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

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

Dior

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

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

Schiaparelli

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

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

Chanel

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

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

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

Giorgio Armani Privé

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

Standing Ground

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

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

Jean Paul Gaultier

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

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

Balenciaga

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

Summer travel has a way of exposing the weak links in your packing: the phone cable you forgot, the SPF that leaves a chalky cast, the toothbrush that feels like an afterthought, the passport cover that has seen better terminals. Whether you’re heading for a long weekend by the sea, a city break in the heat or something further afield, the right travel essentials solve those small, recurring problems, making the whole exercise feel smoother, smarter and far better looking. From well-designed luggage and clever tech to beauty staples, we’ve rounded up the pieces worth making room for.

12 of the best summer travel essentials for 2026

In the late 1970s, the American sculptor Lynda Benglis began her ‘Zanzidae: Peacock’ series, drawing inspiration from the colourful plumage of the birds she witnessed while staying on the Sarabhai family estate in Ahmedabad, a city in the western state of Gujarat, India. Recalling ceremonial fans, the works were constructed from wire mesh, enamel, glass and plastic, and were rich in embellishment – a vivid melange of appliqué flowers, feathers and colourful beads, evoking those created by local craftspeople. ‘The decorative sense, and the pleasure we receive from it, is very basic in the human situation – some birds have it, animals have it,’ she would say of the series in 2016.

Jonathan Anderson looks to Lynda Benglis at Dior Couture

Yesterday, in a black-lacquered wood pagoda constructed in the gardens of Paris’ Rodin Museum, versions of these fan-like pieces appeared in Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore haute couture collection for Dior, spread open across the chest of a crumpled silk dress, or jutting from the waistline, like a surreal crinoline bustle. Elsewhere in the collection, other works by Benglis were conjured: her ‘Pleated’ series, created through the 1980s and 1990s, in which fluid, undulating pleats were spray-cast in hard metal, was reimagined as a duo of molten plissé gowns, while ‘Sparkle Knots’ – which saw shimmering paper stretched over chicken wire – became netted, sculptural skirts. Metallic plissé hats, balanced jauntily on models’ heads, also recalled Benglis’ free-flowing, abstract forms.

But beyond specific works, Anderson said he was inspired by Benglis’ process, and the way she manipulates two-dimensional objects – paper, fabric – into three-dimensional forms through ‘knotting, pleating or moulding’ (something he likened to the act of haute couture dressmaking). A use of plissé ran throughout the collection: the nipped-waist contours of Christian Dior’s 1947 bar jacket were reimagined in finely pleated fabric, while scrunched-up, crumpled dresses – tied up on the back with enormous bows – reflected Benglis’ intuitive, tactile approach. Handbags, meanwhile, were crafted from chintz fabric – first created in 13th-century India – in a nod to Benglis’ time in the country, while cactus handbags and motifs recalling desert flora were inspired by the artist’s Santa Fe compound.

It is not the first time that Anderson has brought the artist into his creative process. In 2023, he staged his S/S 2024 menswear collection for Loewe amid a series of Benglis’ dripping bronze fountains, while his womenswear collection that same season featured jewellery created in collaboration with the artist. The latter won a Wallpaper* Design Award in 2024, praised for its ‘seductive fizz’. ‘There is something about Lynda Benglis’ experiments of the 1970s – the liberation, friction and violence – that I’m drawn to. I think there has to be a tension,’ said Anderson at the time.

The collection was concluded – as is tradition in haute couture – with a bridal gown. This season, it was an off-the-shoulder column dress in white organza, adorned with delicate fern appliqué and pooling into a lace train, prompting speculation as to whether it recalled that which Anderson designed for the wedding of Taylor Swift this past weekend (a statement from the house on Saturday confirmed that the designer had created both her and Travis Kelce’s looks for the day). ‘It was a big honour,’ said Anderson backstage. ‘But no, I can’t tell you anything about it. It will all come out in due course. It was a joy to work with her, and we became very good friends. It is an emotional thing, doing someone’s wedding.’

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

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

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

There will be debuts at Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier

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

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

As well as sophomore shows at Chanel and Dior

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

London label Standing Ground will join the schedule

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

Fendi will show in Rome

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

Olivier Theyskens will reveal his new label, Boloria

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

A landmark Maison Martin Margiela auction will take place

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

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

When the weather has been as stiflingly hot as it was in Europe this June, most people agree that the ideal outfit is one that includes as few clothes as possible. How then, to best express a sense of personal style? At the end of the three-city romp that was men’s fashion month – which saw designers and brands present their S/S 2027 collections in Florence, Milan, and Paris – Wallpaper* has collated the standout accessories of the season, from playful jewellery to statement shoes, which will elevate even the simplest of looks.

Dior’s bold brooches

Jonathan Anderson chose to trompe-l’oeil some of his accessories this season, but the jewellery was very much real, and for S/S 2027 the Dior man is wearing a brooch. Dior was not the only place we saw brooches this week, but the oversized sparkly pom-poms pinned to jumpers, and the large metallic foxglove with coloured bead petals, worn on a jacket lapel, were among the standouts for the season.

Simone Rocha’s ballet pumps

In the run-up to Simone Rocha’s first standalone menswear show, held as part of Pitti Uomo in Florence, the designer told Wallpaper* that it was ‘contrast’ and ‘tension’ that excites her most about fashion. Nowhere was this better expressed in the show at Teatro Della Pergola than in the shoes: punky studded derbys were countered with soft ballet pumps, the latter replete with elastic strap and bow, and an occasional pearl-drop detail.

Prada’s belt bags

It was a highly streamlined affair from Muccia Prada and Raf Simons this season, and, as such, accessories were ‘integrated within these overall structures’, for maximum efficiency. In practice, this meant bags – some practical zip-up nylon, others in squishy leather – hung from belts via carabiner, swinging at the hip, a part of an outfit rather than an add-on.

Celine’s colourful cummerbunds

Michael Rider’s first menswear proposition for Celine was dictated by his own taste, and creating garments he and his team would wish to wear themselves. Cue the cummerbund, a standout piece in a collection teeming with highly desirable accessories, including chunky wooden bead necklaces, spangled fringe scarves, jangly belts and jumbo pins. The fuchsia silk sash offered a colourful contrast to a neutral-toned ensemble, and a version in turquoise worn over a black long-sleeve and white slacks made a case for incorporating the cummerbund into a daytime look.

Ralph Lauren’s statement belts

If the Ralph Lauren gentleman doesn’t have a cable-knit jumper or a striped neck-tie slung around his waist, no matter, he is not short of statement belt options for the season. There was a bit of an emphasis on the accessory at the dual-Polo and Purple Label show in Milan, with an eclectic offering including a brown leather belt with cowboy-esque buckle and studs, a version in black with a clip-on chain, and skinny, woven iterations in contrasting colours, the straps either tucked neatly through D-rings or left to hang loose.

Dolce & Gabbana’s bejewelled slippers

What do you get the man who has everything? Why, a pair of Dolce and Gabbana S/S 2027 bejewelled slippers, of course. One pair came in blue suede with matching beading, another pair positively barnacled in crystal in golden setting – contrasting with the easy, lightweight cotton and sensual linen garments proposed for a vacanze Siciliane.

Paul Smith’s undone ties

Nostalgia for summers gone by was a major theme of this season’s Paul Smith collection – one which takes place in the designer’s 80th birthday year. In the accessories, as in the way they were styled, this theme took us back to Smith’s childhood: memories of his grandfather’s relaxed approach to suiting translated into unknotted neck ties that hung loosely, as if they’d been undone at the end of a hot day. Charms cast in pewter and brass were worn on pins and on necklaces and were shaped like pennies (that a kid might collect), and seashells and sailing boats – the idyllic imagery of long ago school holidays.

Saint Laurent’s see-through shoes

The contentious see-through shoe has been mainly the preserve of womenswear discourse before now, but, thanks to Anthony Vaccarello, men too can join in the conversation. Saint Laurent’s footwear offering for the season included an elongated Oxford dress shoe with its upper portion crafted from transparent vinyl. For proving one’s fashion chops, even if it does mean giving away foot content gratis, there is no better option.

Auralee’s holiday beads

Evocative of the kind of easy souvenir one might pick up on holiday in the tropics, multi-coloured beads the size of seed-pearls were woven on strings and into micro-charms for Auralee’s S/S 2027 presentation – worn as anklets, belts, and even looped through eyelets in lieu of shoelaces.

Louis Vuitton’s surfboards

Pharrell Williams made a convincing argument that the ultimate accessory for the season is one on which you can ride the waves. For the surf-inspired show, which featured neoprene-clad models, the usual leather goods were almost upstaged by LV-monogrammed boards, an impossibly chic addition to any beach look.

Dries Van Noten’s animal-print lace-ups

An 1876 poem about a fantastical creature, half-man, half-animal, was Julian Klausner’s inspiration for Dries Van Noten this season. Presumably it was the bottom half that was the animal, for amongst the shoes featured was a series of slender brogues in photorealistic cheetah print, an effect which was also mimicked on gloves and capacious pouches.

Wooyoungmi’s laundry bags

If doing the washing doesn’t feel like an automatic association for a collection centred around joy to suggest, allow Wooyoungmi’s take on a laundry bag to make you reconsider. An array of striped versions with contrasting leather handles and piping featured throughout, reinforcing the way heung, a Korean concept based on optimism, joy and spontaneity ‘can be evoked through meditative manifestation in every area of life.’

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

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

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

Saint Laurent

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

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

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

Auralee

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

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

Louis Vuitton

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

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

Dior

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

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

Rick Owens

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

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

IM Men

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

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

Dries Van Noten

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

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

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

Studio Nicholson

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

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

Junya Watanabe

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

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

Willy Chavarria

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

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

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

Kiko Kostadinov

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

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

Wooyoungmi

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

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

Celine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13 Rue François Sibilli has seemingly become the epicentre of Saint-Tropez’s summer social circuit. Two stone pillars, each bearing a discreet Dior medallion, open onto a herringbone brick path that heralds a sprawling manifestation of the maison’s universe, luring in both ritzy passersby and those with weeks-in-advance bookings. Here, the majestic boutique – with its pale blue shutters and ivy-clad façade presiding over the whole scene – showcases the latest creations by Jonathan Anderson alongside Riviera-inspired pieces.

Meanwhile, a chic café, open all year round and offering a delectable afternoon tea experience, faces a lush scene punctuated by a colourful stone totem by Swiss sculptor Ugo Rondinone and a carp-shaped gilt bronze sculpture by French visual artist François-Xavier Lalanne.

A new chapter in Dior’s Saint-Tropez story

New for this season is Monsieur Dior, a restaurant helmed by three-Michelin-starred Argentine chef Mauro Colagreco of Mirazur fame as a tribute to the late couturier. Its entrance is discreetly concealed, tucked into a garden beside the boutique where lavender, sunpatiens and cape plumbago grow freely, and the scent of jasmine drifts through the air. The setting is open to the sky, shaded by cream parasols with frilled golden edges and anchored by rattan details echoing Dior’s cannage motif: a geometric pattern of interlacing squares and diagonals.

Colagreco is no stranger to cooking in dialogue with the maison. The first iteration of Dior by Mauro Colagreco opened in Bangkok as a café in 2024, within a Dior boutique infused with Thai craftsmanship and flavours such as pandan and coconut. Saint-Tropez is its Mediterranean counterpart. To prepare for this collaboration, Colagreco spent a week in Paris, fully immersing himself in the Dior museum and the archive with a research team that included anthropologists, artists, writers and ethnobotanists alongside his cooks.

‘It made us leave our creative process,’ he tells me, from one of the café’s deep wicker armchairs. ‘In general, we take an ingredient or a culinary technique. Here it was a dress, a way of thinking of Monsieur Dior.’ Among the most unexpected discoveries: a cookbook. ‘Christian Dior cooked, and cooked with conviction. His recipes revealed more about the man’s sensibility – a love of simplicity, an attentiveness to quality – than any archive photograph could.’

Beyond their shared passion for gardens, the deeper connection is celestial. Christian Dior consulted astrologers before each collection, carried talismans and read the tarot. Colagreco, meanwhile, has farmed biodynamically for years – his calendars at Mirazur are determined not by season alone but by lunar cycles. When he began reading about Dior’s beliefs, something clicked into place. ‘The cosmic influence on the plants is one of the bases of the biodynamic techniques we use at Mirazur,’ he says. ‘It is much more known in winemaking than in agriculture. We follow a lunar calendar to grow our produce.’

The menus follow the rhythm of the day. Breakfast ranges from the pared-back Lever de Soleil to the more generous Rosée du Matin and Éveil Gourmand, centred on artisan breads, seasonal fruit and eggs cooked to order. Lunch is served as the three-course Déjeuner de Soleil, while dinner takes the form of the five-course Clair de Lune. Most ingredients arrive from Colagreco’s biodynamic orchards and vegetable gardens in Menton within 48 hours of harvest.

When I ask Colagreco what he would serve Monsieur Dior first, were he to be seated here with us, his eyes light up. ‘The Champ de Trèfle,’ he says without hesitation: a tartare of red Sicilian gamberoni with lime and wood sorrel, the scattered leaves standing in for the four-leaf clover Monsieur Dior never left home without.

At breakfast, the Casse-croûte truffé combines flaky brioche with a softly set egg, jasmine-infused cream and shaved summer truffle. The Mediterranean John Dory, wrapped in a zucchini flower and served in a saffron sauce (dubbed Drapé de Soleil), is among the menu’s standouts. During my visit, a special of Poisson Mille-Fleurs – the menu changes every three weeks – arrived covered in petals and herbs, assembled with the precision of couture embroidery.

The attention to detail extends to the smallest gestures: amuse-bouches served in rose petals, desserts finished with insect-shaped golden chocolates. The references are deliberate. Throughout his career, Christian Dior returned repeatedly to the garden as a source of inspiration, weaving flowers, leaves and insects into his collections. At Monsieur Dior, Colagreco translates those same motifs onto the plate.

The cocktail list continues the narrative. Jardin d’Étoiles, a pear and fig leaf cordial, references Christian Dior’s belief in fate and the lucky star he carried throughout his life, while Brume Marine is built around passion fruit and tomato distillate, drawing on Saint-Tropez and the couturier’s enduring relationship with the Riviera.

Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Colagreco what he most enjoys growing in Menton. The answer is not fruit or vegetables, but trees. ‘When you plant a tree, you plant it not for yourself, but for everyone that comes after you.’

Monsieur Dior by Mauro Colagreco is located at 13 Rue François Sibilli, 83990 Saint-Tropez, France

This evening (16 June 2026), guests will gather in the cloisters of Florence’s Santa Maria Novella Church for a dinner hosted by the Umbrian designer Brunello Cucinelli – a twice-yearly tradition that marks the opening of Pitti Uomo, the historic Florentine menswear fair. And with it, the beginning of Men’s Fashion Month: after Florence, there are stops in Milan and Paris across a 12-day schedule which will see S/S 2027 menswear offerings from fashion’s biggest houses – among them Prada, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent – as well as a raft of newer names. By the time Paris wraps up on 28 June 2026, we will have the blueprint of how menswear might look a year from now, and no doubt plenty to mull over: this looks to be a season of consolidation and world-building as relatively new creative directors settle into their tenures and others steady the ship amid the backdrop of a global luxury slowdown.

And, while the schedule is certainly lighter than its womenswear counterpart (the S/S 2027 women’s shows will take place in September, and traditionally have a busier line-up), plenty of intriguing moments remain – from Simone Rocha’s first dedicated menswear show (she will be a guest designer at Pitti Uomo, showing in the historic Teatro Della Pergola), to calendar shift-ups, designer returns and (a small handful) of debuts. We've picked the eight moments to look out for this Men’s Fashion Month S/S 2027 below.

Simone Rocha will be Pitti Uomo’s guest star

Historic menswear fair Pitti Uomo, taking place in Florence twice-yearly, marks the start of Men’s Fashion Month each season, centring around the 14th-century Fortezza da Basso. But alongside the main fair – where you will find stands from Brunello Cucinelli, Herno and the like – organisers invite a number of guest designers to show each season in locations around the city (previous guests have included Raf Simons, Martine Rose and Grace Wales Bonner, alongside numerous fashion houses). This time, it is the turn of Irish designer Simone Rocha, who will host her first dedicated menswear show on Thursday 18 June at the 17th-century Teatro Della Pergola, an opera house and theatre that is one of the oldest in Italy (previously she has presented menswear as part of her womenswear show, or via lookbook). ‘I would like to thank Pitti Uomo for their generous invitation to present my first independent menswear show on the men's calendar,’ she said when the news was announced, elucidating that she will use the moment to show ‘the length and breadth of [her] menswear proposition... [and] a new chapter in my work and world.’

Two menswear greats will return to Milan

Milan is well known for its sartorial prowess – particularly when it comes to men’s tailoring – something that has drawn two legendary international designers back to Milan Fashion Week Men’s this season. They are Paul Smith, who has shown in the city for a handful of seasons now, and Ralph Lauren, who returned to the Milan schedule in January of this year, marking the American designer’s first Italian menswear show in two decades. Both will show in their headquarters in the city: the former on Viale Umbria, the latter at Palazzo Ralph Lauren, which resides in an imposing 1941 Mino Fiocchi-designed building formerly known as Casa Campanini-Bonomi. Both will likely be celebratory affairs: particularly for Smith, who will turn 80 in July and use the latter half of the year to celebrate the landmark, including the release of an autobiography, Threads: My Life in Style, in September.

While Thom Browne will make his Milan Fashion Week Men’s debut

American designer Thom Browne has adopted something of a travelling schedule for his runway shows in recent seasons, showing between Paris and his native New York, as well as a one-off show in San Francisco earlier this year to coincide with the Super Bowl (Browne’s tailoring is a favourite among American athletes, and NFL players DeAndre Hopkins, Justin Jefferson and Steeler Marcus Allen walked the show). This season, though, he is breaking new ground: a runway show in Milan on Monday 22 June will mark his debut in the Italian city. Apart from the venue, the neoclassical Palazzo Serbelloni, little has been revealed about the show – though, if his previous outings are any indication, expect his usual eye for fantasy and play (his last menswear show, in Paris, for example, featured enormous glittering alien heads, worn by the models as masks).

Saint Laurent is back to opening Paris Fashion Week Men’s

Last June, Saint Laurent opened Men’s Fashion Week with a S/S 2026 collection that transported guests from ‘Paris to Fire Island’ amid a serene installation by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection (it comprised a circular pool on which a series of bowls floated across its glimmering blue surface). This season, the house will return to its first-day slot (for A/W 2026, in January, it ended proceedings) with a menswear show that is expected to take place in the contemporary art gallery. It will be followed that evening by another blockbuster show: the latest Louis Vuitton menswear collection by Pharrell Williams, which will take place at 9pm in an as-yet-undisclosed location.

All eyes will be on Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Men

Three seasons in, Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson has succeeded in making Dior one of fashion’s most talked-about houses: case in point, a Hollywood-inspired Cruise 2027 in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in May, which alongside a starry front row (Sabrina Carpenter, Miley Cyrus and Al Pacino were all in attendance), featured collaborations with artist Ed Ruscha and milliner Philip Treacy (fittingly, one of the headpieces spelt out ‘Buzz’ in feathers). On Wednesday 24 June, he will return to Dior’s home city for his S/S 2027 menswear show – arguably the most anticipated on the Paris Fashion Week Men’s schedule, following an acclaimed A/W 2026 show that drew inspiration from the outré stylings of couturier Paul Poiret and his infamous Belle Époque dinner parties.

Sarah Burton will reveal her vision for Givenchy menswear

Sarah Burton has shown three womenswear collections on the runway since the beginning of her tenure at Givenchy (she came to the house from Alexander McQueen, where she succeeded the eponymous designer as creative director); this season, in Paris, she will begin to expand her Givenchy universe with her first dedicated menswear presentation. Because, despite overseeing commercial collections – as well as dressing figures like Timothée Chalamet for the red carpet – she is yet to formerly introduce her menswear vision for the Parisian house. What to expect? Some great tailoring, no doubt – Burton is adept when it comes to a pin-sharp suit – alongside the bold flourishes of colour and print which defined her critically lauded A/W 2026 womenswear show last season.

At Celine, Michael Rider will host a dedicated menswear show

An intimate presentation of Michael Rider’s first dedicated menswear collection for Celine – presented earlier this year in the brand’s headquarters – was one of the highlights of the A/W 2026 season, despite a lack of models and runway (the clothing was instead staged in a series of playful tableaus, while guests snacked on Celine-branded popcorn). For S/S 2027, the American designer – formerly of Polo Ralph Lauren, as well as Celine during Phoebe Philo’s tenure – will host a dedicated menswear show on the final Sunday of Paris Fashion Week. Expect the infusion of Parisian insouciance and Ivy League stylings that have become his signature – and won him a devoted legion of fans, as well as thousands more aping the look in Instagram GRWMs, from colourful sweaters slung around the waist to rugby shirts and sliced-away ties.

London label Studio Nicholson will make its runway debut

This menswear season is suprisingly light on debuts, either from fledgling labels or major houses welcoming a new creative director. Studio Nicholson is an exception, though it also doesn’t fit into either camp: founded in 2010 by Nick Wakeman, the London-based label has already established itself as a cult destination for those who favour a simplicity of design and high-quality fabrications. But, while the brand has undertaken high-profile collaborations with the likes of Zara, it has never hosted a traditional runway show, something that will change this season: Wakeman has opted to present a collection during Paris Fashion Week Men‘s. Taking place on Friday 26 June at Hotel d’Evreux in Place Vendôme. Comprising her men’s and women’s collections for S/S 2027, it is a new addition to the Paris Fashion Week Men’s schedule – others include Meryll Rogge’s first menswear presentation, 2025 LVMH Prize winner Soshiotsuki and Australian brand Song for the Mute.

The collection notes for Jonathan Anderson’s first Cruise show for Dior, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) yesterday evening (13 May 2026), were a fantasy film script, with the designer himself – who as a teenager had travelled from Ireland to the United States to become an actor, before shifting course to fashion – as the star. In its pages, Jonathan Anderson (the character) narrates the collection’s inspirations as the action lines describe a runway show that is yet to happen. ‘A model appears on the runway in a buttercup-yellow dress,’ they begin, with everything from music to scenography accounted for – a meta-nod, perhaps, to the way we now consume runway shows through the mediation of a screen.

But the script also set the stage for a Cruise collection that was about the perennial allure of Hollywood, and deeply rooted in the Parisian house’s history and lore. Christian Dior would outfit a coterie of cinema’s leading ladies – from Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe to Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly – both on and off the screen, receiving an Oscar nomination in 1955 for his work on Terminal Station (Anderson has also dabbled in film-costuming; while at Loewe, he was costume designer for Luca Guadagnino’s Queer and Challengers).

Lights, camera, action: Dior heads to Hollywood for Cruise 2027

‘I was about to find a less unknown world: California,’ Christian Dior wrote of his first trip to the area in 1947. ‘Was it not the earthly paradise of which all Americans and so many Europeans dreamed? A year-round climate, an ever-shining sun, a bounty of fruit trees and flowers, large beaches lapped by the Pacific waves. In short, a super-Riviera.’

It was in this spirit of escapism that Anderson approached the collection, which found inspiration in both the Californian landscape – the state’s poppy became a recurring motif, appearing as rosettes of gathered fabric on dropped-waist gowns – and the gleaming sound stages of golden-age Hollywood. ‘Christian Dior understood how important the idea of “the dream” was for people after the war, as a form of escapism,’ Anderson says in the script. ‘He explored this in couture, his Surrealist friends were obsessed with dreams and, of course, Hollywood is “The Dream Factory”. It was all part of the same cross-cultural shift.’

Speaking that morning at a preview in the showspace, which saw the exterior of LACMA (where the new David Geffen Galleries have recently opened) dotted with vintage Cadillac cars, Anderson elucidated that this was a collection about finding joy in clothing. ‘We started with this idea of dressing up, dressing up in daytime, dressing up in evening – we just wanted a collection that is a bit fun,’ he said. Feathered headpieces, made by milliner Philip Treacy, recreated from an original design for Isabella Blow, read ‘Dior’ or slogans like ‘Buzz’ and ‘Star’, while bias-cut gowns had an insouciant glamour. Swathes of sequins, hyper-real floral adornment, and flashes of red also featured – the last a reference to Monsieur Dior, ‘who always put a red dress part way through his collections, simply to wake people up’.

But there was also a nod to Hollywood’s seedier side: Anderson said another inspiration had been Scotty Bowers’ Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, a gossipy tell-all that recounts the former gas attendant and bartender’s double-life arranging sexual liaisons for the town‘s biggest stars. ‘He was sleeping with most of Hollywood,’ said Anderson. ‘I thought that was an interesting starting point for a collection, this idea of action, when something is thrown into the camera lens.’

The collection featured menswear, the first time that the Dior man and woman have walked the same runway (Anderson is the only creative director of the house to have designed across genders). The menswear collection, which saw new riffs on nipped-waist Bar Jacket – including one in metallic tweed, shrunken in proportion as in Anderson’s previous collections for the house – also featured a collaboration with Ed Ruscha, seeing graphic slogans typography appearing across shirts. ‘I had wanted to do something with him for years, but he had said no. So that was my mission,’ Anderson said. ‘He took the canvas of the shirt and did what he wanted to do with it.’

The same could be said of the wider collection, in which Anderson seemed to revel in the freedom of showing a collection away from Dior’s home city of Paris. ‘It’s a moment to lean in,’ he said. ‘It’s my first time doing a resort show – you are going somewhere, and it’s fine to be a bit ironic – you can lean into the cliches, the nuances. You can have fun with it.’

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

Prada opera gloves (above left)

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

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

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

Celine sunglasses

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

Givenchy’s ‘Boudoir’ mules

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

Chanel’s resin necklace

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

Fendi’s ‘Lui’ bag

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

Dior’s ‘Lady Dior by Sheila Hicks’ bag

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

Limited-edition Hermès lipsticks

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

Bottega Veneta’s ‘Baby Veneta’ bag

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

Mulberry denim hat

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

Louis Vuitton’s summer scents

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

Loro Piana’s ‘Just Bag’

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

Fashion/set assistant: Alice Heluin-Afchain

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A languid elegance defines S/S 2026’s most desirable menswear, where lines between the ornamental and the utilitarian are blurred, and perfection is eschewed in favour of the effortless and the undone.

A series of these looks are captured in the pages of the May 2026 Design Issue of Wallpaper* (on newsstands now), photographed by London and Paris-based image-maker Ana Garcia and Italian stylist Nicola Neri amid the serene interiors of Ed’s Shed, a wooden Adjaye Associates-designed home in London’s De Beauvoir neighbourhood (it takes its name from owner Ed Reeve, an architectural photographer).

Each captures a juxtaposition between the functional and the dressed up – whether the voluminous line of a pair of Dior cargo pants, their layered back inspired by a Winter 1948 haute couture ‘Delft’ dress, or the purposely creased texture of a Zegna suit, its surface covered in safari jacket-style pockets.

Elsewhere, the mood is conjured through intriguing layering: a Loro Piano jacket slung around the waist, a cardigan emerging from the neck of a Loewe jacket. Other pieces simply capture the effortless elegance of the S/S 2026 season, like a JW Anderson wool coat, worn here with a decorative Dries Van Noten necklace, and nothing underneath.

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Models: Amedeo Mancini at The Claw, Vincent Rockins at Kate Moss Agency. Casting: Monika Domarke. Grooming: Lachlan Mackie using Sam McKnight. Set stylist: Haruka Kogure. Photography assistant: Ricardo Muñoz Carter. Fashion assistant: Olivia Renouf. Production assistants: Danielle Quigley, Archie Thomson, Indy Davy. Set assistant: Cedrick Jison. Photographed on location at Ed’s Shed, London N1, edsshed.co.uk

Spring has arrived – and with it, that irresistible urge to get away (if it ever really left). It’s time to dust off your passport, start planning, and say yes to new adventures. Whether you’re booking a spontaneous weekend escape or mapping out something further afield, a little smart prep goes a long way.

From versatile luggage and bags perfect for quick getaways to must-have tech, beauty essentials, and clever hacks to outsmart travel’s usual health pitfalls, we’ve rounded up everything you need. The goal? To help you pack smarter, stay comfortable, look fresh, and – most importantly – keep things stress-free wherever you’re headed.

The Wallpaper* guide to spring travel essentials

The ‘Dior Bamboo Pavilion’ opened its doors in Tokyo earlier this year, on 12 February, the very same date that the maison’s founder, Christian Dior, inaugurated his neo-classical boutique at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris in 1947. Tucked away in the quiet residential area in Daikanyama – different from the traditional shopping areas of Omotesando and Ginza – the dramatic new address serves as a stage to celebrate the long-standing relationship between the Parisian house and Japan, which dates back to the first fashion show held in the country in 1953, six years after Dior’s first haute couture show in 1947.

The 2,465 sq m site features a traditional Japanese strolling garden, crafted by Sora Botanical Gardens, helmed by Japanese planter Seijun Nishihata, with pine, cherry and plum trees – each symbolic of Japan – alongside more verdant planting. At the end of a meandering promenade stands the Bamboo Pavilion, which recalls 30 Avenue Montaigne and is clad in a golden bamboo façade made from recycled Japanese aluminium. This 740 sq m pavilion features Dior’s latest collections by Jonathan Anderson, alongside furniture and fittings made in Japan (Monsieur Dior’s own homes were influenced by Japanese interior decoration and art, one which also filtered into his collections).

Passing through the bamboo grove façade, you enter the inner garden, created by floral artist Azuma Makoto, which evokes an orangery where shrub flowers such as lily of the valley, reeves spirea, sweet alyssum and marguerite bloom season by season, paying homage to Monsieur Dior’s love of the botanical world. Inside, the circular central space feels as though one has stepped inside a giant lantern; it is seamlessly covered from floor to ceiling in Awa washi, a handmade paper from Tokushima prefecture, while lighting embedded within the walls softly envelops the space. From this central atrium, six separate rooms can be accessed: the Timeless Room, the Small Leather and Accessory Bar, the Leather Goods Room, the Men’s Collection Room, Café Dior, and the Women’s Collection Room.

In the white-clad ‘Timeless Room’, you are drawn into the world of Dior’s 30 Avenue Montaigne store, with white wall coverings replicating the spiral staircase, neo-classical wall panelling, and French windows of 30 Avenue Montaigne, but here, realised with Echizen Washi paper made by Osada washi. At the far end of the room is a fitting room where the walls are embroidered with another leitmotif of Dior – Toile de Jouy – but realised here through the hands of designer Hana Mitsui in collaboration with a long-established embroidery purveyor Sun Look, in Fukui prefecture.

The menswear room, meanwhile, is adorned with Dior’s signature blue, with fitting rooms where the walls have been replaced with blue tatami mats designed by Hana Mitsui and woven by a tatami manufacturer Ikehiko from Fukuoka Prefecture – a novel concept, it overturns the conventional notion of using tatami mats on the floor to walk upon. But it is not just a new perspective that stands out; the manufacturing process also differs from traditional tatami-making. By exploring new techniques such as weaving Toile de Jouy motifs into the surface of the tatami, the fitting room gives a new look to traditional craft.

Other pieces are more futuristic in their innovations, like a series of stools and tables by the Tokyo-based design duo We+, created by melting down styrofoam boxes used in fish markets and recasting them into new forms. In addition, benches made using algae also feature in the space. This furniture is part of We+’s project exploring new possibilities for sustainable colour coating, whereby a material combining algae powder and naturally derived resin is applied to the pieces’ surfaces.

The space is completed with a new outpost of Café Dior, led by three-Michelin-star French chef Anne-Sophie Pic. The whimsical creations feature interpretations of the house’s quilted cannage motif, as well as those recalling flowers, four-leaved clover and ladybugs, motifs in Anderson’s early collections for the house.

Together, the ‘Dior Bamboo Pavilion’ is a love letter from Paris to Japan – a country which, despite its influence on the couturier, Monsieur Dior was ever able to visit in his lifetime.

Dior Bamboo Pavilion, 8-1 Sarugakucho, Shibuya, Tokyo 150-0033, Japan.

dior.com

From abstracted plays on domestic spaces at Prada and Marni, to sets celebrating icons of urban architecture at Burberry and Dior, the A/W 2026 season offered much in the way of innovative set design.

As always, these temporary constructions can tell us as much about a designer’s current preoccupations as the garments they send out into them. For Loewe’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez it was an invocation of play, at Prada Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada are thinking about what is revealed when the surface layer is stripped away, and for Demna, it was investigating the ‘Gucciness of Gucci’ – a quest which, ahead of his first outing for the brand, led him back to Florence, the city in which it all started. Discover some of the stand-outs from fashion month below.

The standout show sets of fashion month A/W 2026

Burberry

Midway through February, it was reported that it had rained every day of 2026 in the UK – a news story that Daniel Lee might have had in mind whilst conceptualising the set for Burberry’s A/W 2026 collection. Trompe l’oeil puddles of resin scattered the tarmac-effect runway at Old Billingsgate Market, which was transformed into a night-time vignette of Tower Bridge, replete with that most familiar urban sight: scaffolding.

If a former 19th-century fish market seems an unlikely venue for London’s most high-profile luxury brand to show a collection, consider that gabardine, the fabric created by Thomas Burberry in the 1870s, is to this day a mainstay of angling attire – indeed, a quote singing the praises of Burberry from the Fishing Gazette was used in early advertising for the brand. The infusion of that practical, outdoorsy heritage with contemporary cosmopolitan glamour translated into a collection of opulently finished outerwear – from signature trench coats reimagined in silk or with ruffled lapels, to rich swathes of shearling.

READ: A first look at Burberry’s A/W 2026 show set, which depicts London landmarks ‘under construction’

Diesel

Diesel’s A/W 2026 runway set consisted of around 50,000 pieces of memorabilia from the brand’s archive, a monumental time capsule dedicated to almost 50 years of partying. Displayed under bleached lighting, the installation was awash with high-voltage colour, with objects ranging from a fringed parasol and inflatable beach doughnut, to a coffee machine, motorbike, and lava lamp. Creative director Glenn Martens described the season’s mood as ‘waking up in a place, with no idea what happened last night’: think crinkled denim and ripped hems. Judging by the contents of the eclectic clutter, the place could be anywhere from a roadside motel, MTV Beach House, or a teenager’s bedroom. Pick your poison.

Marni

If ‘familiar’ is a recurrent, self-confessed description of Meryl Rogge’s aesthetic tastes, it’s certainly not meant as a synonym for ‘samey’. There is always a little surprise, a fun tweak, or a new addition that keeps things fresh and exciting. For Rogge’s debut collection for Marni, this took the form of palm-size sequins, pointed mules with laces on the toes, and pants with two sets of stacked belt loops. And in the set design – a collaboration with Wallpaper*’s Designers of the Year 2021 Formafantasma – it meant something that looked ‘as if a room has been carefully disassembled and reassembled in another order,’ as Formafantasma’s Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin told us before the show.

The bones of the space were augmented with wood-effect panelling and fabric-covered benches, and a giant door mat in lieu of carpet. Mirrored panels, which were hand-painted with ‘fragments drawn from quotidian life’ like car headlights and office chairs, played with perception. Are they images? Or are they portals?

‘The decision to carefully hand-paint these ordinary details was important,’ say Trimarchi and Farresin. ‘Spending time rendering something banal gives it attention without turning it into spectacle. In a moment when most images are produced and consumed quickly, the act of painting introduces care and slowness. It allows us and hopefully others to look again at things we normally overlook, to pause for a second longer than usual.’ It’s a message that carries through to Rogge’s attitude toward design: robust, realistic and resonant.

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

Gucci

A few hundred metres from the Palazzo Gucci in the Tuscan city of Florence sits one of Europe’s most prominent art museums – the Uffizi, in an architectural complex begun by Giorgio Vasari in the year 1560. It is home to such illustrious works from the Western canon as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, da Vinci’s The Annunciation, and Caravaggio’s Medusa. It was also the starting point for Demna, the Georgian designer who took the helm of the 105-year-old brand in 2025, when the shape of the A/W 2026 show space began to form in his imagination.

‘When I left the museum and stepped into Piazza della Signoria, the first thing I saw was Palazzo Gucci,’ the designer wrote in a letter published online the day before the show. ‘In that moment, I understood the place Gucci holds within Italian culture.’

His recreation of something resembling the storied museum, in Milan's Palazzo delle Scintille, was executed with typical Demna-like innovation: all hard edges and ultra-modern materials. The slick geometric hall was clad in travertine Stoneleaf, made from ultra-fine sheets of Italian marble bonded onto sheets of fibreglass and transparent resin. Classical sculptures were made out of plaster using 3D scanning, and then treated to look like aged marble. The runway itself was marked out by a skinny beam of fluorescent light, through which models sauntered and languished at a museum-appropriate pace.

READ: Demna’s first runway set for Gucci is an imagined museum filled with sculptural greats

Prada

If Prada’s A/W 2026 show was, as Wallpaper’s Jack Moss described, ‘an exercise in extreme layering’, the Deposito of the Fondazione Prada, where 15 models showed a total of 60 looks, was in many ways its antithesis – or perhaps its logical conclusion. The collection itself was cleverly conceived to reveal itself through the gradual stripping away of garments, so that by the time each model had taken her fourth turn about the room, coats and scarves had given way to light cotton pinafores and bloomers. However, the set had been stripped already, leaving only an eerie whisper of what might have been there before, like when you see a partially demolished house. Fireplaces exposed to the elements. Masonry jaggedly revealed. Interior made exterior.

In a continuation of the sliced-open palazzo created by OMA for the menswear offering in January, artefacts which spanned five hundred years – from 16th-century tapestries to modernist lampshades – were effectively suspended around the perimeter of the room, each level an echo of a floor without a floor. Walls were delicate pastel shades with intact wainscotting juxtaposed against the imprint of former joists, or the patinated shadow of where a dividing wall once stood.

‘Their meaning is layered [and] inherently personal,’ explains Prada of the mish-mash of objects within the space: a Venetian mirror, various consoles, paintings from different periods and more. The house’s co-creative directors and their respective tastes and preoccupations are keenly visible in this selection, but they also leave room for imagination. By revealing so little, we are left to fantasise for ourselves about who the inhabitants of this dilapidated, but once grand, former dwelling might have been.

Dior

What more appropriate way to kick off Paris Fashion Week than a promenade in the Jardin des Tuileries? And for Dior, no less. The 1st arrondissement park has been open to the public since the late 17th century and has been a fixture of Parisian life ever since, not to mention a favourite subject of Impressionist scenes and a backdrop for revolution. This March, it became the site of Jonathan Anderson’s second womenswear collection for Dior, in a show space described as ‘an imitation of a park, within a park’.

Designed around Le Bassin Octogonal was a structure which drew from the familiar grass-green garden furniture that is scattered throughout the park, with a runway which snaked 360-degrees round the perimeter of the water, and across its centre (water which was filled with imitation water-lillies, an unmistakably Andersonian touch, and a nod to the eight murals by Monet which are housed at Musée de l’Orangerie in the western-most corner of the Tuileries).

In a conversation which aired before the show, Anderson told his friend, designer and podcaster Bella Freud that he ‘will always feel like a tourist in Paris’ and yet the city itself seemed to look upon him as a treasured friend this A/W 2026: the early-spring sun shone brightly, and the water reflected dappled light throughout the scene.

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

Saint Laurent

Now in his tenth year at Saint Laurent, for A/W 2026 Anthony Vaccarello chose to focus ‘on the house at its most foundational’. For the collection, this meant mega-watt sex appeal, body contouring, and the glorious revival of Le Smoking. And for the setting – it could only mean Paris, and that perpetual, romantic emblem of the French capital, Le Tour Eiffel. Gustave Eiffel’s iconic landmark has been a mainstay visual for what is arguably the city’s most illustrious house since the days of the maison’s namesake. Vaccarello himself has regularly used it as a backdrop for his work with the brand – sometimes with the runway literally beneath its iron frame.

This season, the glittering structure was glimpsed through vast windows, part of a set designed to evoke the apartment once inhabited by Yves Saint Laurent himself, with his partner Pierre Bergé. That duplex, at 55 rue de Babylone, is now the stuff of legend, its contents scattered to the four winds after Yves’s death, but once upon a time it was home to a vast collection of artworks (from Burne-Jones to Mondrian), furniture, and books. Archival photographs of the space show the same wood panelling and thick-pile carpet that we saw at the show space, which also featured a replica of a bust owned by Saint Laurent and Bergé, blown up to oversize proportions.

Loewe

How better to dress the backdrop to a collection foregrounding ‘joy, experimentation and play,’ than with toys? The work of Cologne-based artist Cosima von Bonin was a key influence for Loewe’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez this season, finding its way into both the ready-to-wear and the mise-en-scene. Known for creating larger-than-life plushies and other animalistic sculptures, often fabricated in textiles or constructed from found objects, von Bonin’s mark was left in the show space by a host of black velveteen sea creatures who rubbed up against journalists on the high-gloss, oversize shoebox style seating. These critters and creatures (the soft toys, not the journalists) were dramatically shrunk down too, appearing as hard-shelled minaudièrs and dinky bag charms throughout the show. The room itself, at Château de Vincennes on the very fringes of the city, featured high-contrast, optimistic decor: stark white walls and vivid vinyl yellow floor which echoed the sheen of moulded latex and lacquered leather seen on the runway.

Chanel

‘Matthieu Blazy does it again’ was Wallpaper’s first reaction to Chanel’s A/W 2026 show. After last year’s electrifying debut, Blazy had set the bar at lofty heights for himself, heights he cleared with no trouble in this latest go-around. Drop waists, metallic hair, and some of the most coveted shoe of the 2020s were all part of the magic, but as we’ve already come to expect from Blazy’s tenure, so was the set design. Where his first two outings, for ready-to-wear and couture, saw an immersive take on the solar system, and then something rather more down-to-earth in the form of sugary pink mushrooms, respectively, A/W 2026 featured enormous cranes in Playmobil primary colours, piercing the space within the Grand Palais’ main atrium.

With their resemblance to stage rigging, these monumental installations were assembled on a glitter floor to evoke the joy of dance – reinforced through a soundtrack of Lady Gaga remixed with dialogue from Billy Elliot. The whole effect was a glorious reminder of what Blazy’s Chanel is to be: totally joyful.

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

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

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

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

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

The best of Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026

Dior

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

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

Saint Laurent

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

Dries Van Noten

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

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

Acne Studios

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

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

Alaïa

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

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

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

Rabanne

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

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

Rick Owens

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

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

Loewe

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

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

Issey Miyake

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

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

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

Lanvin

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

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

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

Givenchy

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

Junya Watanabe

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

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

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

Celine

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

Hermès

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

Comme des Garçons

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

Balenciaga

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

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

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

Jean Paul Gaultier

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

Chanel

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

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

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

Louis Vuitton

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

Miu Miu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shop the story

The Tuileries Gardens in Paris, first constructed by Catherine de’ Medici in 1564 and later renovated in 1664 by Louis XIV in its formal French style, has long proved fertile ground for the wandering flâneur seeking artistic inspiration and enlightenment – from Édouard Manet to Oscar Wilde; Claude Debussy to Victor Hugo.

And this afternoon, Jonathan Anderson – the Northern Irish designer and creative director of Dior – was the latest creative mind to be seduced by the gardens’ charms, using the Tuileries to stage his A/W 2026 womenswear collection for the Parisian powerhouse. In bright spring sunshine, the show set had been erected around one of the park’s lily-pad strewn ponds (here, those water-lilies were clever imitations); across its centre ran a contemporary imagining of the Tuileries’ tree-lined Grand Allée, a site of promenade since the gardens opened to the public in 1667.

A walk in the park: Dior A/W 2026 by Jonathan Anderson

Indeed, Anderson said this was a collection about ‘seeing and being seen’ in such public settings, a preoccupation of Louis XIV and the aristocracy of his reign. He also invoked the poet Charles Baudelaire, and his 1857 poem À une passante (To a Passer By), in which the narrator observes a mourning woman in a Paris flea market. Struck by what he sees as her innate nobility and ‘majestic’ grief in a ‘lightning flash’ of a moment before she disappears into the crowd, it would immortalise the figure of the flâneur – a detached but voracious observer of the changing city that critic Walter Benjamin said epitomised the modern 19th-century experience.

Anderson, who began the role as sole creative director of the house in June of last year, could also be deemed something of a flâneur: in one viral video posted to social media, he is captured by an anonymous observer wandering the banks of the Seine alone, smoking a cigarette, while recent Instagram posts have seen him capture quotidian moments observed while traversing his adopted city, like the stacks of love-heart padlocks attached onto the poles of a bridge, or the ducks which wander the Tuileries gardens. Though if a flâneur is someone who knows the city intimately (as Benjamin argued in The Arcades Project), Anderson was keen to assert that he retains an outsider’s eye.

‘I will always feel like a tourist in Paris,’ he told designer and podcaster Bella Freud in a conversation which aired before the show’s start. ‘But sometimes being a tourist is quite good, because you see the thing, you kind of edit.’ ‘I suppose it’s a way of finding the things that attach you to a city,’ she added, to his agreement. ‘Especially Paris, it's so grand, it's so composed.’

The idea of the pleasure garden – one which Anderson said also had very British connotations, too – lay at the root of the collection, the idea of dressing up to enter the thrum of city life (indeed, as he noted, in 1667, when the Tuileries opened, there were strict dress codes as to what you could wear inside). ‘A walk through the park becomes a performance,’ was the tagline to the A/W 2026 collection, conjuring a ‘panoply of Parisians... each dressed to play a part, whether mundane or spectacular.’

It made for a collection of eclectic elements; a modern riff on the 19th-century promenade. Several pieces found their roots in historical dress: ruffled Belle Époque gowns were abbreviated into mini skirts replete with bouncing trains (these millefeuilles of frills and ruffles returned throughout, including beneath a flared riff on the house’s Bar Jacket); regal brocade jackets came with peplum hems and rows of fabric-covered buttons; while a pair of dramatic lace gowns had a feeling of deconstruction, as if torn and destroyed by time (indeed, their edges were left frayed).

Others were a play on Parisian bourgeois tropes: scarves were slung across fabrics which mimicked heritage tweed, blazers were adorned with big gold buttons, and shearling jackets were reimagined with wiggly, wave-like hems. But there was a satisfying levity, too, even prettiness – flowers bloomed from dresses, jeans were adorned with crystals, and the polka dot became a defining motif. Even last season’s shrunken Bar Jacket was loosened up: here, an iteration of the Dior classic came in oversized proportions, and was worn with voluminous matching pants.

It felt like a designer gaining confidence in his position, one no doubt bolstered by the overwhelmingly positive critical reception to his first couture show in January. There, he favoured a similarly freewheeling approach: ‘I think the idea of designing things is to make people want something they didn’t want,’ he said at the time. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learnt at Dior, it’s just about putting ideas out [there].’

Anderson is a designer who has always excelled best when working intuitively and without restriction; here, the collection was created, from start to finish, in under a month. ‘Dior has this giant past, and I had to start there,’ he said. ’Now I feel free to release it from that.’

Stay tuned to our live coverage from Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026 here.

The Year of the Fire Horse – heralded by Lunar New Year on 17 February 2026 – apparently signals optimism and opportunity and comes around only once every 60 years (the horse sign's pairing with the element of fire distinguishing this from other horse years in the Chinese zodiac’s 12-year cycle), so we are saddling up to make the most of it, at least on the design and style front.

With all things equestrian a classic source of inspiration for creatives and luxury brands – some of which, such as Hermès and Gucci, have saddlery in their DNA – there is no shortage of horsey-in-a-good-way accessories for you and your home. And plenty of brands are embracing the theme with specially introduced products and campaigns – see Giorgetti’s collection of horse-shaped leather home accessories; Swatch’s horse-adorned watch; and Prada’s campaign-fronting geometric red steed.

We’ve picked out a few designs we’re sure have staying power, from Abask’s exquisite hand-glazed dinner plates to Jonathan Anderson’s bookish new take on Dior’s ‘Saddle’ bag. If you are inclined towards the subtle, horseshoe earrings by Awe are neat and discreet. For the uninhibited and spatially unchallenged, Front’s lamp for Moooi – essentially a horse with a shade on top – has been a statement-making stablemate since 2006. Happy horse hunting.

12 horse-inspired designs for equestrian chic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘When fashion, film and architecture work together, it’s an empowering thing,’ says film director Luca Guadagnino, who explored the links between the mediums when designing the show set for Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior womenswear collection, for S/S 2026, which debuted last October. A collaborative project, it was the second time Guadagnino and production designer Stefano Baisi had worked with Anderson, who was the costume designer on Guadagnino’s 2024 film Queer.

Anderson’s brief for the show was for a standalone space that also acknowledged his respect for Dior’s history. Says Guadagnino: ‘The way Jonathan works is to involve people dear to him, pushing everybody to get to their limits. It’s beautiful to see that the space we created was really real – physical, massive, very architectural. It didn’t feel transient.’

The purpose-built space was dominated by an inverted pyramid that protruded from the ceiling, becoming a screen as the show began. On it, played a specially commissioned film by British director Adam Curtis, best known for his documentaries on power, politics and the media. Anderson was keen for the space to be monumental, a concept he introduced in the runway set for his S/S 2026 menswear collection for Dior in Paris, which drew inspiration from Berlin’s atmospheric Gemäldegalerie art museum. ‘There is always a lovely playfulness in what Jonathan does,’ says Guadagnino.

The womenswear show also responded to its location in the Jardin des Tuileries, opposite the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre. ‘We started to reflect on the axis that connected the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, and on the idea of an iconic Paris landmark. The reverse pyramid was one of the topics we discussed, and that was the moment in which Stefano and I brought this architectural museum sensitivity to the place. And then – and this was a beautiful intuition from Jonathan – we thought of using the pyramid not just as decoration, but as the diamond upon which this video could be shown, letting you into the new era at Dior.’

The modernist backdrop was offset by the evocative narrative of Curtis’ film, which interspersed archival footage with his distinctive eclecticism. Clips from Dior’s history are juxtaposed against fragments from horror movies. Curtis keeps the anxiety cranked up throughout, ending abruptly on a pure white frame, signalling the clean slate Anderson is beginning at Dior.

‘I think the documentary-style way in which Adam works inspired Jonathan, showing a better way to communicate,’ says Baisi. ‘He has this big challenge of designing a new collection for a brand that has its own important history. He’s been very successful in writing his own vision. Using irony is the key to his success, and this also comes through in the lens of the way Adam works.’

Taken together, the film and the set confront Dior’s history, before turning the page to Anderson’s new chapter. ‘The idea of making a mini haunted mansion film – which is traditionally Anglo-Saxon Gothic, from an Anglo-Saxon designer and filmmaker – shows that the ghosts inhabit the past and the present, and it’s inevitable that we have to deal with those ghosts,’ Guadagnino says. ‘What was beautiful here was that not only did Dior go for this very evocative piece, but when the movie finished during the show, the audience had an incredible reaction to it even before the first look was out. It was very emotional and very strong.’

dior.com

This article appears in the Wallpaper* March Style 2026 issue, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Much has been written about the contemporary relevance of haute couture, a rarefied dressmaking medium that is built on tradition and strict rules (to call yourself a couture house, you must adhere to those set out by La Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode). It remains best defined by its impossible flights of craft – each garment must be stitched entirely by hand in a process that can take hundreds of hours – and its elite cortege of clients, which numbers (by estimate) around 5,000 worldwide. ‘Couture is really a dying craft; it’s nearly extinct. There are only a few houses doing it,’ said Jonathan Anderson at his Dior couture debut this week. Such is its need for protection, he asserted, that after the show, he would open ‘Grammar of Forms’, an exhibition in the runway space allowing visitors to see his work in conversation with original designs by Christian Dior. ‘[I want] to demystify couture and inspire the next generation to ensure its future,’ he said.

The standout collections of Haute Couture Week S/S 2026

Though rarely has Haute Couture Week – which concludes in Paris today (29 January) – demanded so much attention. This was largely down to its two new custodians, Anderson at Dior and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, both of whom would show their first couture collections during the event (their respective houses, two behemoths of Parisian style, are synonymous with haute couture, its design language filtering down to everything from ready-to-wear to cosmetics and perfume). Both seemed to shake off the weight of expectation in collections that expressed converging visions of contemporary couture – Blazy instilled everyday garments with an ethereal lightness through meticulous acts of craft (think: a hand-painted silk mousseline trompe l’oeil pair of jeans), while Anderson presented a ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas in a bold collection full of intriguing forms and bold flourishes, from pom-pom cyclamen earrings to enormous coloured stoles.

Elsewhere, Daniel Roseberry’s latest Schiaparelli collection revelled in the joy of creation; Alessandro Michele staged a ‘peep show’ at Valentino; and at Armani Privé – in the first couture show since Giorgio Armani’s death – Silvana Armani, Mr Armani’s niece, took the reins this season in her own debut show. Here, we unpack the best shows of the week.

Schiaparelli

There is an enjoyable sense of spectacle to a Schiaparelli show, which in its 10am Monday morning spot heralds the start of Haute Couture Week. The models – who always seem to be having fun – parade around the Petit Palais in American artistic director Daniel Roseberry’s always theatrical creations, striking poses that spark nostalgia for the more outré runway shows of the 1980s (there is always good music, too: this season, the euphoric Jamie XX remix of Robyn’s ‘Dopamine’). This season, those creations spanned sculpted tops that sprouted spiking horns or enormous scorpion’s tails; sharp, wide-shouldered blazers adorned with plumes of feathers reminiscent of a bird’s wing; and delicate lace flowers that hovered and floated away from the body. There were some beautiful details besides: a flared dress in millefeuille tulle, which looked as if it had been cut away in chunks, and floating panels of degradé organza, dyed as if by bleeding ink.

Roseberry said that this season he had been inspired by a recent trip to the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s famed ceiling: ‘a wild, visually rambunctious, vulnerable and romantic imagining of God, religion, faith, and the human condition’. The eclecticism of this season came from a desire to replicate the ecstatic feeling of the creative act, one that he imagined Michelangelo experiencing as he created his most well-known fresco. ‘I stopped thinking for the first time in years of how something should look, but instead about how I feel when creating it,’ he said. ‘That was it. The entire emotional heartbeat of this season became not what does it look like, but how do we feel when we make it? What a relief that was. What a revelation.’

Dior

There was a palpable anticipation in the room for Jonathan Anderson’s first couture collection for Dior, one compounded by Rihanna, whose late arrival only upped the anticipation. Under an upside-down meadow of wild cyclamen – inspired by a posy brought to him by former Dior creative director John Galliano – the collection that followed was a bold ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas, which began with the curved form of a vase by ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo (a longtime collaborator of the designer). Her work inspired the ballooning shape of the opening gowns – constructed from ultra-lightweight silk and wire, they seemed to levitate away from the body – while the rest of the collection drew on creative mementoes, from Galliano’s posy of cyclamen (which here transformed into pom-pom earrings) to a series of found objects that became embellishment, whether historic cameo brooches or shards of meteors and fossils.

The idea, said Anderson, was for a dialogue of the past: an elevation of the precious and the rare (after all, haute couture is all about the singular and the one-off). ‘There’s this element in the show of how to upcycle things,’ he said in a preview before the show. ‘Like, how do we take something and reinvent it? Things are found, and then reassembled.’ This idea of reassembly ran throughout: sinuous bias-cut gowns recalled Galliano’s signature silhouette during his time at Dior, while a sculpted black coat, jutting out at the waistline, seemed to nod to Raf Simons’ own couture debut at the house (the Belgian designer was womenswear creative director from 2012-2015). But other pieces felt entirely Anderson’s own: inspired by nature, looks became sculptural marvels: satin protruded from the waistline of a skirt; flared gowns were constructed from delicate shards of pearlescent mother-of-pearl, while bell-shaped tops ballooned around the body to create otherworldly forms.

‘I think what is nice is that [as a team] we’re exploring – it is not about working out the idea before we start, or working out the end customer, because ultimately, we don’t know what people want,’ he says, likening the couture arm of the house to a creative ‘lab’. ‘That’s the whole point. I think the idea of designing things is to make people want something they didn’t want. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt at Dior, it’s just about putting ideas out [there].’

READ: Jonathan Anderson’s historic Dior couture debut was a bold ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas

Chanel

Matthieu Blazy’s brief tenure at Chanel so far has seen the French-Belgian designer embrace joy and levity over the weight of history. ‘I just wanted to have fun,’ he said after his debut ready-to-wear show last October, a feeling immortalised by model Awar Odhiang’s twirling runway finale, one of the year’s most memorable fashion moments (she wore a skirt adorned with hundreds of kaleidoscopic silk feathers).

With his first haute couture show, he sought a similar feeling of lightness, staged amid a fantasy-land set of enormous mushrooms and toadstools, as well as fluttering candy-pink trees. In the collection, that lightness was physical: the opening looks saw the classic Chanel suit rendered in featherweight silk mousseline rather than its usual tweed, while trompe l’oeil silk mousseline trousers were painted to recall denim jeans (a version of the ‘2.55’ handbag was also constructed from the fabric).

He said it came from an impulse to strip it all away and attempt to get to the heart of what Chanel is: ‘What makes Chanel, Chanel? What is the essence and essentialism of the house? How do you bear its soul?’ As such, he largely eschewed the theatrical towards the simplicity of a wardrobe – these were clothes that women could actually wear – though elevated through truly extraordinary moments of craft. There was tweed that sprouted with plumes of feathers; bouncing streamers of fabric at the hems of skirts; or the final bridal look, a simple collared shirt and skirt adorned with hundreds of petal-like mother-of-pearl paillettes.

Blazy said it was an ode to what he sees as the heart of Chanel – the communion between maker and wearer. As such, each model chose something personal to be stitched into their look – from a treasured initial to a symbol of luck. ‘[I] consider this collection almost as a break,’ said Blazy. ‘Something magical, something that makes you dream, something poetic, a calm moment of quietness, almost like a Sunday morning.’

READ: At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy lets the light in with a fairytale first haute couture collection

Armani Privé

It was to be the first Armani Privé show without Giorgio Armani at the helm: this past September, he passed away aged 91 after an extraordinary 50 years in fashion. Like at the Giorgio Armani menswear show in Milan – which was helmed by longtime creative partner Leo Dell'Orco – this was a Privé collection not of divergence but of continuance, mining previous signatures of the haute couture offshoot, from sinuous crystallised gowns to Eastern influences (heavily inspired by Japan, Mr Armani saw his design vernacular as a conversation between East and West).

Away from the more high-profile debuts at Chanel and Dior, this too ushered in a new design lead: Silvana Armani, Mr Armani’s niece, took the reins this season, having worked alongside her uncle for over four decades. She titled the collection ‘Jade’, using the precious stone to inform the collection’s largely green palette, shifting from Armani-esque tailoring (for their haute couture twist, ties came in sheer organza) to gowns that flared below the waist using clever petal-inspired pleats. Look out for them on the Oscars red carpet this coming March – in their ethereal beauty, they have winner written all over them.

Valentino

Alessandro Michele prefaced his latest haute couture collection for Valentino with an ode to the house’s eponymous founder, Valentino Garavani, who passed away aged 91 last week. ‘What we do today takes place within a history not of our making, in a house long inhabited, rich with traces and gestures,’ he said in a letter distributed to guests. ‘To work within this space means accepting both its weight and its grace. It means recognising that every form exists only in relation to what made it possible, that every creative act is also an act of custody.’ (As well as Garavani, Michele also name-checked his forebears Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli.) Garavani’s legacy, Michele continued, was ‘an ethics of making… a practice grounded in the belief that to create is to care for, and that beauty consists in radical, patient attention to bodies and forms.’

The collection had been finalised before Garavani’s death, and was full of the gestures that made the Roman couturier’s work so enduring: a lust for the theatrical, a note of sensuality and romance, as well as more formal references, from ruffles and feathers to the bold red of the opening gown, Garavani’s favoured hue (such was its ubiquity in his work, it was deemed ‘Valentino Rosso’). The show set comprised a series of circular chambers through which models walked; guests watched through a series of peepholes opened by a butler at the start of the show (they were based on the 18th-century Kaiserpanorama, a subject of critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin’s work). It allowed pure focus on the looks themselves: an appreciation of that extraordinary act of making, undertaken by Michele in communion with the petites mains of the couture atelier. ‘Valentino’s legacy remains what it has always been,’ said Michele. ‘An idea of beauty conceived as a noble form of responsibility toward time, bodies and the world we are given to cross.’

On Instagram, a few days prior to his debut haute couture collection for Dior, Jonathan Anderson posted a photograph of a Tesco shopping bag next to a small posy of wild cyclamen. ‘Last year, just before my first women’s show for Dior, the first person I wanted to show the collection to was John Galliano,’ the Irish designer explained in the caption below. ‘John very kindly came with two posies of cyclamen tied with black silk ribbons and a bag of cakes and sweets from Tesco for the team. [They were] the most beautiful flowers I‘d ever seen.’

He viewed them as something of a baton pass; Galliano was the house’s creative director for 14 years in its heady 2000s heyday (after leaving the house in 2011, he would later go on to be creative director of Maison Margiela, a role he held for ten years until 2025). ‘When I was at university, he was like a hero,’ he told Business of Fashion. ‘He is Dior in the public imagination, still to this day, because what he built was so big in terms of the rebirth of fashion. I loved the idea of him being back at Dior. I felt like it was a full-circle moment.’

Jonathan Anderson makes his Dior haute couture debut

It is why each of the 730-or-so guests attending the designer’s haute couture show in Paris this afternoon received a small posy of cyclamen, encased in a white box, alongside the show’s invitation. It is also why, on entering the show space, the ceiling was transformed into an upside-down meadow of more blooming cyclamen, scenting the mirrored room – reclaimed from Anderson’s menswear show held last week – with the smell of mossy woodland. Via the collection notes, he said that these flowers were symbols of ‘creative continuity’ – a physical manifestation of the exchange between Galliano and himself, or any of the other of the creative directors who have defined Dior’s 79-year history, all the way back to Christian Dior himself.

More than any of the other collections produced by the house (Anderson oversees Dior’s men’s and women’s ready-to-wear collections, as well as Cruise and Pre-Fall), haute couture requires the greatest communion with the past. For one, haute couture is the oldest and most revered form of Parisian dressmaking, its strict traditions fastidiously upheld by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode. But at Dior, it is also the crown jewel of the empire: despite being available to the rarefied few (estimates for couture clients worldwide sit at around 5,000), the language of haute couture infiltrates every part of the house, from ready-to-wear to fragrance and jewellery.

As is Anderson’s style, the S/S 2026 couture collection began with a trail of references and mementoes drawn from across eras. A vase by ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo (a longtime collaborator of the designer) inspired the curving, balloon-like shape of the opening trio of dresses (among his first creations for the house, they were crafted from featherweight silk tulle and wire to find form without heaviness); cameo brooches, meticulously sourced by Anderson from vintage sellers, became adornments, while shards of meteorites and fossils were repurposed into jewellery. Meanwhile, cyclamen were transformed into pom-pom earrings or floral embellishments on gowns.

‘There’s this element in the show of how to upcycle things,’ he said in a preview before the show. ‘Like, how do we take something and reinvent it? Things are found, and then reassembled.’

This act of reassembly also drew him towards nature, a longtime fascination of Monsieur Dior, whose love of gardening was fostered in childhood, watching his mother tend the rose garden at their seaside home, Villa Les Rhumbs, in Normandy. ‘I kind of like the cliché that Dior is about the flower – it's this kind of obsessiveness over nature,’ he said. Though Anderson wanted the play with the reference: hyper-real flowers were made out of silk or enamel (‘it’s this idea of what’s fake and real’), while graphics were drawn from images of butterflies and flowers zoomed in until they became abstracted. ‘When you zoom in or zoom out, they become other things. They can be incredibly beautiful, or incredibly ugly.’

It lent the collection a feeling of eclecticism, whereby intriguing forms emerged in bold fabrications: bulbous protrusions of lilac satin erupted from waistlines; sculptural gowns were constructed from delicate shards of pearlescent shell, while bell-shaped tops ballooned around the body and were veiled with net. Alongside, an homage to Galliano came through a series of sinuous bias-cut gowns (the silhouette was the designer’s signature at Dior), as well as what felt like a nod to Raf Simons – creative director of womenswear for the house from 2012-2015 – in a restrained black coat, flared at the hips, reminiscent of the Belgian designer’s own haute couture debut (a show immortalised in the 2014 documentary, Dior and I). Anderson called it a ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas, and there was joy and colour to be found in this freewheeling approach.

Anderson said that the last few months creating this collection have been like undertaking a ‘PhD in haute couture’. He has sat through hours-long fittings to get the perfect shape of a jacket – one which hinges on changes of just a few millimetres of fabric – and has been fascinated by the silence of the haute couture atelier (each stitch is done by hand, rather than by machine). ‘You realise that that's why we love clothing – it's this idea of the make,’ he said. ‘Couture is really a dying craft; it’s nearly instinct. There are only a few houses doing it. So in a weird way, it’s about protecting that.’

As custodian of the house, this is a task he takes seriously. After the show, the runway space will become an exhibition titled ‘Grammar and Form’, which will comprise pieces from the collection in ‘conversation’ with works by Christian Dior and Odundo’s ceramics. The idea, he says, is to ‘demystify couture and inspire the next generation to ensure its future’. Though one senses that haute couture is already in its renaissance: tomorrow, Matthieu Blazy, another lauded young designer, will make his own haute couture debut at Chanel, a fellow behemoth of Parisian style. Like Anderson, he looks set to inject fresh energy into the medium.

‘I think what is nice is that [as a team] we’re exploring – it is not about working out the idea before we start, or working out the end customer, because ultimately, we don’t know what people want,’ says Anderson, who sees the couture atelier as a ‘lab-like’ space for ideas. ‘That’s the whole point. I think the idea of designing things is to make people want something they didn’t want. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt at Dior, it’s just about putting ideas out [there].’

He continues, ‘I think it’s about enjoying the process of making. It’s like the cyclamen. After three days, it had wilted, and I wanted to remake it, to preserve it. But that's like a week-and-a-half's work for someone; every single thing is done by hand. But then you realise if we don’t do it, [craft like this] will disappear. It’s for the house of Dior, not just for me.’

dior.com

On 14 January, the first runway shows of the A/W 2026 menswear season take place at Florence’s Pitti Uomo, heralding the start of a fashion month that will also make stops in Milan and Paris in the coming weeks (the menswear fair’s guest designers Shinayakozuka and Hed Mayner both show on Pitti Uomo’s first evening). While the schedule is certainly quieter than the blockbuster womenswear shows in September – over 15 creative directors made their debuts at fashion’s major houses across the season – there will still be plenty of notable moments, including Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore menswear collection for Dior (it will be intriguing to see him hone his vision now he’s settled) and the swan song of Véronique Nichanian, artistic director of Hermès’ men’s universe, who is leaving after a near-four-decade-long tenure.

In anticipation, ahead of the season’s start this evening, we asked the Wallpaper* style teams about the moments they are looking forward to this Men’s Fashion Month.

‘There will be plenty of standout moments across fashion month: I’m always excited to see what’s next at Prada, and Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore menswear show for Dior will no doubt be a highlight (it’s been exciting seeing his first collection end up in stores this month). But this season I’m going to relish the quieter moments, too: like Setchu in Milan, where Satoshi Kuwata – who is based locally but was born in Kyoto, Japan – will hold his second runway show on the city’s fashion schedule. His considered approach, which melds a background on Savile Row with design flourishes drawn from his native Japan, always makes for an intriguing show. As an aside, I loved his first-ever fragrances, launched late last year: named after times of the day, they reimagine his personal rituals as scents, from morning ‘genmaicha’ green tea to ‘Friday 2AM Tatami’, inspired by the scent of Japanese sleeping mats. I’ll be sure to be wearing mine on show day.’

‘After the near-overwhelming number of debuts at womenswear this past September, I am relishing the relative calm of menswear: the somewhat reduced schedule, particularly in Milan, means there is more time to digest what we are seeing (the various appointments and presentations also allow an opportunity to view things up close). As for the highlights, in Milan it will always be Prada: for me, there's not quite another show like it – the clarity of vision that Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have honed across their partnership has led to collections which again and again set the tone for the season ahead (and, thanks to OMA’s always-transporting show sets, they come with plenty of spectacle).

‘In Paris, I look forward – like Jason – to Jonathan Anderson’s second menswear show for Dior, which promises even more theatre, though I am also excited to see the latest offerings from Willy Chavarria (the American designer will continue to show in Paris this season), Kiko Kostadinov, IM Men and Rick Owens, all showing across the week. There will be a poignant goodbye, too: on Saturday (17 January), Véronique Nichanian, artistic director of Hermès’ men’s universe, will step away from her role after almost four decades (I spent a memorable day in Paris interviewing her for the March 2023 Style Issue of Wallpaper*). Shifting the show to the evening spot, it will be a no-doubt fitting send-off for a record-breaking career (she is the longest-serving creative director of a fashion house) defined by both critical and commercial success. We’ll be raising a glass.’

‘This men’s season I’m most excited for Pitti Uomo, which I’m attending for Wallpaper* for the very first time. Kicking off fashion month, the biannual menswear fair is staged within Florence’s stately 14th-century Fortezza da Basso, where countless brands – including Herno, Caruso and Brunello Cucinelli – will present their collections. The latter hosted its famous dinner last night, and I was excited to witness the decadent spread first-hand.

‘As for the shows, Paris-based Hed Mayner is in the spotlight with the headline guest designer slot, staging his presentation in a midcentury building close to Santa Maria Novella station on Wednesday evening. His show will be followed by two rising Japanese talents: Shinya Kozuka, known for his painterly collections, and Soshi Otsuki, the winner of the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers in 2025. A strong Japanese presence at the fair continues through tangential events during the week, including the first official Sebiro Sanpo (suit walk) in Italy organised with fabric mill Vitale Barberis Canonico. The event originates in Tokyo, a financial hub and home to Japan’s “salarymen”, and sees hundreds of suit lovers gather to walk the streets in their finest tailoring.

‘As for the rest of the men’s shows, I’m always excited to see what Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada have been dreaming up together. Their show takes place on Sunday (18 January) in Milan in the vast Deposito building adjoining the brand’s namesake foundation in Milan – a space they’ll no doubt transform once again into another surprising, imaginative world.’

‘The menswear shows typically have less striking beauty moments than their womenswear counterparts – bar a slew of more avant-garde designers, from Rick Owens to Junya Watanabe, which will hopefully lend some intrigue – though the fresh and clean complexions that will likely be seen on the majority of runways feel fitting for the early weeks of the year (Prada, Dries Van Noten and Hermès always do this well, drawing from their own beauty lines). As someone who wears plenty of menswear, I'll be looking at the fashion, too: Dries Van Noten is a favourite (I loved Julian Klausner’s first menswear show last season, and I’m sure this one will strike a similar balance of the romantic and real), while Kiko Kostadinov is always interesting – after a brilliant co-ed show off-schedule at his London studio late last year (inspired by his dog, Dante), I’m excited to see what he has in store.’

The ‘Saddle’ bag became an emblem of early 2000s style when it made its debut at John Galliano’s Dior S/S 2000 ready-to-wear show, and now, thanks to perfumer and Dior Perfume Creation Director Francis Kurkdjian, the emblematic 'it bag' has been translated into an equally innovative fragrance.

‘For me, the “Saddle” bag is a very inspiring story,’ Kurkdjian tells Wallpaper* at a preview of the fragrance in Paris. ‘It’s almost like an accessory that becomes part of your body, and from that feeling, I started thinking about something very sensual, almost a nude leather. Something very skin-like.’

Cuir Saddle: Dior’s latest fragrance is inspired by the ‘Saddle’ bag

That approach is what led Kurkdjian to develop an entirely new approach to leather perfumery, which tends to be smoky and animalistic, with the kind of olfactory profile lovers of tobacco or rich, musky scents are drawn to. With Cuir Saddle, Kurkdjian has not entirely eliminated those smoky and woody notes, but has tempered them with florals and soft musks to create what he calls a ‘trompe l'oeil’ fragrance or ‘skin fragrance’, designed to subtly enhance the scent of your own body chemistry. Just like the bag that inspired it, Cuir Saddle fuses to the body so that you almost forget you are wearing it at all.

The perfume is the latest addition to ‘La Collection Privée’, a range of luxury fragrances that use scent as a medium to explore the history of the house, by reconfiguring aesthetics from the archives to reflect the olfactory tastes of the present.

When it came to Cuir Saddle, Kurkdjian was not only thinking about Dior’s history, but the unexpected history of perfumed leather. Since ancient times, people have tried to mask the animalic smell of leather with notes of rose, musk, spices and the like. Catherine de’ Medici made history with her perfumed leather gloves, and scented leather took on new dimensions in the Roaring Twenties when the Russians arrived in Paris with their famous Russian Leather, which was finished with birch oil, lending it a distinctive scent. It is the mixture of the animal hide and the methods for perfuming it that have led to our present-day understanding of leather smells. For the new perfume, Kurkdjian wanted to upend this tradition with soft notes and the addition of synthetic molecules. ‘In this sense, Cuir Saddle seemed to present a very modern challenge,’ he says.

At a time when gourmand fragrances are dominating the market, Cuir Saddle presents an innovative, forward-looking alternative – a refined scent that suits the contemporary taste for lighter perfumes while still going against the grain. ‘Leather has always carried an idea of sensuality. It’s often long-lasting, and there’s something noble and expensive about it. But it’s not a very popular category. It’s more for connoisseurs. Leather notes are often raw, scratchy, old-school, which is exactly why we wanted softness here.’

Dior Beauty’s La Collection Privée Christian Dior Cuir Saddle fragrance is available now at dior.com

Amid the heady spectacle of the numerous debuts which took place this past September – 15 new creative directors debuted across the S/S 2026 season of runway shows – it is easy to forget that these were garments which would, eventually, arrive on the rails of stores, far away from the buzz and furore of Paris and Milan (or, indeed, the enormous glowing planets, inverted pyramids or ice-like glass stools of the arresting runway sets which they were backdropped with).

Yesterday (8 January 2026) in London, Jonathan Anderson heralded the arrival of his first collections for Dior (menswear and womenswear, as revealed in Paris) with an ephemeral pop-up in London’s Selfridges department store (the newly installed space takes over the prime ‘Corner Shop’ at the front of the store, straddling Oxford Street and Davies Street). Encapsulating a feeling of both spectacle and arrival, the windows are stacked high with grey Dior boxes – a recently introduced design, imprinted with a de-capitalised Dior logo, which reflects the house’s original 1946 typeface. Inside, two mannequins struggle to hold piles of even more grey parcels.

These boxes are based on originals from Colifichets, the first-ever Dior store, which opened in 1947 (directed by Christian Dior’s friend Carmen Colle, it sold various trinkets, scarves and curiosities, operating from the ground floor of the house’s 30 Avenue Montaigne address). Indeed, the pop-up has its own Wunderkammer feel: boxes open to reveal Lady Dior handbags, or Anderson’s riff on the Book Tote, here emblazoned with the covers of classic books, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (the same graphics appear on T-shirts and accessories).

Meanwhile, cabinets and drawers reveal a menagerie of animal-shaped charms, constructed from the tools of the atelier, from thimbles and embroidery scissors to twisting measuring tapes. Ready-to-wear spans mens and womenswear – intermingled on the shop floor for the first time – with the pieces on show encapsulating a mood of freshness and contemporary romance that feels at the heart of Anderson’s vision for the house. Motifs that run throughout include the four-leaved clover – a nod to both Anderson’s native Ireland, but also of Christian Dior’s fascination with superstitious emblems and charms.

Indeed, for those feeling lucky, a special draw invites guests to select a mystery card which, when unwrapped, could win you a prize from the collection (sadly, when Wallpaper* dropped by, we had no such luck). Elsewhere, notebooks and bookmarks can be personalised – a nod, say the house, to Anderson’s love of literature, which has provided an undercurrent to his tenure at Dior thus far.

Dior at the Corner Shop at Selfridges runs until 28 February 2026.

dior.com

With barely a moment for the dust to settle on 2025, a year dubbed by commentators as ‘fashion’s big reset’ (look back on Wallpaper’s 25 fashion moments of 2025 to see why), the cycle begins once again this January with the arrival of the A/W 2026 edition of Men’s Fashion Week. As ever, this will include stops in Florence for Pitti Uomo, the historic menswear trade fair which happens twice-yearly, Milan and Paris, the latter providing the bulk of this season’s schedule.

Though notably quieter than Women’s Fashion Week, which begins next month in New York, there will still be a number of intriguing moments to look out for – not least Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore menswear collection for Dior, after debuting at the house last June. With numerous big-name houses sitting out the men’s schedule this season – including Loewe, Balenciaga and Lanvin – it will likely prove the standout show of the week. Elsewhere in Paris, Véronique Nichanian will hold her swansong show for Hermès – a no-doubt heartfelt affair which will celebrate a record-breaking 37-year tenure defined by both commercial and critical success.

From this season’s roster of Pitti Uomo guest designers to Paul Smith’s return to Milan, we look forward to the imminent Men’s Fashion Week A/W 2026 and the schedule’s defining moments.

Pitti Uomo (13–16 January 2025)

Historic menswear fair Pitti Uomo, which centres around Florence’s 14th-century Fortezza da Basso – as well as a handful of dramatic locations across the Cradle of the Renaissance – takes place twice-yearly, coinciding with Men’s Fashion Month (generally, attendees take the train from Florence to Milan after its conclusion, where the month continues). Alongside the main fair – which will see showcases from Brunello Cucinelli, Piacenza 1773 and Caruso, among others – are a handful of guest designers, which this season are headlined by Hed Mayner, who will show his A/W 2026 collection at the event (previous guest designers have included Raf Simons, Grace Wales Bonner and Martine Rose, among others).

Mayner, who shows each season in Paris and is known for his inventive riffs on wardrobe staples, says he is ‘excited to show [his] work in such an amazingly rich and historical city like Florence... This new context will encourage me to try new things.’ He will show in the Palazzina Reale di Santa Maria Novella, an imposing modernist building in the same complex as Santa Maria Novella station. He will be joined by fellow guest designer Soshi Otsuki, who hails from Japan and won the 2025 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers. He has chosen the refectory of Santa Maria Novella church for the occasion, expressing his ‘deep honour’ to be chosen as one of the season’s guest designers.

Milan Fashion Week Men’s (16–19 January 2025)

On Friday 16 January, eyes will turn to Milan, where the Italian style capital will host the latest edition of Milan Fashion Week Men’s. Despite a somewhat scant schedule – certainly in comparison to Paris – there remains a handful of shows which will no doubt define the season ahead. Most notably, Prada, where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons will show their latest collection on Sunday afternoon (the house’s highly influential collections often will set the tone for the upcoming month of shows, and beyond). Zegna, meanwhile, will switch from closing proceedings to opening them – the house will now show at 3pm on Friday 16 January – while Ralph Lauren will make his return to the Milan runway with a menswear presentation that same evening. Paul Smith is also returning to Milan after showing in the city last season; he joins a raft of the city’s mainstays, including Dolce & Gabbana, DSquared2 and Giorgio Armani, the latter hosting the first menswear show since the death of the house’s eponymous founder last September. Emporio Armani, meanwhile, will sit this menswear season out.

Paris Fashion Week Men’s (20–25 January 2025)

Making up the bulk of the schedule is Paris Fashion Week Men’s, which will begin with a no-doubt blockbuster show from Pharrell Williams at Louis Vuitton on January 20 and run all the way until the evening of January 25 (Jacquemus will close the month on Sunday night). Standout moments include a much-anticipated sophomore men’s collection from Jonathan Anderson at Dior – his first show last summer was critically lauded, and arrived in stores earlier this January – while Véronique Nichanian will bow out after a 37-year tenure at Hermès. She will hold a final show on the evening of Saturday 24 January, before her successor, British designer Grace Wales Bonner, takes over the Parisian house’s menswear collections later this year. New to the schedule this season is underground Bologna-based label Magliano (the brand usually shows in Milan), joining a roster of major names including Rick Owens, Comme des Garçons, Dries Van Noten, Issey Miyake and Sacai. Meanwhile, Willy Chavarria – one of the Wallpaper* USA 400 for 2025 – will continue to show in Paris this season, the third season showing away from his native New York.

2026 might be the year when the dust begins to settle in fashion – after a year of reset and refresh in 2025, where over 15 creative directors began their tenures at the industry’s major houses, the next 12 months will see them settle in and hone their creative visions. This will begin in January, when Jonathan Anderson and Matthieu Blazy, at Dior and Chanel respectively, will show their first haute couture collections after critically lauded debuts in 2025 (and, perhaps more importantly, their initial offerings will land in stores).

But that’s not to say that we are in a moment of stasis: the debuts will continue into 2026, with Maria Grazia Chiuri showing her first collection for Fendi; Demna holding his first runway show for Gucci; and the presumed debut of the (as yet unnamed) new creative director of Versace. And elsewhere, there will be plenty more notable style moments, from a slew of blockbuster exhibitions (including the biggest ever Costume Institute exhibition at The Met in New York) to some fashionable on-screen moments.

Here, as the new year begins, everything to look forward to in fashion in 2026.

The fashion exhibition renaissance will continue

Following what felt like an unprecedented number of fashion exhibitions in 2025 – even in the usually sleepy summer months, we highlighted 11 to choose from – the renaissance of the medium looks set to continue into 2026. Highlighted by Belle Hutton in her guide to the unmissable fashion exhibitions to add to your calendar in 2026, these will span the blockbuster – an Edward Enninful-curated exhibition on the 1990s at Tate Britain; a vast Schiaparelli retrospective at the V&A – and more introspective displays, like a poetic exhibition of works by photographer Rafael Pavarotti at Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris or the first major exhibition on the ‘Antwerp Six’, an iconoclastic group of designers, who, in the late 1980s, would alter fashion’s trajectory forever. Fittingly, it will take place at MoMu, Antwerp’s brilliant fashion museum.

Valentino will head back to its roots in Rome

In a notable schedule shift, Alessandro Michele has chosen to show his next collection for Valentino in Rome, the city where the house was founded by Valentino Garavani in 1960 (the house has said this is a one-off, returning to its usual spot on the Paris fashion schedule the season after). Other travelling shows in 2026 will include the usual Cruise circuit in late spring – notable this season for the first Cruise shows from Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Demna at Gucci – which this year, whether through serendipity or good planning, are largely set to take place in the United States. Gucci and Louis Vuitton will both show in New York, while Dior will show in Los Angeles; elsewhere, Chanel has chosen Biarritz, France and Max Mara Shanghai, China.

Véronique Nichanian will say goodbye to Hermès after a landmark tend

In October, it was announced that Véronique Nichanian was to step down from her role as artistic director of Hermès’ men’s universe, a tenure which has lasted 37 years – the longest-running of a serving creative director. Known for a mood of quiet beauty – whereby archetypal menswear garments are endlessly evolved and perfected – she has achieved both commercial and critical success. ‘I still love this job. However, I believe that to practice it the way I like to, it now requires more and more time – and today, I want to devote that time to other things,’ she said. ‘Hermès has, above all, shown great elegance by allowing me to choose the moment that felt right to step down. I’ve been thinking about it and discussing it with Axel and Pierre-Alexis Dumas for a year or two now. It’s time to pass the baton.’ That baton will pass to Grace Wales Bonner – an appointment which garnered unanimous praise from critics and online commentators – though the British designer will not show until January 2027. Meanwhile, this January, Nichanian will hold her swansong at Paris Fashion Week Men’s – a no doubt emotional ending to an extraordinary career.

Maria Grazia Chiuri will show her first collection for Fendi

Just when you thought the dust had settled, the creative director reshuffle is set to continue into 2026. Most notably, the arrival of Maria Grazia Chiuri at Fendi – a long-rumoured appointment since her exit from Dior in May, confirmed by the Roman house in October. Hailing herself from Rome – and having started her career at Fendi in the late 1980s – it will be something of a homecoming. She will show as part of Milan Fashion Week in February. Elsewhere, after launching his first collection with a starry Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn-shot film in September, Demna will hold his first runway show for Gucci – also in Milan in February – while in New York, Rachel Scott will make her catwalk debut for Proenza Schouler, having hosted an intimate presentation last September.

While Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson will make their haute couture debuts

Haute couture remains the heady pinnacle of Parisian style: a medium which is meticulously defined Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (FHCM) to retain the traditional craft of bespoke dressmaking (one stipulation is that every gown must be made-to-order to the exact contours of the client’s body). Couture week in January looks set to be the most-watched in years, down to two notable debuts: Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, and Jonathan Anderson at Dior (their ready-to-wear debuts came in 2025). With both designers’ careers defined by imaginative flights of craft and imagination, their first couture shows in January will no doubt inject new energy to Haute Couture Week – a period of the fashion calendar which has felt in flux in recent seasons.

Style will have its moment on screen in 2026

‘2026 is shaping up to be a year to remember for style on screen,’ writes Orla Brennan in her rundown of the fashionable films to look out for in 2026. This of course includes the return of Devil Wears Prada, with the much-anticipated sequel no doubt becoming a cultural lightning rod when it reaches screens in May (as Brennan writes, ‘[it] promises to be the most fashionable film of 2026 – or at least, its wardrobe is bound to be the most closely scrutinised by industry platforms and devoted style fans’). But there is plenty more aside: from Emerald Fennell’s bold retelling of Wuthering Heights to A24’s Mother Mary, in which Anne Hathaway plays a fictional pop star opposite Michaela Coel as a fashion designer, there will be plenty of style moments to look out for. Plus, there’s the return of former fashion designer Tom Ford as director after A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals – he’s set to start filming his adaption of Anne Rice’s Cry to Heaven early this year, which currently has a tentative 2026 release.

The Met Gala will be bigger than ever

The Met Gala – which celebrates the opening of the New York institution’s blockbuster spring Costume Institute exhibition – remains one of the fashion calendar’s notable moments (not least for its starry red carpet, which is unfurled each year on the first Monday of May). For 2026, that exhibition is titled ‘Costume Art’, weaving a thread between the Costume Institute’s archive of fashion garments and the depictions of clothing across The Met’s wider collection, from paintings to ancient artefacts. And this year, it looks set to be bigger than ever: ‘Costume Art’ inaugurates the Costume Institute’s new 12,000 sq ft gallery, adjacent to the Met’s Great Hall (designed by Brooklyn-based architecture firm Paterson Rich Office, it will be named after Condé Montrose Nast, founder of the eponymous publishing empire). Add to this a high-wattage line-up of co-chairs for the opening – Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman and Venus Williams – and the event is sure to dominate the news cycle come May.

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.’

What, at its essence, is a fashion boutique? It’s a space for brands to present their wares, yes – but in today’s luxury landscape, that definition feels insufficient. The most influential brands now prioritise universe-building as much as they do merchandising. Customers aren’t purchasing a garment so much as an aesthetic worldview – and the boutique becomes a tangible expression of that vision.

In 2025, this idea crystallised into a full-scale revival of fashion retail. A series of brands unveiled high-concept stores that treated fashion, art and design as a whole. JW Anderson has restyled its stores as design-driven marketplaces offering not just clothing but ceramics and other crafted objects. Extreme Cashmere introduced a boutique where the clothing nearly disappears into a domestic setting. A series of smaller stores have also emerged: like Jake’s, the Saturday-only store which sees Jake Burt, one half of London-based label Stefan Cooke, sell an ever-changing roster of weekly one-offs designed by him and his friends (pastry chef and model Louis Thompson provides the cakes).

Here, we are focusing on the store design itself: from Stone Island’s experiments with cutting-edge tech to stores-turned-galleries, these were the retail concepts that defined 2025 in fashion.

Acne Studios, Tokyo

Acne Studios’ new three-level Aoyama flagship blends minimalist architecture with playful textures. Designed by co-founder Jonny Johansson and Halleroed, the glass-lined, garage-like space is clad in pink granite and filled with vibrant furnishings by the likes of Max Lamb and Benoit Lalloz. The store remains faithful to Acne Studios’ Scandi roots, but nods to Japan through details like candy-bright ceramics by Takuro Kuwata.

READ: Step inside Acne Studios’ pink-hued Tokyo flagship: ‘fashion is supposed to be fun’

Miu Miu, London 

Miu Miu’s revamped New Bond Street store feels clean and contemporary, defined by an industrial metal grid floor, crisp lighting and bold yellow-green display cases. Upstairs, warmer touches – parquet, plush rugs and a sculptural wooden ceiling – add softness. Crucially, this space is conceived as more than a boutique; it functions as a cultural and social hub.

READ: Inside Miu Miu’s ‘proudly modern and minimal’ new London store

Longchamp, New York

The showstopper at Longchamp’s revamped New York flagship is the vivid green steel-ribbon staircase. Thomas Heatherwick returned to reimagine his 2004 design, shifting focus from theatricality to a warm ‘Parisian apartment’ feel. An opened-up upper floor, green carpeting, vintage furniture and eclectic art create a refined but lived-in atmosphere.

READ: Thomas Heatherwick revamps his New York flagship for Longchamp – 20 years after he first designed it

Extreme Cashmere, Amsterdam

At Extreme Cashmere’s Amsterdam store, opened in April, the display of garments is almost secondary to creating a home-like spirit. Plush carpets, a stainless-steel kitchen block, a ‘cashmere spa’ washing machine and curated objects encourage intimate, relaxed interaction with the brand’s sizeless, genderless pieces, which are displayed market-style.

READ: Extreme Cashmere reimagines retail with its new Amsterdam store: ‘You want to take your shoes off and stay’

Dries Van Noten, London

In March, Dries Van Noten ushered in a new era under creative director Julian Klausner, following the founder’s 2024 departure. A new London store on Hanover Square followed, housed in a former bank. The two-floor space showcases fashion and beauty amid artworks by Hockney, Man Ray and Tracey Emin, plus eclectic furniture, design pieces and a vinyl corner.

READ: Dries Van Noten’s new London store is an eclectic, art-filled haven

JW Anderson, London

Jonathan Anderson is slowly but surely steering JW Anderson towards a lifestyle focus, with stores now mixing in art, ceramics and homewares – from Akiko Hirai pieces to Charles Rennie Mackintosh stools. Gallery-style displays spotlight works by Mary Stephenson, Gwen John, Christina Kimeze, Robert Kulicke and more, underscoring a growing curatorial slant. In December, a Pimlico Road store – designed by Sanchez Benton – continued to hone this vision, seeing fashion, art and interiors converge.

READ: JW Anderson’s new London store is an inviting emporium of fashion, art and homeware

Saint Laurent, Paris

Saint Laurent’s recently opened Avenue Montaigne boutique offers a museum-like experience. Across three levels, muted rooms showcase not just garments, but furniture by Süe & Mare, Paul Poiret, Jean-Michel Frank, Charlotte Perriand and Josef Hoffmann, as well as works from the Pinault Collection, including art by Mark Bradford.

Stone Island, New York

Stone Island boldly stepped into the future with its SoHo flagship, embodying CEO Robert Triefus’ refreshed vision. Designed by AMO, the two-storey space showcases the brand’s ‘lab’ ethos of material innovation, featuring charred cork, stainless steel and immersive digital screens. A subterranean lounge with a DJ booth and bar completes the experience.

READ: With exclusive merch and a secret lounge, Stone Island’s New York flagship is all about discovery

Loewe, Paris

Loewe’s first ‘Casa Loewe’ on Avenue Montaigne evokes an art collector’s home. Colourful ceramic tiles meet marble, brass and concrete, illuminated by abundant natural light. The space is furnished with pieces by Gerrit Rietveld, George Nakashima and Isamu Noguchi, which sit alongside Loewe leatherwork, rugs inspired by John Allen and an eclectic art collection spanning Franz Erhard Walther to Domingos Tótora.

Dior, Shanghai

Christian de Portzamparc’s House of Dior boutique in Beijing is a freestanding, five-storey flagship wrapped in sculptural white resin ‘petals’ and golden glass panels. Not only does this lantern-like behemoth blend couture and architecture, it also incorporates lifestyle – home to a restaurant from Anne-Sophie Pic, OMA-designed displays, VIP salons and art-filled interiors alongside floors of fashion.

READ: Inside Christian de Portzamparc’s showstopping House of Dior Beijing: ‘sculptural, structural, alive’

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.

In Beijing's ritzy Sanlitun district, where luxury retail jostles for attention amid the capital’s kinetic sprawl, Christian de Portzamparc has conjured House of Dior Beijing, the Pritzker Prize laureate's third commission for the French house after Seoul (2015) and Geneva (2024). From every angle, the building – head-turning in its outer sheath of gigantic white petals – is his most ambitious: a freestanding temple to fashion that channels the very gesture of couture into architectural form.

Unlike its Korean and Swiss counterparts – which share the same petal vocabulary but emerged from existing streetscapes with two or three facades apiece – Dior's largest store in China stands exposed on all four sides within Kengo Kuma's Taikoo Li Sanlitun North development. This 360-degree visibility presented Portzamparc with both opportunity and dilemma. Early iterations that wrapped petals continuously around the perimeter proved visually overwhelming. The solution? Alternating those signature resin shells – 14 in total, each shaped differently – with soaring panels of handcrafted golden glass tiles whose subtly varied surfaces shimmer and breathe between the sculptural volumes.

Inside House of Dior, Beijing

The petal forms themselves trace their lineage to the Dior atelier, capturing that decisive moment when flat fabric transforms into three-dimensional silhouette through cutting and draping. In Beijing, Portzamparc pushes this vocabulary further, sculpting each 65-foot-tall element to evoke the caryatids of Athens’ ancient Acropolis: graceful, vertical, dignified. Built using resin-casting techniques in a factory located just outside Beijing, the petals spent 18 months in production.

The golden tile panels – a nod to imperial China, where such hues were reserved for royalty – required equally exacting craftsmanship. Their placement creates crucial breathing space, breaking the mass while generating a play of shadows that shifts throughout the day. At night, the building becomes a lantern, petals backlit from within, curves casting elegant shadows across the plaza.

‘This project has taken four years, and it's a dream come true,’ says Delphine Arnault, chairman and CEO of Christian Dior Couture. That dream rises five stories filled with clothes and accessories: the ground level hosts Monsieur Dior, Anne-Sophie Pic's restaurant in a separate wing with after-hours access; floors one and two present the women's Dior universe; three belongs to men’s.

The top floor presents an OMA-conceived space populated by white toiled mannequins and a dramatic red ball gown. This leads into a soigné set of VIP salons dressed in hand-embroidered dandelion wall panels in yellow and blue in one salon, and gently indented botanical motifs in another, alongside access to an outdoor terrace.

Connecting these dreamy spaces is a circular white staircase that spirals upward, punctuated by a chandelier of clay petals – an intimate echo of the building's larger gesture – that clink softly with the slightest air movement.

Glass vitrines at each landing display miniature Dior creations, while throughout the interiors, works by Chinese artists animate the rooms. Xiyao Wang and Xu Zhen contribute paintings, Hong Hao created special commissions including three artworks in the restaurant that celebrate red as Beijing’s ceremonial colour, while furniture from Claude Lalanne, Franck Evennou, and Gio Ponti punctuates the spaces.

Throughout, Portzamparc's signature preoccupations assert themselves: the porous facade inviting light and views to permeate inward and outward, the commitment to opening constrained spaces, the calibration between solid and void. It is, incidentally, a quality visible across his Chinese work, from the slender columns and apertures punctuating the China National Convention Center to the north in Olympic Green to this Sanlitun venue.

For Portzamparc, whose portfolio spans cultural landmarks from the Philharmonie Luxembourg to the Shanghai Opera House, the Dior commissions represent something both particular and personal. When he completed the LVMH Tower on New York's 57th Street in 1999, Philip Johnson told him, ‘You are very lucky to have a client like Bernard Arnault’, a tacit recognition of an appreciative patron with both resources and the rare willingness to take creative risks. Two decades on, that relationship has evolved into what Portzamparc has described as ‘an architectural style dedicated to Dior’ – a collection united by principle, yet irresistibly responsive to place.

The result in Beijing? A building that mirrors the couture inside by taking something flat and making it sculptural, structural, alive.

House of Dior Beijing, N6 Taikoo Li Sanlitun North, Chaoyang District, Beijing

dior.com

‘Change is inevitable,’ said Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson ahead of his debut womenswear show for Dior, which was held in Paris this past October. Presented amid a gleaming white show set conceived by director Luca Guadagnino and his longtime production designer Stefano Baisi, it was preceded by a film by British filmmaker Adam Curtis, who is best known for his found footage documentaries which explore themes of individualism, progress and power – notably in The Century of the Self, HyperNormalisation, and the recent 2025 series Shifty, which captures the ‘unstable, exciting and frightening’ truths of living in Great Britain at the turn of the milennium.

For the show, in his distinctive style, Curtis mashed up archival clips from the house’s history – and its previous creative directors – alongside shuddering footage from horror movies from the same period. It captured both the thrill and anxiety which underlie a high-profile debut such as this: ‘Dare you enter the house of Dior?’ read its opening title card. ‘Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, which is part of the collective imagination, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box,’ elaborated Anderson in the accompanying collection notes. ‘Not to erase it, but to store it, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories.’

The collection which followed embraced this rationale by ‘recoding’ the house’s archive in the former Loewe designer’s endlessly inventive and oftentimes idiosyncratic style. Classic Dior silhouettes – like the 1947 Bar Suit – were warped and shrunken in proportion, while the bow became a motif throughout, informing the construction of blazers and gowns. Elsewhere, he straddled the theatrical – cornette-style headpieces, dramatic plumes of lace and a bold colour palette – and something more quotidien, like a series of simple denim skirts, plaid shirts and even a riff on the legging. Anderson described it as a ‘tension’ between fantasy and reality, ‘dressing as a way to become a character on the stage that is life’.

In the December 2025 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper*, Paris-based photographic duo Antoine and Charlie and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes capture the S/S 2026 collection, with a focus on the accessories. They prove particularly desirable: bunny-shaped ears on a ladylike pump or those adorned with rosette-like flowers, while handbags span the soft (a suede duffle bag adorned with the house’s cannage motif) and the structured, like the folded line of the ‘Dior Cigale’ bag, inspired by the architectural construction of Christian Dior’s 1952 ‘La Cigale’ dress. Others demonstrate the house’s superlative craft: a version of the Lady Dior handbag is adorned with hundreds of tiny green four-leaf clovers, a nod to the house founder’s love of superstitious talismans and iconography.

A version of this article appears in the December 2025 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 6 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Model: Heather Kemesky at Storm Management Casting: Dean Goodman Set design: Samirha Salmi at Swan Management Production: Kit Pak-Poy at Birdhouse Co Hair: Claudio Belizario at Call My Agent Make-up: Ruby Mazuel at Call My Agent Manicure: Virginie Mataja at Call My Agent Fashion assistant: Eva Rapti Set assistants: Antoine Auboiron, Roxane Raoux Production assistant: Kate Maidment Retouching: Sparks Post.

Located on the third floor of the House of Dior Beverly Hills, this new restaurant led by Dominique Crenn (the most Michelin-starred female chef in the US) showcases the same passion as the founding couturier, who described himself as a gourmand for the culinary arts.

Wallpaper* dines at Monsieur Dior by Dominique Crenn, Beverly Hills

The mood: ladies who lunch

As the first Dior restaurant outside Paris, the mood embodies French art de vivre, woven with fashion and taste. From the moment you step into the lifts, engulfed in floral motifs, an enchanting experience unfolds. Designed by architect Peter Marino, the space blends the spirit of 30 Montaigne with laid-back Californian ease, including a large patio shaded by the quintessential palm trees of Rodeo Drive.

A curved bar crafted in ebony and onyx, overlooked by a ceiling of sculpted rose petals in shades of white and backed by a wall sculpture of faceted mirrored panels, almost cut like a diamond, offers signature cocktails such as the J’Adior, made with pear, elderflower and Champagne, alongside a menu of small bar bites. The main room features a full-wall canvas: Gardens of Courances (2025) by Nicole Wittenberg, a major site-specific commission created to immerse guests in an enchanted botanical cosmos. Dining chairs are swathed in chartreuse green and peach-coloured abstract fabrics surrounding round white tables, though you may prefer a seat along the banquette wall or one of the cosy side booths for prime people-watching.

The rainbow of colourful crystal-cut plates and glasses used during your meal can be purchased in a small Maison conveniently located between the bar and the main restaurant; a tempting prospect after a few fruity or Damask rose cocktails.

The food: light French fare with a Californian twist

Pardon the cliché, but every dish is a work of art. If you’re feeling decadent, the caviar service arrives in a tin layered with smoked crème fraîche textured to resemble tweed. Dig deeper and you’ll find egg-yolk jam and pickled shallot, intended to be spread on a fluffy herbed madeleine. The most-ordered dish so far is the confit salmon with fermented red pepper, clams and grilled spinach. Other hits include seared scallops with blood orange, beef tartare (again with egg-yolk jam), and abalone served with anchovy and pepper sauce.

Crenn’s signature has been reimagined for Beverly Hills as the Guinea Hen Rodeo with mushrooms, though her rich, creamy potato millefeuille remains unchanged. Desserts take the ‘couture cuisine’ theme to its peak and are almost too pretty to eat – from a coconut rosé cream tart with raspberries and pistachio to a chocolate mousse patterned after a quilted handbag. Get your camera ready: photographs are encouraged, and the dishes are crafted to be captured like A-list stars.

Monsieur Dior by Dominique Crenn is located at 323 N Rodeo Dr, Beverly Hills, CA 90210, United States.

At Loewe, Jonathan Anderson was as much a cultural curator as he was a clothing designer. At Dior, the Parisian house where he presented his debut womenswear collection this afternoon, he looks to be forging a similar path. Entering the purpose-built showspace, guests were greeted by an inverted pyramid protruding from the ceiling – not unlike modernist architect IM Pei’s audacious entranceway for the Louvre, just a short walk away across the Jardin des Tuileries – which a card left on each attendee’s seat credited to the Italian film director Luca Guadagnino and production designer Stefano Baisi (Anderson worked with both on Queer as the 2024 movie’s costume designer; here, they were responsible for ‘scenography’).

Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior womenswear collection recodes the archive

As the show began, the pyramid transformed into a screen for a specially commissioned film by British director Adam Curtis, best known for his documentaries on individualism, power, and the collapse of 20th-century ideologies, including The Century of the Self, HyperNormalisation, and the recent 2025 series Shifty, which examined late-20th-century Britain under Conservative rule. Collaging archival footage in his atmospheric style, the short film gathered moments from the house’s near-eight-decade-long history, from clips of Christian Dior himself to collections from the designers at the house who followed, including John Galliano and Maria Grazia Chiuri, which flashed across the screens at the show’s start (interspersed horror movie scenes lent the feeling of anxiety that pulsates through Curtis’ work).

Beneath the pyramid’s point was the box guests had received the week prior, containing the show’s invitation – a plate of walnuts rendered entirely in china, inspired by ceramic curiosities Anderson had discovered in the house’s archive. The illusion was that the footage was emerging, genie-like, from inside. ‘Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, which is part of the collective imagination, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box,’ said Anderson via the collection notes. ‘Not to erase it, but to store it, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories.’

Anderson described his approach as having an ‘empathy’ for the past, though the film’s end – a shuddering rush of crackled footage before the screen turned a bright, optic white – was symbolic of a clean slate, a shedding of the weight of history. ‘Change is inevitable,’ he said in typically direct manner, presenting a collection which took elements of the archive and refracted them in his inventive, idiosyncratic style, warping archival silhouettes into strange and intriguing new proportions. Like the Tailleur Bar suit, which was shrunken and cropped in size, with a minuscule, abbreviated pleated skirt, while another riff on the nipped-waist Bar jacket scooped up at the front, as if tied like a bow. Indeed, the bow was a recurring motif: a series of bow ties (worn with matching shirts and skirts) reflected the subversion of formalwear in Anderson’s menswear collection for the house back in June, while hourglass dresses looked like they had been constructed from twists of fabric, tied at the end with bows.

A sense of theatricality came in dramatic cornette-style headwear and face-covering trims of lace inspired by another archival design. Micro-mini skirts were constructed from frothy mille-feuille layers of fabric, while the distinctive cantilevered waistline of Christian Dior’s 1952 La Cigale dress seemed to inspire the sculpted silhouette of trapeze dresses and double-breasted overcoats, which folded cleverly across their front. More grounded in reality were mini leather skirts (an abbreviated silhouette ran throughout), slouchy suede handbags with metal ‘Dior’ hardware embedded in their straps, and pointed pumps adorned with the house’s signature ’C’ on one foot, and ‘D’ on the other. Anderson said the collection was built on this ‘tension’ – between fantasy and reality, ‘dressing as a way to become a character on the stage that is life’.

More so than the menswear show earlier this year, there was a clarity to Anderson’s vision, which seeks to imagine the tropes of Dior – namely, an architectural construction combined with a mood of femininity and romance – in a sharp, contemporary style. This is only becoming clearer as he builds out his universe: alongside the collaborations with Guadagnino and Curtis, his trio of muses – and new house ambassadors – Mia Goth, Greta Lee and Mikey Madison, were in attendance today and watched on from the front row. The bolder looks on the runway might be more suited for their upcoming red carpet appearances than the everyday, but Anderson – a strong-willed designer who brims with confidence – knows that to build a brand requires bravery, vision and instinct, rather than safety. It’s how he built Loewe into a mega brand – now, with Dior, and the eyes of the world watching, this unwavering approach continues. Call it his New Look.

Stay tuned for live coverage of Paris Fashion Week S/S 2026

‘What would Christian Dior do if he were to create a restaurant today?’ mused Yannick Alléno, before taking the reins at the Monsieur Dior restaurant in Paris. The chef – who holds 17 Michelin stars across various other restaurants under his direction – now steers the culinary offering within 30 Montaigne, the cradle of the maison since 1946. Still home to its historic ateliers, the building has long been a temple of couture. With Alléno, it now sharpens its role as a stage for gastronomy.

Monsieur Dior by Yannick Alléno, Paris

Alléno succeeds Jean Imbert, who led Monsieur Dior’s opening in 2022, and also presides over Le Jardin (formerly La Pâtisserie) and Le Café at the same address. The Peter Marino-designed venue weaves Dior’s codes into a subtly modern mise-en-scène. Parquet floors and delicate caning nod to tradition, while chairs clad in the house’s black-and-white houndstooth sharpen the graphic edge. A scarlet feature wall appears pixelated, but look closer and it reveals a constellation of miniature images pulled from Dior’s archive.

For Alléno, the menu is stitched directly into Christian Dior’s legacy. Years ago, at a flea market, the chef stumbled upon a copy of La Cuisine Cousu-Main, a cookbook released by the maison in 1972, which he revisited for inspiration. The late French couturier’s spirit resurfaces in Alléno’s plates, where forms, textures and finishes are as important as flavour. Take, for example, the perfectly poached L’Œuf Christian Dior, topped with a quenelle of Prunier caviar and bathed in caviar-studded cream covering a layer of Paris ham aspic – a tradition, so legend has it, started by Dior himself during a dinner party with Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé.

‘Like Christian Dior, I am rooted in my era. What I propose is to bring the spirit of the couturier to the cutting edge of contemporary culinary creation. Imagining a restaurant according to his vision, breathing new life into his spirit at the very heart of the boutique,’ says Alléno. ‘A place that offers customers a défilé of flavours on their plates every day. I want this lively place to fully embody its era, just as the house of Dior has always done with couture.’

Alléno’s philosophy, dubbed ‘Modern Cuisine’, is as radical as it is exacting. He approaches French gastronomy through the twin lenses of scientific technique and ancestral memory, reinventing the art of sauce through the extraction and fermentation of flavours. Monsieur Dior becomes the 19th restaurant under his direction.

Monsieur Dior by Yannick Alléno is located at 32 Av. Montaigne, 75008 Paris, France.

For the first time, Dior Maison introduces a personalisation service to its portfolio. Working with the Limoges ranges, customers will be able to create bespoke tableware sets, choosing from 35 hues, ranging from delicate pastels to richer shades, including lilac, peacock blue, pistachio green, and blush pink.

The new ‘Make My Own Table’ service is available within the Limoges porcelain range, featuring two classic Dior motifs. Inspired by the Napoleon III chairs that welcomed guests in the historic Christian Dior salons at the house’s 30 Avenue Montaigne boutique in Paris, the Cannage motif has been a signature of Dior collections since the maison's early days.

On the porcelain pieces, Cannage becomes a modern graphic pattern, metamorphosing with every new shade.

The other motif available for personalisation is the 18th-century-inspired Toile de Jouy, a tribute to French decorative arts. The design was chosen by Christian Dior himself to decorate the walls of his first shop – the Colifichets boutique on the ground floor of 30 Avenue Montaigne – in 1947. Most recently, the motif has been given a contemporary interpretation in the form of Toile de Jouy Sauvage – a design featuring wild animals set within the backdrop of a dreamy landscape.

The Dior Maison personalisation service is available in the two designs to decorate plates, cups, and sugar bowls. It is a collection that speaks of the house's history and Christian Dior's own approach to its curation, while also taking the brand's home offering forwards with a contemporary twist.

Visit dior.com to contact an advisor regarding the personalisation service

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

Power trip (top left)

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

Thigh high (top right)

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

Buffer zone

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

Swan song

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

Magic eye

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

Dark arts

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

Wild ones

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

Hat trick

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

Pump action

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

Carry all

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

Body work

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

Take shape

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

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

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

Before Dior’s newly-expanded Madison Avenue flagship opened its doors in New York earlier this week, it was already generating buzz: consultations with Very Important Clients were well underway and tourists snapped photos in front of the facade. Get closer, though, and you’d realise the buzz is literal, too: a whimsical forest scene unfolds in the store’s large bay windows, a tableau that includes animatronic squirrels, birds and – yes – bees, all made from upcycled Dior materials.

The elaborate display hints at an enchanting world beyond, a universe designed by Dior stalwart Peter Marino. Like its Parisian cousin at 30 Avenue Montaigne, House of Dior New York is rife with the house’s savoir-faire, not to mention men’s and women’s collections, bags, homewares and even a dedicated spa. But this greatly expanded uptown location is perfectly catered to clientele in the City that Never Sleeps.

Inside House of Dior New York

You can find House of Dior New York at the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue, exactly a block away from Christian Dior’s very first Manhattan store, established in 1948, on Fifth Avenue. While a Dior boutique had long stood there, Marino and his team greatly expanded its footprint, by taking over the first four floors of a building next door.

Though you enter into a dazzling double-height entry – where mannequins, in addition to more fabric animals, gaze down at you from a second-level mezzanine – it’s hard to fully grasp the size of the store. That was intentional, according to a Dior spokesperson, as to lend the feeling of entering a private Upper East Side townhouse. Indeed, each part of the store reveals itself like a surprise, from the staircase, which features a glowing Dior ‘Colorama’ of 3D-printed shoes, handbags, hats and gowns in a rainbow swirl, to more private salons, where mannequins dressed in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s final collection hold court.

Like other Dior stores, this one’s filled with house mythology. Look down, and you’ll spy the house’s signature cannage pattern in the pale wood parquet. There are references to Monsieur Dior’s beloved gardens everywhere, from a plant-covered column designed by landscape artist Peter Wirtz and a ginkgo-shaped bench by Claude Lalanne in the entry, to abstract flower paintings by artists like Jean-Michel Othoniel and Nir Hod in the softly-gleaming salons. Dior’s beloved dog Bobby even gets a reference, from a limited-edition perfume bottle to an upcycled pooch in the window display.

But unlike other Dior boutiques, the New York boutique features some very special firsts, like limited-edition J’Adior slingbacks, Lady Dior bags, and B27 men’s sneakers, of which only 47 were made, in reference to the year that Monsieur Dior initially visited New York.

The opening also marks the stateside launch of a Dior Spa, where patrons can indulge in results-focused ‘made-to-measure’ beauty and wellness experiences (as this is high-octane New York, clients receive a wellness elixir that includes a dash of magnesium, to foster relaxation). In a separate storefront next door, visitors will also encounter the only dedicated Dior Maison store in the US, where more exclusives abound, from ceramic vessels to delicate woven baskets decorated with even more bees.

‘Fashion defends the rights of imagination,’ Monsieur Dior once wrote – and House of Dior New York certainly dares you to dream.

House of Dior New York, 23 E 57th St, New York, NY 10022, United States.

dior.com

‘Often, people forget that before he was a couturier, Christian Dior was a gallerist,’ points out Peter Philips, creative and image director of Dior Beauty, when we meet in the sleepy Provençal town of Arles, France, which has played host to an annual photo festival for more than five decades (see our Rencontres d’Arles 2025 review). Eight years ago, French maison Dior announced its sponsorship of a photography prize, the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents, in partnership with Luma, the contemporary art foundation that altered the landscape of the sleepy French town with the opening of its Frank Gehry-designed tower in 2021.

‘Historically, every creative director of Dior has always had a connection to art, whether it’s working with artists or collecting them, so it was very much in sync with the DNA of the house,’ Philips adds, without pointing out the obvious: the house’s longstanding relationship to photography through campaigns, magazine editorials and historical news reports. ‘What Paris is for fashion designers, Arles is to photographers.’

Dior Beauty’s prize invited students from around the world to submit works interpreting the theme ‘Face-to-Face’. According to Philips, the prize has evolved over the years, with submissions reflecting the state of the world and the collective imagination of a younger generation. With the pandemic having coloured the subject matter for a few years – darker themes and fewer submissions due to the closures of schools – more recently, young photographers have begun exploring themes closer to home.

‘This time, I would say about 80 per cent of the artists were dealing with the idea of identity,’ explains Japanese photographer Yuriko Takagi, who chaired the jury, which includes Philips, Simon Baker and South African photographer Lebohang Kganye. ‘I find it surprising and interesting,’ Takagi continues. ‘I realised that so many young people have this identity problem, in different ways – some of them are exploring family, sexuality, nationality – and they are seeing themselves from the inside as well as the outside.’

Many of this year’s artists also explored alternative methods of creating imagery – often exploring videos, digital effects and artificial intelligence over the preferred method of film photography that has defined previous years. Shanghai-based Qianyi Bao created a video titled Chasing the Wind River, poetically documenting nomadic yak-herding communities in the south-east of the Tibetan plateau. Japanese photographer Momo Nakawa digitally created a psychedelic installation of layered prints, photographing them within a studio space and creating a video, chronicling her use of artificial intelligence. Also employing AI was Swiss photographer Aline Savioz, whose retro-futurist images of alien-like figures are achieved through meticulous world-building and AI background sets, exploring our relationships to robotics. Chicago-born Raine Roberts’s photo-video works took myriad forms, with abstract shapes and multifaceted flowers taking shape on Japanese washi paper and pieces of wood, tackling a theme of nature’s erosion that relates to the artist’s own stage-four cancer diagnosis.

This year’s winner, Joel Quayson, is a student at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, and his video work is a self-portrait that questions his own identity and ‘competing selves’. In his slowly paced film, he sits in silence, gazing into the viewer's eyes, occasionally changing, applying make-up, getting dressed, eventually stripping it all away. There is a sense of discomfort, directness, delicate movement and intimacy, as if he were sat in front of a mirror in complete privacy – a stark contrast to the genre of ‘get ready with me’ videos that exist on social media. Throughout the four minutes and 28 seconds, viewers are presented with a repeated question: ‘How do you feel?’ The work conveys Quayson’s complex sense of self, bejewelled queerness competing with the conformist expectations of his religious Ghanaian upbringing.

For Quayson, currently in his second year of art school, the video was a meditation on the different masks he must wear and the questioning of his own sense of self. His family are aware that he has won the prize but have still not seen his work – a fact that underscores the delicately conveyed sense of confusion and contrast within the video. ‘Even though it's me in that movie and it's me telling the story of how I feel, without speaking, there is also something I wanted other people to take away,’ Quayson explains. ‘I want people to ask themselves how they feel, who they are, what can make you feel better and why we choose to present ourselves in certain ways.’

‘Once I saw his work, I could never forget it,’ says Takagi of the jury’s unanimous decision. ‘It looks very simple and straightforward, but it's a bit mysterious. I couldn't forget his eyes, I couldn't forget the way he moves, his voice, and the way in which he was able to see himself objectively, while exploring his own interior thoughts and feelings, which ultimately, are somehow echoed in all our hearts, too.’

Joel Quayson will receive a €10,000 grant from the House of Dior. The video ‘How do you feel?’ will be exhibited at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, in early 2026. It will also be exhibited, alongside all the works by the ten finalists, including Raine Roberts, who was awarded a special mention, at Luma Arles, in the Lampisterie building from 5 July to 5 October 2025.

Also read: What to see at Rencontres d’Arles 2025

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

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

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

Glenn Martens will show his first collection for Maison Margiela

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

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

A new vision for JW Anderson will be revealed

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

Demna will hold his Balenciaga swansong

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

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

Dior will take a pause from showing

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

The couture heavyweights will show throughout the week

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

This afternoon in Paris, in a specially constructed showspace in the grounds of Hôtel des Invalides, Jonathan Anderson revealed his first collection for Dior – the culmination of a week of carefully calibrated teasing via Instagram, from Andy Warhol’s photographs of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Lee Radziwill overlaid with the Dior logo, to a video of the French footballer Kylian Mbappé doing up a striped tie. In between: a frog-shaped pin cushion, handbags with the title pages of Dracula and Les Liaisons dangereuses, and a show invitation comprising a porcelain plate with three eggs on top (it was a recreation of one of Anderson’s more unexpected discoveries in the Dior archive).

The curiosity and speculation such disparate fragments caused was a testament to Anderson’s unique position in fashion – that of both designer of clothing and cultural agitator, a role he honed at Loewe as well as at his eponymous label JW Anderson (he exited the former as creative director earlier this year; the latter will continue in a new, rebooted format launching this July during haute couture week in Paris). Since 2008, when JW Anderson was founded, the Ireland-born designer has fostered deep-rooted links with the worlds of art, design, celebrity and film – including designing costumes for Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers and Queer – and is a lover of both pop and high culture, often fusing the two at once.

Dior proves a new challenge, though. Unlike Loewe, which he transformed from a sleepy, somewhat forgotten house in the LVMH roster, Dior is a crown jewel of Parisian fashion – a venerable, historic institution that bears the name of arguably the most influential couturier of the 20th century, Christian Dior (it is also a name that extends far beyond the industry – on Instagram alone, Dior has over 46 million followers). His appointment is also the first time a single person has designed menswear, womenswear and haute couture, meaning the production of at least ten collections per year (he took over the roles of Kim Jones and Maria Grazia Chiuri). It has also been no secret that amid a luxury sales slowdown, Dior hopes that Anderson is able to rev up interest and tap into new markets.

‘He’s very in tune with his generation. He’s very connected, especially with young people. He speaks to a wide audience,’ Delphine Arnault – Dior’s CEO and a figure instrumental in his appointment – said in a recent interview with Business of Fashion.

The show itself, attended by Rihanna, A$AP Rocky and Daniel Craig – a former Loewe campaign star – took place amid a set reminiscent of the ‘velvet-lined interiors’ and parquet-lined floor of Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie museum. It was hung with two paintings by 18th-century French painter Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, which Anderson described as ‘modest yet beautiful’. The first depicted a bunch of flowers in a Delft vase, the other a bowl of ripe red strawberries. They set the stage for an exploration of affluence and grandeur, and a reconfiguration of those codes – the vaunted house of Dior, through the eyes of Anderson. ‘At a time when art was often concerned with excess and spectacle, Chardin revered the everyday, trading grandeur for sincerity and empathy,’ read the collection notes.

Signals of upper-class dress codes ran through the collection, presented dishevelled and skewiff – from Donegal tweeds and cable-knit sweaters to British regimental neckties, schoolboy jumpers and military jackets, as well as riffs on tailcoats and the Bar Jacket, Christian Dior’s most enduring creation (Anderson’s version on the nipped-waist blazer came with satin lapels and a two-button fastening). A supersized take on the cargo pant, meanwhile – with ruffled layers of fabric drawn from an archival women’s gown – recalled Anderson’s more avant-garde approach, while capes and elongated evening scarves added a loucheness to the silhouette.

Smatterings of surface embellishment and pattern ran throughout, which Anderson said had a ‘Rococo’ feel – a period, he added, with which Christian Dior was particularly fascinated. Further book bags, similar to those revealed prior to the show, included Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal. There was lightness to the display – largely less experimental than his work at Loewe, though still distinctly Andersonian in its assemblage of idiosyncratic elements, and rich cultural references.

Ultimately, Anderson said he wanted to capture the joy of dressing up – an experience likely spawned by his own journey into the Dior archive, a Wunderkammer for any designer. ‘A breathless, almost liberating joy’ is how Anderson described the paintings of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. Here, with an astute debut that culminated in a standing ovation, Anderson captured a similar rush.

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

This summer, the runway leads to the Riviera. Primarily across Europe, luxury hotels are quietly slipping into their seasonal roles as extensions of major fashion and lifestyle brands. Behemoths such as Burberry and Dolce & Gabbana are migrating from urban fashion capitals to the coast in the coming months, trading marble flagships for fresh ocean air and beachfront real estate. The formula is straightforward: exclusive pop-up boutiques flanked by monogrammed loungers and umbrellas, and occasionally, chef-led restaurants. Here are some of the hotel takeovers making a splash this summer – where you too can pop up in style.

Fashion hotel takeovers happening this summer

Burberry at The Standard Ibiza

Hot on the heels of its takeover at The Newt in Somerset, Burberry is off to embrace the Mediterranean sunshine, landing at The Standard, Ibiza, until October. The hotel’s seasonal rooftop bar and restaurant, Up, has been Burberry-ified with a bespoke check pattern in bright yellow. This energising design adorns the site’s loungers, parasols, and seating, as well as a photo booth in the lobby. Starting in mid-July, weekly DJ nights, featuring guests such as Phil Mison, Eric Duncan, and Nicolas Matar, will be accompanied by a curated cocktail menu. For those who can’t get enough of the partnership, Burberry and The Standard also propose a summer capsule collection ‘for warm days and balmy nights’, with swimwear, sunglasses, and hats available for purchase.

The Standard, Ibiza is located at Carrer de Bartomeu Vicent Ramon, 9, 07800 Ibiza, Balearic Islands, Spain.

Dior at Jumeirah Capri Palace

For the fifth time, Jumeirah Capri Palace, which recently unveiled new suites by Patricia Urquiola, welcomes the return of Dioriviera to its seafood restaurant, Il Riccio. The breezy setting, surrounded by Anacapri’s rocky cliffs and adjacent to the island’s magical Blue Grotto, is now decorated with Dior’s Toile de Jouy pattern and animal statues. Guests can choose to sip limoncello spritzes on the beach club terrace or dine at the restaurant, on dishes such as spaghettino with sea urchins. Meanwhile, a Dior boutique pop-up features a summer-ready wardrobe.

Il Riccio is located at Via Gradola, 4, 80071 Anacapri, Italy.

Dolce & Gabbana at Four Seasons Hotel Taormina

Despite occupying its privileged hilltop position for centuries, San Domenico Palace, Taormina, entered the modern zeitgeist in 2022 after serving as the fictional ‘The White Lotus’ hotel. The property, which was acquired by Four Seasons in 2020, is also a beloved part of the Dolce & Gabbana universe, as the Italian brand has taken over its pool area for a couple of years in a row. The now familiar bespoke Blu Mediterraneo theme, seen across parasols, cushions and towels, seeks to reflect the region’s vibrant seaside blues and celebrates the artistry of handmade Sicilian ceramics. Wallpaper’s fashion features editor Jack Moss visited the activation last month to celebrate Dolce & Gabbana’s ninth collaboration with Mytheresa, describing the experience as ‘a day of sunshine, food and spritzes’. Until the end of the season, guests will also be able to browse an exclusive pop-up boutique offering a selection of clothing and accessories, including some location exclusives.

San Domenico Palace, Taormina, A Four Seasons Hotel is located at Via S. Domenico, 5, 98039 Taormina, Italy.

Herno at Phi Beach

The rugged granite landscape of Baja Sardinia provides the perfect backdrop for Herno’s sophisticated take on exploration, travel, and outdoor living. In collaboration with Phi Beach, the Italian brand is showcasing its vision of seaside leisure for the second consecutive summer, lasting through the first week of September. Alongside dressing the exclusive club’s cabanas and deckchairs in sandy, deep brown tones, Herno has also introduced its first fully designed restaurant, Herno Suite. Here, chef Claudio Marenzi presents culinary delights on ceramics inspired by the Erno River, paying tribute to the brand’s roots. With a focus on natural aesthetics and sustainability, bill holders, menus, and coasters are made from natural cork sourced from Sardinia. A selection of ‘open-air accessories’ is available for purchase, including beach towels, tote bags, water bottles, baskets, and hats.

Phi Beach is located at Via Forte Cappellini, 07021 Arzachena, Italy.

Jacquemus at Monte-Carlo Beach Club

As part of a strategic transformation of the area, Monte-Carlo’s emblematic beach club has reopened for the season with a complete redesign of its deck and pool area by French interior designer Dorothée Delaye. Adding a burst of Provençal panache, a sun-kissed collaboration with Jacquemus is underway until 7 October. Inspired by ‘La Croisière’ collection unveiled in Paris in January, the takeover dresses sunbeds, towels, and parasols in banana-yellow, coconut milk, and black stripes. This theme extends to the adjacent Pool Café, which features speciality brews and an Olympic-sized pool, as well as two newly opened Jacquemus boutiques, featuring sketches by Renoir and Matisse on their walls.

Monte-Carlo Beach Club is located at Av. Princesse Grâce, 98000 Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Monaco.

Louis Vuitton at White 1921 Hotel

For the third consecutive year, the Arnaud Donckele & Maxime Frédéric at Louis Vuitton restaurant has returned to the White 1921 Saint-Tropez hotel for the season. Michelin-starred chef Arnaud Donckele and chef pâtissier Maxime Frédéric present a bountiful menu, available for lunch, tea time, and dinner, spotlighting local, seasonal produce and creative twists. Think dishes such as grilled blue lobster enriched by a shiso-infused sauce, or Wagyu beef served in a fragrant bouillon. The restaurant’s interior features natural macramé touches paired with rattan furnishings and tables dressed in seasonal Louis Vuitton tableware. Crockery is adorned with interpretations of the maison’s signature Monogram Flower.

The Arnaud Donckele & Maxime Frédéric at Louis Vuitton restaurant is located at Hotel White 1921, Trav. des Lices, 83990 Saint-Tropez, France.

Missoni at JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa

Nothing embodies summer quite like Missoni’s signature zig-zag motif, a warm-weather staple cherished by many for its cheerful, multicoloured hues and light texture. On the private Isola delle Rose in Venice, the Italian label has established a bijou pop-up store at the JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa, making it convenient for guests to stock up on its beachwear essentials. A serene blend of blue and azure, combined with warm ochres and beige, dominates an exclusive collection of men’s and womenswear, ranging from swim trunks and bowling shirts to bikinis and long cover-ups. This same pattern features in the shop’s sofas and pouffes, as well as the large-scale bunny welcoming visitors. The pop-up is open at JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa until 15 September, with another Missoni Resort Club takeover occurring in Oku Ibiza in the form of a branded poolside lounge.

JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa is located at Isola delle Rose, Laguna Di San Marco, 30133 Venice, Italy.

Alo at Mandarin Oriental, Bodrum

Turkey is familiar territory for Alo Yoga, which launched its first Istanbul brick-and-mortar store last year. This summer, the lifestyle brand has set its sights on the Aegean coast – in particular, Mandarin Oriental Bodrum’s private shoreline, to debut a second boutique, an immersive beach club experience, and wellness workshops. Complementing the oak and pine beach umbrellas are branded cotton towels and seating in an earthy hue, while a customised cart offers refreshments served in coconut cups. Until September, international Alo instructors will lead a wellness programme for hotel guests, including sunrise yoga and pilates alongside sound healing and meditation sessions.

Mandarin Oriental, Bodrum is located at Gölköy, 314 Sokak No.10, 48483 Muğla, Turkey.

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

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

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

Jason Hughes, fashion and creative director

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

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

Jack Moss, fashion features editor

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

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

Scarlett Conlon, Milan contributor

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

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

Orla Brennan, contributing fashion writer

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

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

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

When the financial services firm UBS tapped Carine Roitfeld to curate a special exhibition on the house of Dior, the legendary French fashion editor was more than game for the job. In fact, you might say she was born to do it – Roitfeld was delivered in a Parisian hospital directly across the street from the maison’s legendary 30 Avenue Montaigne address.

Kismet aside, Roitfeld, who helmed French Vogue for more than a decade before founding the magazine CR Fashion Book in 2012, has had a long-standing relationship with Dior and has met every creative director since Gianfranco Ferré.

For the project, the second in UBS’ ‘House of Craft’ exhibition series, she teamed up with fashion photographer Brigitte Niedermair to photograph some of the most memorable couture looks in the maison’s archives. The exhibition brings together eight decades of Dior and the work of eight of the house’s creative directors (Maria Grazia Chiuri, after a nine-year tenure, has been replaced by Jonathan Anderson). For Roitfeld, the exhibition was an opportunity to revel in the unexpected within the context of a heritage house – to give the fashion a new look, so to speak.

‘Carine brings her unmatched aesthetic sensibility to the programme,’ says John McDonald, chief marketing officer of UBS Group. ‘We’ve long admired Carine’s unique ability to bridge heritage and modernity through her creative lens, and it was clear she shares our passion for craft as both an art form and a mindset.’

The three-day exhibition, which opens Friday 6 June at 28 Pine Street in Manhattan, showcases Niedermair’s energetic photography alongside a selection of archival couture looks. The show is free to the public, and will also include programming and talks.

We caught up with Roitfeld, who was en route to a photo shoot, about her relationship with Dior and what it was like to dive into its storied archives.

Go inside the UBS House of Craft x Dior exhibition

Wallpaper*: Could you tell me a little bit about your relationship with Dior and some of your early memories working alongside the house?

Carine Roitfeld: I was born at Clinique Matignon in Paris, right in front of 30 Avenue Montaigne and so was my daughter. So it was, let’s say, my first meeting with Dior. And after, of course, I met all the different designers. I did not meet Marc Bohan, but I met Gianfranco Ferré when I was working at Vogue. Dior is very important to me – Olivier Bialobos [Dior’s longtime chief communications officer] is my oldest friend in fashion. I know [Dior CEO] Delphine Arnault very well. I feel very comfortable working with the team.

W*: It's like working with family, I would imagine...

CR: Yes! And I love the clothes. For the show in New York, I bought two Dior jackets because I think it's a moment to wear Dior in my propre way.

W*: What was it like to work within the Dior archive? Did you make discoveries? Were there surprises along the way?

CR: It’s an old house. So you have so much beautiful heritage. It was very fun to talk with [the archivists] because you learn so many things. I didn't really know Marc Bohan, but I suddenly discovered him. He ran Dior for 29 years. He did amazing looks that, honestly, I didn’t know. And I didn’t know it was Monsieur Ferré who created the Lady Dior bag. Of course, we all know the story about Lady Diana, but I didn’t know he was the one that created it. I also didn't know that the perfume, Miss Dior, was created by Monsieur Dior himself. Suddenly you have a sketch, an idea of the Dior timeline that I didn’t have before.

It's a bit of a special moment for Dior, because someone is leaving, someone is not there yet – it’s a very good diplomatic moment. So we brought all the clothes together of seven past designers, plus Kim Jones. And sometimes we mixed them, like a jacket by Monsieur Dior on a John Galliano couture dress. You know, that sort of thing is not something that usually is possible. It’s what makes this exhibition quite extraordinary and quite unique.

W*: Do you have a particularly favourite era?

CR: I like to discover things so it was very interesting to discover Marc Bohan’s looks. He was a very chic man, en plus, and very important in the Dior house. And of course, I'm a friend of John Galliano. The couture dresses of John Galliano are unique. I like Raf [Simons] because the simplicity of the work is more difficult to do because everything has to be perfect. And Maria Grazia Chiuri, she liked, for example, to put the Bar Jacket with a hoodie. She tried to make it more down to the street. So each had a different point of view on Monsieur Dior. But there’s a link between everyone.

W*: The theme of the exhibition is about exploring craft. Could you talk a little bit about craft in the Dior history, and what you discovered about it by being able to access the archive in such a hands-on way?

CR: Just the way they keep the dresses – it's a special temperature, a special hanger, sometimes the dresses come in a big tent. I had never seen that. And of course, the craft is very important because it's a talent. This is a very French talent and Dior does it with the clothes, the bags, the shoes, the jewellery, because they touch everything. We had the freedom to play with the clothes, but you also must respect them because of how much time it takes to create each dress. I like the idea that all of the dresses have history.

W*: You've worked with photographers your entire career, but what are the specific challenges of highlighting craft through flat images?

CR: You need to respect the dress and respect the people working with these vintages. We want a dress that was made maybe 50 years ago to look modern. We don’t want to create something that you wouldn’t wear today. Nothing looks old, nothing looks demodé. Everything is a link to be wearable today, and to give you the desire to wear them today. I think it was to respect the dress, respect the work, and give them modernity,

W*: Do you have an example of how you did that in one of the photos?

CR: Sometimes, you know, we’d incorporate a classic Monsieur Dior jacket with the model in a latex skirt. It’s so simple. That was the sort of thing we tried to do.

W*: Yes, absolutely. How was it working with Brigitte? Had you worked with her before in your career?

CR: I’ve been working with Brigitte for 12 or 13 years in CR Fashion Book. And we did, one time, a jewellery story about Dior for CR Fashion Book and [that's] the reason that Olivier met her, and now they're working a lot together. So everyone knows each other very well. Brigitte is very, very smart. So she finds the idea between everything in her photographs. It was all prepared in advance. We played a lot with the hair, with the make-up, to make it surprising, but it was very, very prepared.

W*: There've been a lot of exhibitions about Dior – I’m thinking of ‘Designer of Dreams’. What does the UBS exhibition say that's maybe fresh or new about the house of Dior?

CR: I think usually, when they show photographs in shows, they’re like still-lifes. There’s a big difference between seeing the clothes worn – when there is life inside the clothes it’s more modern immediately, you know? Dior is a quiet designer, sometimes. Here, we become a bit crazy, because we mix the hair and the make-up – and it makes everything more exciting.

W*: It’s treating everything with respect, but injecting it with fresh energy.

CR: Exactly. Dior gave us a lot of freedom and when they saw everything they were happy. So I think everyone had the same energy.

W*: What is it like to wear a Dior garment? How does it make you feel?

CR: I'm lucky that one time, John Galliano made a couture dress for me, so I got to go to Dior as a customer. The colour of the room, the lady taking care of you, all the people around you trying to adjust the drape on you – it’s a dream, because suddenly you feel like a princess. I wore it to an amFAR gala and I kept it, of course, because you have your name embroidered inside and the year – so it's really yours.

The dress, of course, is great, but the experience is even more. I’ll never forget it.

UBS House of Craft x Dior curated by Carine Roitfeld runs at 28 Pine Street, New York, 10005 from 6–8 June 2025, ubs.com

Exhibition design by architects opng

When it was announced that Maria Grazia Chiuri would be exiting her role as creative director of Dior’s womenswear and haute couture collections last week – following an emotive Cruise show in her home city of Rome – the writing was all but on the wall. After months of fervent speculation, it was confirmed this morning that Jonathan Anderson would head up the Parisian house’s womenswear, menswear and couture collections – an unprecedented appointment which sees him take near-total creative control of Dior (he was announced as menswear creative director in April).

Indeed, it is the first time in Dior’s 79-year history that a single figure has overseen the house’s womenswear and menswear offerings. The men’s line was first introduced during Marc Bohan’s tenure in the 1980s as Dior Monsieur, though grew to prominence under Hedi Slimane in the early 2000s. Kris Van Assche would follow, before Kim Jones – Anderson’s predecessor – took over ‘Dior Men’ in the summer of 2018. Slimane, Assche and Jones all worked distinctly from their respective womenswear creative directors, while Anderson will oversee the various arms of the business as a singular creative identity – a way of working he is familiar, having led both the men’s and women’s collections of Loewe, where he was previously creative director for 11 years.

Jonathan Anderson’s Dior: what to expect

‘It is a great honour to join the house of Dior as creative director of both women’s and men’s collections. I have always been inspired by the rich history of this house, its depth, and empathy,’ said Anderson in a statement this morning. ‘I look forward to working alongside its legendary ateliers to craft the next chapter of this incredible story.’

With his appointment comes the inevitable question of what we can expect from Anderson’s Dior. At Loewe, he proved a masterful creative director, not only in terms of his collections – which moved from an early exaltation of craft towards the surrealism, and later reductionism, of his more recent work – but in his establishment of a rich, cultural brand which extended far beyond fashion. Memorably, he introduced the yearly Loewe Craft Prize, which awarded artisanal creators from around the world in a high-profile ceremony, held presentations each year at Salone del Mobile, reimagining chairs, lamps and baskets, and established a dedicated and eclectic coterie of celebrity followers, who also appeared in the house’s campaigns (during his time at the house, he would also collaborate with Luca Guadagnino on the costumes for Challengers and Queer under his own name).

‘While reflecting on the last 11 years, I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by people with the imagination, the skills, the tenacity and the resourcefulness to find a way to say “yes” to all my wildly ambitious ideas,’ he said when he left Loewe. We can expect such big ideas at Dior from the ambitious Northern Ireland-born designer, who began his eponymous label JW Anderson in 2008 before taking over Loewe in 2013 and transforming the fortunes of a then sleepy brand in the LVMH roster (sales purportedly went from €200 million to around €1.5 billion).

At Dior, he has a different challenge: the house is already a behemoth of fashion with a name recognition which extends far beyond the industry (for comparison, Loewe has 6.5 million followers on Instagram; Dior has close to 50 million). It also has thriving beauty, make-up, jewellery and home décor lines – among several other arms of the business – which Anderson will work alongside to shape the vision of the house. It is a task he will no doubt relish. ‘I think I need to find a new way to break something,’ he told the New Yorker in March, just prior to his confirmation as creative director of Dior Men’s. ‘I’ve built something – either I re-break it and rebuild it or someone else re-breaks and rebuilds it. I think I need to get outside of my comfort zone again and be challenged by aesthetics I’m not used to.’

So far, he has only offered the briefest glimpses of his vision for Dior, via his personal Instagram, a much-favoured means of communication from the designer. The first, just after the Dior Men announcement, was a photograph of a piece of striped cotton – reminiscent of a classic men’s shirt – with a Dior label pinned onto it. The second, posted today, is of a series of stitched leather four-leaf clovers, on which a tiny ladybug sits. The latter suggests a possible return to the more whimsical side of Loewe – animals were often employed as motifs on leather charms, or appeared on bags and accessories – though also seemed a nod to Christian Dior himself, who was deeply superstitious, obsessed with symbols of luck and chance (the four-leaf clover also seems a wink to Anderson’s own Irish roots).

We also know the extent of the task: as it stands, Anderson will be creating 10 collections a year for the house (four women’s collections, four men’s, and two couture), though his forebears Chiuri and Jones also created other limited-edition collections and collaborations, so it could be more. He will also be continuing his eponymous London-based label JW Anderson, though he has teased on Instagram a ‘new start’ for the brand, including a renovation of the brand’s flagship store in London’s Soho.

In an interview with Business of Fashion this morning, Dior's CEO Delphine Arnault confirmed that the house will sit out the haute couture shows this July (another unprecendented move, though Chiuri did show a series of haute couture looks during the show in Rome, which will likely be presented to clients as this season’s couture offering). ‘He’s very in tune with his generation. He’s very connected, especially with young people. He speaks to a wide audience,’ she said. ‘He’s passionate about craft, about art – and he’s proven that at Loewe. I think he’s also going to surprise you, and everyone… and even me, maybe! I can’t say too much about what he’s going to do, but I think his vision, his passion for craft, and also for leather goods, is going to be something very exciting in the years to come.’

In terms of leather goods, Loewe’s Puzzle bag – which celebrates ten years with a Harrods pop-up this month – was perhaps one element of Anderson’s oeuvre which impressed Arnault, a perennial fashion accessory which continues to be ubiquitous a decade on. It is symbolic of his thoughtful, oftentimes esoteric approach to design: ‘It was about deconstructing a conventional bag to create a flat object with a tridimensional function,’ he said of the Puzzle’s origami-like structure at the time. ‘I set out to find a new way of building a bag, fundamentally questioning its structure.’ Dior will be hoping for such a bag to add to its already successful roster.

The good news is, we don't have long to wait. Anderson has confirmed that his debut for the house will take place during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris later this month. He will show his collection – at an as-yet undisclosed location – on the afternoon of Friday 27 June. The world will be watching. ‘Jonathan Anderson is one of the greatest creative talents of his generation,’ says Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH, Dior’s parent company. ‘His incomparable artistic signature will be a crucial asset in writing the next chapter of the history of the house of Dior.’

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Days after a blockbuster Cruise show in Rome – which saw the Italian designer return to her home city to show in the grounds of the 18th-century Villa Albani Torlonia – it has been announced this morning that Maria Grazia Chiuri is set to exit Dior after a 9-year tenure as creative director of the house’s womenswear and couture lines. She is the first woman designer to have led the Parisian house.

‘After nine years, I am leaving Dior, delighted to have been given this extraordinary opportunity,’ she said in a statement. ‘I would like to thank Monsieur Arnault [CEO of LVMH] for placing his trust in me and Delphine [Arnault] for her support. I am particularly grateful for the work accomplished by my teams and the Ateliers.

Maria Grazia Chiuri to exit Dior

‘Their talent and expertise allowed me to realise my vision of committed women’s fashion, in close dialogue with several generations of female artists,’ she continued. ‘Together, we have written an impactful chapter of which I am immensely proud.’

Indeed, Chiuri’s tenure was defined by a distinctly feminist approach. Her first collection memorably included a T-shirt reading ‘We Should All Be Feminists’, taken from the 2014 essay by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Over the next nine years, she would collaborate with numerous women artists on the scenography for her runway shows; these included Judy Chicago, Mickalene Thomas and Eva Jospin, among others.

Her designs, meanwhile, often drew on lesser-known elements of the Dior archive, including creative directors who came after Christian Dior (Marc Bohan was one such influence). Her collections were infused with a mood of romance and ease, oftentimes inspired by myth and fairytale. Embellishment was central, particularly embroidery, partnering with Mumbai’s Chanakya atelier and non-profit School of Craft on several projects, including the show set for her Fall 2023 show in the city, which featured an embroidered work inspired by the Indian toran (it took 300 artisans over 35,000 hours of work to complete).

‘I extend my warmest thanks to Maria Grazia Chiuri, who, since her arrival at Dior, has accomplished tremendous work with an inspiring feminist perspective and exceptional creativity, all imbued with the spirit of Monsieur Dior, which allowed her to design highly desirable collections,’ says Delphine Arnault, chairman and CEO of Christian Dior Couture. ‘She has written a key chapter in the history of Christian Dior, greatly contributing to its remarkable growth and being the first woman to lead the creation of women’s collections.’

As for her replacement, it is widely rumoured that Jonathan Anderson – who was recently confirmed as the creative director of Dior Men, replacing Kim Jones – will also take over the womenswear line, though there has been no announcement from the house. He will show his debut menswear collection this June in Paris during Men’s Fashion Week.

Christian Dior was notoriously superstitious, and lucky charms, from the Rose des Vents eight-pointed star to the fer à cheval (horseshoe), are synonymous with the history of his namesake house. But it is le muguet – the lily of the valley, the designer’s favourite flower – that is perhaps the most enduring symbol of his legacy.

To Monsieur Dior, the lily of the valley’s delicate white blossoms and sweet yet verdant aroma ushered in the beginning of springtime. And with it, the promise of new beginnings that the season connotes. A constant presence in his life and work, sprigs of the flower were pinned to lapels and hemmed into the linings of garments. It even inspired entire collections, such as the S/S 1954 Muguet collection, and the embroidered and ruffled Muguet dress, created in 1957 as an homage to the couturier’s beloved bloom.

During the years in between, Christian Dior and nose Edmond Roudnitska produced Diorissimo: the first fragrance from the house inspired by the lily of the valley. In perfumery, however, the muguet is considered to be an ‘invisible’ flower; that is, it cannot be distilled into a pure fragrance, only replicated or reimagined using other ingredients.

Francis Kurkdijan, Dior’s Perfume Creation Director, now introduces an exceptional example of this in Le Muguet, the first chapter of a new collection called Les Récoltes Majeures. This trio of fragrances is built around three different flowers central to the story of the house, each contained in an artisanal amphora bottle. Here, Kurkdijan speaks with Wallpaper* about the technical, yet no less poetic process, of bringing Le Muguet to life.

Dior’s Les Récoltes Majeures: Le Muguet by Francis Kurkdijan

Wallpaper*: How did you approach the research process for Le Muguet, the first fragrance in the Les Récoltes Majeures collection?

Francis Kurkdijan: It all began when I joined the House of Dior in 2021. I immediately began researching the specific variety of lily of the valley that Christian Dior loved, called Fortin’s Giant, or Nantes, which he asked his florist in Paris to grow in a dedicated greenhouse that was also heated in winter. That way, it could grow all year round, and he could always have the flower on site in Paris.

Over the decades since, this particular species has been lost to history, and I wanted to rediscover it. A very close friend of mine is a lily producer, so I asked him to do some research to find out how we could reintroduce it to the gardens of La Colle Noire, Christian Dior’s château in Grasse. There was a specific bush behind the fountain on the left side of the house, which we know is where he planted the flower originally, and so this is where we also planted it.

W*: What makes this particular species of lily of the valley so special in terms of its aroma?

FK: The flower is a bit smaller than the lilies we are familiar with today. But it’s much more fragrant. In the making of Le Muguet, we used the ‘Headspace’ technique – an extraction procedure that was developed in the 1970s, but is, of course, much more technologically advanced today. It analyses the fragrant molecules of flowers that can’t be transformed into essential oils. So it helps perfumers to analyse the smell of an object, providing data that captures its DNA; all the different facets that make up its scent.

W*: Can you explain a little more about how the technique works?

FK: To give you a practical example, it’s like analysing the components of a colour. If there is a very specific shade of pink that you want to recreate, you need to know the ratios of red, blue, white, and so on. Perhaps this shade of pink has something else in it that you can’t see with your eye, but you can feel it’s there. In terms of scent, Headspace allows us to see these ratios. At the very end of this analysis, you are presented with the composition of what the flower is made of. Once you get that, you can recreate the smell using different ingredients.

W*: What influence did Diorissimo, the iconic lily of the valley fragrance created by Christian Dior and Edmond Roudnitska in 1956, have on Le Muguet?

FK: Diorissimo set the foundations for what a lily of the valley fragrance is for the entire world of modern perfumery. Since then, every single lily of the valley perfume released to the market smells somewhat alike, because they are based around the same canvas: usually a combination of roses, jasmine and ylang ylang. So Le Muguet is a departure from Diorissimo. My take was to change the paradigm. And instead of starting with Diorissimo, I decided to go a step before that, meaning my point of reference should be the aroma of the flower itself.

W*: With this in mind, how did you arrive at Le Muguet’s final composition?

FK: When I looked at the result of the Headspace analysis, I noticed that this particular species of lily of the valley can be experienced as a ‘green almond’. There was a different idea here. It was a shift from how the lily of the valley was defined by Diorissimo. With Le Muguet, we got rid of the animalic component of the lily of the valley, by removing the ylang ylang. So here, I was able to present a new vision. The idea was to mimic nature; to recreate the flower as Christian Dior would have smelled it blooming. So Le Muguet is built around Grasse centifolia rose and jasmine.

W*: Of course, Le Muguet is highly connected to springtime. As a perfumer, what does the season mean to you?

FK: The springtime is exciting: it’s a signal for flowers to bloom. It’s a sign for nature to awaken… A renaissance. The days are longer and more luminous. The light is sharper. The seasons are always important to what I do, especially the climate in France. I love the sun, the clouds and the rain. The cold and the heat. All of it.

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‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ arrives in Seoul this spring, marking the exhibition's ninth iteration since its 2017 debut at Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs. After captivating London, Shanghai, Tokyo, and other global capitals, the show finds new form at Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza.

Under fashion historian and longtime Dior collaborator Florence Müller’s evolving curation, the exhibition traces over 75 years of couture history – from Monsieur Dior’s artistic influences and garden fascinations to the sumptuous theatricality of balls. Her conceptual framework finds physical form through OMA’s New York partner Shohei Shigematsu, now on his fourth outing designing for the house, who has created a blockbuster tribute that celebrates Dior’s legacy through a millennial Korean-inflected lens.

‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul

Housed within Hadid’s curvilinear landmark, the exhibition unfolds with measured elegance. Shigematsu confronts a vast 2,000 sq m, columnless expanse with 16m-high ceilings, and transforms challenge into advantage with a dreamy sequence of themed vignettes that breathe with intention – where traditional hanbok fabrics and bojagi patchwork patterns create a subtle dialogue between East and West, and Dior’s past and present float through rooms and fashion milestones.

The spatial design itself whispers of couture techniques – room dividers echo fabric ruffles, while the volumes of classic silhouettes inform the very geometry of the spaces. In the Dior Garden room, for instance, dresses are suspended like botanical specimens beneath a ceiling where light projections shift with the hours and seasons, all contained within a minimalist vessel reminiscent of traditional Korean moon jars.

‘If you consider the whole exhibition as one piece of theatre, each room is a scene and the mannequins are the actors,’ explains Shigematsu. ‘Each room is different, but as a whole, you see the consistency of Dior.’ This cinematic approach transforms an otherwise imposing space into an altogether more intimate reading of the maison’s evolution.

But what elevates ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ beyond mere retrospective is its conversation with Korean artistry. Works by actress Kim Hyun Joo, painter and sculptor Soo Sunny Park, and multimedia creator Zadie Xa intertwine with Dior’s legacy, while local interpretations of the Lady Dior bag – 17 for the Lady Dior ‘As Seen By’ concept and nine for the Dior ‘Lady Art’ project – occupy a tunnel styled like a fantasy wardrobe, taking cues from video artist Nam June Paik and traditional Korean cabinetry.

‘What I respect about Dior is that they're really good at creating a multi-faceted domain,’ Shigematsu notes. ‘They deploy architecture, local design, scent, cultures – all of which converge to create a zeitgeist. A single domain – fashion – is not enough.’

From the iconic Bar jacket in ‘The New Look’ gallery to the dramatic double spiral staircase of ‘The Dior Ball’, where light projections conjure the spirit of grand cinematic choreography, the exhibition balances reverence with innovation. ‘It’s important not to glorify the past,’ insists Shigematsu. ‘A retrospective can also be forward-looking. You don’t want the visitor to say, “Oh, they just opened up the archives."’

In this Seoul iteration, the 75-year journey of Dior reveals itself not as a static archive but, rather, a thoroughly immersive, contemporary experience that acknowledges its roots while refusing to be defined by them.

‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ will be showing in Art Hall 1 of Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul from 19 April to 13 July 2025.

dior.com

After months of speculation and rumour, it has been confirmed this morning that Jonathan Anderson is the new creative director of Dior Men, succeeding Kim Jones, who exited the Parisian house in January.

Anderson arrives at Dior from Loewe, after a transformative 11-year tenure as creative director of the house’s men’s and womenswear lines. The news was announced this morning by Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, at the luxury conglomerate’s shareholder meeting.

The Northern Irish designer rose to prominence with his eponymous London-based label JW Anderson, joining Loewe in 2013. Reimagining the Spanish house’s visual identity, alongside M/M Paris, he would make Loewe into one of fashion’s major players, know for an idiosyncratic, oftentimes surreal approach to design and elevation of craft (later collections would include elements from balloon-shaped heels to hammered-metal angel wings).

‘While reflecting on the last 11 years, I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by people with the imagination, the skills, the tenacity and the resourcefulness to find a way to say “yes” to all my wildly ambitious ideas,’ Anderson said at the time. ‘While my chapter draws to a close, Loewe’s story will continue for many years to come, and I will look on with pride, watching it continue to grow, the amazing Spanish brand I once called home.’

Though it is yet to be announced, Anderson is set to continue at his eponymous label. His first collection for Dior Men will be shown in June 2025 in Paris. At Loewe, he will be succeeded by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, founders of Proenza Schouler.