2025 was a year of seismic change in the fashion industry – one not unnoticed by the Wallpaper* style team, who, in reflecting on their personal style moments of the year, found joy in the new. There was Matthieu Blazy’s exuberant debut at Chanel; the ‘clarity’ of Jonathan Anderson’s first womenswear collection for Dior; and the ‘fresh and beautiful’ opening act from Simone Bellotti at Jil Sander.

But there was charm to be found in the existing, too: Craig Green’s ‘delirious, psychedelic’ return to the runway in Paris, or Nadège Vanhée’s ‘Second Chapter’ show for Hermès in Shanghai, which unfolded against the city’s futuristic skyline. ‘It made for an arresting spectacle,’ says Wallpaper* fashion & creative director Jason Hughes. ‘The kind that you feel lucky to have witnessed.’

In this spirit, the Wallpaper* style team reminisce on their personal style moments of 2025.

‘This year was undoubtedly about the debuts, and I really felt like the combination of Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Jonathan Anderson at Dior – despite being distinct in their visions – set fashion’s new mood, and captured the feeling of a slate being wiped clean. Both had a clarity of vision that was exciting to watch: at Dior, I loved the focus on form – and the brilliant accessories – while Chanel had a feeling of joy and energy, bolstered by great clothes and craft (I was a huge fan of Blazy’s work at Bottega Veneta). I’m excited to see the two designers’ vision unfold in 2026 – particularly their debut couture shows in January.

‘On a personal front, I also loved travelling to Shanghai for Hermès’ “The Second Chapter” show – a continuation of Nadège Vanhée’s A/W 2025 womenswear collection for the house. I loved the cleverly layered and stacked-up looks – sweaters around the waist, bags across the chest, leather water bottle holders slung from bags. It played out in North Bund Bay on the banks of the Huangpu River in a specially constructed structure: as the show began, a series of shutters swung open to reveal Shanghai’s glimmering, futuristic skyline beyond. It made for an arresting spectacle – the kind that you feel lucky to have witnessed.’

‘2025 has proved a landmark year in fashion, notable for the number of debuts which dominated headlines and social-media feeds (whether positive or negative, online commentary has been passionate). For sheer spectacle, it was Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel: stepping into the Grand Palais, which had been transformed into an enormous simulacrum of the solar system, was true take-your-breath-away stuff. The collection itself had a feeling of levity, encapsulated by Awar Odhiang’s gleeful spinning finale – she was undoubtedly the model of the season. On the other end of the spectrum was Simone Bellotti’s debut at Jil Sander – eschewing theatrics, he showed in the stark-white surroundings of the brand’s Milanese headquarters. I loved the collection: sharp and sensual, with the intriguing proportions that he brought to his previous role at Bally, it was the type of collection that you immediately want to wear everything you’d seen.

‘Smaller in scale, but no less impactful, was Craig Green’s return to the runway – a delirious, psychedelic outing that looked towards The Beatles and 1960s bedsheets for inspiration. It was an honour following the collection’s progress in the October 2025 ‘Long View’ issue of Wallpaper*, from his showroom in London’s Docklands to the Paris runway. “Creativity is how everything moves forward,” he told me. “You need creative thought for things to progress, and for new things to happen. You have to have the freedom to make mistakes, to create work and not live in fear.” In our increasingly algorithmic society, they seem to be words to live by.’

‘As a native New Yorker, I was pleased to see Matthieu Blazy bring his first Métiers d’Art show for Chanel to the New York subway – even if it was a little more cleaned up than the cross-city commutes I’m used to. Taking place on the platform of the now-disused Bowery station on the Lower East Side, the collection was every bit as exhilarating as his much-discussed debut show in Paris earlier this year, conjuring a fantastical cast of characters you might encounter on the New York street – from Upper East Side ladies at lunch to those headed to the office. It was a joy – and made me excited to go back this Christmas.

‘As for what I'm taking from the runway into my own wardrobe, it has to be the stacked-up charm bracelets and belts of Michael Rider’s first two collections for Celine – they appeal to my magpie-like sensibilities, and have got me searching out charm bracelets of my own. Beauty-wise, I was seduced by the dishevelled hair and stripped-back make-up of Prada’s A/W 2025 show – courtesy of Guido Palau and Lynsey Alexander – which gives an excuse for a just-rolled-out-of-bed look I’m tempted to embrace come January.’

‘My favourite fashion moment of the year was Simone Bellotti’s debut for Jil Sander. The shades of blue and red, the sharp silhouettes, the casting – including Guinevere Van Seenus, who appeared in the brand’s early campaigns. It just felt so fresh and beautiful as it came down the runway. I’m really excited to see where he takes the brand next.

‘As a side note, I’ve also loved listening to the music that soundtracked Wanderlust, a film shot in Hamburg he released for the brand over the summer. It’s a particularly calming kind of astral electro by Bochum Welt, and is the perfect soundtrack for wandering through a city.’

This has been a watershed year in fashion. A quarter of the way through the 21st century, 2025 saw the industry hit refresh: in September alone, 15 designers made their debuts as creative directors of fashion’s major houses, ushering in a bold new era in style (and, as with any such change, prompting passionate – and oftentimes divided – online commentary).

Here, as selected by the Wallpaper* style team, are the 25 fashion moments that defined the zeitgeist in 2025 – from a viral Marty Supreme track jacket and Saint Laurent’s thigh-high wader boots, to big-name buyouts, runway returns and, of course, all those debuts.

Willy Chavarria made his mark in Paris with a powerful duo of shows

In January, CFDA Award-winning designer Willy Chavarria chose to shift his runway show from New York, where he lives and works, to Paris. A striking first show, held at the American Church on Quai d’Orsay, came just a few days after Trump’s inauguration, with Chavarria – whose runway shows have long been a clarion call for the rights of immigrants and the queer community – soundtracking the show with Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon imploring the incoming president to ‘have mercy’ towards marginalised communities. ‘It was so beautiful, and it fell exactly in line with what we were doing,’ he told Wallpaper* of the speech. ‘I wanted to show that everyone is welcome, and to do that in a church seemed like the most pronounced way of showing queer people, trans people, in this environment where they were the saints’. His sophomore Paris show, this summer, was similarly impactful: it opened with 35 kneeling men wearing white T-shirts made in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a reference to those being unlawfully detained by ICE in the United States.

READ: Willy Chavarria: ‘We’re still so stuck in fashion’s old guard’

Faux fur and shearling took over the runway

Not a moment, per se, though the proliferation of faux fur and shearling on the runway – spanning both the men’s and women’s collections – was one of the year’s undeniable style takeaways (so much so, we even spotted it on the spring/summer runways). ‘When worn, it becomes a heady meeting place of signifiers – luxury, wealth, power, but also protection, armour against the elements, an ancient and primal urge to be swaddled in the spoils of the hunt,’ we wrote earlier this year of the renaissance of fur – albeit in imitation fabrics – which seemed to a response to the tumult of contemporary living. Indeed, at Prada, where co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented a collection of ‘Raw Glamour’, ‘fur’ coats – constructed from cleverly manipulated shearling – had strange protusions at the collar or were trapped under plastic. ‘We asked ourselves, what is femininity today? It is a constant questioning,’ said Mrs Prada. ‘It is not my job to be political, but when you open a newspaper – oh my God! Our job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear, about what kind of femininity makes sense in this moment.’

READ: Faux fur and shearling dominated the A/W 2025 runways – these pieces capture the material’s ‘raw glamour’

Alessandro Michele entertained with a showstopping haute couture debut for Valentino

Haute couture was always going to be a medium which suited Alessandro Michele, the former Gucci creative director who now heads up Valentino. For his first couture collection for the house – presented this past February – the Italian designer, known for theatrical runway shows and richly imaginative collections, hit new heights, employing the ‘petits mains’ of the Valentino atelier to create a series of showstopping gowns. In a style typical to the deep-thinking designer, they were explained in the book-length collection notes through the language of philosophy and semiotics – Homer, James Joyce and Italo Calvino were all mentioned – with each gown representing a ‘list’ of words and influences (‘[lists] confine the infinite extension of the existing within a meaningful framework… to bring some order to the chaos of the universe,’ Michele wrote, quoting Umberto Eco). These surreal lists scrolled across the show’s set on a series of ticker-tape screens as the dramatic looks wandered across the stage, a millefeuille of satin, lace and tulle – eclectic, intricate and, as fashion sleuths showed after the show, rooted in the Valentino archive. ‘To attempt to describe each look – and its multitude of elements – would require a pages-long list of its own,’ we wrote at the time. ‘It was best to simply let yourself be entertained.’

READ: Inside Alessandro Michele’s showstopping debut haute couture show for Valentino

Martine Rose held her first gallery show – an ode to Bronski Beat’s radical energy

During London Fashion Week in February, Martine Rose hosted her first gallery show at Sadie Coles HQ, revisiting her 2016 film Everything Must Change – a Sharna Osbourne-shot short starring Bronski Beat frontman Jimmy Somerville. ‘Pop charts at the time I was introduced to Jimmy Somerville’s voice were dominated by gay musicians: Erasure, Bronski Beat, Marc Almond,’ Rose told Wallpaper*. ‘Mainstream pop by out and proud gay men making serious, respected pop music – not tokenistic – which can never be replicated. It was a radical time for music, all about individuality, no stylists, all genuine expression.’ It’s a statement that captures the radical, subculture-infused energy of Rose’s own work: later that year, in June, she staged a one-off show in an abandoned west London job centre, adorned for the occasion in boudoir-style ruffled curtains. ‘I was exploring this new shrunken silhouette,’ she said after the show. ‘Everything feels a bit cinched, a bit too tight, slightly awkward, but somehow still sexy, I hope.’ It is this idiosyncratic approach – at once strange, sexy and real – which has made Martine Rose one of London’s defining voices, doing things her own way for close to two decades.

READ: Martine Rose’s first gallery show celebrates the radical queer energy of Bronski Beat

Calvin Klein returned to the runway with a new ‘sexitude’

In February, Calvin Klein hosted its first runway show since the departure of Raf Simons in 2018 (under him, the runway collections went under the moniker Calvin Klein 205W39NYC; now, they are back to being called Calvin Klein Collection). In one of the year’s first notable debuts, it was former The Row designer Veronica Leoni who took the helm, seeking a mood of sensual minimalism she dubbed ‘sexitude’ – a nod to the pulsing undercurrent of eroticism which ran through the brand’s advertising campaigns and collections in the 1990s. ‘When it comes to sexiness, it’s more like an attitude,’ the Italian designer said backstage. ‘You own it in the way you wear the clothes. I think it’s really intimate being sexy – regardless of the silhouette, the amount of skin, it’s about the confidence.’ The collection came with the blessing of Mr Klein himself, who watched on from the front row. ‘He told me he was happy he had found a new coat to buy,’ she said. ‘I’m really proud for him to feel at home again.’

READ: For her Calvin Klein debut, Veronica Leoni stripped it all back

Fendi celebrated its centenary with a blockbuster show in Milan

2025 was a definitive year for Fendi: not only did it mark a century since the fashion house was founded in Rome, but, after the departure of artistic director of womenswear and couture Kim Jones in October 2024, the beginning of its new chapter. As such, in February, Fendi opened the doors to its newly renovated Milanese headquarters for a celebratory runway show, seeing house scion Silvia Venturini Fendi take the reins for the blockbuster spectacle which included a cast of Fendi muses, past and present. The granddaughter of house founders Adele and Edoardo Fendi, Venturini Fendi started at the house in the 1990s under Karl Lagerfeld, and would go on to head up menswear and accessories, though this was just the second time she had also designed the womenswear line (the first was after Lagerfeld’s death in 2019). Talking to Wallpaper*, she said that it was an honour to head up such a definitive show for both her family and the house – but was adamant this was not about living in the past: ‘I tried to avoid any precise reference because, to me, anniversaries are beautiful, but you don’t want it to be a retrospective or nostalgic’. After presenting a second co-ed collecti on in September, she stepped down from the creative role to become ‘honorary president’. Her successor will be former Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri in a much-rumoured move.

READ: Silvia Venturini Fendi on luxury, lineage and looking to the future: ‘If it reminds me of something we’ve already done, we move on’

Prada agreed to purchase Versace for $1.375 billion

The subject of much speculation and rumour after Donatella Versace stepped down from her role as creative director the month prior, in April, it was confirmed that the Prada Group reached an agreement to purchase Versace after the Italian house was put on sale by former owner Capri Holdings earlier in the year. Agreeing to a deal of $1.375 billion for 100 per cent of the company – well below the initial $2 billion asking price – it marked a definitive move from the Prada Group to establish an Italian luxury conglomerate (The Prada Group comprises Miu Miu, Church's and Car Shoe; in 1999, it purchased controlling stakes in Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, though they were later sold). ‘We are delighted to welcome Versace to the Prada Group and to build a new chapter for a brand with which we share a strong commitment to creativity, craftmanship and heritage,’ said Patrizio Bertelli, Prada Group chairman and executive director, at the time (the deal was completed in December). ‘We aim to continue Versace’s legacy, celebrating and re-interpreting its bold and timeless aesthetic; at the same time, we will provide it with a strong platform.’

READ: Donatella Versace is stepping down as creative director

The Met’s Costume Institute explored the figure of the Black Dandy

In a year which was notable for its slew of fashion exhibitions – from the confection-like gowns of ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at London’s V&A to a Rick Owens retrospective featuring a lifelike sculpture of the designer ‘urinating’ water into a trough below – the Metropolitan Museum’s annual Costume Institute exhibition in May still demands the most attention. This is largely because of the accompanying Met Gala – the starry event heralds the exhibition’s opening – though it is also down to the Costume Institute’s head curator Andrew Bolton’s eye for finding intriguing subject matter in the Met’s extensive archive. This year, he drafted Monica L Miller, author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, to help curate the exhibition, which traced the sartorial history of the Black Dandy from the 18th century to the present day. Titled ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’, alongside historical garments, it featured the work – or personal wardrobes – of Virgil Abloh, Andre Leon Talley and Grace Wales Bonner, among others, with set design for the arresting exhibition courtesy of artist Torkwase Dyson. ‘I clocked into how people have fashioned themselves as a manipulation of autonomy and ownership in which clothing is a resistance,’ she told Wallpaper* of the design, which riffed on her signature trapezoid sculptures.

READ: Torkwase Dyson’s set design for ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ at The Met meditates on ownership, charisma and histories

Saint Laurent’s viral knee-high boots heralded menswear’s dark, sensual mood

At Cannes film festival, while promoting queer ‘dom-com’ Pillion – a film which explores a dom/sub relationship between a shy parking attendant and a biker – Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård donned a thigh-high leather wader boot by Anthony Vaccarrello for Saint Laurent. Shown at the house’s runway show earlier that year, it became one of the viral accessories of the year, worn by everyone from Pedro Pascal to Marc Jacobs, and ubiquitous in magazine spreads. Inspired by an imagined meeting between two men who designed the aesthetic of the 1980s – Yves Saint Laurent and Robert Mapplethorpe – the collection captured a mood of dangerous sensuality which ran throughout the season, from Prada’s patchworked leathers to Maximilian Davis’s S/S 2026 Ferragamo collection, inspired by the languid sensuality of Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Vaccarello dubbed it a ‘menacing, seductive elegance’ – classic menswear with an inflection of kink.

READ: Inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe, Saint Laurent’s surprise menswear show captured ‘a menacing, seductive elegance’

Homme Plissé Issey Miyake channelled la dolce vita in Florence

It would prove one of the most memorable show locations of the year: unfolding against a painterly Florentine sky at sunset, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake staged its S/S 2026 show at Medicea della Petraia, a former Medici residence on Monte Morello in the rolling Tuscan countryside. A guest of Pitti Uomo menswear fair, the Issey Miyake offshoot used the occasion to introduce a new roving format of runway show: eschewing its usual place on the Paris Fashion Week schedule (its position has been taken by IM Men, another brand in the Issey Miyake family), it will show in a series of locations around the world in the coming seasons. As such, collections will draw inspiration from local landscapes: here, it was done via an evocative use of colour, utilising hues sourced through trips the design team had taken around Italy (from ’Cinque Terre Yellow’ to ‘Zucchini Flower Orange’). The result was a collection which fused Italian charm with Homme Plissé’s pioneering fabrications: played out in the villa’s winding, maze-like gardens, it was impossible not to be seduced.

READ: With an ode to Italy, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake brings its brand of fashion magic to Florence’s Pitti Uomo

Rick Owens spread the love with a Paris retrospective

‘I’m surprised I got so far,’ Rick Owens told Wallpaper* in a wide-ranging conversation to mark the opening of ‘Temple of Love’, a career-spanning retrospective at Paris’ Palais Galliera. A celebration of the American designer’s singular approach – one laced with both subversion and wit – the exhibition took attendees on a trip from his early years on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1990s (a recreation of his Los Angeles bedroom of the time appears in the exhibition) towards his blockbuster spectacles at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo (indeed, in June, an opening party took place just after his S/S 2026 menswear show, with guests simply having to cross the road from one institution to another). ‘Michèle [Lamy, Owens’ wife] kept telling me, ‘You gotta stop calling it a retrospective!’ She doesn't like the finality – I'm leaning into it,’ he said. ‘A retrospective implies a decline, it makes you think about legacy and mortality and ageing, and how long do you stay relevant, and how important is that? I don't have the answers to any of those things, but I am thinking about them and addressing them publicly.’

READ: ‘I’m surprised that I got this far’: Rick Owens on his bombastic Paris retrospective, ‘Temple of Love’

Jonathan Anderson rebooted his brand – and debuted at Dior

It was a busy June for Jonathan Anderson. Alongside his much-anticipated debut show at Dior – a menswear offering for S/S 2026 presented at Paris’ Hôtel National des Invalides, which astutely reworked formal dress codes – the Northern Irish designer also revealed a rebooted vision for his eponymous, London-based label JW Anderson, which propelled him to renown after it was established in 2008. Doing away with the label’s usual seasonal runway shows, the new vision centres on the idea of the shop: in Paris, during haute couture week, he constructed a simulacrum of a new store concept by architects Sanchez Benton which included not only a fashion collection (a greatest hits of sorts, seeing signature pieces imbued with a greater commitment to craft) but a curation of intriguing objects and curiosities, from ceramics and vintage gardening tools to furniture, art, even honey. 'I like change. I have wanted to change things around for two years now, and finally I feel at one with who I am today and what the brand means,’ he told Wallpaper*. ‘It’s things that I either want to wear or want to live with.’

READ: Jonathan Anderson’s Dior debut: ‘bringing joy to the art of dressing’

Craig Green returned to the runway – and to Paris

After just over a decade in business, Craig Green remains one of British fashion’s definitive voices – a singular creative force whose imaginative collections transform humble menswear archetypes (workwear, uniforms, biker jackets) through imaginative construction and unusual fabrications, oftentimes evoking sculpture. This year, he made his return to Paris Fashion Week, having shown a year prior in his London studio, and elsewhere via lookbook (Green is one of a handful of designers who seem to be flourishing outside of the typical fashion calendar). The show was one of our highlights of the year: a poetic, free-thinking collection inspired by The Beatles, psychedelics and 1960s bed sheets – albeit in his typically inventive style. ‘Creativity how everything moves forward,’ Green told us in the October 2025 ‘Long View’ issue of Wallpaper*, in which we documented the process behind the collection. ‘You need creative thought for things to progress, and for new things to happen. You have to have the freedom to make mistakes, to create work and not live in fear.’

READ: ‘You have to be fearless’: inside the free-thinking world of Craig Green

Glenn Martens unveiled his vision for Maison Margiela

The task was unenviable: as the new creative director of Maison Margiela, Belgian designer Glenn Martens would not only have to follow the house’s namesake – arguably the most influential designer of recent times – but also John Galliano, his predecessor, whose final collection, which conjured a troupe of contorted dolls on the drizzly moonlit banks of the Seine, was a true fashion epic. But Martens, who comes with a pedigree of his own after zeitgeist-defining stints at Y/Project and Diesel, was more than up for a challenge. His own creatures were sheathed in masks (a nod to a Margiela hallmark, that of anonymity) and appeared pulled through the the walls of history – quite literally, with a melange of jacquards, Renaissance motifs and embossed leather (inspired by 16th-century Flemish wallpaper), evoking the faded grandeur of abandoned stately homes (indeed, the show set was a series of ‘palatial interiors’ printed on crumpled and crased paper). We called it a ‘thrilling’ debut, a task of ‘reinvention and reconstruction – a precarious balance of what to take and what to leave behind’.

READ: Glenn Martens’ thrilling Maison Margiela debut was a balancing act between past, present and future

Fashion East celebrated a ‘rowdy and raw’ 25 years of nurturing emerging talent

In September, Fashion East’s S/S 2026 runway show doubled as a celebration: 2025 marked 25 years of the Brick Lane-based talent incubator, which was founded by Lulu Kennedy to help forge the careers of London’s rising stars. The roll call of names which have passed through its doors is proof of its success: Jonathan Anderson, Martine Rose, Kim Jones, Craig Green and Grace Wales Bonner are all alumni of the unique scheme, which has long encapsulated London’s unique brand of young talent – defiantly creative, ‘rowdy and raw’ (as Kennedy herself described in a letter distributed to guests at the show). Taking place at the ICA, this season’s show – comprising collections by Nuba, Jacek Gleba and Mayhew – doubled as a Nike-sponsored exhibition tracing Fashion East’s impressive quarter century through its memorable clothing and ephemera, from Green’s ‘broken-fence’ chestplates to a leopard-print cake by Mowalola. Later in the year, in December, Kennedy and her creative partner Raphaelle Moore collected a Special Recognition Award at the 2025 Fashion Awards. ‘We’re proud to have created a unique space where designers have both the freedom to create fearlessly, and a family unit to uplift them,’ they said.

September’s fashion week saw almost too many debuts to count

2025 was fashion’s big reshuffle, seeing an unprecedented number of designers making their debuts at fashion’s biggest houses – from Dior to Chanel, Gucci to Celine. It was September fashion month, though, that was a true changing of the guard moment, with over 15 designers presenting their first collections as newly installed creative leads. These spanned an energetic and playful debut from Nicholas Aburn at Area in New York (the former Balenciaga designer riffed on the figure of the party girl in irreverent style), Simone Bellotti’s masterful first outing at Jil Sander, which saw him astutely explore ideas of modernity and lightness (staged in the brand’s white-walled Milan headquarters, it was a true clean slate momet), or Pierpaolo Piccioli’s typically heartfelt first collection for Balenciaga (an appearance from the Duchess of Sussex ensured column inches).

Elsewhere, notable debuts included Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe and Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier. And, while these debuts were largely lauded – particularly by critics – fiercer debates broke out online in the depths of Instagram comment sections. ‘I have read some really heinous comments about the work of many designers in these last few days,’ wrote Perfect magazine’s Edward Buchanan, former design director of Bottega Veneta, in a much-shared post. ‘It is not always perfect, and it is not always what you personally imagined it to be. You don’t have to like everything… but why not celebrate and talk about what you love?’

Though in Paris, it was Chanel and Dior which commanded the most attention

There were two debuts, though, which commanded the most attention: Jonathan Anderson’s womenswear debut for Dior (he had previously shown his first menswear collection in June) and Matthieu Blazy’s opening act for Chanel. Shrugging off the weight of expectation, both collections provided an astute and contemporary viewpoint on the future of two of fashion’s most storied houses – Anderson through a fearless ‘recoding’ of the house’s archive in his idosyncratic style (we said it was a collection of ‘bravery, vision and instinct’), Blazy through a collection of unbridled freedom and optimism (a twirling Awar Odhiang in a gown of kaleidoscopic feathers, the model who memorably closed the show, encapsulated the ‘triumphant’ mood). After Chanel, which marked the end of fashion month, we said that after all of the debuts, it finally felt like a ‘weight had been lifted’. ‘There will be no more anticipation or speculation, no more guessing games or gossip. The designers are in place, and a new chapter of fashion has begun – from there, the hard work begins.’

While Demna marked his Gucci debut with a Demi Moore-starring film

In what proved an astute move, the Georgian designer Demna – previously of Balenciaga – got ahead of the season’s other debuts by presenting his first collection as creative director of Gucci on the first day of Milan Fashion Week, allowing him a moment in which he dominated the narrative (and, of course, social media). Revealed first through a lookbook of Gucci ‘archetypes’, rewritten in his typically irreverent and subversive style (he called it a ‘bold, sexy new chapter’ for the house), it was followed up by a Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn-directed short, premiered at Milan’s Palazzo Mezzanotte. Titled The Tiger, it starred Demi Moore as the fictional ’head of Gucci international and chairman of California’ whose world begins to unravel at a family gathering. Even cleverer? Demna will get another ‘debut’ in 2026 when he holds his first runway for the house during Milan Fashion Week, in February.

READ: Gucci reveals its ‘bold, unapologetically sexy’ new era under Demna

The fashion world mourned the death of Giorgio Armani

In early September, the fashion world mourned the death of Giorgio Armani, an arbiter of Italian style who founded his eponymous house half a century ago, in 1975. One of fashion’s great success stories, Mr Armani began the label using funds made from selling his old Volkswagen Beetle; on his death, he left behind a multi-billion dollar empire spanning not only fashion but homeware, hotels, restaurants, fragrances and cosmetics. To mark his death, after a private funeral held earlier in the month, well-wishers gathered at Milan Fashion Week in September for his final Giorgio Armani show. Originally intended to celebrate 50 years in business, it took place at Brera’s Pinacoteca di Brera, where an accompanying exhibition unfolded in the galleries above. As ever, the S/S 2026 collection – modelled on a cast of Armani models past and present and watched on by muses Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton and Cate Blanchett – encapsulated Mr Armani’s brand of soft elegance, culminating with model Agnes Zogla in a glimmering gown adorned with his face. Afterwards, guests milled the galleries, where the designer’s work took its fitting place amid the great Italian masters – from Bellini to Raphael.

READ: In Milan, the fashion world gathers to say goodbye to Giorgio Armani at his final show

A Virgil Abloh exhibition celebrated his landmark legacy

Just over four years since his death, American designer Virgil Abloh leaves behind a towering legacy – one which was celebrated this September in Paris with the opening of an exhibition at the Grand Palais. Open for just a few days (cue a sold out booking system and snaking queues around the block), the exhibition opened the doors to his prolific archive of objects, clothing, ephemera, furniture and art, displayed across sprawling tables and shelves as if stepping into his headquarters. Indeed, one senses the polymathic designer – who made history as the first Black creative director of Louis Vuitton – would enjoy the exhibition’s approach, which eshewed the behind-glass formality of the traditional museum (only self-restraint stopped you from picking up the objects on display). Titled ‘Virgil Abloh: The Codes’, the idea is for it to go on display around the world. ‘This is a true celebration of Virgil's vision and ethos,’ said the late designer’s wife, Shannon Abloh. ‘This offers an invitation to the world to engage and to build upon his ideas.’

READ: Inside the Paris exhibition cataloguing Virgil Abloh’s extraordinary archive

Grace Wales Bonner is appointed at Hermès

In late October, Hermès announced the appointment of Grace Wales Bonner as the house’s head of menswear, replacing Véronique Nichanian who made the choice to step down from the role after a record-breaking 37-year tenure (the longest of any working creative director at a fashion house). It felt long overdue for the British designer. An LVMH Prize-winning designer whose deeply felt collections for her eponymous label Wales Bonner – exploring themes of Black masculinity, migration and luxury – have consistently won plaudits for rich storytelling and meticulous craftsmanship, leading many to question why she hadn’t been chosen for a creative director role sooner (she had been rumoured for roles at both Louis Vuitton and Givenchy which went to Pharrell Williams and Sarah Burton respectively). On social media, there was a rare positive consensus on the decision: in her own post, the designer, who was born in South London to a British mother and Jamaican father, expressed her ‘deep honour’ at being chosen for the role. ‘It is a dream realised to embark on this new chapter, following in a lineage of inspired craftspeople and designers,’ she wrote.

READ: Lauded British designer Grace Wales Bonner is the new head of menswear at Hermès

1980s ‘architect of glamour’ Antony Price returned to the runway

The fashion critic Alexander Fury – who is an avid collector of his work – has called Antony Price, a British fashion designer who came to prominence in the 1980s, as ‘criminally underrated’. Best known for creating the visual universe of Roxy Music, and staging similarly dramatic runway shows in the decade, the ‘architect of glamour’ made a welcome runway return in November, courtesy of a one-off salon show with London-based label 16Arlington. Staged in the latter’s east London studio, the high-profile cast – from Lily Allen to Adwoa Aboah – prowled the runway in the high-voltage creations, puffing on cigarettes before posing for photographer Felix Cooper. ‘I personally felt Antony never really received his flowers,’ Capaldo told Wallpaper*. ‘To have been able to witness such a legend at work has probably been one of the most incredible and pivotal moments in my career. It's been really magical.’ Sadly, it was announced that Price passed away at the age of 80 on 17 December 2025.

READ: ‘Architect of glamour’ Antony Price makes a high-voltage return to the runway with 16Arlington

Dario Vitale said goodbye to Versace

It was to be one of fashion’s shortest tenures – just a few short months after his debut, in December, it was announced that Italian designer Dario Vitale would be exiting Versace. The former design director of Miu Miu, and the successor to Donatella Versace, the news came as some surprise: Vitale’s debut show at Milan Fashion Week, though divisive, had won over critics and was already being worn by celebrities (Olivia Dean wore custom Versace for a recent SNL appearance, while Addison Rae was also an early adopter). We said that Vitale had ‘stripped back conceptions and ushered in an energetic new vision: sexually charged and ‘reckless’, one that harkened back to the dress codes of Gianni Versace without nostalgia.’ On social media, the announcement came with some disappointment at the way in which designers are given so little time to make their mark: ‘There’s a disturbing pattern across the fashion industry: giant companies, plucking creative directors, placing them on a pedestal, parading them as the future, and then discarding them just as quickly,’ wrote casting director Anita Bitton in a much-shared Instagram post.

In Vienna, there was a chance to see Helmut Lang’s fashion archive for the first time

Though he exited the industry 20 years ago, Helmut Lang’s influence on fashion remains palpable. A definitive figure of the 1990s, he proposed a vision of sensually-charged minimalism and utility which continues to define the way that we dress today. He also changed the way we consume fashion, too: his memorable New York runway shows stripped back the artifice of the 1980s and its elevated runway, drafting friends to walk alongside supermodels, while stripped-back campaigns were captured by a young Juergen Teller. This revolutionary spirit is celebrated in ‘Séance de Travail 1986-2005’, an exhibition which opened in December at MAK in Vienna, which marks the first time Helmut Lang’s fashion archive is on show to the public – from memorable garments to archival film, ephemera, even recreations of elements from his equally definitive stores (Lang donated his archive to the institution in 2011). ‘Looking at Helmut Lang’s store architecture, it became obvious: his stores were all about directing the gaze. This is also what exhibitions need to do, but here it was essential. A photo wouldn’t suffice; you have to experience it,’ curator Marlies Wirth told Wallpaper* of the exhibition, which is designed to immerse you in the Lang universe – all the way down to the floor, which features a seating plan from a runway show.

READ: Inside Helmut Lang’s fashion archive in Vienna, which still defines how we dress today

Marty Supreme birthed the year’s viral garment – thanks to Timothée Chalamet

The Marty Supreme press tour has already come with some memorable sartorial moments – the film’s star Timothée Chalamet and girlfiend Kylie Jenner in matching orange Chrome Hearts for one – though it was more humble track jacket which went viral in December (the Josh Safdie-directed film is out on Christmas Day in the United States). The nylon windbreaker, created by the film’s production company A24 alongside California-based label Nahmias, was part of a merch drop for the film – adorned with ‘Marty Supreme’ and three gold stars, Chalamet has barely taken it off since. Pop-ups in New York and London have seen queues around the block to lay their hands on the $250 jacket – with resale sites selling the garment for up to for up to £4,366 (that’s over 20 times its original price). It speaks not only to A24’s marketing prowess, but also to the rise of movie merch – at the end of 2024, Mary Cleary explored its rise for Wallpaper*. ‘How it will continue to play out is yet to be seen, but one thing is almost certain: movie merch will continue to take over fashion,’ she wrote – and was right.

On any given day at the east London studio of British fashion designer Craig Green, located in the former Carlsberg-Tetley offices in Docklands, you might find paddling pools filled with water for creating surreal mouldings of suitcases, stirrups or hiking bottles; an experimental shop display, comprising rods of scaffold or enormous hoops, destined for the shop floor of Dover Street Market; or a series of figures working away on tiny glowing eyeglasses, constructed from the miniscule lightbulbs used to illuminate doll houses. You might even encounter a runway show: on a warm June morning last summer, Green presented his S/S 2025 collection in the studio, beloved by the designer for its vast windows that look out towards the Thames and flood the space with light. ‘So much has happened here – it’s like someone painting a runway through your house,’ he said at the time.

After just over a decade in business, Green’s studio remains a space of voracious experimentation – one that harks back to his first runway show after graduating from London’s Central Saint Martins (CSM), which featured sculptural wooden masks and chestplates made from shards of timber as if a garden fence had been smashed into pieces and strapped to the models’ bodies (the A/W 2013 collection was shown as part of Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East talent incubator). The collection – which featured monastic riffs on archetypal workwear silhouettes – heralded the arrival of a raw, nascent talent, with Vogue’s Matthew Schneier deeming it the day’s ‘standout show’: ‘The scene-stealers were the face-obscuring plywood headpieces, a sort of haberdashery by way of flotsam. But up close, the pieces had real depth.’

‘It was so haphazard in the beginning,’ Green remembers of these early years in business, which were defined by a mood of improvisation and creative chaos akin to his years at CSM. ‘I was reminded of that first show recently. We were going around London – me and my godfather, with my stepfather driving – picking up these smashed fences and going to the show space; it was so chaotic and small. Everything has always been pulled together by friends and favours – I didn’t start thinking about it until ten years in. And I feel like that’s a dangerous thing to start thinking about.’ Dangerous, he says, because there is a temptation towards nostalgia; to view the past through a rose-tinted haze of another time. ‘It’s hard looking back because, in some ways, you only remember the good bits – sometimes I’m like, “Do you remember when it was just four of us, making sculptures in that tiny studio, and we’d make magic happen with just two fabrics? I wish it was still like that”,’ he says. ‘Things always seem magical in the past; you forget how difficult it was. But I think it’s good to analyse what you’ve done, and hopefully use it to progress forward.’

Indeed, Green’s career has been defined by the idea of forward momentum: after graduating from Fashion East (designers typically show for three seasons), he was awarded Newgen funding from the British Fashion Council, secured a studio at the Lee Alexander McQueen-founded Sarabande Foundation, and presented a series of critically lauded collections that saw him pick up British Menswear Designer of the Year at the Fashion Awards in 2016, 2017 and 2018 (prior to that, in 2014, he had won Emerging Menswear Designer of the Year). Green has also been the guest designer at Pitti Uomo menswear fair in Florence – the memorable S/S 2019 show unfolded in the city’s Boboli Gardens at dusk – and undertaken collaborations with Adidas, Grenson, Fred Perry, Eastpak and Moncler, among others (for the last, he guest-designed as part of the brand’s ‘Genius’ initiative, producing highly conceptual collections that evoked inflatable life rafts, sails, flags and tents). In 2023, he was awarded an MBE for his services to fashion.

But the idea of evolution permeates his clothing, too. Often his collections begin with archetypal menswear garments – workwear, uniforms, priests’ vestments, biker jackets, military attire – which are then transformed through imaginative gestures of construction and intriguing fabric choices. These might evoke the glossy exterior of a Quality Street wrapper, or be made up of colourful jigsaw-like layers of leather patches, meticulously pieced together by hand (‘the childish idea of taking an engine apart to see how it works,’ he described of the latter, which was used to make up a series of biker jackets in his S/S 2025 collection, capturing an impulse to de- and reconstruct garments that runs through his work). Ritual, protection and utility are perennial thematic concerns, as is masculinity, which he has approached with sensitivity and softness. After the pandemic, his combined A/W 2023 and S/S 2024 collection saw crash dummy-like adornments loop around the body in a kind of embrace, while his solo debut – a tribe of barefooted wanderers wearing flags on their backs – moved some of the audience to tears. The fashion critic Sarah Mower (a longtime supporter) describes him as ‘a pioneer explorer of masculine emotional and psychological longings and contradictions in the fraught modern world’.

Green grew up in Hendon, a neighbourhood that, despite its London postcode, has the feeling of suburbia, with parkland and rows of semi-detached housing. He went to CSM with the desire to be ‘a painter or sculptor’, largely down to his natural knack for illustration. His family had no connections to the art world – his father was a plumber, his mother a nurse. But they were a family that made things; his mother was also a Brownies and Girl Guides leader and spent much of her spare time on arts and crafts projects, while Green’s stepfather was a carpenter and his godfather a furniture upholsterer (he taught him to sew as a teenager). ‘I started by doing ceramics, printmaking, fine art,’ he remembers of his early days on the art foundation course, but after discovering that the most interesting people in the university’s smoking area were studying fashion, he began experimenting in the medium and ended up on the print pathway of the fashion design BA. In those early years, he felt like something of a creative outsider: ‘Alexander McQueen was the main influence on every student, and every student was doing this ‘dangerous femininity’ with illustrative prints of roses and animals,’ he says. ‘But I was doing these big black boxes. I definitely wasn’t top of the class.’

Even so, he eventually caught the eye of Louise Wilson, the then-head of the CSM fashion MA course, who was known for a fearsome honesty that helped forge the careers of Christopher Kane, Phoebe Philo and Kim Jones, among others. ‘I told my tutor, Fleet Bigwood, that I wanted to apply, and he took me straight to her office, which was terrifying,’ he says. ‘She asked me all these grilling questions, Louise-style. She made me go and watch Valentino: The Last Emperor, and then called me back to ask what I thought.’ (He does not know why she chose the 2008 documentary, though he suspects it was just her fixation at the time.) Dismissing a meticulous portfolio he had designed on his computer, she instead asked to see his drawings and was impressed; later that year, he began the fashion MA course. ‘I went from feeling a bit lost on the BA, not really knowing where I was going and not really fitting in, and then having a really good relationship with Louise,’ he says. ‘I felt she understood what I wanted to do – she helped me realise what was possible, that there was a place for me in fashion.’ (Wilson died in 2014; Green continues to thank her in the notes that accompany each of his collections.)

One thing he remembers from Wilson’s office was a sign on the door that read: ‘I have nothing to say, but I’m saying it anyway. Does this relate to you?’ It is a question that has become pertinent to the designer as he gets older: for one, he is now a tutor himself, leading the fashion department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (previous course heads have included Raf Simons, Hussein Chalayan and Grace Wales Bonner). Spending a week or so a month at the school, and otherwise overseeing remotely, he feels young students think too quickly about the outcome of a project, leaping to the end point and often becoming paralysed with fear in the process. ‘It’s a privilege to be able to talk to young people about their work and ideas, but I have noticed that they are almost self-censoring, which is maybe to do with social media,’ he says. ‘Creativity is not about having one idea, drawing it and then making it – you have to make it, then analyse it.’

It’s a way in which Green himself works: since the pandemic, he has rejected the typical biannual runway schedule, settling into a rhythm where he shows only once a year, which might be in London or Paris. ‘Before Covid, everything was getting faster and more intense. After that, we talked about different ways of showing – presentations, lookbooks. I was like: am I forcing myself to say things creatively? I think a lot of people are trying to do things differently, but it’s hard because there’s a system – and sometimes when you aren’t a part of that system, it can feel like you don’t exist.’

Last June in Paris, on the final Sunday morning of men’s fashion week, Green showed his S/S 2026 collection at the historic Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers on a runway of glowing yellow sand (amid the city’s chiming church bells, the scene had a ceremonial feel). The collection itself, Green said backstage, somewhat reticently, was inspired by The Beatles. ‘As a British person, they’re quite a naff, obvious reference,’ he blushed, but he elaborated that he was less interested in their attire than ‘how prolific they were in their youth. What they achieved in such a short time was almost a miracle’.

Speaking from his studio, a month or so later, he said the idea emerged from playing ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, a 1966 song from the band that he relates to Our Lady Peace’s cover version which plays over the opening credits of 1990s supernatural film The Craft. From here, it was about an ‘idea in reverse’ – taking a familiar reference point (‘they are so much part of the furniture in the UK’), and working backwards (not unlike the conspiracy theory that if you play certain Beatles records in reverse they contain hidden messages). Psychedelics – a nod towards the discovery of the mind-altering possibilities of LSD by The Beatles in later years – were another reference point, figuring in the eyeglasses illuminated with tiny lightbulbs (as if models had surreal glowing eyes), bold amalgams of 1960s florals (gleaned from vintage bed sheets purchased by Green, before being scanned and reprinted), and the colourful handkerchiefs that emerged from models’ mouths. Green imagined the show as a kind of psychedelic journey, with the closing looks – comprising shirting cut into streamers and adorned with a collage of floral prints – being like the season’s protagonist had had their ‘mind widened’.

‘Everyone is obsessed with this idea of nostalgia at the moment,’ says Green. ‘And there is some comfort to familiarity, but also something terrifying, too.’ Further inspiration came from the horror movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, lending the collection a disorientating undercurrent – one epitomised by the use of ‘harvest yellow’, a colour he sees as encapsulating the era and imbued with an intrinsic strangeness. In looking back at images of the 1960s, he felt there was something ‘creepy in the way [that] everything’s tinted’.

Green’s collections can often feel like a Rorschach test: are these clothes for protection or adornment, celebration or mourning? Are air tubes, wrapped around a parka jacket, for life support, or are they helping you breathe in a distant dimension? Are inflatable tabards meant to evoke lilos or emergency rafts? And, while this might occasionally make a Craig Green collection impenetrable – the designer works by a kind of free association, the logic of which might be only known to himself – his clothes are anything but evasive. Instead, they are immediate, visceral – he doesn’t tell you what to think, they are clothes to make you feel.

In this way, Green is perhaps best viewed alongside the great Rei Kawakubo, whose Comme des Garçons collections require a similar suspension of logic: in her strange, often inexplicable contortions of the body, where reference points are flattened and garments seems to exist outside of time and place, the onus is placed on the observer to make sense of it all. Kawakubo, alongside Walter Van Beirendonck and Bernhard Willhelm, was one of the figures who showed Green that fashion could be something other than just clothes. He has also been compared to Rick Owens, who operates in a similar domain.

‘These designers made me realise that fashion could be from anywhere and be about anything, and that was freeing,’ he says. Indeed, freedom is a word the designer often returns to – for him, creativity requires fearlessness, a space for creativity that must be guarded and sacred (this is helped by working alongside a particularly close-knit studio team, which includes his partner Angelos Tsourapas, who is also the brand’s business director). ‘It’s how everything moves forward,’ says Green. ‘You need creative thought for things to progress, and for new things to happen. You have to have the freedom to make mistakes, to create work and not live in fear.’

This article appears in the October 2025 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

craig-green.com

In the October 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, we give the magazine over to a selection of long-form stories that we feel warrant the unique perspective afforded by print. Given the clamour to create in a multiplatform environment, we believe offering time and space to a series of in-depth articles further enriches our engagement with the world. And by honouring the true value of a medium that privileges rich visual executions, expansive reporting, and the careful juxtaposing of topics and projects, we hope this goes some way to revealing something pertinent and insightful about broader shifts in culture and life, too.

Across the October issue’s 300 pages, we bring you the methods and motivations of a plethora of world-class creatives, including Bas Smets, the landscape architect renewing our relationship with the natural world; the visionary fashion designer Craig Green, whose London atelier we visited, the better to unpack his extraordinary talent; and Irma Boom, reinforcing the primacy of print one extraordinary volume at a time.

We visit Tbilisi, where a robust entrepreneurial spirit is resisting an encroaching authoritarian state, and head to Lagos, where the informal architecture of Nigeria’s street markets is inspiring a young generation of designers to adapt their home-grown structures.

We broaden our focus on the meaning of home at the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, where inhabitants of Le Corbusier’s landmark housing project reflect on its continuing legacy, and consider the evolving role of our innermost realm, domesticity, through the eyes of contemporary artists contemplating this symbol of selfhood.

For our interiors story, we highlight the objects that define the remarkable shelf life of great design, and we offer our thoughts on technology and travel – two aspects of an ever-changing world that are bearing the brunt of our thirst for constant renewal.

Pulling this issue together has been the work of many, but I’d particularly like to thank Clara Perrotte, Anne-France Berthelon, Ora-ïto and Raphaëlle Caldaguès for their help in producing our story on the Unité d’Habitation; Kalpesh Lathigra, who brilliantly translated the backstage world of Craig Green’s Paris show; photographer Devashish Gaur, who traversed multiple time zones (remotely) to capture the ten portraits for our Landscape Architects’ Directory; and London Art Makers for their help in creating our monumental interiors story.

Bill Prince
Editor-in-Chief

The October 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 4 September 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Seen on the newsstand cover (top left): ‘Bibendum’ chair prototype made using EcoLattice for Aram’s ‘Beyond Foam’ exhibition in September 2025, price on request, by Eileen Gray, from Aram. ‘Bibendum’ chair in black leather, 1926, from £4,915, by Eileen Gray, from Aram. ‘Helia’ fabric in 0733, 2020, price on request, by Raf Simons, for Kvadrat. Paint in Baked Cherry, £70 for 2.5 litres, by Little Greene. ‘Leaf II’ recycled wool in Jet Black, 2021, £86 per m, by Kirkby Design

This past June, marking a return to the runway after a two-year hiatus, the celebrated British designer Craig Green invited 120 attendees to his studio in London’s Docklands to view his S/S 2025 collection. The trappings of the space – which he describes as being divided between an artistic workshop and a clothing atelier – had been momentarily hidden away and a snaking white runway painted along the floor of the former Carlsberg-Tetley Brewery. ‘It’s like someone painting a runway through your house,’ he said at the time.

Speaking from that same studio, some months later, Green smiles at the memory. ‘It felt... honest,’ he considers. ‘A lot of the time when we do the show most of the team members haven’t even seen the venue. I think working here until the moment that we showed had a nice feeling to it; a different feeling to what we have done in the past. It’s very much a “making” studio, so I wanted there to be a craft element [to the collection]; to show the reality of where these things were made.’

ECCO.kollektive x Craig Green’s ‘monumental’ leather jackets

But he also admits that the intimacy of the showcase reflected the personal nature of the collection, which mused on the idea of ‘sons and fathers’ (Green’s own father had passed away six months prior to the show). ‘I guess you have ideas of what your father will be, and your father has ideas of what you’ll be,’ he described at the time. ‘It’s not so much a memorial to him, but more thinking about the relationships between sons and fathers.’ The idea of family linked to him seeing his studio as a home, of sorts: ‘I think most people spend more time with the people they work with than anybody else. So in a way, this place is like our home.’

These ideas seemed to culminate in the show’s most memorable pieces: a series of ‘biker jackets’ constructed from stitched-together protective leather patches in an intricate, jigsaw puzzle-like collage (the garment was featured as a winner of a 2025 Wallpaper* Design Award, and has been ubiquitous in magazine editorial shoots this season). A little like a Rorschach test in clothing form, Green says that their amalgam of elements recalls several things at once: biker jackets, yes, but also rollerblading kneepads, hunting jackets, martial arts uniforms, factory wear, even the Meccano-like blocks of a children’s toy.

'I was thinking about how as a kid you wanted to take things apart, like an old television, unscrewing old electricals and seeing what was inside. This collection was about that – about pulling something apart and reconstructing it,’ he explains. It was an act he linked with the collection’s theme: a kind of fantasy of a father and son bonding, which was also reflected in the childlike motifs of tractors and lorries which adorned handkerchief-like tabard tops. ‘It’s not like me and my dad ever did these things,’ he smiles. ‘We didn't have that relationship at all. But it was more about exploring this idea of a father-son relationship.’

The garments, which took over five months to complete, were made possible through a collaboration with ECCO.kollektive, a recent arm of the Danish leather tannery which sees it collaborate with designers on limited-edition capsule collections in ECCO leather (previous iterations have included partnerships with Kiko Kostadinov, Natacha Ramsay-Levi and Peter Do, among others). The pieces were an act of true collaboration: beginning in the Craig Green studio, the designer would then travel to the ECCO atelier in the Netherlands every two or three weeks.

‘We started in the ECCO archive of accessories: they have the most amazing collection,’ he explains. ‘From there we took some of the pieces – these really quite specialist pieces – and started building them up as a team. It was like a jigsaw puzzle.’ The construction demonstrates the leathercraft of the ECCO atelier: pieces are hand-painted along their edges, are padded or quilted, or finished with top-stitched detailing. ‘Every single element is hand-cut, from different types and weights of leather. It was such an ambitious thing to construct – I think there might have been points when they were cursing my name,’ he smiles. ‘But it developed and grew, which is the way we like to work.’

Alongside the ‘monumental, articulated’ jackets, Green also reworked a version of ECCO’s ‘Joke’ shoe, a derby lace-up, from the 1980s, reimagined with a hefty sole and moccasin-style detailing in lace-up and pull-on boot versions. ‘I think this collaboration came out so well because we working so closely with the people who were physically making it – the people who were making the patterns, the people sewing it, the people constructing it,’ he says. ’ That’s the thing I love about the process of making garments, of fashion. I love to see what’s possible.’

ECCO.kollektive x Craig Green is available at selected stockists worldwide, including Ssense.

craig-green.com

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.

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

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

Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025: the fashion winners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For his return to the runway after a two-year hiatus – he last held a show in 2022 in Paris’ Musée de l’Homme and has presented collections via lookbooks in the seasons since – British menswear designer Craig Green returned to London with an off-schedule show in his Docklands studio presented to just 120 attendees yesterday morning (5 June 2024). With the studio cleared out of pattern-cutting tables and machines, a white runway painted across the floor and backdropped by the River Thames through floor-to-ceiling windows beyond, Green admitted after the show that opening up the place he says he spends seven days a week was ‘very scary‘. ‘It’s like someone painting a runway through your house,’ he smiled.

Backstage after the show, he said the collection had begun with a consideration of his late father, who passed away six months prior. ‘I guess you have ideas of what your father will be, and your father has ideas of what you’ll be,’ he said of the starting point of the collection, which once again saw him interrogate the trappings of masculinity – he is perhaps best known for his riffs on workwear – in his expansive, experimental style. ‘It’s not so much a memorial to him, but more thinking about the relationships between sons and fathers,’ he continued.

Craig Green S/S 2025: ’the relationships between sons and fathers’

The roots of the collection once again lay in traditional menswear garments, here extravagantly layered, from a ‘biker jacket’ created with ECCO.Kollektive and made from colourful protective patches to stacks of belts that looped over polo shirts (the latter a new collaboration with Fred Perry). Tailored jackets and parkas were overlaid with blobs of quilted fabric, like a warped take on camouflage. Motifs included colourful diggers and trucks, like those you might find on children’s clothing.

‘I guess they’re quite traditional codes of masculinity,’ Green offered. ‘I always think it's strange – like in children's bedrooms, where they have pictures of tractors and fire engines and cement mixers, from the day they are born.’ The motifs here appeared on checkered cotton tops that, in their construction, recalled oversized handkerchiefs. ‘Handkerchiefs are so simple, just a square of fabric, but they have so much meaning,’ he continued, noting that the shape inspired the voluminous kaftan-like silhouettes adorned with flourishes of colour. ‘They envelop the body but at the same time they are like baby’s bibs.’

’[I was also thinking about] when some people’s parents die and they make patchwork quilts out of their shirts, and things like that,’ Green continued. ‘It’s in a way beautiful, but also strange – the way that clothing holds so much. You don’t want to throw away someone’s clothes, when actually they are just functional things.’

This frisson of emotion ran throughout the collection, which was at its most heartfelt in the extraordinary closing looks, a series of macramé-style net tabards decorated with nostalgic floral motifs and complete with colourful trails of tassels. They spoke to Green’s ability to transform the familiar through meticulous – and often innovative – craft; here, the starting point was chintzy tea towels remembered from childhood. ’My father was more of a tea towel man than a handkerchief man,’ he smiled.

‘I never really talk about my personal life,’ he said. ’But I think it’s because we are here. I’ve spent so much time in this studio. So much has happened here.’

craig-green.com

Craig Green remembers being taught to sew by his godfather, an upholsterer, one of the craftspeople the British menswear designer looked to this season for a collection that marks his ten years in business. His godfather had helped Green with his early collections – first presented as part of talent incubator Fashion East – and here worked alongside the designer on a series of sculptures inspired by the human-shaped dummies used for wrestling training.

’We were looking at work that we've done in the past and work that we'd like to do in the future,’ says Green, who is reticent to make too much of the landmark year, though the collection – which muses on the idea of human touch and connection – marked an opportunity ‘to do something a bit different’. Eschewing the runway show and its typical two-seasons-a-year schedule, Green instead chose to create a single collection to span the entire year which will arrive in stores in two drops. (The first arrives in stores this month; the second will be released in around six months’ time.)

Craig Green on his combined A/W 2023 and S/S 2024 collection

‘I think after the last show [held in Paris in June 2022], I had a lot of personal frustrations of things that I couldn't get to the right place or things that I hadn’t finished,’ Green explains. ‘So I felt like this was the right thing to do for the team, for the ten years. We always like to work in a way where anything can become anything and things are changing constantly. We thought: wouldn’t it be nice to work on concepts and ideas without those set deadlines?’

Sculptural adornment has defined Green’s collections since his debut show at London Fashion Week in 2013, which included shards of wood – evocative of broken-up fencing – covering the models’ faces (subsequent seasons have seen increasingly complex sculptures, including S/S 2023’s ‘decorated men’, where models were hung with objects including moulded leather saddles, ladders and riding stirrups). 

For this new collection, he was inspired by photographs of wrestlers and the cushion-like, human-sized dummies that are used for solo practice by those in martial arts.

‘They’re like these weird kind of padded people – we kept calling them our padded friends,’ Green smiles of the designs, which in the lookbook hang off the models’ bodies as if in a strange embrace. ‘Some of the original ones we looked at had their height and weight on them, almost like dumbells, so you could pick the size of the person you wanted to wrestle with. The way you see them depends on the way you think – there’s maybe something romantic about them, but there’s also something dark because they are made from this kind of fake leather that’s used in medical beds and crash mats.’

The sculptures led him to a musing on connection, a subject he believes is prescient in an increasingly atomised society reliant on digital means of communication (Green himself has been playing around with AI technology, finding it both ‘terrifying and exciting’). ‘[The sculptures] almost feel like a way to interact with someone again – to learn what a leg feels like, what a foot feels like. There’s something beautiful about them; somebody in the studio said that we should send them to people who are lonely.’

The clothing itself – which is made in the ‘atelier’ side of the studio – saw Green attempt to capture a feeling of freedom, with several of the pieces draped onto the body or featuring multifunctional elements to transform their appearance (’I think people always expect something more rigid from us; here it was about the idea of movement and drape,’ he says). Others riff on hallmarks of the label from Green’s decade-long career, like a complex multi-layered jacket with intricate cord motifs or generous, near-monastic silhouettes in dramatic hooded scarves.

As for how the two seasons in the collection – which were largely designed separately, and later combined – worked together, Green says it felt like a surprisingly coherent process. ‘There was a stage where we were thinking: is it all going to feel alien to each other? But then it felt like we found a through line, which wasn’t apparent from the beginning.’

It was part of the reason that several of the looks are presented in duos, as if mirrored. ‘It started with the knitwear, showing two different versions of the stripe – in colour or in monochrome,’ he explains. ‘The balance between each other felt new. I kept thinking it was about loneliness, but it’s actually going back to that idea of connection. You know, it’s the bonds that you have with other people – with your friends, your family – which show you who you are. They are a mirror to yourself. And for this season, that felt right.’

craig-green.com

A photograph of a watch, its face concealed by a specially crafted leather cover, provided the starting point for Craig Green’s S/S 2023 collection first shown at Paris’ Musée de l'Homme in June 2022. ’It was like a watch you couldn’t read,’ he says on a recent call from his London studio. ‘I thought it was a really beautiful thing.’

The watch itself originated from the Second World War, its cover designed to protect the inner workings from the dust and shrapnel of the battlefield. Green insists that the reference – which appeared in the collection as moulded bracelets and chokers, as well as similar covers that sat over neckties or on the chest of a shirt – was not chosen to labour a metaphorical point (though, he concedes, there is probably one there if you look hard enough). Rather, the fascination came from the idea that an object could be stripped of its purpose and yet retain its essence. 

The story behind Craig Green S/S 2023

‘I’m always obsessed with symbolism, about why things feel a certain way,’ he says. ‘I thought it could be interesting to take objects back to their bare bones and see if they still feel important. People still wear watches, and they are beautiful objects, but not how they once did. It’s almost like a relic, or the imprint of a relic.’

As such, models walked the runway with various objects strapped to or balanced on their body: suitcases, bridle stirrups, water bottles, hats, each one crafted from a shell of moulded leather. ’I thought it was interesting that they resembled functional items, but they no longer had any purpose,’ Green explains. ‘They were water canisters that you couldn’t drink from, a suitcase that you couldn’t use.’

Such obscurities have become signatures of Green’s work, which often combines the simplicity of archetypal menswear garments – particularly those derived from workwear and uniforms – with strange flourishes like circular cut-out peep holes, elaborate tie fastenings, or otherworldly textures (in the S/S 2023 collection, a metallic silver fabric looked crumpled like paper, while swathes of quilted fabric were printed with abstracted patterns reminiscent of traditional school sports uniforms). Last season, concertina handbags were made in a factory that usually produces anaesthetic pumps for hospitals.

Here, he said he was thinking about the idea of the ‘decorated man’ – photographs of soldiers adorned with hundreds of medals for service. ‘I guess I was thinking about how decoration can feel like a dirty term in fashion – like you are decorating something to look better than it is, disguising something,’ Green says. ‘I found these images of the “most decorated man in history” who’s wearing hundreds and hundreds of medals. It was interesting because it‘s like: what are the medals for and what are they decorating?’ 

As such, the moulded leather accoutrements that the models carried – ‘the baggage and decorations of many decades’ – were one of the collection’s earliest ideas. They spoke to what Green calls the fallacy of the ‘useful man’, the gap between who you are and what you want to become, something he says is drummed in from childhood. ‘At what point in your life do you stop aspiring to be that man?’ he said after the show. ‘It goes on forever, really.’

The Craig Green studio is split in two: one half is a traditional clothing atelier, the other Green calls ‘more like a workshop... full of materials and machinery that can make 3D things and sculptures’ (he says he originally wanted to be a sculptor or painter, but then moved into fashion). It was in the workshop-style half that the various moulded leather objects were prototyped and created, this season a process undertaken entirely in-house (the team couldn’t find a factory that could manufacture leather objects from moulds on this scale).

Green says that the approach was like solving a puzzle: ‘It’s a lot of finding out what to do on YouTube videos, reading books, trial and error... we like to torture ourselves,’ he laughs. The eventual process was one of handcraft, despite the smooth, plastic-like perfection of the finished objects: moulds were made digitally and then carved from wood, leather hides were soaked overnight in a series of children’s paddling pools dotted around the studio, and the final moulding process saw his team stretching the leather over the shapes by hand before being clamped for a ‘long period of time’ to dry (harder than it seems; Green shows one discarded prototype, where the leather has creased and puckered).

The designer says that he credits this kind of experimentation to his time on the Central Saint Martins MA course under late course head Louise Wilson. ‘She always used to encourage us to start making, because you can draw and draw, but in the end you’re just drawing from your mind,’ he says. ’The best way is to start physically making and experimenting with new things. That’s when you have the ability to try and make something new and exciting; something you haven’t seen before. That’s why process is really important to us.’

Clothing, he says, follows a similar rationale: ‘It’s rare that someone sketches a jacket, and then we make that jacket, and it‘s great. Instead, we might make a jacket, cut it up, start again, throw it away, pick it back out of the bin. It’s part of the fun I think.’

It is an abstract approach that has won the designer plaudits over the nearly ten years his eponymous label has been in business, including a recent MBE for services to fashion in the 2022 Queen’s Birthday Honour’s list. For now, he is working on an upcoming collection, as well as a high-profile collaboration he is not yet able to reveal.

‘The best and the worst thing about fashion is that it’s never finished,’ he smiles. ‘You can work on something forever and ever, and still find something that you want to change.’

craig-green.com

Join us as we take a flick through the fashion books currently taking pride of place on the Wallpaper* style desk – from visually enticing monographs and photographic tomes to limited-edition titles, they will act as elegant accompaniments to the coffee table or bookshelf of any style savant.

Here, selected by the Wallpaper* style team, a comprehensive guide to the best fashion books – including a lush new tome on the work of Irish designer Simone Rocha, an exploration of how directors dress from indie film producers A24 and a rare monograph from seminal designer Jil Sander.

The best fashion books for style savants

‘Jil Sander by Jil Sander’ (Prestel, 2024)

Seminal German designer Jil Sander’s new monograph, ‘Jil Sander by Jil Sander’, sees her consider an influential career with a kaleidoscopic visual journey through her collections. Hoping to evoke the energy of a runway show, the colourful images are curated alongside designer Irma Boom. ‘The mood of the book is true to the frenzy which overtook us every time we prepared a show,’ she told Wallpaper* in a rare conversation. ‘I knew that I didn’t want to achieve a classic coffee table book, so it was trial and error until we got there. The book packages all the shows into one.’ Read more.

‘Jil Sander by Jil Sander’, published by Prestel, is available from waterstones.com and barnesandnoble.com.

‘Loro Piana: Master of Fibres’ (Assouline, 2024)

Celebrating 100 years in business, Loro Piana’s luxurious new tome, ‘Loro Piana: Master of Fibres’, is a ‘story of excellence, savoir-faire, and passion for the extraordinary, passed down for six generations,’ according to author Nick Foulkes. Recounting the history of the Italian house, which is best known for its work in the so-called ‘noble fibres’ of cashmere, alpaca and vicuña, it takes readers on a journey through the family’s early years as wool traders, all the way to its status as the luxury mega-brand it is today. Part of Assouline’s ‘ultimate’ collection, it is housed in a case covered in Loro Piana Tela Sergio fabric and is entirely hand-bound.

‘Loro Piana: Master of Fibres’, published by Prestel, is available from assouline.com.

‘Simone Rocha’ (Rizzoli, 2024)

A new Rizzoli-published book explores the work of Irish designer Simone Rocha, who since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2010 has become one of London fashion’s most celebrated designers for her romantic, folklore-infused collections which straddle the sweet and the subversive. The lush tome – which draws on Rocha’s publishing expertise, having released numerous zines over the last decade – features an expansive catalogue of imagery, alongside contributions from figures including artist Cindy Sherman, photographer Petra Collins and the critic Tim Blanks. It also pays ode to two eternal influences to Rocha: the artist Louise Bourgeois, and Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo.

‘Simone Rocha’, published by Rizzoli, is available from waterstones.com and barnesandnoble.com.

‘O lovely one, girl that fell from a star’ (Dover Street Market)

Róisín Pierce calls her art book ‘O lovely one, girl that fell from a star’ a ‘love note to femininity, creativity, craft, and motherhood in its myriad forms’ – much like the Irish designer’s collections, which weave ancient Irish craft with a romantic vision of womanhood. Comprising a series of images photographed for the project by Jody Rogac of figures like Serena Motola, Frances von Hofmannsthal, Sinead O’Brien and the designer’s mother, Angie Pierce, the all-white ‘pocket book’ (‘a keepsake, a token’) also features interviews and poetry. ‘Imparting their wisdom throughout, their thoughts and views are allowed to flourish, unfiltered,’ says Pierce of the subjects. ‘Among the pages, they invoke the romantic nostalgia of the Gardenia, the sweetness of living in harmony with an uninvited mouse, the joy of being a voice in a choir, and the hope in resistance and revolt. There is no formula to femininity, and this book welcomes its abundance.’

‘O lovely one, girl that fell from a star’ is available exclusively at Dover Street Market Paris (doverstreetmarketparis.com).

‘How Directors Dress’ (A24, 2024)

Indie film production agency A24 adds to its burgeoning imprint with ‘How Directors Dress’, an exploration of the working uniforms of film’s best-known auteurs, from Sofia Coppola to Spike Lee. Comprising a series of essays – contributors include Hagop Kourounian (aka @directorfits), Rachel Tashjian, Lynn Yaeger and more – alongside archival imagery, A24 promise to use clothing ‘to tell exciting new stories about directors, their lives, their movies, and the times in which they were made’. The 256-page book also features a foreword from director Joanna Hogg, and an afterword from legendary Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto.

‘How Director’s Dress’, published by A24, is available from shop.a24films.com.

‘Norbert Schoerner Prada Archive: 1998-2002’ (IDEA Books, 2024)

A new book published by IDEA, ‘Prada Archive 1998-2002’, documents the campaigns photographed for the Italian fashion house by German image-maker Norbert Schoerner. ‘I hear all the time, from art director friends, that [these are] the campaigns they see most frequently on moodboards,’ Schoerner told Wallpaper*, speaking on the legacy of his work with Prada. ‘It's a great compliment, to have had that sort of impact on photography, but by no means could we have anticipated that 20 years later [the campaigns] would have such a ubiquitous presence in visual culture.’ Art directed by Jonny Lu, Schoerner’s clean, hyper-real imagery is collated in the book, featuring era-defining models Angela Lindvall, Freddy Drabble, Mateo Renoir and David Annand. Read more.

Norbert Schoerner: Prada 1998–2002’s first run of 750 copies have sold out, though the book will be distributed to global retailers in the coming weeks. You can sign up at the IDEA Books website to be notified when new copies are available.

ideanow.online

Born in Oasi Zegna: The Book (Rizzoli, 2024)

‘Born in Oasi Zegna’ celebrates the history of the Italian house, tracing its roots back to the Biella Alps in Piedmont, northern Italy where Ermenegildo Zegna opened his first wool mill in 1910. Now designated a natural territory, the locale marks not only the birthplace of Zegna, but also a symbol of its ongoing dedication to the natural world: since the mill’s opening, Ermenegildo would begin planting conifer trees to foster the area’s ecosystem, which now number over 500,000. Combining archival imagery and contemporary illustrations, the book combines dramatic images of the Oasi Zegna landscapes with archival imagery from the house, alongside illustrations by Paolo Bacilieri, Cecilia Carlstedt and Giuseppe Ragazzini. Accompanying texts, meanwhile, are contributed by Italian journalist Chidozie Obasi. Read more.

’Born in Oasi Zegna: The Book’, with texts by Chidozie Obasi, is available now from zegna.com.

Dior Scarves: Fashion Stories (Thames & Hudson, 2024)

’Dior Scarves: Fashion Stories’ grants a closer look at one of the French house’s defining accessories, the silk scarf. A fascination of Christian Dior which has been adopted by the various designers who have helmed the house in the decades since – most recently, current womenswear creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri – the Maria Luisa Frisa-edited tome provides an ’atlas’ of memorable Dior scarves, organised thematically. These include ‘Paris’, ’Optical Effects’ and ’Cosmogonies’, among others, with accompanying photographs by Brigitte Niedermair. The result, says Dior, is ’an enchanting portfolio... a pluralistic odyssey’.

’Dior Scarves: Fashion Stories’, edited by Maria Luisa Frisa, is available now from Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.

Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm (MoMA, 2024)

Last November (2023), British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner was the latest participant in MoMA’s ‘Artist’s Choice’ series, which drafts an eclectic raft of creatives to curate an exhibition of their choice at the New York museum. Wales Bonner’s was titled ’Spirit Movers’, and comprised works which centre on sound, movement, performance and style ’in the African diaspora and beyond’. An accompanying book, published by MoMA, is titled ’Dream in the Rhythm’ and is deemed by Wales Bonner ’an archive of soulful expression’.

‘In this exhibition, ”Spirit Movers”, I was thinking a lot about what becomes embedded into artworks and materials,’ Wales Bonner told Wallpaper* when the exhibition opened. ‘I was thinking a lot about materials that have some kind of past life or the passing of time being evident in artworks. One of the things that has always been fascinating to me is how sound can be captured through different forms.’

‘Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm’, published by MoMA, is available from Waterstones and MoMA Design Store.

Fila: Timelapse (Rizzoli, 2024)

Fila: Timelapse, published by Rizzoli, provides an unorthodox, genre- and era-traversing history of the Italian sportswear brand and its enduring influence. Dreamt up by Italian journalist and fashion critic Angelo Flaccavento, the aim of the intriguing tome is to ’tunnel both past and present into a single, forward-looking vision’ including archival imagery of figures like Björn Borg – the tennis player would put Fila on the map – alongside essays, fiction and poetry from contributors including Charlie Fox, Silvia Calderoni, Jeph Burton, Rahim Attarzadeh and artists Karl Holmqvist and HB Hoyo. A foreword, meanwhile, comes courtesy of Fendi menswear and accessories creative director Silvia Venturini Fendi. Read more.

’Fila: Timelapse’, conceived by Angelo Flaccavento, is available to pre-order from Waterstones and Barnes & Noble (out 30 April, 2024).

Issey Miyake: 1960 to 2022 (Taschen, 2024)

Conceived by Midori Kitamura, one of Issey Miyake’s longtime associates, a new Taschen-published book provides a comprehensive guide to the Japanese designer’s innovative and imaginative collections. Visually rich, the book collates the most important moments from across the late designer’s expansive career. including the development of his signature polyester micro-pleats (which would later become Pleats Please Issey Miyake) alongside collaborations with photographers from Yuriko Takagi to Irving Penn. ‘Miyake liked to convey his ideas visually, so we used that framework as our starting point,’ Kitamura told Wallpaper*. ‘Miyake left us with a clear roadmap to follow, going forward. We have and will always carry this map in our pockets as we move forward, always carrying his dreams and his vision into the future.’ Read more.

‘Issey Miyake: 1960 to 2022’, initiated and conceived by Midori Kitamura, is available now Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.

Karl Lagerfeld: A Life in Houses (Thames & Hudson, 2024)

A new book, Karl Lagerfeld: A Life in Houses (Thames & Hudson), offers an unprecedented glimpse into the dramatic residences of the iconoclastic German fashion designer, best known for his tenures are Chloé, Fendi, and, of course, Chanel. The glossy coffee-table tome features a photographic portfolio of the various homes, from a gleaming Memphis-filled apartment in Monaco to 51 rue de l’Université in Paris, an opulent 18th-century hôtel particular he called home for several decades. Among it all, an extraordinary array of objets and art, a reflection of the eclectic inspirations behind his prolific career in fashion. Read more.

‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Life in Houses’, with text by Patrick Mauriès and Marie Kalt, is available now from Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.

Gabrielle Chanel (V&A Publishing, 2024)

Gabrielle ’Coco’ Chanel is the subject of an expansive new book published by the V&A to coincide with its blockbuster exhibition on the influential French couturier, Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto, which opened last September (until 26 February 2024). Titled, simply, ’Gabrielle Chanel’, the book spans her six-decade long career and pays particular focus to the garments themselves, which would mark a liberated new era for women’s fashion.

‘It’s about chic, simple clothing, looking at movement and the body,’ Oriole Cullen, who co-edited the book alongside curating the exhibition, told Wallpaper*. ’These elements she creates – the jersey, the little black dress, the suit – these are the things she comes back to time and again and refines them.’

‘Gabrielle Chanel’, edited by Oriole Cullen and Connie Karol Burks, is available now from Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.

Givenchy Catwalk: The Complete Collections (Thames & Hudson, 2023)

Thames & Hudson’s ‘Catwalk’ series was made for the style enthusiast: each edition turns its lens on a fashion house or designer and documents their entire runway oeuvre, from Prada to Versace. The latest addition is Givenchy, which explores not only house founder Hubert de Givenchy’s tenure – defined by a demure Parisian elegance encapsulated by his seminal gowns for Audrey Hepburn – but those who followed at the house, including John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Riccardo Tisci and Clare Waight Keller, alongside Matthew M Williams, who exited Givenchy in 2023. ‘In all its purity, I think Hubert created one of the most complex legacies in fashion, because it reaches far beyond dressmaking,’ explained Anders Christian Madsen, who co-authored the book, to Wallpaper*. ‘It’s synonymous with sophistication and good taste, and those ideas are hard to mess with.’ Read more.

Givenchy Catwalk: The Complete Collections, featuring texts by Alexandre Samson and Anders Christian Madsen, is available at Waterstonesand Barnes & Noble.

Yves Saint Laurent: Gold (Abrams, 2023)

The couturier Yves Saint Laurent was well-known for his bold, expressive use of colour, which included gold, a hue he called ’magical’. ’When reflecting a woman, it’s the colour of the sun,’ he once said. This magpie-like fascination is explored in Yves Saint Laurent: Gold, which provides the accompaniment to the exhibition ‘Gold, les ors d’Yves Saint Laurent’, which took place at Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris in late 2022. It holds up as a standalone book, though, featuring suitably glamourous imagery starring a phalanx of Saint Laurent muses, from Catherine Deneuve to Zizi Jeanmaire.

Yves Saint Laurent: Gold, featuring texts by Yvane Jacob and Elsa Janssen, is available at Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.

Shoes A-Z, the Manolo Blahnik Edition (Taschen, 2023)

Shoes A-Z, which explores the enormous archive of footwear at The Museum at FIT in New York City, has long been one of been of fashion’s most comprehensive tomes on the history of the accessory. A new edition of the landmark book – which features designs from Ferragamo, Saint Laurent, Vivienne Westwood and many more – comes complete with three prints by perhaps fashion’s best-known shoemaker, Manolo Blahnik. The limited-edition version – no doubt a collector’s item in the years to come – is completed with a ribbon-fastened portfolio to store the Fabriano prints, providing the perfect gift for any shoe aficionado.

Shoes A-Z. The Collection of The Museum at FIT. Manolo Blahník Edition, an edition of 1000, is available from Taschen.

Christian Dior, Christian Bérard. Joyful Melancholy (Gallimard, 2023)

‘Christian Dior, Christian Bérard. Joyful Melancholy,’ is a Gallimard-published book – created in association with Dior – which charts the couturier and painter’s lives in a unique joint biography. First meeting in the 1920s, the ‘designer of dreams’ Christian Dior and ‘painter of despair’ Christian Bérard became close friends and collaborators despite their contrasting personalities and approaches, with Bérard going on to decorate Dior’s first boutique, Colifichets, on Avenue Montaigne (the design included toile de Jouy motifs, now a house emblem). Alongside images by Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Lee Miller, and Irving Penn, as well as pictures of archival documents and objects, the book is a richly crafted narrative about the pair’s unique relationship. ‘All of Dior is in Bérard, all of Bérard is in Dior,’ says author Laurence Benaïm. ‘This book is not a two-headed biography – it is a meandering in the heart of a history haunted by dreams, affinities, and secrets sewn in the lining of vanishing time.’

Christian Dior, Christian Bérard. Joyful Melancholy, by Laurence Bénaïm, is available now from Waterstone’sand Barnes and Noble.

Thom Browne (Phaidon, 2023)

Thom Browne’s first monograph is released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the American designer’s eponymous label, featuring both original imagery of archival looks as well as explorations of Browne’s theatrical runway shows. Photographer Johnny Dufort has collaborated on the project, while Andrew Bolton – head curator of the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – curates the various looks and provides the book’s introduction. The book is a design object in itself: enclosed in a clamshell box, the Irma Boom-designed tome features Browne’s grosgrain striped ribbon as a bookmark. ‘This is a must-have for any Thom Browne fan,’ says Phaidon. Read more.

Thom Browne: The 20th Anniversary Book, by Andrew Bolton and Thom Browne, is available from Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.

Chopova Lowena: Conversations with Angels (2023) 

Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena – the designers behind London-based fashion label Chopova Lowena – release their third book this July, titled ‘Conversations with Angels’ and starring actress Chloë Sevigny. In it, Sevigny stars as a version of the Snow Queen from the Danish fairytale (here reimagined by poet Precious Okoyomo), one of Lowena’s favourite stories as a child, while the pair’s A/W 2023 collection, inspired by 70s skiwear, appears throughout the Charlotte Wales-shot book. ‘We love creating books because it gives us a chance to completely express our vision in such a meaningful way,’ say Chopova and Lowena. ‘This one was such a special one, working with our long-time collaborator Charlotte Wales and the incredible Chloë Sevigny. It was so exciting to work with Chloë on Conversations with Angels, we are huge fans of her work and it was a dream to work with her.’

Limited edition.

Dior by Raf Simons (Assouline, 2023)

Published by Assouline, a new tome celebrates Raf Simons’ acclaimed tenure at Dior, where he was creative director from 2012 to 2015. Part of a six-part series exploring the Parisian house’s various artistic directors, the book documents Simons’ ‘infinitely contemporary purity’ which married the house’s heritage with a subversive modernity which has defined the Belgian designer’s work since the founding of his eponymous label in 1995. It also explores the passions that Simons shares with Christian Dior – architecture, art and gardens among them – and features ‘dress portraits’ by Laziz Hamani and texts from fashion journalist Tim Blanks.

Dior by Raf Simons, by Tim Blanks, is available from dior.com

Burberry (Assouline, 2023)

Burberry entered a new chapter last month when Yorkshire-born designer Daniel Lee began his tenure at the brand with a debut collection that drew inspiration from eclectic British dress codes (‘you walk down the street and you’re surrounded by people from so many walks of life, all living together,’ he said after the show at London Fashion Week). He also looked towards the British institution’s roots in functionality – Burberry was founded in 1856 to create clothing which would protect its wearer from the country’s unpredictable weather – a heritage which is celebrated with the publication of new book ‘Burberry’ (Assouline). Across five chapters, fashion critic Alexander Fury charts Burberry’s 165-year history for an exploration of ‘innovation, adventure and Britishness’ alongside 200 illustrations. Says Carly Eck, Burberry brand curator, archive: ‘This book, the only one to be endorsed by the brand in recent times, presents a panorama of the company’s extraordinary heritage, which deserves to be widely celebrated. It’s the stuff of legends.’

Burberry, by Alexander Fury, is available from burberry.com.

Macro (Jil Sander, 2023)

The latest in a series of books created by Lucie and Luke Meier in collaboration with international artists and photographers, ‘Macro’ sees the designers unite with Chris Rhodes who captures the brand’s A/W 2022 collection in a number of still-life images. A long-time collaborator, Rhodes reveals the unseen details of the Meiers’ collections – the aluminium heel of a black pump, lapis lazuli stones in a silver necklace, a heart-shaped ornament on a handbag – in the intimate images. ‘Macro is the testimony of a journey, of an idea that adds a different dimension to the purpose of Lucie and Luke Meier’s work,’ say the brand, ‘a suggestion on how design can be unconventionally perceived and displayed’.

Limited edition.

Chloé Catwalk (Thames and Hudson, 2022)

Coinciding with the house’s 70th anniversary, a new Thames & Hudson-published book provides a comprehensive history of Chloé and those who have shaped it – from founder Gaby Aghion to a young Karl Lagerfeld, and the slew of influential female designers who have helmed the house in the years since, among them Martine Sitbon, Phoebe Philo, Stella McCartney and current creative director Gabriela Hearst. Collating over 130 collections and 1,100 looks, ‘Chloé Catwalk’ provides a vivid portrait of the pioneering house that has sought ‘modernity, ease, vibrancy, optimism, freedom’ from its beginnings. ‘All I ever wanted was for Chloé to have a happy spirit and to make people happy,’ Aghion is quoted as saying in the book. It is the latest addition to Thames & Hudson‘s blockbuster ‘Catwalk’ series, this time authored by Lou Stoppard and featuring a preface by fashion critic Suzy Menkes.

Come Stai? (Bottega Veneta, 2022)

Earlier this year, Italian designer Gaetano Pesce created the set – including 400 entirely unique chairs – for Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore outing at Bottega Veneta. A new limited-edition book from the house, launched as part of Design Miami, documents the process. Alongside images of the set’s creation by Stephen Shore and Sander Muylaert, Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews Pesce about the project’s ‘ideation, approach and process’ as well as contributions from Blazy and Wallpaper* Milan editor Maria Cristina Didero. Like the chairs, each cover of the book is entirely one-of-a-kind.

Acne Paper Issue 17 (Acne Studios, 2022)

After a seven-year hiatus, Acne Paper – Stockholm-based fashion label Acne Studios’ cult print magazine – was relaunched last November as a ‘hybrid between a book and a magazine’ across 500 pages. This year, for its 17th issue, the brand says it is taking this idea of a hybrid ‘one step further’ – ‘[it is] part biography, part novel, part cultural art journal, part fashion magazine,’ describe the brand of the latest issue, which centres around a character named Atticus, ‘a fictional personality in the art world who [is celebrating] his 100-year birthday’. Across five chapters, his ‘memoir’ narrates a ‘cultured life’ which sees him journey from a dancer under choreographer Merce Cunningham to a luminary of the contemporary art scene. The biography also centres on Atticus’ relationship with partner Desmond, ‘[reminding] of a time when men who loved men, and women who loved women, were considered delinquents… [and recalling] the dramatic Aids epidemic and the many loved and talented people who perished with it.’ As such, a portfolio in the issue pays tribute to the work of real-life artists Darrel Ellis, Arch Connelly, Jimmy Wright, and Larry Stanton – the latter who will be celebrated in a special capsule collection by the brand – while contributions from contemporary photographers Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Paul Kooiker and an intimate self-portrait series by Ibrahim Kamara are intersected throughout.

Hand in Hand (Fendi, 2022)

Coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the Fendi Baguette, a new book from the Italian house sees the iconic handbag style reinterpreted by 30 artisans across Italy in a celebration of centuries-old craft – from brocade, embroidery and crochet to works in wood and marble. In the book – titled ‘Hand in Hand’ after the 2020 initiative of the same name which originally tasked the artisans with reinterpreting the accessory – these works are captured by Italian photographer Lorenzo Vitturi and accompanied by texts by art critic and curator Eugenio Viola, artist Aldo Bakker and ‘upcyclist’ Orsola de Castro. ‘It pleases me to work on certain techniques that, to me, seem unchanged – and then to observe how, when working by hand, an error can become a virtue. Indeed, an error can become the idea for innovation,’ says the bag’s original designer Silvia Venturini Fendi in an interview about the project in the book. ‘[It] is a couture initiative, because it presents Baguette bags that will not be replicated.’

Akris: A Century in Fashion Selbstverständlich (Rizzoli, 2022)

To coincide with Akris’ 100th-anniversary celebrations – the house was founded a century ago in St Gallen, Switzerland – a new book, ‘A Century in Fashion Selbstverständlich’, presents a history of the house through the lens of current creative director Albert Kriemler (grandson of Akris founder Alice Kriemler-Schoch). The large-format photobook features a portfolio of vintage Akris styles photographed by Iwan Baan at the 1960s brutalist extension of the university of St Gallen, alongside an essay by Swiss author Daniel Binswanger, comments by Kriemler himself, and archival imagery. ‘Selbstverständlich is the one single German expression [that] best encapsulates the Akris spirit for me,’ says Kriemler of the book’s title, which loosely translates to English as ‘natural’ or ‘self-evident’. ‘It perfectly conveys our aesthetic ideal of clothing, embodying an effortless modernity.’

Dior by Sarah Moon (Delpire & Co, 2022)

A new book from Dior celebrates the Parisian house’s relationship with French photographer Sarah Moon – ‘a delicate ode to multifaceted femininity, sublime in its complexity,’ as the accompanying blurb describes. Across three consecutive volumes, Moon captures pieces from the Dior archives – mostly at Fondation Le Corbusier or inside the archival spaces themselves – creating evocative images which ‘communicate the strength which emanates from the architectural silhouettes designed by Christian Dior and his successors’. Current creative director of the women’s collections Maria Grazia Chiuri, who has continually commissioned women artists during her tenure for collaborations or show-set design, is a particular focus of the tome, with a 38-image portfolio of Chiuri’s work making up the book’s final volume.

The Colors of Sies Marjan (Rizzoli, 2022)

‘The Colors of Sies Marjan’ explores the brief but colourful history of Sander Lak’s cult New York label Sies Marjan, which shuttered in June 2020 after four years in business. The ‘highly personal’ book, as Lak describes, features archival imagery of Sies Marjan with a particular focus placed on the designer’s vivid and unexpected use of colour which was the bedrock of his work (‘Cookie Monster blue’, ‘Baskin Robbins pink’, ‘Lakers purple’ and ‘Post-it yellow’ are all described in the book). ‘The intention of a lot of books about fashion houses is usually within a marketing or PR-filled context, like an anniversary or store opening, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but this was something very different,’ Lak says of the book, which features contributions from artist Elizabeth Peyton, author Donna Tartt, and architect Rem Koolhaas, among others. ‘It was a chance for myself to give this chapter some closure.’

Annie Leibovitz (Taschen, 2022)

Originally published as part of Taschen's Sumo series – in which seminal cultural figures, including Helmut Newton, David Hockney and the Rolling Stones, are celebrated with limited-edition supersized monographs – Annie Leibovitz is rereleased in a new unlimited version. The comprehensive tome draws on 40 years of the American photographer’s work, from photojournalism for publications like Rolling Stone to her best-known celebrity portraiture in Vanity Fair and Vogue, as well as a number of photographs never before seen. ‘This is not a retrospective. It is a kind of potpourri. A roller coaster,’ Leibovitz says. ‘As you go through it, you forget what you saw in the beginning. You’re in another place toward the end.’

The Fendi Set: From Bloomsbury to Borghese (Rizzoli, 2022)

British designer Kim Jones became head of Fendi couture and womenswear in September 2020; his first collection for the house, the following January, melded Fendi’s famed Italian craftsmanship with his own British roots, looking towards the Bloomsbury Set for inspiration (particularly – Virginia Woolf, and her novel Orlando). The link, he said, was the way they were drawn to Rome – to its ancient monuments and Renaissance treasures – a journey he explores in a new Rizzoli-published book The Fendi Set (first released in January in the UK, it will arrive in the US at the beginning of April). Exploring Jones’ relationship with the culture-shaping group of artists, intellectuals and writers, it sees collaborator Nikolai von Bismarck photograph their famed gathering spots – Charleston House, Knole House, and Sissinghurst Castle – before heading to the set of the haute couture show in Paris, and then to Rome’s Villa Medici and Villa Borghese, where the histories of Fendi and the Bloomsbury Set meet. The photographs capture Jones’ own contemporary ‘set’ – Christy Turlington, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell among them – alongside original letters, diary entries and excerpts from Bloomsbury members.

GANNI: Gimme More (Rizzoli, 2021)

Ganni girls embody a celebratory, spontaneous, community and eco-aware spirit – one that has been captured within the pages of the Copenhagen-based brand's debut monograph GANNI: Gimme More. The vivid volume, published by Rizzoli, dives into the world of the sustainability-focused, pattern- and print-celebrating label. Look out for a photo essay documenting Ganni's home city, shot by longtime collaborator Ana Kraš; an insightful conversation with the label's creative director Ditte Reffstrup and a vivid visual collage piecing together the brand's raising-the-roof house parties. Laura Hawkins

Versace Catwalk: The Complete Collections (2021)

In recent years, Versace catwalk shows have well and truly broken the internet. For the label’s Milan Fashion Week S/S 2022 offering in September, its campaign star Dua Lipa opened and closed a scintillating runway show, which featured a profusion of its signature motifs: tropical foulard silks, oodles of neon, safety-pin embellishments and a steamy hit of bare skin.

With the release of Versace Catwalk: The Complete Collections, fashion fans can ogle their favourite catwalk collections from the brand – be it the animal-print and power-shouldered silhouettes of the S/S 1983 offering, or the cyber glamour of the S/S 2012 couture show. The volume, authored by esteemed fashion critic Tim Blanks, is paged chronologically and brings together more than 40 years of fashion shows, kicking off with Gianni Versace’s 1978 debut, in a carefully curated edit of some 1,200 images. LH

OBJECT-FORM.FORM!, by Samuel Ross (2021)

Samuel Ross' interdisciplinary mindset – that sees him bridge not only his fashion label A-Cold-Wall* but also his art and design practice SR_A – culminates in Object – Form. Form!, Ross' first major book celebrating the range and extent of his projects and collaborators. Leaf through this visual history of Ross' projects to date, which also features a gallery of short texts by friends, mentors and peers, including Virgil Abloh, Takashi Murakami, Daniel Arsham, Hans Ulrich Obrist and David Adjaye. LH

Vivienne Westwood Catwalk (2021)

Vivienne Westwood vanguards, unite! A veritable treasure trove of images and inspiration, Thames & Hudson-published Vivienne Westwood Catwalk celebrates 40 years of the legendary British designer’s runway collections. Take a coveted seat at the catwalk of over 70 collections and delight in 1,300 looks, that celebrate the historicism-rooted, renegade, punk and environmentalist aesthetic of Westwood. The volume, released in celebration of Westwood's 80th birthday, features an introduction and collection texts by fashion critic Alexander Fury, with contributions by Westwood herself and her partner in life and work Andreas Kronthaler. The book is bound with the brand's iconic tartan, first produced in 1993 and officially recognised by the Scottish register of Tartans. LH

Familiarity (Jil Sander, 2021)

Creative director and husband-and wife-duo Lucie and Luke Meier have collaborated with a cohort of legendary image makers, teaming up with Joel Meyerowitz on Sander's recent A/W 2021 campaign. Now the label has released Familiarity, a limited photographic volume, which sees five image makers, Anders Edström, Olivier Kervern, Chris Rhodes, Lina Scheynius and Mario Sorrenti, personally interpret the the Meiers’ designs. These images offer five distinct visual takes on the Sander aesthetic, which are united by Sander's clothing. The images have been captured inside photographers’ homes and gardens, bringing a sense of intimacy to the photographic series, and a notion of familiarity to elevated fashion. LH

Peter Lindbergh. Azzedine Alaïa (Taschen, 2021)

‘We met in 1979, I believe. Ever since, Azzedine and I are hand in glove. I photographed his collections and I have countless portraits of him,' said renowned German photographer Peter Lindbergh of his longtime friendship with Azzedine Alaïa, before he passed away in 2019. Alaïa and Lindbergh were united on many creative passions: a love for black and the celebration of the female form.

Now, a grayscale Taschen volume – launched in conjunction with the exhibition Azzedine Alaïa, Peter Lindbergh at the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris – celebrates the creative output of the two artist's, spanning atmospheric settings including the lamp lit streets of Paris and the windswept beach of Le Touquet, and featuring models and musicians including Naomi Campbell, Kristen McMenamy, Madonna and Tina Turner. The book – a must for Alaïa or Lindbergh-obsessed bibliophiles, also features contributions from Fabrice Hergott, director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la, photographer Paolo Roversi and Olivier Saillard, fashion historian and director of the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa. LH

Silicon Valley. No_Code_Life (Rizzoli, 2021)

When Italian label Tod's launched its No_Code trainer project – a line of silhouettes that adheres to technological and fabric innovation, and invites design visionaries to apply cutting-edge ideas to its designs – it demonstrated a synergy with the forward-thinking mindset of Silicon Valley, and its ascendancy of unicorn companies. Now, in celebration of the famed San Francisco location, and the site of spectacular start-ups, the label has launched a Rizzoli-published book which lenses Silicon Valley, in an alternative light, breaks through the venerated veneer of its streets.

For Silicon Valley. No_Code_Life, Tod's enlisted Iranian-American photographer Ramek Fazel to document the daily goings on in Silicon Valley. For 10 days he roamed its roads, armed with a Rolleiflex, shooting diverse portraits and panoramic views, from aerial shots of lengthy highways to employees armed with colourful Google-branded tote bags. The result is a colourful and multifarious presentation of Silicon Valley existence, rooted in reality, instead of millennial-infused myth. LH

Craig Green x Jack Davison (Limited edition at Dover Street Market, 2021)

In March 2021, London menswear designer Craig Green teamed up with photographer Jack Davison, on a poetic S/S 2021 visual set of images that captured Green’s sculptural, utilitarian and headpiece-accented designs. Now, in celebration of the project, Green and Davison have launched a print media extension of the collaboration, encompassed as a limited set of four riso-printed and saddle-stitched self-cover books, accompanied by Tyvek sheet posters, printed in a spectrum of colour variations. From midday tomorrow, 13 May 2021, a mere 30 sets of the books will be available, for free, for the public to collect from Craig Green’s space at Dover Street London. LH

Pucci (Taschen, 2021)

One designer who had the ability to imbue escapism into every garment was Emilio Pucci. The Italian designer was a doyen of dramatic, pattern-splashed clothing, which also had a boundary-pushing comfortable appeal, and was sported on the ski slopes and in the chicest summer resorts. Now, a Taschen released tome celebrates the history of the print-swathed Pucci dynasty, in a volume brimming with archival images, sketches and eye-catching ephemera. Pucci, features accompanying text by fashion critic Vanessa Friedman and is wrapped in a tactile fabric cover, with a selection of archive prints abounding in abstract swirls and tropical blooms. LH

Her Dior: Maria Grazia’s New Voice (Rizzoli, 2021)

During her creative tenure at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri has made feminism an integral part of her aesthetic expression, collaborating with revolutionary female artists including Judy Chicago and Tomasina Binga and creating silhouettes that explore the multi dimensional facets of womanhood. Now, a new publication by Rizzoli New York, brings together a host of female photographers, including Wallpaper* contributor Brigitte Niedermair, Nan Goldin, Sarah Moon and Laura Coulson, in a visual exchange exploring female identity.

‘Seeking a dialogue from the outset with these women artists, writers and activists, they themselves at times distant from me and from fashion, was party and parcel of my focus on the reasons and the situations that I believed we urgent, and that I wanted to put at the heart of my creative process,’ Chiuri explains in the volume’s Introduction. LH

Stazione Termini, Lookbook 2009-2021 (Drago, 2021)

Niccolò Berretta has been drawn to the anthropological bravura of August Sander and Diane Arbus since he first started taking pictures. ‘I see their work as a sort of catalogue of human beings yet with the search for the mysterious,’ he says. In 2009 he began taking photographs of some of the one hundred and fifty million passengers that pass each year through Rome’s Stazione Termini. Now 490 of them have been brought together in a chunky book published by Drago.

The first edition includes a glossy wraparound featuring models striding the streets of Esquilino in the 15th rione wearing REDValentino’s Spring/Summer 21 collection. Between the covers, we see couples dressed in matching shiny puffa jackets, a cigar smoking man in a finely tailored navy suit, stickered suitcases, knitted leg warmers, and sunglasses pushed up onto people’s heads. ‘I do not go beyond the mirror they see themselves in every day,’ Berretta says in the introduction. This is more than just a record of quotidian style, it is an archive of a city and its people in flux. ‘An integral part of this visual process is the environment: the advertisements, the construction sites, the cars, the street signs, the scenography that speak to their time. The subtitle Lookbook 2009-2021 is an ironic reference to the world of fashion in which everything is fleeting, fast and almost does not exist.’ Dal Chodha

MSGM 10! The (in)complete Brand Anthology (Rizzoli, 2020)

The vibrancy, pattern and eclectic flavour of Massimo Giorgetti’s MSGM is synonymous with modern Milanese design, and in celebration of the label’s tenth birthday, the brand has released a Rizzoli-published monogram, majestic in colour and warmth. The volume, which is visually inspired by a fanzine and was art directed by Giorgetti himself, features a mix of fashion-focused and personal memories, from his dogs Pane and Coda to effusive editorial images. With contributing texts from friends and collaborators including Maurizio Cattelan, super stylist Katie Grand and journalist Charlie Porter, this is a must read for any MSGM enthusiast. LH

Images (Jacquemus, 2020)

Simone Porte Jacquemus understands the transportive power of Instagram. The designer has long used the medium to convey the sun-drenched seduction his brand reflects, associated with the sand-lined shored of Southern France. During lockdown the designer even shot S/S 2020 digital campaign images with Bella Hadid, Barbie Ferreira and Steve Lacy, showcasing the uplifting results on the social media channel. Now, in his second publication to date, Jacquemus has released ‘Images’, a book of his favourite 321 Instagram images, edited down from the 85,041 pictures he has stored on his phone. The publication is a soothing snapshot of summer, boasting beachside shots, architectural and food close-ups and Jacquemus-clad portraits. They capture the energetic, warm and downtime-focused essence of the brand, whether you’re browsing the book from a sun bed in its founder’s beloved hometown Marseille, or city-bound on the sofa. LH

Sicily (Jil Sander, 2020)

We’re all in need of a touch of escapism right now, and lucky for us, Jil Sander’s Lucie and Luke Meier have just released a sun-kissed pictorial road trip around Sicily, lensed by photographer Olivier Kervern. The analogue amalgamation was first presented back in February at Milan Fashion Week at the brand’s Via Sant’Andrea exhibition space, and the sleek volume also serves up a series of portraits depicting the brand’s A/W 2020 offering. While road-tripping may feel out of reach, Sicily will feel out of the way enough when this book is held in the palm of your hands. LH

Sportmax (Assouline, 2020)

This Assouline-published volume by Luke Leitch and Olivier Saillard offers a pleasingly pictorial stroll through the five-decade history of the sports and casual wear-focused label Sportmax, founded in 1969 by Achille Maramotti. Sketches and advertising campaign images abound, highlighting the boldy saturated shades that define Sportmax’s aesthetic and capture the style signatures of the creatives who anonymously worked on the brand’s collections, including Nanni Strada, Jean- Charles de Castelbajac, Odile Lançon and Guy Paulin. LH

Prada Catwalk (Thames & Hudson, 2019)

When it comes to a Prada catwalk show, fans of the Milanese label delight in decoding the various archive Prada-isms which appear in each collection, be it S/S 1996’s icky ‘Formica’ prints, S/S 2000’s tessellated lipstick pattern, a heavy brown shoe or a pleated knee length skirt. Now, a new tome houses all of the brand’s catwalk collections in one place, from Miuccia Prada’s debut A/W 1988 runway offering, with its schoolgirl simplicity and utilitarian tailoring, to her S/S 2019 collection, boasting bourgeois takes on its signature nylon fabric, chubby Alice bands and swathes of grunge green satin. The Thames & Hudson published volume, written by fashion critic Susannah Frankel offers commentary on each collection featured, and boasts over 1,300 illustrations, making it the perfect printed tool for Prada fans everywhere, vying to decode the designer’s famed aesthetic, her obsessions and eccentricities and the brand’s boundary-breaking sensibility. LH

Chanel: The Impossible Collection (Assouline, 2019)

It’s fitting that this clamshell-cased tome, measuring nearly fifty centimetres in length, is purchased with a complimentary pair of white gloves. For ‘Chanel: The Impossible Collection' is a bookshelf treasure equal to the house’s signature bouclé tweed suit or its 2.55 handbag. This enormous edition is a tribute to the famed Parisian maison; its glossy pages are packed with fashion show shots, magazine editorials, newspaper cuttings, illustrations and portraits. As part of the volume, author and fashion critic Alexander Fury has also selected 100 iconic looks that represent the house, from the Little Black Dress to the day suit. ‘Let them copy, my ideas belong to everyone, I refuse no one,’ Gabrielle Chanel told The New York Times in January 1971. It’s hard to refuse this book too. LH

Fashion Central Saint Martins (Thames & Hudson, 2019)

Alexander McQueen, Phoebe Philo, Wallpaper* October issue guest editor Hussein Chalayan: some of the most lauded, experimental and innovative designers in the world began their fashion lives in the hallowed halls of Central Saint Martins in London. Fashion Central Saint Martins – published by Thames & Hudson and edited by the school’s programme director of fashion, Hywel Davies, and Cally Blackman, lecturer in fashion history and theory – takes a bold, collaged and archival amble through the art school’s fashion history, which began in 1938, when six years after its fashion school was founded by Muriel Pemberton, it began teaching fashion design and drawing.

Its colourful, cut-and-paste pages are divided into decades, allowing the reader to party alongside the school’s Blitz Kids Eighties alumni, like journalist Hamish Bowles and John Galliano before touring into the 2010s, the era of Craig Green, Charles Jeffrey and Molly Goddard. Expect pages packed with unseen student work, essays from guest writers including Sarah Mower and Judith Watt, and intimate insight into the student lives of some of fashion’s most important figures today. LH

Legaspi: Larry Legaspi, the 70s, and the Future of Fashion (Rizzoli, 2019)

‘It’s me fetishizing him through a fanboy filter’ says Rick Owens of the subject of his latest Rizzoli New York release, dedicated to the work and aesthetic of 70s unsung design hero Larry Legaspi, who created pioneering looks for musical behemoths including KISS, LaBelle and George Clinton. Owens’ men’s and women’s Glam Rock-ready A/W 2019 collection was also dedicated to the designer and featured sinched streamlined tailoring, platform boots and plenty of stage-ready make-up.

For the first ever book documenting LeGaspi’s work, Owens had unprecedented access to his partner’s archives – Legaspi died of Aids in 2001 – and the book is an amalgam of archive backstage imagery, tour posters and sketches, interspersed with newly Owens-lensed images of LeGaspi’s designs, alongside commentary from Patti LaBelle, André Leon Talley and Pat Cleveland. ‘Larry introduced a camp ferocity to the mainstream and helped set a lot of kids like me free,’ Owens adds. We urge you to get introduced too. LH

Craig Green’s fourth collection for the luxury outerwear brand Moncler was first shown in February 2020 in Milan and is now available to buy. ‘One of the reasons I enjoy working with Moncler is that they are so distinctive and definitive about what they are,' says Green, speaking from his studio in London’s Victoria Dock. ‘It’s about protection and functionality at its core, and they also have a very definitive key product category of down-filled jackets and padded outerwear. So, each season it’s about thinking about what else you can do within those ideas of construction and a down-filled jacket.'

Collection inspiration 

For the A/W 2020 season, the starting point was the two flat pieces of fabric that are sewn together to create a down jacket. ‘The construction of a down jacket has its own rules. There’s loads of restrictions but also possibilities,' says Green. ‘There’s restrictions in how you can apply and inject the down and how you can construct the volume, so working with the technical team on that is a very interesting part of the process.'

The pieces for 5 Moncler Craig Green are split into two distinct stories; a black and white section and a colourful section of neon oranges, acid yellow, faded pastel pinks, chalk blue. ‘The black and white section of the collection was created after sessions with the designers and technicians experimenting with down jackets and ski suits. Some of the colour mixes in the second half of the collection were happy accidents as the fabric was so translucent it created new shades when overlaying. In part the colours were inspired by insects and animals.'

Technical fabrication 

The pieces are crafted from an extremely lightweight and translucent micro ripstop nylon. The fabric is so sheer you can see the feathers inside, creating what Green describes as ‘almost like a 3D print with an iridescent effect.’ Other parts of the garments were inflated for the presentation to exacerbate the feeling of lightness.

‘People have played with putting volume onto the body, but this was about how the body could create volume in the garments as well. They are completely flat sheets with a series of zips, so you weave your body in and out of them to wear them. A bit like putting a floating 2D graphic onto the body,’ says Green.

A year in the making 

This collection took nearly a year to conceive and create. ‘We thought, "How can we make the lightest possible outerwear pieces?" Combining the micro ripstop fabrics with feathers created lighter than air jackets. During the process, we make trips to Milan to see the design and technical team at Moncler – we build things and play round a lot. Moncler are very open to experimenting, testing new ideas and pushing things forwards, which I think is really important for a collaborative partner. It’s an amazing team to work with, we have a lot of fun! Some of the ideas start off very strange!’

Protection as a theme

The collection was designed pre-Covid, but Green’s consistent vision explores concepts of protection in garments and feels more resonant than ever. ‘I’ve always gone back to the idea of protection. Even a technical idea of what that means. But I think people can be protected by things that aren’t tangible or ‘real’, like being part of a group, wearing a uniform, being part of a team. Emotional protection or finding protection in other people are things that we play with and consider. I think people always want to feel protected, even if there is not one specific thing to be protected from at that moment in time. Someone might buy an arctic down jacket but live in a city that is never that cold, but you still want to feel that level of protection, even if you might never really need to use it for its true purpose.'

INFORMATION

moncler.com

Mood board: Green’s first Paris show was themed around notions of intimacy and growth. ‘It started with this idea of packaging a person,’ the designer said backstage. There was an unwrapping of the term ‘the whole package’ – the attitude that the packaging is now more important than what’s inside. This translated into the cashmere dresses at the start of the show that had a protective layer sewn underneath. ’It’s that idea that we dream of wearing cashmere but these are being protected from you as much as you are being restricted from feeling them,’ Green said. He was in an esoteric, sensitive mood. A/W 20 looked at ’love, human relationships, different types of intimacy and our reactions to them.’

Best in show: Ripstop traditionally used for wind sails was employed for coats and trousers so the clothes rustled as the models walked. Plastic tubing was knitted into hats and tabards that bounded as they moved. Larger mechanical volumes twisted. There was a kinetic rigour throughout. The clothes could be pulled up like blinds, creating protective layers around the body. ‘They look like somebody looking out of the window and seeing their reflection at the same time. I also think that windows are really weird – you have them to feel like you are outside, but they are very much a sign that you are inside your house,’ Green said. Elsewhere large flower silhouettes were printed onto tabards and wide pants.

Sound bite: The show’s first section put leather and synthetic together. Green said: ‘People think of Tyvek as an inexpensive disposable material but the leather looked so much like it. That feeling of detachment was important too. Like people falling in love who might have never lived in the same city together or even met! I was interested in that sense of moving through life and collecting things. Outfits that are like multiple garments in the way that we adapt as we grow but still carry everything along with us.’

Mood board: Green has become known for his sensitive, incisive work exploring the body and its architectural reality. It is always revealed or wrapped, presented or protected. For S/S 20, the designer took a philosophical approach to the human form. Much of the research looked into resurrection and ways of thinking about transformation. Green wondered why we wear the skin of another animal as a protective layer on top of our own. Here he embedded matte leather into a ribbed knit jacket and tabard, worn like a second-skin. The show ended with a succession of brightly coloured laser-cut ripstop pieces inspired by Mexican Easter flags, which symbolise rebirth, though are quickly disposed of after use.

Best in show: Green’s signature workman jackets have added mirror and lacework patches or come in flesh toned silk. Standout were the silk dream suits, hand-embroidered with padded shapes inspired by Zoroastrian anatomical drawings, where human flesh and muscle appear like flora. ‘There was a weird Egyptian idea of embalming or burying you with your worldly goods. I think it’s such a strange thing that when you pass, you get put into a tomb or a concrete box when, throughout your life, you’re never that protected,’ he said. Elasticated cotton suits were printed with lo-resolution images of men’s bodies found online. There was a sense of the ethereal, but with an ultramodern attitude.

Sound bite: ‘The outlook was a bit more positive than normal,’ Green said. ‘I kept thinking about mirrors, which I always think of as possibilities. There is also that idea of scrutinising yourself in the mirror that ties into the research about resurrection. I like the idea that things didn’t have to be from one place, they didn’t have to be either negative or positive, they are celebratory in their balance.’ The designer was in full renaissance mode: ‘it’s about lightness and skin and playing with this idea of transformation.’ 

Mood board: ‘Emotion doesn’t mean weakness,’ said Craig Green backstage after his triumphant homecoming show, presented after a season spent showing as a guest designer on the Pitti Uomo schedule in Florence. London is a city renowned for its eccentricity and humour, with catwalks for A/W 2019 boasting a giant Pikachu, furry monsters and men on springy stilts. Green’s catwalk was more emotive, sensitive and made up of an amalgam of moving and breathtakingly intricate codes, symbols and techniques. ‘I was thinking of a man made of glass, but that idea doesn’t necessarily mean fragility,’ he added. New shapes were added to Green’s workwear and uniform-centric canon – spliced monastic robes in Buffalo check, gauzy tailored trenchcoats, densely crocheted vests and trousers incorporating ‘medieval techniques’ and resembling padded protective ice hockey uniforms, sweeping coats with Japonism landscape prints on the back, hidden from view by front-facing runway catwalk shots. Catwalks looks spliced from a multitude of references and tribal signifiers, to resemble something distinct and new.

Scene setting: Green staged his show within a densely arched underground space inside the old Billingsgate Fish Market on the Bankside of the River Thames. The stark space featured nothing but a white runway and a darkened interior. Like the tartans, tassel head pieces, and diverse references in the collection which ‘mean so many different things to so many people,’ Green wanted his show location to be equally ambiguous. ‘As if the show could have happened at any place, any time,’ he said.

Best in show: The most striking representation of Green’s ‘men made of glass’ came in a series of acid tone looks created from densely knitted pieces of plastic, ruched to resemble bubble wrap or transparent orbs of blown glass.

A procession of petticoated Victorian hikers traversing crumpled paper mountains; 6.5m-high mechanical cylinders resembling steaming underwater pistons; a monastic chapel hanging with paintings by artist-monk Sidival Fila. These are just three of the eight scenes, hidden beneath huge tents of silver fabric, which greeted guests at Moncler’s Genius Project debut, in the cavernous Milanese stadium Palazzo delle Scintille in February.

The premise? A roster of designers – from Simone Rocha (winner of a 2018 Wallpaper* Design Award, W*227) to Craig Green, Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli and Rei Kawakubo’s protégé Kei Ninomiya – were invited to put their creative spin on the brand’s signature padded down jacket. Their creations were to be released in line with a new retail strategy, one that disrupts the traditional seasonal cycle with fresh drops of product put on sale each month (a model that nods to the selling strategies of street and sportswear brands such as Supreme and Nike).

‘I started looking at images of women wearing voluminous silhouettes among really rugged landscapes,’ says Rocha of the 19th-century Alpine trekkers, such as Maria de Mont Blanc and Henriette d’Angeville, that inspired her collection’s fusion of ‘femininity and practicality’. For the Milan presentation, the London-based Irish designer created a scene of hikers, milling against shadowy paper peaks, clad in gauzy petticoat layers, lampshade dresses in padded down, shiny puffer jackets with frills and frothy finishes, and marabou-trimmed accessories.

‘I’ve long been intrigued by Rocha’s sophisticated and hyper-feminine aesthetic,’ says Remo Ruffini, chairman and CEO of Moncler. The brand’s original, now ubiquitous, padded down jackets were first conceived in 1954, and Rocha brought her mastery of airy fabrics, such as organza and cloqué, to their ultra-light construction. ‘What was so surprising was that I could manipulate the fabric like taffeta or tulle,’ Rocha explains. She saw the padded garments as a ‘jigsaw’, the seams of which could be pieced together to create voluminous shapes – such as an A-line coat, its linear puffed sections widening towards the knee, and a jacket with undulating ruffles sprouting from its seams.

Ideas of growth and blossoming were essential to Rocha’s design concept, which worked to assimilate outdoorsy garments into their natural environments. ‘I was looking at foliage and flowers growing up through rocks,’ she explains. Signature handwork, such as beading, sequins and embroidered flowers, appears to push through seams or cluster around the graphic Moncler logo. ‘I used pearls to evoke a snowy mountain palette,’ she adds of the collection, which is realised in white, powdery pink, red and black.

An element of protection is often evident in Rocha’s designs for her own label, her romantic silhouettes offset against militaristic cross-body belts and oversized cushiony bags. In her accessories for Moncler, she has emphasised functionality, creating nylon hiking backpacks that buckle around the waist and padded ski mittens. ‘It’s something I’ve never done before in terms of manufacturing,’ she enthuses. Her experimentation with technical fabrics is also seen in signature flaring dresses and soft double-breasted coats reinterpreted in nylon.

‘The Moncler Genius Project was very much about everyone having their own identity but being part of the brand’s voice,’ Rocha explains of unveiling her collection amid offerings as diverse as Craig Green’s padded men’s diving suits and Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Madonna-inspired flaring capes.

‘We’re establishing a dialogue with consumers, talking to different audiences and continuing to evolve,’ adds Ruffini.

Included in Rocha’s collection is a range of sunglasses. Ski goggle-inspired and ovular, they appear as if circled with black droplets of water. Functional yet feminine, made for the outdoors yet opulent, they serve as a symbol of Moncler’s multifarious vision. §

As originally featured in the September 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*234)

INFORMATION

4 Moncler Simone Rocha is available from mid-September. For more information, visit the Moncler and Simone Rocha websites

COS: the brand is known for its minimal clothes and artistic presentations. At Pitti it introduced a new season-less capsule collection of 17 menswear essentials entitled Soma with a performance choreographed by Wayne McGregor. The collection of separates in white, navy and grey melange have been designed to explore what essential menswear means. ‘Every detail has been designed with functionality and the movement of the wearer in mind,’ said Christophe Copin, COS head of menswear design, of the understated aesthetic. Dancers drew on the connections between garment and gesture. Wayne McGregor said: ’My choreography, performed by the dancers, has movement which is both familiar and unfamiliar, light, inventive and playful, but in its essence – simplicity. Soma is of the body, of nature, of being human.’

Craig Green: London Fashion Week Men had a number of notable gaps – one of the biggest was left by Craig Green who, as menswear guest designer, was the headline act at Pitti Uomo 94. Since starting his label in 2012, his padded workman’s jacket with tie-fronts has become a staple for sartorial men across the world. His palm tree collaged cagoules for S/S 2018 were worn by many guests to his show, held in the enormous Boboli Gardens. The space was dressed in tarpaulin and metal structures made in collaboration with David Curtis-Ring. Models moved in and around the grass and stone walkways. The collection riffed on Green’s ‘travelling men’ – his muse is often esoteric, embracing new shapes and forms as he goes. Here, he added more fluid flourishes to his signature, rigid style. Shapes and materials were collaged onto the body; multicolored flyknit tops were made in collaboration with Nike. Vests were wrapped and worn layered, high and tight over the torso; a series of crisp white shirts had vests trapped between them. Red rope cables ran across the back and down the arms of clothes. The show closed with a series of multi-floral quilted tarpaulins attached at the shoulders with knitted cables. Flora and fauna. Nature and future.

Federico Curradi: The designer, who presented his S/S 2019 collection in his home city, looked to Tuscany’s Arno river for inspiration. Organic hues meandered through casual and relaxed separates, like garment-dyed silk waterproofs in orange and sea green, rusty chunky knit V-necks and loose striped shirts. Patchy garment dye techniques evoked the salt spray of the sea, while fish-shape charms and woven belts had a crafty, nautical flair. Fabrications and silhouettes that float our boat.

Roberto Cavalli: Creative Director Paul Surridge arrived last year at the helm of a design house steeped in swagger and sex. Cavalli’s inimitable namesake founder built an empire on animal print pep, sand-blasted denim, leather and gold – all things that seem today at odds with our more sombre times. What does the manicured machismo of the Cavalli man look like today? Surridge’s S/S 2019 collection was entitled ‘Reboot’ – re-working and re-examining the brand’s DNA. Athletic tailoring was front and centre. The mood was relaxed as models walked across a red and blue carpeted catwalk set inside an epic Carthusian monastery high in the suburbs of Galluzzo. Modestly lavish, the collection focused more on surface tension than dramatic silhouette or OTT gestures. ‘My mantra is respect the past embrace the future, and that is my approach at Cavalli and how I navigate this brand to the next chapter. You just have to believe in yourself and protect your vision,’ he said. The show opened with all-white abstractions of animalier; throughout, the anticipated animal motifs were sliced, sun-bleached and out of focus. They appeared as tone on tone jacquards or perforated onto leather. ‘This is a wardrobe that reflects the times; I wanted the clothes to be immediate and not over designed or complicated. This collection is the new foundation of things to come.’ His approach is lenient and sparing; the opulence is all left to the touch.

Herno: on the first day of Pitti Uomo, Herno unveiled L.I.B.R.A.R.Y. – an installation inside the Leopolda Station that explored two important anniversaries for the brand. It is 70 years since its inception and half a century since it has been in Japan. Conceived under the creative direction of Anomalia Studio, the exhibition presented pieces from the archives stored at the factory in Lesa – from the double-breasted coat added to the line in the late 1950s to a whole section dedicated to Japan, which included a white cashmere coat worn by Princess Masako in the 1960s. Herno started with the raincoat; fittingly guests first hear and then see Studio Azzurro’s installation: a drop of water drips rhythmically into a container at the centre of a 10 by 10 meter space, falling from an upturned cap of a silk parachute suspended from the ceiling. As you stop each drop with your hand, you interact with one of the eight surrounding screens. Later on, unpublished clips from Istituto Luce in the 1950s show founder Giuseppe Marenzi launching his first collection as he wins the Rally della Moda at Saint Vincent – his car taking pride of place in this story of dynamism, vivacity and elegance. Here, in an exclusive film, you can see the exhibition coming to life.

Z Zegna: tennis may be emerging as a micro-trend for S/S 2019 – is it a key inspiration for Z Zegna’s chic summer wardrobe. Where Bally honoured the retired Swiss tennis stars Marc Rosset and Jakob Hlasek, Z Zegna announced the appointment of its first ever official face for the brand: Alexander Zverev, the youngest tennis player in the ATP top 20 and currently ranked number 3 in the world. Game, set and match. The collection offers a range of practical, smart sports tailoring in the brand’s trademarked TECHMERINO textile. From classic navy and grey, to the more seasonal spearmint and pale pink, a wash and go wardrobe of deconstructed jackets, technical blousons and tailored joggers work for both on and off the courts

Birkenstock: For its second fully fledged catwalk show, the German footwear brand pitched up at the Giardini Torrigiani, taking over the 16th century garden with a collection chock-a-block with updated classics: the cross or double strap Siena and Malmedy reimagined in khaki and with gold closures, the introduced of leather soles into the women’s ranges, the thick upper Zurich upgraded in green and brown camouflage. The label has been going from strength to strength, and bolstered its fashion credentials earlier this year with its launch of a Rick Owens collaboration. For spring, it also showcased the ‘Summmer Stride’ collection, a series of closed-shoes in unlined leather and with a cork sole.

Moncler: In February, the prominent outerwear and lifestyle brand announced a brave new communication and business model: the Moncler Genius project. Periodic collaboration with designers and artists across disciplines is now creating a laboratory of innovation and technological research. ‘We have overhauled everything, by overcoming the very concept of seasons. Our approach is monthly, weekly, daily. An approach which considerably reduces the time that elapses between the collection presentations and when they actually arrive in the stores,’ Remo Ruffini, Chairman and CEO of Moncler said at the time. At Pitti, the label unveiled a two-part project with Japanese polymath Hiroshi Fujiwara, whose fashion work is always centred on streetwear and music. His 7 MONCLER FRAGMENT HIROSHI FUJIWARA collection fuses the weatherproof DNA of Moncler with a hip-hop, urban sensibility. Jean jackets are in the iconic padded fabric in a military palette of white, fatigue green and black.

Brunello Cucinelli: there is a reboot of Riviera chic happening at Cucinelli – the customary pastel pinks and blues have been replaced with earthier deeper colours such as caramel, off white, brown and radish. The collection takes inspiration from the Roaring Twenties – a time when formal elegance collided with the sporting world. (The golf and tennis motifs writ large across so many of the collections at Pitti each summer owe much to this phase of the American Dream). The mood here is prim. Linen is key. A white one and a half breasted suit in dry cotton and linen mix is worn over a denim shirt with pearl buttons, exemplifying the coming season and a fittingly summery mood

Band of Outsiders: the fourth collection by design director Angelo van Mol and brand director Daniel Hettmann was shown on a post-rain patch of grass inside the grounds at Palazzo Forteza, scattered with broken columns and statues. Models arrived in a giant golden yellow school bus and sauntered across the square one by one in easy separates inspired by varsity vacation to Italy. Cue wide-leg Bermuda shorts worn with windcheaters in sugary pastels and boxfresh trainers in collaboration with Sergio Tacchini, lightweight tensile shirting and unstructured tailoring in plaid (worn with matching bucket hats). The mood was summery and fresh despite the added quirk of the rain-drenched setting. Whimsical cartoonish prints are by Brooklyn based artist Amit Greenberg. Inspired by childhood excursions to Roman ruins, his drawings are repeated over boxy, boyish shirts and shorts.

Corneliani: ‘silk is the cashmere of summer,’ creative director Stefano Gaudioso said when introducing his latest collection. The focus for the coming season is on silk and streetwear; a trio of raincoats, from a 1950s classic egg-shaped belted mac, to a sharp, laser-cut nylon style exemplify the tension at the heart of so many classic tailoring brands. How to do modern without abandoning heritage? In a time where Off-White styling and Supreme sweatshirts rule, Gaudioso is busy giving the classic sprezzatura of a fifty-year-old company subtle upgrades. S/S 2019 brings with it a more extensive range of athleisure in the finest fabrics – zip up jackets in stretch suede, lined in jersey with an elasticated membrane give luxury a new mood. ‘I am already working on a concept of street tailoring for next winter,’ Gaudioso says. ‘I want the suits to become less stiff, I want to work with different materials, maybe inserts, to do things that are a little more edgy. The suit is our heritage, sure, but in order to keep up with how the world is changing, you need to move with the times.’

Parajumpers: the label, which derives its name from the vigorous pursuit of parachuting is all about functionality before form. Inspired by a chance meeting between founder Massimo Rossetti and a serving member of the 210th Rescue Squadron in a bar in Alaska, Parajumpers has become known for its rugged, technical styles. The latest collection features high performance outerwear in vibrant, crinkle-effect washed nylon; generous cargo pockets at the chest are shaped for iPads and maps. Packable jackets come with taped seams and zippers. But it isn’t all about the rugged outdoors: the Limited Edition by Yono line (made in collaboration with Japanese designer Yoshinori Yono) introduces leisurewear made from three layer laminated fabric both stretchy and waterproof. It works just as well at home or at sea.

Woolrich: In October 2017, the heritage American company Woolrich International announced an alliance with Goldwin Inc, the Japanese experts in technology for the outdoors. Their debut collection Woolrich Outdoor, unveiled at Pitti is said to explore the balance between humanity and the natural world, which translates as super desirable, lightweight, functional, youthful clothes designed to adapt to the demands of active pursuits. The collection features a new curvier logo for Woolrich, which acts as a preview of the brand direction to be rolled out in A/W 2019. Stand out are a series of lightweight seersucker outdoor pyjamas, cut wide they come folded up in their own little cross body bag. The mood is lively and light. Let’s go outside!

MCM: for the last few years, the MCM logo backpacks have become omnipresent on city sidewalks around the world. Founded in 1976 in Munich, the brand was acquired by the Seoul based Sungjoo Group in 2005 who had worked with the brand as a distributor and licensee from the early 1990s. The label chose to debut its first full ready-to-wear and accessories collection at Pitti Uomo. Under the direction of Mrs Kim, founder and chief visionary officer of Sungjoo Group and owner of the MCM brand, the proposed ready-to-wear was aimed at the ‘21st-century Global Nomad’, striding alongside the signature backpacks, leather goods, eyewear and footwear. ‘Millennials have less need of leather goods than previous generations, because they can basically do everything with just a mobile phone. So the need for multiple bags and large bags is becoming less important’, Mrs Kim said. The performative, immersive show opened with a tropical storm and was punctuated by the landing of a skydiver down the catwalk. Metallic and holographic textiles reflected the light. Outerwear was functional and free.

Pringle of Scotland: the collection for S/S 2019 takes its influence from photographs in the Pringle archives from the 1980s. The label’s iconic argyle sweaters were worn in and out of sporting circles for much of the decade. The look for the coming season is relaxed and playful as knitted pyjama shirts have matching wide cuff joggers. In the archives too are the many logos and iterations of the lion motif, which the designers have hand-embroidered onto the front of a classic golf jumper. The distinctive diamond argyle graphic appears on slim-fit jumpers and as texture on a sleeveless style made from recycled yarn.

Doucal’s: there is a discreet elegance and confidence about Doucal’s – the anglophile shoe label established in 1973. Avoiding fashion’s roundtable of trends and seasonal collections, the core styles are modestly updated with new details and colours each season; this is where Italian classics and sustainable sprezzatura come together. The signature flexible shoe comes this season with a double buckle; a tassel moccasin in red suede has a soft insole, giving the shoe a unique flexibility. Elsewhere at Pitti there’s has been a proclivity for terry towelling; at Doucal’s, pastel suede high-top sneakers come with natural sponge laces mimicking the feel of a foamy seashore.

Fanatic Feelings: when Nigeria’s World Cup 2018 Kit went on sale at Nike Town in Oxford Circus last month, queues formed around the block. It had received more than three million pre-orders after it was first seen online in February. Football is big business and fashion’s relationship to the sport can be seen in the hip clothes of Gosha Rubchinskiy and Martine Rose. This week, Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery presented a pop-up entitled Fanatic Feelings – Fashion Plays Football. Curated by Markus Ebner – founder of German fashion magazines Achtung Mode and Sepp Football Fashion – and art critic Francesco Bonami, the project threw a spotlight on the impact of football on the world of men’s fashion. This is most notable in the pervasive fusion of tailoring and sportswear. The duo handpicked a team of designers to make one-of-a kind football fashion pieces, which will be on sale for a limited time only. Christelle Kocher of Koché Paris designed a special World Cup limited edition capsule using vintage national football jerseys; Alessandro Sartori, who continues to champion active wear at Z Zegna, has designed a striped polo with football crests in superb, user-friendly TECHMERINO. Part of the proceeds from the sales will help to support the activities of Centro Storico Lebowski, a Florentine amateur sport’s association.

Bally: the value of designers’ archives is well known today as young designers seem self-consciously wedded to the idea of permanence in a digital age. Yet, the real value is in archival clothes that have a bigger story to tell. The Bally company has a vast archive of around 35,000 pairs of shoes in Schönenwerd, Switzerland – it is a constant source of inspiration. There, the design team unearthed the battered white sneaker with pink and blue rubber sole worn by the Swiss tennis stars Marc Rosset and Jakob Hlasek throughout the 90s. For S/S 2019 the designers looked to Bally’s sporting heritage, reintroducing the Champion style in soft calf-skin, fixed to a multi-component rubber outsole with herringbone mould for all-surface endurance. It has been reissued in the original colour way endorsed by Jakob Hlasek during the ATP World Tour in 1991. The nineties are still in.

Fumito Ganryu: Ganryu has been a pioneer of the hybridised approach to menswear since launching his eponymous cult line within the Comme des Garçons stable in 2007. A graduate of Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, he started as a women’s pattern maker for Junya Watanabe in 2004 and so naturally his work fuses innovative pattern making with archetypal casual wear: ‘I do not consider my work as streetwear’ he says. ‘If people see the element of "street style" in my design, I assume it has come from what I have taken from skateboard culture. I focus on making garments that I think are necessary for the 21st century.’ In 2017 Ganryu separated from Comme des Garçons and Pitti marks his return to the spotlight. His S/S 2019 debut was futuristic and functional. Clothes were to be carried or worn as accessories, used when the need arises; shorts double as swimsuits. ‘What I would like to do is to create ‘non-sex’ clothes – garments without gender,’ he says. For summer this translated into garments attached to the body on silicon belts. ‘Transported rather than being worn, this would give the garments the sense of object, without being about sex.’ This is what Ganryu coins ‘conceptual casualwear.’

Margaret Howell: there’s a breezy nonchalance to the latest collection from MHL. Wool suiting is featherweight – cut in light Fox Brothers & Co cloth – relaxed shirting has big wide collars and long short sleeves, based on classic formal pyjama styles. Jogger trousers are hacked into shorts in lightweight cotton. New desert shoes are in suede with seamless backs and can bend in half for ease when packing. Blazers take inspiration from a woman’s style and are oversized and exaggerated in their slouch. A pioneer of anti-glitz, Howell’s suiting for spring is merrily sombre. Unlined and unstructured, it’s easy, sexy, cool.

Fratelli Rossetti: in 1968, as the world was ablaze with the vivacity of student protests, Renzo Rossetti developed the smart Brera tasselled loafer, inspired by the kids hanging around the historical artist district in Milan. On its 50th birthday, the brand is celebrating with a collection that has the same nonchalant poetry of youth in revolt; calf-skin loafers have soft suede backs so they can be folded down and worn as slippers. Classic woven styles have a bold graffiti snakeskin patina. A small showcase of work created by BA Students from the NABA Nuova Accademia delle Belle Arti in Milan was on show too. Invited to reinterpret the loafer, Arianna Monticelli proposes an idiosyncratic take on the tassel, mixing woven leather, suede and rope.

Tiger of Sweden: Pitti Uomo 94 marked Christoffer Lundman’s second collection for the classic menswear label. The head of creative and design, who cut his teeth at Burberry, Tom Ford and Acne, was fascinated by the spirit of adventure for spring, presenting versatile crease-resistant travel suits, short suits and tactile woven tote bags. Details that reflect a lifetime of travel populated the collection, like Asian prints, shirts with Cheongsam fastenings and stripes neckties, inspired by Sweden in the Seventies, naturally.

Colmar: Outdoor exploits are essential to the renowned Italian outerwear label, which pushes its own sense of adventure each season with the development of fabrications and finishes. For S/S 2019, Colmar looked to the endless promise of America, from the East to the West Coast, incorporating Pop Art-centric prints, madras fabric and colour blocking into its silhouettes. A women’s highlight was encompassed in a water-repellent jacket with a semi-shiny yarn belt bag attached at the waist, and a men’s was an ultra light version of the brand’s down jacket, imagined in super shiny ripstop fabric.

Fashion week is not just the time for brands to showcase new collections. It’s also the schedule from which they experiment with new formats, be it presentations or video debuts, the merging of men’s and women’s lines or the showcase of see-now-buy-now collections. Last night on 20 February, Italian label Moncler debuted the latest chapter in the narrative of its creative vision, unveiling the ‘Genius Building’, a magnificent show at Palazzo delle Scintilla, made up of eight individual presentations by a roster of Moncler’s latest collaborators, including Craig Green, Simone Rocha and Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli.

‘Since the beginning, Moncler has been constantly been looking for new means of expression,’ explains Remo Ruffini, Moncler’s chairman and CEO. Until last year, the brand had presented its Thom Browne and Giambattista Valli directed Moncler Gamme Bleu and Rouge lines on the men’s and women’s fashion week schedule. It has also collaborated with a roster of creative talents including Jean Philippe-Delhomme, Greg Lauren and Off-White.

Last night, Moncler bought its diverse and evolving approach to collaboration to a majestic crescendo. Eight separate presentation galleries were cloaked in futuristic silver fabric, like huge draped theatre curtains or interplanetary oil cylinders. As guests entered each space via entrances like tunnel or porthole, they were greeted with eight diverse set-ups, which featured imaginative reinterpretations of the brand’s classic down jacket.

Take Pierpaolo Piccioli, whose ethereal installation featured a range of gently flaring and multicoloured duvet coats on elongated mannequins, their widening silhouettes taking on a couture meets Handmaid’s Tale sensibility. Or Simone Rocha, whose set-up featured models dressed as Victorian climbers walking amongst a snowy mountain landscape.

Rocha, who is renowned for using gauzy and lightweight fabrics like lace and tulle, was fascinated by Moncler’s signature down fabric, presenting quilted asymmetric dresses with marabou trim, and scarlet coats with fronds of ruffles. 'It was amazing to work on a project that required a new level of expertise,’ she says. ‘I wanted to work with materials that were signature to me like twill or cloqué, and balance those pieces with the down.’

‘We had real freedom,’ says Craig Green, whose presentation space featured two undulating mechanical structures, designed by London-based set designers Isabel + Helen, which resembled steaming pistols or globulous jellyfish. Green has a long fascination with underwater imagery, and his architectural padded designs resembled huge deep sea diving suits that protected the body. ‘They’re like crazy Moncler flotation devices,’ he adds of the pieces, which were presented against a dark backdrop of eerie mechnical noises, like the sounds of a submarine miles below the surface of the sea.

Moncler has always taken its catwalk set-ups to amazing heights. For its A/W 2017 show in New York, the brand recreated a majestic Viennese Ball at Hammerstein Ballroom, and for its S/S 2016 Gamme Bleu show in Paris, its regatta-inspired show set featured a catwalk installed with rowing boats. The Moncer Genius Building debut was a creative culmination of this performance-focus. Produced by Villa Eugénie, it also comprised of a Karl Templer curated installation featuring a giant patchwork sea of Moncler jackets, Sandro Mandrino’s presentation of models moving as if inside a huge reflective kaleidoscope, and Comme des Garçons’ protégé Noir Kei Ninomiya's darkly minimalist set-up, which featured mannequins clothed in innovative knitted down.

‘I believe that creativity has no boundaries,’ Ruffini says. ‘I conceived the Moncler Genius as a hub of exceptional creative minds, that will work together under the same brand, keeping Moncler's DNA alive.’

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Moncler website

Scene setting: Craig Green has always been interested in sculpture and form. His contemplative and intellectual fashion shows are often completed with models carrying abstract wooden sculptures, designed by David Curtis-Ring. For his A/W 2018 show, Green erected his most powerful show set to date at the Workshop on Lambeth High Street. The brand created a backdrop of hanging black panels, which separated the show set into sections, and featured bright beams of light at their intersects, which models walked between as the show began. 

Mood board: Green has become known for his intricately detailed and designed clothing, which takes inspiration from military silhouettes, utilitarianism and uniforms- be that of boyscouts or deep sea divers. For A/W 2018, he was preoccupied with ‘blueprints of masculine dress’, culminating in exaggerated looks which resembled parachuters outfits, detailed with graphic military-inspired ‘gig seams’, running the length of torsos and legs as 3D folds. Green also developed the denim offering he showcased for S/S 2018,  with wide legged jeans in dark denim, and sent out a jersey tracksuit with the brand’s signature hole motif- both commercially savvy options, complementing his more avant-garde designs. 

Best in show: Green worked with David Curtis-Ring on a series of wearable wooden sculptures strapped to the torsos of models and covered in colourful latex. As models walked down the catwalk, the sculptures bobbed and the bright latex resembled filled water balloons associated with childhood games. Also building on this naïveté , Green showcased panelled multicoloured knitwear with cut out panels, and patches of delicate crochet.

Poster art: Loewe loves a poster-themed invitation, so for its S/S 2018 men’s presentation, the Madrid-based label opted for a fold-out of a model lounging by a pool at Salvador Dalí’s house in Cadaqués, Catalonia. The poster, part of the brand’s spring lookbook, was created in collaboration with graphic design studio and regular collaborators M/M Paris. Just like the windows of a home, it featured sleek rectangular cutouts. 

Home comforts: Designers were keeping house for S/S 2018, with a series of invitations revelling in domestic bliss. Anya Hindmarch’s came complete with a branded bar of soap, while Miu Miu’s was lined with a layer of sponge – what chicer tools for kitchen chores? More study-focused, Chalayan’s women’s invitation came complete with a pink Post-it note and JuunJ’s with a white collar. Dries Van Noten’s menswear invitation was printed with a retro office interior, boasting an old IBM computer.

True romance: In London, a host of show invitations nodded to nostalgia. Burberry’s featured an image by Dafydd Jones, of two students at the Magdalen Commemoration Ball at Oxford University in 1988, lying in formal clothing on the grass. Simone Rocha’s fold-out included two machine stitched-red figures with gothic trailing threads. Also otherworldly, the invitation to Thom Browne’s women’s show in Paris featured a card with a hand written poem speculating on the possibilities of dreams.

Feeling blue: The hue du jour during Paris men’s, blue accents were seen across the city’s invitations. At Louis Vuitton, an inky stripe completed the brand’s luggage-tag-inspired offering. At Yohji Yamamoto, a transparent black envelope encased a paper concertina printed with various global typescripts, which folded from a piece of sky blue card.

Box of tricks: Gucci presented its show attendees with a metal tin inspired by old pharmacy boxes. Its lid featured a mythical illustration taken from a German alchemical manuscript from the early 1700s, and opened to reveal a sheet of branded, chemist-inspired wrapping paper. Concealed inside? A thread holder, aromatic paper, five candles and a packet of matches. Talk about a hot ticket!

Bookworms: During the Paris womens’ shows, designers encouraged front rowers to engage in a spot of light reading or doodling. At Yohji Yamamoto, a yellow paged notepad was bound in plastic; at Hermès, guests were treated to a booklet listing the components of the brand’s 46 catwalk looks and a poem penned by Jarvis Cocker called ‘Hermès Colours’.

Orient express: Designers looked to Japan for their menswear show invitation inspirations. Take Paul Smith, which mailed guests a scaly plastic fish inscribed with Japanese typography. Or Emporio Armani, who printed an inky Oriental floral pattern onto its fabric-covered invitation. At Lanvin, guests kept themselves cool with a polka dot fan.

Band aid: Brands bought the entrance cues of music venues to the catwalk. From lanyards at Fendi and Versus, and barcoded tickets at Vetements, to sticky yellow wristbands at Marques’Almeida, we’d never felt more like we were with the band.

Hole in one: Designers brought cutouts to their catwalk invitations. Take the circular punches in Craig Green’s offering, evoking the hole motifs in his menswear designs, or the undulating curves in the Akris invitation, which nodded to a plywood sculpture by Alexander Girard (an inspiration behind the brand’s women’s collection). Or the circle cutout of a surreal horizon at Dirk Bikkembergs, and a viewfinder-like chink in the invitation for Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s debut for Chloé. Talk about making the cut!

Material world: Folds of fabrics acted as keepsake invitations. For Dries Van Noten’s women’s show and Luke and Lucie Meier’s debut at Jil Sander, the designers opted for subtle cream shades of fabric, printed with bold black typography. Marni’s women’s invitation featured a fold-out handkerchief finished with messy loops of thread, while Carven’s came with a pouting beaded fish. At Rick Owens’ women’s show, a scarf was printed with an illustration of a futurist sculpture by Thayaht, while at Tsatsas, the German accessories brand created a fabric invitation printed with an image of a rusty shipping liner.

Touch points: Textures were of top importance for S/S 2018, with Saint Laurent and Giorgio Armani opting for invitations in sumptuous leather – a white calfskin envelope for the former’s women’s show, and a tan leather invitation for the latter’s men’s offering. At Marni’s menswear show, creative director Francesco Risso favoured a tactile invitation printed on corrugated cardboard.

Clear view: Brands both emerging and established opted for invitations encased in cellophane. Kiko Kostadinov used a press stud to fasten a white strip of paper inside a glossy sheer plastic envelope. For Prada’s men’s show, the brand enclosed a white cardboard sleeve for a ‘Draft Novel’ inside a clear tearable pouch.

Back in 2011, we teamed up with luxury rug-making company Stepevi for a Handmade collaboration with the Paris-based designer Vincent Darré of Maison Darré, resulting in a striking surrealist rug with a body-part motif. We so enjoyed working with the family-owned brand that we decided to make another aesthetic pilgrimage to its factory in Isparta in southern Turkey, this time teaming up its craftsmen with the London-based menswear designer Craig Green.

Inspired by the history of mats used in worship, Green designed two 170 x 240cm ceremonial rugs, crafted in 100 per cent wool. One is multicoloured, while the second is described by the designer as being a ‘shadow version’ of the first, made entirely with black yarn. ‘Doing two versions of the same thing is a strong part of the brand I have been building,’ Green explains. He constructed each rug from smaller elements. Each design is an amalgamation of 28 pieces, and they resemble large-scale graphic jigsaw puzzles.

Traditionally, rugs are known for their concealing properties, but instead, Green’s design features an elliptical porthole-style cut-out. Holes are a recurring motif for the designer, who founded his eponymous fashion label in 2012. Knitted jumpers with a cut-out circle at their centre featured in the designer’s A/W15 collection. Known for his meditative approach to fashion, Green’s garments also include deconstructed silhouettes, which are created piece by piece from separate shapes and laced together to create varying degrees of closure.

When it came to the rug design, Green’s search for inspiration went global. ‘We looked at world flags and almost layered their designs on top of each other,’ he says. ‘The final patterns took on Russian Constructivist shapes.’ It’s not the first time Green has drawn on flags in his designs. For his S/S17 collection, he created both bright and colour-bleached scarves, inspired by flag aesthetics and Boy Scout neck scarves. White flags, a universal symbol of truth and surrender, also featured in the collection.

Keeping the thread of our spirituality-focused Handmade theme, Green’s multicoloured rug design, when divided into graphic blocks, also evokes the bright hues and graphic structures of ecclesiastical stained glass windows.

In Green’s kaleidoscopic interpretation, each of the 28 pieces was created using a different colour. ‘Each separate element was produced to the standard of a finished rug, so that when they were laid down together they fitted seamlessly next to each other to form one perfect design,’ explains Ayşegül Yürekli Şengör, Stepevi’s managing director.

Founded in 1919 in Istanbul, the company uses the latest technology to create its multifaceted designs from its production facility based in Isparta, a town with a heritage of traditional carpet weaving. For Green’s ceremonial rug, Stepevi’s craftsmen used hand-operated tufting-guns – machines that push loops of high quality wool through a canvas stretched over a frame. A backing foundation, known as scrim, was then applied to the canvas using a water-based glue. ‘For me, working with Stepevi was an easy process,’ says Green. ‘Perhaps not for them, though, as they were making multiple pieces for each design.’

Green’s garments are associated with a meticulous level of craft, and the second stage of rug production focused on intricate handcrafted details. ‘To create a soft pile, the wool loops were sheared by a software-operated machine blade,’ says Şengör. ‘Then the strands were hand-carved and cut at different levels to create a three-dimensional surface. Our specialism in creating multifaceted rugs enhanced the design.’

Not content with producing two striking finished rugs, Green experimented during the making process, creating versions of each design with dynamic, moveable pieces. ‘They’re like exploding flags,’ he says. ‘You could even put parts of the coloured design into the black one, and vice versa.’ The designer is pragmatic about the impact of jigsaw-like furnishings on domestic bliss. ‘You could even separate all of their parts around your house,’ he adds. ‘Although the pieces would be a nightmare to vacuum.’

As originally featured in the August 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*221)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Craig Green website and Stepevi website. Available from WallpaperSTORE*

Mood board: Last season, Craig Green was inspired by the vastness of the oceans, his models – like bold fisherman or divers chartering a watery abyss – clad in sou’wester hats and chunky outerwear evoking traditional deep sea diving suits. For S/S 2018, an oceanic thread continued to run throughout Green’s designs, but one more beach-focused, drawing parallels to surfers in clear blue seas or nomadic travellers walking tropical shores. Zip up neoprene tops- pulled, ruched and tied in Green’s signature style, or embellished with lengths of rope- resembled wetsuits. Colourful ponchos and long hooded tops, patchworked with tropical sunrise details, resembled the garb of long-time hippy travellers or bright fringed towels picked up in beach shops by sun seeking tourists.

Scene setting: The show was held in a series of murky and misty railway arches nearer Southwark station in south London. This lent a darker bent to the colourful patchwork pieces in the collection, reminiscent of the darker tropes of paradise in Alex Garlands The Beach, or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Best in show: The show saw a return to Green’s use of architectural structures, last seen on the catwalk in S/S 2016. Models held wooden forms, used as frames for khaki, light blue and colourful fabrics in front of their faces, their physiognomy concealed. This uneasy element of disguise was also emphasised in Green's hooded ponchos, colourful in their materials but more monastic and disconcerting in their ability to shroud the face in mystery.

Mood board: Craig Green kicked off the LCM S/S 2017 schedule with a free-spirited, even romantic, unfurling of everyday uniforms – be they those of a handkerchief-swaddled Scout squad, a professional’s two-piece or the quilted garb of his more familiar martial artist. Green began with hybrid suiting, deconstructing traditional grey wool pinstripes by splicing and then re-stapling linear panels back together with terracotta hued inserts. As his nomad tailoring flapped down the runway, the desert breeze blew in patchworked judo jackets and wide-legged pants (again with numerous splits, for which some were laced a little of the way, adding a street element reminiscent of Adidas’ 1990s press studded track pant), which were quilted from Moorish, hand-blocked prints inspired by Moroccan bed sheets that also looked a little Batik.

Best in show: The unlacing continued with Green’s recalibration of the trench. His cotton drill, part anorak, part coat in hues of brick brown and camel channeled Yves Saint Laurent’s Veruschka dress albeit under the influence of a more utilitarian desert punk riff. Here tabs and lacings (as if borrowed from a ship’s sail) took over from last season’s trailing ties. They also held the gender neutral line and will be sure to infiltrate the wardrobes of his female fans too.

Team work: Green is still yet to cash his £150,000 check from his May BFC/GQ Designer Menswear Fund win, but he’s already stepped up the production values bringing in music maestro Frederic Sanchez for S/S 2017. Together the pair lulled us into awe with organ music that possessed an eerie twilight brio.

INFORMATION 

Photography: Jason Lloyd-Evans

Mood board: Craig Green continued to unravel the uniform for winter, releasing its institution bond and customising it for the individual. Padded tabards and wide-leg issue pants were resized with utility strapping, just as jersey t-shirts were streamlined by rolled and gathered surface manipulations.

Best in show: Green's tailoring was as powerful as his raspberry and moss green colour-blocking, while his use of neoprene on short-waisted jackets offered an inspired update of the leather bomber.

Finishing touches: In Green's halls shoes are clearly not mandatory, so his inmates or martial artists (depending on your frame of reference) did his winter line-up in their socks.

Amassing both critical acclaim and commercial success over three seasons on the Man catwalk, Central Saint Martins graduate Craig Green showed his first solo collection for S/S 2015 today, in a complex design exercise that stripped back any prior penchant for print to deliver serene, liberated garments in large, enveloping forms. Layered and wrapped in shells of striped quilting and drapes of chemical blue cotton, Green's designs seemed to explode off the body in a flurry of ties and sashes that appeared both oriental and surgical in execution, traversing ideas of strait jackets and kimonos through an intangible ethnic lens. Previously known for his crude wooden sculptures that obscured the face, Green inverted his signature to place those structures behind the body, rising like crude frames from which cotton voile sails breezed behind his barefoot soldiers.

Photography: Jason Lloyd-Evans