At Wallpaper*, we’re constantly searching for the objects, homeware, accessories, fashion and tech that push boundaries. The Design Drop is where we gather the month's best finds – a running wish list for the design-obsessed.

This month's selection runs from craft with provenance – a hand-weathered bronze light from Original BTC and geometric jewellery from Shihara – to joyful accessibility in the form of Ikea's ‘PS 2026’ furniture collection and new Ilse Crawford lamps. Elsewhere: a Bottega Veneta fragrance, Polaroid's third-generation camera, and the chicest childrenswear of the season.

Read on to discover everything you didn't know you needed this month.

When Louise Trotter presented her debut collection as creative director of Bottega Veneta in September 2025, the British designer said that working at the Italian house was like being ‘in a candy box’. It was a reference to Bottega Veneta’s superlative history of craft: founded in 1966 in Vicenza, Italy, it was built on leatherwork – specifically, intrecciato, its signature technique, which sees two strands of leather woven together in a process that takes hours of handcraft.

‘The language of Bottega Veneta is intrecciato. And it is a metaphor,’ Trotter said at the time of her debut. ‘It is two different strips woven together that become stronger – the two things make a stronger whole. Collaboration and connectivity run throughout this house and its history, from its beginnings to what it is now. It’s about different places, different people, male and female – individual parts and stories intertwined to make a stronger whole.’

Intrecciato features across a selection of five handbags that are the protagonists of a new photographic series, ‘Il Mio’ – Trotter’s proposition for the handbags that will define the months ahead (though, of course, these are objects designed to last years – even decades – in a person’s wardrobe). Photographed by Drew Vickers as a series of portraits that capture the intimacy between owner and handbag (il mio translates here as ‘what belongs to me’), the first major handbag campaign under Trotter’s tenure imagines the bags as a ‘companion for life’ – ‘collected, cherished, and passed between generations’.

The five handbags are rooted in the Bottega Veneta archive, and not simply thanks to their intrecciato construction. Several of the designs reimagine existing styles in miniature – there is the ‘Mini Andiamo’, a compact version of the cult ‘Andiamo’, which saw previous creative director Matthieu Blazy revive a metal knot emblem from the 1970s; the ‘Small Campana’, a miniature tote which was introduced for spring 2024; and the ‘Small Barbara Tote’, a smaller version of the supple shopper which was one of Trotter’s first handbag designs.

The others are the ‘Small Lauren 1980’ pouch, named after Lauren Bacall (the actress is a perennial Bottega Veneta muse after her character Michelle Stratton carried the style in the 1980 film American Gigolo), and the ‘Madison’, a bag named after the first Bottega Veneta store on New York’s Madison Avenue, which reimagines classic flap front, chain-handle styles in intrecciato.

Models Chu Wong, Selena Forrest and Sihana Shalaj feature in the accompanying photo series, which reflects Trotter’s vision for the Italian house – one of ‘sensuality and brutalism’, a juxtaposition that she relates to Milan, where she now lives and works. ‘I started with this idea of brutalism and sensuality,’ she said after her A/W 2026 show at the Bottega Veneta headquarters in central Milan. ‘Because for me it really sums up the feeling that I have: Milan is this very brutalist city, with a sensuality that’s a little hidden.

Following the launch of its Venice-inspired perfumes in 2024, Bottega Veneta is entering its second fragrance chapter with the launch of the new Alta collection.

Alta takes a more expansive approach to perfumery than its predecessor, in terms of its size (an initial launch of ten fragrances as opposed to the Venice collection’s five), its reach (it is retailed at a more accessible price point and distributed more widely), and its inspiration (looking beyond Venice, to Italy and the wider world).

Each Alta fragrance comes in a glass bottle decorated with the brand’s signature Intrecciato pattern. It is an obvious homage to Bottega’s history, but also a nod to the line’s conceptual underpinning, with each fragrance an ‘interweaving’ of an ingredient from the house’s native Italy with an ingredient from another place in the world.

Take, for instance, Ricordami, a stracciatella-inspired fragrance that blends milky vanilla notes and crunchy, dark chocolate. Its name meaning ‘remember me’ in Italian, Ricordami, is meant to evoke childhood memories of ice cream melting on your fingers, but, to temper the sweetness, an oak wood essence is added to the blend.

The same is true of Bare Morning, which blends the scent of Borotalco – an Italian baby powder that will be immediately evocative to anyone who grew up there – with Oceania sandalwood to create a cosy, skin-like fragrance. Other fragrances on the lighter end of the collection include Montebello, which takes its name from the Bottega’s leather atelier. Since the actual Montebello is surrounded by gardens, the perfume version is created with a blend of zesty, fresh blood orange essence with creamy North African neroli flower.

Balliamo, which means ‘let’s dance’ in Italian, is inspired by dancing under the trees at a garden party with a glass of prosecco in hand, with green notes of Italian white fig and the deeper woodiness of American cedarwood.

The fragrances graduate to richer notes, starting with Moment After, which combines very delicate Italian leather accords with warm vanilla. Night Sounds is meant to conjure the feeling of being both asleep and awake with a dark, resinous blend of Italian saffron accord and Vietnamese benzoin. Velvet Steps, inspired by the idea of secretly escaping in the night, blends liquorish-like Italian plum accord with a velvety Spanish labdanum. Finally, Crepuscolo, which is inspired by watching the last rays of sun sink beyond the sea, is a blend of salty Fior di Sale and dark South Asian oud.

The Intrecciato-weave glass bottles are finished off with a wooden cap and gold-finished ring, which visually unites this new fragrance collection with the previous. Yet, Alta marks a new moment for the brand, as it aims to reach a broader global audience without sacrificing craftsmanship.

From 4 June 2026, the Alta Collection will be available on bottegaveneta.com, across Bottega Veneta boutiques and in department stores worldwide.

As seen in the June 2026 Travel Issue of Wallpaper* – a series of ‘horizon-expanding adventures and voyages of discovery’ – here’s how to stand out this summer with our pick of the season’s most eye-catching accessories, from the fantastical (Prada opera gloves; Givenchy feathered mules) to the functional (Mulberry denim sun hat; Celine oversized sunglasses). Each is primed to make a sartorial statement over the warmer months – a time for dressing with joy and abandon.

Prada opera gloves (above left)

A glove might not immediately call to mind the summer months, though the elongated opera glove was ubiquitous on the S/S 2026 runways, including this pink satin pair at Prada, where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons mixed up the working uniform with flourishes of eveningwear (often in a single look). ‘There is the license to combine different elements, to compose,’ said the latter post-show.

Loewe’s ‘Amazona 180’ bag (above right)

A reinterpretation of the archival Amazona bag has become the hallmark accessory of Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s tenure at Loewe so far (they debuted for the S/S 2026 season). The ‘Amazona 180’ – referring to the 180th anniversary of the Spanish house this year – reimagines the boxy shape of the original with a slouchy new structure, designed to hang open when worn. Our favourite? This mini version in bold azure blue.

Celine sunglasses

Celine’s Michael Rider, who formerly worked at the house under Phoebe Philo before heading up Polo Ralph Lauren, marries his American roots – he was born in Washington D.C. and attended Brown University – with the house’s Parisian sensibility. Like these gleefully oversized sunglasses, which are a nod towards the bourgeois-inflected uniform of house founder Céline Vipiana in her 1970s heyday.

Givenchy’s ‘Boudoir’ mules

The summer months are primed for dressing with abandon – particularly this S/S 2026 season, where designers channelled a mood of colour, optimism and joy. These slip-on Givenchy ‘Boudoir Fringe’ mules – designed by creative director Sarah Burton – epitomise this liberated attitude, adorned with fronds of feathers.

Chanel’s resin necklace

Thanks to the stewardship of Belgian designer Matthieu Blazy, Chanel has fast become this year’s most sought-after brand – the arrival of his S/S 2026 collection in stores earlier this year sparked a much-documented shopping frenzy. This necklace, with an enormous resin charm recalling a black oyster shell, is a way to pledge your allegiance.

Fendi’s ‘Lui’ bag

Fendi has long been known for its colourful accessories which marry Made in Italy leathercraft with a sense of humour and play. Case in point: the Lui bag, a slouchy shoulder bag designed to slot neatly onto the body when worn cross-body. This version is finished with supersized leather topstitching.

Dior’s ‘Lady Dior by Sheila Hicks’ bag

At both his eponymous label, JW Anderson, and Loewe, where he was creative director for a decade, northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson has fostered a close relationship with the art world, often through collaboration. This continues with his new role as creative director of Dior, where his S/S 2026 collection featured this Lady Dior tasseled bag, a collaboration with American artist Sheila Hicks.

Limited-edition Hermès lipsticks

A trio of limited-edition Rouge Hermès lipsticks will add a flash of colour to your make-up bag, and not only in their rich pink and mauve shades. Because the real joy of these lipsticks is the Pierre Hardy-designed packaging, adorned with graphic motifs in eye-catching primary hues.

Bottega Veneta’s ‘Baby Veneta’ bag

Bottega Veneta’s intrecciato technique – which sees strands of leather woven together – is the house’s hallmark, eschewing the need for more overt logos and branding. The new ‘Baby Veneta’, a mini hobo bag, is crafted from padded intrecciato leather, here in vivid ‘Cardinal’ red.

Mulberry denim hat

A sun hat is a perennial summertime essential. This one, from British house Mulberry, combines function with flair: crafted from classic blue denim, it comes with a bright-yellow cord-fastening, like those you might find on hiking attire.

Louis Vuitton’s summer scents

This duo of Jacques Cavallier Belletrud-masterminded Louis Vuitton fragrances capture the scent of summer: the first, On The Beach, has citrus fruit yuzu at its centre, married with fresh neroli and woody cyprus (the idea was to capture the ‘ecstasy of sun and the warmth of sand’). The second, Sun Song, is a radiant mix of orange blossom, neroli and petitgrain, finished with a final touch of lemon.

Loro Piana’s ‘Just Bag’

Sometimes the summer months require simplicity: in the heat of the day, the last thing you want is complicated. Loro Piana’s effortless ‘Just’ bag is inspired by the simple proportions of a classic paper bag, though here rendered in the Italian house’s soft and lightweight ‘Silk Calf’ leather.

Fashion/set assistant: Alice Heluin-Afchain

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Venture into Bottega Veneta’s Via Sant’Andrea store during Milan Design Week 2026 and you’ll find a twisting mass of green and black leather cords suspended from the ceiling. Arranged across the store’s windows and swooping around its first-floor water feature like vines above a lake, some are woven into basket-like forms that conceal softly glowing LEDs.

Called ‘Lightful’, the sculptural, site-specific installation is the work of Korean artist Kwangho Lee, marking his third collaboration with the brand under creative director Louise Trotter.

Lee, whose work draws on traditional weaving, basketry and 'chilbo' (a traditional Korean enamelling craft meaning 'seven jewels'), is known for his experimental material palette, having worked with aluminium, marble, copper, enamel, steel, bundled rice and even garden hoses.

With Bottega Veneta, what began as an invitation to create lamps for the brand’s S/S 2026 runway led to the inclusion of his work in its ‘Weaving the World: The Language of Intrecciato’ exhibition in Seoul (June 2025). Now, through this installation in Milan, the collaboration shifts into a spatial context, continuing Lee’s ongoing exploration of materiality, weaving and illumination.

Created in close collaboration with artisans at the house’s Montebello Vicentino atelier, Lee’s signature forms become light sculptures hand-woven from Bottega Veneta fettucce leather in bespoke green, selected by Trotter. 'When I got this material in my studio in Seoul, I was really surprised because it’s very detailed and well made,' Lee told Wallpaper*. 'It’s very soft, so it’s better for making specific shapes.'

The pieces sit somewhere between control and improvisation, extending the brand’s traditional woven language into a more irregular, experimental form. Made in situ, Lee created the composition in reaction to the space. ‘When I came here two days ago and started working in the space, I started very freely, communicating with this new space,’ he explains. ‘It’s quite intuitive, just like playing.’

Displayed alongside the lamps are Lee’s ‘Ghost in the Shell’ chairs, made by wrapping a frame in knotted sponge pipes and nylon rope. Coated in multiple layers of polyurethane, the chairs take on a chrome-like finish that belies their soft, improvised construction.

For Lee, the project serves as both inspiration and reassurance that he is on the right path. ‘When I saw the artisans working, I received great inspiration from them,’ he recalls. ‘I realised that the way they work is actually pretty similar to my way, so I got conviction in what I was doing.’

Follow all the latest news from Milan Design Week 2026 with our editors’ live blog

All change! So could be the motto of the S/S 2026 season, which heralded the arrival of 15 new creative directors at fashion’s major houses – from Dior to Chanel.

It led to a sweeping feeling of freshness and renewal that would define the season, one that Wallpaper* captures in a new series of images by photographer Nicole Maria Winkler and Wallpaper* fashion & creative director Jason Hughes.

S/S 2026’s standount looks in the fitting room

Originally featured in our March 2026 Style Issue, they capture model Valerija Kelava dressing up in a series of S/S 2026’s standout looks – whether the rising Belgian design Julie Kegels’ collaged layers (she said she wanted the collection to feel like it had a life of its own) or a sweeping white gown from Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior collection, delicately edged with flowers.

The setting is a surreal imagining of a fitting room by set designer Kim Harding, Winkler’s longtime collaborator. Within it, we explore the transformative power of a new season of looks. Keep scrolling to shop the story.

Model: Valerija Kelava at Oui Management. Casting: Esther Boiteux at EB Agency. Hair: Moe Mukai using Oribe. Make-up: Sunao Takahashi at Saint Luke using Byredo. Set design: Kim Harding Studio. Digi tech: Anna-Sophia John. Photography assistants: Josh Rea, Elliot Humbles. Set design assistant: Austeja Gokaite. Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor. Production assistant: Danielle Quigley.

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

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And so concludes another Milan Fashion Week, a season marked by its debuts: across the week, Maria Grazia Chiuri presented her opening vision for Fendi as the house’s first sole creative director, young Belgian designer Meryll Rogge made an expressive debut at Marni, and Demna hosted his first runway show for Gucci – a virile mediation on sex and the body which had everybody in fashion talking. Meanwhile at Giorgio Armani, Silvana Armani – the niece of the late eponymous designer – made her ready-to-wear debut at the house. Though true to Mr Armani’s well-established codes, she said this was ‘a new perspective on the Armani style’ – light, fluid and purposely ‘imperfect’.

Alongside, there were standout shows from Prada – in a feat of quick changes and expert layering, 15 models wore 60 looks without pause – and Bottega Veneta, where Louise Trotter conjured Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini in a riot of colour and texture. While at Jil Sander, Simone Bellotti found new freedom in his sophomore runway show after the rigour and restraint of his debut.

Here, reported by Wallpaper* fashion & beauty features director Jack Moss and contributing writer India Jarvis, the 14 standout shows which defined the week.

Fendi

‘Less I, More Us,’ was the mantra Italian designer Maria Grazia Chiuri chose for her debut as sole creative director for Fendi, emblazoning it across the runway which stretched the length of the house’s Milanese HQ on Via Solari. Chiuri is fond of such mission statements: for her debut collection as the first female creative director of Dior in 2016, she printed the title of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book-length essay ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ across a T-shirt. Over the nine years which followed, she would champion numerous women artists and collaborators.

Her mantra at Fendi is perhaps a feminist one too, despite the fact that Chiuri also showed menswear on the runway (and will be equally in charge of the house’s mens- and womenswear lines). It was, in part, a reference to the collective force of the formidable Fendi sisters: Alda, Carla, Paola, Franca and Anna Fendi, who took over from their parents, house founders Edoardo and Adele Fendi, in 1946. Speaking before the show, she said that people speak too often of Karl Lagerfeld’s influence – the designer was creative director of the house for 54 years – and not enough of the sisters, who employed him and would work alongside him until the company was sold to LVMH in 1999. ‘I would like people to remember all that they created at Fendi,’ she asserted.

Chiuri, who began her career at Fendi in 1989, working with the sisters until her own departure in 1999, said she credits her working ethic to them: ‘They were my mentors. They gave me my career. And I felt part of their teamwork.’ In the show, the idea of collaboration came through projects with women artists SAGG Napoli (colourful football-like scarves were created alongside the Naples-born artist) and the estate of Mirella Bentivoglio, whose slogan-like works appeared across garments. But the idea of a collective ‘us’ stretched to dissolving the divide between mens- and womenswear, too, the designer said: ‘Feminine and masculine cease to be categories of opposition and become adjectives used to describe shared qualities,’ envisioning not two separate collections but ‘one wardrobe’.

As such, the A/W 2026 outing – which eschewed theatrics in favour of a more pragmatic approach – moved between sleek, elongated tailoring and flourishes of romance, from layers of sheer tulle and lace (some evocative of her work at Dior). Meanwhile fur – the founding material of the house – came back to the fore, with Chiuri introducing the ‘Echo of Love’ project whereby clients can have their old furs transformed in an act of circularity. Across vivid two-tone chubby fur coats and patchworked fur handbags, all the materials had been sourced from leftovers in the house’s fur department – another act of practicality over spectacle. ‘Fashion is not entertainment. Fashion is a job. I am that kind of designer,’ she said. Jack Moss

READ: ‘Less I, more us’: Maria Grazia Chiuri lays out her vision for Fendi in Milan

Jil Sander

After a brilliant debut last season, Simone Bellotti continued to cleverly hone his vision for Jil Sander with a sophomore collection which he said was inspired by the idea of ‘home’. Presented in the house’s stark Milanese HQ – this season, warmth was added by the addition of a rust-coloured carpet which had been installed the length of the upper floor – the former Bally designer said he was thinking about home as an ‘an emotional space where one lives, feels safe and belongs to’, leading to a collection which diverted from restraint and rigour of last season towards something freer, more eclectic. Indeed, the designer said this was a collection about ‘flow, flou [and] movement’, with Bellotti imagining garments imbued with a life of their own through an intriguing use of pattern cutting – whether raised shoulder lines, curving seams, folded waistlines, or intentionally puckered tailoring (the slashes through garments also returned from his debut). Meanwhile evocative moments of colour and pattern added visual richness: flashes of electric blue and leopard print met fabrics evocative of interiors – a nod, Bellotti elucidated, to his father’s career as an upholsterer. ‘The question this season is whether abandon can convey restraint,’ he said of this newly liberated approach. Jack Moss

MM6 Maison Margiela

One of life’s great pleasures is watching other people, and what better place to sit and do it than a train terminal? It’s a pleasure that MM6 Maison Margiela tapped into for its A/W 2026 show – one designed around the comings and goings of passengers in an ‘archetypal train station’, in this case Milano Centrale. An archetype is a recurrent, even constant, principle, whereas a station is innately transient – how do the two meet? At MM6 it was with ‘a veritable spectrum of individuality’, and ‘sartorial actions rooted in the genuine appreciation for garments as they are, looking for ways to see them anew, which is where the fun lingers.’

What does that look like? It looks like pea coats with bunched and scrunched hems, loosely tacked to reveal quilted or flannel linings. Clashing stripes with check – something you might serendipitously pair when hurrying to get dressed. Backless khaki trench coats and skirts. And lots of tucking: hair tucked into jumpers, jumpers tucked into jeans, jeans tucked into high-gloss Wellington-style boots.

There was a strong equine theme too – afterall, 2026 is the year of the firehorse, a symbol of forward movement and independence that is characteristically MM6 – from horse motifs printed on oversized T-shirts and teddy fleeces, to full cotton flounced skirts with a decidedly American frontier feel. A train station welcomes all kinds of people going all kinds of places, after all. India Jarvis

Prada

This season, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons played a clever runway trick: instead of the usual 40-or-so models cast in a given season, the pair chose just 15 to walk the A/W 2026 show. In an impressive act of timing, they wore 60 looks in total, walking the runway four times each in quick succession, achieved through removing a layer of clothing during each quick change. When you realised the conceit (for me, I wondered if Bella Hadid had a doppelganger or secret twin after what seemed like an impossibly quick reappearance on the runway), it made for one of the most thrilling Prada shows of recent times – there was a near-breathless energy to the spectacle. (Indeed, chatting to one of the models backstage, she said she had never sweated so much, or walked so far, in a runway show during her career.)

But this was no gimmick: post-show, the co-creative directors said the collection was a reflection of the way that women wear clothing on a given day – the removal of a coat to reveal a cocktail dress, the addition of a scarf. ‘It’s about life, and how you dress each day with the clothes you have,’ said Simons. ‘About real, human people.’ The garments themselves were infused with Prada-isms: purposeful marks of wear (some appeared stained or creased; others saw layers of fabric torn away to reveal another beneath) met an insouciant, bourgeois-inflected glamour in embroidered stockings, feathered and beaded footwear and a use of satin and organza. A feeling of utility, meanwhile, came in uniform-style tailoring and riffs on classic outerwear styles, from the parka jacket to the raincoat. ‘As a woman, your life is layered – each day demands not only a shifting of clothes, but a richness of identities within yourself,’ said Mrs Prada. ‘You make choices, you decide who you want to be.’ Jack Moss

Max Mara

Is a growing interest in the history and aesthetics of the Middle Ages a reaction to the hyper-digitised, blue-lit world of today? An idealised fantasy of a pre-capitalist society? Or perhaps a byproduct of the popularity of the romantasy genre? Whatever the answer, for Max Mara’s Ian Griffiths​, whose unlikely seasonal muse was the 11th-century diplomat and military commander Matilde di Canossa, ‘there is something so strikingly of the now about so-called Dark Age design’.

Griffiths’ interpretation of pre-enlightenment era clothing saw tunics in luxurious, butter-soft suede, ankle-skimming cashmere coats and hooded garments reminiscent of the coif shapes worn by Di Canossa and her contemporaries. Standout pieces included a caramel-coloured bias-cut silk gown with a mohair, funnel-necked yoke; a suede muff worn belted around the waist; and a taupe wool playsuit accessorised with the gathered suede, elbow-length opera gloves that were seen throughout the show. Griffiths has been with the house since graduating from London’s RCA in 1987, and over the four decades which have followed, there is nobody who knows the Max Mara woman better than he. The A/W 2026 collection offered new-yet-medieval twists on the tried and tested house codes, which keep this woman returning to the brand, season after season. India Jarvis

Emporio Armani

Following the death of its eponymous founder in the autumn of 2025, Emporio Armani took an understandable hiatus from showing at menswear week in January, but returned for A/W 2026 with a combined men’s and women’s runway outing. ‘Maestro’, as the collection was titled, was not only a narrative device, but an ode to Mr Armani himself – the eminent composer, conductor, and virtuoso of fashion symphonies for almost 50 years.

The imaginative backdrop for the season was, according to show notes, a music school, and the maestro – and maestra, for this is a co-ed conservatoire – who stepped out in Leo Dell’Orco and Silvana Armani’s first jointly developed collection wore loosely tailored overcoats and baggy denim, and student-y accessories including baker boy caps, backpacks, and ties just visible beneath oversized striped knits. Leg warmers styled over patent leather pumps evoked the chill of a rehearsal auditorium, whereas the show’s second act saw rather more performance-ready pieces in the form of draped velvet, wide-lapelled tuxedo jackets, and starched white collars (a recurring motif in Milan this season: most notably in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s riff on Claudine à l'école at Fendi).

For the finale – the crescendo, if you like – the models turned out in Lydia Tár-esque monochrome. Tight leggings or flowing slacks on the bottom, white dress shirts on top, each with a different button, brooch, pin, collar, or embroidered flourish. ‘A simple and rigorous statement – now more than ever rebellious – of modernity and self-awareness,’ that could only be Armani. India Jarvis

Marni

The Belgian designer Meryll Rogge chose to collaborate with Formafantasma on the runway set for her debut show as creative director of Marni. Transforming the house’s Milanese headquarters with wood-effect panelling and fabric-covered benches – recalling a banal office space, or entranceway to a Milanese apartment block – the space was punctuated with mirrored panels which had been painted with ‘fragments drawn from quotidian life’, from office chairs to cigarette lighters. ‘The structure of the set suggests a bourgeois interior wooden frame, hints of domestic architecture – but fragmented, slightly taken apart. It feels familiar yet unsettled, as if a room has been carefully disassembled and reassembled in another order,’ Formafantasma’s Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin told Wallpaper*.

It linked with Rogge’s vision for her tenure at the Italian house: to create something which felt both familiar and contemporary, evoking Marni’s founding principles with her own distinctive twists. ‘I have a very personal connection to Marni,’ she said. ‘It’s a brand that shaped my design sensibility during my formative years, and through the show I wanted to acknowledge that sense of familiarity.’ It made for an astute opening outing: there was the irreverent spirit of founder Consuelo Castiglioni in its eclectic combinations, not only in its amalgam of nostalgic prints, swinging paillettes and boldly graphic jewellery, but also in the way a sweater might be worn with a cocktail dress, or a colourful sporty parka over a suit and tie. Rogge’s own twist on the Marni protagonist was a newfound toughness, figured in some great leather trousers and skirts, some with Western-inspired detailing. In their slung-on sensuality – imbued with a certain 1980s nostalgia – they might well fill a gap for those who are already missing Dario Vitale’s Versace. Jack Moss

READ: Formafantasma created the ‘familiar yet unsettled’ show set for Meryll Rogge’s Marni debut

Sportmax

If there are a few thematic ideas that inevitably crop up and play out in different ways by different brands in any one season, then for A/W 2026 one such example could be travel. At Loro Piana and MM6 Maison Margiela the vehicle of choice was a train; at Sportmax, the journey seemed to be taken by air. ‘Dynamism’ was the word they used, but ‘aerodynamism’ may be just as apt – as the brand itself puts it: ‘There is no clutter weighing the Sportmax woman down.’

Dresses were close-fitting and body-skimming but with movement in the draping, worn with long wraps which fell backwards over the shoulder like wings. Some of the weightier outerwear nodded to aviator-style jackets with their gargantuan lapels and collars, and contrasting textures and fabrics. Clutches were spheroid, almost discus-shaped; one could imagine them flying through the air with ease. Flashes of skin were visible beneath a kind of jumbo mesh effect leather, used for tops which were worn as a base layer beneath more autumn-winter suitable coats and gilets. Speed and movement were the defining characteristics of the collection – even the show itself was a particularly fast-paced affair – as the show notes said, the Sportmax woman has ‘places to go’. India Jarvis

Gucci

Prior to his debut runway show for Gucci, the mononymous Georgian designer Demna said he had been searching for the ‘Gucciness of Gucci’, a trip which took him to the Tuscan city of Florence, where the house was founded as a leather goods company in 1921. There, he visited factories and the archive, though it was stood in front of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus at the Uffizi Gallery – just a few hundred metres from the Palazzo Gucci on Piazza della Signoria – that Demna had his lightbulb moment. ‘Standing in front of it, I felt overwhelmed,’ he wrote in a letter distributed before the show. ‘The beauty in it was unconditional; it was absolute. It made me realise how deeply the Italian Renaissance shaped everything I understand about art, about proportion, about desire, and about beauty. When I left the museum and stepped into Piazza della Signoria, the first thing I saw was Palazzo Gucci. In that moment, I understood the place Gucci holds within Italian culture.’

It was part of the reason why he staged the A/W 2026 collection amid an imagined museum constructed in Milan’s Palazzo delle Scintille, clad in marble and populated with plaster recreations of ancient sculptures (the vast statues had been 3D-scanned and crafted by Tuscan artisans to appear as if hewn from marble). This was a veneration of Gucci as an expression of Italian style and insouciance: after the show, he said this opening act was simply about capturing a feeling, rather than anything more intellectually overwrought. ‘I hope I made you feel Gucci today,’ he said, expressing a desire for Gucci to become an ‘adjective’. ‘That was my main purpose with this show.’

The essence of ‘Gucci-ness’ that Demna landed on was one of unbridled sensuality, a morning-after-the-night before glamour which borrowed from Tom Ford’s transformative tenure at the house in the 1990s (all the way down to a recreation of his 1997 double-G G-string, which here appeared as an in-built thong in a gown worn by Kate Moss to close the show). Other garments had been constructed without seams or with curved hemlines in order to emphasise the relationship between body and garment, while muscled male models burst out of skin-tight T-shirts and jeans. Slung on jackets, lean tailoring, and a final flurry of shimmering evening gowns completed the look. ‘[I think] it’s because of my relationship with myself, to my own body, to the way I want to see myself,’ he said. ‘I want to feel like that. I want to feel sexy.’ Jack Moss

Tod’s

It takes deft craftsmanship to imbue leather with real lightness – after all, leather is better known as a material of protection and toughness. But Tod’s’ A/W 2026 ready-to-wear was characterised by a levity of touch that could only be the handiwork of a house that makes an art out of leather (and a designer who’s got pedigree when it comes to this particular material).

In Matteo Tamburini’s latest, leather may have been the protagonist, but the plot itself was all about artisanal excellence – a fact reinforced by the real craftspeople stitching, folding, or carving objects in the entryway to the venue at Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea – cherry-picked by the brand for their impressive skill. Amongst these were brothers Vincenzo and Manuel Aucella, coral artisans and cameo carvers who represent the fourth generation of a family tradition that began in 1892 (that’s around 30 years before Filippo Della Valle started the shoe-making business that would later become Tod’s).

As for the clothes themselves, feather-light asymmetrical leather dresses fluttered with all the delicacy of a silk handkerchief, blanket-style outerwear enveloped luxuriously about the shoulders, and saddlery techniques and hand-finishing synthesised tradition and modernity. Overall, the effect was a masterclass in Italian craft and sprezzatura. India Jarvis

Ferragamo

The 1920s were a formative decade for Salvatore Ferragamo: in 1927, he founded his eponymous footwear company in Florence after returning from Los Angeles, where he worked as a shoemaker for the burgeoning film industry in Hollywood. The British designer Maximilian Davis has found fertile creative ground in the decade, with recent collections channelling what he sees as the ‘liberated elegance’ of the era – one in which conventions of dress were interrupted and marginalised groups found new freedoms (last season, Davis evoked the Harlem Renaissance, the proliferation of Black art, culture and intellectual output from the New York neighbourhood in the 1920s).

This season, in one of the curving Giovanni Muzio-designed upper galleries of the Triennale di Milano museum – dimly lit and sheathed with floor-to-ceiling curtains – he evoked the 1920s speakeasy, ‘a locus of liberation; a space where conventions of class and identity are disrupted’. As such, a louche, after-dark mood infused the collection – negligées, molten-gold dresses and vampish stilettos all featured – while riffs on maritime attire were a nod to those who frequented such drinking spots. Though the evocation of the sailor also nodded to the notion of travel which informs the Ferragamo story – the transformative experience of moving away from your home in search of something new.

‘That’s something that both Salvatore and my own family experienced – he left his home in Italy for America before returning home, and my family moved from Trinidad and Jamaica to Manchester,’ said Davis. ‘They all crossed the water to discover new beginnings.’ Jack Moss

Dolce & Gabbana

Dolce & Gabbana’s A/W 2026 collection was an assertion of brand identity, said designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, all the way down to a front-row cameo from Madonna – perhaps the most well-known house muse and the current face of The One fragrance. The musical powerhouse watched on from the front row as the pair performed their own greatest hits: an outing near-entirely in their signature vampish black, replete with house hallmarks – lingerie-inspired silhouettes, hourglass LBDs, and, of course, plenty of lace. Though perhaps most desirable this season was the tailoring: if best known for their body-contouring dresses, the pair have always possessed a strong sartorial prowess, here encapsulated in some brilliant tuxedos which nipped at the waist and flared across the shoulder, inspired by archival silhouettes from the 1990s (they would make a great Oscars look for those wishing to eschew the traditional princess gown). Post show, Domenico and Stefano were keen to make clear that drilling into the archive was not about ‘nostalgia’ but ‘presence’, ‘a language built on roots that are still alive – Sicily as emotion, black as strength, lace as intimacy, tailoring as authority,’ they said. Jack Moss

Bottega Veneta

The particular joy of good fashion is that it’s a work of art you can actually touch – and with Louise Trotter’s sophomore collection for Bottega Veneta, touch is exactly what you want to do. The shaggy, curvaceous shapes she creates out of fibreglass need to be felt to be believed. Great piles of shearling cry out to be fondled. Even less immediately showy pieces, like a tailored grey coat with exaggeratedly round shoulders and cinched waist which was made from a thick, almost foamy looking fabric, was just begging to be squished between the fingers.

It’s the mark of a talented designer that to describe their work as ‘wearable’ doesn’t just mean ‘commercial’, or, worse ‘boring’. The Sunderland-born designer, whose previous creative director roles were at Lacoste, Joseph, and Carven, makes clothes that are infinitely wearable, but here the word might mean things that feel really wonderful to actually wear. On the practical side: pieces have pockets, shoes are flat, and bags are roomy. The more flamboyant garments are countered by easy tank tops and shirts. But more than that, there is a sensuality and tactility that sets Trotter’s work apart. Is this the byproduct of being one of the few women making womenswear at the head of a luxury house? Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that she is one of the most credible designers working today.

The A/W 2026 collection carried what Trotter described as a ‘suggestion’ of Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini – two of 20th-century Italy’s most erudite and subversive exports, and unlikely friends. Both figures have been brought back to the forefront of the cultural conversation in recent years – operatic prima donna Callas was played by Angelina Jolie in a 2024 biopic, and before that her life and lonely, premature death was dramatised on stage in an opera project conceived by Marina Abramović and co-starring Willem Dafoe. Dafoe, in turn, has played Pasolini, the poet and filmmaker whose brutal murder, presumably at the hands of far-right thugs, was commemorated on its 50th anniversary in the autumn of 2025 through a series of cultural programming and new publications. If these sound like unlikely characters to influence a ready-to-wear collection, consider that Callas and Pasolini had more in common than just tragic ends: formidable artistic talent, potent sexuality, and confident personal style amongst them. For Trotter’s debut last year she described her use of intrecciato as a conceptual device as well as a literal braiding technique – by citing these two artists she is articulating a continuation of that weaving principle, but also making a bold declaration of what Bottega Veneta, under her stewardship, is going to be. India Jarvis

Giorgio Armani

The Armani Privé show in Paris marked the debut collection from Silvana Armani, the late Giorgio Armani’s niece, who worked closely with the designer in his lifetime and was a fitting successor to uphold his legacy. On Sunday in Milan, she made her ready-to-wear debut at Armani, selecting the house’s headquarters on Brera’s Via Borgonuovo to show the A/W 2026 collection (the address was also the site of Mr Armani’s personal Milan home). At the time of the Privé show, we wrote that she had presented a collection ‘not of divergence but of continuance’, and the same could be said of this collection – it felt recognisably Armani in its louche, unstructured tailoring and interplay between Eastern and Western tropes of dress – though there was a greater feeling of softness and ease. Indeed, Silvana Armani said she was looking for lightness in both construction and spirit: jackets were assembled without padding, wrapped silhouettes appeared thrown on, and the slouchier, pleated trousers – held in place with wide belts – felt contemporary in proportion. She called it ‘a new perspective on the Armani style,’ one which she said was informed by being a woman, designing for women. ‘It is fluid, enveloping, perfectly imperfect.’ Jack Moss

Optimism, colour and a sense of play are the order of the day as this season’s 12 standout looks and accessories spark a fresh start. As taken from the March 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, we unpack S/S 2026’s defining trends.

Bold Texture

Above left.

For her Bottega Veneta debut, Louise Trotter channelled a feeling of ‘liberation’ through an expressive use of colour and texture, including a series of pieces constructed from strands of iridescent recycled fibreglass. In their dynamism, she sought to reflect the vibrant life of Laura Braggion, Bottega Veneta’s design director from 1985-2001, who was a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory before her time at the house.

Lucky charms

Above right.

The charm bracelet is an item of jewellery long said to bring luck andprotection. This season, the auspicious accessory enjoys a renaissance, thanks to Michael Rider at Celine: the designer’s debut ready-to-wear collection featured bracelets heavy with charms, from the house’s Triomphe monogram to heart-shaped padlocks, lockets and a helping hand, the latter a longtime symbol of prosperity and safety.

The 1990s slip

The 1990s’ mythic cool continues to be an influence on contemporary fashion (and looks set to carry on with the launch of Tate Britain’s blockbuster exhibition ‘The 90s’ in October). Few garments are more synonymous with the era than the slip dress, which had a rebirth on the runway this season, appearing at Victoria Beckham, Tom Ford and Wooyoungmi, where this negligee came edged in delicate fronds of lace.

A brand new bag

‘A study in intimacy’ is how Sarah Burton describes her first major bag launch for Givenchy. Titled the ‘Snatch’, its gently curved shape, which hooks over the shoulder and hugs neatly under the arm, is designed to echo Burton’s ready-to-wear, whether the cinched waist of a blazer or the curve of a bra top. The softness of the leather is an echo of this feeling of intimacy: ‘it pulls, cinches and embraces,’ she says.

Pyjama dressing

There is an undone elegance to the pyjama shirt, which appeared in various iterations this season – at Dries Van Noten, Dunhill and Dolce & Gabbana, among others. This striped offering, from Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, is part of a collection of ‘ease and escapism’, in which Vaccarello sought to capture the inertia of a summer afternoon. ‘Everything feels light; shapes float rather than cling,’ he says.

Block colour

At Ferragamo, Maximilian Davis took inspiration from the dress codes of the 1920s, injecting modernity via vivid accessories – feathers sprouted from bags while mules came in luminous hues – and colour-blocked garments, like this graphic silk-panelled dress. Indeed, colour blocking was a throughline of the wider S/S 2026 season – collections from Celine, Jil Sander and Loewe all featured the expressive motif.

True blue

Blue provided a feeling of undeniable uplift this season, with the breezy hue colouring the runway at IM Men (part of a collection inspired by the work of ceramic artist Shoji Kamoda), Fendi, Tom Ford and Dolce & Gabbana. Over at Lanvin, Peter Copping paid homage to house founder Jeanne Lanvin’s love of the colour – a fascination that began with the vivid blue skies of Fra Angelico’s 15th-century frescoes.

A new summer shoe

Former Proenza Schouler designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez looked to artist Ellsworth Kelly for their debut collection for Loewe, channelling his ‘elemental colours’ and ‘chromatic intensity’ in a collection that sought a feeling of freedom and release. Sculpted leather dresses, flocked heels and vivid striped knits had a playful sensibility, injecting new energy into the Spanish house.

Extreme layering

Zane Li’s debut show for his eponymous New York label LII made a case for extreme layering, a playful theme that ran throughout the S/S 2026 season. At Issey Miyake, diaphanous layers of fabric were stretched over household objects to create surreal silhouettes, while rising Belgian designer Julie Kegels turned garments upside down and collaged them together, as if they had taken on a life of their own.

Shirt tales

Matthieu Blazy’s debut collection for Chanel featured a collaboration with Parisian shirtmaker Charvet. The designer drew inspiration from Coco Chanel’s love affair with polo player Boy Capel and the way she would purportedly share his clothing. Embroidered with ‘Chanel’ and crafted with a weighted hem, the poplin shirts capture Blazy’s knack for elevating the quotidian through meticulous acts of craft.

Standout specs

Sunglasses are for making a sartorial statement this season. Case in point: these goggle-like frames from Miu Miu, which appeared on the S/S 2026 runway in bright shades of yellow, orange and blue. Similar styles were seen at Loewe, Versace and Balenciaga, the latter presenting huge bug-eyed shades adorned with shimmering crystals and worn with gowns and opera gloves – a very modern proposition for eveningwear.

Vivid outerwear

Outerwear eschewed the usual hues of grey, brown and black for bold colours that befit spring. This red overcoat by Prada embodies the season’s optimism, appearing as part of a collection that was about capturing a mood of escapism. Colourful outerwear was also spotted at Auralee, Dries Van Noten and Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, the latter inspired by hazy summer days on New York’s Fire Island.

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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

Models: Pascal Thulin at Next, Marrit Krikke at Platform Agency. Casting: Leila at Suun Consultancy. Hair: Paula McCash using Babylisspro and Evopro. Make-up: Claire Urquhart at Julian Watson Agency using Make Up For Ever. Manicure: Saffron Goddard using Chanel La Base Camélia and La Crème Main. Digi tech: Cameron Williamson. Photography assistant: Lucas Bullens. Fashion assistant: Nathan Fox. Production assistant: Danielle Quigley.

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.

Bottega Veneta has unveiled Bottega for Bottegas 2025, the newest chapter of its annual tribute to the small-scale artisans who embody the house’s devotion to craft. Introduced in 2021, the initiative has become a powerful stage for independent workshops whose heritage, technique and creative spirit echo Bottega Veneta’s own.

'This year’s collection celebrates workshops in cities that have profoundly shaped our story – Venice, Milan and New York,' says Bottega Veneta CEO Leo Rongone. The brand invited an artisan from each location to reinterpret the unmistakably Italian ritual of the aperitivo. The resulting objects form an exquisite, modern still life: a pair of silverplate glasses from Milan’s Ganci Argenterie; sterling-silver cocktail sticks with a sculptural knot by Brooklyn silversmith Heath Wagoner; and a handbound journal by Venetian Paolo Olbi, imagined for cocktail recipes and evening reflections.

'[These] workshops represent, individually and together, a profound commitment to the preservation and innovation of artisanal and creative culture,' continues Rongone. Paolo Olbi is a masterful bookbinder whose works draw on Venetian, Byzantine and Islamic motifs. In New York, Heath Wagoner’s hybrid background in industrial and jewellery design translates into finely finished barware and tableware; and atelier Ganci Argenterie – founded in 1926 and now led by the third generation of the Morandino family – stands as one of Milan’s oldest silversmiths.

The project pays homage to the geographic and cultural lineage that has shaped Bottega Veneta for nearly six decades. Founded in Vicenza in 1966, the house grew up in close orbit to Venice, drawing on the city’s artisanal traditions and fluid landscapes. Venetian influence runs deep at the brand, from its iconic knot motif to the early production of fragrance flacons made from swirling glass. That said, Bottega Veneta also looks outward: in 1972, its first boutique opened not in Italy but on Madison Avenue in New York – although by the late 1990s, the house had relocated its design studio to Milan, where its headquarters and runways remain today.

With Bottega for Bottegas 2025, Bottega Veneta once again honours the artisans and cities that shaped its past – while reaffirming the relevance of the handmade in the present.

For more details of the artisans, view the collection at bottegaveneta.com

Hotel slippers to flip-flops, house socks to bath robes, recent seasons have seen designers reimagine indoor wear for the outside world – a reflection of our desire for home comforts, even when we're on the go. The Row has proved masterful at this switch-up, taking humble homewear and reimagining it in uber-luxurious style – what greater pleasure, designers Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen seem to say, than stepping out of bed and straight onto the street?

It goes some way to explain the proliferation of bedwear on the runway for A/W 2025, most notably at Prada, where the house’s men’s and womenswear collections both featured pyjamas as a proposition for the everyday (at the men’s show, pyjama sets were shrunken in size and worn with cowboy boots – as if on an early morning or late night wander – while for women, night shirts were stuffed into the waistbands of skirts). They appeared as part of collections that explored the idea of sartorial freedom: ‘within feminine beauty, when you think of its archetypes, there is lots of restriction of the body – here, it is free,’ said co-creative director Raf Simons of the womenswear collection, where the pyjamas’ relaxed proportions were symbolic of this liberated mood.

10 of the best pyjama shirts to take you from bed to street

Though despite their synonymy with relaxation, there is also an innate elegance to classic pyjamas, particularly the shirt – after all, it is a button-up you wear to bed, often rendered in silk, satin or cotton poplin, and cut with a louche, evening-time silhouette that is not unlike traditional formalwear. Dolce & Gabbana’s men’s and women’s collections for S/S 2026 mined this mood – pyjamas were reimagined with smatterings of crystal embellishment or twisting floral embroidery (lingerie-inspired gowns and vertiginous heels presented an even more glamorous counterpoint)

Here, as selected by the Wallpaper* style team, are ten of the best pyjama shirts – good enough to wear out of the bedroom and onto the street.

At Louise Trotter’s Bottega Veneta debut this weekend, we were not only entranced by the collection on the runway, but also the rows of jewel-like hand-blown Murano glass stools lining it. Cuboid in shape and rendered in ten shades of green, blue, red and amber, the design, we learned, came courtesy of Milan-based studio 6:AM – the duo behind one of our favourite Milan Design Week showcases earlier this year. Shaped using cast-iron moulds engraved using CNC technology, each piece begins as a 43 cm block of glass, its final form revealed in a process echoing traditional marble sculpture. As with all of 6:AM's work, the stools were produced in close collaboration with Murano’s master artisans – continuing a centuries-old tradition while pushing a more contemporary aesthetic language.

Founded in 2018 by Edoardo Pandolfo and Francesco Palù, 6:AM takes its name from the moment the furnaces are lit each morning on the Venetian island, marking the start of a day’s work for the glassmakers who have preserved this craft for more than 700 years. Pandolfo, born in Venice, and Palù, trained as an architect, set out to bring Murano glass to a new audience through architectural installations, modular lighting, furniture and sculptural objects defined by precision, materiality and conceptual clarity.

The studio works across a network of independent artisans, each with their own specialisms, producing projects that range from bespoke commissions for global brands to research-led explorations into the future of glassmaking. Always rooted in Murano’s legacy yet looking ahead, 6:AM combines ancient techniques with evolving forms and ideas.

'Product development and glassworking techniques evolve together in parallel steps: the shape of an object often depends on how the glass can be worked, and in turn, the design influences the choice of technique,' the studio explains. 'This dialogue between craftsmanship and design is at the heart of 6:AM’s creative practice.'

Since its inception, the studio has investigated both traditional and lesser-known glassmaking processes, drawing on the centuries of expertise held by Murano’s master artisans. Working with the material in its molten state, 6:AM experiments with layering, fusing and adapting methods to push the material’s potential while seeking to minimise its environmental impact.

This approach led to FLOAT, unveiled during Milan Design Week 2024, which transformed salvaged glass from 1930s Milanese windows into furniture, shelving and architectural cladding. Combining fused glass panels with minimal steel structures, the collection explored new technical and aesthetic possibilities for post-industrial material. Developed in collaboration with Park Associati, FLOAT culminated in the 'Resourceful Intelligence' installation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, where reprocessed glass from Milan’s Palazzo Missori, currently under renovation, was used to demonstrate circular design strategies.

Earlier this year, 6:AM staged its first solo exhibition, 'Two-Fold Silence', at the historic Piscina Cozzi during Milan Design Week. At its centre was Quadrato, a lighting collection inspired by 1920s industrial design, merging Bauhaus rationalism with the geometric abstraction of Kazimir Malevič. Crafted from blown Murano glass in varying textures and opacities, the collection included a screen-printed lattimo wall lamp framed in painted iron – a contemporary nod to early 20th-century emergency lights.

Whether collaborating with fashion houses or developing material recovery projects, 6:AM maintains a distinct visual language: fluid silhouettes, luminous textures and a commitment to the handmade. Its work may be rooted in Murano’s furnaces, but its gaze is firmly on the future.

6am.glass

When Louise Trotter was named the successor to Matthieu Blazy at Bottega Veneta after his move to Chanel last December, there was a rare social-media consensus that the Italian house – part of the Kering conglomerate of luxury brands – had made the right hire.

Part of this was because the Sunderland-born designer comes with pedigree: stints at Joseph, Lacoste and Carven garnered wide acclaim, and, more importantly, meant she had experience leading a brand and design team. The other was that she would be a rare woman creative director in a still male-dominated role – a zeitgeisty topic after a viral Instagram post by London-based magazine 1 Granary in 2023, which called out Kering for having (at that point) white men in every creative director role at its roster of fashion brands.

Inside Louise Trotter’s Bottega Veneta debut

‘We hear so much about “change”, while diversity and equality are used as marketing strategies every day,’ 1 Granary wrote, the post coming in response to the news of Seán McGirr’s hire at McQueen, another brand in the Kering roster (he replaced Sarah Burton, who is now at Givenchy). ‘But in truth, nothing seems to have evolved.’ It garnered over 23,000 likes, and was widely shared; a later post from the magazine announcing Trotter’s appointment was captioned ‘YEEEEEESSSSS!!!!!’, followed by a trail of clapping emojis (the comments section was equally effusive).

This afternoon in Milan, nine months or so since that day, Trotter made her much-anticipated debut for the house at Fabbrica Orobia, a former industrial facility where Bottega Veneta has shown for some seasons (with Blazy tending to hold his shows in the evening, it was refreshing to see the space lit this time by sunlight). Chains and webs crafted from leather hung, installation-style, around the space, while cuboid glass stools in shades of moss green, yellow, navy, and grey made seats for an all-star front row that included Uma Thurman and campaign star Lauren Hutton.

The soundtrack was an ‘audio artwork’ by British artist Steve McQueen. He said he wanted to ‘heighten people's emotions, to make them more sensitive to the clothes’, with the piece, which was titled ‘’66 – ‘76’ and mashed up Nina Simone and David Bowie’s versions of Wild Is the Wind, recorded in 1966 and 1976 respectively. Fittingly, the first was recorded the same year Bottega Veneta was founded: with 2026 marking the house’s 60th anniversary, Trotter said she wanted to ‘return to the beginning to find the present’. Meanwhile, McQueen described the spliced-together voices as an ‘aural intrecciato’, a reference to the leather weaving technique synonymous with Bottega Veneta, which celebrates its own 50th anniversary this year with a series of celebrations, including a Harrods pop-up.

‘The language of Bottega Veneta is intrecciato. And it is a metaphor,’ said Trotter. ‘It is two different strips woven together that become stronger – the two things make a stronger whole. Collaboration and connectivity run throughout this house and its history, from its beginnings to what it is now. It’s about different places, different people, male and female – individual parts and stories intertwined to make a stronger whole.’

Indeed, intrecciato was utilised as a technique and motif throughout the collection, which juxtaposed regal silhouettes – broad-shouldered overcoats were worn with high-neck white blouses beneath, which evoked historical ceremonial attire – with more frenetic plays with colour and texture, like a series of dresses and skirts constructed from a colourful fabric comprising thousands of iridescent strands, which bounced and shimmered as models walk (one editor likened the effect to the fibre-optic lamps popular in the 1990s). After the show, she said she was ‘in the candy box’ as a designer – Bottega Veneta has a superlative atelier when it comes to both leather work and fabric innovation, something the designer here used to striking effect.

Thematically, the idea of freedom has run throughout the week so far – most notably at Prada, where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons talked about designing clothes for a woman’s ‘authority and agency’. For this opening collection, Trotter sought a similar idea of liberation through an imagined journey for this season’s protagonist: from Venice, the birthplace of Bottega Veneta, to New York and Milan. ‘The extravagance of Venice; the energy of New York; the essentialism of Milan,’ described the collection notes, something which was in part derived from a study of Laura Braggion, Bottega Veneta’s first female creative lead, who worked from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

‘She was part of Andy Warhol's team. She was in The Factory,’ Trotter elaborated backstage. ‘I was imagining her journey – 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 really what I wanted to capture – a feeling of liberation.’

Catch up on highlights from Milan Fashion Week S/S 2026 here.

A playful pavilion

Ellie Stathaki, Architecture & Environment Director

A trip to south London on Monday included a sneak peek at the Dulwich Picture Gallery's new ArtPlay Pavilion and Sculpture Garden, which opens its doors to the public this weekend. Whimsical interiors, sensory immersion, arty nods and cracking architecture by Carmody Groarke make for a guaranteed fun visit with little ones. My family has test-driven it already.

A love letter to leather

Jack Moss, Fashion Features Editor

A family of dog-shaped bag charms caught my eye at Bottega Veneta’s Harrods pop-up, which opened earlier this week and celebrates 50 years of the Italian house’s signature ‘intrecciato’ leather-weaving technique (think of them as a tasteful alternative to the Labubu). Also on the wishlist? A pair of – sadly not for sale – leather armchairs, rendered in a jumbo version of the weave.

An east London institution

Anna Solomon, Digital Staff Writer

Everyone should have a chef friend. Mine, formerly at the helm of Clapton cult favourite My Neighbours the Dumplings, has an unerring knowledge of culinary gems in London. Last night, she took us to Tayyabs – an icon of the Punjabi food scene that is tucked away down an unassuming backstreet in Whitechapel. Still, the gleam of its iconic blue neon sign – and the congregation of people outside – leave no doubt that you’re in the right place.

Founded in 1972 and still family-run, Tayyabs is an operation of prodigious proportions – multi-storey, packed to the rafters and buzzing with barely contained chaos. I’d been once before, on a Saturday night, when it felt more like a club than a curry house, and Thursday wasn’t much different. The service is, at best, brusque. But the food doesn’t lie. The smoky, spicy lamb chops are Tayyabs’ speciality and a must-try; for dessert, the rasmalai – spongy cheese balls bathed in fragrant milk – is a concluding counterpoint to a punchy, flavour-filled experience.

A rainy-day remedy

Tianna Williams, Staff Writer

After harping on in the office about how excited I was for autumn to arrive – with the romance of crisp air, big coats, and Nora Ephron movies – I plummeted back down to reality when dreary September weather greeted us in London this week. With the number 27 bus on diversion (again?), forgotten umbrellas, and straightened hair turning frizzy in the humidity, I’ve exited this week mourning summer.

But with rainier days comes more hermit-like behaviour, giving me the chance to devour Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection. It follows the lives of Anna and Tom, expats who have relocated to Berlin as they chase an ideal – yet entirely superficial – life revolving around slow cooking, Danish furniture and sexual experimentation.

Latronico holds up a deeply satirical mirror to a world captivated by social media and a consumerist lifestyle. At just over 100 pages, I respect the author’s appreciation for the current generation's limited attention span.

From sharks to Switzerland

Malcolm Young, Managing Director

I have just returned from a holiday on Holbox, off the north coast of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, the highlight of which was a private tour to swim with nine-metre whale sharks in the island’s turquoise waters. The trip opened with a pitstop in Miami and dinner at Carbone – opening an outpost in London next month in the former US Embassy on Grosvenor Square.

No time to settle at home, it was straight back on a plane to Geneva for the opening of Lombard Odier’s new headquarters. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the curved, sculptural building makes a striking new addition to the banks of Lake Geneva.

A Parisian presentation

Gabriel Annouka, Senior Designer

While in Paris on my way south, I stopped at the Centre Pompidou for Wolfgang Tillmans’ Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us. Nothing could have prepared me for this image overload: photographs commanded the room – some monumental, others more intimate – while captions were mostly exiled to the margins, letting images be in conversation with each other. The room had its own rhythm; benches became places to nap, sigh, or look at the work from a further distance.

I even ran into a friend, which felt perfectly normal, as if the centre's Bibliothèque had turned into a café or club. Some shelves stayed filled with books; others were stripped bare and carried photographs instead, like they’d changed job descriptions for the weekend.

The video archive was another gift – a library of short pieces you could freely scroll through, and my first chance to properly see Tillmans’ video works. It also recalled Raven Row’s People Make Television (2023), which offered a similar sense of generosity and access.

I wished for days to sit with the photographs, but the clock was ticking. This is the Pompidou’s final act before closing for its five-year renovation. Almost too fitting that Tillmans has the last word, staging an exhibition about images, memory, and the impossibility of taking it all in.

‘Wolfgang Tillmans: Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us’ is on until 22 September 2025.

An esteemed art fair

Anna Fixsen, US Editor

There’s a lot to see at the Armory Show (taking place in New York now through 7 September) – so much so that the annual art fair has inspired its own bingo card. Venture outside the halls of the Javits Center and you’ll discover enough gallery shows, satellite fairs and cultural openings to keep you busy well until next year’s edition. As far as contemporary design is concerned, however, Collectible is always a highlight. A favourite display – part of the fair’s Curated section – was dreamed up by my former colleague, Hannah Martin, senior design editor at Architectural Digest. Her selection of work both surprised and delighted in its thought-provoking riffs on history and domesticity.

I was especially drawn to Annie Coggan’s bright blue chair, based on unrealised Chippendale-inspired designs from 1766, and Miles Gracy’s hand-carved Conch Couch which was inspired by over-the-top Rococo shell forms. Other items came with a distinct message, like a sleek stainless steel room divider by Georgia-based Around the Studio that was inspired by police riot shields used to counter protests in Tbilisi last year. There were also moments of levity, like Cat Snodgrass’s scenography, which featured trompe-l'œil desserts, plates and other household objects, and Jisu Han Jung’s chair with feet made from lightbulbs, part of a body of work he calls ‘useful useless objects’. In all, Martin’s presentation felt like a breath of fresh air in a week that can feel filled with so much naval-gazing.

This year, Bottega Veneta celebrates the 50th anniversary of ‘intrecciato’, a leather weaving technique which was first introduced in 1975 and has since become a central part of the Italian fashion house’s design vernacular (favouring understatement, the distinctive intrecciato has taken the place of more overt branded logos or monograms).

It has also become symbolic of Bottega Veneta’s longstanding veneration of craft: an intrecciato handbag, for example, can take days to construct, relying on a process of weaving whereby individual strands of leather (the ‘fettuce’) are braided together around a frame of wood. ‘Interconnectedness, exchange and [a] collaborative ethos,’ say Bottega Veneta of intrecciato’s symbolic significance to the house.

Inside Bottega Veneta’s Harrods pop-up

Festivities begin today in London, whereby an ephemeral space in historic Knightsbridge department store Harrods is dedicated to the technique (the ground-floor, street-level space has been the site of numerous recent pop-ups, from a Miu Miu ‘gymnasium’ to a summer store from Celine). Previewed this morning, the space – unsurprisingly – is one of luxury and refinement, with nods to intrecciato in the custom furnishings (a set of armchairs in jumbo intrecciato is particularly appealing).

At the centre, though, is an impressive console table constructed from contrasting walnut wood and concrete – titled La Tavola, it references the workshop tables at the Bottega Veneta atelier – which houses a series of intrecciato products, including handbags, wallets and even dog-shaped leather bag charms (as part of the display, some are left ‘in process’ in order to see the complex weaving it takes to create each one). Elsewhere, alongside the house’s recent introduced fragrance line, is a small selection of ready-to-wear – including an intrecciato shirt and trousers, the spoils of hours of artisanal handcraft.

The opening comes at a pivotal moment for the Italian house: later this month, British designer Louise Trotter will present her debut collection as creative director at Milan Fashion Week. The much-anticipated show – Trotter is a rare woman designer in a male-dominated field – will take place on the evening of 27 September, with so far only a handful of hints as to what to expect from the former Lacoste and Carven designer’s tenure.

These include a series of custom looks for actor – and recently confirmed brand ambassador – Vicky Krieps, including an asymmetric handkerchief-cut dress in black grain de poudre worn with intrecciato earrings at the premiere of Father Mother Sister Brother at the 82nd Venice Film Festival last month (the film festival also provided the first glimpses of Jonathan Anderson’s Dior haute couture and Dario Vitale’s Versace).

Meanwhile, an initial campaign – titled ‘Craft is Our Language’ and marking the intrecciato’s 50th anniversary – saw a number of notable figures photographed by Jack Davison with a particular focus on the hands, many of which were interlinked as a nod to the intrecciato weave (participants included Krieps, Tyler the Creator and Julianne Moore, among others). ‘[These] hand gestures that connect people across generations, cultures, backgrounds, and contexts,’ said the house of the poetic campaign, which now adorns Harrods’ iconic Brompton Road windows.

Bottega Veneta Harrods pop-up, entrance Door 9, Hans Road, SW1X 7XL.

bottegaveneta.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.

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

The notes of spring perfumes are markers of the season itself, with blossoming flowers, ripening fruit and green accords symbolic of new beginnings.

After the moodier, heavier scents of wintertime – rich gourmands, spicy ambers and woody ouds that linger in a colder atmosphere – spring fragrances are a welcome breath of fresh air, in keeping with the climbing temperatures and renewed sense of optimism buoyed by the sun’s rays.

Here, Wallpaper* presents our edit of the best spring perfumes of 2025, from the likes of Réservation, Perfumer H, Louis Vuitton and more.

The best spring perfumes of 2025

With the launch of last year’s fine jewellery collection, Bottega Veneta acknowledged a rich history. Created in Vicenza, Italy, the jewellery is inspired by the region’s rich jewellery history, dating back to the 14th century when local artisans formed the first Constitution of the Guild of Goldsmiths of Vicenza.

These traditional elements are intertwined throughout the jewellery’s second drop, a collection in two parts. The first, Enlaced, draws on Bottega Veneta’s distinctive design details, such as the intricate trompe l’oeil effect reminiscent of Bottega Veneta’s foulard intreccio technique, embossed on to a bracelet, rings, earrings, and necklaces.

In the second part, Alchemy, bold colours juxtaposed against classic ribbons of white and yellow gold make a vibrant combination. In standout pieces, such as in the necklace encompassing 380 diamonds, 19 black onyx and 19 green agate stones, there is an easy fluidity which belies the preciousness of the materials.

These new jewels join 2024’s collections, comprised of 15 pieces and divided into three parts, Drop, Primavera and Catena. Encompassing a love of organic forms, the curving silhouettes and considered techniques have been carried through to this year’s pieces.

bottegaveneta.com

Milan is synonymous with both style and design, so it is little surprise that it plays host to some of the world’s best fashion stores that also happen to have some of the best interiors.

As Milan Fashion Week A/W 2025 begins today, we have consulted some of the city’s most style-conscious residents to collate a list of its must-visit fashion stores, from hidden vintage hangouts to concept spaces and big-name boutiques.

A guide to the best fashion stores Milan has to offer

10 Corso Como

Arguably the world’s first concept store, 10 Corso Como changed how people shop, not only in Milan, but around the world. In 1991, former Elle Italia editor Carla Sozzani converted an old garage on what was then the outskirts of Milan into a gallery. From that initial idea, it quickly turned into what Sozzani once described to us (on the occasion of the opening of 10 Corso Como New York) as a ‘virtual 3D magazine’. The concept encompassed a boutique selling some of the most innovative new names in fashion at the time, and still today, like Maison Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons and Alaïa; an art bookstore; a café (an ideal location for an afternoon spritz) and even a hotel across the street.

Today, the Milan store still retains its Wunderkammer-like feel, with an endless assortment of some of the world’s most remarkable clothes, books, and trinkets. Yet, in 2024, 10 Corso Como got a new look with a dramatic renovation of its ground floor. Designed as a ‘flexible theatrical machine’, it features mobile and modular devices for displaying clothes that can be configured around the space in an infinite variety of ways; there’s also a gallery space and a project room for design pieces, vintage books and cult magazines.

Corso Como, 10. 20154 Milan, Italy

10corsocomo.com

Prada Galleria 1913

Miuccia Prada’s grandfather Mario Prada opened the first Prada store inside the historic Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II arcade in 1913 as a luxury travel goods shop. Today, the shop features Mrs Prada’s innovative collections – now designed with co-creative director Raf Simons – alongside its vast offering of leather travel goods. But while the items on the shelves have changed, the shelves themselves – exquisite mahogany constructions that Mario Prada commissioned a British architect to make – remain the same. Other classic elements include a marble black and white check floor and large red leather and wood tables where customers can interact with items before deciding on their purchase.

While you are there, don’t forget to take a look at the brand’s ‘Galleria handbag’, a square style that Mrs Prada created in 2007 in homage to the store, inspired by 1950s medicine bags and made with the house’s signature wax-treated saffiano leather.

Prada, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, 63-65, 20121, Milan.

prada.com

Bottega Veneta

While you are in the Galleria, don’t forget to stop by the nearby Bottega Veneta store. Opened under former creative director Matthieu Blazy, the two-storey space became the brand’s flagship in 2021. The design is centered around three materials – glass, Italian walnut wood, and green Verde Saint Denis Marble – which come together to create a space that features Italian modernist inspirations and, in Blazy’s words, ‘spaceship’ elements.

In keeping with the Bottega aesthetic Blazy cultivated before the end of his tenure there earlier this year, the space is enhanced by an array of idiosyncratic details. The golden glass door handles at the front entrance feature teardrop-motifs that are echoed in gold throughout the rest of the space; while green leather couches and chairs both upstairs and down have weave detailing in homage to the brand’s signature ‘intrecciato' designs.

Bottega Veneta, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, 20121 Milan

bottegaveneta.com

Antonia

A 40,000 sq ft luxury department retailer inside Milan’s historic Palazzo Cagnola, Antonia is widely considered one of the city’s most beautiful stores. The space is arranged according to three category types – menswear, womenswear, and five single-brand corners that focus on a rotating selection of labels.

Founder Antonia Giacinti is known for her meticulous taste and in-depth research, which is reflected in the eclectic and carefully considered range of clothing, accessories and shoes. Menswear focuses on more luxe streetwear, while a number of interesting brands can be found throughout, with niche Japanese labels sitting alongside iconic luxury names.

Antonia, Via Cusani, 5, 20121 Milan

antonia.it

JW Anderson

When Jonathan Anderson opened his store in the Quadrilatero – Milan’s main shopping district – in 2023, it marked his first outside of London for the brand and second JW Anderson store overall (the first store opened in Soho in 2020). The space has a neon red window in homage to its London sibling, but everything else about its design is filtered through a distinctly Italian sensibility.

A chequerboard terrazzo floor, walnut-fluted panels and hanging curtains create a welcoming atmosphere, while scaffolding-inspired shelves add an industrial touch. ‘For me, art is always going to be a language, it’s what I love,’ Anderson told us when the store opened. ‘I’m always discovering things I’m fascinated with or curious about. So designing a store, that’s the personal part. To me, they’re just as important as a show, if not more – because they need to last. I enjoy the process, and being involved in every decision down to the door handles. The furniture, the lighting – every aspect I choose to include.’

JW Anderson, Via Sant'Andrea, 16, 20121, Milan

jwanderson.com

No. 21

On the Quadrilatero you will also find the flagship for Milanese brand No. 21. Founded by Alessandro Dell'Acqua in 2010, the brand is best known for blending sharp tailoring with a sensual, modern femininity. That same style is reflected in the flagship’s design, which is both sleek and glamorous. Designed by architect Hannes Peer, who also designed No. 21’s Tokyo shop as well as its Milan headquarters, the brand's Milan space has been conceived as a ‘modernist palazzo’ with monochrome optical marble floor and midcentury furniture.

Spread over the three floors, the entrance space is a marble-filled area designed to introduce viewers to a vast array of clothes, while the second floor showcases the newest men’s and women’s clothing collection and the third room is dedicated to accessories.

No. 21, Via Santo Spirito, 14, 20121 Milan

numeroventuno.com

Slam Jam

Slam Jam is credited with having brought streetwear to Europe when, in 1989, founder Luca Benini started selling Stussy and Supreme in Italy. These days, Slam Jam is still known as one of the continent’s most preeminent purveyors of streetwear and hosts of some of the most buzzed-about events in Milan. Its flagship is located in Brera, the city’s historic design district, and sells collaborations with brands like Nike and Our Legacy, as well as streetwear staples like Kapital, Undercover, BrainDead and more. Spread over two floors, the space also features a dedicated pop-up room that frequently plays host to events and exhibitions.

Via Giovanni Lanza, 1, 20121 Milan

slamjam.com

Cavalli e Nastri + Cavalli e Nastri Uomo

Located down a secluded side street in Ticinese, Cavalli e Nastri and its menswear counterpart Cavalli e Nastri Uomo are two of the city’s best destinations for quality vintage. Cavalli e Nastri contains a plethora of designer finds from ready-to-wear to haute couture, as well as accessories, shoes and even a few home goods – it's the kind of place where you will find a 1980s Fendi kimono alongside a flapper dress from the 1920s.

Across the street is Cavalli e Nastri Uomo, which contains an equally impressive selection of menswear. Downstairs you’ll find outerwear and shirts from brands like Comme des Garçons and upstairs there is an array of suits, blazers and waistcoats from classic Italian labels.

Via Gian Giacomo Mora, 3, 20123 Milan

cavallienastri.com

La DoubleJ

La DoubleJ is known for channelling the joyful spirit of Italian living into fashion and, in the case of its Milan flagship, interiors. Located on Via Sant’Andrea in the Quadrilatero, the store is a vibrant space with emerald green walls, marble floors, and a lotus leaf installation covering the ceiling.

Inside, visitors will find racks packed with the brand’s signature brightly printed dresses, as well as a separate area with a wide array of homeware. Downstairs, you can find the Sacred Grotta, ‘a magical sanctuary conceived as a studio to help you guys fall into an experience of connecting to your feminine energy’. Events include pranayama workshops, heart-opening meditations and more.

La DoubleJ, Via Sant'Andrea, 10/A, 20121, Milan

ladoublej.com

Frip

It is easy to walk past Frip while strolling through the picturesque area around Basilica San Lorenzo, but if you are in the market for quality design pieces at relatively reasonable prices then you won’t want to miss it. Founded by a stylist and a DJ couple in the 1990s, the Scandinavia-inspired concept store sells men’s and women’s clothing from brands like Acne Studios, Ann-Sofie Back, Hope, Marios, Lucio Vanotti and Marques’Almeida. Alongside clothing, it also retails shoes, a rotation of jewellery and a range of international magazines.

Frip, Corso di Porta Ticinese, 16, 20123 Milan

@frip_milano

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.

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

Trompe l’oeil (top left)

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

Cut-outs (top right)

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

Reimagined plaid

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

Hybrid accessories

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

Spiralling silhouettes

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

Puzzle-piece construction

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

Blown-up tailoring

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

Shifted waistlines

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

Brown

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

Transparency

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

Open arms

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

Deconstruction

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

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

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

The fashion show has a tendency to be prescriptive. It tells its viewer what to wear, and often how. It proposes a certain silhouette – the hiking up of a hemline, the shift from the slender-cut to the oversized – or garment, which then becomes an object of desire. Often, these runway shows are filtered through a particular theme, which might be esoteric or universal; the next season, the designer will evolve that vision or reject it. And so the cycle goes on.

At Prada’s latest womenswear show, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons offered an alternative. In recent seasons, the co-creative directors have seemed to feel increasingly constricted by strict thematics. Instead, their shows together have become meditations on more abstract themes such as time or youth, which are open to interpretation. Even when they have elucidated a theme – a recent menswear show clashed corporate attire with outdoor wear – there was a feeling that they were seeking something more intangible, a sense of style that defies categorisation. ‘We try to make the best out of our work, to make beautiful things, for today,’ said Miuccia Prada, simply, in 2023. ‘That may sound banal, but it is the truth.’

S/S 2025 heralds a new era of fashion eclecticism

The S/S 2025 show, which was staged among snaking benches covered in sheets of raw-edge grey satin, operated more like an open-ended invitation: who do you want to be today? ‘Infinite options proffer infinite opportunities,’ said the house. These options comprised 49 entirely different looks to choose from; a collage of elements with barely a garment or idea repeated. There was no discernible diktat on silhouette, fabric or colour. Instead, it was an electrifying melange of ideas: 1960s swing coats in trompe l’oeil fur, luminous nylon windbreakers, satin gowns reminiscent of midcentury haute couture, bug-like sunglasses-cum-hats, BDSM hooks as adornment on leather belts, glimmering Space Age silver skirts dotted with huge round eyelets. The list went on.

Miuccia Prada called it ‘a Prada for every individual’. Simons concurred. ‘We thought of each individual as a superhero – with their own power, their own story,’ he said. ‘That reflects an idea of transformation – through your practice, actions or the clothes you wear. They’re all means to express a message about your personal strength. They can transform your perception of yourself.’

The pair said it was, in part, a reaction to the internet algorithm, evoking the feeling of an infinite scroll; an onslaught of information designed to mine our dopamine-fuelled desires. Miuccia Prada said it wasn’t necessarily a ‘critique’ of the technology, though she asserted it can silo us into ways of thinking and dressing. ‘[Everyone] sees their own version of the present; their own reality curated for them,’ she said. Because, despite the illusion of endless choice, the effect of an algorithm is more likely to smooth and homogenise: after hours of scrolling, everything eventually begins to look the same.

‘An incredible amount of information is collected on us all today. Everything you like is recorded by an algorithm. This is our proposal for an alternative,’ concluded Miuccia Prada. These were clothes to reassert your authority over what you wear; a riposte to the ‘derivative and the expected’.

As is so often the case with a Prada show, the collection would set the tone for a season whereby designers embraced the eclectic and advocated individual style, albeit in a multiplicity of ways. It led to collections that were infinitely richer in construction; more colour; more adornment; a certain nostalgia. Like at Prada, designers offered invitations: who do you want to be when you put on these clothes? How will you wear them? Will you mix or match?

It provides both a challenge and an opportunity for the wearer. By and large, designers rejected the swaddling safety of quiet luxury, and the reassurance of uniform dressing. It’s easy to put on an expensive sweater and jeans to walk out of the door in the morning; to wear a piece from Anthony Vaccarello’s opulent S/S 2025 collection for Saint Laurent – its flourishes of brocade and lace inspired by the heady rush of Yves Saint Laurent’s 1970s oeuvre – is an altogether bolder proposition. The same goes for the strange and seductive clashes of colour and print at Dries Van Noten, or the dishevelled glamour of a Numeroventuno collection inspired by the rebellious female subjects of Austrian photographer Karlheinz Weinberger.

‘I took their creative spirit, which, in my opinion, came from their urge to put different fads and fashions together,’ said creative director Alessandro Dell’Acqua. ‘They reinvented themselves day after day.’

Bolder still are the riotous creations of Benjamin Barron and Bror August Vestbrø at Paris label All-In, which offers a playful ode to the perennial party girl (ruffles, sequins and a purposeful dishevelment are de rigueur). This season, the pair took inspiration from Melanie Griffiths’ character Tess McGill from 1980s romcom Working Girl, a figure who uses clothing to transform herself. Staged against the backdrop of a late-evening Parisian sky, it was a collection that conjured up the thrill of flicking through a fashion magazine as a teenager (indeed, All-In began life as a magazine).

At Louis Vuitton, models pounded a raised runway in looks that also evoked 1980s abundance, albeit with Nicolas Ghesquière’s futuristic, postmodern sheen. He has always been a master of eclectic style, and is steadfast in his rejection of thematics or trends, instead ricocheting between centuries and place, the real and the imagined. There might be a gulf between the might of a house like Louis Vuitton and the wildness of All-In, but the resulting collections were rooted in the same feeling of self-expression, a no-holds-barred approach.

These were the highlights of the season. So too was Matthieu Blazy’s latest collection for Bottega Veneta, which would also be his last (in December, he was announced as the new artistic director of Chanel). For S/S 2025, he thought about the ‘primal’ moment of a child dressing up in a parent’s clothing, seeing oversized shapes meet illustrated animals, tasselled wigs and a pile-up of floral appliqué. It’s not a stretch to say the unbridled joy of the collection helped him secure what is arguably fashion’s top job. And, with close to a dozen new creative directors beginning their tenure in 2025 – from Sarah Burton at Givenchy to Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford – the challenge is for designers to be equally fearless in their conviction. To stoke desire, clothes have to say something again. There will likely be reward in risk.

Here, we have imagined similar acts of transformation and invention; the feeling of stepping through a door in the boldest of looks. It is an ode to personal style, an invitation to get dressed up again. Take inspiration from these pages, or don’t. Search out the new or reinvent the old. Express yourself. Who do you want to be today? The options are infinite.

Model: Katlin Aas at Supreme Management. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Set build: London Art Makers.. Hair: Masayoshi Fujita at Of Substance Agency using Oribe. Make-up: Sandra Cooke using Victoria Beckham. Beauty. Manicure: Cherrie Snow at Snow Creatives using Pleasing. Digi tech: John Cronin. Photography assistant: Charlotte Ellis. Fashion assistant: Nathan Fox. Set and 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.

While January might typically be a month of piety and abstinence, we have always been proponents of embracing the new year in a more celebratory fashion. Particularly when it comes to clothing – after all, in the year’s darkest months, there is still joy to be had in dressing up.

Here, taken from the January 2025 issue of Wallpaper* – a celebration of a new era of design – photographer Dham Srifuengfung and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes capture the best men’s and women’s looks from the Resort 2025 collections, which herald the beginning of a new year in style.

The best Resort 2025 fashion

Reflecting a wider shift in fashion, away from the quiet and the beige, the Resort 2025 collections are defined by a mood of nostalgia and eclecticism, with looks made to be mixed and matched with abandon – whether flourishes of animal print or faux fur, pussybows or neckties, or playful combinations, like a classic Dunhill tuxedo worn with MM6’s riff on the carpenter jean.

Each look comes complete with an equally sonic accessory: an assemblage of vintage music devices, from Walkmans and Discmans to dictaphones and iPods. It’s our nod to the season’s free-spirited mood: we imagine these looks as ones to pound the streets in (complete with your own soaring soundtrack) or for letting loose at your very own silent disco.

Models: Giovanna Pinho and Anick Chan at IMG, Valentin Haedecke, Raad Al Gabril and Abdallah El Farjani at Supa Management, Jamie Riselay, Kentha Kirezi and Marcello Chang at The Milk Collective, Zhou at Linden Staub. Casting: Hien Le Casting. Hair: Anna Cofone using Authentic Beauty Concept. Make-up: Faye Bluff at Of Substance Agency using Surratt. Props stylist: Haleimah Darwish. Photography assistants: Emmet Banahan, Ben McManus. Fashion assistants: Lucy Proctor, Leonie Dennett. Hair assistants: Jessica Hau, Lee-Anne Willoux. Make-up assistants: Craig Hamilton, Lily Simmonds. Props assistant: Kash. Production assistants: Archie Thomson, Ady Huq.

A version of this article appears in the January 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.

Unboxing beauty products on Boxing Day? Well, metaphorically speaking, why not?

Here, we take a look back at the pages of Wallpaper* from the past year, reflecting on the make-up, perfume, tools and accessories that defined our 2024.

Unboxing beauty products from 2024, as seen on the pages of Wallpaper*

Chanel lipstick in Wallpaper* February 2024: The Design Awards Issue

In the February 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, we presented a design award to the Chanel ‘31 Le Rouge lipstick’. The lipstick comes in several shades and textures, all created to be housed in a glass case crafted by Japanese artisans and designed by Sylvie Legastelois.

Read the full article here.

MyBlend led mask in Wallpaper* March 2024: The Style Issue

For the first Wallpaper* Style Issue of the year in March 2024, we turned the spotlight on the MyBlend ‘myLedmask’, with its uniquely contoured design slightly reminiscent of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In.

Read the full article here.

Acne Studios x Frédéric Malle perfume in Wallpaper* April 2024: Global Interiors

We spoke with the creative director of Acne Studios Jonny Johansson, fragrance legend Frédéric Malle and emerging nose Suzy Le Helley about their collaborative work on ‘Acne Studios par Frédéric Malle’ eau de parfum, previewed in the April 2024 issue of Wallpaper*.

Read the full article here.

Bottega Veneta scented candle in Wallpaper* June 2024: The Travel Issue

Bottega Veneta launched scented candles earlier this year, with three different fragrances available in red, yellow and green lava glaze ceramic pots. We captured the brand’s ‘Redstone’ candle on the pages of Wallpaper* June 2024, which contains notes of plum nectar, tobacco and cedarwood.

Read the full article here.

Rimowa vanity case in Wallpaper* June 2024: The Travel Issue

Rimowa's vanity case also made its debut in Wallpaper* June 2024, our annual travel issue. A reimagined 1970s design from the Rimowa archives, the case is robust enough to contain a multitude of products and tools without fear of damage whilst on the move.

Read the full article here.

Fendi perfumes in Wallpaper* July 2024: The Design Directory

In 2024, Fendi created seven exclusive perfumes, inspired by the personalities and memories of close members of the Fendi family. The collection, which we included in the July issue of Wallpaper*, features refillable glass bottles evoking the vocabulary of Roman architecture.

Read the full article here.

Calvin Klein CK One perfume in Wallpaper* August 2024: The USA 100

The August 2024 issue of Wallpaper* was dedicated US creatives, with an accompanying portfolio shot by Inez and Vinoodh. In addition, we looked at 12 American design icons, including Calvin Klein’s ‘CK One’ eau de toilette. First released in 1994, the fragrance remains a best seller to this day.

Read the full article here.

Solid soap in Wallpaper* September 2024: The Style Issue

For Wallpaper* September 2024, the year’s second issue dedicated to style, we celebrated the pleasures of solid soap, including bars from the likes of Aesop, Celine, Diptyque, Hermès and Sisley.

Read the full article here.

Celine Beauté lipstick in Wallpaper* October 2024: Guest Editors

Celine launched its first-ever beauty line in October 2024, Celine Beauté. Designed by Hedi Slimane, who has since left the house in the hands of his successor Michael Rider, the ‘Le Rouge Celine’ lipstick in a shade of red called 'Rouge Triomphe’ made its Wallpaper* premiere in the same monthly issue.

Read the full article here.

Hermès eye and lip pencils in Wallpaper* November 2024: The Art Issue

Hermès’ ‘Trait d’Hermès’ eye and lip pencils were designed by Pierre Hardy and Gregoris Pyrpylis, the house’s creative director of beauty, to evoke a playful stationary set. We captured the collection’s kaleidoscopic colour palette in Wallpaper* November 2024.

Read the full article here.

Bottega Veneta perfume in Wallpaper* November 2024: The Art Issue

Bottega Veneta’s fragrance collection by Matthieu Blazy (now succeeded by Louise Trotter after his appointment as creative director at Chanel) includes five scents inspired by Venice, with bottles blown in Murano glass. Above, is the brand’s ‘Come With Me’ eau de parfum, as featured in the November 2024 issue of Wallpaper*.

Read the full article here.

Dior perfumes in Wallpaper* December 2024: The Entertaining Issue

In 2024, Francis Kurkdjian, the creative director of Dior Parfums took five fragrances from the house’s ‘La Collection Privée’, reinterpreting their notes in ‘Esprit de Parfum’, a new scent range featured on the pages of Wallpaper’s December Entertaining Issue.

Read the full article here.

Dries Van Noten lipsticks in Wallpaper* December 2024: The Entertaining Issue

After taking a final bow on the runway earlier in the year, for the December 2024 issue of Wallpaper* we caught up with Dries Van Noten about his next steps, which include growing the beauty and fragrance arm of his eponymous brand (and spending more time in his beloved garden).

Read the full article here.

2024 was a year of fashion ephemera, whereby designers spoke not only through the clothing they showed on the runway, but the objects which they chose to populate their universes. The result was a conveyor of printed publications, furniture, artist collaborations, edible produce and collectable invites, which were often as intriguing and illuminating as the collections themselves.

Here, we look towards seven objects which tell the story of fashion in 2024, none of which are items of clothing or accessories. Some speak of a newly intimate relationship between fashion and design, like Sabato De Sarno’s reissue of an Enzo Mari classic for Gucci, while others – like Willy Chavarria’s enormous American flag – symbolise an engagement with the wider political landscape. Others are simply gleefully surreal: Blonde Ambition Madonna wigs at Dolce & Gabbana, JW Anderson’s pint of Guinness, or a series of giant cats at Dior Men.

Collated by Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss, together they provide an unconventional but illuminating portrait of style in 2024.

Bottega Veneta’s beanbag animals

Matthieu Blazy said he wanted his S/S 2025 collection for Bottega Veneta to capture the ‘power of wow’, mining a mood of childlike wonder for a vibrant collection which featured animal motifs, colourful tasselled wigs, plays on corner-shop plastic bags, crocheted flowers and enormous tailoring, as if a child was playing dress up in their parents’ clothing. It captured a new mood of eclecticism that pulsated through the season – from Prada to Louis Vuitton – and was presented in Milan amid a menagerie of leather beanbag animals. Inspired by Zanotta’s Sacco easy chair, each guest had a different animal – from yellow chicks to killer whales and foxes – with Blazy saying that he was inspired by the scene in E.T. whereby the titular extra-terrestrial conceals himself in a closet full of soft toys. Looking through a child’s eyes, said Blazy, allowed him to take a creative leap. ‘In a kid’s world everything is possible. You can really approach reality in a different way.’ It would also prove to be his final show for the house: last week, he was announced as the new artistic director of Chanel (at Bottega Veneta, Louise Trotter will take the helm). Read more.

Gucci’s reissue of Enzo Mari’s perpetual calendar

Since the beginning of his tenure as creative director of Gucci, Sabato De Sarno has forged links with the design world: in 2023, just after his appointment, he collaborated with a slew of Italian furniture titans to reissue their most memorable pieces in his own signature shade of oxblood ‘Ancora’ red (the project included designs by Piero Castiglioni, Mario Bellini, Tobia Scarpa, and more). It fit with a wider embrace of the design world from fashion in 2024 – proved by the numerous houses which took over this year’s Salone del Mobile – and was complemented later in the year with a reissue of Enzo Mari’s perpetual calendar, which served as the invite for De Sarno’s S/S 2025 womenswear show in Milan. It reflected a collection he described as about ‘a precise moment in time... a moment to seize and live to the fullest. This collection is a tribute to those moments, and an invitation to stop, seek your own moment.’ Read more.

Dolce & Gabbana’s Madonna wigs

It was perhaps Milan Fashion Week’s worst-kept secret: Madonna, the queen of pop, would be turning up to Dolce & Gabbana’s S/S 2025 show (she is a longtime wearer of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s high-voltage clothing). Arriving clad in a black veil and evoking the house’s brand of Sicilian glamour, the show itself would prove an ode to the musician, with each and every model clad in a Blonde Ambition-esque wig and wearing riffs on Madonna’s signature outfits, including Jean Paul-Gaultier’s pneumatic cone bra. It was a reminder of the fashion show as entertainment, a joyous celebration of a figure who has long defined pop culture – indeed, fashion. ‘Madonna has always been our icon. It’s thanks to her that a lot of things in our lives changed,’ the designers said, embracing a clearly emotional Madonna at the end of the show.

JW Anderson’s pint of Guinness

In one of the more unexpected – and yet somehow totally fitting – fashion collaborations of 2024, JW Anderson united with Irish stout producers Guinness for a capsule collection which first appeared as part of the brand’s S/S 2025 menswear show this past June in Milan. Encapsulating Jonathan Anderson’s eye for the idiosyncratic, historical Guinness advertising adorned sweaters and T-shirts in the playful capsule. ‘I’ve always been obsessed by Guinness and their brand,’ he said. ‘I think they are still today one of the greatest advertisers... I’ve always wanted to be able to show some of it, because in fashion we think we are so radical but actually, Guinness was way before all of that.’ It made for perhaps 2024’s best fashion party: a celebrity-filled Guinness-on-tap booze-up at buzzy London pub The Devonshire, purportedly the best pull of Guinness in town (we drunk responsibly, of course).

Hylton Nel’s cats at Dior Men

‘Homepsun monumentalism’ is how Kim Jones described the work of South African potter-artist Hylton Nel, who provided the inspiration behind his latest collection for Dior Men. On the runway, Nel’s playful, naive cat sculptures – which feature hand-drawn motifs and anthropomorphic elements – were blown up to enormous size, while the collection itself the artist’s work became pins, embroidery and intarsia knits. ‘He’s an old friend of mine, I’ve known him maybe 12 years,’ Jones told Wallpaper*. ‘I love his work, and I wanted to take that idea of working with an artist and working it through the Dior archive.’ Capturing not only the veneration of homespun craft which has run throughout the year’s collections, but it was also one of a slew of art-led show sets, from Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s twisted living room for Acne Studios to Gary Hume’s reimagining of a 1990 work to backdrop Burberry’s S/S 2025 show in London. Read more.

Miu Miu’s ‘The Truthless Times’ newspaper

Miu Miu‘s S/S 2025 show took place amid a set created by London-based, Poland-born artist Goshka Macuga, evocative of a printing press. Over the ceiling ran moving conveyors of hundreds of hanging newspapers: copies of ‘The Truthless Times’, a satirical publication dreamt up by Macuga to capture the disorientating times in which we live (‘Endings Unending as Future Moves to Past’ ran one of the purposely impenetrable headlines). ‘The struggle for truth and meaning in contemporary society,’ said Macuga of the installation, which also featured a short film of sparring lovers amid a futuristic printers (the work was also part of Art Basel Paris 2024 later in the year, supported by the brand). Miuccia Prada responded with a collection which looked towards youth – a ‘period of absolute truth.’ ‘It’s a reaction to an era of overstimulation and over-information, simplicity in clothing may offer clarity and precision, and serve as an honest frame of character,’ elaborated the ever-perceptive designer.

Willy Chavarria’s American flag

Willy Chavarria’s S/S 2025 show was titled ‘América’ – a nod, said the designer, to the immigrant communities who take on the weight of the country’s labour (Chavarria is of Mexican-American descent). Taking place on Wall Street – a temple to American commerce – the show’s runway was backdropped by an enormous American flag. It was given greater significance by the then-looming American election, which would take place two months afterwards in November (as guests left they were given a sticker to remind them to vote). ‘Given the time that we're in – around the corner from a major election – I wanted to shine light on the people who make this country work, and also celebrate immigration and those people who have built the country and are still the backbone of the country,’ he told Wallpaper* at the time, reflecting a wider mood at New York Fashion Week whereby designers grappled what it meant to be an American designer today. ‘We haven't had the opportunities or the benefits that a lot of our white brothers and sisters have had. It's about giving, showing dignity to all of these people.’ Read more.

Beauty and fashion are close bedfellows. But in 2024, this relationship got even cosier, with a litany of turbocharged crossovers between the two disciplines.

The year began with Pat McGrath’s viral porcelain doll make-up for John Galliano’s tenure-defining Maison Margiela Artisanal S/S 2024 show. Later, during September’s S/S 2025 show season, Olivier Rousteing welcomed the much-anticipated Balmain Beauty. (As well as releasing a line of perfumes called ‘Les Éternels’, the Balmain runway collection included clothes and accessories directly referencing the fragrance bottles, alongside yet-to-be-released products such as lipsticks and eyeshadows).

In October, Celine debuted its first-ever beauty line, with a red lipstick called ‘Rouge Celine’, designed by Hedi Slimane. (Slimane announced his departure from the house soon after). During the same month, Matthieu Blazy unveiled a collection of Bottega Veneta fragrances in Murano glass bottles. Last week (12 December 2024) it was revealed that Blazy would be stepping down from Bottega Veneta and into the role of creative director at Chanel. The day before that, news broke that John Galliano would be exiting Maison Margiela.

If one is to believe fashion’s rumour mill, there are more major changes yet to come in the new year. But if the past 12 months have taught us anything, beauty is going to be a huge part of whatever these changes may be. Here, Wallpaper* takes a closer look at a selection of key fashion-meets-beauty moments, which set the tone for 2025 and beyond.

How 2024 brought beauty and fashion closer than ever before

Beauty on the runway, from Maison Margiela to Marc Jacobs

Even if you still haven’t seen the videos of Maison Margiela Artisanal S/S 2024, where John Galliano’s cast of models (including the likes of Gwendoline Christie) staggered beneath the arches of the Pont Alexandre III in Paris, dressed as dolls plucked straight from Émile Zola’s demi-monde, you’ll have seen the make-up. Or, perhaps the endless reproductions of it across Instagram and TikTok at least. After all, almost immediately after the Pat McGrath-created look appeared on the runway, the internet was ablaze with beauty creators trying to decode the secret formula to the waxen, porcelain skin.

The hubbub around the look reached such a fever pitch that McGrath eventually weighed in herself, sharing the lengthy list of products – including a dizzy combination of peeling masques layered and dried directly on the skin with a hairdryer – that it took to achieve. (Ever the savvy entrepreneur, though, Dame Pat also revealed that her empire-scale beauty business, Pat McGrath Labs, is in the process of developing an all-in-one product for fans eager to get the look).

If there’s another fashion figure who won big in the beauty stakes this year, it would have to be Marc Jacobs, who collaborated with McGrath on a limited edition ‘MatteTrance’ lipstick to mark the 40th anniversary of the American design’s namesake brand.

On the runway, however, it was the S/S 2024 40th anniversary Marc Jacobs show, held in March, which saw the likes of Alex Consani and Kaia Gerber transformed into living dolls (a key theme this year, it would seem).

Strutting out from beneath large-scale Robert Therrien sculptures, their clumped eye make-up by Diane Kendal was offset with hectic 1960s-esque bouffants from Duffy. The label’s second show of the year for A/W 2024, which took place in July, pushed the all-pervasive doll theme yet further, with models sporting cartoonish overblown pastel eyelid covers, sewn from fabrics and trimmed with spidery faux lashes.

Beauty-inspired collections, from Balmain to Abra

But runway beauty went the extra mile in 2024, with collections even taking direct inspiration from beauty products themselves.

At Balmain, Olivier Rousteing used the house’s S/S 2025 show, staged in September, as an opportunity to toast a new line of perfumes called ‘Les Éternels’ and tease yet-to-be-released Balmain Beauty products. Flacon-shaped clutches, trompe l’oeil lipstick heels and eyeshadow palette pochettes figured alongside dresses embroidered with depictions of scarlet tinted lips and lacquered nails. (In 2022, Balmain partnered with Estée Lauder to bring Balmain Beauty to life. William P. Lauder, grandson of Estée and chairman of executive chairman of The Estée Lauder Companies, watched the collection unfold from the front row).

Elsewhere, independent label Abra leaned into beauty-inspired design for its A/W 2024 show, presented over Paris Fashion Week in February. The brand was founded in 2019 by Abraham Ortūno Perez, who has worked with Jonathan Anderson on footwear for both JW Anderson and Loewe. In particular, Perez is responsible for the former’s giant chain mules and the latter's surrealist sandals for S/S 2022, which included heels in hyper-realistic broken eggs, bars of soap and bottles of nail polish.

For the Abra collection in question, make-up brushes were transformed into necklaces, while lipsticks and mini eyeshadow palettes became earrings and brooches. There was also an oversized white T-shirt dress, which appeared as though the model had wiped her hands on it after applying foundation.

Beauty launches, from Celine to Bottega Veneta

2024 was as much about what landed on shop floors as what we saw on the runways, with the year bringing a glut of beauty launches from brands and houses.

One of the most memorable is Celine’s first-ever make-up product, ‘Le Rouge Celine’, a classic satin-finish scarlet hue that comes in an exquisite gold case, developed under the direction of Hedi Slimane. The entire cosmetics line, Celine Beauté, is set to continue under his successor Michael Rider, with more products such as eyeliner, eye pencils and more coming next year.

Elsewhere, Victoria Beckham’s booming beauty empire expanded further, with a collaboration with Augustinus Bader on a concealer pen, which contains the science-led skincare brand’s patented TFC8 technology. Augustinus Bader, which was founded by its namesake biomedical scientist and CEO Charles Rosier, is no stranger to fashion partnerships, having previously teamed up with the likes of Haider Ackermann. (On another note, Ackermann joined Tom Ford in September 2024, drumming up intrigue around the direction the French-Colombian designer will take its revered fragrance and beauty line, which recently put out a lipstick campaign starring Angelina Jolie).

Victoria Beckham Beauty debuted ‘21:50 Rêverie’ – a scent inspired by a twilight dinner she and her husband David once had in the Javan rainforest – by perfuming the designer’s S/S 2025 show space with it. (This wasn't the only time that scent was seen on the runway this year, with Burberry perfuming its A/W 2024 show space with ‘Ivy’ by Perfumer H).

Acolytes of Matthieu Blazy’s Bottega Veneta were blessed with scented candles in volcano-glazed pots and five perfumes including ‘Come With Me’ and ‘Acqua Sale’, all inspired by Venice, the ultra-luxe label’s home city. Each was housed in glass bottles that echoed the texture of handblown Murano and perched on a miniature Verde Saint Denis marble plinth.

Beauty and fashion in 2025, from Dries Van Noten to Miu Miu

Keeping track of the developing relationship between the worlds of fashion and beauty in 2024 was truly a head-spinning task. This year also saw Dries van Noten take a final bow as creative director of his brand, after almost a decade at its helm. (On 9 December, it was revealed that Julian Klausner would succeed him).

However, Van Noten will continue to work on its beauty and fragrance division, stoking excitement around how its offering could develop. As the designer told Wallpaper* in the December 2024 issue: ‘My life changed quite a lot this year,’ he says. ‘It’s an exciting time. We had some storms, with big trees falling over, so there is more work to do in the garden and some thinking to be done.’

Perhaps the launch to look out for next year, though, is the arrival of Miu Miu beauty. Launching by way of a licencing agreement with L’Oréal, the new line expands the Prada Group’s beauty foothold, which was first established in 2023 with Prada Beauty, under the creative direction of Lyndsey Alexander.

It is also worth keeping an eye on Chanel. Although beauty and fragrance will not be under new creative director Matthieu Blazy’s direct purview, it will nonetheless be interesting to see how his creative vision informs and interacts with this vital and storied branch of the French house.

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

Matthieu Blazy has been appointed as Chanel’s new creative director. ‘I am thrilled and honoured to join the wonderful House of Chanel. I look forward to meeting all the teams and writing this new chapter together,’ he said in a statement issued this evening.

Since the departure of Virginie Viard from the house this past June – Viard had worked at the house for three decades since the departure of Karl Lagerfeld in 2019 – rumours have swirled through the vaunted halls of Paris’ great houses as to who would become her successor. (There have been rumoured sightings of designers at the Chanel offices, some purportedly high-profile job interviews, and near-endless conjecture and chatter from the front row).

Matthieu Blazy is is Chanel’s new creative director

But the noise is now quieted. Blazy, exiting Italian house Bottega Veneta, will become the latest artistic director of Chanel, arguably fashion’s biggest job (at least, if Lagerfeld was anything to go by, the highest profile). Announced in the wake of Chanel’s Métiers d’art show in Hangzhou, China, Blazy’s appointment will be immediate, with his first show taking place next February during Paris Fashion Week. He will oversee ready-to-wear, accessories and haute couture and design the house’s Cruise and Métiers d’art collection.

Blazy was born in Paris in 1984, before moving to Belgium to study fashion as the prestigious La Cambre school in Brussels (other notable alumni include Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello, Rabanne’s Julien Dossena and Courrèges’ Nicolas Di Felice). An industry stalwart, he went on to work at Raf Simons as men’s designer, at Maison Margiela overseeing the Artisanal line and women’s ready-to-wear, and Celine, under Phoebe Philo.

However, it was at Bottega Veneta – which he joined after briefly working again with Simons when he became creative director at Calvin Klein in 2016 – that would thrust Blazy into the spotlight. Working again behind the scenes as the number two to Daniel Lee during the British designer’s transformative tenure at the house, in 2021, after Lee exited to go to Burberry, Blazy was appointed as creative director.

His critically lauded and commercially successful tenure at the house (in October 2023, it was the only house in the Kering roster to make a profit in the conglomerate’s third quarter) has been defined by a playful use of the house’s historic leather atelier. Notably, his first collection featured a pair of blue denim ‘jeans’ which were actually trompe l’oeil leather; other such visual tricks have featured throughout his collections. Often riffing on quotidien garments in luxurious fashion, his collections have drawn inspiration from the dress codes of the Italian street (his opening trilogy).

His greatest success, though, is bags: his Andiamo handbag, which is crafted from the house’s intreccato woven leather with a looping golden clasp, has become ubiquitous. Other successes have included the Sardine bag (a reference to its metal fish-shaped handle), the Kalimero, and the roomy Hop bag. He has also forged strong links with the design world – collaborators have included Gaetano Pesce, Flos and Cassina – while in October 2024 he launched his first fragrance, encased in a dramatic Murano-glass bottle.

‘I am delighted to welcome Matthieu Blazy. I am convinced that he will be able to play with the codes and heritage of the House, through an ongoing dialogue with the Studio, our Ateliers, and our Maisons d'art. His audacious personality, his innovative and powerful approach to Creation, as well as his dedication to craftsmanship and beautiful materials, will take C in exciting new directions,’ said Bruno Pavlovsky, President of Chanel Fashion and Chanel SAS.

Louise Trotter will succeed Blazy at Bottega Veneta. Trotter joins the house from Carven, where she was appointed as creative director in 2023. ‘I am deeply honoured to join Bottega Veneta as Creative Director. The House’s storied legacy of artistry and innovation is truly inspiring, and I am excited to contribute to its future and celebrate its timeless vision,’ says the British designer.

In Italian, ‘bottega’ is used to refer to a traditional shop whereby the items on sale are made in an attached workshop (its etymology comes from the Latin word for warehouse, ‘apotheca’, and can also be used to refer to artists’ studios). As such, it conjures in the mind a more bygone era, one of homespun tradition and local expertise, of winding Italian streets and buzzing cobblers, bookmakers and woodworkers.

It is this sense of culture and tradition that Bottega Veneta – no doubt the most well-known ‘bottega’ in the world – hopes to evoke with ‘Bottega for Bottegas’, a project that now takes place annually and sees the Italian fashion house draft local artisans, from both Italy and beyond, to create a series of special items which arrive just in time for the festive season. Think of it as a unique, ready-made gift list for even the fussiest of loved ones; last year, products came from a round-the-world odyssey, spanning Italy, Taiwan, China and South Korea.

This year, Bottega Veneta is staying closer to home, seeking out six artisans from in and around Venice to contribute to the curation (the house was founded in 1966 in Vicenza, Italy, just outside of Venice). The edit is evocative of a curiosity shop or wunderkammer, spanning a wooden puzzle of a traditional Venetian home or palazzo by Signor Blum, a carpentry workshop that creates children’s toys and sculptures inspired by its home city, playing cards encased in a leather sheath by Modiano, a printer known for its luxurious card games, and a metal winged lion and gondola prow by traditional foundry Fonderia Artistica Valese.

Elsewhere is a striped glass vase by Laguna~B in local Murano glass, a Murano-glass starfish by Bruno Amadi, and a colourful tabletop glass sculpture by Robert Beltrami of Wave Murano Glass, which is currently the youngest factory on the island of Murano.

Led by the house’s creative director Matthieu Blazy, the Bottega for Bottegas project – which will also take over international billboards this Christmas – encapsulates the designer’s desire to elevate Bottega Veneta with traditional craft (albeit in playful, offbeat fashion, like a recent reproduction of a Richard Scarry children’s book in the house’s woven ‘intrecciato’ leather). ‘Craft is not a trend. Neither is it something that has to be improved. It is a timeless technology,’ Blazy has previously said. ‘The irregularities of handwork make each Bottega Veneta design unique. This for me is true luxury.’

Discover Bottega for Bottegas at bottegaveneta.com and the house’s stores.

bottegaveneta.com

And so it begins: the turning of November to December marks the start of the festive season, as advent calendars are opened and halls are decked with gleaming displays and stacked-up Christmas trees (for inspiration, see this year’s Claridge’s Christmas tree designed by Paul Smith, or for the less traditional, Kengo Kuma's minimal wooden displays in Tokyo’s two Edition outposts).

Here, in our own annual tradition, the Wallpaper* style team has selected a line-up of Christmas baubles from fashion’s best-known names, providing the perfect festive adornment for the fashion fan this holiday season. From Bottega Veneta’s surreal, undulating ornaments to Loewe’s fantastical collaboration with Suna Fujita, or some truly luxurious cashmere pom-poms from Loro Piana, they will accessorise your tree in style.

Christmas baubles for style fans

Bottega Veneta

Matthieu Blazy’s gourd-like tree ornaments are satisfyingly surreal – all the more so in this vivid banana-yellow and black colourway (an alternative to the usual green and red Christmas fayre). Crafted using a traditional Polish technique, the glass ornament’s undulating texture is inspired by the Italian house’s ‘intrecciato’ woven leather.

Available from: bottegaveneta.com, £140 for two.

Loewe x Suna Fujita

‘Childhood dreamscapes’ inspire a new collection of clothing, accessories and trinkets from Loewe in collaboration with whimsical Japanese ceramicist Suna Fujita released in time for festive gifting. Alongside, a menagerie of animals to decorate your Christmas tree – like this colourful dotted octopus with Loewe-branded ribbon tie.

Available from: mytheresa.com, £75 for one.

Celine

An elegant line-up of the house’s motifs – from the ‘Triomphe’ logo to a perfume bottle and handbag – make up this selection of gilded baubles from Celine. In an expression of Parisian savoir-faire, each one is handpainted by Celine artisans, and come encased in a gift-worthy white Celine box.

Available from: celine.com, £270 for three.

Prada

These sleek Prada baubles take their geometric designs from the flooring of Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, where the Italian house’s first-ever store was opened in 1913 by Mario and Martino Prada (back then, it was called ‘Fratelli Prada’ – 'Prada Brothers' – and sold luggage). Available in red and white or black and white, each set of four is hand-crafted from glass and stamped with the Prada logo.

Available from: prada.com, £380 for four.

Hermès

This sweet leather charm, depicting a horse in flight, was crafted using the near-unparalleled expertise of the Hermès artisans (in particular, those who usually make the house’s leather gloves). And, while a fittingly festive adornment for the tree, it doubles as a bag charm for a sprinkle of year-round magic.

Available from: hermes.com, £660 for one.

Saint Laurent

Part of the house’s Rive Gauche line – a collection of Saint Laurent-branded ephemera, from travel mugs to ski helmets – this heart-shaped decoration is crafted from silver-coloured metal and engraved with ‘Saint Laurent’. The heart motif was a particular favourite of house founder Yves Saint Laurent, whose ‘coeur fétiche’ (‘heart luck charm’) necklace – created by jewellery Roger Scemama – would appear in almost every runway show from the early 1960s to his retirement in 2002.

Available from: saintlaurent.com, £130 for one.

Gucci

Add a touch of Italian glamour to your tree with this set of Gucci baubles, made from traditional mouth-blown Murano glass and completed with the house’s signature webbing-stripe ribbon. They are part of a luxurious line-up of gifts designed by creative director Sabato De Sarno, spanning fantastical luggage sets, animal-shaped bag charms and a pair of shimmering crystal-adorned pumps.

Available from: gucci.com, £485 for two.

Loro Piana

We first glimpsed these ultra-chic baubles at Loro Piana’s festive takeover of Harrods, which opened last month with a series of transporting displays along the department store’s Brompton Road facade. Crafted from the house’s signature cashmere in a series of warm, natural hues, they will add a textural flourish to any Christmas tree.

Available from: loropiana.com, £1080 for six.

A sense of childhood wonder permeated Matthieu Blazy’s S/S 2025 collection for Bottega Veneta, shown this past September in Milan. ‘I was interested in the power of “wow”,’ he said at the time, presenting the show amid a menagerie of leather beanbag animals, which doubled as seats for the assembled guests. ‘[This collection] encompasses the joy of looking, discovering and dressing,’ he said of the eclectic collection, which featured tasselled leather headpieces, animal motifs and blown-up tailoring, like a child playing dress up. ‘[That] wonder you have as a kid when you try on your parent’s clothes; it’s almost primal.’

A similar mood infuses his latest collection, a Pre-Spring 2025 offering which was revealed by the designer earlier this month to coincide with its arrival in stores. There are oversized leopard-print ties and twisting snake earrings, shoes adorned with three-dimensional flowers and bold flushes of primary colour, while perhaps this year’s most unexpected accessory also features: a 62.5 x 52.5 cm edition of Richard Scarry’s seminal 1985 children’s book ‘Biggest Word Book Ever’, reimagined with a cover crafted from woven ‘intrecciato’ leather. Its appearance in the collection’s lookbook heralds a wider capsule collection inspired by Scarry’s work, arriving in selected stores and online today (25 November 2024).

Bottega Veneta Richard Scarry capsule collection

Befitting the playful mood of Scarry’s oeuvre, the special collection features a version of the house’s ‘Intrecciato Dust Bag’ in a colourful striped iteration, a red belt with apple-shaped metal clasp, a striped leather bag charm, and a series of striped wallets and cardholders. An apple-shaped coin pouch, crafted from ‘intrecciato’ leather, also features. Meanwhile the book itself, which is based on a 2013 edition of the ‘Biggest Word Book Ever’, features reprints of the original pages within the special cover, as well as a parallel ‘sketchbook’ edition with pages for drawing or writing. Of the cover itself, Blazy says it features ‘the best outfit in the world’ – namely the Tyrolean hat, bowtie and blue and green ‘body tube’ worn by the character of the ‘Lowly Worm’.

Scarry, who has sold over 100 million books, was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1919. Studying at the Art School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the late 1930s, before being drafted to World War II – where he used his drawing skills to disseminate news from Time magazine to troops via posters and flyers – he became a commercial artist in New York after returning home. Encouraged by an agent, his shift to children’s book illustration began in 1949 (‘Two Little Miners’ was his first published book, written by Margaret Wise Brown), though he would become best known for his ‘Best Ever’ series, set in ‘Busytown’ and of which ‘Biggest Word Book Ever’ was a part. He would die in 1994, aged 74, in Gstaad, Switzerland.

‘I’m not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten,’ he once said. ‘I am very happy when people have worn out my books, or that they're held together by Scotch tape.’

The Bottega Veneta Richard Scarry capsule collection is available in selected international stores and at bottegaveneta.com.

bottegaveneta.com

In partnership with Bottega Veneta

Gino Sarfatti’s Model 600 Lamp is a favourite for discerning design fans. When it was first unveiled at the Triennale in 1968, no one had seen a light quite like it and it has remained as curious and covetable to this day. So it is with great excitement that we greet the announcement of a special edition Model 600 – the result of a collaboration between Bottega Veneta and Flos, two brands with an eye for an icon and a commitment to craft.

Born in Venice in 1912, Sarfatti was one of the most pioneering and prolific lighting designers of the post-war period. He founded Arteluce in 1939 and designed more than 600 lights over the course of his life. As with the great Italian modernists he married advances in technology and manufacturing with a lovable humanity, and his Model 600 is a perfect case in point. It is famous for its stitched leather base filled with lead pellets, which turns the humble light fixture into a friendly companion. For all that we love the precision engineering of a trusty anglepoise, the satisfying squash of a pellet-filled sack is more fun to play with, and arguably does a better job of angling your light source exactly where you want it.

Sarfatti designed the Model 600 in 1966, the same year that Bottega Veneta was founded in Vicenza. The Model 600 was originally manufactured by Arteluce, which Saraftti sold to Flos in 1973, so it feels fitting that Bottega Veneta and Flos have joined forces to bring the Model 600 back to life. The partnership, overseen by Bottega Veneta’s creative director Matthieu Blazy, has been respectful and faithful to the charm of the original design, honouring Sarfatti’s design ingenuity while gently flexing the brands’ own commitment to craft and innovation, both sensitively and appropriately.

What’s new and noteworthy is the leather base, to which Bottega Veneta has introduced its signature Infilato and Foulard Intrecciato techniques, adding a grown-up handsome elegance to the more preppy sack of the original. The characterful shape of the original’s bulb is present and correct, updated here with the latest LED technology. Suitable not just on the desk but on any surface or floor, the special edition comes in two sizes and is available in a variety of colourways. These include black, grey, red, emerald green and Bottega Veneta’s signature green, which brings a verdant verve to proceedings.

Find out more and shop the lamps at bottegaveneta.comand flos.com

While some people doom scroll on social media, I do so on shopping websites, finding a way to reward my dopamine sensors by ordering by ‘new in’ and swiping away until I’m just about as familiar with the entirety of said websites’ merchandise as their own employees (followed by a leisurely scroll back to the top just in case). And, while I hope to leave this habit in 2024, my near-encyclopedic knowledge of the merchandise of just about every fashion e-retailer does come in handy while curating this yearly gift guide, as all it really takes is a quick (long and laboured) flick through my (several hundred) open tabs.

Wallpaper* Gift Guide: fashion features editor Jack Moss’ picks

That said, plenty of thought has still gone into this selection of gifts, which, while unapologetically my own fantasy wish list, can nonetheless double for the style-conscious loved one who will no doubt be satisfied with the luxurious line-up. There are also nods to gifts that are far away from big fashion websites: Leo Costelloe’s custom jewellery is truly special, and only available in rare windows when he decides he has the time to create, artist Hylton Nel’s charming ceramic cats which inspired Kim Jones’ latest Dior Men collection are far from easy to come by, while a hoodie from Climax, Isabella Burley’s cult London and New York bookstore, is the ultimate in IYKYK.

A colourful Bottega Veneta tree decoration

There’s something of the Whoville to Bottega Veneta’s slightly surreal tree decorations, which lend their undulating shape to the woven design of the house’s ‘intrecciato’ leather motif. Here replicated in polished glass, my favourite is this harlequin design in an unexpected palette of yellow and black.

Bottega Veneta check ornament, £140. Available bottegaveneta.com.

A grass-green &Daughter sweater

&Daughter made the Wallpaper* list of the best knitwear brands in the world for its colourful sweaters, cardigans and accessories, which are all made and spun in Ireland and Scotland using time-honed techniques. A new menswear collection captures founder Buffy Reid’s eye for uncomplicated silhouettes and vivid colour – like the lambswool ‘Balla’ sweater in the perfect shade of grass green, which I have had my eye on since the collection launched.

&Daughter ‘Balla’ sweater, £350. Available and-daughter.com.

An evocative Nonfiction fragrance

I’ve been meaning to upgrade my almost-done tester of Santal Cream, the sandalwood-heavy – but intriguingly sweet – fragrance from indie South Korean perfumers Nonfiction. For me, it’s the perfect autumn through winter scent, a languid mix of woody notes and fresh fig, spicy ginger and cardamom, and bergamot. If you are not ready to hedge your bets on a single fragrance, I discovered Santal Cream in one of the brand’s six-scent tester packs.

Nonfiction 100ml Santal Cream perfume, 100ml, £125. Available from goodhoodstore.com.

A hoodie from cult bookstore Climax

In September, Isabella Burley opened an NY outpost of her buzzy bookstore Climax which began in London and is a haven of rare or limited-edition titles. This just-released brown-and-pink hoodie is my merch of choice, though the ‘Book Fantasy’ tee, ‘Books Are Exciting’ caps or simply the decidedly phallic pink gift card, are equally pleasing.

Climax hoodie, £90. Available climaxbooks.com.

A set of Leo Costelloe cutlery

Independent London-based jeweller Leo Costelloe works to his own schedule: those who want to purchase a piece of his work – which often features a twisted-metal bow motif – have to follow him on Instagram and wait until the announcement he’s taking commissions (shoppers in Los Angeles or New York can find a small amount of his jewellery work in local Dover Street Market outlets). I would take anything, though I’m currently obsessed with his latest project – full cutlery sets tied off at their ends with bows.

Enquire at hello@leocostelloe.com and follow @leocostelloe on Instagram.

A pair of Loewe’s twisted boat shoes

I've been wanting to invest in Jonathan Anderson’s ‘Campo’ shape for some time: what I’ll affectionately call the ‘flipper’ sole has appeared in various iterations in his Loewe collections, on Derby shoes and loafers, sneakers to biker boots. Though it’s the leather boat shoes – with twisted-lace charm – which have finally convinced me. I’m fantasising about them poking out from beneath a pair of baggy blue jeans.

Loewe ‘Campo’ leather boat shoes, £1000. Available mytheresa.com.

An unexpected Bless extension cord

I am always jealous when I visit the Extreme Cashmere showroom in Paris and see the Bless extension cord owned by the Amsterdam-based knitwear brand’s founder Saskia Dijkstra (she has great taste). It’s perhaps the chicest piece of technology I've seen for the very reason it doesn’t look like technology at all, rather an elegant trail of wooden blocks snaking across the floor.

Bless multiplug extension cord, £115. Available ssense.com.

A playful Hylton Nel ceramic cat

I fell in love with the South African artist Hylton Nel’s ceramic cats at a preview for Kim Jones’ S/S 2025 Dior Men show (as we talked, a row of them sat behind the designer). The day afterwards, they had been blown up to enormous size as part of the show’s runway set (above). Jones described them as capturing ‘homespun monumentalism’, which I think is an apt description of their distinct appeal. They go up for auction occasionally (slightly out of my price range), though Nel’s motifs also appear in the S/S 2025 collection, arriving in stores later this year.

Ceramic Hylton Nel cat, approximately £9000. Enquire stevenson.info.

An apple-green Miu Miu bag pouch

Miu Miu’s veritable pick ‘n’ mix of leather ‘tricks’ – the house parlance for key chains and bag charms – cheer up the most time-worn of handbags. I’m particularly seduced by the ‘apple green’ clip-on pouch (a mini drawstring sack designed to hang on your bag’s exterior) and chic leather key holder, though we encourage a pile-up of the brand’s leather flowers, mountaineering cords and cute micro handbags for full Jane Birkin effect.

Miu Miu ‘apple green’ pouch. Available from miumiu.com.

A hydrating bar of Fussy soap

I had the enviable task of helping Wallpaper* beauty & grooming editor Hannah Tindle test out the bar soaps for the September 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* (read her plea as to ‘why solid soap is the most pleasurable object to bathe with’ here). And, while soaps from Hermès, Chanel and Celine were undeniably luxurious – and will make highly desirable stocking fillers – my surprise winner was the £8 bodywash bar from Fussy, which leaves the skin soft and nourished with none of that squeaky bar soap feeling. My flavour of choice is the uplifting ‘Tropic Tonic Lime’.

Fussy bodywash bar, £8. Available from getfussy.com.

What makes a ‘winter perfume’?

Our sensory experiences are inextricably seasonal: through the materials we wear, the food we consume and subsequently, our relationship with taste and smell. In the same way that savouring a rich mug of hot chocolate during the height of August has little appeal, dousing oneself with crisp and ozonic fragrance notes can be somewhat jarring when it’s bitterly cold outside.

Temperature also dictates a perfume’s sillage (the scent trail left by the wearer), projection (the distance it travels from the wearer) and also the way in which scent molecules interact with the skin. Heat decreases longevity; cold increases it. But the opposite is true with sillage and projection, meaning that gourmand, spicy, or resinous notes (often used in the base of a perfume) can become cloying in summer, but infuse the air with a much-needed sense of warmth during winter.

Below is a list of fragrances that do just that, ranging from niche scents designed by innovative independent brands to modern classics from major luxury houses.

Dior

Francis Kurkdijan, who was appointed creative director of Parfums Dior in 2021, created the recently launched ‘Esprit de Parfum’ collection to push the notes of iconic fragrances in the house’s ‘La Collection Privée’ portfolio – ‘Lucky’, ‘Rouge Trafalgar’, ‘Oud Isaphan’, ‘Ambre Nuit’ and ‘Gris Dior’ – to the extreme of their expression’. Subsequently, ‘Gris Dior Esprit de Parfum’ has a heighted floral accord but is also sweeter and woodier.

dior.com

Bottega Veneta

Bottega Veneta’s Alchemie is a fitting choice for those who like to make a statement with their winter fragrances. Unabashedly bold, this blend of myrrh from Somalia and spicy pink pepper lasts from the moment you spray it in the morning until late in the evening. Notes of mandarin, nutmeg and leather add even more depth, while the artisanal glass bottle, handblown in Venice and elevated on a base of Verde Saint Denis marble, compliments the opulence of the fragrance inside.

bottegaveneta.com

Loewe

The fragrance equivalent of a cashmere sweater, Loewe’s Roasted Vanilla is one of three scents in its new Crafted Collection. A soft, warm fragrance, its creamy vanilla heart is complicated by the peculiar spiciness of pink pepper and the alcoholic sweetness of cognac.

perfumesloewe.com

Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton's ‘​​Fantasmagory’ is the latest addition to its Les Extraits Collection, a line of perfumes for which in-house nose Jacques Cavallier Belletrud reinterprets classic perfumery notes into idiosyncratic new fragrances.

‘​​Fantasmagory’s’ central focus is a remarkably pure vanilla note. To create it, the brand cryogenically freezes a whole vanilla pod prior to CO₂ extraction, producing a scent that is ‘akin to smoothing a vanilla pod's natural essence directly over bare skin.’ Almond notes add a creaminess to the vanilla’s natural sweetness, while the addition of CO₂-extracted ginger adds a touch of freshness. Visionary architect Frank Gehry designed the bottle with soft curves and a silver cap inspired by the appearance of a wind-blown flower.

louisvuitton.com

Perfumer H

Perfumer Lyn Harris’ cult favourite brand, Perfumer H, has come out with a new fragrance just in time for winter. Rose With Insect with a dark reimagining of a classic rose fragrance with succulent notes of peach and neroli, spicy cardamom and metallic aldehydes inspired by the glint of an insect's wing. It is a unique interpretation of a classic rose fragrance that, in the words of the brand, ‘evokes a tainted idyll where perfection is unsettled and fragility becomes desirable.’

perfumerh.com

The Nue Co

The Nue Co’s ‘First Milk’ is an ideal choice for those who prefer their winter fragrances to be more subtle. One of three scents in the brand’s ‘nostalgic’ functional fragrance line–scents that use neuroscientific research to trigger certain emotions– ‘First Milk’ is designed to evoke the infantile comfort of a person’s first scent memory. Made with notes of almond milk, tonka bean, and iris, this ‘skin fragrance’ infuses the natural scent of its wearer with an intimate, creamy quality that lives up to its promise of being instantly calming, while also smelling strangely compelling.

thenueco.com

Acqua di Parma

Acqua di Parma is synonymous with Italian sunshine and its signature fresh and citrussy colognes. But ‘Luce di Rosa’, with rich floral notes of Bulgarian Rose and verdant geranium has a darker facet to its character: a grounding of vetiver, guaiac wood and cedarwood, finishing with the embrace of musk.

acquadiparma.com

Frederic Malle

‘L’Eau d’Hiver’, created in 2003 by nose Jean Claude Ellena for Frederic Malle, translates to ‘winter water’. The perfume has been rather accurately described by the brand as ‘fluffy’ and ‘like a perfect scarf, warm and light at the same time, inviting you to curl up with it’. Weightless enough to be worn all year round with top notes of bergamot, the heliotrope in its base notes provides a gourmand and powdery base.

fredericmalle.com

Marissa Zappas

Joining the roster of fragrances created by Marissa Zappas for her namesake brand is ‘Carnival of Souls’, inspired by the 1962 B-movie of the same name. (It was fittingly released on 31 October, to mark Halloween). With notes of mimosa cream, violet, saffron and vanilla, plus incense and musk, Zappas has described it as a ‘melancholic celebration of life (and death), and the radiant psychedelia of survival’.

marissazappas.com

Diptyque

‘Bois Corsé’ is one of the richer scents in Diptyque’s ‘Les Essences de Diptyque’ collection. Created by nose Nathalie Cetto, it combines cedarwood with roasted Arabica coffee, creamy sandalwood and Tonka bean. As Cetto told Wallpaper*: ‘[With ‘Bois Corsé’] I wanted to capture the duality of the tree bark – its rough exterior and its tender, protected core’.

diptqyueparis.com

Maison Francis Kurkdijan

Maison Francis Kurkdijan’s ‘Oud Satin Mood’ was created in 2015 with Bulgarian rose, violet and strawberry, Turkish rose and gourmand notes such vanilla and caramel meeting with resinous oud and benzoin at the base. Kurkdijan has said that he designed this fragrance for the wearer to ‘wrap’ themselves in, like being swathed in a rich fabric.

franciskurkdijan.com

Unifrom

Stockholm-based independent brand Unifrom is a fragrance house inspired by Swedish high-rise architecture. But, all its perfumes are developed in Paris and made in Grasse. This includes perfume oil ‘Winter Saga’, which blends fresh and warm notes together such as sweet ginger, cinnamon and clove, fir tree and white musk.

unfrom.com

Earlier this year, Jonathan Anderson described his S/S 2025 menswear collection as one of ‘irrational clothing’ – an embrace of the strange and the unexpected, inspired by the experimental attitude towards dressing he had witnessed among young people at Primavera Festival in Barcelona earlier that summer. ‘The experimentation with clothing among younger generations is incredible,’ he said at the time. ‘The eye has changed.... people want something that is really challenging.’

Anderson is astute with a soundbite, and the idea of ‘irrational clothing’ could equally have been applied to the womenswear collections shown this past month in New York, London, Milan and Paris. By and large, there was a marked disavowal of ‘quiet luxury’, seeing restraint thrown out the window in the pursuit of the bold and eclectic. If sometimes this led to a lack of cohesion – with designers seeming to ricochet between ideas – when it was done well, it made for some enlivening fashion moments. Such was the case at Prada, where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented a freewheeling collection that paid homage to individual style, traversing Prada eras and comprising 49 near-completely different looks filled with colour, texture and shifting silhouettes. A similarly eclectic approach provided transporting collections from Valentino, Bottega Veneta, Loewe and Louis Vuitton, which were among the highlights of the season.

Here, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss unpacks the S/S 2025 womenswear shows, from an embrace of the eclectic to a new mood in tailoring, and clothing where nothing was quite what it seemed.

The season was an homage to individual style

A Prada show is usually a barometer for the season, such is the knack that Miuccia Prada has for shifting the fashion needle, reimagining the familiar in oftentimes electrifying new ways (now, she does so alongside Raf Simons, her co-creative director and another fashion soothsayer). For S/S 2025, a radical new proposition from the pair: the decision to do away with trends or thematics entirely, choosing instead to present a freewheeling and eclectic collection that celebrated individual style. It was a riposte, said Mrs Prada backstage, to the way that the social-media algorithm smooths personal style and siloes us into social-media echo chambers. ‘We are driven by algorithms,’ she said. ‘We like things because people tell us to like them.’ As such, the pair spoke about rejecting the ‘derivative and expected’ for a stream of 49 near-entirely different looks that veered between sculptural high-shine silver skirts dotted with enormous eyelets, leather dresses with BDSM hooks and elements of trompe l’oeil (there were also feathers, bug-like sunglasses, and day-glo anoraks). It made for an enticing visual feast, ‘a Prada for each individual’. ‘We thought of each individual as a superhero – with their own power, their own story,’ said Simons.

Also in Milan, Matthieu Blazy struck a similar mood at Bottega Veneta, which he described as an attempt to evoke a sense of childhood wonder (as such, the animal-shaped beanbag chairs were a reference to the scene in E.T. when the title character hides amid a closet full of cuddly toys). Blazy said that the collection began by thinking about a suited businessman taking his child to school while carrying their pink cartoon rucksack or lunchbox over his shoulder. The collection was full of such juxtapositions, seeing ‘Italian sartorialism’ clashed with playful flourishes, from tasselled wigs to blown-up tailoring and animal motifs. Like at Prada, barely two looks were the same, and it was a definitive statement that luxury fashion needn’t be discreet nor restrained – rather, it should spark joy. ‘[This collection] encompasses the joy of looking, discovering and dressing,’ the designer said. ‘Last season was maybe more contemplative. But at the same time, we need beauty. We need joy. We need this moment for ourselves, and continue to play.’ In Paris, Nicolas Ghesquière felt similarly liberated – his 1980s-infused collection seemed to recall the flamboyant, individual style of the New Romantics, albeit with the designer’s always-futuristic sheen – while Alessandro Michele opened his tenure at Valentino with a musing on beauty that was as richly expansive as his collections for Gucci (he left the Italian house in 2022). Over the collection’s mammoth 85 looks were hundreds of elements, among them ruffles, feathers, polka dots, floral motifs, wide-brimmed hats, facial piercings, ladylike handbags (sometimes worn two-a-piece) and ribbon-tied pumps. Again as at Prada, it was a bold invitation to experiment with clothing – a maxim that defined the season.

Designers reimagined the everyday

Despite its more dramatic flourishes, Blazy’s latest collection for Bottega Veneta was rooted in the idea of everyday style (‘everyday adventures’, is how he described the collection’s mood). As such, objects like the plastic corner-shop bag – here recreated in heat-pressed nylon – were elevated onto the runway, alongside bunches of flowers (woven from leather), brown paper bags (more leather), and shopping baskets (also leather). Such transformations were also applied to clothing: this season, he continued to riff on everyday garments like jeans, crumpled T-shirts and corporate tailoring, albeit in luxurious style. ‘I was interested in the simple acts of fashion that happen everyday,’ said Blazy. Demna, creative director of Balenciaga, is also known for taking disparate objects – like crisp packets, toolboxes and rubbish sacks – and turning them into fashion accessories. This season, though, Demna looked towards archetypal garments, like denim jeans, and radically altered their proportions (his version sat perilously low on the waist). Elsewhere, dresses looked as if a classic trench coat had been tied around the body, while padded jackets were reshaped to recall Cristóbal Balenciaga’s ‘cocoon’ silhouette.

At Issey Miyake, models carried shopping-style bags filled with bunches of flowers, as if on a trounce to the market, while Anderson’s latest Loewe show featured feathered T-shirts handpainted with works by Vincent Van Gogh, including Irises and Sunflowers. Reflecting the designer’s idiosyncratic approach, these were not inspired by encountering the paintings in a gallery, but by the reproductions he sees on tea towels and T-shirts while driving to work each day past the tourist markets that line the River Seine. ‘We get so used to them that they become a kind of high-low culture,’ he said, placing what he called the ‘burned-out’ images in a new context as an attempt to shift the eye. ‘[They are artworks] we are always magnetically drawn to... There’s something that we want to be part of, something, even if we don't understand it.’ The same can be said for Anderson’s collections for Loewe, which continue to intrigue.

There was a tailoring redux

Backstage after that show for Loewe, Anderson touched on the evolution of tailoring at the house during his tenure. ‘Historically, tailoring was something Loewe wasn’t good at for a long time, but I think we’ve been able to do it right, and come up with a kind of signature,’ he said. ‘Tailoring is about the subtlety of the change, and it’s taken me years to understand that.’ His proposition here was a tailored jacket with long, gently flared sleeves and baggy trousers that twisted cleverly towards the waistline. The result was roomy and generous, though the silhouette – a move from a relatively narrow shoulder line towards the more voluminous weight of the trouser – was one of louche elegance. It was proof that tailoring remains fertile ground for designers, something Simon Chilvers discussed in the September Style Issue of Wallpaper*, in regards to men’s tailoring. Womenswear, if anything, allows for even more sartorial experimentation, unrestrained by the still-conservative mores of men’s suiting.

Such experiments were in evidence across the various cities: in Paris, Victoria Beckham turned blazers inside out or sliced tailored trousers down the leg to expose the pocket lining, while another trouser shape sat away from the waistline through clever use of corsetry (in New York, Tory Burch evoked a similar effect on skirts). At Dolce & Gabbana in Milan, jackets were inserted with a Jean Paul Gaultier-inspired ‘cone-bra’ (an ode to Madonna, who sat front row and inspired the collection), while at Emporio Armani, the designer revived his 1980s suit and tie for women with a multitude of iterations of the blazer, including those folded sharply along their front. At Seán McGirr’s sophomore show for McQueen, jackets were cut to evoke the feeling that they were being grasped close by their wearer to protect them against the elements. Though perhaps the most seductive proposition for this season’s tailoring was that at Saint Laurent, where Anthony Vaccarello revived the languid, broad-shouldered tailoring of his menswear collection earlier this year – which was no doubt was inspired by Mr Armani’s tailoring of the 1980s – to evoke the wardrobe of Yves Saint Laurent himself, from a fluid black tuxedo (modelled by Bella Hadid who also wore the couturier’s famous thick-rimmed glasses) to beige and grey double-breasted tailoring.

American fashion was dissected

On the final Tuesday of New York Fashion Week was the first – and perhaps only – television debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Such was the anticipation there were fears that Luar’s runway show, due to take place that evening, would be underattended (it wasn’t: Madonna even made a rare front-row appearance), while those already travelling to London for the next fashion week leg made complicated plans to watch the debate while in the air (they managed, thanks to a BBC iPlayer live stream and aeroplane wifi). Which is to say, the upcoming election loomed large in New York, prompting a dissection of American fashion and what it represents – or what it could represent. Such was the case at Willy Chavarria’s latest show, which saw the designer present an homage to America’s immigrant communities, like those he grew up around in his home city of Fresno, California (Chavarria is the child of an Irish-American mother and Mexican-American father). He did so through riffs on uniforms: hotel managers, farm workers, and employees at electronics chain Circuit City, albeit in his distinct style, which instils a mood of elegance through abundant silhouettes and references to haute couture. ‘Given the time that we’re in – around the corner from a major election – I wanted to shine a light on the people who make this country work,’ he told Wallpaper* at the time. ‘It’s about giving, showing dignity to all of these people.’ Afterwards, guests were given a sticker to remind them to vote.

Other designers looked towards the history of American fashion: Tory Burch continued to reference figures like Claire McCardell, a pioneer of American sportswear, as inspiration for her breezy summer collection, while Tommy Hilfiger drafted Wu-Tang Clan to perform at his latest show, a reminder of the longtime synergy between his namesake label and hip hop music (the show took place on a former Staten Island ferry owned by the comedians Pete Davidson and Colin Jost). Sometimes it took an outsider’s eye: against the backdrop of the gleaming New York skyline in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Off-White creative director Ib Kamara staged his debut show in the city, in part an ode to founder Virgil Abloh’s American heritage. It made for a vivid, continent-swapping collection from the Sierre Leone-born designer, which celebrated America as a cultural melting pot. ‘I have vivid memories of what America, and New York in particular, represented in the collective imagination of Africans: a dreamland of utopias made real, a place of opportunities,’ he said. Also making his debut in New York was Belgian designer Pieter Mulier, who showed his latest collection for Alaïa in the dramatic spiralling atrium of the Guggenheim Museum, swapping from Paris for the season. Conjuring the easy glamour of figures like Charles James, Adrian and Halston, as well as McCardell, it was an exemplary collection that showed the rich potential American fashion history still holds for contemporary designers (it was a show that felt like it had been percolating since his exit from American powerhouse Calvin Klein, where he worked alongside Raf Simons, in 2018). ‘[This collection] is a celebration of an American ideology of dress, and through that of a spirit that can unite New York and Paris – of the body in motion, liberated,’ Mulier said. ‘As Alaïa always has been.’

Sometimes things weren’t what they seemed

Balenciaga’s S/S 2025 show began with what appeared to be lingerie, though on closer inspection was actually a series of nude bodysuits embroidered with bras, knickers and stockings for a playful visual trick. It captured a mood of disorientation which ran through the season, reflecting the menswear shows earlier this year. Back then, Anderson spoke about ‘things not being what they seem’ in his JW Anderson collection (inspired by the experience of hypnotherapy dredging up past memories), while at Prada the designers spoke about the idea of ‘truth and pretence, the real and the unreal’, a response, they said, to a world where these categories feel increasingly blurred. As such, the technique of trompe l’oeil – the illusion of one garment imprinted onto another – continued to be evoked by designers across women’s fashion month, from JW Anderson’s mini dresses decorated with faux buttons and zips, to printed fur collars and belts in-set into trousers at Prada. Meanwhile, at Moschino, simple white-cotton garments adorned with childlike impressions of trench coats and sailor’s scarves. A similarly illusory mood was conjured in pieces that appeared to have a life of their own – or, indeed lived a life already – whether purposely creased garments at Ferragamo, Bottega Veneta or Victoria Beckham, or dresses at Prada constructed with twisting wired seams. Set into skewiff proportions, they appeared to be leaping off the models’ bodies.

Revisit our coverage of New York, London, Milan and Paris fashion weeks.

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.

Soft curves, streamlined silhouettes and sleek fabrics: the A/W 2024 menswear collections were imbued with a new flamboyance, seeing classic ensembles reimagined with a sense of panache and performance.

There was Loewe, where creative director Jonathan Anderson looked towards the ‘iconography’ of Hollywood and the ‘collaged realness’ of social media with a collection adorned with theatrical flourishes. This included bows and beads alongside the delirious illustrations of Los Angeles-based artist Richard Hawkins (‘it’s all about different types of validation… how we perceive ourselves to the outside world,’ said Anderson at the time).

At Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello proposed louche, oversized tailoring and outerwear which recalled the 1980s silhouettes of American Gigolo. ‘Fluid, with an intentional slouch, an illusion of fabric turning liquid,’ said the designer. Meanwhile, Dolce & Gabbana’s latest menswear offering was titled ‘Sleek’: a ‘story of elegance and handmade… a sartorial essay,’ described Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana of the largely black collection, which demonstrated their tailoring prowess.

Here, taken from the September 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, photographer Matthieu Delbreuve and fashion editor David St John James put a series of these menswear looks centre stage in a series titled ‘Quiet on Set’.

Model: Indy van Opstal at Ford Models Paris. Casting: Svea Casting. Grooming: Chris Sweeney at One Represents using Sunday Riley and Sisley. Interiors: Olly Mason. Photography assistant: Kevin Ramos. Fashion assistant: Olivia Meghan. Interiors assistant: Archie Thomson. Production assistant: Minna Vauhkonen.

This article appears in the September 2024 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.

As seen in the September 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* – a reflection on a season defined by tactility, texture and touch – 12 of A/W 2024’s defining men’s and womenswear moments, from scrunched-up Miu Miu gloves and decadent Ferragamo feathers to seductive leather ties and cocooning balaclavas.

Soft touch (top left)

Enveloping textures, the pleasure of clothing on the skin: this season is all about tactility. Cue a melange of furry, fuzzy, soft-to-the-touch textures – whether the teddy-bear feel of a Dries Van Noten bag or the fluffy finish of a Carven skirt.

Match point (top right)

This season saw designers explore the co-ordinating accessory, albeit in an unexpected manner – at Gucci, the tone of a leather glove met that of a handbag, part of Sabato De Sarno’s ongoing investigation of colour and texture.

Parallel lines

The stripe is one of Missoni’s enduring motifs, often appearing in vivid colour combinations. Designer Filippo Grazioli paid homage to the pattern in playful style, like with these shaggy knit stripes, which adorn an elongated overcoat.

Glossed over

Slick, high-shine textures lent this season’s menswear a futuristic sheen. At Jil Sander, lustrous crackled-leather overcoats appeared as part of a collection that designers Lucie and Luke Meier described as an ‘immersive capsule, smooth and embracing’.

Back out

At Prada’s womenswear show, the backs of tailored jackets were sliced away, as if to expose their lining, appearing as part of a collection that saw co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons excavate historical silhouettes.

Hands on

At Miu Miu’s show, rolled-up sleeves and heavy, worn-leather gloves suggested a woman at work. Indeed, gloves – largely oversized and scrunched up – appeared throughout the collections, with iterations at The Row, Marni and Balenciaga.

Tied up

The tie was reimagined by a gamut of designers. At Prada, it formed part of Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ riff on the corporate uniform, while at Bottega Veneta, ties were cut from leather in Matthieu Blazy’s typically seductive style.

Fine feather

A fascination with old Hollywood glamour permeated Maximilian Davis’ collections for Ferragamo. Flourishes of feathers sprouted from necklines or heeled pumps – an ode, said Davis, to the liberatory dress codes of the 1920s.

Slim chance

Menswear designers provided a long and lean riposte to the oversized silhouette that has dominated recent seasons. Silvia Venturini Fendi was one such voice, presenting slim, straight-cut tailoring, inspired by the contrast between ‘town and country’.

Hood times

The idea of protection featured prominently, with designers creating silhouettes that wrapped and enveloped. At Issey Miyake, balaclavas appeared as part of a collection that saw Satoshi Kondo explore the instinctual ‘act of clothing the human body’.

Second skin

This season’s slick boots offer up a glamorous way of protecting the body as the temperature drops. Such is the case with this pair by Daniel Lee, whose latest collection for Burberry is inspired by the ‘heritage of the British outdoors’.

Buckle up

A defined waistline added a nostalgic elegance to the season’s menswear silhouette, whether in nipped-waist tailoring, tie-fastening overcoats or eye-catching belts, like those at Prada, which were perhaps A/W 2024’s most covetable accessory.

Models: Jimai Hoth at PRM Agency, Mohammed Banze at Wilhelmina. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Set design: Kei Yoshino at Bryant Artists. Hair: Mayuko Nakae using Oribe. Make-up: Sunao Takahashi at Saint Luke using Chanel Fall-Winter 2024 Make-up Collection and No.1 de Chanel Skincare. Manicure: Sabina Uzunovic at Snow Creatives using Kure Bazaar. Photography assistants: Callum Su, Joshua Hippolyte.

This article appears in the September 2024 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

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.

Bottega Veneta has just (21 May 2024) announced the release of a new line of scented candles. Paying homage to the design principles of the house, which are deeply rooted in artisanal craft, the candles are housed in one-of-a-kind volcano-glazed clay pots, that have been handmade in Italy.

The type of glaze references Bottega Veneta’s Venetian origins (the brand was founded in Venice in 1966 by Michele Taddei and Renzo Zengiaro) through a nod to the city’s marbled architecture and networks of water. It also appears as though the finish of the glaze is in motion across the surface of each pot, mimicking the intricate and kinetic leatherwork of creative director Matthieu Blazy.

Bottega Veneta’s scented candles form an olfactory tryptic

Created in three distinctive scents, extracted from essential oils, the candles can be lit separately or together to create an olfactory triptych. Each clay jar is colour-coded to indicate their notes. The green Raintree candle combines mellow fig, aromatic thyme, and lavender absolute, which Bottega Veneta says creates ‘a soft, verdant scent brimming with summer promise and Mediterranean warmth’.

Next, the Lantern candle (housed in a yellow pot) combines incense, suede rose, and vetiver for a spicy, suede-like ambience. The red jar, contains the Redstone scented candle, and blends plum nectar, tobacco, and cedarwood into a rich, leathery scent, with sweet amber notes. Once the mineral wax has burned down, the ceramic pots can then be reused around the home, as a decorative and functional object.

Bottega Veneta scented candles, £320 each, are available now.

bottegaveneta.com

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

Common wisdom says that wearing black in summer is a sartorial no-go, the light-and-heat absorbing hue a recipe for torrid and uncomfortable afternoons in the sun. Though, as the many year-round aficionados of the colour will attest, such is black’s timelessness – it is arguably the shade most synonymous with style and taste – that even when it comes to the summer months, it’s never too hot to wear black.

Taken from the June 2024 The Travel Issue of Wallpaper*, photographer Valentin Hennequin and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes take a trip to Amanjena – the Moroccan outpost of the Aman hotel group – with Estonian model Katlin Aas and a handful of the S/S 2024 season’s most dramatic looks to make a case for summer blacks.

A case for wearing black in summer

With it, rules for embracing black in the heat of summer: keep layers diaphanous and fluid, like the sinuous line of Rick Owen’s gently ruched asymmetric evening gown, or Givenchy’s floating, sheer organza layers. When it comes to covering up, less is more: look for cutaway silhouettes (like Louis Vuitton’s open-back blouse) and plunging necklines (à la Alexandre Vauthier), or opt for black swimwear, arguably the simplest way to wear black in summer (our choice: a classic black bikini from Chanel). As is a simple black sweater in the lightest of cashmere – like that from Italian knitwear producer Luca Faloni – made for the onset of coolness on a summer evening (or overly air-conditioned hotel rooms and airline cabins).

And, when it comes to the evening, black remains the choice for taking to the resort bar in dramatic style, whether in a richly adorned dress from Prada – its glimmering surface replete with metal eyelets for a chic take on ventilation – or a body-clinging body-suit from British designer Supriya Lele, whose S/S 2024 collection included dissolving mini dresses and swimwear cut in the designer’s gently subversive style. Or, indeed, the sculptural silhouette of a stomach-bearing set from Jacquemus – a French label well-versed in seductive summer style.

Complete the look with bold stacks of bangles, like those from New York designer Alexis Bittar – their oversized and dramatic forms the balm to break up otherwise consuming expanses of black – or Goossens’ choker-like golden chains. And, if all else fails, simply resort to the nearest shade, sunglasses on, and channel your inner femme fatale.

Model: Katlin Aas at Supreme Management. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Noelia Corral at Blend Management using Kevin Murphy Spain. Make-up: Eny Whitehead at Wise & Talented using Chanel Beauty. Photography assistant: Pietro Lazzaris. Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor.

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

As Salone del Mobile 2024 and the wider Milan Design Week got underway this week in the design capital, one thing quickly became clear: the majority of the fashion contingency among the schedule was in a reflective mood.

While some brands looked to design masters past, others mined their archives: Bottega Veneta worked with the Le Corbusier Foundation to re-interpret its LC14 Tabouret Cabanon stool; Yves Saint Laurent collaborated with the Gio Ponti archive to create an exclusive porcelain collection; and Gucci presented archival re-editions in its now-signature Ancora red from the likes of Tobia Scarpa and Venini.

Elsewhere, Hermès and Armani placed their new furniture and design creations beside the sartorial objects that inspired them (with Giorgio Armani sharing personal photographs that span his career) and Loewe worked with its Craft Prize alumni to create 26 unique lamps that spotlighted the time-honed craft techniques that still exist around the world.

It’s a move that reflects a recent trend in their primary medium of fashion, where reminders of iconic codes are increasingly served up to highlight the importance of respecting the signatures that stand the test of time.

Here, in our comprehensive round-up, is the Wallpaper* edit of the best fashion moments at Milan Design Week 2024.

Fashion moments at Salone del Mobile and Milan Design Week 2024

Armani Casa

Held once again in Palazzo Orsini on Via Borgonuovo (also known as Armani HQ), Armani Casa’s Salone installation took visitors on a journey of the places founder Giorgio Armani has been most inspired by during his illustrious career. His travels have taken him far and wide – all over Europe, as well as Japan, China, Saudi Arabia and Morocco – and over the years, homages to the craft and skill he has discovered in each have appeared in his ready-to-wear collections. For this installation, called ‘Echoes From The World’, he placed his exquisite couture creations and his own personal collection of souvenirs (from Samurai swords to kimonos) alongside new pieces of furniture such as the Venus console with a hand-painted lacquered glass top backed in gold-leaf to give a luminous shimmer in the room dedicated to China and the blue velvet bed in the room celebrating Morocco that took months to make (only seven centimetres of this fabric can be woven in a day and this bed took 12 metres of material). A highlight waiting at the end of the show was a room with supersized images from Armani’s private photo album in a few of the locations celebrated here. ‘For this edition of the Salone del Mobile, I imagined a “cinematic” journey to the countries that have always inspired me: places and cultures that spark highly personal reworkings,’ shared Armani, adding: ‘I like to present myself to the public in the most authentic and direct way possible.’

Hermès

Taking over the sprawling La Pelota space for the week, Hermès presented ‘Topography of Material’, an installation conceived ‘to create a dialogue between roots and movement, between materials and know-how’, shared the brand. Suspended below foot-level on a diagonal catwalk of sorts, guests were welcomed by 16 intersecting floors that brought together 16 different types of stone, ten types of earth, four types of wood and many variations of terracotta brick all sourced from either Italy or France arranged in intricate ways to celebrate the skill of timeless handcraft. It formed a powerful introduction to the presentation of objects itself as this year Hermès made a point to highlight its own enduring codes. Behind a 35m-long and 6.m-high suspended black wall lay objects from the house’s archive juxtaposed with recent masterpieces and objects making their debut. For example, the silver Timour choker necklace from 2002 sat beside the new Diapason D’Hermès chair designed by the Hermès Studio this year in homage to the piece of jewellery; the original Mangeoire pouch from 1949 (used to feed horses) stood beside the new Derby leather buckets, also launched this year; and the Drag travel bag from the 2010s was presented next to Jasper Morrison’s Equilibre chair for Hermès from 2020. As intended, it effectively presented the virtues in time-honed skills and luxurious designs that retain a forever relevance.

Valextra

Valextra worked with Bergamo-based Studio Temp (with whom it also collaborated for Casa Valextra) on its Valextra Vocabolario concept that transformed its John Pawson-designed Via Manzoni flagship into the Valextra Spa. The idea was to highlight the exceptional care that goes into each of Valextra’s leather goods, from the hands that craft them to the after-care that the brand offers its clients. Inside a huge, simulated sauna, guests were invited to sit and observe the brand’s artisans hand-painting its signature black lacquered Costa edging onto handbags in real time. In the pink-carpeted space around, the brand’s new Assoluto collection – a three-piece capsule crafted from Econyl – was unveiled as machines worked in real time to 3D-print the new Iside Onda handbag. Combining state-of-the-art handbag development and best-in-class customer service through a radical architectural lens, it beautifully captured the DNA of this Milanese brand.

Bottega Veneta

Bottega Veneta presented ‘On The Rocks’ at the Palazzo San Fedele, a special location for the house as it was the setting for creative director Matthieu Blazy’s first show and is its soon-to-be HQ. Partnering with Cassina and Fondation Le Corbusier, the brand honed in on the iconic LC14 Tabouret Cabanon stool that it described as ’a timeless icon of Le Corbusier that embodies the excellence of the Cassina carpentry workshop’. First conceived by the designer for his Côte d'Azur cabin, it was inspired by a washed-up whisky box he found on the shores beneath the residence, hence the title of the installation, which saw several iterations piled high, one on top of the other, reminiscent of a jagged coastline. This isn’t the first time Blazy has affiliated himself with the object; at his recent A/W 2024 womenswear fashion show set, guests sat on bare wooden versions. For Salone, they came in the same rendering but also covered in the brand’s famous intrecciatio leather to create 160 limited editions.

Loewe

Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson primarily worked with alumni from the brand’s prestigious Craft Prize on his first-ever lighting installation at Salone del Mobile. Staged at Palazzo Citterio in the heart of the Brera Design District, the presentation featured one-of-a-kind lighting designs from 24 artists who the brand has either worked with or supported in the past. Remarkably, it was the first time that any of the featured makers had worked with light, which accounted for the originality on display. From Enrico David’s curved Onyx table lamp that features the face of a woman on closer inspection and Dahye Jeong’s spherical structure using an ancient weaving technique using horsehair, to Young Song Lee’s hollowed-out calabash fruits covered in twisted mulberry-tree paper and Dame Magdalene Odundo’s cinched leather hanging lamps (above), each captured the celebratory spirit of Loewe in the world of craft and design that promotes and helps preserve the most exquisite techniques from all over the world. While each of the 24 pieces was for sale at the start of the week, by 5pm on the second day the majority were – predictably – all snapped up.

Gucci

Gucci’s creative director Sabato de Sarno’s ‘Ancora’ campaign continues to thrive in Milano as the brand unveiled Gucci Design Ancora in its newly reopened flagship on Via Montenapoleone. Entering through a carpeted staircase surrounded by lacquered walls in the dark red ‘Ancora Rosso’ hue that is a signature of the De Sarno era at Gucci, visitors were presented with an antidote in acid green when they reached the top. Inside this starkly saturated mini maze, architected by Guillermo Santomà, were five objects De Sarno had chosen from several Italian masters over the years that had been re-issued in the Ancora-red hue for the occasion. The Le Mura sofa by Mario Bellini for Tacchini from 1972; the Clessidra rug from an iconic design of Piero Portaluppi made by CC-Tapis; the Storet tallboy by Nanda Vigo for Acerbis in 1994; the Opachi vase by Tobia Scarpa for Venini in 1960; and the Parola lamp by Gae Aulenti and Piero Castiglioni for FontanaArte in 1980 each stood in their own space to be admired from all angles. ‘Through Design Ancora, Gucci doesn’t simply celebrate old icons, it creates new ones,’ said Michela Pelizzari, founder of P:S Agency, which co-curated the project. ’The aura emanating from the brand spotlights five pieces by Italian masters that are perfect from a design standpoint but less known to the general public.’

Thom Browne

For his Salone del Mobile debut, Thom Browne took over the Palazzina Appiani to unveil his collaboration with the 160-year-old home textiles expert Frette with his performance, entitled Time To Sleep. True to his reputation for subverting traditional settings and concepts into unexpected scenarios, Browne placed six identical beds under the frescoes in the Hall of Honour and had models undress themselves before getting into bed. In the models’ getting dressed, rather than undressed, to sleep, Browne intended to ‘challenge the audience to question the role of dress in public life’, highlighting that the act of sleeping is just as important as the hours we are awake. ‘I think it's so much more interesting, and it elevates the product launch, when you create an installation that transcends the specific world that it’s in,’ Browne told Wallpaper* during rehearsals for the performance. The collection, which is available immediately, comprises sheets, blankets, terry-towel and cashmere robes, bath towels, and a quilted bath mat in crisp white cotton-sateen. ‘The reason I wanted to work with Frette is because they’re the best at what they do,’ added Browne.

Saint Laurent

The Paris-based house turned the clock back to 1953 and the private collection of Anala and Armando Planchart who commissioned the legendary architect Gio Ponti to mastermind their hilltop Venezuelan villa overlooking Caracas. On finishing the project, Ponti commissioned artisans from his native Italy to help furnish the space and turned to Ginori 1735 to create a collection of porcelain plates featuring motifs from around the villa and the couple’s initials. It is these plates that creative director Anthony Vaccarello curated and had reissued by the ceramic experts for Saint Laurent’s special installation in the cloisters of the Chiostri di San Simpliciano. Displayed in oscillating tubes on a raised platform that mirrored the height in which they originally lived in Villa Planchart Segnaposto, the presentation marked a coming together of multiple design icons.

Prada

Once again collaborating with FormaFantasma (above), Prada staged its Prada Frames seminar discussions on the theme of Being Home. Throughout the week, luminaries in different fields came together – including Paola Antonelli, Brigitte Baptiste, Kate Crawford, Jack Halberstam and David Van Severen – to cover myriad topics that were contextualised by Alice Rawsthorn. Each of the 17 sessions took their leave from different rooms around the home: for the bedroom, Gulsum Baydar and Philippe Rahm discussed the bedrooms role as a comfort zone; for the living room, Jayden Ali and Jack Halberstam were in conversation with Andrés Jaque exploring the rituals of diaspora communities in architectural spaces; and in the library, Isabella Rossellini and Mary Kuhn examined the relationship between humans and nature in the home, past and present. Staged each year to invite people out of their everyday lives and explore new and alternative analysis of familiar situations, it continues to be a highlight. Read more about Prada Frames.

Issey Miyake

60,000 bamboo skewers were used to create the one-of-a-kind carpet collaboration between Issey Miyake and the Dutch collective We Make Carpets. Famous for transforming everyday objects into artistic works of beauty, the artisans channelled Issey Miyake’s own skill at finding the sweet spot of robust-delicacy with the piece that was created by inserting the skewers one by one by hand into a thick piece of foam. The resulting patterns emerged organically as their dipped ends started to create surface patterns. Issey Miyake praised the group’s tenacity in making something meaningful without the need for ‘fancy gadgets and advanced technologies’, praising their labour-intensive and synchronised teamwork in bringing the piece to life. Transported flat to Milan city centre from where it was crafted in the Netherlands, in a nod to the national emblem it was presented resting on wooden beams crafted from tulip trees at the Via Bagutta flagship.

Versace

‘If These Walls Could Talk’ is an apt name for Versace’s Salone del Mobile presentation staged in its original atelier, the Palazzo Versace on Via Gesu. As many a fashion aficionado will know, it is at this residence that many of the fashion house’s famous catwalk shows have taken place over the years (including that 1991 show that birthed ‘the supermodel’) and where many of its globally recognised logos and icons were first designed, including the Medusa, Barocco and Greca emblems. They were omnipresent through this presentation that guided visitors from room to room, with even more opulence around each corner – an experience heightened by an audio experience created in collaboration with Radio Raheem for each space. They featured pieces new and reworked including The Medusa ’95 Conversational Sofa, the La Greca Bed and the Lady Desk, each a conversation starter in the space they stood.

Loro Piana 

Paying tribute to the late Milanese designer and architect Cini Boeri, Loro Piana showcased the most iconic pieces from her archive and presented them in its famously luxurious interiors fabrics. The collaboration with the official archive of Boeri, marks not only what would have been the year of Boeri’s 100th birthday, but the year Loro Piana also celebrates its centenary. Honouring Boeri’s insistence that furniture should be engaged with at all times, visitors to the presentation were encouraged to touch and sit on the pieces as they moved through the space. ’The thinking of Cini Boeri is extraordinarily contemporary,’ shared Francesco Pergamo, Director of Loro Piana Interiors. ’Just as extraordinarily contemporary remain the pieces we have chosen to exhibit together with Arflex and Archivio Cini Boeri, and to dress with our fabrics.’ Featured in the presentation are the famous modular Strips system, that won the prestigious Compasso d’Oro in 1979, the corresponding bed, the Bobo and Boborelax armchairs and the Botolo Chairs that have been covered in the brand’s ‘cashfur’ and made in a limited edition of 100. ’The dual centenary of Cini’s birth and the founding of Loro Piana has offered us the opportunity to contribute to the appreciation of the architect's figure,’ added Pergamo, who revealed plans to work with the archive on additional projects over the next three years.

Fendi Casa

Welcome to the world of Fendi Casa where the family keeps growing. This year, the Via Manzoni space was masterminded by Silvia Venturini Fendi and realised by Controvento creative collective. Together, they kept the house’s ‘double F’ logo of the house front and center, creating intimate spaces that invite people to cosy up, much like the emblem. The perfect example lies in the new Fendi F-Affair sofa by Controvento that is an interlocking platform of seats and suspended tables presented with a champagne bucket and glasses. It was joined by other collaborations in the sumptuous sofa department, the F-Stripes by Ludovica Serafini and Roberto Palomba and the Sohoft by Toan Nguyen. Existing families grew their brood, too: Thierry Lemaire’s Parsifal sofa was joined by the Mrs Parsifal armchair; Stefano Gallizioli’s Adrianand’s Audrey chair was complemented with square-shaped Audrette chairs; and Cristina Celestino's Ottavia chair was delivered of a sister, the Lazy Ottavia armchair.

Zegna

Zegna staged something of a takeover of Milan as it released its new Rizzoli tome, Born In Oasi Zegna. Named after the 100km of forested land north of Milan in the Biella Alps where its founder Ermenegildo Zegna initiated a reforestation programme in 1910, the book marked a moment for the brand to celebrate both its values and association with the city of Milan. In celebration, mini Zegna-branded newsstands (‘edicolas’) that are famously found on most corners were giving out limited-edition tote bags, while over in the piazza in front of the landmark Duomo, tulips transported in from the area were being planted in the square’s new flower beds. ’The project aims to convey the value and urgency of respect for the Earth and nature, as well as the importance that urban green spaces can bring people closer to natural ecosystems and the protection of biodiversity and social responsibility,’ shared the brand, ’concepts that are fundamental to Oasi Zegna.’

Dolce & Gabbana

Fresh from setting the city alight with its extravagant Milanese exhibition, ’From the Heart to the Hands’, Dolce & Gabbana staged an intimate reveal of its new interiors offering, The Dreaming Collection. Here, it was all about sitting comfortably, as the Moss Curved Sofa, which sits on a polished metal base in black nickel, and the DG Casa Moon Island armchair (above, which the brand said was ‘reminiscent of a warm embrace’) were joined by the Moon Island Sofa – designed to steal the spotlight in any room it’s in, much like everything this brand turns its heart and hand to.

Lanvin

Parisian house Lanvin looked towards its heritage for its installation at Milan Design Week; specifically, Lanvin Decoration, a furniture and decoration line which was first introduced by founder and couturier Jeanne Lanvin in 1920. Lanvin united with Rooms Studio – founded by two Georgian designers Nata Janberidze and Keti Toloraia in 2007 – for the project, which saw the pair curate a number of their pieces, including a series of sculptural chairs and benches, which were displayed at Lanvin’s Milan outpost.

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.

A mood of escape and discovery infused the S/S 2024 womenswear collections, with designers taking a round-the-world odyssey – both real and imagined – to create a series of striking, craft-rich looks which offer a dramatic and colourful riposte to the banality of the everyday.

Here, as seen in the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* (on newsstands worldwide now), photographer Nicolas Kern, Wallpaper* fashion and style director Jason Hughes and Dutch model Bente Oort take a trip to the otherwordly landscapes of the Canary Islands, capturing the season’s best looks amid the archipelago’s unique vistas and volcanic black-sand beaches. 

From Matthieu Blazy’s pom-pom-adorned dress for Bottega Veneta – which appears on the limited-edition cover of the March 2024 Style Issue – to the cocoon-like wrapped forms of Issey Miyake, or the intricate embellishments that adorn looks from Isabel Marant, Feben and Carven, it makes for a series of electrifying ensembles which capture the mood of offbeat elegance set to define the S/S 2024 season ahead. Enjoy the trip. 

S/S 2024 womenswear looks for escape and discovery

Model: Bente Oort at Platform Agency. Casting: Ikki Casting at The Art Board. Hair: Daniele Falzone at Blend Management using Davines. Make-up: Jimmy Owen Jones at Julian Watson Agency. Photography assistants: Francesco Colombo, David Gimenez. Fashion assistant: Kris Bergfeldt. Post-production: Ink. Local production: Studio Volca.

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

A mood of escape and discovery permeated the S/S 2024 collections, with designers looking to journeys real and imagined to inspire their summertime offerings. Here, taken from the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, we select 12 objects and looks that capture the freewheeling mood of the season – whether Matthieu Blazy’s around-the-world odyssey at Bottega Veneta, Hermès’ beach-primed fisherman’s sandals, or Jonathan Anderson’s crystal-adorned sunglasses at Loewe. 

In fashion: the best of S/S 2024

Wander lust: Ferragamo (top left)

Maximilian Davis’ collection for Ferragamo was rooted in an imagined exchange between his Caribbean roots and the house’s Italian heritage, epitomised by these vertiginous sandals, elevated on a sculptural sole and laced with coloured rocks.

Enquire at ferragamo.com

Globe trotter: Bottega Veneta (top right)

Describing it as an ‘odyssey’, Matthieu Blazy’s show for Bottega Veneta saw models march across a tiled world map, sporting huge woven leather beach bags, stacked with clothing and rolled-up newspapers, as if wandering back from a day at the beach.

Enquire at bottegaveneta.com

Fluid forms: Dior Men

Elements of femininity – think shrunken, crystal-embellished cardigans, feather-and flower-adorned hats, and pearls – pervaded Kim Jones’ Dior menswear, inspired by previous Dior creative directors, from Yves Saint Laurent to Gianfranco Ferré.

Available at dior.com

Craft union: Prada

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ collection for Prada was one of material richness and intrigue, from floating translucent gowns to tasselled skirts in-set with eyelets. ‘We try to make the best out of our work, to make beautiful things for today,’ says Prada.

Enquire at prada.com

Great lengths: Dries Van Noten

There was an elongated line to this season’s menswear silhouette, which suggested a mood of ease and movement. This tabard by Dries Van Noten, with its subtle, 1970s-tinged print, formed part of a collection that encapsulates a ‘disrupted elegance’.

Available from driesvannoten.com

Big picture: Chanel

Chanel’s Virginie Viard looked to the French town of Hyères for inspiration, with her ensuing collection embodying the Riviera locale’s easy creative spirit. Camera-like quilted bags, complete with lenses, hung from models as if to capture the views.

Enquire at chanel.com

Track record: Wales Bonner

Inspired by Ethiopian and Kenyan marathon runners, Grace Wales Bonner’s ode to ‘long journeys and life missions’ was marked by a use of complex crafts in everything from woven zebra-print tops to macramé dresses adorned with Ghanaian glass beads.

Enquire at walesbonner.net

Action packed: Miu Miu

Miuccia Prada continued to explore notions of contemporary beauty for Miu Miu with a collection punctuated by sporty swimwear that crept above the waistline (as if clothes had been slung on after a morning in the surf ) and hiking-style sandals.

Available at miumiu.com

In proportion: Burberry

Daniel Lee’s collection for Burberry paid homage to ‘lightness, sensuality, beauty and elegance’, largely through proportion: the house’s signature trench sported a newly dropped waistline, while tailored trousers were replaced with long shorts.

Enquire at burberry.com

Escape route: Hermès

A soft and sultry summer mood permeated Véronique Nichanian’s Hermès menswear collection, which featured translucent layers, woven rope beach bags and this elegant riff on the fisherman’s sandal, made for clambering through coves and rock pools.

Enquire at hermes.com

Crystal clear: Gucci

The shimmer of crystal heralded the arrival of Sabato De Sarno at Gucci, with the house’s new creative director using it to adorn babydoll dresses and chainmail bustier tops in a collection designed to capture the insouciant glamour of Italian street life.

Enquire at gucci.com

Tunnel vision: Loewe

For his menswear collection for Loewe, Jonathan Anderson set out to create a silhouette that felt as if the viewer were looking upwards at the wearer through a fisheye lens. These oversized crystal-studded sunglasses completed the vision.

Available from loewe.com at selfridges.com

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.

Models: Shuqi at The Milk Collective, Rex Rayner at Supa Model Management. Casting: Monica Domarke. Hair: Chris Sweeney at One Represents using Philip B. Make-up: Sandra Cooke using Giorgio Armani Beauty. Manicure: Ami Streets using Byredo. Photography assistants: James Donovan, Sarah Merrett. Fashion assistants: Kris Bergfeldt, Ady Huq. Digi tech: Al Habjan. Retouching: MGS Post.

For Milan Design Week last April, Bottega Veneta tasked design maestro Gaetano Pesce with creating a site-specific artwork at the house’s Via Montenapoleone store. Pesce and his team draped a huge scaffold structure with painted canvas, sprayed it with resin and backlit it to create an immersive grotto installation, where visitors could view two bags realised by Bottega Veneta for the designer.

As a celebration of this unique project, entitled ‘Vieni a Vedere’ (and among our favourite fashion moments of Milan Design Week 2023), each visitor to the grotto received a souvenir gift: a poster drawn by Pesce, commemorating the installation, and a box containing striking hand-painted chocolates by Turin-based artisanal chocolatier Peyrano – no doubt our sweetest Wallpaper* Design Awards 2024 winner (the distinct chocolates were awarded ’Best Goody Bag’ at this year’s awards, as featured in our February issue).

Wallpaper* Design Awards 2024, best goody bag: hand-painted chocolates, by Peyrano, for Gaetano Pesce and Bottega Veneta

Matthieu Blazy, Bottega Veneta’s creative director first collaborated with Pesce for the house’s S/S 2023 show, where he created 400 colourful resin chairs, as well as a poured resin floor. In the artist’s humanist style, each chair was entirely unique, featuring naive smiley faces, drawings of handbags, or the designer’s own signature.

‘As a designer, I make originals, not standardised series, that’s the old way – this is the new way,’ Pesce said at the time. ‘And this is a fashion company that did a fantastic job in helping me realise such a project. It is a message that is super political – and it is not a museum or a gallery that is helping me convey it. Who makes culture today? The museum or the fashion company? It is food for the brain – not for pay. If we see the same thing each day, then we die.’

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

bottegaveneta.com

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

As the year comes to a close, the Wallpaper* fashion and beauty team share their personal 2023 fashion highlights – from the blockbuster spectacle of Pharrell Williams’ debut at Louis Vuitton to cascading curtains of slime at Prada. These are style moments of 2023 that will stick with us.

2023 fashion highlights: as picked by the Wallpaper* team

Jason Hughes, fashion and style director

There was something about Matthieu Blazy’s latest Bottega Veneta show – S/S 2024,  – show that I felt like captured a particular mood, one of fantasy and imagination, the way that fashion allows the mind can travel. Set on a tiled map of the world which stretched across the space’s floor (complete with illustrations of penguins, sardines and crabs), Blazy imagined his protagonists on a journey around the globe – ‘an odyssey: a journey that is both free and hopeful... internal, physical and through the imagination,’ as he described. It made for a satisfying roll-call of travel archetypes – the beachgoer, the businessman, the castaway – each one rendered through his incredible expressions of craft. I loved it, and as ever there was plenty to desire: chief among them the vast woven beach bags which opened the show. 

I’ve been a fan of the American artist Lynda Benglis for some time, so it was exciting to see Jonathan Anderson collaborate with her at Loewe: first, her enormous fountains provided the show set for his S/S 2024 menswear show, then, for his later womenswear show he also collaborated with her studio on sculptural pieces of jewellery evocative of her works cast from manipulated pieces of clay (which also lined the runway). As ever, he used the inspiration point to create some of the year’s most intriguing collections, which largely focussed on an extraordinary now silhouette – super high-waisted trousers worn with shrunken shirts or knitwear – which he described as looking through a fish-eye lens or looking upwards at one of Benglis’ towering fountains.

Finally, nothing beats John Galliano’s Maison Margiela shows: held in the all-white showspace on the upper floor of house’s new Paris headquarters and complete with stomping models – and equally stomping soundtrack – it’s a true fashion rush.

Jack Moss, fashion features editor

2023 might well have been the year of spectacle, a mood encapsulated by Pharrell Williams’ menswear debut at Louis Vuitton – undeniably the most blockbuster runway show (or indeed fashion happening) I’ve ever attended. For a start, most do not require the boarding of a boat to get to the venue – guests were shuttled down the Seine before the show’s start – nor do they require the full-scale shutdown of a Parisian landmark (Pont Neuf, the city’s oldest bridge, here gilded gold for the occasion). And, while they do usually attract a handful of stars, Williams’ presence ensured an altogether stratospheric guest list – among them Beyoncé, Zendaya, Meghan Thee Stallion, Tyler the Creator, Kim Kardashian and (many, many) more. Post-show, Jay-Z staged a live performance; my own personal highlight was finishing the evening dancing feet away from a heavily pregnant Rihanna.

A different kind of spectacle at Prada – always a highlight of my fashion season – whereby dripping Alien-like cascading curtains of slime interrupted the otherwise sparse stainless-steel set in the house’s Deposito showspace at Fondazione Prada in Milan. At both the house’s menswear show (which happened first), and the womenswear show later in the year, the trick was enough to elicit audible gasps from the gathered audience. It provided the backdrop for two standout collections by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, the menswear show an exploration of ‘fluid forms’ – tailoring was cut with the lightness and ease of a cotton poplin shirt – while the womenswear collection melded featherweight diaphanous gowns with ladylike silhouettes and extraordinary expressions of craft (from eyelet-studded tassels to intricate embroidery). ‘We tried to make the best out of our work, to make beautiful things, for today,’ said Mrs Prada in her typically succinct style. ‘That may sound banal, but it is the truth.’ 

Elsewhere, I enjoyed young British menswear designer Aaron Esh’s sleek, confident London Fashion Week debut which riffed on the dress codes of his own group of friends – set against the London skyline on an upper floor of the Tate Modern’s Blavatnik Building, he said it was an ode to the city in which he grew up, and later studied. My final highlight goes to Matthieu Blazy at Bottega Veneta. It goes without saying that his collections are extraordinary in their expressions of craft and design, but I want to particularly shout out his equally extraordinary – and always poignant – soundtracks. After his A/W 2023 show, I listened to Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You, Always Forever’ on repeat.

Hannah Tindle, beauty and grooming editor

Mia Goth opened the Miu Miu A/W 2023 show in February this year, which was titled ‘Ways of Looking’ (a sideways glance at John Berger’s 1972 essay, perhaps). She was styled by Lotta Volkova in pieces befitting of Mrs Prada’s subversively sexy take on a bookish aesthetic. With a charcoal button-up twin set, strappy patent pumps, a leather box bag carried nonchalantly in the crook of her arm, and black, low denier tights – the gusset of which was pulled up above the waistline of a low-slung, sheer polka dot pencil skirt – Goth looked as though she had just rolled out of bed in a hurry, and in being late for a lecture at the Sorbonne, had left her sleeping lover behind. Guido Palau created intentionally unkempt hair, using the static electricity from balloons and a can of hairspray to sculpt strands into frazzled quiffs. Later in the lineup, tiny rounded tortoiseshell spectacles worn by the likes of Rianne Van Rompaey completed the fantasy (and I have been thinking about it ever since).

Daniel Lee’s obsession with green seeped through from his tenure at Bottega Veneta into Burberry’s new direction for S/S 2024. However, for the sophomore collection at the British heritage label, Lee put a trademark stamp on a deeper variation of the shade; a hue that is in part reminiscent of a mallard head (duck motifs are also on the designer’s mood board) and one that also recalls the verdant foliage of British scenery. Held in a tented structure erected in London’s Highbury Fields, the show space was laid with moss-coloured carpet, which carried over into the clothes, make-up and even nails. Ammy Drammeh took care of the former, where glossy, lacquered lips appeared black at first glance; upon a second, a tint of green was slightly perceptible. The same custom colour was applied to fingers and nails, by session manicurist Ama Quashie. Would I try and recreate this rather swampy makeup look on myself? Probably not. But I loved the strangeness of it nonetheless.

For quite some time, the necktie has been relegated to an artefact of a bygone era, one of stuffy corporate wear and forced formality that in a post-pandemic world looked largely left behind.

It is with some surprise, then, that the tie has had something of a comeback in recent seasons, its death knell stilled by a new generation of designers who are using the classic accessory to represent something altogether more irreverent – a symbol of the past which in their hands is ripe for reinvention. 

The return of the shirt and tie

It might be in part down to the influence of Matthieu Blazy at Bottega Veneta, who featured a series of nappa-leather ties as part of a playful riff on corporate wear in his A/W 2023 collection. In its unexpected fabrication – which conjured a satisfying frisson of kink – it continued his desire to elevate the quotidian into extraordinary and seductive expressions of design.

Much of the tie’s appeal lies in its shape-shifting ability and multitude of iterations – whether the playful polka dots of Paul Smith (clashed here with a striped shirt and 1970s-tinged tailoring) or the heritage-inspired checks of Margaret Howell (team with a V-neck sweater for a contemporary exercise in layering).

At contemporary British tiemaker Marwood, meanwhile, the 2010-founded brand continues its desire to reinvent the accessory with distinctly modern designs in woven silk and British lace, each made in England. Here, their flecked tie in silk slub is combined with a vivid blue zip-up sweater by Jil Sander to striking graphic effect

A version of this story appears in the January 2024 Next Generation Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today!