest vision for Prada menswear (as ever, it will likely set the tone for the season ahead). An on-schedule Saint Laurent menswear show, on the opening day of Paris Fashion Week, is also on my highlights list, as is a duo of exhibition openings (also in Paris) from two of the city’s boundary-pushing designers: Demna, who will stage a retrospective of his work at Balenciaga prior to leaving for Gucci next month, and Rick Owens’ ‘Temple of Love’ exhibition, which opens at the Palais Galliera on June 28.

Scarlett Conlon, Milan contributor

The big reveal that I’m most looking forward to is, of course, Jonathan Anderson at Dior during the Paris leg of the shows. I’m fascinated to see how he brings the idiosyncratic charm that he has carved out a niche in to the storied French maison.

Elsewhere, with presentations outnumbering shows in Milan, I always love the opportunity that menswear provides to get up and close with the sartorial expertise of the clothes and talk with the designers; Brioni, Tod’s, and Brunello Cucinelli are always highlights, each finding new ways to make their super luxe offering feel relevant and fresh (and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t already planned what time I’ll be at the famous parmesan wheel at the latter).

Orla Brennan, contributing fashion writer

Besides seeing what Jonathan Anderson will do with his first collection for Dior – a moment we are all very excited about – I’m most looking forward to Prada. If Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ last few shows are anything to go by, I predict an intriguing show set and cast of interesting (possibly celebrity) characters coming down the runway – plus, of course, their usual agenda-setting fashion, guaranteed to shift what we find desirable.

I’m also looking forward to Wales Bonner’s return to the Paris Fashion Week schedule. The brand isn’t known for big spectacles, but the stories, music and clothes are always so clever and soulful – a testament to the eponymous designer’s superlative world-building ability.

Read the full Men’s Fashion Week S/S 2026 preview here.

In 2019, the micro-sized version of Jacquemus’ ‘Le Chiquito’ bag – so small it could fit into the palm of your hand with proportions less than the size of a credit card – briefly became a viral sensation, dangled from the fingertips of celebrities and influencers, the protagonist of many a street-style photograph. It captured a mood for the miniature which had defined accessories of the late 2010s – a playful riposte to the hefty and unwieldy handbags of a previous generation, with the understanding that all you really needed to carry was your phone.

Half a decade on, the demands of contemporary life have shifted thanks to the pandemic: now, our bags have become vessels for hybrid working, hauling laptops, chargers, papers, gym kits and the various accoutrements of workplace life between office and home (and back again). It’s why the XXL bag has replaced the micro, ushering in a generous new class of oversized shoppers, carry-alls and totes – from Loewe’s ‘Puzzle’ tote and Prada’s ‘Buckle’ bag, to the resurgence of the Hermès Birkin, which was originally designed to cater to the lifestyle of its namesake, actress and singer Jane Birkin, after a chance encounter with Jean-Louis Dumas, the former chairman of Hermès, on flight (as a young mother, she had struggled to find a leather bag large enough for her belongings).

It’s why the XXL tote also doubles as a reliable travel companion – with an easily accessed top opening and spacious interior, it makes navigating trips through airport departures or cross-country train journeys simple (and, for the over-packer, can carry more than you will probably ever need). In time for such escapes, the Wallpaper* style team has collated ten of the best supersized totes and shoppers – from the slouchy and nostalgic to the playfully surreal.

Ten of the best supersized tote bags and shoppers

This afternoon, it has been announced that Italian designer Pierpaolo Piccioli, the former creative director of Valentino, is set to replace Demna as creative director of Balenciaga. Demna, in something of a game of fashion musical chairs, announced that he would be heading to Gucci in March. (There, he replaces Sabato De Sarno, who succeeded Alessandro Michele, the now-creative director of Valentino.)

Piccioli, whose lauded tenure at Valentino largely centred around his superlative haute couture collections, will take over Balenciaga’s ready-to-wear, menswear and couture lines. And, though many designers’ names have circulated around the open role – including former Maison Margiela creative director John Galliano – it felt inevitable that Piccioli, who had proven success critically and commercially, would not be out of a job for long.

Piccioli, on his part, says he has long been inspired by the construction of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s haute couture – the Spanish designer was often deemed the couturier’s couturier for his influence on dressmaking – though also seeks to honour those who have followed at the house, including Nicolas Ghesquière.

Pierpaolo Piccioli is Balenciaga’s new creative director

‘Every new story has a lot to do with the path that brought us there, the humans we are now and the experiences we have already lived,’ he said in a letter released today. ‘I’m not a big fan of predestination but as I was scrolling my personal Instagram page, I realised that the very first picture I’ve uploaded was the 1967 wedding ensemble by Cristóbal Balenciaga. Don’t know if I should take it as a sign, what I know is that now I can see the bigger picture.’

‘Cristóbal Balenciaga’s legacy and archive is probably one of the most influential fashion statements of all time,’ he continued. ‘He has done everything before everyone; he has literally invented the culture of creativity; he has infused the idea of couture in every aspect of his career, and he has shown, through his creations, the power of evolution and innovation. Being here today, to mould a new story of a house where creativity has always been a culture and innovation a science, makes me feel honoured and proud to continue the story that who came before me already told with respect and assertive points of view.’

‘I feel good, blessed, grateful and honoured to be here, now,’ he concluded.

‘I couldn’t be happier to welcome Pierpaolo to the group,’ added Francesca Bellettini, deputy CEO in charge of brand development at Kering, the luxury conglomerate which owns Balenciaga. ‘He is one of the most talented and celebrated designers of today. His mastery of haute couture, his creative voice, and his passion for savoir-faire made him the ideal choice for the house.’

Piccioli will show his first collection during ready-to-wear week in Paris this October.

As is so often the case, it was fashion soothsayers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons who seemed to distill the mood of the season with their A/W 2025 collection for Prada, positing a ‘raw glamour’ – a subversive interrogation of the tropes of feminine elegance, from ‘fur’ coats to 1960s-style dresses, which Mrs Prada said chimed with a growing unease about the state of the world. ‘It is not my job to be political but when you open a newspaper – oh my God!’ Mrs Prada said after the show. ‘Our job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear, about what kind of femininity makes sense in this moment.’

Nostalgic glamour – largely twisted or disrupted – ran throughout the season in evocations of ’fur’ (almost exclusively faux, or cleverly manipulated shearling), bra tops and pussybow blouses, celebrating an unconventional, dishevelled beauty. The carved or sculpted waistline also emerged as a trend throughout the month – though in the hands of designers like Sarah Burton, who made her debut at Givenchy, the silhouette was stripped of connotations of confinement. ‘[It’s about] strength, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, feeling powerful or very sexy,’ she said. Elsewhere, cocooning and concealing silhouettes protected against the elements – whether real or existential – while upside-down and back-to-front silhouettes reflected our topsy-turvy moment.

Here, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss selects the trends and takeaways from the A/W 2025 womenswear shows, which concluded earlier this week in Paris.

Designers explored a ‘raw glamour’

‘Raw glamour’ was the term coined by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons to describe their A/W 2025 womenswear collection for Prada. ‘Glamour was something we were attracted to, instinctively, and its connection to femininity,’ said Mrs Prada on a show which interrogated notions of conventional beauty – all the way down to the dishevelled bed head hair by Guido Palau. Typically feminine silhouettes – like 1960s-style dresses – were blown up in size as if sizes too big, or came creased and sliced-away raw at the hem. Meanwhile tropes of feminine elegance – like fur coats or ladylike handbags – were subverted in provocative style, the former into strange forms with protusions around the neck or trapped under plastic (‘fur’ was actually shearling – more on that later). ‘It is not my job to be political but when you open a newspaper – oh my God!’ Mrs Prada said after the show. ‘Our job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear, about what kind of femininity makes sense in this moment.’

A similar mood was struck at Miu Miu – where Mrs Prada works solo – seeing the designer propose a wardrobe of undone Milanese glamour, where similar hallmarks of femininity, from the 1950s-pointed bra to ‘fur’ stoles and brooches, were warped and disrupted. ‘These accessories of femininity – bras, furs, brooches – they are things we have had forever. Are they relevant today? Do they lift us up?’ she said of the collection, which played out amid a set entirely covered in girlish yellow moiré. A similar mood ran throughout the season: at Valentino, Alessandro Michele’s louche, eclectic vision of glamour – sheer lace bodies, satin bra tops and bows, more ‘furs’ and feathers – played out amid a surreal ‘public bathroom’ (models tottered around the space, gussying themselves up in the toilet mirrors as if in a nightclub restroom), while Francesco Risso’s Marni playfully riffed on the salon show with high-colour faux furs, patchworked dresses and 3D flower adornment. At Acne Studios, pussybow bodysuits and slashed scarf dresses – straight out of a Helmut Newton photograph – were worn with fuzzy ‘fur’ coats, their construction inspired by that of teddy-bear limbs.

Textures and prints got animalistic

The proliferation of ‘fur’ this season was unavoidable, appearing in various iterations, from candy-striped at Gucci, two-toned at Marni, to mink-grey at Giorgio Armani. Almost exclusively faux or crafted from cleverly manipulated shearling, the by-product of meat and dairy farming (an exception was Gabriela Hearst, where the sustainably conscious designer had crafted a coat from second-hand mink to prevent waste), its use suggested both Prada’s ‘instinctual attraction to glamour’ and a desire for protection (indeed, some uses of the material were almost primitive in their cut). Highlights included a series of incredible ‘fur’ coats and stoles at Fendi’s 100th anniversary show which had the illusion of fox, mink or sable but were actually shearling – a paean to the house’s brand of Roman elegance – while at Rabanne, tassel-like ‘tails’ hung from coats and dresses. The animalistic mood extended into print, both Dolce & Gabbana and Saint Laurent featured leopard spots – the latter under a slick of transparent resin – while at Duran Lantink, zebra, cow, python and leopard prints met in an unconventional mélange (in a playful flourish, the model Leon Dame was entirely body-painted in black and white zebra stripes).

The waist was accentuated

‘McQueen is about a waist,’ said the Irish designer Séan McGirr at his A/W 2025 show for the British house, after a trip into the archive had drawn him towards Lee McQueen’s amped-up ‘hourglass’ silhouette – accentuated shoulder, narrow-waist – which captures the clash of power and eroticism which ran through his collections. McGirr’s riff was lithe and elongated, with extra-long sleeves, a corseted waistline and rounded, armour-like shoulders. ‘I took a lot of pieces from the archive, especially tailoring, and reworked them in a way that made sense for today.’

Meanwhile former McQueen designer Sarah Burton’s acclaimed debut at Givenchy – which also began with a return to the archive, inspired by a lost trove of Hubert de Givenchy’s 1952 sketches – saw her meticulous eye for tailoring create carved-waist blazers and overcoats with a wide, amplified shoulder line that was without constriction. ‘I want to address everything about modern women,’ she said. ‘[It’s about] strength, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, feeling powerful or very sexy. All of it.’ At Miu Miu, wool tailoring was cleverly constructed with a fold under the chest – the result was a narrowed, though not restrictive, waistline – while at Balenciaga, meticulous pattern-cutting saw ‘fur’-hooded nylon parkas whereby the quilted exterior had been reworked to recall a corset or bodice.

Things got turned back to front, or upside down

When Celine Dion wore a white John Galliano tuxedo to the Academy Awards in 1999, she landed on numerous worst dressed lists. Turns out the Canadian chanteuse was simply ahead of her time: this season, several designers turned garments back to front – a fitting uniform for our topsy-turvy times. Most committed were Paris-based duo Danial Aitouganov and Imruh Asha, whose A/W 2025 collection for fledgling brand Zomer saw almost every look turned upside-down or back-to-front resulting in a kind of opposites day in clothing form (even the run of the show went backwards, starting with the finale). At Givenchy, Burton presented a more refined take with a sculptural tailored jacket which fastened along its back, while at Hodakova – the buzzy LVMH Prize-winning label run by Ellen Hodakova Larsson – trousers were turned upside down and recut into dresses (belts still ran around the waistline, which was now the hem). Meanwhile at Issey Miyake, performers contorted themselves into surreal forms as part of a collaboration with Erwin Wurm and his ‘One Minute Sculptures’ – a reflection of the playfully surreal collection, in which shopping bags became tops and trompe l’oeil prints saw dresses printed on dresses.

Looks were cocooning, wrapped or concealing

The want for protection, to be covered up, wrapped and cocooned is nothing new for the winter season, though for A/W 2025 the current state of unease – referenced by numerous designers this season, from Miuccia Prada to Rei Kawakubo – no doubt contributed to a renewed desire to be protected against the elements (whether the everyday or the existential). Most strikingly, this came in the idea of concealment: several designers created silhouettes this season which obscured the hands, whether the jaunty kangaroo pockets on dresses at Issey Miyake – it made the models appear to be clutching their hands to their chests – or Rokh’s long, cape-like silhouettes which entirely enveloped the hands of the wearer.

At Hermès, Nadège Vanhée presented a collection which moved between a determined sensuality – she also carved the waist in sinuous leather dresses – and something softer and enveloping, figured in coats with enormous collars, or leather jackets with soft double-faced cashmere linings. A similar tenderness was struck at Sacai, whereby Chitose Abe said she was thinking about the act of wrapping: as such, the silk foulard became a motif, inspiring the cut or dresses or inset into a blazer. Meanwhile at Comme des Garçons, a liberated A/W 2025 collection – which Kawakubo said was a celebration of the ‘small but mighty’ – saw enormous sculptural ‘gloves’ wrapped around the hand like a boxer’s gloves or lobster claw. It spoke to the idea that concealment could be as much about armour as comfort – a mood reflected at Junya Watanabe, where leather jackets were cut with giant spikes or had a plate-like construction, like a beetle’s shell.

Nothing is quite what it seems with the S/S 2025 collections, seeing designers riff on wardrobe staples with illusory tricks – from trompe l’œil to twisted silhouettes and unexpected fabrications. Whether the turned-up hemline of a leather Loewe overcoat – as though perpetually caught in a gust of wind – or a surreal Hodakova shoe, which squashes together a beach flip-flop and high-heeled pump, these are pieces that appear as one thing, but are actually another (a response, no doubt, to our increasingly disorientating digital age). The effect is something like a surreal collage; garments that implore a second look.

S/S 2025’s twisted wardrobe staples

As such, in the March 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper* (on international newsstands now), photographer Nicole Maria Winkler and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes capture these looks in a surreal interior of their own: a liminal apartment whereby Winkler’s archival photographs become trompe l’oeil wall coverings, or adorn folding screens and chests of drawers. Inhabited by Swiss artist and model Veronika Kunz, the space – which was imagined by set designer Kim Harding – is completed with modernist furnishings, from a Ron Arad bed to an Afra and Tobia Scarpa Cassina sofa.

‘Nicole and I have been friends for many years and have played with trompe-l’œil before, and this story was a further exploration of that theme,’ Harding told Wallpaper*. ‘Delving into Nicole’s archive of still lifes, we created some interesting stand-alone pieces to sit among the set itself.’

Model: Veronika Kunz at Kunz Management. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Set design: Kim Harding Studio. Hair: Sophie Jane Anderson. Make-up: Faye Bluff at Of Substance Agency using Makeup by Mario. Manicure: Sasha Goddard at Saint Luke using Dior. Digi tech: Anna-Sophia John. Photography assistant: Tom Porter. Set design assistants: Matilda Greenwood, Heather Allen. Fashion assistants: Nathan Fox, Rebecca Evans-White. 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.

How best to define a year in style? Here, we look back over a series of illuminating conversations Wallpaper* has had with fashion’s leading figures in 2024 – whether those helming vaunted maisons, or an energetic new vanguard of designers shaping the industry’s future.

There are threads that link these conversations: both Demna and Kim Jones talk about modernising the historic art of haute couture, at Balenciaga and Dior Men respectively, while Nadège Vanhée also talks about her quietly rebellious revolution of Hermès’ womenswear collections. Meanwhile, renegade British designer Martine Rose talks about bringing her disruptive vision to the usually polite Milan Fashion Week. America – perhaps down to its shifting political landscape – is also a thematic thread, explored in conversations with Tory Burch, Willy Chavarria, and a new generation of New York-based designers who consider the future of New York Fashion Week.

Selected by Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss, these wide-ranging fashion interviews tell the intriguing stories behind the designers who’ve shaped 2024.

Nadège Vanhée on a decade of womenswear at Hermès

In the September Style Issue of Wallpaper*, Nadège Vanhée – the artistic director of Hermès’ womenswear collections – opened up about her past ten years at the venerable French Maison. ‘It’s a balance between what I love and what I want to explore – my obsessions, my feelings. What I want to wear, yes, but also pieces that go out of my comfort zone,’ she says of her quietly rebellious design philosophy, which contemplates ideas of female liberation and sensuality. Or in her words: ‘What is the life of a woman today?’

READ: ‘What is the life of a woman?’: Nadège Vanhée on a decade of womenswear at Hermès

The story behind Kim Jones’ first Dior Men couture collection

In June, Kim Jones presented his first couture collection for Dior Men, a virtuosic expression of savoir-faire that drew on the on-stage uniforms of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (the designer’s uncle, Colin Jones, was a former dancer who photographed Nureyev in 1966 for Time magazine). Speaking to Wallpaper* in Paris a few months later – amid preparations for his S/S 2025 show – Jones said the impetus for the collection was a growing desire from consumers for the unique and precious. ‘People want something that nobody else has,’ he told us.

READ: The story behind Kim Jones’ showstopping first couture collection for Dior Men

Willy Chavarria on rewriting American fashion

Ahead of a standout show at New York Fashion Week in September, Willy Chavarria – one of American fashion’s most distinct new voices – sat down with Ann Binlot to discuss the collection, which was titled ‘América’ and paid homage to immigrants’ contribution to the country’s infrastructure (Chavarria is of Mexican-American descent). ‘The community that I grew up in as a kid had a tremendous influence on not only my aesthetic and my work ethic, but also my view of what the country is that we live in, what it means to be American,’ he said. 'I wanted to shine a light on the people who make this country work.’

READ: How Willy Chavarria is rewriting American fashion

The renaissance of Tory Burch

‘I feel like a new designer,’ Tory Burch told us in the August issue of Wallpaper*, a celebration of creative America. A perennial fixture on the New York design scene – her eponymous label began in 2004 – recent seasons have seen something of a renaissance for Burch, who is flexing her creative muscle with experimental and unexpected collections that have garnered her a whole new generation of fans. ‘The only regret I have is that I didn’t do all of this sooner,’ she says.

READ: Inside the renaissance of Tory Burch

A rare conversation with Jil Sander

The occasion of a new Irma Boom-designed monograph led to a rare conversation with seminal German designer Jil Sander this November, seeing the designer reminisce on a career in fashion that began in 1968. ‘I was surprised by the strong feminine side of my work,’ she told Wallpaper*. ‘Some voices categorised me as a designer for business wear. But I was always interested in changing the general performance of men and women... I looked for a more intellectual sensuality.’

READ: A rare conversation with Jil Sander as she releases a career-spanning monograph

Demna’s thoroughly modern haute couture for Balenciaga

Speaking to Dal Chodha in the March Style Issue of Wallpaper*, Demna opened up about his distinctly contemporary vision for the Balenciaga’s haute couture line – a pitch for the historic medium’s relevancy today. ‘I always knew that couture had this kind of magic to it, of being an experiential way of wearing clothes,’ he said. ‘I just wondered if it would still be like that. The world we live in is so oversaturated with information, colour, visuals. We’ve become numb to the beauty of the world. Why don’t we see the beauty anymore? We need it to survive as a human race.’

READ: Balenciaga’s Demna on creating thoroughly modern haute couture

Martine Rose on bringing her disruptive vision to Milan

‘You have to do what you believe in,’ renegade British designer Martine Rose told Joe Bobowicz as she brought her disruptive, subculture-infused vision to Milan Fashion Week (in a particularly enjoyable contrast, it took place just after Prada and a few hundred yards away). Cue plastic noses, trailing wigs, and influences from kink, clubland and street culture: ‘I trust that people will come with me, that people are curious enough,’ she said.

READ: Martine Rose on her disruptive Milan Fashion Week debut

Molly Goddard on creating a community of brides

‘It was really something that I resisted for a while. Partly, it was because people often chose to wear pieces from our ready-to-wear collections and that felt enough,’ said Molly Goddard of her foray into bridal wear, which has been adopted by a community of brides seeking something more unexpected for their nuptials. Sharing her tips on how to approach bridal attire – ‘my main tip is not to suddenly become a totally different person’ – we also catch up with three Molly Goddard brides on wearing the designer for their big day.

READ: Molly Goddard on creating a community of contemporary brides

New York’s next generation designers weigh in on the future of fashion week

‘Beneath the glamorous surface, a new generation of independent designers have been increasingly vocal about how difficult it is to not only launch, but maintain, a successful brand in New York City,’ wrote Nicole DeMarco her introduction to a series of interviews with the city’s rising talent, ahead of the September edition of New York Fashion Week. Talking to the designers behind Diotima, Willy Chavarria, Collina Strada, Meruert Tolegen, Theophilio and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, she asked: what is the future of New York Fashion Week? And: can you still ‘make it’ in New York City?

READ: What is the future of New York Fashion Week? The city’s independent designers weigh in

Jony Ive on collaborating with Moncler

‘If you’re a proper designer, you can design many different forms,’ said Jony Ive about a foray into fashion, a collaboration between LoveFrom – Ive’s design agency – and outerwear behemoth Moncler. Catching up with Laura May Todd in Milan, Ive unpacks the unique collaboration, a shape-shifting, modular collection five years in the making. ‘I love the rigour of this kind of research,’ says Ive.

READ: Jony Ive unpacks his modular LoveFrom, Moncler outerwear collection

Just before men’s fashion month began this past June, Meta introduced a new tag for Instagram and Facebook allowing you to label images ‘made with AI’. It was a response, no doubt, to the bizarre ‘AI art’ which flooded the latter: anthropomorphic animals that move like humans; statues of Jesus made of stacks of shrimps or vegetables; ‘cyborg’ children engineered with empty plastic bottles and computer detritus. They have been deemed ‘slop’: a queasy and surreal stream of images made by a mysterious army of bots to mine likes and views (search: ‘weird AI art Facebook’ on Google Images to view some of these oddities).

Later that month at Prada, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons showed a menswear collection which the duo said explored ideas of ‘truth and pretence, the real and the unreal’. It made for a collection of illusions: belts that looked like belts but were actually stitched into the construction of a trouser, shirts that were warped with hidden wires, shield-like sunglasses overlaid with images of Roman statues, ravers and American highways. ‘Viewed from afar, pieces can pretend to be other,’ said the designers. ‘Details may seem simplistic, naïve, but up-close, physically, perceptions transform.’ It was fashion for our bewildering post-truth era, where nothing is quite what it seems.

Throughout 2024, designers have used their collections to grapple with designing for our increasingly disorientating world, resulting in idiosyncratic and intriguing collections which British designer Jonathan Anderson best described as ‘irrational clothing’ (he was talking about his own S/S 2025 menswear collection). The idea of the hybrid ran throughout, strange mash-ups that seemed to capture the dizzying spin of a social-media stream: at Loewe and Balenciaga garments appeared crafted from stacks of discarded clothing, at Sacai garments like the MA-1 flight jacket were melded together in Chitose Abe’s offbeat style, while at Issey Miyake sweaters appeared stitched on to the front of vests (typical of the Japanese brand’s innovative approach, they were actually knitted as a single piece).

Though it was accessories that made for some of the most curious hybrids. There was JW Anderson’s loafer bag, first appearing as part of Anderson’s S/S 2025 menswear collection in Milan, which ‘deconstructed and reconstructed in bag form’ the penny loafer (the classic shoe’s ‘whale-tail keeper’ detail runs across the bag’s boxy design, while the base recalls a loafer’s sole). Part of a collecton that was inspired by the stream of memories dug up by hypnotherapy – sweaters ran with slogans like ‘Real Sleep’ – it was both strange and familiar, like an object appearing from a dream. And, judging by a buzzy release last month, it looks set to follow in the JW Anderson ‘Bumper’ bag’s footsteps as a contemporary it-bag.

At Hodakova, the Stockholm-based winner of the 2024 LVMH Prize, eponymous designer Ellen Hodakova Larsson uses deadstock in imaginative ways. Like a series of bags constructed from discarded belts, or a surreal bag crafted from a knee-high boot, capturing an undone glamour that feels fitting for our times. At Duran Lantink’s thrilling S/S 2025 show, handbags became hats, while at Acne Studios trompe l’oeil prints saw ‘denim jeans’ printed across silk scarves and tote bags. Demna, meanwhile, melded a soft satin house slipper with towering stiletto heel at Balenciaga, while at Bottega Veneta, what appeared like a knitted wool sock was actually a woven leather shoe. Off the runway, New Balance’s loafer-cum-trainer was one of the year’s most divisive (and talked about) shoes.

These were pieces that spoke of not only the experience of living in what feels like an endless, infinite scroll of a social media stream – the dizzying juxtapositions from one post to the next – but also a newly experimental attitude in fashion as designers shift away from the quiet to the loud, no doubt buoyed by a new generation of consumers willing to make bolder statements with the clothes they wear. Indeed Anderson said his S/S 2025 collection had partly been inspired by seeing young people experiment with their outfits when he had attended Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona earlier that year. ‘The experimentation with clothing among younger generations is incredible,’ he said post show. ‘The eye has changed within menswear and within womenswear. People want something that is really challenging.’

Hybrid accessories: the Wallpaper* edit

In the gamut of men’s footwear, there has always been a particular loucheness to the slipper: the Albert slipper, named after Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria, was designed for men of the 19th century to move from dinner table to smoking room without damaging rugs or carpets with the dirt and soot of the street. Oftentimes in velvet – to match tuxedos and smoking jackets – they came to symbolise the suave and the urbane, resurging in midcentury Hollywood among its light-footed leading men.

Another half-century on, the men’s slipper looks set for ubiquity once again. Earlier this month, I was talking to the founder of a London-based skatewear label (and one of fashion’s most influential figures), who told me that he was currently fixated on the slipper: in particular, those produced by the French shirtmaker Charvet on Paris’ storied Place Vendôme, around the corner from The Ritz. Cut from soft suede with their own matching carry case, they are the essence of simplicity: a slip-on style with gently cushioned sole, embossed with the looping Charvet emblem as if a particularly luxurious hotel slipper. He was trying to make his way through every colour, which span classic brown, tan and navy, as well as powdery blue, pink and sanguine red.

Prior to that, Jason Hughes – fashion and creative director of Wallpaper* – had noted to me that the slipper was his shoe of the season, and all he planned to wear during the womenswear shows this past September (a rainy evening on the cobbles of Milan did momentarily highlight the occasional impracticality of the style). His slippers of choice: Prada’s slick, glossy leather mules, which appeared on the house’s menswear runway for A/W 2024 (and returned in a tasselled version for S/S 2025), or a Manolo Blahnik slip-on in mock croc. Another friend, who works at a British heritage house, recently told me he wanted to rough up a pair of the brand’s signature classic velvet slippers – complete with embroidered crest – and wear them on a night out with torn jeans.

If that makes for ‘two’s a coincidence, three’s a trend’, then there was plentiful evidence on the runway, too: at JW Anderson’s A/W 2024 menswear show – which drew inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut – boys wore tasselled slippers with just-sheer tights and socks (as with much of Jonathan Anderson’s output, the result was gleefully strange). The aforementioned Prada mules were part of Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ subversive riff on the corporate uniform (guests entered the show through a simulacrum of a nondescript office space), while at Balenciaga, Demna presented a typically twisted take on the slipper, which appeared like a uniform-issue work loafer had been stamped down at the back (they were worn with ballooning track pants).

And despite what might seem like a shift away from the Albert slipper’s formal origins, these new iterations of the style nonetheless come with a suggestion of elegance – even when worn with baggy jeans or trackpants (there is something eternally appealing about the juxtaposition of formality and slouchiness, which conjures off-duty starlets and days after the night before). It makes the slipper a shoe of low effort, high reward, requiring the wearer to simply slip it onto the foot and go – without so much as having to tie up a pair of laces.

Men’s slippers: the Wallpaper* picks

Prada

‘Glossy perfection – best worn poking out from beneath a pair of baggy blue jeans’

Available from Mytheresa, £780

JW Anderson

‘Jonathan Anderson’s ubiquitous chain mule has evolved – now with tassels’

Available from JW Anderson, £520.

The Row

‘Restrained and elegant, The Row’s leather Nicco mule is a forever shoe’

Available from Mr Porter, £1,060.

Balenciaga

‘Stomped down at the back, Balenciaga’s uniform-issue loafer becomes a twisted slipper’

Available from Balenciaga, £820.

Charvet

‘These Charvet slippers are like turning up at a particularly expensive hotel’

Available from Mr Porter, £465.

If ever there was a time to hone your working uniform it is the autumn, a season which, after the hot and heady rush of summer, marks the moment to pack up your holiday wardrobe and embrace the strangely seductive pull of officewear – a mood of grown-up polish that draws you back to your desk and the routine of the nine-to-five.

This needn’t suggest tedium: the A/W 2024 collections offer an altogether twisted view of city dressing, seeing futuristic and sculptural silhouettes meet unexpected flourishes of texture in a corporate palette of navy, grey and black. Alongside, riffs on the classic overcoat: like Acne Studios’ version in moulded leather, which creative director Jonny Johansson likened to Estonian artist Villu Jaanisoo’s enormous rubber armchairs that were dotted around the runway when the collection was revealed in Paris earlier this year. ‘[It’s] rooted in toughness and human form, leather and denim,’ Johansson says of the full-throttle collection.

A/W 2024’s twisted officewear

Victoria Beckham describes her A/W 2024 collection as taking the silhouettes at the core of her brand and ‘abstracting’ them, often deconstructing them to their essence and rebuilding them into new propositions. This includes office-style tailoring, whereby blazers are redesigned to hang on the front of the body, leaving the back exposed, as one might hold a garment to the body before trying on an outfit. At Sportmax, the wide, notched lapels of a tuxedo are combined with a classic elongated grey coat for statement-making outerwear that need not be removed when you step inside the office.

Meanwhile at JW Anderson and Louis Vuitton, the idea of a sculpted waist is explored in different ways by Jonathan Anderson and Nicolas Ghesquière, two designers who defined the A/W 2024 season with imaginative and intriguing collections. At JW Anderson, a grey sweater has a darted waist for a pinched silhouette recalling tailoring or dressmaking, while at Louis Vuitton, a sculptural jacket comes with the kind of sharp, futuristic line which has defined Ghesquière’s postmodern approach during his ten-year tenure at the house (the A/W 2024 collection was a celebration of the past decade, seeing the French designer revive his archive anew).

In the heart of London’s Square Mile – the financial epicentre of the city – photographer Sasha Marro and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes capture A/W 2024’s new working uniform as part of the October 2024 Guest Editors’ issue of Wallpaper*, which is on international newsstands now.

Model: Julia Rambukkana at The Milk Collective. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Chloe Frieda using Authentic Beauty Concept. Make-up: Sunao Takahashi at St Luke using Dior Forever Foundation and Capture Totale Le Sérum. Photography assistants: Fred Barlet, Pablo Gallegos. Fashion assistants: Lucy Proctor, Nathan Fox. Production assistants: Minna Vauhkonen, Ady Huq, Archie Thomson. Retouching: IPP Studio.

This article appears in the October 2024 Guest Editors’ 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 S/S 2025 shows offered a typically transporting array of runway sets and show spaces, which spanned the romantic, the playful and the surreal, alongside the downright cinematic. Like Anthony Vaccarrello’s opulent, monolithic set for Saint Laurent – an enormous gilded circle that hovered over a circular blue runway – made all the dramatic by rain pouring through its open-to-the-elements ceiling.

Other brands drafted artists to create installations to backdrop their shows: there was Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s ‘messy, complicated’ domestic scene for Acne Studios, or Gary Hume’s reimagining of a 1990 work, ‘Bays’, for Daniel Lee’s latest Burberry show in London. Meanwhile, perhaps the most Instagram-friendly moment of the month came at Bottega Veneta, where Matthieu Blazy created a menagerie of leather beanbag animals inspired by a scene from E.T. (read on for the full story).

Here, selected by Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss, are the most breathtaking runway sets fashion month – a celebration of the architecture of fashion.

The best runway sets of S/S 2025

Artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s twisted living room for Acne Studios

‘The idea for this collection started from a twisted domestic scenery. I asked myself whether classic domestic codes could actually be translated into fashion,’ explained Jonny Johansson of his surreal S/S 2025 Acne Studios collection, which reimagined home furnishings – from curtain ties to wax tablecloths – as clothing. Backdropping the show was a ‘complicated and messy’ domestic scene by Philadelphia-based artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase, comprising soft sculptures of lamps, radios and cats, alongside recycled furniture from Leboncoin scrawled with his playful motifs. Evoking a twisted living room, the artist told Wallpaper* that the installation was a musing on ‘emotions and the body, and how they affect the space around you’. Read more.

Bottega Veneta’s menagerie of bean-bag animals

‘I was interested in the power of “wow”,’ said Matthieu Blazy of his latest collection for Bottega Veneta, which was inspired by a sense of childhood wonder, 'the joy of looking, discovering and dressing’. It was a mood reflected in the show space, a menagerie of leather beanbag chairs for guests to sit on – a reference, the designer said, to the scene in E.T. when the titular extraterrestrial hides amid a pile of soft toys in Elliott’s closet. Spanning killer whales, bunnies and foxes, the beanbag design was inspired by Zanotta’s ‘Sacco’ easy chair, with Blazy working with the Italian design company on the unique project. Read more.

Gary Hume’s reimagining of a 1990 work for Burberry

At London’s National Theatre, Daniel Lee looked towards artist Gary Hume – best known for being a part of the YBA movement, and currently showing at Sprüth Magers in London – to create the runway set for his latest Burberry collection, inspired by the artist’s 1990 work ‘Bays’. Originally staged as part of the notorious East Country Yard Show, the work comprises a series of lorry tarpaulins, hung like curtains and slashed to recall doorways and windows. Over three decades on, they were reimagined in medical green, lining the lobby of the brutalist theatre, which was partly chosen for the way it recalls the original concrete industrial space of the 1990 show. ‘I hadn’t touched the pieces in a long time, and so when Daniel asked me if I could participate in his show, I said yes,’ Hume told Wallpaper*. ‘There was a real bond of being two creative people.’ Read more.

Balenciaga’s dining-table runway, inspired by Demna’s childhood

Demna said that this season began with reminiscences of holding fashion shows on his grandmother’s kitchen table in Georgia as a child. ‘My early memories of fashion start with me drawing looks on cardboard, cutting them away and making “fashion shows” on my grandmother’s kitchen table,’ he wrote in a letter to guests. ‘Thirty-five years later, this show reconnects me to the beginning of my vision. It’s a tribute to fashion which has a point of view.’ For the runway set, this scene was blown up to surreal proportions, with an enormous polished dining table – around which VIP guests sat – serving as the show’s runway.

Loewe’s ‘radically reduced’ runway set, featuring a Tracey Emin sculpture

Jonathan Anderson described his latest Loewe show as an act of ‘radical reduction’, an attempt to replicate the ‘eye going into focus’ as your eyes adjust to a darkened room. The show space, constructed in a box in the grounds of Paris’ Château de Vincennes, was similarly spare: a vast white space with a circular runway that ran around a 2007 sculpture of a metal bird on a narrow, totem-like plinth by British artist Tracey Emin. Anderson said he liked the idea of the looks circulating around the sculpture ‘like a sundial’. ‘Caught in a moment of pause, [Emin] encourages us to imagine the bird’s imminent flight, and ultimately its freedom,’ said the designer via the collection notes.

Chanel’s blown-up birdcage, marking the house’s Grand Palais return

Chanel’s S/S 2025 show marked a triumphant return to the Grand Palais, the longtime site of the house’s runway presentations after the Beaux-Arts building was renovated to host the fencing competition during the Paris Olympics. Under the enormous glass roof, the house erected a giant birdcage, complete with the house’s double-C motif interwoven into its design. At the end of the show – which drew on bird motifs, from feather trims to feather prints – the actress-singer Riley Keough was lifted upwards on a swing inside the cage, singing a version of Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’ as models took their finale circuit. It was a nod towards one of Chanel’s most memorable ads: the 1991 Coco L'Esprit de Chanel campaign starring house muse Vanessa Paradis as a feathered bird in a cage (though this time, the enormous fluffy white cat was missing).

Louis Vuitton’s raised runway, constructed from hundreds of the house’s signature trunks

There was a hint of nostalgia to the runway set for Nicolas Ghesquière’s latest show for Louis Vuitton, which was staged on a raised runway and lit by a ‘Louis Vuitton Paris’ neon sign, recalling the amped-up fashion shows of the 1980s and 1990s. The runway itself was crafted from what appeared to be hundreds of Louis Vuitton’s signature trunks – spanning an array of eras and styles – all stacked up and hammered together, rising from the floor of the Louvre venue as the show began.

Archer-artist Sagg Napoli creates a fantastical show set for Dior

Maria Grazia Chiuri’s latest show began with the multidisciplinary Italian artist-archer Sofia Ginevra Giannì (aka Sagg Napoli) marching down the runway, bow in hand, before entering a Perspex corridor and firing shots on target. Carrying on the tradition of Chiuri collaborating with women artists, she had also designed the runway set. It saw the space in the gardens of Paris’ Musée Rodin transformed with an installation evocative of wrought-iron gates adorned with looping texts from the artist, who draws on the culture of southern Italy in her work. Meanwhile, an enormous Big Brother-style eye served as Sagg Napoli’s target – light work for the artist, who also has competed in national Italian archery competitions.

Alessandro Michele’s romantic, dust-sheet covered set for his Valentino debut

Fashion month’s most-anticipated moment took place in a judo stadium on Paris’ outer reaches, entirely transformed for the occasion by Italian design maverick Alessandro Michele, who was making his debut for Valentino after a two-year hiatus (he left his role as creative director of Gucci in 2022). Evoking what Michele deemed a 'Pavillon des Follies’ (which was also the title of the collection), the typically theatrical space saw the designer assemble a jumble of chairs, furniture and lampshades which were all covered in dust sheets, while the runway itself was made from shattered mirror, casting shards of light on the models’ faces. It provided an apt backdrop for Michele’s romantic exploration of beauty. ‘When I say beauty, I am clearly not referring to its universalistic, dogmatic and normative mythologisation,' he wrote in an introduction to the collection. ‘I rather allude to that unique capability to deeply feel and connect with something.’

Saint Laurent’s rain-soaked show space, which paid ode to Yves Saint Laurent’s Marrakech

It was a return to Saint Laurent’s Rue de Bellechasse headquarters on Paris’ Left Bank for Anthony Vaccarello’s latest womenswear show for the house, a location that he had not shown at since his debut eight years ago. The monolithic set, created by Bureau Betak, comprised an enormous gilded circle – open to the elements – under which models walked on a slick blue runway, evocative of the blue used in the Saint Laurent gardens in Marrakech. It was made all the more strking by the fact that the rain was pouring, a final cinematic flourish to the already dramatic mise-en-scène.

Gucci’s setting sun at Milan’s Triennale Milano design museum

Milan’s temple to design, the Triennale Milano museum, provided the setting for Sabato De Sarno’s latest Gucci show, following a menswear presentation in the historic space earlier this year. This time, the designer created an enormous curving runway that looped around the museum’s ground floor, where various ‘rooms’ were designed to evoke a sunset, moving from yellow to orange to Ancora red, the deep oxblood hue that has become central to De Sarno’s tenure. The idea behind the exuberant collection was to capture a moment in time, just as the sun is rising or setting: ‘a moment to seize and live to the fullest’.

Fendi’s futuristic runway set, which came with a final surprise

It was only fitting that what will be Fendi’s first collection of its centenary year (the brand turns 100 in 2025), was celebrated in theatrical style. In the centre of the vast, sound-stage-like space on the outskirts of Milan was an enormous, futuristic white box, into which models streamed after taking their loop around the square-shaped runway. It was to provide a moment of surprise: as the show ended, the box opened up, revealing a tableau of models inside. In their flapper-inspired dresses and nostalgic, crystal-adorned looks, it was a clash of past and present: ‘I wanted something romantic, something with a debt to the 1920s from the 2020s,’ said Kim Jones, artistic director of Fendi’s womenswear and couture.

For more on the latest fashion weeks, see our reports from the Paris, Milan, London and New York S/S 2025 shows.

The luxury fashion-house Balenciaga has announced its latest Balenciaga Music project in collaboration with Italian singer and style icon Mina. The Balenciaga Music platform was created to offer hand-selected playlists that reflect Balenciaga’s culture, and offer an immersive experience through merchandise, exclusive content and playfully interactive campaigns. The latest collaboration with Mina marks her first foray working with a fashion house and launching official merchandise of any kind.

On 19 September, the fashion Maison's latest collaborator Mina will pre-release her new track 'L’Amore Vero', which will be available via a limited-edition scannable merchandise, which is embedded with a NFC (Near Field Communications) chip. When activated by a compatible device, it unlocks the new song. The development of this new technology allows for people to wear the music, unlocking listening experiences. There will also be a three-hour original playlist by Mina featuring a personal selection of songs from her favourite artists.

Deciding to leave the public eye in 1978, Mina has not given a concert or interview since, and has focused on producing music instead, releasing an album a year for the past 40 years. Her music style dips into a beautiful balance of strength and sensuality captured through her powerful vocals on each track. She has published 1,395 songs sung in Italian, English, Spanish, Neapolitan, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese and Turkish. This exclusive preview is an opportunity to hear the first single from Mina’s upcoming album, which will be released in November.

The track, merchandise and playlist, will be available in selected Balenciaga stores worldwide and via balenciaga.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

The meal we had the day we got engaged has stayed with me. It was a lunch at Asador Astillero in Getaria, a professional, business-like affair frequented by business-like Basques, at the very end of a business-like pier. I always enjoy places like that – ones that don’t romanticise what’s implicitly romantic. I like clean, plain tables, sturdy chairs – nothing perfunctory, of course, but nothing indulgent either. Restaurants in Milan often have this quality. So do some in Genoa and the Basque Country.

That morning we had made a pilgrimage to the Balenciaga museum in Getaria, Cristobal Balenciaga’s hometown. Afterwards, we followed various people’s directions and found ourselves the beneficiaries of the last table at Asador Astillero. After a bit of handholding, as we struggled with the names of dishes in Basque, we landed on percebes – goose barnacles – and rodaballo – a huge turbot cooked over fruit wood and served dripping in olive oil and fried garlic. These are two of the most famous dishes of the lands around the Bay of Biscay. We drank txakoli, which is from Getaria. Later that day, after a long and beautiful descent into Deba, we were again fate-kissed. We got a hotel room in town. We dropped our things, ate cheese and bread and drank local cider. We went to the beach and hopped around, finding shells. And then we got engaged.

Someone asked Pete if he had planned the engagement, and his answer had just been to recite the day we’d had, especially the meal at Astillero – as though after a meal of percebes, rodaballo, txakoli, just the two of us, alone in a sea of gracious Basques, beside the gracious sea, of course we decided to get married.

There are other meals. The plateau de fruits de mer that we ate later on the same trip at Chez Albert in Biarritz, or a year later, a similarly unexpected lunch – exploring a mountainside on bicycles – of preserved duck and salad and whatever light red wine they were pouring. The point is the way that restaurant meals can mark time. They are spiritual milestones. Often it is their fullness that inspires action – admitting that you love someone, making momentous decisions, understanding that you’ve touched, for a moment, the completeness of what life has to offer. That is, I think, what the great restaurants can offer.

It is over a year since Bruno Sialelli, who was appointed in 2019, exited his role as creative director of Parisian house Lanvin. Now, after a year of collaborative collections and speculation over the future of the label, Lanvin has announced that its new artistic director is the British designer Peter Copping.

A graduate of London’s Central Saint Martins, Copping is a tested, veteran designer with an impressive breadth of experience at Paris’ luxury houses. Beginning his career at Sonia Rykiel, he would go on to spend a decade at Louis Vuitton with Marc Jacobs, where he was head of womenswear. Later, he would become creative director of Nina Ricci in Paris and Oscar de la Renta in New York.

Most recently, he assisted with the relaunch of Balenciaga’s haute couture line under creative director Demna and subsequently became head of VIP and special projects. With the appointment, Lanvin has shirked the recent trend of hiring lesser-known, behind-the-scenes designers, as has recently been the case with Sabato de Sarno at Gucci, Séan McGirr at Alexander McQueen, and Chemena Kamali at Chloé.

‘Jeanne Lanvin was a visionary of her time whose interests and passions extended far beyond fashion, as do my own,’ said Copping, who will lead both the men’s and womenswear collections. ‘I am extremely honoured to have been chosen as artistic director of Lanvin and to be able, along with the atelier and teams, to write the next chapter for this iconic house.’

‘Peter Copping’s arrival at Lanvin is an important milestone in the renaissance of one of the great French maisons,’ added Siddartha Shunkla, Lanvin’s CEO. ‘I am confident that with Peter’s vision and technical rigour and the continued perseverance of our teams globally, we will identify a new frontier in fashion and deliver beauty and results in equal measure.’

The appointment marks the first of several open roles in fashion to be announced, including Givenchy and Chanel, which are both currently without creative directors after the departures of Matthew M Williams and Virginie Viard respectively. Meanwhile, former Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele will make his much-anticipated debut at Valentino in Paris in September 2024.

lanvin.com

The imminent arrival of the Paris Olympics is the talk of Haute Couture Week – and, if the first day was anything to go by, the inspiration point of this season’s collections. At Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri recalled the classical silhouettes of the event’s Ancient Greek roots, while Thom Browne riffed on American sportswear and ended his runway show with a medal ceremony of his own (here, though, the Chaumet-designed medals of the real games were replaced with models in gold, silver and bronze embroidered blazers). Meanwhile four-time gold medal winner Serena Williams took her seat front row, joining the usual phalanx of high-profile guests who travel to Paris for the haute couture shows, which represent the pinnacle of French craft (a legally protected term, couture refers to made-to-order gowns constructed entirely by hand for private clients).

Elsewhere at the week, there was the first Chanel show since the departure of creative director Virginie Viard yesterday (a replacement is yet to be announced), while a guest collection by Courrèges’ Nicolas di Felice at Jean Paul Gaultier was shown on Wednesday (previous guest designers have included Simone Rocha, Haider Ackermann and Olivier Rousteing). Shows from Armani Privé, Balenciaga and Viktor & Rolf rounded out the week.

Here, in an ongoing round up, Wallpaper* picks the best of Haute Couture Week A/W 2024.

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The best of Haute Couture Week A/W 2024

Balenciaga

Balenciaga’s latest couture collection was shown in the house’s historic salons on Avenue George V, which were recently renovated by current creative director Demna to feel as if you were opening the doors and stepping back in time (‘for me, it’s very important for it to feel like a special place… it is the same place where Cristóbal used to be... he would look out of the window and see the same trees,’ he told Wallpaper* last year). This season, Demna looked towards the ‘streetwear, goth, skater and metalhead subcultures’ which have long been his inspiration at Balenciaga, melding them here with the tropes and grandeur of mid-century haute couture. ‘This couture collection is a tribute to subculture dress codes as important influences to my fashion vocabulary,’ said the Georgian designer. ⁠

As such, hallmarks of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s oeuvre were reinterpreted in Demna’s idiosyncratic style, seeing abundant, cocooning silhouettes constructed from denim, leather and nylon (for the final look, over 47 metres of nylon were used to create the dramatic final look, which was designed to disintegrate as it was worn). Other pieces elevated the quotidian, like a sharply cut T-shirt crafted from black scuba satin which Demna likened to Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup series. ‘Demna is interested in not only object intrigue itself, but also, the techniques used to elevate said object into an art form,’ read the collection notes. Meanwhile, dramatic millinery created alongside artists Ni Hao and Alastair Gibson recalled traditional couture headpieces, though here were constructed from T-shirts set in resin or carbon fibre. It was the butterfly, though – which appeared on masks worn by models – that became the collection’s symbol, one of transformation and fleeting beauty. ‘These creatures are beautiful and extraordinary – they are of a perfect design,’ said Demna.

Armani Privé

A quest for serenity inspired Giorgio Armani’s latest Privé outing, seeing the veteran designer look towards the lustrous surface of pearls for inspiration (indeed, for the occasion, a pearl-like runway had been installed in the Palais de Tokyo showspace). Watched on by his devoted celebrity muses – among them Cate Blanchett, Eva Green and Naomie Harris – this was a collection led by an exploration of surface and texture, moving from molten lamé tailoring and extraordinary beaded gowns towards surfaces entirely covered in shimmering crystals. Silhouettes hung close to the body – a series of black gowns in velvet or sequins which nipped the waist will no doubt prove seductive to his famous fans – while playful flourishes included bouncing feathered headpieces. ‘Gentle and enchanting,’ described Mr Armani, who took a beaming finale bow flanked by two of the collection’s models.

Chanel

Chanel marked its first collection since the departure of former creative director Virginie Viard with a show at Palais Garnier, the city’s opera house. Gone were the enormous constructed set pieces of both Viard and her forebear Karl Lagerfeld, with the ornate atrium and sweeping marble staircase instead serving as the show’s backdrop. It lent the collection – which for now was designed by an in-house team Chanel called the ‘Fashion Creation Studio’ – a feeling of reality, as if the models were simply striding along the corridors after an evening at the opera. That said, the collection’s taffeta capes and frilled collars had the requisite drama necessary for an haute couture show such as this, while this season’s tweeds were largely embellished, whether with jewellery-like adornments or feathers which emerged from sleeves or hems. Elsewhere nods to opera and the ballet – including Le Train Bleu and Apollon Musagète for which Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel designed the costumes in the 1920s – came in tutu-like ruffles and bows tied in each model’s hair. Even without a creative director, it was a show which proved the enduring strength of the house codes – as for who will put their spin on them next, and when, rumours continue to swirl.

Dior

It was inevitable that the Paris Olympics would influence the season’s collections: driving around the city, the games’ architecture is already taking over the city’s streets, with vast stands being erected at Place de Concorde and along the Seine’s bridges (along with some amount of grumbling from the city’s residents about traffic and the imminent QR codes which will prevent them from travelling outside of their own neighbourhoods for the duration of the games). Maria Grazia Chiuri was the first of haute couture week to reference the Olympics explicitly with a collection which looked back to the classical roots of the games in Ancient Greece with garments which draped, toga-like on the body, or referenced the ‘peplos’, a garment made from a singular piece of cloth and folded at the waist. Chiuri noted it was a silhouette that had inspired Christian Dior himself, though here she spoke of a desire for modernity and freedom, using jersey fabric – more typically associated with sportswear – to replace the typical haute couture fabrics the house founder would have used.

The reference, she said was the 1924 Olympics, also held in Paris, where women were still fighting to compete. New fabrics, like jersey – first used by fellow female couturier Coco Chanel in 1916 after more luxurious fabrics became hard to get hold of – signalled a mood of liberation in women’s clothing. It felt a fitting reference for Chiuri, a feminist designer who has long rallied against the idea that couture must constrain the body; here was a collection of effortless and airy elegance, which no doubt appealed to the house’s clients in Paris’ currently sweltering heat. ‘[This collection] represents an extraordinary opportunity to combine couture and sportswear with classicism, rebellion, collective energy and, above all, the political value of the female body,’ the designer said via the collection notes. ‘It allows [me] to assert the power... of haute couture actions... [imagining] the elegance of a woman at once delicate and strong. A woman who performs just as well as a man.’

Thom Browne

Last year, as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of Thom Browne’s eponymous brand, the American designer staged his first-ever haute couture outing in Paris. Yesterday (24 June 2024), his sophomore couture collection – presented at Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs – showed a designer already astute in the medium, which allows him to flex his creative muscle with both imaginative runway shows and extraordinary feats of embellishment and craft. Beginning with a series of male models clad in white Thom Browne skirt suits playing a game of tug-of-war, like at Dior, the designer looked towards the upcoming Olympics for inspiration. Here, he imagined a collection of de- and reconstructed American sportswear – like the tailored sportscoat, the swim trunk, and the pleated tennis skirt – created largely from white muslin in a nod to toiles, the draft versions of garments usually constructed from the fabric (guests were also instructed to dress in the muslin coats which served as the collection’s invitations). Of course, these archetypal garments were riffed on in imaginative ways by the designer, playfully layered or cinched and corseted, or adorned with sweeping embroidery and embellishment. In typical couture style, it ended up with Anna Cleveland as the bride, her gown erupting into a vast bunch of white flowers along its back, each one painstakingly crafted from fabric. The final scene, though, was a medal ceremony of sorts: three models, in gold, silver and bronze embroidered jackets stood on the podium for the show’s final tableau. ‘Couture is the Olympics of fashion,’ said the designer.

Schiaparelli

Daniel Roseberry hosted his latest couture show in Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, the stately former residence of Adèle von Rothschild known for its ornate, gilded salons which have hosted many a runway show, from Valentino to Maison Margiela. It was the more anonymous basement, though, which the American designer chose to set his latest collection, the darkened space lit only by a series of dim chandeliers. It set the scene for a collection titled ‘The Phoenix’, which saw Roseberry inspired by a coq-feathered stole house founder Elsa Schiaparelli wore to the opening of the Ambassadeurs restaurant in Paris in 1941. Inspired by the Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, the stole had been hand-painted by the artist Jean Dunand; in this garment, Roseberry saw a vision of the Surrealist couturier as a rising phoenix, ‘a magical creature whose power lay in her ceaseless ability to reinvent – not only herself, but fashion, too’.

Inspired by this idea of rebirth, Roseberry presented a collection of free association which was less to do with tidy thematics than a desire for each look to stand alone and evoke emotion (after all, the couture client is likely to only end up with a single look from the collection; ‘People don’t buy Schiaparelli, they collect it,’ Roseberry noted someone telling him recently). It began with his own phoenix – the opening look saw a model in a velvet cape adorned with trompe l’oeil feathered embroidery in three-dimensional chrome – while later pieces largely explored silhouette, whether blown-up tailoring or sinuous sheer gowns narrowed at the waist with corsets. Meanwhile, enormous bows, millefeuilles of ruffles, and riffs on the opera coat made reference to the archetypes of midcentury haute couture (Roseberry said the 1950s, in particular, was a reference this season).

‘Each gown, each bustier, each shoe, every piece of folded velvet feather, or triple organza spike, seeks to catch the eye and hold it,’ he said. ‘This is what makes haute couture so special: it’s an expression of my vision for the maison today, one free from marketing and merchandising. But it’s also something else: a way for me to honor that relationship, one of the most intimate ones in the world – the one in which I give women the power to be reborn, again and again and again.’

Stay tuned for more from Haute Couture Week A/W 2024.

Hard and soft, sweet and sharp: Pre-Fall 2024’s most intriguing looks are defined by a play on texture, seeing clean lines and pin-sharp tailoring meet shaggy, enveloping fabrics and touches of romance, from knitted candy-pink bows to twisted leather flowers. Whether the crackled vinyl of a Sportmax jacket, Alaïa’s delicate twists of merino wool, or layers of faux fur, shearling and leather, these are pieces that call out to be touched (and, indeed, treasured).

Captured in a series of portraits by Milan-based photographer Mattia Parodi and Wallpaper* creative and fashion director Jason Hughes, Dutch model Renee Does wears the defining looks of the Pre-Fall 2024 collections – from Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello to Bottega Veneta, Chanel and Celine – backdropped by a textural collage of draped fabric, modernist furniture and concrete. The story was originally featured in the Design Directory July 2024 Issue of Wallpaper*, on international newsstands now.

Pre-Fall 2024: the defining looks of the season

Model: Renée Does at Viva London. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Tomi Roppongi at Julian Watson Agency using Bumble and Bumble. Make-up: Faye Bluff at Of Substance Agency using Byredo. Set design: Stilema Studio at Tristan Godefroy. Interiors: Olly Mason. Photography assistants: Pablo Gallegos, Tom Green. Fashion assistant: Samela Gjozi. Interiors assistant: Ady Huq. Digi tech: Jess Segal/

A version of this article appears in the July 2024 Design Directory 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.

As Salone del Mobile wrapped up in Milan, eyes turned eastwards to the floating city of Venice, where this past weekend the 60th Venice Biennale was inaugurated with a typically packed roster of events and openings to cater to the thronging crowds from the art world and beyond. At its centre was the 60th International Art Exhibition, titled ’Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’ – the Adriano Pedrosa-curated group exhibition paying ode to ’foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, [and] refugees’ – which was supported by Parisian fashion house Dior, a continuing nod to house founder Christian Dior’s roots as a gallerist in the 1920s and 30s.

Dior was not the only fashion house present, though. As ever, fashion brands and designers seized the opportunity to forge their cultural links to the arts – with Venice providing a typically seductive backdrop. These included Burberry’s sponsorship of the British Pavillion (to celebrate, a party at the city’s legendary watering hole Harry’s Bar), Golden Goose opening the doors to ’Haus’, a new multidisciplinary cultural space (their celebration comprised a vast candlelit dinner in the hangar-like main hall), and Tod’s celebration of Italian craftsmanship which coincided with their own sponsorship of the Italian Pavillion. Here, as the 60th Venice Biennale opens to the public, the best moments where fashion met art.

The best fashion moments at the 60th Venice Biennale

Setchu collaborate with Savile Row tailors Davies & Son at Palazzo Venier

Sometimes it is illuminating to take the familiar out of context; such was the ambition behind Japanese label Setchu’s latest project, a collaboration with storied Savile Row tailor Davies & Son. Choosing to present the collaboration on neutral ground, the Palazzo Venier in Venice on the opening days of the Biennale, the presentation captured the uniqueness of the project, which traverses time and space. Central to the collaboration, which is led by Setchu designer Satoshi Kuwata – who originally trained on Savile Row – is an attempt to conceive a collection of truly contemporary tailoring, which melds Davies & Son’s time-honed techniques (it is the street’s oldest operating tailor shop) with Setchu’s unique take on the medium, which combines Western and Japanese approaches (Kuwata now lives and works in Milan). The result is three black-and-white outfits, for men or women, comprising sleek single-breasted overcoats and trousers, complete with Setchu’s signature sliced seams and darts which are edged with buttons. Completing the lineup is a pair of laceless shoes by cobbler George Cleverley, made from a single piece of leather. At the chic Venice installation – featuring Japanese objects, from paper lanterns died with sumi ink to ceramic stools and cerami mats – guests could set up appointments to be measured for the bespoke pieces. Further fittings will follow in Milan with Kuwata, in London at Davies & Son, or in New York City when the Davies & Son team travels stateside.

Burberry sponsors the British Pavillion, John Akomfrah’s ‘Listening All Night to The Rain’

Since the beginning of his tenure, Yorkshire-born Burberry creative director Daniel Lee has been keen to celebrate Britain’s diverse cultural output. ‘[I want] to show a positive side of Britain to the world,’ he said after his debut in February 2023. ‘There is great music here, great theatre, great art. That’s something I missed in recent years and that’s what I’m trying to celebrate.’ Just over a year on – and two collections later – Lee is true to his word as Burberry becomes the headline sponsor of the British Pavilion for the second consecutive year. This year’s Pavilion comprises a commission by artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah titled ‘Listening All Night to The Rain’, a multi-layered, multi-media piece which looks towards the sea to explore issues from environmental decline to migration. I’d got to a point where I thought a lot of what I want to say involves trying to pull people into positions of listening,’ he told Wallpaper’s Hannah Silver. ’[The work] is both looking ahead to the things that we are definitely interested in the present, but a lot of it is also to do with the immediate past and the things we haven’t really paid attention to, [and] sometimes they are related. There’s much to hear.’ Read more.

The British Pavillion runs from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November 2024.

Golden Goose continues its Haus of Dreamers project

Coinciding with the Biennale, Golden Goose opened the doors to ’Haus’, a multidisciplinary space in Marghera, an industrial suburb of Venice where the brand was founded in 2000. Comprising an academy, where over the Biennale’s opening weekend locals could attend a number of workshops and talks, an extensive archive of rare Golden Goose sneakers and clothing, an auditorium, and a vast hangar-like room where guests enjoyed a candlelit dinner on Friday evening, it will continue to evolve as the months go on. Earlier in the night, guests were taken on an immersive tour of the space, which included an opportunity to customise a pair of the brand’s new Marathon sneakers, inspired by 1970s and 1980s running shoes, alongside installations and performances by Argentinian visual artist Andrés Reisinger, Italian sculptor Fabio Viale, French-Italian painter Maïa Régis, and Puerto Rican singer Mia Lailani. Viale’s was perhaps the most striking of the evening: a vast burning pyre erected in the rectangular pool in the Haus’ forecourt. It follows last year’s Haus of Dreamers event, which introduced the project with a series of events across the floating city – including a spoken-word performance by Quannah Chasinghorse on the Rialto Bridge.

Tod’s celebrate the art of Venetian craftsmanship

Tod’s’ involvement with the Venice Biennale this year was twofold. First, they were the sponsor of this year’s Italian Pavillion, which was titled ’Due qui / To Hear’ and created by artist Massimo Bartolini alongside curator Luca Cerizza at the Biennale’s Arsenale venue (the installation comprised a vast scaffolding maze, alongside a sound installation featuring music by Caterina Barbieri and Kali Malone, and British composer Gavin Bryars). Secondly, the Italian brand used the event to celebrate its own deep-rooted history of creation and craft by uniting with Venetian artisans to reinterpret the Tod‘s famed Gommino driving shoe. Cue a dramatic array of original works inspired by the perennial style, created by craftspeople working across mediums, from glassblower Roberto Beltrami and goldbeater Marino Menegazzo to traditional Venetian mask maker Sergio Boldrin. Meanwhile, a limited-edition collection of pieces, inspired by Venice, will be available for purchase.

The Italian Pavillion runs from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November 2024.

Dior supports happenings across the city, including the Beinnale’s International Art Exhibition

Christian Dior began his career not as a couturier, but as a gallerist, co-founding Paris’ Galerie Jacques Bonjean in 1928, before going on to be linked with Galerie Pierre Colle, which hosted works from artists including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. As such, art has long permeated the Dior universe, something celebrated this year in a wide-ranging sponsorship from the Parisian house which stretched across locations and events. First, Dior supported the Biennale’s main group exhibition (the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia), which this year was curated by the artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, Adriano Pedrosa. Titled ’Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’, Pedrosa said the exhibition paid ode to ’foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, [and] refugees—particularly those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Migration and decolonisation are key themes here.’

Elsewhere, the ’Cosmic Garden’ exhibition – which includes works by Madhvi Parekh and Manu Parekh created alongside the Chanakya School of Craft, with whom Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri has collaborated extensively – is supported by Dior at Salone Verde – Art & Social Club. Meanwhile, at Museo Fortuny, guests can discover Eva Jospin’s Selva exhibition, a Parisian artist whose layered cardboard grottos provided the backdrop to Dior’s S/S 2023 womenswear show. Finally, Dior also collaborated with the Venetian Heritage Foundation to partner on the extravagant Naumachia Ball on April 20, 2024 at the Arsenale Vecchio of Venice, with funds largely supporting the renovation of the Arsenale’s Porta Magna and the ’House of Gold’ Ca’d’Oro museum.

’Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’ ,the International Art Exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale runs from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November 2024.

Balenciaga spotlights the Rodeo bag with theatrical installation

For the Biennale, Balenciaga transformed its Venice store into a red-curtained installation to celebrate the arrival of the brand‘s summer collection (the S/S 2024 show itself had featured a similarly theatrical set). In particular, the Rodeo bag, a roomy, vintage-inspired handbag which can be customised with a multitude of playful charms in creative director Demna’s typically idiosyncratic style. 14 unique iterations were available to Venice shoppers, while the installation was celebrated with a cocktail on April 18.

Louis Vuitton brings French artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest to Venice

Fondation Louis Vuitton, the LVMH Group’s vast cultural outpost in Paris, brought French artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest to Venice for this year’s Biennale, staging an exhibition of his work at the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia (the foundation’s Venice oupost, close to the famed Piazza San Marco). Titled ’Je Est Un Autre’, the exhibition – conceived by Pignon-Ernest for the space – continues his exploration of ’the foreigner’, a perennial theme which has run throughout his oeuvre since he began his career in the 1960s. An early proponent of street art – with works appearing in places across the world, including Naples, Rome, Soweto, Haiti, Paris and Algiers – his pieces often feature portraits of figures who operated on the margins, from Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who travelled across the country to escape persecution from the Soviet regime, to Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The new exhibition is curated by Suzanne Pagé and Hans Ulrich Obrist, in dialogue with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.

Ernest Pignon-Ernest ’Je Est Un Autre’ runs at Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November 2024.

A charred desert of Murano-glass cacti, a damask-curtained boudoir, a simulacrum of an art gallery – this season’s runway sets were an exercise in the theatre of fashion. Here, we select 12 of the very best runway sets and show spaces of A/W 2024 fashion month, which concluded in Paris last week.

Best runway sets of A/W 2024

Saint Laurent

For Anthony Vaccarello’s sensually charged A/W 2024 show, a boudoir-like mood was conjured by the show set, which comprised two vast circular rooms lined with emerald damask curtains. The curtains, said Vaccarello, were a nod to those found in the house’s historic haute couture salon on Paris’ Avenue Marceau. 

Read our review of the show here.

Jil Sander

Designers Lucie and Luke Meier said that this season they were thinking about sound and the way it influences our ’emotions, desires and needs’. As such, the warehouse space on the outskirts of Milan had been transformed into a green-toned ’smooth and immersive capsule’, populated by a series of blown-up cobalt-blue horns.

Read our review of the show here.

Louis Vuitton

Nicolas Ghesquière returned to the Louvre’s Cour Carrée for his tenth-anniversary show for Louis Vuitton, the location of his debut as creative director for the house back in 2014. This time, a dramatic installation by artist Philippe Parreno – made in collaboration with film production designer James Chinlund and sound designer Nicolas Becker – centred around an enormous orb, which crackled and flashed as the show began.

Read our review of the show here.

Prada

A continuation of the menswear show in January, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ latest OMA-designed show set featured a lush forest floor – complete with springs of real water, ferns, grass, pebbles and soil – encased beneath a gridded floor of futuristic clear perspex, to extraordinary effect. 

Read our review of the show here.

Bottega Veneta

Matthieu Blazy collaborated with Cassina to organise a special edition of Le Corbusier’s LC14 Cabanon stool – here in burnt wood – for the 350 guests attending his A/W 2024 show. In the formerly industrial Milanese space, they were combined with a burnt wood floor and enormous Murano-glass cacti to create a ’barren’ desert-like landscape inspired by Calabria in the south of Italy. Together, it provided an apt backdrop for a show celebrating regeneration and resilience. ’In a world on fire, there is something very human in the simple act of dressing,’ he said. 

Read our review of the show here. 

Loewe

The ’small but intense’ paintings of Albert York provided the backdrop for Jonathan Anderson’s latest Loewe collection, which subverted aristocratic dress codes in the designer’s typically idiosyncratic style. As such, it was the largest exhibition of the American painter’s work outside of the United States, where his devoted following included the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

Read our review of the show here.

Dior

Continuing a tradition of collaborating with international women artists on her show sets, at the centre of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s A/W 2024 runway was a series of sculptures by Indian artist Shakuntala Kulkarni. Evoking ceremonial figures of women, created from cages of cane, the house said they capture a feeling of ’protection and transformation’.

Read our review of the show here.

Hermès

Hermès’ A/W 2024 show came complete with a downpour: as the show began, rain fell from the ceiling of the Garde Républicaine space, providing a dramatic backdrop to Nadège Vanhee’s latest collection, which was titled ’The Rider’.  ‘Astride a horse or a motorcycle… boldly she rides on,’ said Hermès. 

Read our review of the show here.

Acne Studios

A series of blown-up armchairs and footstools crafted from recycled black rubber tiles provided the centrepiece to a full-throttle collection from Acne Studios. They were created by Villu Jaanisoo, an Estonian artist who lent the existing pieces for the show. ’I was basically deep into a “racing” mode [last year], into everything related to racing, and I stumbled across these amazing pieces,’ Acne Studios creative director Jonny Johannson told Wallpaper*. ‘They symbolise the mood I was trying to create, and they do so in a modern way.’

Read more about the Acne Studios show set here and read our review of the show here.

Balenciaga

At Balenciaga, floor-to-ceiling screens surrounded the runway, an attempt to capture the dizzying feeling of scrolling on your phone. Created by Demna alongside Berlin-based studio Sub, the flashing AI-created images – which spanned photorealistic natural landscapes and glimmering cityscapes before descending into glitchy internet-style graphics – reflected the eclectic nature of the collection, which featured DIY ’one-minute’ dresses made from a collage of other garments. 

Read our review of the show here.

Chanel

The centrepiece of Chanel’s A/W 2024 show was an enormous curved screen which bisected the interior of the Grand Palais Éphémère and played a short film starring Penelope Cruz and Brad Pitt as a pair of lovers. Around it circled a wooden runway designed to evoke the boardwalk at the French seaside town Deauville, where Gabrielle ’Coco’ Chanel opened her first millinery store. 

Read our review of the show here.

Fendi

Vast drapes of silk, in various sorbetto-hued tones, divided Fendi’s Via Solari showspace into a series of more intimate ’rooms’ to showcase Kim Jones latest womenswear collection for the house. They recalled those found in Roman statuary, one of the inspirations for this season’s collection in a nod to Fendi’s home city of Rome.

Read our review of the show here.

The rows of guests filming Balenciaga’s 52nd couture collection show in Paris turned the glittering spectacle into a cloud of digital confetti. We were left with what German artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl refers to as ‘a ghost of an image, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution’. We end up getting only some of the story. A glimpse at the magic.

‘I notice it from backstage,’ says Demna, the mononymous artistic director of Balenciaga. ‘People are seeing the clothes in person, but looking through their phones. They truly have become a physical extension of our bodies.’ Most of us have no idea how long it took to cover the bustier dress worn by Eva Herzigová in 9,000 hand-mounted crystals and 36,000 bugle beads. Or that a pair of jeans were, in fact, not jeans at all, but canvas trousers hand-painted by an artist over a period of two months to make them look like jeans. ‘Fashion, including couture, has become show business. You see things through the phone held in front of what you are looking at,’ continues Demna.

’What is beauty?’: Demna on his transformative Balenciaga haute couture collections

The seductive realm of couture ought to haul our focus away from the noise of the seasonal, the short term and the quickfire towards something that is more profound. For Demna, couture is the chance to pay homage to the métier of making clothes beautifully. This is the thing that he cares about most. Through couture, the designer has ushered in a modern type of elegance to our visual culture and the images broadcast into the palms of our hands.

Compared to the mere months offered between the ready-to-wear seasons, Demna has almost a full year to work on the couture collection. This encourages a different feeling and a more critical, almost spiritual process. ‘It’s a true luxury for a creative person to have that. It’s a platform where you can tap into things so when they don’t work out, you have time to try something else,’ he says. ‘I always start with a very vague collection of ideas. Then I learn from the process of making.’

Cristóbal Balenciaga once said that a couturier must be an architect, a sculptor, a painter, a musician and a philosopher. More broadly, the references Demna draws upon aren’t things grasped from what he might have seen on the streets of Paris or Geneva, where he is based. It is about the tactile job of a bolt of cloth around the body. ‘There are many fittings so one can learn how to make things happen,’ he says. ‘More than anything, making mistakes is the most important part of the process as it triggers decisions. It guides you somewhere. It’s also a very natural and human thing to make mistakes.’

But what does it mean to be human when a half smile to the camera will open your bank statement and a fingerprint can unlock a hotel room door? At the heart of couture is flesh and bone, the many skilled pairs of hands working mostly in time-honoured ways. When it is mentioned today, we are often suspicious of its sorcery, anxious about its place in modern life yet happily floored by its splendour. ‘There’s an element of perfection in control, which we will never achieve, of course, because we are not made to be perfect. But when it comes to couture, there is the aspiration to be perfect.’

Like all good art, couture – away from the weary discussions about who is going to buy it – should take our breath away. The reintroduction of a couture line at Balenciaga in 2021 was framed around life today, not 60 years ago. The beautiful things that Balenciaga make, and the lush surroundings in which they are revealed, curiously rely on the rampant technology that we are all – Demna included – grappling with. The tension is in how to inspire people to feel something intensely, while creating an image that speaks with alacrity.

In around 1917, the French artist Marcel Duchamp openly rejected the work of many of his peers, including the painterly topographies of Henri Matisse, dubbing them ‘retinal’ art. In Duchamp’s mind, they were works devoid of philosophical content, intended only to please the eye. He would try to present a more conceptual point of view. Duchamp’s judicious, cerebral approach is a big influence on Demna: ‘My work has been so misinterpreted for years because people wouldn’t take five minutes to go a bit deeper. There is a lot of what I call “retinal fashion”, something only made for our eyes that we don’t have to think about. That’s not what I do.’ With his ready-to-wear, a beige terry cotton towel wrap skirt will become a meme for a week, but in a decade might be rewarded with a sharp reassessment. In years to come, the 3D-printed armour dress in resin that closed the couture show in July will have the space to speak beyond its immediate Joan of Arc campy largesse.

‘Everyone wants an instant success. I think that’s a big problem,’ says Demna. ‘Duchamp once said: “The danger is in pleasing an immediate public, the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for a public that will come 50 years or 100 years after your death. It is the ideal public – the right public – that I want.” That really spoke to me.’

Couture should transcend the everyday. It should yank you out of your inbox, your problems, your anxieties. For those of us who will never buy the clothes, or even see them in real life, we get 50 per cent of the experience. Demna says: ‘The silhouette, the volume, the three-dimensional process, the experience of wearing it – it’s crucial. Somebody who goes into the couture salon and tries on the pieces wouldn’t need to know why it is so much work because they can feel it. Visually, however, if we are talking about this retinal layer of fashion that’s about visual perception, couture is powerful. It makes you think about what is elegant. [It makes you ask] what is beauty?’

Couture should make us raise an eyebrow and gasp for air. ‘I can’t remember the last time I had that feeling,’ says Demna. ‘It’s very rare. It doesn’t happen to me when I go to an art exhibition and it should, but it doesn’t. I might love something, but not to the point where I’m breathless, awe-inspired.’

In October 2023, he travelled to Venice with his husband and frequent collaborator Loïck Gomez, a musician and composer who works under the moniker BFRND. Walking around the city one evening without any GPS reception, the couple realised they were lost. ‘I cannot say it was breathtaking, but that was one of those moments where I thought, “Wow, this is so beautiful”, almost like an imaginary world that is not imaginary at all.’ Similarly, after Balenciaga’s Fall 2024 show in LA in December 2023, Demna found himself overwhelmed by the intensity of the sunset across the Hollywood Hills.

Both moments arose spontaneously. They were respites from the demands and rigours of his job. ‘I’m a very curious person and I need that unknown territory to be able to be triggered to have an inspirational experience. And it is always related to the situations where I have no control. You cannot control a sunset – and that’s great.’

In 2023, Balenciaga returned to its original address at 10 Avenue George V, where Cristóbal Balenciaga established his Paris ateliers in 1937 and lived until retiring in 1968. Although the location had served as a flagship store in the decades since, the historical couture salon on the fourth floor had remained closed. Today, a near- perfect facsimile of the original, lined with white stucco arabesques, patinated light grey carpets and ‘ash-stained’ curtains, exists just above street level. ‘For me, it’s very important for it to feel like a special place,’ says Demna. ‘It is the same place where Cristóbal used to be... he would look out of the window and see the same trees. From that point of view, it is a very emotional space.’

It makes an enchanting backdrop for the couture shows. ‘I always knew that couture had this kind of magic to it, of being an experiential way of wearing clothes,’ he says. ‘I just wondered if it would still be like that. The world we live in is so oversaturated with information, colour, visuals. We’ve become numb to the beauty of the world. Why don’t we see the beauty anymore? We need it to survive as a human race. I don’t want to be numb to the sunset.’

A version of this article appears in the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

All looks from Balenciaga’s 52nd couture collection. Models: Bo Exters at Next Paris, Diego Torrealba at Success Models. Casting: Ikki Casting at The Art Board. Hair: Kazue Deki at Calliste Agency. Make-up: Marielle Loubet at Calliste Agency. Digi tech: Carole Durosoy. Photography assistants: Louis Dumetz, Hugo van Manen. Fashion assistant: Kris Bergfeldt. Post-production: Courtoisie Fashion.

balenciaga.com

Our Style Issue celebrates the mood of escapism and fantasy which permeates the S/S 2024 collections with a round-up of contemporary style that draws inspiration from around the world and invites us on a journey of discovery.

Our newsstand cover is by photographers Melanie + Ramon and our fashion & style director Jason Hughes, who were granted exclusive access to Balenciaga’s history-steeped haute couture salons to capture Demna’s latest transformative couture collection. The Georgian designer also opens up to Dal Chodha about instilling a feeling of modernity into this most traditional of mediums. (Fans of the house should also see our review of ‘Cristóbal Balenciaga: Master of Tailoring’, currently on show in Atlanta.)

Our limited-edition cover, meanwhile, available to subscribers, takes a more classic trip, seeing the season’s most transporting looks photographed across the otherworldly volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands. 

There’s also the return of the Wallpaper* Glossary, our essential guide to this season’s defining codes, which revels in the art of dressmaking, combining feats of craft with flights of imagination. Elsewhere in the issue, we distil the new season’s escapist mood down to 12 key pieces and objects to covet. 

Rem Koolhaas talks us through the drama and fantasy of the runway show, bridging the worlds of architecture and fashion, with a look at the dramatic sets that OMA/AMO has created for Prada over the last 25 years. As Vésma Kontere McQuillan writes, ‘It has revolutionised the fashion show as spectacle and pushed the boundaries of what is expected from a runway presentation’.

In Tuscany, writer Scarlett Conlon delves into Ferragamo’s rich atelier and archive to discover how Maximilian Davis, the brand’s brilliant young creative director, is exploring the storied Italian house’s ultra-sophisticated heritage in order to inspire its future.

In Paris, meanwhile, we’re granted a glimpse of Saint Laurent’s new flagship Champs-Élysées store, designed by creative director Anthony Vaccarello, which features marble, concrete, dark wood, Donald Judd chairs, a Cerith Wyn Evans neon sculpture and seating by Rudolph Schindler – a true vision, and a clear sign of architectural direction from the house. 

Finally, an enormous thank you goes to Jason Hughes, Jack Moss and Tracy Gilbert, our much-travelled fashion team; you have truly made this a Style special to remember. We hope you enjoy the trip!

Sarah Douglas
Editor-in-Chief

The March 2024 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print from 8 February, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘Architectural’ is a word that defines the work of Cristóbal Balenciaga. A master of haute couture, his elegantly precise and determinedly sculptural silhouettes provided him unparalleled fame in the middle of the 20th century, and his legacy has endured throughout the decades. Today, under the creative direction of Demna, the house of Balenciaga explores the cutting-edge and the sensational through fashion. The brand is synonymous with moody, blockbuster runway shows, with clothes that alchemise subcultural influences, all while celebrating the codes established by its founder.

A new exhibition, ‘Cristóbal Balenciaga: Master of Tailoring’ at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta, Georgia travels back to the house’s roots, when a 22-year-old Cristóbal Balenciaga established his name in Saint Sebastian in the Basque region of Spain. ‘He was a perfectionist since day one,’ the museum’s creative director Rafael Gomestells tells Wallpaper*. ‘Cristóbal had an eye for the detail, even as a child when he made clothes with four little arms for his dog and later as a teenager to his town’s Marquesa de Casa Torres.’ The repertory on view shows his talent in full fruition, with garments created between 1942 and 1968 when he closed his house. A few pieces out of 30 dresses, tailored suits, and coats appear to the public eye for the first time, complemented by runway footage, the couturier’s sketches, and correspondences with his business partner sister and clients.

‘Cristóbal Balenciaga: Master of Tailoring’ at SCAD FASH Museum

The neatly organised exhibition replicates the interior of the Balenciaga archives and salon in Paris, with muted sandstone tones and a panelled backdrop. Two alumni from SCAD School of Fashion readjusted the garments originally tailored for clients’ physiques to typical mannequin sizes. The undertaking is a collaboration between the museum, the Balenciaga archives and Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, which today holds around 600 Balenciaga garments, while the Miami-based Parodi Costume Collection has also contributed a number of objects to the exhibition. As such, the exhibition is curated by Gaël Mamine, head of collections of Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, Gaspard de Massé, head of archives at Balenciaga, and Gonzalo Parodi, director of Parodi Costume Collection. The organisers aim to shed light on the foundations of the wildly popular brand and emphasize the craft and perfectionism that established the founder as a fashion loyalty.

From a 1964-dated silk tunic worn by Elizabeth Taylor to silk and organza gowns crafted for European nobility, the clothes are imbued with both a mood of experimentation – particularly in cut and silhouette – and timelessness. ‘He designed [clothing] to be worn for a lifetime,’ says Gomes. Balenciaga’s early life, as the show underlines, was shaped by social and political unrest, and his career took unexpected turns along the way. Spain’s neutral stance in World War I led many wealthy French citizens to settle in the bordering town of San Sebastian where they frequented the local designer’s atelier. When Spain was marred by the Civil War in the late 1930s, he found himself in Paris, where the Balenciaga brand reached soaring heights. The immediately ensuing World War II took its toll on the industry but as a Spanish citizen, Balenciaga could travel to his country to acquire garments while his French colleagues struggled to find materials.

Demna’s Balenciaga haute couture shows – which have been walked by the likes of Nicole Kidman, Naomi Campbell, and Isabelle Huppert – are staged in the house’s restored salons at 10 Avenue George V, where Cristóbal Balenciaga famously held three-hour-long shows for eager crowds.

Here, ’Master of Tailoring’ seeks a similar dialogue between the past and future. Holding the show at a university museum – SCAD stands for the Savannah College of Art and Design – with a fashion program contributes to the organisers’ mission to pass down a legacy. ‘I always tell our students that they need to know the past to shape the future,’ says Gomes. ‘Cristóbal was very interested in understanding his clients’ lives,’ the director adds. ‘Seeing some of the pieces first time myself, I am amazed by the construction both outside the dress and for the corsetry inside.’

‘Cristóbal Balenciaga: Master of Tailoring’ runs at the SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta, Georgia, until June 2, 2024.

scad.edu

January marks the beginning not only of a new year, but a new season in style – gone are the winter collections of last year, in are the S/S 2024 collections, and with them the promise of brighter days ahead.

As part of Wallpaper’s Design Awards 2024 issue, we select the winning men’s and womenswear collections of S/S 2024 – and their standout looks – which will define a season of dressing ahead. These span Sabato de Sarno’s sensual new vision for Gucci (the designer called it a ’story of richness and lust... of sweat, dancing and singing’, and is pictured top left), the eclectic oppositions of Dries Van Noten’s womenswear, and Maximilian Davis’ expertly reduced Ferragamo tailoring. 

Winning collections came too from Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons at Prada, where they reckoned with beauty and craft, the sinuous lines of Kim Jones’ Fendi, or Matthieu Blazy’s extraordinary riffs on the quotidien at Bottega Veneta (here encapsulated his version of a working man’s tie, recrafted in leather). Or Lucie and Luke Meier’s gently oversized men’s Jil Sander tailoring, adorned with glimmering crystal broaches (pictured top right). 

The various looks are captured by London-based photographer Daisy Walker, and styled by Wallpaper* fashion and style director Jason Hughes. 

The standout looks of S/S 2024, selected by Wallpaper*

Courrèges

Dolce & Gabbana

Dries Van Noten

Acne Studios

Hermès

Wooyoungmi

Ferragamo

Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello

Givenchy

Alexander McQueen

Carven

Isabel Marant

Bottega Veneta

Miu Miu

Paul Smith

Fendi

Dior

Prada

Balenciaga

Marni

Valentino

Loewe 

Models: Kerolyn Soares at IMG, Aaron Shandel at Wilhelmina. Casting: Ikki Casting at The Art Board. Hair: Adam Garland using Authentic Beauty Concept. Make-up: Jo Banach using Chanel Les Beiges Winter Glow and No.1 de Chanel Red Camellia Exfoliating Mask. Interiors: Olly Mason. Set build: London Art Makers. Photography assistants: Chloe Yates, Zillah Rauter. Fashion assistants: Kris Bergfeldt, Samela Gjozi. Hair assistant: Annabella Hudgell. Interiors assistant: Archie Thomson. Post-production: Lasso Studio. 

A version of this article appears in the February 2024 issue of Wallpaper* – dedicated to the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2024 – available in print from 4 January, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Armour has been prevalent in fashion and design culture this year, with Balenciaga unveiling an armoured ballgown at the Paris couture shows in July, while Rabanne riffed on its signature chainmail dresses. And if you look at current jewellery design, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the world of precious metals and stones is only following suit after clanking suit.

You might argue that there’s more than a whiff of the medieval doomsayer about it all, but take a closer look and a more romantic tale emerges. Dior’s knuckleduster ring, Hermès’ gold chainmail cuff and Elie Top’s distressed silver, gold and gemstone bracelet all come with a dreamy element. While Top cites the intricacies of gothic metalwork as a recurring reference in his creations, it was not Joan of Arc who struck a chord when creating his ‘Bouclier’ (shield) collection but another fearless protester named Joan.

‘I remember listening to the plaintive guitar and liquid voice of Joan Baez in Queen of Hearts while I was designing ‘Bouclier’,’ he says. ‘It’s a traditional folk song that sounds like a mix of legends, from Arthurian tales to Elizabethan queens. The cuff is like a form of jewelled protection, but it has a sweet floral engraving on the underside, so it’s romantic, too.’

Pierre Hardy, creative director of Hermès Jewellery, enjoys playing with the house’s signature chaîne d’ancre (anchor chain), which made its debut as a silver link bracelet in 1938. With the ‘Chaîne d’ancre Danae’ cuff, he has created an illusion of reams of nautical chain welded together to make a rigid form. The scale of the large central link, he says, is ‘either discreet or assertive, like a distinctive seal’.

Meanwhile, Dior Fine Jewellery’s creative director Victoire de Castellane embraced ancient relief techniques for her ‘Les Jardins de la Couture’ collection. Among a sweet bouquet of horticulturally-inspired creations is a shield-like ring that caresses the fingers in a flash of gold, its mystical skyline highlighted in relief, blazing across the hand like a miniature piece of Aztec armour.

A version of this story appeared in the December 2023 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print from 9 November, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today!

‘What is a legacy? It’s a vision, of course, and it’s also a place,’ says the disembodied narrator of a new film from Balenciaga, which offers an unprecedented tour of its haute couture salons at 10-12 avenue George V in Paris, where house founder Cristóbal Balenciaga lived and worked until the couture arm of the business was shuttered in 1968. Such was its resonance for the Basque-born couturier – who arrived in Paris in the late 1930s during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War – he named his first fragrance ‘Le Dix’, in reference to the salon’s street number. 

In 2021, current Balenciaga creative director Demna returned to the address to stage his first haute couture collection, which also marked the house’s first haute couture collection since 1968 (in the designer’s typically idiosyncratic style, he created haute couture versions of hoodies and jeans, alongside an extraordinary array of gowns inspired by Cristóbal Balenciaga’s most memorable silhouettes). Originally designed by Albert Le Voisvenel in 1887, before being later redecorated by Christos Bellos – an interior designer who worked for Balenciaga – the space was built to reflect apartments of the time with clean white walls, curtained doorways, and looping mouldings which reflected those found on the salon’s furniture. 

Inside Balenciaga’s Avenue George V address

For the reopening, Demna chose not to dramatically alter the space; rather, he noted a desire to evoke the feeling that those entering the space had just opened the door to the salon after it had been left untouched for decades. As such, new white stucco arabesques and light-grey carpets were ‘patinated’ as if to suggest the passing of time, a technique not dissimilar to Demna’s ‘Raw Architecture’ concept in the brand’s stores, whereby purposefully stripped-back spaces are made to recall abandoned warehouses or car parks (rust, patches of damp and the traces of graffiti are all painstakingly hand-applied by a team of artisans). More contemporary elements in the Avenue George V location include smoked-glass partitions, as well as a ‘Couture Shop’ at street level comprising rare Balenciaga products and collaborations.

The short film, released today, takes the viewer inside the address using 3D-scanning technology which glides through various rooms and salons, ending with Cristóbal Balenciaga’s office, ‘into which no one entered,’ as the narrator describes. ‘As history tells you, all the greatest works start out as silence.’

Watch the film below

balenciaga.com

‘French excellence... a je-ne-sais-quoi’ is how Air France describes its unique brand of air travel on its 90th anniversary. Founded in 1933, the airline has come to epitomise the country’s synonymy with elegance and style – not least in the roll call of couturiers and fashion houses that have created the cabin crew’s uniforms, from Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga and Christian Dior in the 1960s to Nina Ricci, Christian Lacroix and Olivier Rousteing in more recent years. Alongside, a roster of seminal designers has worked on the airline’s interiors: Charlotte Perriand, Andrée Putman and Jean Prouvé among them. 

90 years of Air France at Galeries Lafayette, Paris

To celebrate this unique history – ‘90 years of travel, fine dining, design, haute couture, art and architecture’, as the airline describes – Air France has taken over the Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann department store with a series of fashion-infused window displays alongside souvenirs and ephemera. The latter are available in a number of pop-up stores on Galeries Lafayette’s second and third floors, and include objects created or reissued for the anniversary – such as tableware by Jean Picart Le Doux, Bernardaud mugs, and vintage accessories, from flight bags to key rings. Fashion shows will also take place across the store, seeing models wear vintage pilot and cabin crew uniforms.

However, it is Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann’s 12 on-street windows – long a site of creative collaboration with fashion houses, artists and designers – which provide the nexus of the takeover, featuring a series of dramatic displays created with Xavier Ronze, French designer and head of the costume design workshops at the Paris Opera Ballet. 

Ronze has created a series of five fantastical dresses that epitomise the various hallmarks of Air France: ’aircraft and technology, uniforms and fashion, emblematic posters promoting its vast network; fine dining and tableware; design and architecture’, as the airline describes. Featuring surreal motifs and dramatic flourishes, the gowns are situated in a milieu of archival Air France objects.

For those not in Paris, Air France has also created an immersive online platform that tells the stories behind the displays, as well as a special edition of Air France magazine EnVols. The collector’s issue – in French and English – goes behind the scenes with Ronze as he creates the custom gowns for the anniversary project, takes a closer look at Rousteing’s current uniforms, as well as ‘shares the secrets’ of triple Michelin-starred chef Anne-Sophie Pic, who has previously created menus for Air France’s ‘La Première’ and business cabins. It will be available from Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann and in Air France lounges.

Air France’s takeover of Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann runs until 10 October 2023.

airfrance.co.uk
galerieslafayette.com

In 1966, the Spanish couturier Paco Rabanne presented his breakout collection, ‘Twelve Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials’. An evolution of an earlier project, as well as his work creating plastic accessories for Parisian houses like Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Givenchy in the early 1960s, the collection of abbreviated mini dresses were fashioned from futuristic panels of aluminium and iridescent plastic, joined together with metal rings to evoke chainmail. 

The audacious designs would send a jolt through Paris’ traditional haute couture salons – ‘he’s not a couturier, he’s a metal worker,’ Coco Chanel is said to have sniped – and posited the designer, who first trained as an architect, as fashion’s enfant terrible. Alongside fellow couturiers André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin, and furniture designers such as Verner Panton, Arne Jacobsen and Eero Aarnio, he was deemed responsible for ushering in the ‘space age’ spirit of the late 1960s, which used post-war industrial materials to create a gleaming, utopian vision of the future. ‘I defy anyone to design a hat, coat or dress that hasn’t been done before,’ Rabanne said in 1966. ‘The only new frontier left in fashion is the finding of new materials.’

‘I can feel the evolution’: Julien Dossena on ten years at Rabanne

In February 2023, Rabanne passed away, aged 88, at his home in Brittany. The following month, in Paris, French designer Julien Dossena – creative director of the house since 2013 – presented a collection that he described as a ‘coda to the couturier’s legacy’, ending with five archival dresses and featuring spoken extracts from Rabanne as part of the show’s soundtrack. ‘Spanning five decades, these dresses will signal the innovative craftsmanship that defines the timeless and totemic women of Paco Rabanne,’ read the collection notes.

‘He left behind so much, all those radical moments of modernity,’ says Dossena, speaking from the Rabanne design studio on Paris’ Rue Françoise (‘Paco’ has now been dropped from the house’s name as part of a wider rebranding). ‘He was really fighting against the old rules, the old world. Even aesthetically, he didn’t understand couture, and he didn’t want to understand.’

The collection itself had been completed prior to Rabanne’s death, though a sensorial focus on material and texture – several of the intricate paillette-covered gowns and skirts could be heard jangling as they walked the runway – felt a fitting homage to the designer’s legacy. ‘When you wear Rabanne chainmail, it’s really a feeling. There is a sensation between the garment and the skin,’ he smiles. As such, collections often begin with Dossena tasking his team to experiment with fabrics and embellishment. 

This season, sharp, elongated metal paillettes were honed to evoke both the ‘lightness and movement of feathers’ and ‘little weapons’. Elsewhere, a layer of sheer mousseline was combined with metal mesh to conjure up the effect of ‘smoke around the metal’, while leather panels seemed to melt away into diaphanous chainmail.

‘The two materials together have this tension, this new interaction,’ says Dossena, who grew up in the Brittany resort of Le Pouldu, not far from where Rabanne would spend most of his later years. He never met the couturier, preferring to respect the distance that Rabanne placed between himself and fashion by the time he left his label in 1999. ‘I did hear from a few people who were still in contact with him that he was really liking what we were doing with the brand,’ says Dossena. He was even told that Rabanne had said he was welcome to reach out for a coffee the next time he was in Brittany.

‘I never dared to,’ says Dossena. ‘He was doing so many other things, and expressing himself across so many other fields. And I wanted to respect that – when you work on somebody’s name, on their designs, you don’t know how they feel. I wanted to keep that respectful distance. So I never met him, but I don’t regret it. Let’s call it politeness.’

Besides, the designer brought his own influences to the house. He remembers first encountering fashion through a video of a Jean-Paul Gaultier runway show on TV as a child in the late 1980s, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with clothing (in a full-circle moment, he was selected as Gaultier’s guest designer this season, showing a collection at the last couture week in July). ‘He was surrounded by all those crazy, beautiful people,’ he says. ‘I’d never seen people like that in Brittany, and I was like, “Wow, that looks so fun. And that’s a job?”’

Dossena would go on to study art at the Duperré School of Applied Arts in Paris, before moving to Brussels’ visual arts institution La Cambre to become part of the prestigious fashion school (notable alumni include Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello, Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy and Courrèges’ Nicolas Di Felice). There, he became fascinated by the work of Belgian designers like Dries Van Noten and Martin Margiela; on graduation, in 2008, he took an internship at Balenciaga, which was in the process of being reinvented by creative director Nicolas Ghesquière. The French-Belgian designer’s anachronistic approach melded archival silhouettes with moments of futurism, something which proved hugely influential to the young Dossena.

In 2012, he left Balenciaga and launched his short-lived label Atto. Later that year, stylist Marie-Amélie Sauvé – a longtime Ghesquière collaborator, who now styles Dossena’s own collections – introduced him to Marc Puig, CEO of the Barcelona-based Puig conglomerate, which owns Rabanne. The house had gone through two designers in two years and was in need of some stability. After working at Rabanne for eight months, Dossena was promoted to creative director in 2013.

For the first four years, he did not enter the house’s archive. ‘I didn’t want to fall into the trap of recreating [garments], or being retro,’ he says. ‘Then, at some point, I thought we were solid enough to recontextualise some of the archive.’ When he did, he didn’t leave for three days, ‘taking pictures of every little thing’. What struck him were not the singular garments, but the overwhelming sense he got of the designer from old photographs, newspaper editorials and discarded chainmail tests.

‘Rabanne was just in love with metal,’ says Dossena. ‘To him, it symbolised the next civilisation. He wanted everyone dressed in it. It felt like I was seeing this really deep, personal, cultural expression of him.’

Now Dossena visits the archive when ‘he wants to be surprised’, likening it to the feeling of visiting an exhibition or gallery for inspiration. On one of these visits, he discovered photographs of Salvador Dalí alongside models in Rabanne’s dresses at the artist’s house in Catalonia in 1966. Another video, taken at some point during the 1960s, showed the pair throwing sewing machines on the floor as a riposte to the ‘old world’. ‘When you see that video, you can feel the radicalness, the craziness. Together, they became this great avant-garde energy.’

For the A/W23 collection, four of Dalí’s paintings – which Dossena describes as ‘mental landscapes’, surreal, dreamlike tableaux – appeared as prints across a series of sliced-away gowns. They had been used with permission of the Dalí Foundation (aware of Rabanne and Dalí’s relationship, they were keen to collaborate), and contributed to what Dossena calls the ‘exploration of sensation’ that runs through the collection. ‘It’s about sensuality, but a new kind of sensuality,’ says Dossena. ‘The imagination of what it feels like to touch – the dream and the subconscious, they arrive in that moment.’ 

Archival interviews with Rabanne show the designer repeating a piece of advice for his mother, who worked as chief seamstress for Balenciaga in San Sebastián, in northern Spain, during the couturier’s heyday. ‘In fashion, you have all the freedom and liberty that you want,’ he recounts. ‘Except one thing. You are not allowed to attack the beauty of women.’ Rabanne saw women as figures of sensual power, describing his clothes as ‘weapons’. ‘The woman of tomorrow will be efficacious, seductive and, without contest, superior to man,’ he said.

Dossena says he has been largely surrounded by women for most of his life, and collections often emerge from observing his female friends going about their day-today lives, ‘on the street, in their couples, with their family, when they dance, or when they work. It’s a little bit like sociology. I want to give them what I think they might need.’ 

So far, so successful. In his ten years at the house, Dossena has transformed Rabanne from a near-forgotten fashion house to an agenda-setting, financially successful label built in his vision. Puig does not release the fashion results for its individual brands, though in the group’s 2022 financial report, it noted its fashion arm was ‘growing at the same pace as the company’, whose overall revenue rose by 40 per cent.

As for why, in the topsy-turvy world of fashion – where creative directors rarely last more than a few years at a house – Dossena has achieved such staying power, the designer credits the ‘absolute freedom’ he has been given at Rabanne. ‘It’s so close to me, because I really built it from the beginning,’ he says. ‘Nobody expected anything from Rabanne when I started; it was tough work because you have to prove the value of the brand, but I could create it the exact way I thought it should be.’

‘Now, there’s a perception of the brand that is completely different,’ he continues. ‘First, it was the industry insiders that were sceptical about what Rabanne could be. Then we got them on side. Now, Rabanne is going mainstream. I can feel the evolution.’ 

Model: Shuting at Elite Paris. Hair: Beth Shanefelter using Less is More. Make-up: Kamila Vay using Edulis and Make Up For Ever. Photography assistant: Hugo Varaldi. Fashion assistant: Sara Perilli. Producers: Anya Hassett, Tracy Gilbert.

A version of this article features in the September 2023 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, on sale now available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘It looks like we found the perfect location in the middle of the city that was already stripped down, and we’ve just added some appliances, lights, and new elements. But of course that wasn’t the case,’ Berlin-based practice Sub – made up of art director Niklas Bildstein Zaar and architect Andrea Faraguna – told Wallpaper* last year of its design for Balenciaga’s Bond Street flagship in London. 

Then, it was the latest in the house’s ‘Raw Architecture’ concept, which sees new and renovated Balenciaga stores designed in purposefully stripped-back manner, as if the shopper is stepping into an abandoned warehouse or multi-storey car park (as such, exposed concrete and polished cement are some of the key materials of the concept). The project was inaugurated by current creative Balenciaga director Demna, who says that the idea is to reevaluate what he calls the ‘codes of luxury’.

Balenciaga’s new store in Hamburg, Germany

Opening today (April 17 2023), a new store from the house in Hamburg, Germany continues the ‘Raw Architecture’ concept with a 540-square meter space located on Neuer Wall, a 1.2-kilometre stretch of luxury retail in the city’s inner-city Neustadt district. Deemed by Balenciaga as an ‘atemporal’ setting – its interior is devoid of references to particular eras – the cavernous store is largely made from concrete, painstakingly treated to appear as if it has been corroded through time and use. Patinated treatments have been used on the store’s surfaces ‘suspending the interior in a state of conditionality’, while walls are left unfinished or worn away to reveal a previous raw material beneath. 

Other elements in the design include an exposed ventilation system – like those found in warehouses, or other industrial spaces – and a metal staircase, evocative of those installed in ‘areas for delivery and assembly’. Even sets of grey velvet curtains, housed behind glass, have been treated to look like they have had water damage, while aluminium tables are stained in a technique which lends them the look of having been left outside in the elements. An aged cement floor ‘resembles a construction site, ‘bridging coded elements of public and private spaces’.

The store will house nearly all of Balenciaga’s product offering, including men’s and women’s ready-to-wear, shoes, bags, accessories, jewellery and eyewear, displayed largely on polished, underlit shelving. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors and digital screens showing recent Balenciaga content complete the space (the latter ‘punctuating the vacated effect with modernity’). Furniture includes a ‘Balenciaga Bench’ by Dutch designer Tejo Remy for Droog Design, whereby vintage and deadstock Balenciaga fabrics in recognisable prints are stacked to create seating (its addition is part of Balenciaga’s ongoing ‘Art in Stores’ project).

Balenciaga say that beyond its aesthetic purpose – which coincides with Demna’s vision for the house’s collections – the ‘Raw Architecture’ concept also has a marked effect on the amount of virgin materials used to create or renovate existing stores. It was first introduced in London’s Sloane Street store in 2021, and has since been utilised in locations around the world.

Balenciaga Hamburg, Neuer Wall 20, 20354, Hamburg, Germany

balenciaga.com

Spanish designer Paco Rabanne – whose visionary designs under his eponymous label came to define 1960s ‘Space Age’ fashion – has died aged 88 in Portsall, France, according to an announcement from Puig, the group which controls the label’s fashion and fragrance lines. 

‘Paco Rabanne made transgression magnetic,’ said José Manuel Albesa, president of Puig’s fashion and beauty division. ‘Who else could induce fashionable Parisian women to clamour for dresses made of plastic and metal? Who but Paco Rabanne could imagine a fragrance called Calandre – the word means “automobile grill”, you know – and turn it into an icon of modern femininity?’

Albesa continued: ‘That radical, rebellious spirit set him apart: There is only one Rabanne. With his passing, we are reminded once again of his enormous influence on contemporary fashion, a spirit that lives on in the house that bears his name.’ 

Paco Rabanne dies aged 88

Born Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo in 1934, close to San Sebastián, Spain, Rabanne left the country not long later, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, with his mother (she had worked as head seamstress for Cristóbal Balenciaga, and the Spanish couturier remained a profound influence throughout Rabanne’s career). Heading to France, he initially studied architecture at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, before shifting to fashion, creating bold jewellery and accessories for a slew of Parisian fashion houses, including Nina Ricci, Givenchy, Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges. 

It was 1966 that proved formative in Rabanne’s career, when he released his first haute couture collection under his own name, titled ‘Twelve Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials’. Establishing Rabanne as something of an ‘enfant terrible’ of Parisian fashion, the dresses came to epitomise his distinct vision as a designer, which married historical elements – primarily chain mail, which was to become his signature – with contemporary materials, like plastic, rhodoid and aluminium, and the abbreviated silhouettes of the 1960s. 

The look established him, alongside Cardin and Courrèges, as one of a cadre of so-called ‘Space Age’ designers of the 1960s, a movement which coincided with a boom in space exploration, culminating with the moon landing in 1969. Pieces were defined by a futuristic sensibility, featuring sharp, modernist silhouettes, metallic elements and an influence of contemporary engineering and architecture. A definitive moment in the ‘Space Age’ movement was Rabanne’s costumes for Barbarella in 1968, a sexually charged space-exploration movie set in the 41st century and starring Jane Fonda as the movie’s titular character.

‘The woman of the future will be efficacious, seductive, and without contest, superior to men,’ Rabanne once said. ‘It is for this woman that I conceive my designs.’

Rabanne is also synonymous with fragrance, his name appearing on some of the bestselling perfumes of the last half-decade. His foray into fragrance began in 1969 with debut fragrance Calandre – created alongside nose Michel Hy – which was encased in a metal bottle evocative of a Rolls-Royce radiator grille. Rabanne said he wanted the metallic scent, with top notes of bergamot and aldehydes, to evoke a couple making love on the bonnet of a car in a forest. ‘I like my fragrances to be fresh first, then structured, full of vibrations and contrasts,’ Rabanne said.

After three decades at the helm of his eponymous label, Rabanne retired in 1999. While remaining largely out of the public eye in the years since, he was made an Officer of the Legion d’Honneur – one of France’s highest awards – by the country’s culture minister in 2010. ‘I have always had the impression of being a time accelerator,’ he said later, in 2016. ‘Of going as far as is reasonable for one's time and not indulging in the morbid pleasure of the known things, which I view as decay.’

Rabanne was also a believer in the occult, making him prone to outbursts, particularly on the subject of impending Armageddon and apocalyptic visions. He claimed to be able to see and communicate with ghosts (‘I’m a bit of a medium, a clairvoyant’), to have lived several past lives, and to have been visited by extra-terrestrials. ‘My personal conviction is total,’ he said on the subject in 1999. 

The label went on a five-year hiatus from 2006, reopening in 2011 with Indian designer Manish Arora at the helm. Currently, French-born Julien Dossena is creative director of the house, his commercially successful and critically acclaimed collections often drawing from Rabanne’s original archival pieces (chain mail and metal paillettes feature heavily, and Rabanne’s 1969 ‘Le69’ handbag was reissued under Dossena’s tenure).

‘Whenever you see Paco Rabanne’s work, you know it was done by someone with an eccentric mind who didn’t care about trends,’ Dossena said in 2019. ‘He used clothes to liberate, and I love that idea.’

pacorabanne.com

Deck the halls with our array of Christmas baubles and decorations for fashion lovers, made to add a sartorial flourish to your tree as the festive season gathers steam. From Celine’s ‘Triomphe’ baubles – recalling the shape of the Parisian house’s famed monogram – to sleek monochrome glass spheres from Prada, an array of designer adornments to gift or treasure yourself. 

The best Christmas baubles for fashion lovers

Celine

Celine’s double-C ‘Triomphe’ monogram – originally inspired by the lines of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe – has become one of the defining symbols of Hedi Slimane’s tenure at the house. Invest in this trio of golden hand-painted baubles for a truly luxurious adornment to your Christmas tree. Another set includes a miniature perfume bottle and a black Celine handbag (top).

celine.com

Prada

Fans of the Milanese house will delight in this pair of monochrome glass baubles, decorated with bold geometric prints which feel synonymous with the house. Each one is finished with the Prada logo, and can also be purchased solo.

prada.com

Dior 

A magical trio of baubles from Dior, which draw inspiration from Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Cruise 2023 show, held in Seville earlier this year. Hand-blown from French crystal and etched with delicate motifs, these transparent spheres are encased in a richly illustrated box. 

dior.com

Selfridges

One for the retail addicts. Selfridges have released an array of Christmas ornaments evocative of their symbolic products, including this miniature version of the British department store’s instantly recognisable yellow shopping bag – complete with piles of sparkling gifts inside.

selfridges.com

More Joy by Christopher Kane

Christopher Kane’s playful More Joy collection now spans an array of items – from clothing to key rings to mugs, to recent collaborations with Le Specs and musician Elton John. Ready for Christmas is a trio of red, black and white baubles emblazoned with the offshoot’s various slogans: ‘More Joy’, ‘Sex’ and ‘Special’. 

christopherkane.com

Paul Smith

This Paul Smith bauble – in the designer’s recognisable house stripes – adds an unconventional twist of colour to your Christmas tree (a welcome alternative to the usual festive palette of green, red and cold). Each bauble is hand-painted and comes presented in a Paul Smith padded gift box. 

paulsmith.com

Fendi

This year marked 25 years of the Fendi Baguette handbag – perhaps the noughties it bag. Accessorise your Christmas tree with this clear glass bauble from the Roman house, filled with a shimmering miniature version of the bag. 

fendi.com

The Kunstmuseum Den Haag is a fitting place for the first and largest ever showing in the Netherlands of the work of fashion’s most revered modernist, Cristóbal Balenciaga. Realised in the 1930s by Hendrik Petrus Berlage, today the museum holds the biggest Mondrian archive in the world as well as an impressive dress collection. Despite their various disciplines, Balenciaga, Berlage and Mondrian were united in their passion for clarity and grace. 

The exhibition ‘Balenciaga in Black’ – open until 5 March 2023 – explores the late couturier’s reverence for the hue. Black encompasses all colours. It is direct and unobtrusive. In clear, mathematical terms, the show displays 65 haute couture pieces and a few toiles from the 1930s-60s, 57 photographs, sketches and drawings, six hats and five necklaces that are set across 15 rooms. Curiously, just outside of the entrance to the show, Henry Moore’s abstract bronze Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece from 1962 rests on a waist-high plinth informed by the shape and lightness of a bone fragment. With its arched angles and shadows, it echoes Balenciaga’s sinuous clothes. 

Balenciaga in Black at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague

Writing in The Guardian at the time of the designer’s death fifty years ago, Alison Settle noticed a purity of line in Balenciaga’s work that felt more akin to sculpture than to dressmaking. Attending one of his shows after the war she recalled: ‘It dawned upon me, as the collection passed, that I was looking at works of art, a totally different conception of elegance.’ Featuring pieces on loan from Palais Galliera and Maison Balenciaga, this exhibition forces us to study clothes away from the body and the humdrum business of seasons. Pieces kept flat in the archives are shaped and unveiled; the curators ask us to assess the works for their sculptural qualities. Anonymous mannequins and hushed lighting encourage serenity and reverence in the air.

The Netherlands has a long-held affinity with black. In the 17th century, Dutch noblemen and women were always depicted in different shades of the colour. In Spain, black is symbolic of a sense of liberation, which it came to represent after the people regained their independence after defeating the Napoleonic army in the 19th century. Black hints at Catholic piety too and the austere fashion favoured by the Spanish Habsburg court of the 16th and 17th centuries. Black was Balenciaga’s identity and instrument. 

Early designs, pencil sketched on graph paper, look like mathematical equations. Numbers are jotted next to X’s and sharp dashes become shorthand for lapels and hems and cuffs. Laid flat in glass vitrines, black cotton pattern pieces with geometric coloured threads running through them evoke maps of star constellations. Partly finished toiles are studded with silver pins and handwritten notes in chalk. In black, even the knot of a bow in silk crepe satin appears to say more – it becomes crisper, more defined, more urgently tied. Taffeta radiates in black too; the gowns take on an even more operatic gesture. 

In the middle of the show is an expertly placed jolt of uncanny beauty: a 1967 bias-cut silk gazar, four-pointed envelope dress with embroidered rhinestones and pearlescent beaded straps, which has been trimmed and hemmed with crin mesh ribbon. It is unnervingly modern. Totally classic. In this period, Balenciaga's research led him towards a deconstruction of traditional forms and the elaboration of increasingly abstract figures. It is a legacy that persists in artistic director Demna’s hands. Look 48 from the house’s 51st couture collection – a spikey faux feather embroidered dress in silk organza – ruffles the archive into a striking extremity of grandeur. Like the works on display, it is unforgiving and unforgettable.

INFORMATION

‘Balenciaga in Black’ is on view at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague until 5 March 2023

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‘When other people start throwing up,’ Sissel Tolaas told us back in 2020, ‘that’s when I start to work’. Thankfully, Tolaas’ new candle fragrance for Balenciaga is quite the opposite of vomit-inducing, though it certainly maintains the perfumer-artist-scientist’s penchant for bizarrely derived scents.

To create the Balenciaga Couture candle, Tolaas used a special device to extract molecules from the walls of Balenciaga’s historic couture house at 10 avenue George V in Paris, along with pieces from the Balenciaga archive and objects that belonged to Cristóbal Balenciaga himself. The result is a remarkable olfactory document of Balenciaga history, from the couture house’s opening in 1937 to its closure in 1968 and its reopening in 2021 under current creative director Demna. Open the candle’s mirror-polished case, designed with Panter & Tourron, and you will be blasted with an intoxicating mix of burnt incense, tobacco smoke, warm skin, old paper, tanned leather, aged wool, delicate silk, exotic fur, oak, and the oiled metal of sewing machines.

This candle fragrance, or ‘BHC smell’ as Tolaas calls it, is not the first collaboration between Balenciaga and Tolaas. Back in 2019, Demna tapped Tolaas to create the smell of power for the brand’s S/S 2020 show, which centred around ‘power dressing, no matter what one does as a job’. As models walked through the ultramarine room, inspired by the European Parliament meeting chamber, Toolas pumped a concoction made from the smell of blood, antiseptic, petrol and money in through the vents. 

Other Tolaas projects include creating cheese from the sweat in David Beckham’s trainers and then serving to VIPs at the London Olympics, filling a rose-coloured room with the sickening scent of salmon farms as a comment on their environmental impact, and having a fragrance linked to oxytocin (the hormone that facilitates childbirth) emanate from walls in order to create a feeling of togetherness. Her work is also currently on show as part of the Serpentine's Back to Earth exhibit, for which she haas created a unique smell that evolves throughout the exhibition. By highlighting the emotional power of our sense of smell, the work seeks to emphasise the need for change in response to the climate emergency.

For Tolaas, smell is as much philosophical exercise as it is a sensory one, which makes her a perfect match for the cerebral aesthetics of Balenciaga. Speaking about the collaboration Tolaas told us, ‘these [smell-trapping] devices are my “smartphone” for invisible information. Surprise is part of my discoveries. Nothing in the air is stable and static.’

INFORMATION

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Biking or battling, we think any digital gaming activity requires a winning ensemble. A host of luxury labels have stepped up their game, providing players’ online avatars with outfits and skins that have stylish silhouettes.

Enter Prada, Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton, the Italian and French luxury brands fitting out characters and champions online, whether they’re snowboarding at speed down an icy mountain or engaging in a battle arena showdown. Once your wardrobe is in fighting and fashionable form, we’ll meet you in the metaverse.

Prada and Riders Republic

Putting pedal to the metaverse’s metal, Prada has sped into the gaming circuit, collaborating with Ubisoft to outfit outdoor enthusiasts in the October 2021-released multiplayer video game Riders Republic. Here, online adrenaline junkies can bike, ski, snowboard, wing and rocket suit, while sporting pieces from Prada’s technical and high-performance Linea Rossa line, featuring flame and camouflage print and go-faster zebra stripes. 

Gaming perks for speed and style freaks? The Riders Republic social hub has been swathed in Prada Linea Rossa colours. Exclusive outfits are also up for grabs for players competing in the Shackdaddy Bandits weekly challenges, completing contracts in the in-game Prada sponsor program, or challenging their friends in the Prada Beyond The Line permanent event.

Balenciaga and Fortnite

Fortnite’s Doggo, Ramirez, Banshee, and Knight can be fitted out in virtual Balenciaga skins and accessories, such as backpacks and its signature ‘Triple S’ sneakers, thanks to the French maison’s collaboration with Epic Games' 2017-founded battle royale behemoth. Gamers can even access tools inspired by Balenciaga products, like a ‘Speed’-sneaker pickaxe and an ‘Hourglass’-bag glider.

Balenciaga began getting into ‘Creative Mode’ for A/W 2021, when it released its latest collection through the video game Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow. In its collaboration with Fortnite – a platform that boasts 350 million players – gamers can shop on ‘Retail Row' through ‘Battle Mode' in Balenciaga's virtual stores, which are a take on the brand’s bricks-and-mortar boutiques.

Louis Vuitton and League of Legends

Women’s artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière is a well-known science-fiction fan, transcending the physical and digital realm back in 2015, when he cast Final Fantasy heroine Lightning as Vuitton's S/S 2016 bubblegum pink-haired campaign star. Ghesquière has also referenced Minecraft as an inspiration and in 2019, the label teamed up with Riot Games to outfit the League of Legends heroine and Empress of the Elements Qiyana, who brandished an LV monogram-emblazoned Ohmlatl throwing weapon. Senna, part of the Sentinels of Light faction, then followed, sporting slick thigh-high boots and wielding a relic cannon with an LV logo.

The same year, Vuitton released a one-of-a-kind Trophy Travel Case to hold the Summoner's Cup, the annual prize awarded to League of Legends world champions, which is cast in brass and silver plate, with accents in 24ct gold. The trunk, the first of its kind for an esports championship, celebrated a video game that boasts 180 million registered players worldwide.

For the past 30 years, many of Paris' smarter brands have turned to Imprimerie du Marais (IdM) for the finer or more interesting sort of printed matter. Just a small sample of recent work includes an offset-printed folded invitation inspired by the artwork of Eva Jospin for the Dior haute couture show at the Rodin Museum; a magazine, four-colour offset-printed on both sides of translucent paper with transparent hot foil stamping on the cover, for Samuel Ross; and similarly involved show invitations for Balenciaga, Balmain, Berluti, Givenchy and others. As of June 2021 though, Paris’ most fashionable print house is no longer du Marais. The business has a 1,500 sq m new home in Cité Griset, a block’s worth of a 19th-century industrial classic – a former foundry and factory buildings off Rue Oberkampf in the 11th  arrondissement – now redesigned by French architecture studio Ateliers Saint-Lazare (ASL). 

Mélody Maby-Przedborski, IdM’s communications director, describes its new home as a ‘forgotten treasure’. The building was opened in 1825 by Griset, one of the oldest family-owned companies in the world. Antoine Griset had established a precious metal foundry in the Marais in 1760 before opening a huge purpose-built operation, Cité Griset (it housed apartments for workers as well as industrial architecture). The company moved on again in 1920 and Cité Griset was chopped up into small factories and workshops (the Institut d’Etudes Supérieures des Arts is now housed in part of the building).

IdM took over what had been a cardboard box factory in need of a complete structural overhaul. It turned to Ateliers Saint-Lazare, formerly Studio Be-Poles, based in Paris and New York-and co-founded by architect Antoine Ricardou, and a long-term IdM client. A branding as well as architecture and design agency, ASL is the definitive 360-degree studio, working on everything from identity to interiors, with a project back catalogue that includes the Merci concept store and Le Pigalle hotel in Paris, Le Barn boutique hotel outside Paris, the NoMad hotel in New York and The Surf Club hotel in Miami.

Ricardou says he was inspired by IdM’s ‘audacious courage’ in opening up a place of craftsmanship and light-industry in the centre of Paris. He set out to create a contemporary creative factory that nodded to the building’s history but also pointed a way forward.

‘Antoine really wanted to make the building a manufacture again,’ says Maby-Przedborski, ‘but using lots of wood and glass rather than steel.’ ASL designed and produced crisp bespoke cabinetry and set it against all-white walls and exposed ducting to create a light-filled fantasy update of a pre-war workshop that never slips into pastiche.

The new building is a grand atelier, a conglomeration of eight interconnected workshops that can handle lithography, foiling, embossing, four-colour printing, letter pressing, stamping, screen printing and more. These techniques can be, and often are, combined in one piece of work and in a traditional or technically advanced and experimental fashion. This inter-connectivity, an easier advance of works through one workshop to another, was a big driver for the move. IdM’s new home, though, is also a theatre, a stage for the most elevated printing and paper-based arts.

Structurally, Ricardou’s key intervention was introducing a large open staircase to connect the building’s three levels and bring in more light. But, he says, the staircase also acts as a viewing platform, a way of immediately immersing you in the hum and energy of the workshops.

The new space is large enough for planned live events and talks exploring the distinctions between art and craft. But it also allows for day-to-day theatre. Maby-Przedborski is quick to emphasise that IdM has no in-house creative team. It is there to serve, dedicated to collaborating with outside creatives. A key priority in the design of the new HQ was allowing enough space that clients could see the workshops in action, understand processes and get a proper sense of what is possible and what might be possible, if collaborative creative energy was applied.

‘They really wanted to create a space for collaboration between clients and the printers,’ says Ricardou. ‘The job was really to create a showroom for inspiration. And that was the real challenge for us, to create a factory but also a comfortable place to work and think and get that balance right. You don’t go to Imprimerie du Marais with a precise idea of what you want to do, you get inspired by what they are, what they can do and what they can bring to you. There are times when you want to be in the workshops, following the process, and then you need space to think about what you want to do.’ Around the workshops Ricardou created are a series of wood and glass offices. ‘You can see the workshops but the offices have this warmth and comfort,' says Ricardou.

Maby-Przedborski says Ricardou found the perfect balance of industry and creativity. ‘I go and see brands and I see how studios work in fashion, design and music and how creativity drives people forward,’ she says.  ‘We have that same flow here.’

The new building’s extra space also allows brands to document and produce videos of Imprimerie du Marais’ workshops in action, should they wish. And many do. As Maby-Przedborski says, much of what the workshop produces is created in very limited numbers and for a select audience. These videos allow brands to share and ‘valourise’ their commitment to craftsmanship in all things to a wider audience.

IdM has understood, as have their smartest clients, that as communications became more digital, a brand’s printed materials have come to serve a different function. They are literal touchpoints and craft, care and materiality. At best, they have become remarkable, collective objects. And ironically, screen-centric living has encouraged an on-screen fetishisation of the physicality of fine print and packaging. As Maby-Przedborski says, YouTube and Instagram (and the rise of e-commerce) have made unboxing and unwrapping performative. As she says, these videos are a celebration of the ‘tactility, the magic of movement, the fluidity’ of the finest packaging.

IdM is a particularly Parisian business, its skillsets born of its local economy. Paris’ luxury goods brands have always seen packaging and printed material as central to their brand proposition. And they care as much about the skills and capabilities of their printshops as their seamstresses and leather workers. And ask just as much of them.

Imprimerie du Marais was founded by Charles Przedborski in 1971, though for the first 20 years of its life it printed books and created stationery and order forms for Parisian ready-to-wear makers, part of the Marais' then thriving ecosystem of specialist ateliers. Twenty years later, just as many of the ateliers in the Marais were falling victim to foreign competition, Charles’ son Jacky joined the company and gave it a new creative edge. Imprimerie du Marais developed a reputation for experimentation, developing new techniques and tackling the trickiest of commissions from the biggest names in fashion and luxury goods.

The printshop has also built relationships with creative agencies, art galleries and brands of all sorts, in Paris and far beyond. Six years ago it opened an outpost in London – though all production remains in Paris – and is now looking at opening up in the US as well.

We have studios in Paris and New York,’ says Ricardou. ‘And there are a lot of great printers around New York but nobody uses craftsmanship in a modern way like Imprimerie du Marais. And nobody is as precise or has such attention to detail.’

China has, of course, taken up a huge slice of the market for bulk printing, but specialists such as IdM offer something different. Maby-Przedborski says that IdM’s use of innovative sustainable materials has also been key to its growing appeal. She rummages through a box of paper and cardboard samples that includes paper made with glucose designed to attract bees, paper made from compostable wood fibres, paper impregnated with seeds that can be planted after reading, paper made from powdered stone. IdM is also screen-printing with natural inks and using upcylable foils. And these materials offer new stories to tell, they feel different, look different, smell different, add new physicality to Imprimerie du Marais’ remarkable printed matter.

INFORMATION

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‘Ay, caramba!' Last week Balenciaga showcased its own episode of The Simpsons, complete with a star-studded (Chief Wiggum, Smithers, Patty, Selma) catwalk show in Paris, as part of its innovative S/S 2022 presentation. In celebration of the screening, we look back to some of the most recent set design extravaganzas served up by the maison, taking its guests from graffiti-topped mountains to the auditorium of the European Parliament. If they don't stimulate your show-set senses, we'll eat our shorts.

Best Balenciaga fashion show sets: S/S 2022

Balenciaga literally rolled out the red carpet for S/S 2022 with a show-cum-film premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, which saw guests, from fashion journalists to A-listers, take a turn on the red carpet as they entered the venue. Taking their seats inside the ornate auditorium, they were treated to a special screening of The Simpsons, which saw its beloved characters travel to Paris and take part in a Balenciaga runway show. Cue Lisa and Maggie sporting pillar box-red peplum dresses, Marge wearing a voluminous gold gown complete with XL bow, and Homer rocking the brand's signature pufffer jacket as they strutted down the cartoon catwalk.

Balenciaga A/W 2020

Guests entered an apocalyptic, flooded landscape inside Luc Besson’s Cité du Cinema building in the suburbs of St Denis, Paris. Stadium seating was submerged in viscous water (unluckily for fashion editors, the first two rows were completely sunken). Models sloshed along the runway, while above them were projected huge images of global climate crisis – from raging flames to frantic birds in flight – and a techno soundtrack pounded. Backstage, creative director Demna Gvasalia offered a surprisingly positive take on his runway set-up, emphasising the power and beauty of fashion amidst a vision of the end of the world.

Balenciaga S/S 2020

In a show set inspired by Brussels, and the ongoing political tumult of Brexit, Gvasalia erected an in-the-round show set at Luc Besson’s Cité du Cinema building – which resembled the European Parliament. Guests sat in a spiral of office chairs in a huge curtain-lined assembly room that was swathed in bold blue, and on the ceiling, huge panels of strip lights illuminated the botched-cosmetic-surgery make-up looks sported by models on the carpeted runway.

Balenciaga S/S 2019

While, for A/W 2018, Gvasalia had taken guests to the peak of a graffiti-tagged mountain (below), for S/S 2019 he had a more immersive vision in mind. The designer created a catwalk-turned-video tunnel, lined with digital video installations devised by Canada-born video artist Jon Rafman. The psychedelic trip-like visuals surrounded guests as they watched the Paris-based show, projecting them into an uncanny alternative universe, as an eerie voice repeated ‘presence is key, now is the answer, ego is not who you are…’

Balenciaga A/W 2018

During his tenure at Balenciaga, Gvasalia has imagined show sets which evoke the everyday — like a roller blind-lined office or a tree-lined Paris park. There was a more intrepid air to the brand’s A/W 2018 show set, which featured a looming mountain within a Paris broadcasting studio. There was an urban edge to the landscape, which featured an all-white runway, evoking a snowy pathway or a blank canvas. The mountain at its centre was tagged with neon graffiti, boasting the Balenciaga brand name, celebratory slogans like ‘power of dreams’ and a smiley-faced emoji.

INFORMATION

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Slowly but surely, the pleasurable prospect of dressing up again is becoming a reality. But what do you do when all we can remember is how to snuggle into our sweatpants? From cocktail dresses to wedding guest dresses, there's a host of event get-ups for diving into this summer whether you're enthused about something streamlined or keen to show off dramatic and embellished forms.

Here, we present the strongest silhouettes for summer and beyond, from brands including Balenciaga, Valentino and Fendi.

Balenciaga: the chainmail party dress

Encouraged to embrace all out adornment? Look to the French maison's gold linked chainmail dress which will jangle as your get down on the dance floor.

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Hermès and Jil Sander: the leather dress

Embrace luxurious fabrications after months of simply wearing cotton and jersey. Hermès and Jil Sander recommend minimalist and calf and ankle grazing dress shapes, with sumptuous leather accents.

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Loewe: the voluminous dress

Turn up the volume at your first special ocassion. Loewe's two-tone party dresses flirt with dramatic and poufed-up proportions and also features artisanally-inclined knot details.

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Emporio Armani: the transparent dress

Embrace the body and opt for gauzy and featherlight fabrics. Emporio Armani's transparent dress is formed from a breezy transparent fabrics, for lighter-than-air luxury.

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Fendi: the cut-out dress

A cheeky cut-out detal witll turn heads. Fendi balances the coy with the classic, with this elegant knitted dress. Its alluring backless detail is scintillating for show offs.

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Saint Laurent: the strapless dress

A strapless dress boasts a couture level of chic. Discover Saint Laurent's sophisticated style, accented with elegant draping and pleating.

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Valentino: the floral dress

Floral details always have fine form in spring. Valentino's take on bold blooms has a graphic twist. The Roman maison's party dresses feature precise petal cut-outs. 

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A renewned sense of stability is returning to wedding season, and while some ceremonial restrictions are in place globally, it's clear that celebration is on the up. Dressed down for so long that you're lost in how to excel in elegance? Here we present our guide to being an impeccably dressed wedding guest, whether rocking up to a city town hall or sitting en plein air in the grounds of a castle.

Nail the dance-all-night accessory

If pandemic dressing has taught us anything, it’s that ease is essential to elegance. Shirk the stilettos in favour of a foot-friendly mid-heel, like Manolo Blahnik's leopard-print Mary-Jane pumps.

Go for gild

Riff on the Roaring Twenties with an outfit oozing ostentation. Enter Balenciaga’s golden chaimail dress, which reflects the lights of a disco ball as you get down on a dancefloor.

Upturn tradition

Turn heads with an androgynous take on wedding wear. Sport sophisticated tailoring and forget the undershirt, like Petar Petrov's subtly oversized suit jacket.

Carry a coveted accessory

Search out a small style to hold all those matrimonial essentials (hand sanitister, lipstick, face mask). The covetable quilted details of Dior's signature ‘Lady Dior’ bags will turn heads as you take your seat at the wedding service.

Turn black tie topsy turvy

Black tie dress code? Opt for a tradition-shifting pristine white tuxedo jacket with a luxurious satin lapel. Avoid red wine and colourful cocktails at all costs.

Mix and match

Sport a statement shoe

Ditch the classic Derby shoe and err away from Oxfords. Turn heads with something a little more sartorial, like Y/Project's square-toed boot with a bold block heel.

Consider no tie

Consider a more ease-fuelled silhouette and say goodbye to the tie. Fendi's sleek, lightly toned tailoring needs nothing else.

Just days before the opening of Paris Fashion Week, new Covid-19 restrictions were implemented in France. Bars and restaurants in Marseilles were shuttered. In Paris, drinking spots were ordered to close at 10pm and gatherings of more than 10 people were banned in public places. The final city to host the S/S 2021 shows with the most sizeable schedule has been beset with travel restrictions – from the 14 day quarantine required of returning UK citizens, put in place in mid-August – to the announcement that those arriving in Italy from France are subject to a Covid-19 test. But for the City of Lights, and the epicentre of the French fashion industry, estimated at creating one million jobs and €150 billion in direct sales each year, the shows had to go on, if at least in largely ‘phygital' form.

French fashion behemoths including Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton staged live physical shows, in venues including the top floors of former department store La Samaritaine, which has been shuttered since 2005, and the rooftop of the office skyscraper Tour Montparnasse, while brands including Balenciaga, Thom Browne and new-to-the schedule Wales Bonner devised innovative collection films, featuring in Browne's case, a trio of Olympic athletes. When a week before in Milan, Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada debuted their co-creative collection via a live stream, so Matthew Williams also presented his first collection for Givenchy online, teasing out his debut designs days before on Instagram.

Maria Grazia Chiuri may have presented a softer Dior silhouette for spring – inspired by enforced ease with which we are living our lives – but she didn’t go soft on the set design of the maison’s show, which was live streamed for the first time on TikTok. Inside a socially-distanced tent at the Jardin des Tuileries, Chiuri enlisted Italian visual artist and writer Lucia Marcucci, to create 7-meter high stain glass collages, that sprung up in 18 illuminated columns, inspired by the 2011 artwork ‘ Vetrata di poesia visiva’. Collage has a visual resonance with Chiuri, and she uses the art form as a tool to convey her feminist methodology. For the brand’s A/W 2018 show, she pasted the walls of the brand’s show space with provocative magazine covers and slogans, in a collection which nodded to the student protests in Paris in 1968.

If Dior is defined by the cinched in silhouette, Chiuri relaxed this rigour for spring. Models sported loose gauzy gowns, dressing gown shape jackets, easy tuxedo trousers and utilitarian cagoules. While her silhouettes were made for our at-home habits, details had an escapist élan, incorporating nomadic tie-dye, tassels, crochet and faraway florals. Designs for social-distancing, but still with a dream.

If anyone was going to respond to the practicalities of Covid-19 with technical tenacity it was Coperni. The label has its finger on the pulse of contemporary life, incorporating the digital experience into its design DNA. For S/S 2021, founders Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Valliant developed ‘C+' a protective technical jersey developed using Swiss technology, which is lightweight, moisturising and anti-bacterial. This fabric – which is immersed in silver ions – was incorporated into streamlined designs, which worked to enhance the body, not restrict it, like elasticated trousers and loose buttonless shirts. The collection, shown on the roof of Paris’ tallest skyscraper, also featured wet suit leggings and technical blazers, with easy zip fastenings.  

Face masks and visors have entered the global accessory lexicon, and for his sophomore outing for Kenzo, creative director Felipe Oliveira Baptista tapped into this phenomenon. Inspired by an early 20th century photograph of a man wearing a structural 3D mosquito net and cap (complete with a hole for his pipe), he created silhouettes which spoke of soft protection. Models walking outdoors at the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds, wore mackintoshes and gauzy archival floral print cagoules, paired with beekeepers hats, some of which had transparent coverings protecting not only the face, but cocooning the entire body.

In 2020, the world accelerated in line with Marine Serre’s apocalyptic design vision, with proposes sustainable silhouettes for battling climate change, and environmental and social chaos. These mediate somewhere between sportswear and couture. In ‘Amor Fati', a film directed by Sacha Barbin and Ryan Doubiago, she presented a cinematically impressive sci-fi fantasy, with a circular narrative hooked around a laboratory, a natural landscape and an underground water-world. Serre’s cast sported balaclavas, Black Panther-centric berets and body suits, arming themselves against upheaval with recycled moire harnesses and holsters.

There’s also an apocalyptic armour behind Rick Owens’ designs. In recent seasons, the label’s creations have drawn on the garb of glam rock stars and mythological Aztec gods. For spring, Owens streamed a show from a piazza in front of Venice Lido’s casino – the spot where he spends his summers, and also the city where the term quarantine originated, when during the Black Death, infected ships arriving in the port where isolated for 40 days. An apt allusion to our times, the collection was titled ‘Phlegethon’, referring to one of the rivers in the Inferno described in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Owens equipped his hell dwellers in jackets with bulbous shoulders, fluid gowns, leather hot pants, platform thigh high boots and face masks. Uncharacteristically optimistic hues of creamy pink, banana yellow and candy apple red nodded to Neapolitan gelato. In his show notes Owens said, ‘I might just be getting into a taste for the lurid that an undercurrent of threat and dread can inspire.’ 

Pepto Bismol pink was also a colour favoured by Kiko Kostadinov’s Laura and Deanna Fanning, who for S/S 2021, evolved the label’s womenswear lexicon, experimenting with both Victorian and 1970s shapes, in bold hues and textures. Standout were hand craft-focused shirred and smocked dresses, which pucker and crinkle around the body, retro wide-collared tailoring, and an update of the brand’s curved Louis heel, embellished with colourful crystal beads and accentuated with Gladiator ankle straps.

Wales Bonner showed for the first time on the S/S 2021 schedule, but her collection – presented in ‘Thinkin Home', a sunset-drenched film by Jamaican artist Jeano Edwards – was the second in a three-collection spanning exploration of the diasporic connections between Britain and the Caribbean. While A/W 2020’s ‘Lovers Rock’ considered the British Jamaican community in the 1970s in London – inspired by Bonner’s father’s family, and photographs of teenagers hanging at Lewisham Youth Club, ‘Essence' explores the early 1980s origination of dancehall music in her grandfather's home country. Bonner looked to the style of Augustus Pablo, the Jamaican roots reggae and dub record producer and musician, and her collection sung of dancehall vibrancy and sleek British smartness, featuring stripe caftans mixed with tailoring, and fluid knitwear and bold patchwork corduroy. The collection also continued her collaboration with Adidas Originals, on slimline shell suits and colour blocked tees.

‘Psychedelic optimism’ is how Acne Studios’ Jonny Johansson summed up the brand’s S/S 2021 collection, designed to celebrate the possibilities of life experienced on pause. Looking to astrological elements as optimistic symbols, the Swedish brand collaborated with the LA-based artist Ben Quinn on a series of star prints layered over organza tunics. Johansson also honed in on luminescent fabrics, finding illumination in pearlised cotton, metallic threads and iridescent paper, and celebrating fluid and diaphonous silhouettes, with handcrafted details. Akris’ Albert Kriemler also found inspiration in phosphorescence, namely the light-emitting sculptures of Imi Knoebel. He collaborated with the German Minimalist on a series of fluorescent and vibrant creations that nodded to the artist’s graphic and colour-focused oeuvre, including caftans and relaxed dresses and chic tracksuits. ‘A Knoebel line, colour or form is instantly recognisable as its own. It represents what felt very right for this moment,' Kreimler explained. ‘Something designed today should not be obsolete tomorrow.'

There have been diverse opinions regarding the return to the physical show format, and one designer content with finding alternative methods is Jonathan Anderson. For the men’s shows back in July, he devised a ‘show-in-a-box' concept for his eponymous label, and for Spanish house Loewe where he is creative director, containing interactive runway show-inspired ephemera. At Loewe, the label's S/S 2021 men’s design was imagined as a grey canvas index card box – conceived in collaboration with M/M (Paris) – packed with fabric swatches, a record, and a pop-up show set, inspired by Duchamp's ‘Boîte-en-valise', a box the artist carried in a suitcase with miniature monographs of his own work.

For S/S 2021 womenswear, Anderson broke out of the boundaries of the box, creating a ‘Show-on-the-wall', an artist's portfolio featuring S/S 2021 looks, accompanied by an interactive selection of ephemera, encouraging its receiver to immerse themselves in the collection's elements, as the viewer would at a physical runway show. Eagerly Instagrammed add-ons included a roll of wallpaper designed by Anthea Hamilton, plus a border roll depicting spring's voluminous and architectural shapes – enhanced with plumes of taffeta, ruffles of broderie anglaise, glittering knots and XL pleats – sent with Loewe monogrammed scissors, a canvas tool bag, paintbrush and glue. 

Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski also placed focus on the printed form, sending out a collectors' item scrapbook to accompany Hermès’ physical show, with atmospheric images lensed by creatives including Wallpaper* collaborator Katrien De Blauwer. The maison’s accompanying collection was a masterclass in seductive minimalism. Body suits with cut-out backs were paired with knee length skirts in the supplest leather, crisp trousers styled with bandeaus, while shawl coats featured rolled up collars that unpoppered into scarves. The colour palette was rich and restrained in tones including caramel, sorbet yellow and scarlet. The most luxurious house shoe for spring? The Hermès clog, complete with an ‘H’ detail leather upper.

Paul Smith – whose beloved British brand celebrates its 50th anniversary this year – immersed himself in his personal history for spring. The designer – who swapped a physical or digital show for a lookbook and walk-through press appointments in London – was inspired by over 30 holiday photo albums, featuring snapshots of himself and wife Pauline. ‘We designed it over the phone!’ Smith laughed of the creative process behind the soothingly optimistic collection which features easy zip-up jackets in stripe tailoring fabrics, silk skirts and beach shorts emblazoned with enlarged archive rose prints, plus unconstructed tailoring. A double-breasted jacket with tactile prick stitch detailing, was inspired by the retro shapes Smith spotted on trips to Havana. ‘If people have been wearing sweats and tees all year, we ned to ease them back in,’ he said of the soft shapes.

There was also a nostalic nod behind Miu Miu's spring offering, which featured super sweet girlish silhouettes, like tracksuit tops paired with retro briefs, stripe halternecks and tennis skirts, knitted polo shirts and micro minis shimmering with plastic pailettes. It spoke of the innocent joy on dressing up and was sublime in its celebratory tone.

Designers used the downtime experienced during global lockdown to reconsider the core values of their brand. In fashion cities across the world, labels have presented pared-back or streamlined collections, with fewer looks and more focus. This concept resonated with designer Satoshi Kondo, who, troubled by the sheer number of shipment boxes used to transport Issey Miyake's last A/W 2020 offering from Tokyo to Paris, conceived a collection so compact it fitted into one. S/S 2021 features a number of shrink-inspired silhouettes that nod to the brand’s prowess in fabric development and innovation, from a technical parka and poncho which can be folded into a garment bag, to zig-zag knit patterned tops and dresses that can be rolled into a shape of a sponge. 

Y/Project’s Glenn Martens also presented a vision which evoked the ‘essential meaning’ of the experimental brand. Celebrating the versatility of its hybrid silhouettes, an accompanying ‘How to wear’ film showed how pieces could shaped, with the incorporation of zips and poppers. At Schiaparelli too, Daniel Rosenberry’s third collection for the house was focused on ‘essential silhouettes in the best fabrics’ that assimilated the hand-focused flourishes of haute couture, like trouser suits in the brand’s signature hot pink with Rorschach test-centric prints, Delphic gowns and chain-embellished shirting. These silhouettes were anything but shy, and were paired with hammered gold jewellery with nose and keylock details – surrealist symbols of the house.

While few were physically able to attend Paris for the spring shows, brands chose to celebrate the city itself. At Ami, the brand held its first show on the womenswear schedule, on the bank of the River Seine. In a more seductive spin than previous seasons, models sported dresses with cut-outs at the décolletage and check pencil skirts paired with string vests, inspired by Nineties evening wear. The urban landscape also inspired the soundtrack to Paco Rabanne’s pared-back physical show at Espace Commines, which bought a relaxed, daytime ease to the brand's disco-centric shapes. Nostalgic noises, that were silent for so much of this year, accompanied the collection, like dogs barking, police sirens honking, cars indicating and bike bells jingling.

The fashionable flaneur was also a focus. In a digital film presented as a music video, Balenciaga's S/S 2021 models stomped towards the Place Vendôme and along the Seine in the dark, miming to a synthy take on Corey Hart’s electro pop hit ‘Sunglasses at Night,’ sporting chainmail dresses and hybrid sportswear, fluffy heeled hotel slippers and wraparound shades, naturally. Rokh’s Rok Hwang was also fascinated with the concept of walking outside at night - a pastime we’ve all appreciated in recent months - recalling teenage wanders with friends when living in Austin Texas. The brand’s cinematic show film, set in an otherworldly location, featured modern flaneurs in fighting forms, including ruffled and tartan Victoriana dresses layered with leather harnesses.

For his debut at Givenchy, 1017 ALYX 9SM founder Matthew Williams teased out snippets of his S/S 2021 showcase a week before on Instagram, posting low-fi close-up images of chains and padlocks, lensed by Nick Knight. Hardware was essential to the designer’s vision, which was revealed in a surprisingly low key lookbook, with metal elements designed as a luxurious interpretation of the much-coveted logo. Williams looked at the codes of the historic couture house through a Gen Z-centric streetwear lens, featuring sleek, architectural shapes like square shouldered leather capes paired with gauzy bejewelled gowns, severe tailoring and tube dresses with seductive exposed backs. Williams nodded to previous creative directors, celebrating the tenure of Alexander McQueen with animalistic accessories, like sandals with curving horn heels and caps with knobbly antlers, and to Riccardo Tisci, in a hardware-focused revision of the graphic Antigona bag, beloved of supermodels in the Noughties. Referring to the collection as a ‘sampler’ of things to come, William’s Gen-Z fans will be fixated on what is next.

Chanel is one of many red carpet labels that has lost out to countless cancelled occasions this year, although Julia Garner and Shira Haas did opt to wear the brand to the Emmy’s first ever ‘phygital' awards show. With a typically insouciant mindset, creative director Virgine Viard was attracted to the off-duty attitude of an actress before a photocall for S/S 2021. In the show's press release she spoke of women with ‘their attitude a little out of sync with the outfits they’re wearing’ – a feeling many people have experienced this year, dressing up for visual dinner parties and on-screen events. Models walked against a huge Hollywood-inspired Chanel sign – the letters of the house erected with huge scaffolding – at a physical show inside the Grand Palais, sporting fluid asymmetric dresses, power shouldered skirt suits, sequin bermuda shorts and slogan t-shirts inspired by neon lights. The show celebrated cinematic escapism, one of which was rooted in reality.

Also intrigued by the codes of dressing today, John Galliano dissected the haute couture shapes and techniques used in Maison Margiela’s Artisanal collection, creating ethereal, finely crafted and avant-garde creations which were presented in ‘S.W.A.L.K 2', a Nick-Knight directed sequel to the brand’s video in July. The 40 minute film flits between fitting scenes in the label’s studio, and a sprawling estate in Tuscany, where Galliano’s models dance the tango, offering extensive insight into the creative process behind creating a collection.

Louis Vuitton's Nicolas Ghesquière was also fascinated by the concept of ‘in between garments' that reflect the on-pause lifestyle of today, somewhere between suiting and sportswear, at home clothes and ones for dreaming of going out. Usually showing in various areas of The Louvre, from its IM Pei-designed Cour Marly to its underground Pavillon de l’Horloge, the label decamped to the top floor of La Samaritane, the LVMH-owned department store which has been shuttered for refurbishment since 2005. In a physical and digital presentation blend, the Art Deco architecture and Art Nouveau frescoes were offset with green screen elements, which showed snippets of Wim Wenders ‘Wings of Desire' to audiences at home. Ghesquière's ‘stylistically vague' shapes featured 1980s power suiting, chainmail mini dresses and slouchy knitwear. Silhouettes appeared elegantly thrown on, like boardshorts paired with a long duster coat and a ‘Peace’ slogan tee. The show summed up a season that navigated the online and physical realms, creating clothing which caters to today's much changed lifestyle, one which shows no sign of settling come spring.