Since being named creative director of Alaïa in 2021, Belgian designer Pieter Mulier has sought to hone his conception of modern beauty – one which honours house founder Azzedine Alaïa’s vision of womanhood, while forging his own distinct path. This week, this evolution continues with the reopening of Alaïa’s New Bond Street flagship store in London, a harmonious matrimony between art and fashion.

The intimate space doubles as an art gallery, showcasing designs and artworks chosen to complement the house’s collections. Upon entering the flagship, the central staircase nods to Alaïa’s signature curved and crisp lines (Azzedine Alaïa was known as the ‘king of cling’, and Mulier’s own designs continue this fascination with form), while a glass showcase cabinet by Axel Einar Hjorth acts as a dramatic centrepiece at the entrance.

Alaïa's reopened New Bond Street flagship

Moving to the first floor, René Drouot offers comfortable seating with a sofa and four armchairs, offering a space for relaxation amid bouts of shopping. In a minimalistic manner, Plexiglas boxes reveal the new Alaïa shoes – one of Mulier’s most popular exports, particularly his ubiquitous glittering ballet pumps – the display taking on a gallery-esque quality.

Throughout the flagship, a curated selection of designs adorn the space. Marc Newson’s Pelota lamps warm up the neutral concrete floor, while chairs by Gerrit Rietveld, Gio Ponti and Franco Albini are accompanied by Philippe Starck stools and tables by Shiro Kuramata. In between Alaïa’s new collections, Mulier has carefully curated a selection of works from various artists. A picture by Sarah Lucas, portraits by Thomas Ruff, a large collage by Steven Shearer, and a painting by Sterling Ruby accessorise the store.

To enhance the flagship’s inviting feel, an industrially designed kitchen will open on the second floor. Accessed via the modern spiral staircase – which creates a natural fluidity throughout – this space encourages visitors to share encounters and finds, and harks back to Azzedine Alaïa’s own Paris kitchen, where he would memorably host gatherings of friends (among them artists, supermodels, fashion editors and more). 

Azzedine Alaïa was himself an avid art lover, and was often considered a sculptor in cloth (an extraordinary exhibition in the Bernini-filled rooms of Rome’s Borghese Gallery in 2015 was titled ‘Azzedine Alaïa, Couture, Sculpture’). It's a desire for fluidity that Mulier has continued during his tenure. ‘I want to create clothes that carry this idea of a modern beauty, always in movement,’ he told Wallpaper’s Jack Moss in 2022.

139 New Bond Street, London.

maison-alaia.com

Belgian designer Dries Van Noten – a member of the famed 1990s fashion movement the Antwerp Six – has announced today that he is to step down from his eponymous label this coming June, after 38 years as creative director. 

Van Noten will show his final collection – S/S 2025 menswear – this coming June in Paris, marking his official exit from the label. The following womenswear collection, presented in September 2024, will be overseen by an in-house design team. Puig, the Spanish luxury goods conglomerate which owns the brand, has said that a search for a successor is already underway.

Dries Van Noten to leave his namesake label

‘Now I want to shift my focus to the things that I never had time for,’ the designer wrote in a letter which accompanied the announcement. ‘I’m sad, but in the same time happy, to let you know that I will step down at the end of June. I have been preparing for this moment for a while, and I feel like it’s time to leave room for a new generation of talents to bring their vision to the brand.’

Born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1958, Van Noten enrolled to the fashion design course of Antwerp’s Royal Academy aged 18 (fashion – or clothing at least – was in his blood, hailing from three generations of tailors who worked in the city). Under course director Linda Loppa, he would meet the other members of what would become known the ’Antwerp Six’ – Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs and Marina Yee – a group of designers who studied at the school from 1980-81 and would later travel to London en masse in 1986 to show their collections at London Fashion Week.

There, purportedly because the reporters could not pronounce their individual names, they were deemed the ’Antwerp Six’, a name which stuck. Though each had a distinct aesthetic, they largely caught attention for collections which provided a riposte to the outré 1980s fashion of the era, favouring a DIY, deconstructionist approach which nonetheless referenced the rich history of Flemish craft. It would provide a precursor to the moody aesthetic of the 1990s, and pave the way for later Belgian designers, like Martin Margiela and Raf Simons.

The trip to London would also mark the start of Van Noten’s own label, which began with menswear and later saw the addition of womenswear (he began showing menswear officially in Paris in 1991; womenswear was added in 1993). Defined by rich fabrications, an astute use of colour and emotive presentations – all infused with the energy of subculture and a seductive, underlying strangeness – Van Noten would become one of contemporary fashion’s most lauded designers.

In 2008, he won the International Designer of the Year at the CFDA Awards; later, he would be awarded France’s ‘Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ (he would show in Paris throughout his career) and the Culture Award from The Province of Antwerp. Van Noten’s expansive career would see him celebrate a 50th fashion show in 2004 and a 100th fashion show in 2017 (a year later, in 2018, Puig became the majority holder), as well as a monograph and retrospective exhibition, ’Inspirations’, which both launched in 2014. Memorably, he would collaborate with Christian Lacroix on a joint S/S 2020 collection.

Van Noten saw his work as a continuing search for beauty, in part inspired by the colours and seasonal fluctuations of his beloved garden in his Antwerp home. ’The idea of beauty is supremely subjective and very personal,’ he says. ‘Time also plays a role when our view on what is beautiful to us evolves. A flower, a building or a garment can be a thing of wonder for one while leaving another completely indifferent. What was beautiful to us even recently may be ugly today. Luckily, all designers have their own eye on and language of beauty.’

The final chapter of his tenure at the brand was the addition of a beauty line, which was launched in 2022. Comprising rich, evocative fragrances and colour-saturated lipsticks (in equally colourful packaging), Van Noten likened to the experience of eating olives for the first time. ‘The first one makes you go, “Ooh, what is this?”’ he said. ‘But after that you always like it. I think you have to learn to appreciate things, and sometimes you have to learn to appreciate my vision of beauty.’ 

’Last but not least, my heartfelt appreciation to everybody who loves what we do,’ today’s announcement concluded. ’Seeing our clothes out in the world, knowing they have a place in your life has fulfilled me beyond words. I am sure of this: the Dries Van Noten future looks bright’

driesvannoten.com

In partnership with Akris

For Akris’ Spring 2024 collection, creative director Albert Kriemler turned to the work of Austrian textile designer Felice ‘Lizzi’ Rix-Ueno (1893-1967) for botanical and tonal inspiration, in particular her fascination with poppies. ‘Petals resembling little round fans. Free-floating oval fruits… all in shades of blue, yellow and poppy red,’ said Kreimler, describing the collection. ‘These distinct compositions bring to mind the illusion of movement.’ 

At Akris’ atelier in St Gallen, Switzerland, creative exploration often begins with a new ‘artist relationship’. At the genesis of the design process, Kriemler will fire his imagination through galleries, books and archival material, sometimes making studio visits to gather colour, structure and texture references, before eventually deciding on a particular story that complements the season’s mood. In response to the moment, fabrics, patterns, and silhouettes are reinterpreted. Artistic collaborations are forged. A new collection takes shape. 

Back in S/S 2018, Akris paid tribute to the colour and graphic sensibility of American designer and artist Alexander Girard (1907-1993). For Spring 2021, it was the work of German artist Imi Knoebel that inspired the brand’s futuristic, colour-saturated pieces.

Akris Spring 2024

The Spring 2024 collection is informed by Rix-Ueno’s delicate but powerful textile designs made at the Wiener Werkstätte and later in her adopted home of Kyoto, Japan embracing both the Mitteleuropean graphics of the early 20th century and the traditional floral, bird and fruit motifs of Japanese craft. 

Rix-Ueno’s poppy sketches are interpreted by Kreimler and St Gallen’s embroiderers Forster Rohner on cocktail dresses and organza blouses, with each individual poppy applied by hand. Her design for an Easter bon-bon box decorates a shirt dress, while her watercolour and pencil avian abstracts appear on a button-down collar shirt and combat trousers ensemble. Elsewhere in the collection, the poppy print is rendered as a discreetly drawn border on a light-coloured suit.

Kriemler first came across Rix-Ueno’s ‘design poetry’ at the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna in March 2023. ‘I was amazed by her passion to create a visual language of her own – to become one of the most remarkable textile and craft artists of the 20th century,’ he says. ‘Strong colour contrasts let her art shine to this very day, most fabulously in her flowers and birds. Her whimsical ideas made the universal personal.’  

Viennese modernism, he adds, was defined as a search for reduction and rationality. ‘And then Lizzi came along, bringing ornament, vibrancy, colour and curves.’ A century on, her work still presents a concept of fantasy. ‘For her, it meant demonstrating imagination to achieve originality,’ says Kriemler.

Educated at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under architect Josef Hoffmann, Rix-Ueno created hundreds of drawings, mainly for fabric patterns, but also for wallpaper, embroidery, enamel work, fashion and home accessories, toys, and graphic artwork. She moved to Kyoto after marrying Japanese architect Isaburō Ueno in 1925, and they later founded a design school in the city. ‘Lizzi was convinced that only inner creativity will lead to one’s identity, truly believing in the expressive possibilities of craft,’ says Kriemler. ‘I very much relate to her idea of craft as a momentum.’  

Rix-Ueno’s aesthetic can be seen throughout this season’s Akris collection, woven into the hand-embroidered poppies, in tassels transformed into sleek fringes, and in floaty organza incorporated into the architecture of suits and coats. ‘I want to celebrate the infinite imagination of “fantasie”,’ says Kriemler. ‘This new Akris collection is a dedication to Lizzi.’ 

akris.com

The exhibition ‘Stars, Feathers, Tassels. The Wiener Werkstätte Artist Felice Rix-Ueno’ is at the MAK, Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, until 21 April 2024

Is there an item of clothing as reassuringly perennial as the trench coat? Much of this is down to the way it provides the perfect transition between seasons – those intermediate, indecisive moments when your winter coat feels too heavy, but it is too cool to do away with outer layers entirely. Though the trench has never just been about function: from the women of film noir to the insouciant Burberry-clad supers of the 2000s, it has long encapsulated an easy elegance, its enduring silhouette achieved by the most simple of actions – the tying of a belt around the waist. 

This season’s designers riffed on the wardrobe fixture in a myriad of ways, as captured here in the April 2024 issue of Wallpaper* by London-based photographer Theresa Marx and Wallpaper’s fashion and creative director Jason Hughes. From Maximilian Davis’ layered satin trench at Ferragamo to Daniel Lee’s drop-waisted riff on the classic Burberry trench, or Dolce & Gabbana’s sensually charged (but surprisingly functional) sheer PVC raincoat, each is a uniquely chic interpretation of the classic trench coat – equally fitting for bright spring days, and inevitable April showers, ahead.

The trench coat, reimagined for S/S 2024

Model: Honey Ordoñez at Next Management London. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Kei Takano using Oribe. Make-up: Sandra Cooke using Yves Saint Laurent Beauté. Set design: Amy Friend at Lalaland. Interiors: Olly Mason. Photography assistant: Tom Porter. Fashion assistant: Kris Bergfeldt. Set design assistant: Fei Yang. Hair assistant: Motoharu Iwaizum.

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

Throughout his career so far, British designer Kim Jones has proved adept at channelling the energy of subculture into the vaunted ateliers of Paris’ historic houses. At Dior, a heady infusion of salon and street has seen him celebrate five years as artistic director of the men’s collections – a veritable lifetime in the spinning merry-go-round of creative directors elsewhere.

The S/S 2024 anniversary collection – which references the work of previous Dior creative directors Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior himself – sees footwear inspired by Ray Petri’s Buffalo Collective, a rebellious British creative movement which would come to reshape the landscape of 1980s fashion. Here, Buffalo’s signature chunky, lugged-sole loafer is rendered in silver-toned tweed decorated with the house’s emblematic cannage motif – a symbolic clash of agitator and establishment.

A closer look at Kim Jones’ S/S 2024 Dior Men accessories

Meanwhile, the same fabric adorns a new version of the house’s saddle bag, a perennial accessory first introduced by John Galliano in 2000. This functional riff, the ‘Saddle Twin’ bag, comes with a removable handle and adjustable calfskin strap, allowing it to be carried in a multitude of ways: clutched in the hand, as a cross body, or looped over the shoulder.

‘Dior is an haute couture house... at the heart of Dior is silhouette, shape, technique and fabrication of the very highest order. I like to think that in my five years of being here I have never forgotten this,’ Jones said after the show. ’It’s a culture we have inherited from womenswear past and applied to menswear present. And for the first time in our collections, it is a collage of influences from different Dior predecessors and eras we wanted to pay tribute to at once – together with some of our own.’

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

Set design: Thomas Conant. Photography assistant: Matt Bramston

The Dior Men S/S 2024 collection is available now on dior.com.

dior.com

Founded in 1971 in St Tropez, Vilebrequin is known for swimwear collections that capture the allure of the French Riviera in its 1970s heyday. It’s the same heady period during which, in the French capital, Parisian fashion stalwart Ines de La Fressange was dominating the runway as a teenager (her modelling break came at age 17 in 1974).  A decade later, she would be the first model to sign an exclusive modelling contract with Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, alongside walking for houses including Christian Dior, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Yves Saint Laurent and more, before founding her own eponymous label.

Paris meets St Tropez: Vilebrequin x Ines de la Fressange

Now, Vilebrequin and de la Fressage – both symbolic of French style and taste – have united for the first time, collaborating on an exclusive swimwear range that couples effortless Parisian design with Vilbrequin’s vision of a relaxed, riviera lifestyle. Indeed, the collection itself draws inspiration from summertime in Paris – and days spent lounging on the banks of the River Seine – with timeless swimwear cuts and a breezy palette reflecting the colours of the French flag, in navy, red and white, while a mood of Riviera ease runs throughout.

‘The beach is where Vilebrequin was born. And it’s where we belong. Every summer since 1971, it’s been the backdrop to an art of living in the sun,’ Roland Herlory, CEO of the French swimwear label, previously told Wallpaper*.

The collection features 14 pieces for women and seven for men, including swimwear, T-shirts with Vilebrequin’s notable turtle emblem, shirts, tunics, pea jackets, and trousers crafted from lightweight organic cotton and linen. ‘The modernity shared by Vilebrequin and Ines de La Fressange Paris transcends generations, reinventing the elegance of French holidays spent in the city or by the sea,’ says the brand.

Vilebrequin is no stranger to collaboration. Last year, it created a technicolour swimwear collection with Spanish artist Okuda San Miguel, while other recent collaborators have included Off-White, Bape, Deux Femmes Noires, Sylvie Fleury, John M Arleder and more. Elsewhere, collections draw inspiration from colourful art movements, from the Memphis Group to Pop Art.

The Vilebrequin & Ines de La Fressange Paris collection will be available online and in selected stores from April 2024

vilebrequin.com

Dior unveiled its newly transformed spa at Hôtel Plaza Athénée in September 2023, and Wallpaper* has been to try it out. It is an ultra-private Parisian temple to beauty and wellbeing and a key destination for state-of-the-art therapy and rejuvenation in France’s capital. The legendary hotel, which opened in 1913, is located at 25 Avenue Montaigne in the 8th arrondissement, near the Champs-Élysées and the Palais de Tokyo, and sits in the very lap of luxury.

Avenue Montaigne is regarded as the grande dame of Parisian streets when it comes to fashion and its history, with Dior’s Paris flagship store sitting at No. 30. It was opened in 1946 by Christian Dior himself, who factored in the proximity to the Hôtel Plaza Athénée when choosing the four-storey building for his fashion house. It was only natural, then, that when Dior launched its first spa in 2008, Hôtel Plaza Athénée was selected as its destination.

Dior Spa at Hôtel Plaza Athénée, Paris: luxury surroundings and sleep-enhancing light therapy

The spa itself slots in seamlessly with the ambience of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée. It’s grand yet intimate all at once, giving the feeling of a lavish private home in the heart of Paris. Just like the hotel’s other elegant public spaces (including a bar and five outstanding restaurants, which epitomise timeless French glamour), the Dior Spa immerses you in the luxurious setting. 

The spa has been designed as a retreat from the hectic bustle of city life, a series of beautiful rooms decorated with warm, pale tones and natural materials. There is a cocoon-like feeling, enhanced by a striking egg-shaped marble water table that sets a mood of soothing calm. 

There are five individual treatment rooms, a couple’s treatment room, a sauna and a hammam, and traditional techniques are combined with new therapies that use cutting-edge technology. The beauty menu features a selection of treatments created specially for this location, as well as the opportunity to explore personalised sensory spa experiences to suit guests’ needs for body, face, and mind.

The reimagined spa features a new Dior Light Suite, which is the first-ever light therapy room in Paris. This spectacular innovation has a ceiling set with LEDs that perfectly reproduce the light of the sun. Light therapy is used to synchronise circadian and chronobiological rhythms that influence sleep, daily wellbeing and skin health. Dior has used its expertise in collaboration with medical professionals to develop three different therapies that aim to rebalance sleep and energy patterns.

‘The Recharge’ ritual awakens the body and mind by imitating the gentle glow of dawn before gradually intensifying into the brilliance of the midday sun. ‘The Recover’ treatment promises total relaxation via soothing massage that includes a restorative nap phase, with guests enveloped in luminous daylight (which gradually fades to a warm amber twilight). Finally, ‘Rest’ emulates sunset as a gentle pre-bedtime treatment with tension-alleviating massage to encourage a good night’s sleep.

Whichever ritual you choose (or even if you opt for multiple) they are perfect antidotes to jet-lag, and for those who simply wish to relax, rebalance and reinvigorate body and mind under the hands of experts, in beautiful surroundings.

dior.com

dorchestercollection.com

Amid the reworked classics within Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s new collection for A.P.C. – the quintessential trench coat shorn off at the waist and the wide-leg jeans tied with a white lace; the ornamental pendant that’s actually comprised of nuts and bolts – is a T-shirt upon which a photograph of her own body is printed, a thick band of tape placed across her chest. ‘I wanted something intimate and sincere. I liked the idea that you could feel my hand behind it,’ says the designer, who since leaving her post as creative director at Chloé in 2020 has embarked on a series of similar, small-scale projects (including a stint at Ecco Leather’s At.Kollektive that began in 2022; later, she would become a ‘creative partner’ of the Danish leather brand, designing a collection called NRL).

‘I was at the beginning of finding a new way to work, not in a group or big fashion studio, so I liked the idea of something a bit crafty. This idea of the tape, about doing things in a spontaneous way,’ she says.

A.P.C. Natacha Ramsay-Levi ‘Interaction’ #22

Prior to joining Chloé, where she took over from Clare Waight Keller in 2017, Ramsay-Levi served as design director under Nicolas Ghesquière during his tenures first at Balenciaga and later at Louis Vuitton. Her new work with A.P.C. marks a return, of sorts: she interned with the brand for two weeks during her first year studying at fashion school Studio Berçot. ‘It was not a big thing,’ she laughs today, ‘but I was basically in front of [A.P.C. founder] Jean and [artistic director] Judith [Touitou]’s office, so I could observe and look at the way people got dressed.’ The brand, founded in 1987, has since remained a constant in her life, she explains, recalling her first purchase. ‘It was the standard denim, super classic. I kept and wore it for 20-something years, and I still have it.

‘I see A.P.C. as a family space, but also as a community,’ she continues, alluding to the environment the Touitous have created at their Paris HQ. ‘It’s a place where I know there will be amazing music, interesting people, and conversations about culture and literature.’ Ramsay-Levi’s collection marks the 22nd ‘interaction’ for A.P.C., following past collections with JW Anderson and the late Jane Birkin, and the designer tells Wallpaper* that its genesis began a year and a half ago, on the suggestion of Judith. A confident marriage of A.P.C.’s clean lines and Ramsay-Levi’s more directional approach, the collection dips into archetypal French style with a heavy dose of Americana. ‘My first intention was to make a really good denim and super-great T-shirts,’ shares the designer. ‘There's a culture of denim at A.P.C. that doesn't exist elsewhere. It's not a fashion item, it goes back to the identity of what denim is.’

For his part, the brand’s founder considers Ramsay-Levi ‘conceptual and wearable’, according to the accompanying press notes. ’Her vision of femininity [is] strong and assertive.’ A largely personal affair, the collection’s core elements echo the way the designer herself considers clothes. ‘This is how I dress. For me it’s important those pieces don't shout, that they leave the wearer to express some personality and play around, become like a second skin,’ she says. ‘Usually with a T-shirt [for example] there’s a slogan or it's a music T-shirt – there's always, behind the shirt, a thought; a way to express your being, your [desire] to be part of a community.’

Shot by Nigel Shafran, the British photographer who made his name in the 1980s and 1990s with stripped-back photography capturing quotidian beauty, the campaign imagery is comprised of solo portraits arranged around a relaxed living space: a series of imagined stolen moments, wherein the models, stand-ins for Ramsay-Levi perhaps, appear right at home. ‘There is a humanity in his pictures, he’s always looking for the little accident, something a little weird. I felt it was paying tribute to the way I approached A.P.C.,’ reflects the designer. ‘Natural, not afraid to show vulnerability. In Nigel you have this rawness, but it's always very gentle and soft. Very human.’

A.P.C. Natacha Ramsay-Levi ‘Interaction’ #22 collection, for men and women, is available now.

apcstore.co.uk

In 2020, cult Italian sportswear brand C.P. Company united with Bulgaria-born, London-based fashion designer Kiko Kostadinov on a limited-edition jacket. A bold signal green, the ‘Sinesis’ jacket combined C.P. Company’s technical expertise (protective Co-Ted nylon fabric, a utilitarian design) with Kostadinov’s conceptual approach, which is defined by unexpected combinations of colour and texture and unorthodox pattern-cutting. 

C.P. Company x Kiko Kostadinov

Four years on, the second chapter of the collaboration has been revealed by C.P. Company in a much-anticipated launch (both brands are well known for their devout followers, meaning launches regularly sell out and become rare fashion ‘grails’). The capsule, which was released yesterday (12 March 2024) comprises three limited-edition pieces under the C.P. Company x Kiko Kostadinov name: a modular jacket, cargo pants and a hoodie. C.P. Company describes the pieces as encapsulating Kostadinov’s ‘pioneering approach’ to design.

The pieces themselves capture the underlying strangeness which pulsates throughout Kostadinov’s work: the pullover jacket is crafted from cool, industrial steel grey Flatt-Nylon (an emerised, sanded nylon with tough Mais gabardine) with a central fastening allowing the style to metamorphose into a zipped bag (which can then be worn as an accessory to the jacket in its altered state). A longer back with curved hem, meanwhile, reflects the silhouettes in Kostadinov’s own collections.

The hoodie comes in an electric shade of green with contrast stitching and mesh inserts and is titled ‘Sinesis’, in reference to the designer’s original jacket for the brand. Completing the capsule is a pair of cargo pants, a panelled style in the same steel grey emerised nylon and Mais gabardine as the jacket. It’s completed with slanted flap utility pockets.

The collaboration, which is captured in a series of polarised images photographed in a studio and amid nature, is available now on cpcompany.com and in the brand’s flagship stores in Milan and London – we would advise moving fast.

cpcompany.com

Celine presented its A/W 2024 collection yesterday (12 March 2024), an ode to the maison’s 1960s heyday and titled ‘La Collection de l’Arc de Triomphe’. Make-up artist Aaron de Mey, who has been working with Hedi Slimane on Celine shows for a number of years, created a pared-back beauty look, which included a nude lip befitting of the era the collection referenced.

As it turns out, this was a shade called ‘La Peau Nue’ (translating as ‘naked skin’) and is part of the soon-to-launch Celine Beauté line, the first cosmetics offering in the house’s nearly 80-year history.

Celine Beauté is coming, with the first product launch in autumn 2024

In 2019, Celine brought out a Haute Parfumerie collection, another pioneering move from Slimane, which Wallpaper* awarded ‘Best Beauty Packaging’ in 2023 for its bath and body line. The aesthetic of Celine Beauté is very much in keeping with this, with faceted refillable tubes embossed with the Triomphe monogram, inspired by late 18th-century French-style classicism (notably the gold jewellery worn by Louis XVI and the art deco movement). This includes bottles, pencils, cases, and objects made for ‘enriching the cultural roots’ of the maison through Parisian beauty and grooming rituals.

The first items will arrive in autumn 2024, ‘a collection of high-end luxury objects and jewellery or accessories as well as precious leathers’, and a red lipstick, ‘Rouge Triomphe’. This will soon be followed by a wider range of colours, comprising a 15-shade, satin finish lipstick collection called ‘Le Rouge Celine’. The hydrating and long-wearing formula is said to ‘provide precise, generous and effortless application’, including 89 per cent naturally derived ingredients. The products are scented with notes of rose and rice powder, in a nod to the 1970s. After this, each season reveals a new collection, with lip balms, mascaras, eyeliners, loose powder, blush cases and nail polishes.

celine.com

So the story goes, in 1971, Céline Vipiana found herself momentarily stranded on Place de l’Étoile after her car broke down at the busy Paris junction that houses the Arc de Triomphe. It would prove a lucky coincidence for Vipiana, who founded eponymous French fashion house Celine in 1945, the brief diversion making her notice the distinct decorative motif adorning the chain-link fence that loops around the Parisian landmark. A version of the design would soon become the Celine monogram, decorating handbags, buckles and scarves, which were quickly adopted by the city’s bourgeoisie.

Over half a century on, the ’Triomphe’ monogram continues to be an emblem for the house, reintroduced by Hedi Slimane, whose tenure began in 2018 (the French designer says he reimagined the monogram on his first day). Now, his streamlined, modernist version is perhaps best known for appearing on the house’s ‘Triomphe’ bag, which in its various iterations ‘embodies the very essence and values of the couture house’, appearing time and again in Slimane’s collections. 

Hedi Slimane reveals Celine A/W 2024 womenswear collection

Released today (12 March) in a short film directed and conceived by the designer (watch it below), Slimane’s A/W 2024 womenswear collection is titled ‘La Collection de l’Arc de Triomphe’, celebrating the house’s spiritual roots in the monument. Filmed in several of Paris’ landmark art deco interiors – among them Salle Pleyel theatre, Maison de la Chimie conference centre, and Musée Bourdelle and Musée des Arts Décoratifs galleries – alongside flashes of the Arc de Triomphe, the collection also reveals a first glimpse at Celine Beauté, which launches in autumn 2024.

The launch, which follows the debut of Celine’s Haute Parfumerie collection in 2019, marks the first cosmetic line in the house’s history. Here, models wear one of the 15 shades of the ’Le Rouge Celine’ lipstick range that be available in 2025 (the shade used is ‘La Peau Nue’, which translates to ’naked skin’), while the Celine Beauté line will launch this autumn with a satin lipstick shade ‘Rouge Triomphe’. A sleek, faceted gold case engraved with the ’Triomphe’ monogram continues the much-coveted aesthetic of the house’s Haute Parfumerie collection, which draws inspiration from traditional Parisian apothecaries (a recent bath and body launch from the collection was named by Wallpaper’s beauty and grooming editor as some of the best beauty packaging of 2023).

The collection itself looks back to the house’s 1960s heyday with a sleek collection of abbreviated skirts, coordinated nipped tailoring and moulded felt hats which recall those by the era’s ‘Space Age’ designers, like André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin (notably, no trousers feature in the collection). Meanwhile, a Parisian insouciance is conjured in chubby faux fur jackets, polka-top blouses and chunky, round-toed Mary Janes. Other looks are an expression of the Celine couture atelier, whether dramatic pussy-bow fastenings, sculptural baby-doll dresses or flourishes of embellishment, from swathes of jewellery-like crystal adornment to plumes of feathers and raised floral appliqué (out of the collection, 20 looks are from the house’s haute couture line). Bags include the ‘Nino’, ‘Terence’ and ‘Garance’ bags, each a riff on the ladylike top-handle handbag and complete with ’Triomphe’ monogram clasp.

The collection is dedicated to the photographer Richard Avedon, with whom Slimane collaborated Dior Homme campaigns during his tenure at the house in the 2000s. ’A friend and mentor’, he describes of the late American photographer, whose humanistic portraiture – which combined formal simplicity with a poetic majesty – no doubt influenced Slimane’s own prolific photographic oeuvre, which runs concurrent to his work in design.

Watch the Hedi Slimane-shot film below

celine.com

In the summer of last year (2023) Chanel staged an ephemeral pop-up boutique in Edinburgh, located at No.8 Charlotte Square. Celebrating Gabrielle Chanel’s close ties to Scotland, the neoclassical Robert Adam-designed building became a showcase of its Métiers d’art 2023 collection. It was designed to feel like a ‘charming temporary home’, with a light and airy ambience embellished with soft furnishings and antiques.

This month (March 2024), however, there’s a new beauty-focused takeover to discover, that transports you from Mme Chanel’s 1920s drawing room to a 1980s-inspired nightclub. It marks the launch of Rouge Allure Velvet Nuit Blanche, a limited-edition range of lipsticks, accompanied by a campaign starring a leather-clad Margot Robbie.

Chanel’s Rouge Allure Velvet Nuit Blanche lipsticks go all night long

I took a trip up from London to preview the space, which is now open to the public until March 30, 2024. As the lipstick collection hones in on the transformative power of after-dark make-up (with eight different shades taking you from 12am to 7am) the townhouse has been decked out with a cinema with red neon signage, digital clocks displaying times between midnight and the morning, a nightclub replete with disco balls and DJ decks, and an illuminated make-up school, where Chanel-trained artists are on hand to offer product demonstrations and trials. The cinema itself screens the Rouge Allure Velvet Nuit Blanche campaign video, with Robbie recounting anecdotes from her life about lipstick and colour, set to a soundtrack of Grace Jones’ 1981 hit Nightclubbing. (Of course, we were offered Chanel-branded popcorn and a glass of champagne as an accompaniment to our viewing.)

Each lipstick is held in a white case with a black trim, a departure from Chanel’s usual glossy black and gold packaging, so a little easier to find when rummaging around your handbag in the corner of a dancefloor. And, each takes its name from the 24-hour clock, with colours that mirror the trajectory of a party.

There’s 00:00, a sienna red, and 01:00 a brick orange, followed by 02:00, an orange-toned red and 03:00 a vibrant fuchsia. These four shades are meant to reflect the early parts of the evening, when the clock strikes midnight and a wild soiree gets in full swing. The hours that follow include 04:00, a warm brown, and 05:00, a dusky purple, as the evening begins to wind down. As the sun comes up and a new day begins, any ill-advised behaviour is swiped away with the cool-toned 06:00 – a rosewood hue – and 07:00, a fresh pink.

As a die-hard night owl and lipstick obsessive, I can attest that the Rouge Allure Velvet Nuit Blanche lipsticks perform exactly how you would want them to. Although the textures are matte, with concentrated pigments providing an excellent payoff and staying power, an infusion of a moisturising jojoba oil derivative and shea butter means the formulas certainly live up to their velvety name, too.

The lipsticks come as individual tubes, or in a set of two or four. So you really can wear a different colour for every hour, if you so wish. The ‘walk of shame’ is now a walk to remember, thanks to Chanel.

The Rouge Allure Velvet Nuit Blanche Pop-Up is located at No.8 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, EH2 4DR, Monday – Saturday 10am – 6pm, until March 30, 2024.

Rouge Allure Velvet Nuit Blanche is available now, £42.

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

Best runway sets of A/W 2024

Saint Laurent

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

Read our review of the show here.

Jil Sander

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

Read our review of the show here.

Louis Vuitton

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

Read our review of the show here.

Prada

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

Read our review of the show here.

Bottega Veneta

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

Read our review of the show here. 

Loewe

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

Read our review of the show here.

Dior

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

Read our review of the show here.

Hermès

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

Read our review of the show here.

Acne Studios

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

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

Balenciaga

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

Read our review of the show here.

Chanel

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

Read our review of the show here.

Fendi

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

Read our review of the show here.

As a decorative adornment, the tassel has spanned centuries and mediums, whether skimming the hem of a Regency sofa or a flapper’s dress. Tassels have even been found in the tombs of ancient Egyptian pharaohs, believed to ward off evil spirits on the journey to the underworld.

Designers embraced the adornment in intriguing new ways for S/S 2024. At Sabato De Sarno’s debut collection for Gucci, the standout look was a yellow coat sprouting shimmering crystal fringing. It captured the collection’s mood, which was inspired by the irreverent glamour of the Italian streets, ‘a story of richness and lust, of sweat, dancing and singing.’

Fringe theatre: tasseled fashion to elevate the everyday

At Akris, Albert Kriemler paid homage to Austrian textile designer Felice ‘Lizzi’ Rix-Ueno with a collection that celebrated the richness of materials, including dresses with diaphanous trails of tassels, while Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ collection for Prada was rooted in the house’s history of craft and experimentation, encapsulated by a proliferation of fringed garments, some intricately inset with eyelets, others in shaggy layers over shirting.

‘This work is always part of what we do, have always done… we wanted to recognise it here,’ said Simons.

At Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy presented an imaginative ‘odyssey’ around the world – as if his wandering models had picked up homespun treasures on cross-country trips. A series of fringed dresses and skirts appeared throughout; when in movement, the tassels parted, revealing a pile-up of patterned fabric underneath.

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

Scottish director Kevin Macdonald couldn’t have timed the release of his documentary, High & Low: John Galliano (Mubi), any better. Arriving in UK cinemas on 8 March 2024 (see the trailer below), the film dissects the rise, fall and redemption of legendary Gibraltor-born British designer John Galliano, chiming neatly with a second wind exemplified by his lauded S/S 2024 Maison Margiela Artisanal show in January, for the house where he is now creative director. ‘At the beginning, John said, “I don't want it to have a dark ending,”’ Macdonald recounts of the documentary project. ‘He said, “There has to be some light at the end of it because my life has come back.”’

To this point, the Maison Margiela Artisanal show – presented in Paris as part of Haute Couture Week – saw Galliano reignite fashion’s hunger for unbridled drama on the runway, presenting an exquisite blend of lived-in, distressed scrimps and Belle Époque silhouettes, with foot-on-the-back cinched corsets and frou frou tulle. Here, not only were the designs – some taking up to a year to fabricate – virally consumed and much reposted, but so too were the show’s extras: like Pat McGrath’s porcelain-like make-up; the wind-up-doll walks care of movement director Pat Boguslawski; or the antique chairs and the half-finished wine glasses strewn across time-worn tables. Together, this sum of parts reminded fashion’s older guard of the halcyon 1990s and noughts, when Galliano was the word on every editor's lips.

Of course, most know the story of Galliano’s fall from grace. These days, many have forgiven him – a bad drunk, now sober – for his racist outburst, and are ready to celebrate his early namesake collections, the 1984 ‘Les Incroyables’ Central Saint Martins graduate show, the heady days at Dior, and that brief but pivotal intermission at Givenchy. ‘Even my friends who have an aggressive disinterest in fashion came out and said, “That guy’s a genius”,’ says Macdonald.

This is Macdonald’s first fashion documentary, originally sparked by an interest in ‘cancel culture’. The end result, however, taught the director a thing or two about fashion’s cultural significance. ‘It just felt like his story was a great story in its own right,’ says Macdonald, who came to see Galliano as an artist, tapping into profound psychological reactions through the medium of clothes. The white muslin gowns of his eponymous S/S 1986 collection, intentionally sodden, were a case in point, reducing the front row to tears with a poetic, liquid femininity that runs throughout Galliano’s work – whether it’s a friction-taut bias-cut gown for Dior S/S 1993 or a sweat-slicked Gisele Bündchen campaign lensed by Nick Knight for Dior’s S/S 2003 accessories. Alongside Galliano, the film features conversations with Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Anna Wintour, Edward Enninful and more.

A fil rouge in the documentary is Galliano’s ‘Napoleonic ego’, a concept Macdonald ties to the designer’s meticulous obsession with the French Revolution. ‘If you look at the costumes and outfits throughout the film, he dresses up as Napoleon or in a Napoleonic fashion, and often in the background there’s Napoleon on a postcard,’ explains Macdonald. It’s a parallel bolstered by the romance of a south London-raised plumber’s son taking on Paris, where he’s not – at first – wanted, winning the city over before losing face.

If today’s runway shows are largely defined by commercial caution – as several critics have noted in recent seasons – their antithesis is found in the documentary’s archival footage of Galliano’s collections. This is especially true for the Lolita-infused Princess Lucretia S/S 1994 John Galliano collection, a character study-cum-couture show at his own label that many argue served as a portfolio for his appointment at Givenchy a year and a half later. After the Lucretia show – a time when Galliano’s brand was struggling financially – a fashion community stepped in, with the late André Leon Talley sourcing funds for the next show, and the supers, including Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista, walking gratuit.

Years later, Anna Wintour and Condé Nast supported Galliano’s return to fashion post-scandal, recognising his mercurial designs as not just beautiful, but necessary. In October 2014, he was appointed by Renzo Rosso as creative director of Maison Margiela. Fast-forward to now, and his aesthetic contributions continue at the Martin Margiela-founded brand, enhanced via VR, immersive choreography, and collaborations with longtime collaborators like Knight, as well as nods to fringe icons from Galliano’s first heyday, such as as the King’s Road punk, ‘Jordan’ (A/W 2023).

‘What was remarkable to me about the fashion world is how little they seemed to care for their past,’ says Macdonald. ‘Until very recently, even LVMH didn't keep archives of the dresses, sketches and shows.’ Lucky, then, that Galliano’s family, colleagues and friends kept the goods, showcased in their splendour once again in this transporting documentary, which captures the unique spirit of one of contemporary fashion’s most enduring designers.

’High & Low: John Galliano’ (Mubi) is in UK and Irish cinemas from 8 March 2024. Watch the trailer below.

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When Bernard Arnault, the chairman of French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, was searching for an architect to create a building to house his vast private art collection, he remembered being struck by the fluid forms of Frank Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In 2001, the pair met and, by 2006, the plans for Fondation Louis Vuitton – named for the Parisian fashion house at the centre of the LVMH empire – were announced, marking the first collaboration between Arnault and the Canadian-American architect.

Eight years later, in 2014, the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened its doors in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a historic amusement park in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne. A spectacle in scale and form, the 126,000 sq m gallery was described by LVMH as a ‘transparent cloud’, its shimmering, overlapping ‘sails’ appearing as if preserved in perpetual movement.

Frank Gehry’s architecture-inspired handbags for Louis Vuitton

A decade on, Gehry remembers walking through the Jardin d’Acclimatation with Arnault with ‘tears running down my face’. ‘The site was so filled with history, and the project was so modern,’ he says. ‘I felt incredibly honoured that Bernard Arnault would trust me with such a rare project.’

He is speaking on the occasion of a new collaboration with Louis Vuitton, which sees the architect design a limited-edition collection of handbags for the house. Smaller in scale but no less architectural in scope, the 11-piece collection draws inspiration from some of Gehry’s most notable designs while building on the architect’s initial handbag for the maison’s 2014 ‘Celebrating Monogram’ project. Called ‘Twisted Box’, its hard shell twisted in the architect’s unorthodox style, the bag is now available in embossed leather rather than the original canvas.

The new collection also features more architectural styles, like the angular ‘Capucines MM Concrete Pockets’, which recalls the concrete exteriors of Gehry’s most memorable buildings, or a shell-like iridescent Plexiglas model that evokes the façade of Gehry’s distinctive Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. Other creations feature fish and crocodile motifs in an echo of interior fixtures Gehry has created for various buildings (the crocodile appears in London’s Sexy Fish restaurant; the fish nods to lamps at Fondation Louis Vuitton), or reference the glass toppers Gehry created for Louis Vuitton’s Les Extraits perfumes.

‘It’s not so much about making sure that the original vision is translated,’ says Gehry. ‘Rather, it’s about working with the team to create the object of desire together. The craftspeople working on the bags have constraints in what the leather or materials can do. You have to work with those limits and pick and choose where to push the boundaries… [but] they were able to produce things that were beyond my wildest dreams.’

The project also saw the architect work with his daughter-in-law, Joyce Shin Gehry, who is also a colleague at Gehry Partners. ‘Joyce is very talented and has a great eye,’ he says. ‘She started making all sorts of bags – playing with different themes and shapes. Working inside the “Capucines” shape [one of Louis Vuitton’s most enduring handbag styles] meant that we started exploring texture, colour and graphics more than we might have if we were starting from scratch.’

The idea, says Gehry, was that each handbag had a unique story to tell. ‘What Louis Vuitton brings to the table is a deep respect for the artistic process,’ he says. ‘We try things, we see what works and what doesn’t.’ As for the exactitudes of each bag’s construction, unlike the painstaking process of creating the Fondation Louis Vuitton – which involved the placing of 3,600 panels of curved glass – Gehry largely left it to the expertise of the Louis Vuitton atelier. ‘They made everything look effortless to me.’  

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

Set design: Thomas Conant. Photography assistant: Matt Bramston.

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Luxury oral hygiene brand Selahatin, was founded after a stroke left Swedish-Turkish designer Kristoffer Vural ‘trapped in [his] own worst nightmare’. Partially paralysed and with a jarring hypersensitivity for taste and smell, he realised ‘that when you’re stripped of everything, it’s the small things that make up 50 per cent of your life. If you can fix the small things, you have a really good baseline.’

Brushing his teeth, a seemingly daily mundanity, held the utmost importance for Vural during his rehabilitation. But he felt that the act ‘actually made my day worse’, he recalls. ‘[Toothpaste] tastes so synthetic, so chemical, so strong. It’s got to be the most loveless product with no meaning.’ It was here that Vural saw an opportunity to elevate toothbrushing and dental care to a ritualistic part of self-care, via mindfully flavoured toothpastes, mouthwashes, oral sprays, and elegant accessories to accompany the act.

Selahatin makes luxury oral care products to elevate the act of toothbrushing

The brand’s name pays homage to the founder’s Turkish heritage. (It’s his grandfather’s name.) But Vural felt it was also perfectly ‘poetic and clinical’, and also harnessed his personal experience of scent and flavour as a vehicle for memory. ‘I remember that as a kid in Turkey, we would be served cloves after dinner to chew on, cleanse the palette, and feel fresh,’ he reflects. ‘I thought it would be really cool to bridge the two cultures I come from and expand the collective notion of what “fresh” is.’

The oral hygiene industry has, for the most part, been dominated by big pharmaceutical companies and bound up in clinical regulations. In launching Selahatin, Vural faced the challenge of convincing developers to work with a boutique brand, which would order a fraction of what competitors were selling and demand niche specifications (like the product being in an aluminium tube, and not plastic).

‘I met this team in Switzerland, and the Swiss are really dedicated to craftsmanship,’ he explains. ‘They really got it. With [this team], we were able to create a product that is superior to anything else out there.’ The resulting items produced by Selahatin respond to market regulations, while innovating, both aesthetically and functionally, what oral hygiene can be. Think: sensory palettes and sleek packaging that create a truly pleasurable bookend to the day.

The success of Selahatin lies in Vural’s ability to manipulate flavour and aroma as a perfumer does, with a concept and story behind each profile. ‘Everyone is sort of primed to think about the clinical aspects of toothpaste, but no one has really connected to the oral aspect as an experience,’ he says of unique, holistic approach.

Take, for example, his toothpaste Hypnotist: the harmonious blend of anise, honey, and peppermint is designed to help calm down the nervous system before bed. Such deeply personal products twist the sterility of oral hygiene into a thoughtful, luxurious act of self-care. ‘These products can have an emotional impact on you,’ he explains of the psychology behind his designs. ‘They can essentially shape your brainwaves and put you in a different state of mind.’

Selahatin’s latest collection, Four Seasons, takes this personal approach one step further with a range designed to match the seasons (and the moods that come with it). From a summer profile that embodies the inimitable high brought on by long days and short nights spent on the beach, to a winter flavour that translates the slow, insular nature of the darkened months, the range encourages the consumer to adapt their choice to both their inner and outer landscapes. ‘This ritual becomes an act of meditation because it centres you, and aligns your mind and body,’ says Vural. ‘It makes you more present.’

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The whispers of a secret Saint Laurent show came to fruition on Tuesday evening (5 March), as Anthony Vaccarello staged his latest menswear collection in the Tadao Ando-designed rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, closing out Paris Fashion Week A/W 2024.

Saint Laurent’s secret menswear show

As most of the British press whizzed off into the night on motorbike taxis to make the final Eurostar back to London after Nicolas Ghesquière’s ten-year anniversary show for Louis Vuitton at The Louvre, a select few joined a group of carefully selected attendees a five-or-so minute walk away at the contemporary art gallery, which opened in 2021. A former corn store – hence its circular design – the building was rebuilt in the late 19th century to become the city’s stock exchange.

Ando’s intervention to Bourse de Commerce’s central room – which sits under the vast original cast-iron dome – also provided the backdrop to Vaccarello’s A/W 2023 menswear show in January of last year. The Japanese architect’s stark, cylindrical concrete wall, reflects the monumental rigour of Vaccarrello’s collections – often defined by a singular repeated silhouette – as well as the interplay between past and present at the heart of Saint Laurent.

‘It was about regenerating the historic monument: honouring the memory of the city inscribed in its walls, and inside, placing another structure,’ said Ando at the inauguration of the gallery, which houses the collection of Francois Pinault, the founder of the Kering group (Saint Laurent is part of the luxury conglomerate’s portfolio). 'A composition establishing a living dialogue between the new and the old, creating a space full of life as a place dedicated to contemporary art should be.’

For this latest show, models emerged from one of the rotunda’s openings, here edged in calla lilies, anemones and orchids (a nod, said Vaccarello, to the shows of Yves Saint Laurent) and into the deep-pile carpeted space. Looping the circular runway, the silhouette was louche and double-breasted, with wide-shouldered tailoring, trench coats and variously coloured ties recalling 1980s office wear. The only real diversions from the look were a series of high-neck silk tops and enormous rubber jackets and hats.

As such, it felt a stricter proposition than Vaccarello’s recent menswear collections, whereby elements of glamour – pussybow fastenings, wrapped and draped silhouettes – set a more romantic tone. Here, there was a different sensuality at play, the loose cut of the tailoring reminding of Giorgio Armani’s 1980s collections, which represented a newly liberated mood in menswear (epitomised by Mr Armani’s costumes for Richard Gere in American Gigolo). Vaccarello talked about the formal silhouettes of the opening looks ’dissolving’ as the show goes on – ’fluid, with an intentional slouch, an illusion of fabric turning liquid’.

The show follows Saint Laurent’s S/S 2024 menswear show, which took place in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, the modernist art museum designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in one of his final commissions. Vaccarello’s travelling menswear presentations – which tend to run for one season in Paris, the next somewhere further afield – have also taken place in the Moroccan desert and a beach in Malibu, California.

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In 1947, Christian Dior launched his fashion house with a collection that charmed and markedly changed the industry. Paris had been liberated from Nazi occupation three years earlier, while Dior’s own emancipation from Lucien Lelong, for whom he’d been designing since 1942, arrived in 1946. Labelled the ‘New Look’ by Carmel Snow, the acclaimed editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, the collection made a compelling argument for excess after post-war austerity. The bar suit in particular, comprised of an ivory, wasp-waisted jacket and full, pleated black skirt, was quickly championed for its dramatic new silhouette. Now, adopting its moniker from Snow’s baptism, a new ten-part drama from Apple TV+ titled The New Look excavates fashion history, tracing Dior’s professional and personal life during the Second World War and leading up to the New Look. 

’The New Look’ on Apple TV+

‘My grandmother used to talk about it,’ says the show’s costume designer, Karen Muller Serreau, recalling her introduction to Dior’s celebrated silhouette. ‘For her, the New Look had the feeling of future and hope.’ Conceived by Todd A Kessler, we first meet Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) backstage at the Sorbonne in 1955, where he is to give a speech to a hall full of enthusiastic design students. An audience question takes us back to 1943, and for much of the show’s run we’re privy to the hardships of occupied Paris, a restrictive environment that would ultimately provide the New Look its power. ‘I can understand how it brought hope to people,’ continues Muller Serreau. ‘We were building up to it as we worked, so when we came to the part with the bar suit, we felt like people then must have – a sense of wow, and this relief to have cloth and a full skirt.’

Running parallel to the Dior narrative, which sees him crafting party frocks for Nazi officer’s wives (a way for him survive the war), drinking with his contemporaries Pierre Balmain and Cristóbal Balenciaga, and worrying about his sister Catherine (Maisie Williams), imprisoned at a labour camp for her efforts in the French Resistance, is the story of Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche). While Lelong kept his atelier open for the duration of the war, Chanel shut up shop, supposedly as an act of patriotism, though the show depicts the couturier living at The Ritz where she conducts an affair with a Nazi agent. The rest of The New Look charts the pair’s rivalry, and the changing fortunes of their eponymous houses. On-screen, clothing is largely employed as a vehicle for storytelling, while fashion and creativity are presented as a means for survival, as Mendelsohn’s Dior announces at the Sorbonne. 

Binoche and Williams’ characters in particular were the most fun to dress, says the costume designer, while Chanel was also the most challenging. ‘There aren't many pictures from during that period in her life, so it was [a question of] looking at before and after for inspiration,’ she notes, ‘[of] trying to get the essence and feel of her right, but not have her wearing what everybody knows.’ Chanel’s own rulebook was a valuable tool, and the designer’s famous directive to remove the last piece of jewellery you put on was frequently followed. ‘Catherine’s really interesting too, because she’s Dior’s sister and had been his model in her younger days,’ adds Muller Serreau. ‘But she’s then working for the resistance, so wanting to disappear, not be noticed in the outside world. It was always about pulling her back and making her sort of ordinary. She goes through several stages, so building the character was good fun.’

This disparity between the high glamour world that Dior and his peers were creating and the reality of war time, and subsequently Dior’s New Look and the rich attire of the editors who attended his debut, was keenly observed during production, says Muller Serreau. ‘There was this real contrast all the time, from wartime to a fashion show. That was kind of interesting,’ she explains. ‘I'd go from one part of the workshop where we were working on skimpy, dull-coloured outfits and then at the other end, there'd be these beautiful satin and silk things being worked on. We only had two scripts at a time, so we didn't ever quite know what was going to happen afterwards. We were always surprised.’

The New Look is available to stream on Apple TV+ now.

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The first collaboration between Cartier’s nose Mathilde Laurent, the San Francisco Symphony Music Director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, came to fruition this weekend (1-3 March 2024); a performance of Alexander Scriabin’s 1910 symphony, Prometheus, the Poem of Fire.

20 minutes in length, their interpretation of Scriabin’s tone poem was liberating and full of feeling, uniting sound, scent and light to multisensory and monumental effect. It was also cathartic, an antidote to the pandemic years, when we were unable to gather for cocktails, conflabs or concerts (and were afraid of simply breathing in deeply beside our best friends).

Cartier’s Mathilde Laurent on scenting Prometheus, the Poem of Fire

Scriabin, a Russian composer with synaesthesia, envisioned a total, consuming work of art around this seminal Greek myth. Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to mortals, enabling civilisation and the arts to flourish. Scriabin scored Prometheus for light and colour, as well as music, and dreamed of drawing on all the senses, including smell. But the technology didn’t yet exist to perform it.

Of course, now it does. And on Friday (March 1 2024), above the 100-person orchestra and a 100-person chorus, a massive halo of light designed by Luke Kritzeck illuminated the hall in vivid hues aligned with Scriabin’s original ‘colour organ’, an instrument he created to link projected light to harmonic shifts. The music ranged from ethereal and shimmering to thunderous and rises from danger and dissonance into exultation. Releasing a fragrance that was subtle in degree but complex in composition, at three symbolic moments, Laurent's olfaction worked in tandem with the music to help the audience feel it in their bodies and minds.

Laurent crafted two original scent accords (fragrances not designed to be worn) to be released ‘Before’ and ‘After’ Prometheus’ gift. For the moment of giving, she chose an existing Cartier fragrance of her own design. The scents are dispersed using two methods purpose-built for the symphony by olfaction engineers in St. Malo. Small black cassettes installed beneath the seats use a non-aerosol, dry-air diffusion technique to propel air through capsules infused with scents. Without the alcohol-heavy vapour of perfume diffusion, they dissipate more quickly, allowing the audience to smell each without the lingering interference of the fragrance that preceded it.

This technology underscores the affinities between musical composition and scent design. Both create something ephemeral and able to carry a narrative, both are abstract and evolving. ‘We use so much music vocabulary to explain olfactory creation,’ Laurent says. ‘The composition of music begins in the mind, with “notes” in the head of the musician as they are in the head of a perfumer. We talk of “harmony” in perfume and are also trying to create a “symphony”. Scent has a beginning and an end, a lapse of time during which different ingredients play at different moments, as do the instruments.’

Laurent’s ‘Before’ accord evokes a dark human struggle before the advent of fire through a petrichor quality of earth after rain, a stormy suggestion of ice, ozone and vegetation. When Prometheus offers the fire, the cassettes and 12 ‘cannons’ lining the hall broadcast notes of smoke and burnt wood, Laurent’s 2005 La Treizième Heure. This fragrance pays tribute to the origin of perfumery (and jewellery) in fire, which extracts the absolutes, essences and oils that are the building blocks of her art. (The word ‘perfume’ comes from the Latin per fumum, which means ‘through smoke’.) Then, in a triumphant crescendo, the ‘After’ accord depicts man’s elevation in hesperidic notes of hope and joy: bergamot, lemon and verbena, fresh grass, sunlight and warmth.

Prometheus offers too much to explore in one sitting. The audience will want more. But it also requires that we take something we’ve denied ourselves for years: ‘It’s very important, during this performance, that you breathe in deeply,’ says pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. ‘It’s a very natural thing: suddenly, you are enveloped, and you won't even know what with. But it is something that will make you hear differently and see differently.’

cartier.com

sfsymphony.org

This weekend, Stone Island ventured across the Atlantic to inaugurate its first major US exhibition. Titled ‘Selected Works ‘982-‘024’, it showcases a collection of rare and previously unseen pieces – such as the first comprehensive overview of the Stone Island Shadow Project, alongside exploring Stone Island’s various collaborations. 

The exhibition, displayed in Los Angeles’ Buttercup Studios, Culver City this past weekend, coincided with Frieze LA. 

Stone Island presents: ‘Selected Works ‘982-‘024’

The brand, founded in Italy in 1982, is best known for its experimental use of fabric. This was on full display here, the exhibition comprising various designs which represented Stone Island’s boundary-pushing fabric technology, while encompassing Stone Island’s synonymy with functionality, ease and subculture. 

’Selected Works ’982-’024’ also invited visitors to explore the display of 42 archival pieces, all carefully curated to map out Stone Island’s milestones. The Italian fashion house nods to its research in reflectivity, displaying the ‘992 collection, which includes 12 reflective jackets. A behind-the-scenes look at its innovative design process was also granted to visitors, with seven rare pieces from the Stone Island Prototype Research Series also on display.

Collaboration was a key theme throughout the retrospective, with a display of the brand’s projects with Supreme, New Balance, and NikeLab. It also featured the largest-ever retrospective of Stone Island’s ‘Shadow Project’, a long-running collaboration between the brand, Errolson Hugh and Michaela Sachenbacher Acronym design studio. For the first time, pieces from across the entire collaboration were displayed, allowing a behind-the-scenes insight into the research methods of cut, form, and materiality.

While diving into the retrospective, live sets from local DJs such as Jacob Rochester and Bianca Lexis added to the show’s atmosphere. A selection of curated books and records nodded to Frieze LA's celebration of art and design, accompanied by prints created by various artists.

Though the exhibition was brief – running only over Frieze weekend – it will likely travel over the coming months. 

stoneisland.com

In 2023, Susanne Kaufmann celebrated 20 years of her namesake brand. As one of the earliest pioneers of the natural beauty and skincare movement, the secret to her success isn’t difficult to unlock. Born and raised in the Austrian Alps, Kaufmann brought the herbs, plants, and flowers that grow around that region – and are known for various healing properties – down from the mountains and into her products. (She began formulating said products for face and body, to be used in the medical spa of Hotel Post, a retreat in the Bregenzerwald that has been in her family for five generations).

Today, she’s speaking to me over a video call, having just marked the launch of her first-ever face oil. And, I have to ask: why has it taken so long for her to launch one? ‘We have always used the best natural oils in our body products, whether that’s sunflower, apricot, rosehip, broccoli, or celery,’ she explains. ‘They are so very appreciated by our customers, and a lot of them would ask me why we don’t make an oil for the face. It took us a long while to develop it because, in every formula we do, we start from scratch. And taking the time to do proper research into the product is also key to what we do.’

Susanne Kaufmann

The final blend of oils performs in multiple ways to support optimum skin function on the face. Lightweight and readily absorbed, there’s bilberry seed oil to support the skin barrier, astaxanthin, an antioxidant derived from blood rain algae which revitalises and smooths, (and also provides the oil’s deep orange hue), and apricot kernel oil for additional moisture. ‘It was vital to me that we created a product that is suitable for every skin type. No matter if you’re dry or oily, everyone needs moisture. The skin barrier also needs protection, which was perhaps the most important thing we aimed to achieve with this oil. Also, no one wants an oil that sits on top of the skin and doesn’t absorb. It needs to be silky, lightweight and perfect for make-up application afterwards.’

Kaufmann notes that the oil is also ideal for mixing into existing skincare products, such as her day and night moisturisers, for an additional boost of nourishment, or even into her Moisturising Mask.

‘Sustainability’ has become somewhat of a beauty buzzword over the past few years. But Kaufmann, having led the way with authenticity since the start, has no plans to launch any other face oil products. ‘We have made the perfect face oil that works. Every product we make has to be useful and work universally. We never create things just because there is a trend for it. From the very beginning, sustainability was in our DNA. That's why I started with glass bottles, which was a little bit of a fight because people told me I was crazy for having glass bottles in the bathroom. But, it was recyclable. I refused to use plastic. And back then, plastic was even worse [for the environment] than it is now!’ 

With recent collaborations with the likes of Byredo (Kaufmann and Ben Gohram came together at the end of 2023 to produce a body oil that captured the scent of the Bregenzerwald) and the appointment of a new CEO, the brand is continuing along its balanced trajectory, working with care and intention to speak to its cult audience.

‘The whole whole world is now talking about sustainability,’ Kaufmann continues. ‘It became a trend, but now, I think it’s moving towards an industry standard, and most brands incorporate it into their business in some way. Soon, I believe it will become a law.’ It goes to show that slow and steady really does win the race.

Susanne Kaufmann Face Oil is available now (£65).

susannekaufmann.com

In 1965, having graduated with a degree in graphic design from Tama Art University in his native Japan, Issey Miyake would travel to Paris. It was in the French city that the designer would learn his craft: alongside compatriot Kenzo Takada (of fashion house Kenzo), he enrolled at l’École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, studying dressmaking. Later, having founded fashion label Miyake Design Studio in 1970 in Tokyo, he would return to Paris in 1973 to show his collections – a deep-rooted link to the city which would continue throughout his life (the designer would show in Paris until his retirement from the brand in 1997).

Inside Issey Miyake’s luminous new Paris store

A newly opened Issey Miyake Paris store, located in the exclusive Triangle D’Or shopping district, continues this legacy, and marks one of the designer’s final commissions (though formerly retired, the Miyake remained involved in the running of the company until his death in August 2022). Japanese designer and artist Tokujin Yoshioka – who has worked on numerous Issey Miyake projects and stores over the last three decades – remembers first being approached by Miyake in 2021 to work on the store. ’Paris is a centre of fashion and a hub of culture,’ he describes, having masterminded the new space at 28 rue François 1er, which replaces the former flagship on Rue Royale in the 8th arrondissement. Titled ’ISSEY MIYAKE / PARIS’, ’it is a space that gives form to this cultural energy for the future,’ Yoshioka tells Wallpaper*.

The 360 sq m store, which stretches across two stories, is located in the former headquarters of Europe 1 radio station, marking the first time that a retailer has occupied the space. The exterior is typically Parisian – a 19th-century stone facade with vast windows and traditional mouldings – while the interior is designed in Yoshioka’s sleek, modern style, with airy, white-walled rooms interrupted only by angular metal fixtures and glass vitrines. ‘I was thinking [about] combining contemporary elements with the 19th-century French architecture to express the contrast of time,’ explains Yoshioka.

‘The architecture accommodates the space which is designed to be minimalistic, [while] details are designed to give the impression of lightness, as if the clothes were floating,’ he continues. Of those clothes, the store will stock the majority of Issey Miyake’s lines including Issey Miyake, Pleats Please, Homme Plissé, Bao Bao, perfumes, watches, eyewear and more.

Though it is the store’s orange aluminium accent walls – recurring throughout and able to be viewed from the street – which provide the nexus of the space. Representing the rising sun, they are an attempt to capture the joy and levity of Miyake’s design philosophy. ’The aluminium walls are individually coloured with an anodising technique and installed at the site to create a large luminous orange wall, shining like the sun,’ says Yoshioka. ‘[They] express Issey Miyake's philosophy of craftsmanship and energy for the future.’

ISSEY MIYAKE / PARIS, 28 rue François 1er, 75008, Paris is open now. 

isseymiyake.com

Acne Studios’ creative director Jonny Johansson discovered the work of sculptor Villu Jaanisoo at just the perfect moment. ’I was basically deep into a “racing” mode [last year], into everything related to racing, and I stumbled across these amazing pieces,’ the Swedish designer tells Wallpaper* in the lead-up to his latest women’s show, which took place this evening (28 February) during a busy Paris Fashion Week A/W 2024. ‘They symbolise the mood I was trying to create, and they do so in a modern way.’

The artworks in question are huge, sloping chairs crafted from hefty recycled rubber tyres, which were made by the Estonian artist over 20 years ago, back in 2001. Lent to the brand upon Johansson’s request, these ‘furniture bodies’ sat imposingly in the Paris show space, setting the scene for a full-throttle, biker-inspired collection which the brand describes as being ’rooted in toughness and human form, leather and denim’. 

Acne Studios’ full-throttle A/W 2024 show set

Approaching recycling through the traditions of sculpture, Jaanisoo’s practice involves a manipulation of harsh industrial materials into the silhouettes of gentler organic forms. Slightly unnerving to look at, these have ranged from rubber ducks and homely furniture made from snaking truck tyres, to undulating ocean waves crafted from forgotten speakers and fluorescent tubes. ‘Environmental issues have been important in terms of employing these, but to me, what’s even more interesting is the trace that the former lives have left to the recycled things I use,’ the artist said in a statement released ahead of the show. 

Forever awed by the baroque masters who whittled heavenly figures from cold, unyielding marble, Jaanisoo’s process similarly involves both immense physical effort and a sensitive, prospecting eye. ’What interests me about working with tyres is the certain inner resistance of this material – it requires a lot of physical as well as mental force to shape them,’ the artist says. ‘The resistance that exists in each tyre makes the surface of the sculpture alive.’ For Johansson, it was this living feeling that drew him to the works. ‘Their size, which is of a non-human scale, made me think about nature and animals,’ he says. ‘At the same time, I loved the recycled and industrial aspect of them.’

Johansson has always brought a spectrum of artists into Acne Studios’ orbit. Dipping its pen into everything from advertising to architecture, the brand's start in the 1990s as a multidisciplinary creative collective has shaped something of an outsider approach to clothing design. Marrying influences from subculture and the visual arts with a coolly minimal, Swedish edge, previous projects have imaginatively drawn upon the works of American sculptor Peter Schlesinger, photographer William Wegman and seminal artist Hilma af Klimt, to name a few. ‘Acne Studios has always been about multiple disciplines in the creative field, and I believe that it stimulates the creative process and enriches what you do,’ says the designer. ‘It is inspiring.’

While Jaanisoo didn’t collaborate with the brand beyond lending his artworks to the set, his pieces seem to capture the spirit of the collection, which envisions a powerful woman whom Johansson wryly describes as being ‘fast, with a penchant for speed’. Much like Jaanisoo’s work, the collection plays with the sticky edges where contradictions meet: tough and soft, industrial and organic, familiar and new. ‘This collection is about the juxtaposition of an elevated femininity and a biker attitude,’ Johansson explains. ‘I wanted to look deeper into the archetypal codes of women’s fashion and confront them with the codes of Acne Studios.’

Denim and leather, the core materials of this collection and of underground subcultures like punk and BDSM – rebellious notes of which ring through the looks – have been at the heart of the brand since its genesis. ‘One of our first collections in the late 1990s was quite literally called “leather and denim”; two things that belong together,’ says Johansson. ‘I’ve always related to clothing through subcultural movements. When you want to feel tough you gravitate towards leather and denim; it’s like armour. It always feels right.’

Beyond twists on these two sacred Acne Studios materials, Johansson toughened up hyper-feminine shapes and fabrics – faux fur, girly handbags, and the little black dress – to take on a new, hard-girl edge. Elsewhere, heavy biker jackets, second-skin silhouettes and chrome accessories further played with themes of racing and kink. ‘This season it was about inputting leather into different situations, the way we tend to do with denim,’ the designer explains. ‘It was about taking codes we’re known for and twisting them completely.’ The result is a collection of women not to be messed with – formidably sexy, severe, yet polished in the contemporary way Acne Studios’ designs always effortlessly are.

Approaching what he does holistically, for Johansson a show is never just about the clothes; it’s about expressing a particular feeling, and the set plays no small role in this. Previous seasons have seen the brand transform the Palais de Tokyo into a saccharine pink-carpeted wedding venue – a tribute to Johansson’s own nuptials two decades before – and construct an enchanted forest that fondly referenced the designer’s childhood years in northern Sweden. ‘Like your home tells something about you, the show space can tell you something about the collection,’ he says. ‘The space you are in reflects you or your creation.’

This evening in Paris, among the confronting sculptures of Jaanisoo, this seemed to be a celebration of Acne Studios’ creative history as well as a gritty, complex kind of feminine energy – wild yet sophisticated; tough yet beautiful – though he’d much rather leave it to you to decide. ‘I wanted to bring a sense of scale and size, a moment that’s alive,’ says the designer. ‘But I also don’t want to direct people’s feelings too much. I want them to feel something individual or personal within the space we built.’

acnestudios.com

An LED mask is an essential tool to keep in one’s beauty roster. Light therapy – and particularly the use of red and blue light – has numerous benefits to the skin, including decreasing pigmentation and wrinkles and preventing breakouts. After a few sessions with this particular mask from Parisian beauty brand myBlend, which harnesses the power of 288 FDA-approved red and infrared LEDs, the biological processes of cell regeneration and collagen production begin to speed up, subsequently reducing (and even erasing), skin damage. It also has pre-set programmes to treat different skin concerns.

The myBlend LED mask is contoured to every inch of the face

The unique design of the mask, which is perhaps one of the most ergonomic on the market, is contoured to every inch of the face and neck. This gives it a sculptural and even cinematic quality (looking eerily like something you might see in Pedro Almodóvar’s melodramatic thriller The Skin I Live In (2011), or Georges Franju’s 1960s ‘homoeopathic horror’ Eyes Without a Face). But don’t let this dissuade you from using it in the comfort of your own home – or in public. (The mask also comes in a compact case for use on the go, making it perfect for passing time in airport lounges or during long-haul flights.) It’s even suitable for backstage at a fashion show – Roksanda tapped the myLEDmask to provide skin prep for its London Fashion Week A/W 2024 show.

Each model had their skin thoroughly cleansed with myBlend’s Enzyme Face Cleansing Water, which is rich in papaya enzymes to gently exfoliate the skin. Next, the models spent a few minutes wearing the myLEDmask, before a cocktail of serums was applied. This included the Revitalizing Pre-Serum (launching exclusively at Harrods on 19 March 2024), SuperSerum Hydration, and SuperSerum Radiance to deeply moisturise and hydrate. Finally, SuperSerum Recovery offered an added layer of comfort for fashion-week-ravished skin in need of nourishment and repair.

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

MyLEDMask by MYBLEND, £1,100, available at harrods.com.

my-blend.com

OTW by Vans and American artist Sterling Ruby’s S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA. revealed their much-anticipated first collaboration last night (27 February), on the eve of the opening of Frieze LA 2024. It was celebrated with an open-air lot party, pop-up skate installation, and performance in downtown Los Angeles with guest artists Paris Texas and Salem. 

Ruby, himself a former pro-skater, has been wearing Vans for four decades. The collaboration manifests as a new skate shoe titled ‘Clash the Wall’, a mash-up of four Vans icons: the Old Skool 36, the Authentic, the Mid-Skool 77, and the Sk8-Hi. Its two acid colourways – luminous orange and vibrant green – feel reminiscent of Ruby’s often unnerving use of colour in his works, which span sculpture, textiles, drawing, collage, ceramics, painting, and video. The 2019-founded S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA is the arm of his studio which creates clothing collections (the designer also memorably collaborated with Raf Simons on a co-branded A/W 2014 collection for Simons’ eponymous label). 

Sterling Ruby’s S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA. collaborates with OTW by Vans

This new project marks the first time the artist has officially collaborated Vans, although in the summer of 2023, in Paris, there were hints of what was to follow. Back then, Vans shoes hand-customised by Ruby’s studio started cropping up on select friends of the studio and on skaters making use of Los Angeles-based creative studio PLAYLAB, INC’s pop-up skateable installation at the city’s Pont Alexandre III.

A similar set-up by PLAYLAB, INC provided the backdrop for the event yesterday evening, an epic skate park which Jeffrey Franklin, the collective’s co-founder and partner, worked on with Ruby. ’We wanted to take the classic wood skate architecture of ”the hill” and create a sort of abstract [version] of that into a standalone piece,’ he tells Wallpaper*.

’It was about creating a colour field they could skate within,’ he continues, pointing out how the sound stage was integrated into the back wall. An angular, abstract clog which is in development with Sterling Ruby’s S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA. appeared to provide further inspiration to the skatepark’s blocky shape, while the bright ‘pollen’ yellow was intentionally chosen to complement the shades of Sterling’s sneakers.

’We “dipped” the whole thing in this unique colour so it was uniform all the way through,’ says Franklin.

Built using Skatelite in collaboration with California Skate Parks, the installation can be disassembled and reused. ’It's a skate language, but we wanted to create something that leans more towards the unique artwork side of things,’ Franklin concludes.

OTW by Vans x S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA. will be available in limited-edition quantities through selected global retailers and at otw.vans.com, from 29 February 2024. 

otw.vans.com
srstudio.com

Guido Palau requires little introduction. But, with a career in hair as illustrious as his, it’s always worth recapping a little. A session stylist for almost three decades, he has created the hair for some of the most enduring fashion and beauty imagery in history. One of his first jobs was working with The Supers – Naomi, Linda, Cindy, et al – in George Michael’s Freedom 90! music video, before he went on to define the lived-in insouciance of the grunge era with photographer David Sims and Kate Moss.

To this day, he counts the likes of Sims and Steven Meisel among his collaborators, and is responsible for dreaming up the looks for runway shows and campaigns, including Prada. In December last year (2023) Palau brought his editorial eye to Zara, for a range of limited edition festive hair products called ‘Glitter In Gold’, which included a glitter spray and gel, amongst others.

Guido Palau is shaping a new beauty chapter for Zara

It turns out that this was just the beginning of a new chapter for Zara’s beauty offering. On March 4 (2024), Everyday Basics, which is described as an evergreen group of essential products, will cement the Spanish brand as a major player in the haircare space. ‘I wanted the collection to be really easy to use,’ Palau explains over a Zoom call. ‘With all my years of experience talking to people about what they want from hair products, I knew what the big no-nos were. It couldn’t be too sticky, leave a residual, or feel too oily. So the range has a real touchability to it, and they smell amazing.’ (Nose Jérôme Epinette, who has already put his name to several Zara perfumes, is behind the fragrance.)

Palau goes on to explain that Everyday Basics draws direct inspiration from the essential items in his personal session stylist kit. ‘So it’s six key products I felt that people could do multiple things with,’ he says. ‘They can be used on their own or they can be teamed up together. You could use the Blow-Dry Spray and the Volumising Mousse for your heat styling. The mousse is great for root lift, but still has a softness and a shine to it. And then you could add texture to the result with the Dry Texturising Spray, before finishing it all off with the Hair Balm for sheen, nourishment and to tame flyaways. There’s also the Curl Activator, which is great for textured hair and encourages defined curls to form. You can just put it in and just leave it to air dry. The Hair Spray has hold, but brushes out without residual.’

The Everyday Basics campaign was shot by Baron & Baron and comprises models with three different hairstyles, from blowouts to braids. The vivid, multicoloured packaging was also designed by Baron & Baron, who worked with Palau to create an elevated aesthetic. ‘I wanted to make the packaging appealing in a way that you can build up a collection of products that look great on your shelves,’ he says. ‘The product is the minimal part, in that it performs very well and does exactly what it says. But Zara is a fashion brand, after all, so we needed to keep a fashion edge to the design.’

Palau also reveals that whilst Everyday Basics forms the beating heart of Zara Hair, there is much more yet to come. ‘Again, with Zara being a fashion brand, it’s not just about hair products but hair accessories, too.’ Indeed, Zara’s gold hair collection from December contained matching gold bobby pins, that can be used to a rather dazzling effect. ‘We're making further drops of limited-edition products down the line, including some exciting collaborations,’ he says. We’ll be watching. And whilst our breath might be bated, thanks to Zara and Guido Palau, we’ll also have great hair.

The Zara Hair Everyday Basics collection by Guido Palau is available from March 4, 2024 on zara.com.

The penultimate look of Jonathan Anderson’s latest womenswear collection for Loewe featured an enormous golden dressmaker’s pin, skewered through the ecru-coloured gown – itself appearing like an unravelling roll of fabric – as if holding its folded form in place.

Earlier in the show, pins were also seen perforating the waistband of leather shorts, and they had made an appearance in Anderson’s menswear collection, shown a few months prior, piercing through brocade tops. There, they were meant to evoke the small samples of fabric tacked on a board before a garment has even been created. In the womenswear collection, the designer said he imagined them jumping off the wall and onto the body. ‘If you take out the pin, does it fall down?’ he said after the show. ‘There’s something seductive in that.’

The Glossary: S/S 2024’s defining womenswear looks

The pin: a tool of transformation. The dressmaker can use it to wield power over a piece of fabric. It is an act of sculpting, intuitive and instant, without the need to whittle away at marble, stone, wood or metal. Neolithic man would use pins of wood, bone or thorn to hold skins and furs to the body, while in Roman times, gold and silver pins created the draped forms of antiquity, piercing through the cloth of a toga.

They say that to understand a garment, you must turn it inside out. When curators were working on the 2014 retrospective of 20th-century American couturier Charles James at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, they said it was like undertaking an archaeologist’s excavation. Underneath the perfectly draped and cinched exterior fineries of James’ garments were intricate layers of underwire, whalebone and buckram cotton, all crammed together in an attempt by the designer to reshape the female form. 

James, who was credited with inspiring the nipped waist of Christian Dior’s New Look, found women’s bodies to be cumbersome so he approached clothing like an anatomist. Underneath their exterior beauty, his clothes were orthopaedic, heavy, sometimes painful. But despite this, most of the women who wore them – Gypsy Rose Lee, Babe Paley, Marlene Dietrich – experienced a kind of delirious liberation. ‘Diabolical,’ said Virginia Woolf of his gowns. ‘But geometrically perfect.’

Pins were James’ foremost tool: those who worked with him in his atelier would begin not by touching the gowns but by picking up the pins from the floor. When trusted, they would be tasked with inserting the pins at James’ command, striking his desired angle of an exact 45 degrees into the fabric. If they were placed wrongly, he would fly into a rage. 

His final years are often painted as a time of bitter, misanthropic resentment, with him displaying particular ire towards those he believed he had influenced, like Halston. But James also became a part of New York counterculture, spending nights at Studio 54 and Max’s Kansas City. There, he no doubt witnessed the unrestrained dress codes of the city’s young; to go out, he would purportedly wear a pair of vertiginous platform boots. In his studio, people remember him trying on his dresses or luxuriating in a state of repose amid reams of silk and satin. 

Bottega Veneta creative director Matthieu Blazy also talked about the pleasures of dressing up this season: ‘the simple wonder of dressing without boundaries’. In his S/S 2024 collection, gowns sprouted with anemone-like pom-poms, were dotted with bows, or fell away into delicate leather tassels. Others had undulating folds of fabric, or appeared as if boned, slipping off the shoulder. Taking place on a giant tiled map of the world and set against a euphoric soundtrack, featuring sounds of nature, he called it his odyssey, ‘a journey to who you would like to be and where you want to go, a journey of transformation and escape’. 

John Galliano is well-versed in the primal desire for transformation and the notion of fashion as fantasy. At Dior, his creations were legendary in their construction. Silhouettes conjured up worlds and eras; to wear them was to become somebody new. As creative director of Maison Margiela, he has found another level of expression. His work is nothing like house founder Martin Margiela’s, which was reduced, obscured and enigmatic. Galliano’s work is pure spectacle, but he also seems to revel in Margiela’s desire to rewrite the history of clothing, to pull the familiar and accepted apart. 

In his latest collection, Galliano revealed his clothing’s inner workings: seams were exposed and the dressmaker’s chalk was left as adornment. Bodices were torn from the body to expose stitching, while other garments contained flattened, laminated elements, inspired by clothes being packed into a suitcase. And Margiela’s influence continues to hover over the collections. He remains a favourite with fashion students, who, more than three decades on, still see a vision of modernity in his work. In interviews, the designer would often denounce the term with which he is most associated, deconstruction – maybe because he saw his work not as an act of undoing, but as part of the constant evolution of fashion, a conversation between past and future. 

Molly Goddard also looked to the past this season, beginning her collection amid the evocative rails of the National Theatre’s costume archive. Despite their theatrical exteriors, Goddard instead turned the pieces inside out. Like Galliano, she was fascinated by the seams and imperfections she found within, and these emerged in duvet-like skirts and bustier tops, which conjured up a fusion of domesticity and languid glamour.

A similar mood was struck at Victoria Beckham, who looked towards the ballet rehearsal room for inspiration. Her collection felt like a dancer’s layers being put on and taken off. Delicate silk gowns – trails of thread looping around the bust, askew at the neck – evoked ballerinas being shepherded backstage for a quick change, the craft of the seamstress momentarily exposed.

At Balenciaga, vast swathes of fabric, like the red curtains of a theatre, provided the backdrop for Demna’s latest collection. If the effect was dramatic, the designer’s mind was on the minutiae: he called the pieces ‘engineered, with a couturier’s precision’. His garments are in a state of metamorphosis; he cuts and reshapes them until they are something new, all in a distinct language that has run throughout his tenure. 

The show played out to a soundtrack by actress Isabelle Huppert, who read the instructions for creating a tailored jacket. The steps are so complex that it took more than an hour for Huppert to record them in full. Demna said he wanted to show that fashion is complex and that, beyond the theatrics, his garments take hours of craft.

Craft, creativity and imagination, all hinging on the placement of a pin – this is the unique magic of the dressmaker. At Prada, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons always create extraordinary, unexpected clothing. This season, in lieu of collection notes, there was a description of each look: its fabric, its details, its construction. Most extraordinary was a series of gowns created from a blend of translucent silk and gazar. Purportedly, the fabric was so lightweight, the house had it patented. It was another fashion evolution.

At Issey Miyake and Alaïa, there were similar focuses on form. The former was inspired by the movement of a fluttering flag; gently creased dresses enveloped the body like a cocoon, while vast tailored jackets drew inspiration from the art of origami. At the latter, Pieter Mulier continued house founder Azzedine Alaïa’s desire to sculpt and shape the female body, with none of the restrictions that it might suggest. His forms this season were sinuous, occasionally erupting into intricate ruffles at the cuffs or hips.

The best designers have always been those who hone a vision season on season and, in doing so, create distinct, richly populated, creative worlds. Full-scale reinvention will always be futile. How many talented young designers – fuelled by the industry’s voracious desires and often led by external pressures – have been completely squeezed of creativity in the search for something new?

It is why young Dutch designer Duran Lantink is both an anomaly and a blueprint. He has been running his eponymous label for several years, though last season, his A/W 2024 collection marked something of a departure: showing in Paris for the first time, there was a new clarity to his silhouettes, which had previously been defined by a haphazard, DIY aesthetic (many of his garments were crafted from old, discarded clothing). Here, the focus was on form, the pieces seesawing between art and fashion: strange, bulbous shapes emerged from the chest, backpacks became vest tops, and trousers crept down to expose glimmering mini shorts beneath.

His S/S 2024 collection proved to be even more extraordinary: padded, sculpted dresses recalled those slotted onto a doll; a pair of inflated denim shorts sat on the waist, like a rubber ring. These rings also appeared as bra tops or stitched into shirts; other silhouettes were dramatically pitched at the shoulder. Three-dimensional gowns in dolphin-like forms seemed to hover away from the body entirely.

It was an exercise in creativity, a transformation of the familiar into something new. But for all its novelty, for Lantink – a designer who has played the long game – this was not reinvention, but just another step in the steady metamorphosis from where the designer has been to where he wants to be. ‘I’m just experimenting,’ he says. ‘Focussing on form, trying to find my handwriting.’

Model: Maria Zakrzewska at Established Models. Casting: Ikki Casting at The Art Board. Hair: Roku Roppongi at Saint Luke using Sam McKnight. Make-up: Mattie White using Nars. Photography assistants: Matt Bramston, Pablo Gallegos. Fashion assistants: Kris Bergfeldt, Ady Huq. Digi tech: Al Habjan. Post-production: LAH Retouch.

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

Rowse is a plant-based beauty brand on a mission to embrace nature in all forms. It was on a particularly grey Parisian afternoon in 2018 when Spanish travel photographer Nuria Val and Gabriela Salord (a French marketing expert in the cosmetic sector) crossed paths. The serendipitous encounter marked the start of not only their friendship but the birth of the skincare brand, which uses cold-pressed, organic ingredients.

Paired with the knowledge of pharmacist Lamia el Kadiri, Rowse quickly grew into a line of face serums, body oils, shampoo bars, perfumes, and more. Fast forward six years, and after firmly planting its roots as one of the most coveted online marketplaces for natural beauty, Rowse has opened the doors to its debut flagship store in Madrid. The space represents the brand’s first standalone brick-and-mortar store, outside of its various pop-up locations across Europe. Located at Calle Vallehermoso 114 in the charming district of Chamberí, the store spans two floors featuring a boutique and wellness space for a multi-sensory retail experience. 

Inside the Rowse flagship store, designed by Isern Serra

‘Transitioning from an online presence to a physical space is an exciting step forward,’ Val and Salord tell Wallpaper*. With Val’s social presence as a reputable photographer and Salord’s reputation in beauty and business, it comes as no surprise that Rowse has garnered a vast following across Europe, notably in Scandinavia and the Mediterranean. ‘Our online community has grown tremendously and it’s incredibly rewarding to now have the opportunity to connect with them face-to-face,’ they continue. ‘This opening symbolises the shared values and aspirations of a growing community. It’s a tangible representation of the increasing awareness and support for brands like ours, that prioritise sustainability and environmental responsibility.’ 

The concern for environmental responsibility extends beyond the products and into the retail space, which is designed to cultivate a welcoming Mediterranean atmosphere. Barcelona-based architectural firm Isern Serra, who was previously tasked with designing Rowse’s Barcelona showroom in 2021, was enlisted once again.

The store incorporates responsibly produced fixtures from local craftsmen, against a minimal backdrop of white micro cement. Hints of earthy tones permeate the space, through wooden fixtures, terracotta hues and green potted plants. Furnishings are contemporary; a standout feature is the Muuto lamp and chair that grace the entrance, accompanied by long white curtains from family-led Spanish fabric house, Guell Lamadrid. Downstairs in the wellness space, terracotta walls create a ‘serene ambience’, lit by a bespoke light installation by Santa & Cole.

‘We want to cultivate a sense of warmth and comfort, allowing visitors to feel at home and at ease,’ explain Val and Salord. This is very much in keeping with the Rowse ethos, which almost operates as a global community as well as a skincare brand, encouraging connectivity through workshops and creative collaborations. ‘We’re diving headfirst into the world of wellness, with plans to host retreats across Europe, starting with Mallorca in the Balearic Islands,’ the founders say.

‘As for why we chose Madrid and this particular building, it's deeply personal,’ Val and Salord continue. ‘Madrid holds a special place in our hearts, as it's where our journey together began. It only felt natural to realise our dream of opening our flagship store in this vibrant and dynamic city.’ Another factor in selecting this location was the availability of an underground floor. We envisioned transforming it into a beauty oasis where we could provide facial treatments and host workshops. 

‘We’ve got some incredible plans brewing behind the scenes. While we can’t reveal all the details just yet, we’re continuously working on expanding our product line and exploring new ways to connect with our community.’

The Rowse flagship is located at Calle Vallehermoso 114, 28003, Madrid, showcasing the full product collection starting from €25.

rowse.co

Givenchy Beauty’s creative director Thom Walker has parlayed his experience as a celebrated make-up artist into a new vision for the brand’s make-up line, since taking on the role in 2022. It is a vision that reflects the iconic aesthetic of the storied fashion house, all while meeting the needs of the modern beauty consumer. ‘It’s such an iconic brand to be a part of, with such a strong DNA from Hubert de Givenchy,’ Walker tells me over a call from the Givenchy offices in Paris. And, while it can be intimidating to work in the shadow of one of the 20th century’s great designers, Walker also concedes that it ‘kind of makes my job a lot easier’.

‘It's not like we’re a new brand where we haven't told a story yet,’ he says. ‘[With Givenchy] the story has already been told, so it’s about how you modernise that story and how you move that story forward. Mixing timeless elegance with the boldness Mr de Givenchy created is always at the front of my mind when we’re creating new products. And I always say it’s a little contradictory to have something elegant, but still really bold as well.’

Givenchy Beauty blends the old and the new

That blend of the old and new, the sophisticated and the flamboyant, is reflected in hero products such as the Prisme Libre Loose Powder, an iconic bestseller which blurs imperfections while also adding light and radiance to the skin. It’s also evident in Walker’s latest Le 9 eyeshadow palette, which contains shades of versatile browns that range from subdued nude shades to punchy metallic textures.

‘I think that contradiction is what makes something creative; for example, making something that is matte but brings light to the skin as well,’ he says. Or, as is the case the L’Interdit Couture Volume Mascara, released just this week (February 2024), it is a product that provides a dramatic, exaggerated false lash look, yet has a formula that improves the health of your real ones. With 90 per cent natural ingredients that include ceramides and D-panthenol, it also encourages lash growth over time to create, as Walker puts it, a ‘skincare mascara’.

Walker is working to create products that balance between subtle and impactful, expressing Hubert de Givenchy’s belief that ‘the shortest path to elegance is simplicity. You can’t rely on the trends of fashion to influence the products,’ he says. ‘It’s more about the storytelling, the heritage of the brand, and [leaning on] those codes... Bringing them into the products, understanding how they function.’

He does, however, keep one eye open when it comes to certain ‘trends’ in the beauty industry, allowing him to play with the tension of the past, present, and future. ‘[In 2024] I think we’ll see more of that naturally enhanced version of yourself with [a focus on] soft brown shades, a little bit 1990s,’ he says, which is very much in keeping with the aesthetic of his new Le 9 palette. ‘I’m finding the “mob wife” trend quite hilarious at the moment,’ he says with a laugh. ‘But when you break it down, that look is essentially a brown, smoky Kate Moss eye.’

Ultimately, for Walker, performance is key to every product he creates. ‘Before I got into fashion I worked in a store, on the counter for different make-up brands,’ he adds. ‘I think having the perspective of what the customer wants is always at the front of my mind... I don’t want to put make-up products on and feel like I can’t see anything, yet I [also] want subtle enhancement that makes me, and others, feel better.’

L’Interdit Couture Volume Mascara, £34, and Le 9 de Givenchy Eyeshadow Palette in shade No.12, £64, are available now.

givenchybeauty.com

Marilyn Monroe’s sparkling red stilettos, Andy Warhol’s paint-spattered loafers, the sleek-lined ‘Wanda’ bag: Ferragamo creative director Maximilian Davis is recalling his favourite discoveries from the Florence-based house’s archive with an air of wonder.

‘There’s one shoe that I really, really wanted to see before I joined,’ says the Manchester-born designer, who was appointed to the role in 2022. ‘It was the S-shaped heel with the transparent straps that I saw in a 1950s campaign shot – it was the first of its kind, and is really surreal and dark and moody. It feels so modern. When I saw it [in person], it was so small and so delicate, and I had to wear gloves to touch it.’

Inside Ferragamo’s treasure-filled Florence hub

Very few leading labels can offer their top designers the wealth of reference points that Davis has at his fingertips. The Ferragamo archive, occupying a sprawling space in Osmannoro, just outside Florence, (a short spin from its Palazzo Spini Feroni HQ and museum on the River Arno), comprises a staggering 14,700 – and counting – shoe models alone.

‘My first week was pretty intense,’ he laughs. ‘I was just so curious to see what 14 or 15,000 pairs of shoes look like in person. I can’t name another brand or another person that has an amazing heritage like this, especially based on shoes, which is what makes it so special.’

The Ferragamo tale is a storied one. It’s more than a century since the brand’s eponymous founder, Salvatore Ferragamo, emigrated from Italy to America in 1915 at the tender age of 17 to pursue his dreams of becoming a shoemaker to the stars. In 1923, he opened his first shop – the Hollywood Boot Shop on Hollywood Boulevard – and realised his ambition of providing footwear for the locale’s colourful clientele.

Upon returning to his native Italy in 1926, Ferragamo quickly established a reputation for pioneering material innovation, and a prolific output over the next four decades saw the stars align. The likes of Judy Garland, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn and Monroe wore his creations both on and off set; meanwhile, over 350 pairs of shoes were made by around 700 shoemakers every day in this period. That resulted in 369 patents by 1964 – the highest number in the sector – including the wedge heel. ‘He was using all the materials that he could find – cork, candy-wrapper cellophane and fish skins,’ explains Davis. ‘Every shoe was created or designed for something specific. It was epic.’

It didn’t stop at shoes. Following Ferragamo’s death in 1960, his wife, Wanda Ferragamo, took over the business, transforming it into a fully fledged fashion brand that put it on the global radar. Her entrepreneurship saw Ferragamo expand into other categories so that now, alongside the shoe emporium in the archive, lie 5,000 garments, 5,600 ties and 1,500 bags. (Actual numbers of artefacts dwarf in comparison to the 630,000 data sheets, including thousands of press review records, that were imported into the Ferragamo database as a part of its recent digitisation.)

Perhaps the most popular item finding new resonance in Davis’ tenure is the ‘Wanda’ handbag, introduced in 1988 in its namesake’s honour. It was the first thing that Davis set his sights on reimagining for his first collection. ‘I saw it and immediately thought that this was a bag that I just wanted to re-energise while paying respect to the heritage,’ he says. ‘When I saw it, it was like, “Wow, this is a bag that just feels very timeless,” which is one of my goals – to continue the timeless elegance that Salvatore started. Using heritage products allowed me to continue Wanda’s story too, in a modern way.’

Davis’ access to these pieces has been made possible by the recent amalgamation of the Ferragamo’s archive, atelier and workshop under one roof at the Osmannoro site, a project ongoing since 2017. ‘I’m very grateful to have all these resources on site so that I can quickly go to the technicians and discuss how a seam can be done, how we can try something a different way,’ he says. ‘It’s a very one-on-one relationship.’ He recalls a moment from the previous week, when working on his upcoming A/W 2024 show (taking place during Milan Fashion Week A/W 2024), that demonstrates his point perfectly. ‘Our amazing atelier turns around a sample of a prototype in an hour,’ he says. ‘I was styling the collection and we were in need of a sandal. An hour and a half later, it came back. Having built a huge atelier for the ready-to-wear, we’re also able to make a full collection in-house, which is honestly a dream.’

For Davis, the close-knit set-up at Osmannoro aligns with his own approach to design – in more ways than one. The 28-year-old designer was appointed at Ferragamo fresh from industry-wide recognition for his eponymous London-based brand, where he says he learnt to be ‘always working with my hands’. At Ferragamo, he still insists on working with paper, scissors and glue when conceiving a new shoe, studying the process of the workshop when developing a last or garment, much like the Ferragamos would have done.

For his own label, he drew on his family history. ‘My brand was based on my Caribbean heritage, using my grandmother’s life as a starting point.’ At Ferragamo, he finds himself conducting the same cultural interrogation. ‘Here, I’m looking into the Ferragamo family heritage. It’s very similar to my own way of working so I felt comfortable immediately.’

The resources that Ferragamo’s Osmannoro site provide have resulted in a world of possibilities. ‘It’s liberating, but it also provides a sense of security. Knowing the history of the brand, what we have done so far, and what we can achieve with the resources we have is reassuring to myself and the whole company.’ It’s a collaborative approach that is already attracting high praise. In December 2023, Davis collected the coveted British Womenswear Designer accolade at the Fashion Awards for his work at the house. ‘It’s an incredible achievement and recognition for what we’ve done so far,’ he says humbly. ‘I’m still processing it.’

As far as his own legacy goes, he already has an idea of the pieces he would like to see immortalised in the archive: the ‘Elina’ kick-heel that featured in his first collection; his take on the gold chain sandal first made by Ferragamo in 1955; and his new ‘Hug’ bag. Above all, ‘the goal is to be timeless,’ he says. ‘When I think about what Salvatore did in the past, it was very ahead of its time, always pushing the boundaries, but in an elegant way. Having this legacy as an advantage is something that makes us feel modern and comes very naturally to us.’  

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

Harriet Allure is a new luxury candle brand created by childhood friends, Freddy Mackensy and Alex Adu, as a way to stay connected when the demands of adulthood drew them apart. The brand’s current collection of four candles come in amorphous ceramic containers with scents inspired by memories or feelings that the two have shared over the years. The packaging is edgy and the home fragrances are sophisticated.

But ultimately, the candles have a sentimental message behind them. Harriet Allure began as a pandemic-born passion project inspired by the love shared between two friends and their families. The goal was to use the power of scent to conjure the feeling of ‘home’ from anywhere one might be in the world.

Harriet Allure is writing an olfactory love letter to ‘home’

Mackensy and Adu were both born in Düsseldorf to Ghanaian immigrant parents, who were friends long before the boys were born and, consequently, raised their children side by side ‘in brotherhood,’ as the pair like to say. That childhood bond is what kept Freddy and Alex close, even when they left Düsseldorf to pursue their respective careers. (Mackensy went to work in Berlin and Adu studied history in Stockholm).

When Covid hit, and their lives, like most people’s, became upended, the pair leant on each other for support. After they had worked hard to make new lives for themselves in their respective cities, the global pandemic suddenly made the friends feel displaced and isolated. Home, instead of being a place of refuge, became a place of isolation and confinement.

‘Feeling at home in a new environment is not always immediate,’ says Mackensy. ‘Scented candles play a crucial role in making each new place feel comforting. Especially during the dark winters in Sweden and the heightened indoor hours due to the pandemic, the comforting aroma of a candle became an essential part of our routine. The ritual of settling into a new, possibly empty apartment with a scented candle became a source of comfort and familiarity. This experience taught us that “home” is not confined to a single place; it can be embraced in different locations and among different people.’ 

The pair acknowledge that they learned this lesson from their parents, whose own immigrant experience taught their children that home is something you create and it is not simply the place you are born. ‘Our parents taught us about adaptability, cultural pride, perseverance, and the importance of community support,’ says Mackensy. ‘Those lessons benefitted us at home but they also taught us how to feel a sense of belonging in a new and unfamiliar environment. We are as much Germans as we are Ghanaian. Despite the challenges they faced as immigrants, our parents emphasised the importance of embracing cultural roots and being proud of our identity. Despite being far from their homeland, they forged connections with other immigrants and people of the Ghanaian diaspora, creating a sense of belonging.’ 

That sense of belonging and comfort is exactly what Mackensy and Adu want to generate with Harriet Allure. That might seem like a big ask for an inanimate object, but the candles’ warm, elegant scents do evoke just that. Of the four fragrances on offer, there’s ‘Ama’, powdery with floral notes, and named after Freddy’s mom as an homage to the warmth of home, motherhood and childhood. ‘Tartu’, named after the Estonian city that Freddy and Alex visited together, is the earthiest of the brand’s scents, with notes of rosemary, basil and fig.

‘Minuit’ is a dark, slightly smoky fragrance that blends amber, rose and patchouli. And ‘Faiyaz’ is perhaps the most enigmatic of the brand’s scents. Inspired by the pair’s parents and the trepidation they felt leaving home, ‘Faiyaz’ aims to conjure the feeling of stepping out of your comfort zone, with an ambiguous blend of tobacco with violet, saffron and pine cedar. 

The candles’ containers are handcrafted in Portugal using recycled clay and are meant to be kept and reused as containers or cups once the wax is finished. Eventually, the pair hope to expand the brand beyond candles and into more lifestyle goods. ‘Harriet Allure has much more to give,’ say the founders. ‘We are trying to touch as many people in their lives as we can through our unique scents, shapes, and stories.’ 

Candles, £53 each, from harrietallure.com

The house of Prada, currently under the creative direction of Miuccia Prada and Belgian designer Raf Simons, stands distinct in the landscape of fashion. Its style is characterised by a dual narrative: on one side, Prada embodies a timeless elegance rooted in sophisticated cultural references, such as Italian neorealism. On the other, it boldly ventures into cutting-edge modernity, bravely skirting the edges of banality.

A Prada fashion show is the prime setting for observing these narratives, particularly when they take on the language of architecture. Here, we are granted a view of how the future of fashion might materialise. Since Miuccia Prada introduced her first womenswear line for the family-owned business in 1988, these runway shows have proved a benchmark to gauge the zeitgeist.

Prada’s show sets have become intrinsic to the presentation of the house’s collections. They are designed by the Rotterdam-based OMA/AMO, led by the eminent Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. This collaboration is the most enduring of its kind, bridging the worlds of architecture and fashion for 25 years. It has revolutionised the fashion show as spectacle and pushed the boundaries of what is expected from a runway presentation.

25 years of OMA/AMO and Prada’s extraordinary runway sets

The collaboration began in 1999 when Prada approached OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) with a request to design its New York store. This marked the active start of AMO (OMA in reverse), the research arm of the practice, dedicated to applying architectural thinking to various disciplines. Initially, AMO’s role primarily involved experimenting with content creation and video production, showcasing a new architectonical ability to enhance the Prada brand through various mediums. With the S/S 2004 fashion show, though, AMO focused exclusively on the set design, which was then regularly staged in an industrial space at the Prada HQ on Milan’s via Fogazzaro. The practice has been collaborating with Miuccia Prada – and later, with Raf Simons – on the show sets ever since.

This season’s sets were particularly striking. For the men’s and women’s S/S 2024 show set, which featured a dripping wall of slime, the architects successfully straddled a difficult line. They not only transformed the set into a space that spoke to the social-media moment but maintained the essence of experimentation with physical space. The achievement marks a unique fusion of digital-age aesthetics with the tangible aspects of architectural design, appealing to a modern, tech-savvy audience while preserving the authenticity of spatial exploration.

With the opening of the OMA-designed Fondazione Prada’s Torre in 2018 – part of the foundation’s new location in Largo Isarco in the south of Milan – Prada’s fashion shows found their new home in Deposito, a vast industrial space on its ground floor. En route there for the A/W 2018 womenswear show, I chatted with my taxi driver, pointing out the neon lights that Prada and AMO had erected on the skyline that season. The driver shook his head: ‘No, signora, non è Prada, è un lunapark!’ (‘No, ma’am, it’s not Prada, it’s an amusement park!’). His confusion reminded me of Koolhaas’ words in his 1978 book Delirious New York, where he stated that ‘Luna Park [in Coney Island] is the first manifestation of a curse which is to haunt the architectural profession for the rest of its life, the formula: technology + cardboard (or any other flimsy material) = reality.’

‘What has always interested me is whether we could find ways to experiment, and to experiment with architectural transformation,’ says Koolhaas when I ask him why he believes the collaboration with Prada has been so lasting. ‘A lot of our work together has been connected to an interest in generating transformation through the know-how of fashion. For instance, if you take the ceiling that moves up and down [as was the case at Prada’s A/W 2023 men’s and womenswear show sets], if you were to do it as an architect, it would take at least a year and a half to engineer, and it would cost at least €3 million at that scale.

‘What is fascinating [about collaborating with a] fashion mentality is that it takes maybe three weeks, and is done not using metal and steel but foam and Velcro, yet the effect is the same. For us, it’s really interesting for us to use fashion tools to experiment with architecture.’

Reflecting on the formula learned from Luna Park, one of Coney Island’s first enclosed theme parks, Koolhaas says: ‘In my early writings about New York, my focus extended beyond just the phenomenon itself; I aimed to understand the early effects of technology on communities and on reality. This early realisation has always stayed with me.

‘But it’s important to emphasise that none of the work we’ve accomplished with Prada would have been possible without a dedicated team. It requires an extensive team effort, and often, changing team dynamics is crucial to keep the project’s intelligence alive. We work with a mix of consistent elements – you could call it a formula – and an endless array of variations. These variations come from our partners, the teams themselves, and the people who work on the project. This is why Giulio is here with us today.’

Giulio Margheri, associate architect at OMA, joined the Prada project team at AMO for the house’s S/S 2016 show. Margheri tells me that AMO never starts with a conventional brief. Instead, the process begins with distinct, sometimes seemingly unrelated words. It’s a deeply involved and interactive journey, typically necessitating around six discussions between the AMO and Prada teams. These dialogues guide AMO’s work by fostering an understanding of the overarching mood or critical elements that might influence the collection. This is then translated into a unique expression, explored in architectural drawings, visualisations, and physical models.

‘There is never one direction we work, but several, and it is a constant,’ Margheri adds. ‘It’s also a response to what is happening in the outside world, or to the political situation. This conversation is always a challenge on both sides. It’s interesting, sometimes when we discuss a show, we at AMO might refer to, let’s say, the “yellow curtains” show (S/S 2021), while the Prada team might refer to the “banana pattern” (S/S 2011). This illustrates that we operate with two different reference systems simultaneously – architecture and fashion.’ Asked for the words for S/S 2024, Giulio responds with ‘organic minimalism’.

Koolhaas dislikes being asked about his or AMO’s contribution to fashion. In his own words: ‘I’m nervous about discussing my work or our influence in such terms. I aim to maintain freedom. Dwelling on this could become a significant burden. Our office strives to explore any direction without being tied down by these heavy considerations, as it could restrict our freedom.’

After pausing, he continues: ‘One aspect I can acknowledge is our demonstration of long-term engagement in fashion, an industry typically known for short-term partnerships. This might be the most intriguing aspect and perhaps why we’re discussing this now. Our collaboration covers a broad spectrum of contrasting approaches, yet they all stem from the same source. From the start, there was an almost automatic understanding of our mutual ambitions and aesthetics with Prada. We instinctively embraced Prada’s ambitions to challenge convention, to work with concepts of ugliness, and to experiment with uniforms and uniformity.’

In line with Koolhaas’ formula in Delirious New York, the collaboration between Prada and OMA/AMO shows that shaping the reality of architecture and the future of fashion through runway shows involves more than just technology and simple materials; it’s fundamentally driven by a continuous hunger for knowledge and innovation.

A/W 2021

For the Prada A/W 2021 show (featuring the first menswear collaboration by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons), AMO created a colourful set designed to be broadcast rather than experienced by a live audience. The models navigated an interior of faux fur and marble planes, with the camera closely following them. This led Koolhaas to coin the term ‘close-up from the back’, a rare instance of an architect creating terminology that was later adopted by the fashion industry

S/S 2024

For the S/S 2024 men’s and womenswear set, AMO focused on the idea of ‘organic minimalism’. Walking alongside a cascade of pink slime (having shifted from the green of the menswear show), the models at Prada’s S/S 2024 womenswear show wore dresses in hues of white, pink, light blue, light green, and brown, complementing the salmon-pink set and creating a satisfying visual spectacle in which the fashion and the architectural framework merged seamlessly.

‘That was indeed stunning,’ says Koolhaas. ‘There was no brief provided about the dress that transforms [in] the space. But I do think that sometimes the set influences what they’re doing. There’s a resonance between the fashion and the design of the space, which is based on a conversation, where these elements materialise in different forms later [on]. For us, it is always exciting to see the final show – not just the space itself but seeing who is inhabiting it.’ 

The slime concept for S/S 2024 introduced fluid architectural elements, something that contrasted with the mechanical rising ceiling used for the A/W 2023 set and somehow felt less industrial, harsh or threatening. This reflects a common trend in the Prada and AMO collaboration – a new set often reacts to the previous one.

A/W 2023

For this show, the focus on the ceilings highlighted a significant architectural ambition. Margheri emphasises the desire for a space that initially seems unchanged, but where introducing just one element can lead to a radical transformation. Here, a ceiling rose as the show progressed, eventually revealing enormous hanging art deco chandeliers (for the men’s show) and columns of sweetly fragranced lilies (for the women’s show). This strategy utilised the height of the Deposito, demonstrating the role of architecture as an engineering discipline to redefine a space.

A/W 2022

For this cinema and sci-fi inspired menswear show, OMA transformed the Deposito into a theatrical space featuring seats from the nearby Cinema Fondazione Prada and a recreation of its iconic olive green carpet. But the spotlight was firmly on the models (including Hollywood actors Kyle MacLachlan and Jeff Goldblum) who emerged and disappeared from tunnels illuminated by bright blue neon lights and lined with metal grating. The resulting scenes echoed a mix of cinematographic references, from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to Twin Peaks.

S/S 2021

Thanks to their previous spatial experiments, the traditional catwalk had already begun to lose its role as the main principle in Prada’s fashion spaces well before the pandemic. However, the digital presentation of Prada and Simons’ first collaborative womenswear collection, S/S 2021, was markedly different.

‘I would use the metaphor of a film studio because, without any kind of public, we became much more experimental and aware of the camera,’ Koolhaas explains. ‘The freedom of movement that the camera suggested meant that the camera alone became very prominent and present in the show itself. It became a new actor. Since that moment, our approach, even when the public is present, is a lot more about filming and mobility. This change was partly due to Covid but also partly due to Raf Simons’ co-creative direction with Miuccia Prada, who was interested in pursuing that direction. So, the set became a merger of the previous and the upcoming.

S/S 2023

The exploration of height in the Deposito began with the S/S 2023 set, which is a perfect example of the strength of the collaboration. It combined Rem Koolhaas’ intellectually driven architectural philosophy with Prada and Simons’ unique approach to fusing contrasting elements via novel combinations. ‘The Paper House’ – a paper mock-up executed from rolls of regular paper suspended from 10m-high ceilings (white paper for the men’s show, black for the women’s)– served as a subtle tribute to ‘paper architecture’, embodying visionary, yet often unrealised, architectural concepts. More than a mere fashion space, it was a manifestation of architectural imagination and theory.

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

prada.com
oma.com

Lightness, experimentation, reduction: such are the principles behind Stone Island’s ’Ghost’ line, seeing details stripped back and every element on the garment – including the brand’s signature compass badge – rendered in pure monochrome. 

It makes Oscar Niemeyer’s 1970s-built Palazzo Mondadori in Milan, a vast modernist office where monumental concrete arches emerge from the surface of an artificial lake, an apt backdrop for a new series of images of the collection captured by seminal British artist and photographer Nick Waplington (the campaign is revealed by Wallpaper* for the first time today).

Joseph Grima photographed by Nick Waplington for Stone Island

Described as a ’response’ to Stone Island Ghost’s latest collection, the series stars the architect Joseph Grima in what the brand describes as a continuing ’research’ project into members of the Stone Island community (another recent campaign, released the same day as the brand’s first runway show in January 2024, captured the Stone Island ’famiglia’ from actor Jason Statham to musician Dave).

Grima, who is co-founder of the architecture and research studio Space Caviar and creative director of Design Academy Eindhoven, said he came to be involved in the project through Stone Island’s creative director Ferdinando Verderi, ’an old friend’. ’I didn’t know Nick previously but I’ve always loved his photography. It all sounded crazy and fun so I jumped on board,’ Grima tells Wallpaper*.

The choice of Palazzo Mondadori was his own, ’mainly for the opportunity to explore it properly, which I’d been meaning to do for years’, he says of the building, which he describes as ‘insanely amazing’. ’I basically spent the day on what felt like a sci-fi film set, acting out the part of some lost and confused interplanetary design critic who had travelled a few light years to experience the seductive architectural wonders of a nearby galaxy,’ he says.

’At the outset, I didn’t really know anything about what I’d be wearing, but in retrospect, Stone Island’s Ghost collection felt like it was designed to be worn in such an extreme environment – Nick’s main job was to keep my feet on the ground and stop me getting carried away by my fantasies of interstellar cinematic glory.’

This season, the Stone Island Ghost collection largely centres on research into two fabrics, cotton-derived Cupro Raso, which has the hand-feel of silk, and the contrasting organic cotton O-VENTILE, a fabric used by the military for its breathable and waterproof properties. Here, it makes up versions of archetypal trench coats and field jackets.

‘I enjoyed the playfulness of the pieces – it was very liberating to be stepping into such futuristic clothing,’ Grima continues. ‘My favourite was the white outfit, perhaps because we shot that one on the top-floor terrace. [It was] brilliant, unforgettable stuff.’

The S/S 2024 Stone Island Ghost collection is available from stoneisland.com.

stoneisland.com

A mood of levity and play infused the S/S 2024 menswear collections, seeing designers combine colour and silhouette for enlivening looks primed for brighter days ahead.

Here, as seen in the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* (on newsstands worldwide now), the season‘s uplifting mood is captured in a series of images by London-based photographer Grace Difford with fashion by David St John James. 

Step change: S/S 2024’s enlivening menswear

From the vivid hues of Prada’s lavender trench coat to the bold, high-waisted silhouette of Loewe’s latest menswear collection – designer Jonathan Anderson said that he wanted the looks to appear as if being viewed through a fish-eye lens – this season’s best menswear looks are designed to be a delight to wear.

Completing it all, a series of accessories to match the eclectic mood – whether milliner Stephen Jones’ flower-adorned beanies for Dior Men (Kim Jones said he wanted his models to feel like sprouting blooms as they emerged from the gleaming metal floor at his S/S 2024 show) or a breezy damier-check denim cowboy hat, part of Pharrell Wiliams’ blockbuster debut collection for Louis Vuitton.

Models: Gabriel at PRM, Joan at Success, Leo at Tomorrow Is Another Day. Casting: Ikki Casting at The Art Board. Grooming: Moe Mukai. Movement director: Anders Hayward at Unsigned Group. Photography assistants: Max Glatzhofer, Nick Freeman. Fashion assistant: Rachel Allison. Grooming assistant: Nao Sato.

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

London Fashion Week A/W 2024 heralded the 40th anniversary of the event that, despite earlier iterations, was inaugurated in the early 1980s by British PR maven Lynne Franks (Franks was said to be the inspiration behind Absolutely Fabulous’ Edina Monsoon). Since then, the week has held its unique balance of rising stars – perhaps best represented by fashion incubator Fashion East – and the city’s blockbuster names, from Vivienne Westwood to Burberry (and even featured an appearance from Queen Elizabeth II, who attended a Richard Quinn show in 2018). 

This latest edition continued the week’s legacy, beginning on Friday evening with a return to London Fashion Week from historic British house Dunhill after four years (it heralds the arrival of new creative director Simon Holloway). Elsewhere, the two biggest draws were JW Anderson – its eponymous designer Jonathan Anderson first rose to prominence at Fashion East in the 2010s – and Burberry, where Daniel Lee showed his third runway show for the historic British label in Victoria Park on Monday evening. Rounding out the schedule was a mix of the week’s stalwarts, including Molly Goddard, Simone Rocha, Roksanda, Erdem and Ahluwalia, alongside a raft of next-generation talent, from KNWLS, Aaron Esh and Conner Ives to the Central Saint Martins MA fashion show.

Here, reported from the shows, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss rounds up the best of London Fashion Week A/W 2024.

The best of London Fashion Week A/W 2024

Burberry

It was a return to the great outdoors for Daniel Lee’s third runway collection for Burberry, shown yesterday evening in a vast tent erected in east London’s Victoria Park (on the floor were woodchips, while guests sat on enormous fleece cushions). It has been a thematic link that has run through his opening triptych, initially inspired by tents and outdoor-wear from the late-19th and early-20th centuries that he found in the British house’s archive. ‘Burberry’s heritage of the outdoors continues to inspire me,’ said the Yorkshire-born designer in a series of quotes issued after the show. ‘[This season], I wanted this collection to feel warm and protective.’

Soundtracked by a collage of Amy Winehouse clips and music – Lee said backstage that he was inspired by her tenacious desire to write about her life, in her own way – the collection doubled down on Burberry’s synonymy with outerwear, seeing a funnel-neck moleskin version of the trench coat, abbreviated parkas and puffers, and hefty shearlings appear throughout. The mood of textural richness was inspired, Lee said, by British and Irish wool and fabric (also used across long pleated skirts, zip-front trousers, and myriad enveloping, homespun knitwear). ‘[It’s] functional – these pieces are made for the outdoors,’ he said. The line-up of models, including Agyness Deyn, Lily Donaldson, Lily Cole, Naomi Campbell and Edie Campbell, recalled the 2010s, when Burberry was at cultural ubiquity. 

Backstage, after the show, Lee noted the trickiness of designing for a brand that is made to appeal to huge swathes of people: from royalty to football fans. With this collection – which was full of seductive propositions for real-world wintertime dressing – Lee made his strongest push yet. ‘I have to have a point of view,’ he said. ‘You can’t just make a simple trench coat forever.’

Aaron Esh

A brilliant winter collection from rising London-based designer Aaron Esh, inspired by the dress codes of his inner circle, closed out Sunday evening in an intimate show at east London’s Sarabande (Esh recently became part of the foundation, which was set up by Lee McQueen and offers studio spaces to emerging artists and designers). Building on his runway debut in September 2023, staged at Tate Modern against views of the London skyline, the designer once again noted the influence of his native city and its ‘rhizomatic’ streets. ‘It’s the clothes that I see when I’m at a house party; or the clothes someone would wear to do an off-licence run – big shades, ripped jeans, a blouse thrown over her shoulder,’ he told Wallpaper’s Hannah Tindle at the time.

It lends his work a kind of dishevelled sensuality, where slinky bias-cut dresses, smeared eyeliner, sunglasses, caps and hoodies meet intriguing tailoring, like a wide-lapelled tuxedo cut with a poker-straight hem (later, it evolved into an expansive overcoat), or the pinched hooded tailored jackets that the models grasped closed with their hands. Esh says that he hopes the ease of his clothing belies the craft and construction behind them, something that felt achieved here: his models looked as if wandering home from evenings out, or perhaps the morning after. Skinny jeans, meanwhile, heralded the return of a silhouette introduced by Hedi Slimane in the 2000s while at Dior Homme – the French designer’s singular, subculture-infused approach no doubt an influence on Esh’s growing oeuvre. 

JW Anderson

Nosy neighbours, M&S knickers, horse riding trophies – after the show, Jonathan Anderson laid out the nostalgic inspiration points for his A/W 2024 collection, presented this season at Marylebone’s Seymour Leisure Centre in a shift from The Roundhouse. ‘It was something twisted, in terms of the woman next door,’ he said, a mood elaborated in the press release as ‘a grotesque everydayness, in grotesque distortions and proportions’. So there were knit dresses with enormous stitches, trails of blown-up haberdashery adornments, layers of everyday ribbed underwear and vests, house slippers, and brassy grey curly wigs. In its strange banality it was surprisingly affronting, a further demonstration of Anderson’s ability to traverse the seductive and the ugly (the designer is perhaps only equalled by Miuccia Prada in his ability to strike this dichotomy so successfully season on season). 

Other pieces were designed to recall interiors, like a series of twisted dresses which evoked curtains and curtain ties, looping elegantly around the model’s bodies (their evolution into a version in pearl made for a convincing proposition for a contemporary wedding gown). Outerwear recalled British heritage styles, here blown up in size and slightly dishevelled, pulled up at the sleeve to reveal the lining beneath, while everyday staples like the striped sweater and sweatpant shorts appeared throughout. Anderson elaborated backstage that it was in part a consideration of Britain, a strange refraction of the country’s past – at once nostalgic and subverted, likening it to the slew of recent songs that have risen up the charts years after they have been released. 

‘Young people are discovering nostalgia,’ he said. ‘And then they glorify [things from the past], and it becomes a kind of future thinking in a didactic way. They’re like mixing things that my parents know, that we all know, and reconfiguring them. It makes nostalgia not such a scary thing.’

Simone Rocha

Simone Rocha described her A/W 2024 collection as the closing chapter of a triptych of works which began with last season’s ‘Dress Rehearsal’ – capturing the anticipation and fraughtness of the evening before a wedding – and continued with the designer’s haute couture collection for Jean Paul Gaultier shown in Paris last month, which was titled ‘The Procession’ and looked towards the nuptials themselves. Presented in medieval church St Bartholomew-the-Great in Smithfield, the conclusion was titled ‘The Wake’, with Rocha beginning the collection by looking towards the mourning attire of Queen Victoria after the death of her husband Prince Albert (famously, she would mourn the loss for over four decades of her life). It made for fertile ground for the Irish designer, whose collections have long had a swelling undercurrent of darkness despite the beauty of their execution. Here, pelts of faux fur sat on the shoulders of delicate, near-transparent tailoring, while corsets – adorned with shimmering crystal embellishment under the chest – seemed a continuation of her collaboration with Gaultier. Unexpected accessories came in the shape of soft-toy lambs carried in the models’ arms, a nod to the mythical animals which serve as church guardians, while mourning blacks were reimagined in tie-hem anoraks, worn with faux-fur stoles adorned with crystals. ‘This was the final piece of the triptych, because I was working on these collections at the same time,’ explained Rocha backstage. ‘I’ve been looking at a lot of preserved garments, a lot of archives, and I really wanted to take that and place it today.’

Molly Goddard

A vast mural by London Group artist Ivon Hitchens provided the colourful backdrop for Molly Goddard’s latest collection, staged at the main hall of Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in north London. The collection itself reflected the work’s freewheeling composition – Hitchens took three years to complete the 1954 mural, which depicts a mass of abstract figures dancing in a mythical woodland – with Goddard noting that this season she once again began the collection with an ‘experimental fitting’. In these, the designer takes vintage pieces, samples from her archive and toiles and begins to combine them as a starting point for the collection (she also noted inspiration from her eBay watch list, which with two young children is currently comprised of colourful baby and toddler wear). Here, it led her to a consideration of form – ‘shapes on top of shapes; garments combining – pulling in, pushing out, smushing’ – in part inspired by the haute couture silhouettes of Cristobal Balenciaga and Christian Dior, though relaxed with elasticated and tie fastenings for the everyday. Meanwhile, a continuing exploration of tulle – this season, Goddard described their construction as ‘blobs’, tightly ruffled shapes which provided dramatic silhouettes across skirts, shirts and dresses – met slouchy sweaters, cowboy jackets and polka-dot tops and bustiers in a collection of refreshing levity. 

Roksanda

Earlier this week, Zendaya wore a Roksanda look to Dennis Villenvenue’s Dune: Part Two London premiere: a plum-hued suit, jacket nipped in at the waist with exaggerated shoulders and loose-cut trousers, layered with a knee-length skirt. It turned out this was a sneak preview of the A/W 2024 collection presented yesterday, against the backdrop of the Tate Britain. (The suit opened the show with Law Roach, the actor’s stylist, watching on from the front row).

This season Ilinčić said she had been inspired by Le Corbusier, one of the Serbian-born designer’s ‘heroes’, and that she had recently spent time at the architect’s tiny holiday cabin, Cabanon de Le Corbusier. It was constructed in 1951 and located in Cap Martin, a coastal commune in the South of France. The interiors, and most notably the murals in the entrance hall, were subsequently referenced in the tapestries swathing around the body and trailing dramatically along the runway. Melton wool, a fabric ‘used in interiors and homes, places that provide refuge and comfort’, formed the opening suit and additional tailored pieces, where boucle, fil coupé jacquard, and a smattering of faux fur also lent themselves to the embrace of soft furnishings.

Roksanda is renowned for her considered use of colour, and of course, A/W 2024 was no different. The show notes reeled off a descriptive list of shades, reminiscent of the names that one might find on tins of expensive emulsion: Chartreuse-Verse, Canvas, Dark Flamant, Grey-Melange, Bleu-Cair, Pale-Lime, Light Hibiscus, Antique Rose, Peche-Clair. There were also sportier nods to windbreakers and wellingtons (footwear was produced in collaboration with Fit Flop), with the closing looks of the show taking the form of huge taffeta dresses that appeared almost tent-like, as though held up with a framework of poles. They conjured the idea of spending a windswept day along the coast, before returning to the warmth of a lavishly decorated home. Hannah Tindle

16Arlington

Writer and curator Charlie Fox’s 2019 exhibition My Head is a Haunted House, presented at Sadie Coles gallery, provided the starting point for Marco Capaldi’s A/W 2024 collection for 16Arlington. At the time, the group show was described by Fox as an attempt to recall ’the hallucinogenic memory’ of a childhood obsessed with werewolves, bats and monsters; here, Capaldi gave the monstrous a more elegant twist, seeing his sharp, streamlined vision for the brand enlivened with flourishes of strangeness, like swathes of shaggy faux fur or the clattering tinsel looks which closed the show. A pair of diaphanous white dresses, meanwhile, seemed to conjure Frankenstein’s bride, while shirts and sweaters tied around the neck in lieu of scarves suggested a mash-up of parts. ‘It’s not about Halloween – it’s about human nature,’ Capaldo said. ‘Hence the title of the show, I’m Not Sorry, It’s Human Nature, borrowed, of course, from Madonna. Those who go against conventions are often ostracised, but there’s so much strength and power and beauty in rejecting norms. These are the people I design for.’

Dunhill

For its first runway show since 2020 – and the first collection from newly installed creative director Simon Holloway – Dunhill chose the Duveen Wing of the National Portrait Gallery, a series of rooms inaugurated by King George V and Queen Mary in 1933. The historic venue hinted a return to classicism for the British brand (itself in its 130th year), a mood also captured in show’s the layout, which with its low-lit individual tables, gin martinis and dainty plates of cucumber and caviar sandwiches nodded towards traditional salon-style fashion presentations of the early 20th century.  

’This collection celebrates our origins and subsequent evolution into a unique British luxury house,’ explained Holloway of the A/W 2024 collection, which sought to capture Dunhill’s rich tailoring heritage and tradition of dressing figures from stage and screen (earlier in the week, the brand hosted a star-studded pre-BAFTA party, a hint towards this new direction). So the collection itself ran the gamut of what Holloway called the ‘finer things in life’ – whether motor racing (recalled in the suede field jacket worn by model Kit Butler, or the leather driving gloves throughout), jaunts to the great outdoors (gabardine chinos, blazers in heritage checks and cord, aran-stitch cashmere sweaters) or a swathe of evening wear, including an elegant ivory riff on the tuxedo with matching bowtie and overcoat (worn here with a sneaker).

‘[These are the things] we have always done best,’ concluded Holloway of the collection, which felt like something of a palette cleanser for his tenure ahead. ‘I hope we have re-captured that spirit, one that is at once refined and international,’

Fashion East

There was an interesting synchronicity to this season’s Fashion East designers Olly Shinder and Johanna Parv – the latter in her third and final season at the talent incubator – who both provided their own distinct riffs on the nine-to-five wardrobe. Shinder, who last season presented a debut collection of pieces inspired by the sporty, sleazy nightlife uniforms of Berlin and London, where the designer splits his time. Soundtracked once again by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, here Shinder turned his attention towards the corporate uniform, which was ‘queered... displaced, subverted and refined’. So there was a take on ’middle managerial’ shirting, which appeared to have been grasped at the collar and sliced down the back, while other pieces continued Shinder’s more familiar exploration of workwear, with clean-lined functional sets with PVC at the sleeves and over the trousers, as if models were about to deal with hazardous materials (indeed, Shinder likened his studio this season to a lab). Completing the lineup were pieces primed for the dance floor: slick, semi-shirted latex bodysuits, or abbreviated mini shorts in black and silver. Judging by buzz, he already has an audience for these clothes.

Parv, meanwhile, is a designer who looks towards the functionality of sportswear through toggle and adjustable fastenings, and technical fabrics, attempting to replicate them across the full gamut of a woman’s wardrobe. This season, a polished collection continued this approach with what she said was inspired by the ‘topography of the city’, and the demands of urban life. The mood was darker, and more sensual than previously – the skirt suit was sliced open at the front and shoulders – while zip-up mini dresses were featherweight in their fabrication. As ever, a series of clever accessories accompanied in the form of leather bumbags and handbags with an adjustable nylon strap, evocative of those found on a backpack. It will be interesting to see what Parv does next.

If anyone was wondering when the 1980s fashion revival was going to ramp up, look towards Copenhagen, where the city’s breakout design star, Nicklas Skovgaard, is single-handedly reigniting the era that brought us white stilettos and shoulder pads. 

‘It’s kind of weird, but I’ve always had this obsession with the 1980s since I was a young,’ says Skovgaard, who had Melanie Griffith’s Tess McGill from Working Girl, Lecia Jönsson of Danish band Laban, and his aerobics instructor mother, Annie, on his mood board for A/W 2024 (the collection was shown earlier this month as part of  Copenhagen Fashion Week).

Nicklas Skovgaard: Copenhagen’s designer to watch

‘I was born in the mid-1990s so I never experienced the 1980s myself, but I remember as a child always hearing my mother telling me about the time of her life when she was in her mid-to-late twenties,’ he says. ‘It’s the time of my life that I’m living right now so I guess that’s why it appeals to me.’ It turns out that the fashion world also wants to embrace the decade, as interpreted through Skovgaard’s eyes, with the same enthusiasm.

Subsequently, the young Dane has become somewhat of a national treasure within just two seasons of showing collections at Copenhagen Fashion Week. Following the success of his debut show in August which saw the designer collaborate with the performance artist Britt Liberg to stage a one-woman show – she modelled every single look in the collection to rapturous applause and critical acclaim – he was asked to open the five-day event for the A/W 2024 season. It’s a trajectory the 29-year-old is handling with characteristic humility.

‘It was a great honour [opening fashion week] but also a great deal of pressure on top of last season,’ he tells Wallpaper*. ‘From the beginning, I kept on saying to myself that I wanted to create a show just like we wanted it to be, without thinking too much about what we did last season and not having any high praise or pressure or affect our choices in terms of creating and making the show.’ For the A/W 2024 collection, he did just that, having each of his models saunter around a deconsecrated church pulling playful poses that could have jumped off the cover of an old copy of Woman’s Own, wearing pleated midi skirts, suede-insert leather bomber jackets and sequined funnel necks.

Skovgaard’s independent streak is a recurring theme throughout his career to date. After an early career in interiors, he diverted his attention to fashion during the pandemic after finding a child’s loom in a thrift shop on holiday. Having taught himself how to weave on it by watching YouTube and Instagram tutorials, he began to make his own materials. He would then made those materials into clothes, selling them via Instagram.

To this day, he still whips up his own fabrics (albeit on a bigger loom), combining them with additional responsibly sourced fabrics to meet the demands of his growing business (which he said doubled in sales and production for S/S 2024). For A/W 2024, which is his eighth collection to date, there was a continuation of hand-woven brushed wool and alpaca, though here mixed with lambskin leather, chiffon, faux fur, vinyl, lycra and mohair to achieve the mood of the 80s epoch. ‘I try to make my collections as continuous as possible,’ he says. ‘I like to keep on reworking and rethinking pieces of the last collection into the new collection.’

Being the new wunderkind on the block doesn’t come without its challenges. The fashion industry has been pulled up lately on promoting new talent, and then dropping off when a designer is somewhere in between ‘emerging’ and ‘established’. But Skovgaard is all too aware of what he needs next. ‘The health of the business is good at the time being,’ he says. ’I think for my brand, I see myself very much as a maker, rather than as a businessperson [so] I think the best support would be working closely with a team that could be mentoring and guiding the business side. But of course [they] would also be someone that understands the vision of the brand.’

For now, Skovgaard is happy living out his dream playing with the aesthetics of his favourite decade. ‘The brand had quite an accidental start to it, but has been growing very organically over the past years. I never did a business plan at first, and I think following the [organic] journey of the brand, without having too many strict plans to follow, has helped the brand grow into the success I’m seeing at the moment.’

Nicklas Skovgaard’s S/S 2024 collection is available from nicklasskovgaard.com and ssense.com

nicklasskovgaard.com

Every minute, Chāmpo sells a bottle of its Pitta Growth Serum, a scalp treatment designed to encourage hair growth. It is the kind of stat every beauty business dreams of and one Chāmpo that has achieved in just four years. So what’s the secret? In part, it is that its founder Kuldeep Knox, has created a product that addresses a problem many people (including women) have, but few brands actually address: hair loss.

A number of years back, Knox started to experience drastic hair thinning. Quickly, she realised that many of the women she knew had also gone through the same.  ‘My experience of hair thinning just really knocked my self confidence,’ Knox tells me over a call from her office in London, ‘and it made me realise how important a hair is to self-identity.’

Chāmpo is the fastest growing hair brand in the UK

‘I started talking to friends of mine and I was really surprised that pretty much every single woman I spoke to was also suffering with hair loss concerns, but there wasn't a product on the market that was high performance, natural, and also looked like something we wanted to have on our bathroom shelves.’ So, Knox set out to create the product herself. How exactly she was going to do that though, didn’t become clear until a visit from her grandmother. ‘It was during the time of my own hair thinning that grandmother visited from India,’ Knox says. ‘I noticed that she just had the most incredible long, dark, thick hair even though she was in her late 70s, so I started speaking to her about her hair secrets and the Ayurvedic ingredients and rituals that she'd been using. That was the moment I really started my own personal wellness journey.’

Knox began researching the techniques her grandmother taught her, and quickly discovered that they derived from ancient teachings of Ayurveda. The vision for Chāmpo suddenly became clear, and Knox spent the next eighteen months working with expert trichologists and natural chemists on over 150 rounds of formulations to develop six products that set a new benchmark for what natural haircare performance could really be. 

To those unfamiliar with Ayurveda and its relation to hair care, Knox describes it thus: ‘Ayurveda is an ancient healing system that encompasses yoga, diet, massage, herbal remedies and looks at health holistically, focusing on prevention rather than cure. Ayurveda uses three different doshas to describe different body and character types and tailor recommendations to each. With Chāmpo, we’ve channelled this Ayurvedic diagnostic system to tailor haircare to the specific needs of different hair types: Pitta, Kapha and Vitta.’ 

Pitta products are for fine, delicate hair that needs strengthening and protection. The Pitta dosha’s element is fire, a consumer of energy, and Pitta hair types are associated with hair that has been depleted and worn by environmental and emotional factors. As such, they are formulated with strengthening haritaki fruit extract to thicken hair and sandalwood to kickstart circulation at the scalp.

Then there’s Kapha for thick, heavy hair that may be oily and frizzy. The Kapha dosha, associated with earth and water, represents imbalance and as such is designed to protect against humidity and pollution, while also treating excess oil production from the scalp with turmeric root extract, whilst ends are softened with a mild form of coconut oil. Finally, there’s Vitta for damaged, lacklustre hair, damaged by heat styling and sun exposure. It’s also formulated with coconut to offer a heavy dose of moisture, plus smoothing macadamia seed oil. 

Beyond the dosha shampoos and conditioners, there is a brow serum that, almost miraculously, thickens brows and fills in gaps within a few weeks time. There’s also a styling cream, and new hair growth supplements that taste so good it’s hard to eat just the recommended two per day. And then, of course, there is the serum. The hero product that has earned Chāmpo its cult following. Formulated with caffeine, creatine and haritaki extract, the serum visibly increases the density of hair within a month of regular use. You don’t have to wait that long to see some results though, with hair looking smoother and shinier after only a few uses.

And therein lies the ultimate reason behind Chāmpo’s meteoric success: these products actually work. As Knox herself says, ‘being announced as the fastest growing beauty company in the UK was such a proud moment for us because it took years of consistent, fast and profitable growth. I was really determined to create something that would deliver results to customers in a moment of need, because I know from my own experience how much hair loss can knock your self confidence. So I’m really proud that it's helped hundreds of thousands of people.’

champohaircare.com

Acqua di Parma has opened a playfully vibrant café in the heart of Seoul’s Lotte Tower Mall in South Korea. Designed by Dorothée Meilichzon, Acqua di Parma Yellow Café beautifully balances Italian architectural details with the energetic nature of Seoul, delivering a colourful space that is fun and sophisticated.

A reflection of the brand's Mediterranean roots, the boutique café is finished in noble white stone. Arches, and vaults replicate a Milanese cityscape, while splashes of azure blues and citrus yellows happily boost serotonin levels upon entering.

Step inside Acqua di Parma Yellow Café

The maison’s iconic art deco bottle is a source of inspiration throughout the space. Whether it be subtle detailing within table and column design to two life-size Blu Mediterraneo that stand tall at the entrance, the brand’s identity is notable throughout.

The warming hues of the maison’s signature colour palette make for an inviting space, while the vivid design gently nods to the Memphis movement. Round tables and soft yellow seating create a cosy ambience, encouraging communal conversations and interactions. Acqua di Parma products, (which are all made in Italy since the brand was founded in 1916) gracefully line the shelves of the central kitchen area. Meilichzon honed in on the brand’s affinity with citrus, integrating citrus peel textures and swirling curves into the design from sculptures to textural plaster.

The café’s decadent menu also creates an aroma of fresh citrus notes reminiscent of the maison’s fragrances. Drawing from Italian cuisine it includes a light panna cotta, colonia tart, tiramisu, and lemon or orange mousse cake, which will be updated seasonally and in occurrence with the maison’s new launches. Whether it be to browse the shelves to indulge in the scents of Blu Mediterraneo or Colonia, or to take part in coffee-tasting masterclasses, Acqua di Parma Yellow Café serves up a slice of Italian sun.

‘Designing the Acqua di Parma space in South Korea was an exploration of cultural synthesis  and vibrant aesthetics,’ says the designer Meilichzon. ‘My vision was to build bridges that connect the architectural heritage of Italy, particularly Milanese design, with the dynamic spirit of South Korea, especially Seoul. I drew inspiration from the Memphis movement, while paying homage to giant monuments, white stone, arches, vaults, and porticos that speak of timeless beauty. They are all coming together to create a space that is as much a cultural dialogue as it is a design statement.’

Acqua di Parma Yellow Café is open now.

acquadiparma.com

Yves Saint Laurent opened his first Rive Gauche store in September 1966 at 21 Rue de Tournon, in Paris’ 6th arrondissement. Located in a former antique store in a Left Bank neighbourhood largely known at the time for its distinctly bohemian clientele – the arrondissement is also home to the Beaux-Arts de Paris art school – it would be the first boutique to sell ready-to-wear clothing by an haute couture designer. ‘I’d had enough of making dresses for jaded billionaires,’ said the designer, who went on to open Rive Gauche stores in London and New York. In 1969, he opened an outpost for men.

A 2011 exhibition on Rive Gauche, subtitled ‘La révolution de la mode’ (the fashion revolution), proves the fashion store is as much a part of Saint Laurent history as cut or silhouette. It’s a mantle picked up by the current creative director Anthony Vaccarello, who each season reinterprets elements of Yves Saint Laurent’s oeuvre in his own seductive style – befitting the house’s Parisian origins, the Belgian designer’s collections have largely been shown with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop, breaking into its glimmering light show at the collection’s climax.

Saint Laurent’s monumental new Paris store

In 2019, Vaccarello opened his own version, Rive Droite (‘Right Bank’), across the River Seine on Rue Saint-Honoré, taking over the former location of cult concept store Colette. Inspired by Rive Gauche’s democratic approach, the wunderkammer- like store houses one-off projects and collaborations, which might span exhibitions, art books or various Saint Laurent-branded ephemera, from skateboards and bicycles to speakers and coffee cups. Meanwhile, a sister store was opened later that year on LA’s Rodeo Drive. ‘Saint Laurent was a very youthful brand in the 1960s and 1970s,’ Vaccarello said at the time. ‘It shouldn’t become something sacred and untouchable.’

The house’s latest opening is more ambitious in scale. Located on historic Paris shopping boulevard Champs-Élysées, it marks the first full-scale showcase of Vaccarello’s reimagined ‘store concept’ for the house (a teaser came in 2022 with the opening of a store on Boulevard Saint-Germain, offering ‘a first glimpse of what will evolve into his new architectural vision for Saint Laurent’). It comes as the Champs-Élysées enjoys something of a renaissance as numerous fashion openings, alongside some major renovations – like the vast new Louis Vuitton ‘project’ at number 103 – anticipate the arrival of the Olympics this summer.

‘I wanted to realise one of Yves Saint Laurent’s wishes when he arrived in Paris and said he wanted his name to be written in fiery letters on the Champs-Élysées,’ says Vaccarello of the outpost, located at number 123. Behind the 19th-century building’s decorative Haussmannian façade – itself renovated for the project – are several stone-clad rooms that house Vaccarello’s latest collections and reflect the designer’s rigorous, monumental approach to design, so often defined by the visual impact of a silhouette. His recent menswear shows, with their dramatically pitched shoulders and narrow-waisted tailoring, are a good example of this philosophy, set against modernist, temple-like show locations, such as Tadao Ando’s concrete-clad rotunda in Paris gallery Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection or Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1968.

Indeed, the stark architecture of the latter (Van der Rohe’s last major construction and an enduring emblem of the modernist school) inspired Vaccarello’s monumental S/S 2024 womenswear show set, produced by Bureau Betak, which featured a series of enormous stone and marble walls lining the runway. ‘A modernist set of kaleidoscopic, mineral surfaces, affording views of the Eiffel Tower while highlighting its soft elegance,’ is how the house described it at the time. 

This same fixation with surface and materials extends to the store, which can be seen as an architectural continuation of the set (Vaccarello noted that the S/S24 collection signalled something of a shift in approach, moving towards simplicity and pragmatism, albeit instilled with the ‘assertive sophistication’ synonymous with the house). Undulating textures of marble and stone dominate the double-height foyer space and can be found throughout the four-floored store, which is punctuated by simple rails of clothing. The result is a seductive assemblage of surfaces: some raw, cracked and brutal, others softer, like a vast grey carpet flecked with blue, evoking hunks of lapis lazuli still embedded in rock. Vaccarello says he hopes to capture a mood of ‘sophistication, modernity and timelessness’.

The space is also populated with works by American sculptor Donald Judd, including a pair of painted aluminium chairs, while wooden seating by Austrian-born American architect Rudolph Schindler and enormous custom-made marble display tables continue the mood of architectural reduction. On the upper floor, a VIP suite (a contemporary evocation of Yves Saint Laurent’s haute couture salon) features an enormous circular mirror, while glass doors lead out to a lush private garden. Vaccarello says he hopes people ‘forget about their phones, [and just] enjoy the experience of the space’.

And, if Yves Saint Laurent’s name is not entirely ablaze in the fiery letters that he desired, then a neon light sculpture by Welsh conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans hanging in the foyer – an illuminated collection of intertwining shapes and forms – offers a gleaming waymarker for Vaccarello’s luminous architectural vision ahead, where he reimagines the couturier’s legacy anew.

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

Lucia Pica is speaking to me over a Zoom call from the Byredo offices in London. She’s in town from Paris to mark the launch of her latest product range for the brand, the next chapter in her role as creative image and make-up partner. A revered make-up artist, Pica, who has previously headed up beauty at houses such as Chanel, took the reins at Byredo in 2022, starting her tenure with a line of vinyl liquid lipsticks in muted shades of nude, and a collection of products called ‘First Emotions’ (which won a 2023 Wallpaper* Design Award for Best Use of Colour). Now, it’s matte formulations she’s turning to, in a wider spectrum of colours that pack a punch. (One is even wryly named ‘Red Coma’.)

Lucia Pica on Byredo’s Liquid Lipstick Matte collection

‘I've had the shade “Calmer” on for most of the day, which is sort of like a 1990s, brown colour. And I just applied “Marriage” on top, which is a rich burgundy. I also really love “Fire Grace”, which is more of a blue-toned red. Then there’s “Space in Between”, which is exactly what it says: an in-between colour,’ says Pica, when I ask what she likes to wear herself. Matte lipsticks have a reputation for being rather drying and claggy, which is something that Pica was keen to avoid for the Liquid Lipstick Matte collection. ‘For me, when it comes to make-up, senses and touch are so important, because it’s something that becomes a part of you. And I didn’t want to make a heavy, dry, powdery matte texture. So what we have here is very nourishing and moisturising,’ she continues. ‘It glides on the lips very easily and the applicator means that you can do a bold lip, or blur out the edges for a softer effect. It has a very strong delivery of colour, but the experience of it is so sensual. I find it almost compulsive the way you want to continue to put it on and on and on.’

In the days since our conversation, I really have been applying ‘Space in Between’ continuously, as it’s an ideal every day colour for me, a rose tone that leans brown rather than pink. The texture is sensorial dream; it glides on like velvet, remains creamy on the lips, yet doesn’t skimp on staying power. (In addition, the formulations are vegan.) I was even able to forgo lip liner, too, using use the thinner tip of the doe-foot applicator to cleanly draw a shape around the vermillion border and define the cupid’s bow. Later this evening, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I’ll be switching to ‘Fire Grace’, which happens to match the gel polish I’m wearing almost exactly.

‘With Byredo, we tend to have this mixture between primordial and sophisticated,’ concluded Pica, just before she left the call to prepare for an intimate dinner that Byredo was hosting to celebrate the Matte Liquid Lipstick collection that evening. ‘And I think, in the same way that a scent has a power of leaving a mark on someone’s memory, that lipstick does the same,’ said Pica. ‘It's also about pleasure, having fun. I saw Poor Things recently and I thought… The matte lipsticks we’ve created here are products that Bella Baxter would enjoy wearing.’

The Byredo Liquid Lipstick Matte collection by Lucia Pica is available now, £40.

byredo.com

APOC Store has cemented itself as one of the most progressive online marketplaces, championing emerging designers and makers through a curated buy of clothes, shoes, accessories, jewellery, and more. Now, almost four years on from the store’s opening (it was founded by Ying Suen and Jules Volleberg in 2020), nail art has been added to the roster.

‘APOC Store has always been a platform to discover and support young talent. Being known as a fashion and art platform, we are always open to extending our offering,’ says Volleberg. ‘In recent years, we saw such a surge in creative nail artists across social media, particularly ones that were approaching nails as a medium for their art as opposed to simply an adornment. A lot of them were already working with artists or larger brands, yet their works weren’t readily available for purchase.’

APOC Store’s collaboration with nail artists

This sparked an idea between the founders to bring press-on nail art and nail jewellery to the APOC community, tapping a selection of artists who are renowned for their visionary work. This spans from ready-to-wear designs to bespoke and intricate pieces – some even using sculptural techniques such as upcycling to reinterpret the French manicure, or 3D-printing to provide fingertips with an otherworldly feel.

‘It was a very organic process,’ continues Volleberg. ‘We started with speaking to nail artists who have previously collaborated with APOC designers and other creatives that we admire. Afterwards, we did extensive research on the different techniques and materials used and being inspired by such a wide range of talents, we also wanted to reflect this in our offering.’

Artists include the likes of digital fashion studio Dinara Garaeva, who has brought its designs into the ‘real world’ through sculptural, silvery tendrils; Doux Nails, renowned for its textural, chrome finishes; Texto Dallas and RÄTHEL & WOLF, who makes jewellery to frame the tips of fingers and has worked on exclusive pieces specifically for this project. This marks the start of a push towards a bigger beauty-based offering for APOC. ‘We already started exploring different types of adornments, including face jewellery and temporary tattoos, as well as extending our hair offering,’ says Volleberg. ‘Stay tuned…’

The APOC Nails collection is available now.

apoc-store.com

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

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

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

S/S 2024 womenswear looks for escape and discovery

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

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

You might expect a designer collaborating with a champagne house to conjure up an aesthetically pleasing bottle or label, and perhaps some merch to match. But this was not the case for Stella McCartney’s recent collaboration with Veuve Clicquot. Instead, it was about what they could give her: specifically, the stalks, skins, pulp, and discarded fruits left over from the grape harvest, which takes place each year between September and October.

The reason is Vegea, a pioneering leather alternative from Italy made from the leftovers of large-scale grape farming. Founded in 2016 by furniture designer Gianpiero Tessitore and industrial chemist Francesco Merlino, it is solvent- and metal-free, and does not use any environmentally harmful substances. It also evokes real leather in weight and suppleness.

McCartney has been using Vegea for some time. She says, ‘One day I said to Bernard Arnault [CEO of luxury goods group LVMH, of which Stella McCartney is a part]: “I’m putting bags down my runway made from grape waste from the Italian wine industry, so why are we not doing it with one of your champagnes?”.’ Less than 18 months later, a woven ‘Frayme’ bucket bag, created from Vegea leather made from Veuve Clicquot grapes, appeared on the Stella McCartney catwalk.

Stella McCartney’s grape-leather bags

Now available for pre-order in limited-edition numbers, each is adorned with a tag evocative of a bunch of grapes, featuring a QR code that details the bag’s construction and traceable origins. An accompanying pair of platform sandals are also made from Vegea and feature a sole made out of popped corks from Café Clicquot, the restaurant at the house’s cellars in Reims.

The region’s strict laws about champagne production means that McCartney can trace the raw material all the way back to a single patch of grand cru vineyard in the village of Bouzy, where Veuve Clicquot grows the grapes to create the red wine needed for the house’s rosé champagne. The technique of mixing wines in this way was pioneered by the eponymous Madame Clicquot, who took over the company after her husband’s death and first purchased this vineyard patch two centuries ago.

‘Madame Clicquot’s innovations revolutionised the champagne industry,’ says McCartney. ‘She created vintage champagne and blended rosé champagne, and helped shape the modern champagne bottle, all at a time when very few businesses were owned by women [a legal loophole allowed her to inherit the vineyard as a widow]. She was truly a disruptor.’

The patch of land is also unique in Veuve Clicquot’s commitment to regenerative agriculture, which largely centres on the rejection of herbicides in favour of natural and traditional techniques. One such method is grazing sheep in the vineyards, which has been shown to improve soil quality and the bioavailability of nutrients, making for quality grapes and abundant harvests.

‘Regenerative agriculture is a long-term commitment – it demonstrates our spirit of climate entrepreneurship,’ says Veuve Clicquot CEO Jean-Marc Gallot. ‘We are always testing new practices to drive the change – eco-grazing, cover cropping or [using] green manure, to name just a few.’

Gallot says he is confident that this initial collaboration with McCartney can be scaled up, and believes that such innovations should be shared with other champagne producers (‘shared, open and collective’ is how he describes the house’s approach to such regenerative practices, which are becoming more and more the norm in the region).

‘I know a lot of our customers have no idea they are buying a non-leather bag, which just shows there’s no need to kill more than one billion creatures annually,’ says McCartney, who has never used animal products in her collections and has been one of fashion’s most steadfast sustainability advocates. ‘I believe we can get to a place where leather alternatives are seen in the same way as the real thing.’

The Stella McCartney Frayme Veuve Clicquot Bucket Bag is available for pre-order at stellamccartney.com.

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

Saint Laurent continues its expansion in Paris – where it recently opened a vast new flagship on Champs-Élysées – with its latest project, Saint Laurent Babylone, a store entirely devoted to art, books and culture. 

Situated at 9 Rue de Grenelle in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, the new cultural store's name references the ties that Yves Saint Laurent and partner Pierre Bergé had to the Sèvres–Babylone neighbourhood (the pair moved to 55 Rue de Babylone in 1970). 

Inside Saint Laurent Babylone

Anthony Vaccarello, Saint Laurent’s current creative director, said that he wanted the space to emulate the iconic Saint Laurent Rive Gauche boutique, which opened in 1966 and later spread roots to the Sèvres-Babylone neighbourhood.

Capturing Paris’ longtime links with literature and the arts, inside the store the specially curated collection of books, prints, and tomes are laid out across minimal marble countertops in soft creams and whites, emulating the surrounding Haussmannian architecture.

Meanwhile, the large dusk blue and white rug adds to the textural landscape, accompanied by a minimal wooden table to sit around when jotting down fleeting ideas. The walls are stripped back, revealing off-white plastering, lending the space an industrial air.

Each item selected for the store, from SLRD editions, publications, out-of-print musical recordings, and original productions, was curated entirely by Vaccarello.

And, Saint Laurent Babylone is more than a traditional bookstore – over the coming months, the store will be transformed into an events space varying from live music sessions to author readings and signings, and a space to inspire those who enter.

ysl.com

It’s safe to say that in Japan – more than in any other part of Asia except, perhaps, South Korea – skincare is serious business. So much so that brand loyalty for the average consumer is measured in decades, if not generations. Not that the big guns just sit back, resting on their laurels and rolling out the occasional new serum and repackaging exercise. Rather, they might, like Ya-man – a beauty brand that debuted back in 1978 with hi-tech unisex face and body tools and an equally coveted skincare range – quietly unveil a stunning new look.

By any yardstick, the freshly minted 450 sq m flagship store in Ginza’s buzzy Chuo-dori Avenue is a smartly conceived salvo aimed squarely at the cashed-up millennial demographic with a penchant for beautiful design, unique (read, Instagrammable) retail experience, and sharply curated merchandise. That the two-storey store succeeds as well as it does on all three metrics owes much to the design of I In, the Tokyo-based studio deftly fusing elements of Ya-man’s products to create an immersive, almost psychedelic experience. 

Inside Ya-man’s Tokyo store (with a nod to Star Trek)

The brief required, among other things, an eye-catching street frontage, a tall order in a neighbourhood bristling with so many luxury tentpole brands, including Shiseido, which looms across the street. The solution was a futuristic, in-the-round glass column in the ground floor lobby, where the back wall, lined with shifting floor-to-ceiling LED and corona lights, brings to mind the Star Trek’s transporter room on the Enterprise. 

Designed as a kaleidoscopic nod to the LED technology central to much of Ya-man’s products, this dramatic light column (in morphing hues of red, orange, yellow, green and blue) forms the core of the store, say I In’s principals, Yohei Terui and Hiromu Yuyama. ‘The impression that you’re literally bathing in light is amplified by the fact that the light is diffused in multiple directions through a screen of glass that is designed specifically to subliminally resemble human skin cells.’

Behind and flanking the column in neat, back-lit rows are arrayed Ya-man’s hero products – elegantly sleek hand-held devices embedded with translucent LED nodes to treat just about every part of the face, hair and body, alongside regimented rows of creams and lotions. Edged with gold panels, the display shelves, say Terui and Yuyama, are individually lit in subdued light ‘where the interplay of light and dark create both a rhythm and the impression that the products are floating’.

The sensation of otherworldliness is carried through up to the second floor. Dubbed rather prosaically, the ‘Face Lift Gym’, the experience is luxuriously soigné as it morphs from the pulsing party vibe of downstairs to a more earthly, visually calmer mood of natural light. A series of creamy-hued semi-circular pods are lined in blonde timber, their silhouettes reflected in circles of light floating above each pod. Here, customers submit faces and tresses to the full range of Ya-man devices and products, whilst reclusive VIPs are whisked off to the back into a capacious suite swathed in white linen and walls, and gold accented furniture.

‘This is a store that fuses luxury with technology,’ say Terui and Yuyama, an altogether natural progression given their studio’s already proven track record in working with blue-chip brands, not least their design for Cartier’s Japanese HQ, Pokemon, and Shiseido. Up next for the busy duo is a waterfront concept house in Kamakura, which they believe will reinvent the way Japanese brands approach lifestyle, design and fashion.

The Ya-man flagship store is located at 8-9-1, Ginza, Chuo 104-0061 Tokyo Prefecture.

ya-man.co.jp 

New York Fashion Week A/W 2024 heralded the start of fashion month, which sees subsequent stopovers in London, Milan and Paris in the coming weeks. It was an energetic opening act: Peter Do’s sophomore collection for Helmut Lang began proceedings with a collection which mused on the dichotomy between armour and adornment, while Willy Chavarria – selected as part of the Wallpaper* USA 300 last year – rounded out the opening day with a collection which cemented him as one of the city’s most intriguing talents. 

Meanwhile, Paris-based Ludovic de Saint Sernin made his New York Fashion Week debut with an ode to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, while buzzy shows from Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, Thom Browne and Tory Burch were among the season’s biggest hitters. 

Here, reported from the shows, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss and contributing editor Tilly Macalister-Smith select the best of New York Fashion Week A/W 2024. 

The best of New York Fashion Week A/W 2024 

Thom Browne

Though Thom Browne’s latest show took place on Valentine’s Day – the holiday nodded to in the enormous heart-shaped box of flowers the designer grasped for his post-show bow – the inspiration for the collection itself was altogether darker, with Edgar Allan Poe’s haunting 1845 poem The Raven providing the season’s starting point. The poem tells the story of a man who after the death of his lover is visited by a talking raven, provoking a slow descent into madness; here, an altered version – with nods to Chesterfield puffers and silk moiré – was narrated by The Gilded Age actress Carrie Coon. 

It made for fertile ground for the theatrical Browne, whose towering cast of characters had a gleefully creepy air, their ruffled hair shaped into enormous sculptural plaits or adorned with delicate black mourning veils. The palette was largely black and white, like a series of plays on the tweed blazer – whether checkered, or deconstructed and patchworked – or white coats over which a flock of black ravens were appliquéd. Ravens also appeared across the dramatic closing look, which comprised an enormous gold brocade cape, removed at the end of the show like a ‘beguiling golden bug’, as the notes described. Watching over it all was a tree-like figure clad in a 30-foot-high version of the brand’s Chesterfield puffer – another dramatic flourish from the designer, who can always be relied upon to put on a show. JM

Gabriela Hearst

The dreamlike paintings of artist Leonora Carrington fueled Gabriela Hearst’s imagination this season. But, rather than lay claim to the artist as a source of inspiration, Hearst instead spotlighted a series of women through which she had learned about Carrington, from art historian and author Katy Hessel to journalist Jackie Wullschläger and writer Joanna Moorhead.  ’Teaching us empathy and about how others live; and to dream up a better world for all,’ said Hessel of the surrealist artist.

There’s something especially seductive about Hearst’s clothes during a winter season, with the richness and decadence of enveloping shearlings and sweeping gowns worn with riding boots. And then you remember – it’s Hearst, so it can’t be shearling, and you find that it’s actually shredded post-consumer recycled cashmere from Italian cashmere jumpers. (Hearst has made the seasonal commitment to deliver a document capturing the origin and composition of all the fabrics in the show, along with her show notes). For this collection, it stated that the clothes were constructed of 100 per cent natural fibres. These included fine cashmere corduroy (the first time anyone has produced this fabric), liquid silk velvet woven on historical French velvet looms only operated by one mill in Lyon, and a printed wool gauze based on flowers Hearst had found on vacation. TMS

Michael Kors

Michael Kors titled his A/W 2024 collection ‘Timeless’, reflecting the American designer’s ongoing desire to refine the building blocks of a woman’s wardrobe over pursuing fleeting trends. Taking place at the former Barneys New York space in Chelsea – a longtime pillar of American fashion, before it shuttered in 2020 – the designer said it was a collection which doubled down on the foundations of the eponymous label (something several New York designers seem to be doing this season). ‘One of my hallmarks has always been fashion that stands the test of time,’ he elaborated. 

So here was a collection of elegance and polish, one which spanned the gamut of garments which make up a woman’s wardrobe: nipped-waist double-breasted tailoring, leather jackets with soft shearling collars, pointed pumps, and even a hoodie. Flourishes of New York glamour, meanwhile, came in sequin adorned cardigans and lacy slip dresses, or the expansive fluffy overcoats in shades Kors described as ‘dusty makeup shades’, inspired by insouciant 1930s glamour. ‘When we talk about what’s timeless and what endures – it’s quality, it’s simplicity, it’s sophistication,’ said Kors. ’It’s clothes that make you feel confident and powerful.’ JM

Tory Burch

Tory Burch ended Monday evening’s proceedings with an evening-time takeover of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. Erecting a silver runway along one of the building’s ornate walkways, Burch said that this season she wanted to explore silhouette and proportion in new ways, a continuation of the recent gear-shift for the designer which has seen her embrace a more freewheeling, experimental approach to her eponymous label. ‘Internally there was a lot of discussion around the concept of being ”on brand” and that wasn’t interesting to me because it inhibits creativity. So, over the last five years, I’ve smashed that concept,’ she recently told Wallpaper*. 

So there was an intriguing strangeness to this season’s collection, whereby bonded, heat-sealed garments – like a series of tweed-like dresses and overcoats which opened the show – had an architectural silhouette though through their construction (which Burch noted started from the inside out) were surprisingly light and fluid in movement. Textural richness, meanwhile, came in fronds of tassels or twisting ruffles which curled around the hem of delicate diaphanous mini dresses, or sleeker hair-on-hide dipped outerwear. Other garments had a more sensual air, like the semi-sheer skirt worn by Emily Ratajkowski – its surface gently decorated with a shimmering degradé motif – combined in the show with a faux croc bodysuit and the brand’s vertiginous new ‘Pierced’ pump (a style complete with a sweeping abstract metal adornment which will no doubt be ubiquitous come next season). ‘We were thinking about making the everyday sublime,’ concluded Burch. JM

Coach

Presented in the regal James B. Duke House on New York’s Upper East Side – long synonymous with the city’s blue-blooded elite – Stuart Vevers presented a collection which clashed American classicism (epitomised in the show notes by John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette) with the ‘unvarnished’ eclecticism and spontaneity of the city’s streets. Ruffled debutante dresses in taffeta and tuxedo blazers were crumpled, as if their wearer had been up all night, paired with heavy worn-in leather boots as models stomped through the building’s downstairs salons. In their hands or slung over the shoulder, heaps of bags and accessories, including tourist charms of the Statue of Liberty and the city’s symbolic apple, as well as Yankee caps, perhaps New York’s most enduring accessory.

Elsewhere, Vevers offered a highly desirable wardrobe of pieces primed for the demands of city life; among them, elongated, gently oversized trench coats, shearling and tasselled leather jackets, and more playful sweaters adorned with bows and ducks. It made for one of the designer’s strongest outings at the American mega-brand for some time, and a decisive return to its New York origins, where the brand was founded in 1941. ‘We’re based in New York and embracing it – fashion escapism is not our style,’ said Vevers, who noted the collection originally began with thinking about New York love stories, like those by writer Nora Ephron. ‘[Her] tension between something romantic and picturesque and something very real and spontaneous is unique to New York, I think. And it captures the mood of the collection.’ JM

Zankov

‘Seduction and gusto!’ exclaimed Henry Zankov of the mood of his A/W 2024 collection at his presentation on Monday morning, as models and fans swirled around the designer in the Chelsea space. ‘Strong saturated colors with strong energy for evening,’ he expanded. ’That’s how the seduction happens.’ In his first outing since winning runner up at the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in October 2023, Zankov’s presentation was ratcheted up a notch. The street outside the skylight-studded gallery was lined with black suburbans (a tell-tale sign of a ‘moment’), while inside, teams of PRs with headsets ushered guests to the light-flooded atrium. Alongside brand hallmarks such as his perforated knits and intarsias, the clothes took on a new dimension: subtly engaging colour mixing, a wealth of texture, and some new categories. The tufted hand-worked ‘pom pom’ knits; the feathery shredded alpaca tomato-orange dress and scarf; and the mouline hand knit crew-neck were all asking to be stroked. A red deconstructed jumper, meanwhile, appeared to have been repurposed – but effortlessly – so that the model's head popped out of an arm hole while its sleeves were knotted at the hip. Scarves were a focal point: a moss green cashmere coat had one built into its neckline, a device he used again on a chartreuse fine gauge knit. TMS

Ulla Johnson

A soft-on-the-senses welcome: sandy deep pile carpet and soaring terracotta curtains absorbed the chatter as guests arrived for Ulla Johnson’s show on Sunday morning. In the hushed, soothing space, a towering sculpture by Mississippi-born artist Andrew Ondrejcak made in collaboration with Brooklyn-based artist Abby Cheney appeared as if a delicate filigree ring had been blown up into new giant proportions. 

Raven Leilani, author of Luster, which enjoyed much buzz following its 2020 publication, wrote in the show notes: ’In adornment, there is also fantasy… making something beautiful requires something of you.’ Indeed, the hand of the artisans with whom Johnson has built years-long partnerships with all over the world were front and centre in the sequin and bead embroideries that came to life as a black dress and pencil skirt, as well as the use of crochet. Fluidity, romance, movement – Johnson’s handwriting – was ever present, but this season, punctuated by a vibrant violet spongy wool (particularly mouthwatering layered under a chartreuse trench), while her sellout quilted coat appeared in moss green with golden brocade print. Cleverly, tailoring (notably a pantsuit in a textured pinstripe) and denim (a dramatically waisted jean jacket won here) spoke the same feminine vernacular. An unexpected entry came in the form of leather pants, which might be the most desirable we’ve seen in some time. TMS

Ludovic de Saint Sernin

In the days prior to his first show at New York Fashion Week (previous seasons have seen the Belgian designer show in Paris, where remains based) Ludovic de Saint Sernin teased a collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. In particular, the American photographer’s flower photographs, with De Saint Sernin finding inspiration in Mapplethorpe’s description of these sensually charged works that ‘beauty and the devil are the same thing’. Such a juxtaposition provided the collection’s impetus, seeing Mapplethorpe’s delicate stamens and blooms adorn sheer handkerchief tops and skirts which exposed the body beneath, or slinky, contouring chainmail dresses. Meanwhile, more provocative frissons of kink, inspired by Mapplethorpe’s portraiture and patronage of queer BDSM bars like The Mineshaft, came in lace-up leather underwear and trousers, the latter sliced down the back to reveal the models’ behinds (his riff on the Alexander McQueen bumster trouser). Other eyelet-studded pieces, a longtime signature of the designer, adorned harness-style tops and underwear, as well as dresses which wrapped and twisted around the body like a series of stacked leather belts. After the models stomped around for their finale walk, it was De Saint Sernin’s own turn to take a spin around the runway. Backdropped by the twinkling lights of the city beyond, he looked more than at home – as for whether he’s becoming a permanent fixture, watch this space. JM

Area

A surreal outing from New York-based label Area saw designer Piotrek Panszczyk adorn gowns with hundreds of ‘googly eyes’ – the cartoonish spinning eyeballs which adorn greeting cards and craft tables. Across the collection, they appeared in miniature or oversized iterations, sprouting over skirts or reimagined in leather and shiny silver studs (they also seemed to transform a Dalmatian-style print, which covered monastic hooded gowns and baggy shirting). Panszczyk noted inspiration from both the surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as Pop Art, as inspiration points – the latter evoked in colourful cartoonish flowers, studded with Area’s signature crystal adornment. Indeed, crystals – with which the brand is synonymous – were here blown up in size, creating enormous necklaces or tasselled skirts which could be heard clattering as the model walked. If these more outré pieces might only be reserved for red carpets and music videos, crystal-studded jeans and slinky Area-branded tank tops will no doubt have a wider appeal, particularly with the announcement that the brand will be teaming up with Amazon’s luxury fashion division to sell its collections going forward. JM

Khaite

A succinct personal statement from Catherine Holstein, typed on a postcard, greeted guests as they were seated for the show on Sunday evening at Chelsea Piers: generational legacy, and the ebb and flow of memory, has been preoccupying the designer. In contrast to the intimate welcome was the show’s set, a cavernous black interior, stretching into the darkness with a roped off oil-slick floor. New York has come to expect exceptional high gloss from this schedule fixture: lighting, set design (thanks to her husband, the architect Griffen Franzen, also responsible for the Wooster Street flagship), music by Jean Michel Derain, styling by Vanessa Traina, and general show mastery care of Prodject, who handle bringing events to life for the likes of Chanel and Prada, not forgetting the Met Gala. It’s a powerhouse team and the impact is always impressive. As to the clothes? On the one hand, the sharpness fans have come to know and covet: supple leather jackets with right-angle shoulders, a cropped boxy military peacoat, the just-the-right-amount-of-stiff tuxedo jacket. Even fox-fur chubby coats managed to retain perpendicular proportions and defined lapels. Then, on the other hand, lightness, fluidity and volume: duchess satin paper bag waists, a leather cocoon coat (wait for the price tag on that one) and – perhaps most impressive – the levity achieved in the gravity-defying silk gazar tops and skirts, which appeared to softly ripple away from the body. Evening looks, meanwhile, had a disheveled insouciance, which came through in the crinkled silk slips and gowns with sleeves formed from swathes of featherweight silk chiffon. TMS

Eckhaus Latta

In lieu of traditional collection notes, Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta have always offered a more abstract evocation of the season’s mood – here, they described the collection as ‘remembering America as though you’re standing on an orange milk crate hearing it crack under the weight of you thinking: “what will happen next?”’ Against the backdrop of floor-to-ceiling windows which looked out onto the New York City skyline, and a live soundtrack by Los Angeles-based musician Loren Kramar, including renditions of Lou Reed, Lana Del Rey and Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York, the collection itself seemed to muse on what American dressing, and being an American designer, means today (discussions this fashion week have centred on the particular challenges of showing on the New York schedule as a young designer, in part led by Carly Mark of Puppets + Puppets who has declared she will no longer show her collections in New York). In practice, like at Proenza Schouler, this meant a shift towards minimalism for the designers – or, at least, as stripped back as the brand’s undone aesthetic allows – honing in on the Eckhaus Latta codes with new clarity. Particularly strong were a series of surprisingly sharp shearling overcoats which opened the show (in a clash of textures, they were worn over featherweight sheer jersey tops), while shaggy ribbed knits will no doubt have real-world appeal. A mood of dishevelled glamour, meanwhile – a reflection, perhaps, of the show’s doomed America soundtrack – was struck in spaghetti-strapped silk slip dresses sliced away into streamers at the hem, or the iridescent fabric which was gently ruched and layered over mini dresses for the collection’s closing looks. JM 

Proenza Schouler

It was a stripped-back outing for Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Proenza Schouler this season, a mood in part decided the evening before the show (the designers noted backstage that a series of more embellished and embroidered garments had for the time being been shelved). The pair explained the shift towards reduction as part of an ongoing desire to eschew the search for ephemeral trends which defined their early collections towards a more rigorous consideration of exactly who the Proenza Schouler woman is – evolution, rather than revolution. So there was sharply cut tailoring and enveloping overcoats which recalled 1990s minimalism, diaphanous dresses which looped seductively around the body (in part recalling the silhouettes of the previous season), while a series of blanket-like knits – sliced away into frayed cut-outs – provided the show’s closing looks. ‘It’s about beauty and enveloping layers, and comfort and soulfulness. It’s about protecting yourself in softness, beauty, luxury and sensuality,’ said Fernandez backstage of the collection. With it, the designers cemented themselves as one of New York Fashion Week’s most consistent talents, and arguably still the week’s biggest draw for travelling editors. ‘We want to be making clothes that don't feel throwaway, that you're going to own for a long time,’ concluded McCollough. ‘We think that's how people dress these days.’ JM

Tommy Hilfiger

Could Tommy Hilfiger have chosen a more poignant location for his aptly named ’New York Moment’ show than Grand Central Station’s Oyster Bar? Unlikely. Outside the show, in the station’s famed cavernous cream marble atrium, onlookers jostled to catch a glimpse of their favourite TikTok celebs as well as Sofia Richie Grainge, Damson Idris, Sonam Kapoor, Junho Lee and Jon Batiste, who gave a finale performance that had the whole room on its feet. Inside, a surprisingly intimate affair came to life at ‘The Tommy’, a secret saloon bar serving martinis and champagne, where editors gathered around cocktail tables and Questlove played a soundtrack inspired by New York’s five boroughs. Since its inception, Hilfiger has always closely connected his brand identity to youth culture, in particular music, and this evening was no different. A slouchy, youthful, insouciant energy pervaded. And in case there were any doubt remaining as to the brand’s legacy, the clothes were a lesson in ‘classic American cool’ – its raison d'être. 

Essentials of the American wardrobe were revisited with new freshness and relevancy, such as a black and white rugby shirt with generously proportioned sleeves. Chinos were cut to be roomy, hands slunk into pockets. Shirting layered under long line cardigans and trench coats felt effortless and relatable. A pleated skirt that fell below the knee, worn with block-heeled boots, read as a fashion silhouette that would translate into the real world. The shearling motorcycle jacket and oversized tweedy puffa will no doubt be popping up on wishlists. The show itself also marked a shift away from the see-now, buy-now approach, in order to adhere to the fashion week schedule – a move deemed necessary to accommodate the elevation of its clothing production which, with various Italian-sourced fabrics and more complex production, appropriately require a little more time. TMS

Willy Chavarria

Willy Chavarria’s shows have a kind of inexplicable magic which has made him one of New York Fashion Week’s most intriguing talents (the American designer was selected as part of the Wallpaper* USA 300 last year). In part, it is because he has played the long game – his career comprised design roles at American mega brands like Ralph Lauren before starting his eponymous label – allowing him to forge Willy Chavarria the brand at a moment he was confident in his hand and design codes, which largely centre on the multiplicity of the New York street (where he now calls home) alongside his Mexican-American upbringing in Fresno, California. And, having shown for several seasons, it is paying off: the designer won the 2023 Menswear Designer of the Year at the CFDA awards and has become a red carpet fixture (Billie Eilish is a particular fan), while his collection will soon be stocked in Barney’s and Saks. It lent proceedings a buzzy, celebratory air, backdropped by rows of church candles and religious ephemera which have long been a reference point for the designer. Chavarria’s hallmarks continued to be honed – notably a voluminous silhouette, which at once recalls baggy streetwear and the abundance of traditional couture – though freshness was struck in new fabrications (like houndstooth wool used across leaner trousers and a highly desirable elongated overcoat) and mood of refinement, seeing sweaters slung elegantly around the neck or some brilliant tuxedo- style tailoring, dramatically pitched at the lapel. JM

Helmut Lang

‘Protection versus projection,’ said Peter Do of his sophomore collection for Helmut Lang, which opened New York Fashion Week on Friday afternoon. ‘The way we protect ourselves is the way we define: armour or adornment?’ The designer continued this message via the printed collection notes, written in the same all-caps logotype Lang utilised in his own campaigns. So there were shirts and trousers which appeared crafted from bubble wrap – a suggestion of both protection and sensuality, exposing the inner workings of the garment, like pockets and zips beneath – while other knits rose up to engulf the face and body against the elements. A crescent-shaped bag, meanwhile, looked as though it was made for the model to rest her head on for comfort, like an aeroplane pillow, alongside technical vests which recalled the ‘bulletproof’ vests which appeared in Lang’s archival collections. As for the impetus behind the collection, Do said it emerged from a continuing observation of New York dress codes; the rigours of living in the city require both a need for protection and exhibition in the clothes people wear. ‘In a world of chaos, a system of dressing,’ the designer concluded of the collection, which though astutely mined hallmarks of the Helmut Lang archive, felt sometimes missing the unique frisson of sensuality and subversion which defined the brand’s seminal 1990s collections – a balance better struck by Do in his collections for his eponymous brand, which he will show later this month, on February 27, in Paris. JM

Stay tuned for more from New York Fashion Week A/W 2024

Today (9 February 2024) Miu Miu has announced its exclusive worldwide partnership and licence agreement with L’Oréal Groupe for the creation, development, and distribution of a luxury beauty line. This follows the launch of Prada Beauty, in 2023, with L’Oréal. As Benedetta Petruzzo, Miu Miu’s CEO, says in a statement: ‘We are excited to announce this partnership with a distinctive and leading beauty player such as L’Oréal. This new chapter will sustain the brand’s growth and help to further untap Miu Miu’s full potential in the category.’

Miu Miu beauty is coming in 2025

Having worked with Coty to bring its inaugural fragrance to market in 2015 (a collaboration between Miuccia Prada and nose Daniela Roche Andrier, simply called Miu Miu Eau de Parfum), the scent offering from the brand has remained minimal ever since.

This partnership is set to change all that. Cyril Chapuy, president of L’Oréal Luxe added: ‘Over the past years, we have successfully established a very strong partnership with Prada teams. We are now thrilled to welcome Miu Miu and unleash together its outstanding potential in beauty. With its unique positioning, fuelled by limitless creativity and experimentation, Miu Miu will perfectly complement L’Oréal Luxe’s portfolio of iconic brands and reinforce our worldwide leadership in fragrances.’

We’ll have to wait and see how the beauty products will look and perform, as they are set to debut in 2025. Wallpaper* predicts that the design and formulations will be in keeping with the playful spirit inherent to the codes of Miu Miu, which is often referred to as Prada’s ‘little sister’ brand.

miumiu.com

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

In fashion: the best of S/S 2024

Wander lust: Ferragamo (top left)

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

Enquire at ferragamo.com

Globe trotter: Bottega Veneta (top right)

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

Enquire at bottegaveneta.com

Fluid forms: Dior Men

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

Available at dior.com

Craft union: Prada

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

Enquire at prada.com

Great lengths: Dries Van Noten

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

Available from driesvannoten.com

Big picture: Chanel

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

Enquire at chanel.com

Track record: Wales Bonner

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

Enquire at walesbonner.net

Action packed: Miu Miu

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

Available at miumiu.com

In proportion: Burberry

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

Enquire at burberry.com

Escape route: Hermès

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

Enquire at hermes.com

Crystal clear: Gucci

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

Enquire at gucci.com

Tunnel vision: Loewe

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

Available from loewe.com at selfridges.com

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

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

Though it attracted figures from the worlds of stage and screen – notably the British actors Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield – the latest stop on the annual awards season tour had nothing to do with film. In fact, the winners were not actors or directors, nor costume designers or make-up artists, but sheep farmers, all the way from Australia and New Zealand.

Because the prize in question was the Loro Piana Record Bale Award, now in its 25th edition, which is given to the wool producer who creates the finest bale of merino wool in Australia and New Zealand respectively (the unit measurement is microns, a fineness of fibre which is equivalent to one-thousandth of a millimetre). The awards were initiated in the 1990s by Pier Luigi Loro Piana – one of the scions of the Loro Piana family, which started the luxury knitwear brand in 1924 – and the latest ceremony took place in London, with Pyrenees Park farm’s Pamela, Robert and Bradley Sandlant scooping the top prize for Australia in 2023.

Inside the Loro Piana Record Bale Awards

Their entry was a world-record-breaking 10.2 microns, surpassing the previous record of 10.3 microns set in 2013 (for context, a human hair is 80 microns, meaning these fibres are almost eight times finer). ‘This wool is not just a gift of nature, it is the result of the hard work of exceptional people combined with their passion and true belief in innovation, in the power to change things and improve them day after day,’ says Damien Bertrand, CEO of Loro Piana, who presented the award alongside Pier Luigi Loro Piana. ‘This enables us to create unique masterpieces for the most discerning connoisseurs.’

The New Zealand prize went to Barrie and Yvonne Payne of Visuela Farm, whose own bale was 10.7 microns. Both the winning farms also took home the 2022 prize for their respective countries the same evening (the ceremony saw the 24th and 25th editions of the Loro Piana Record Bale Award held together). ‘You simply cannot produce a World Record Bale without passion, focus, and dedication, [it’s] such a wonderful reward for our Pyrenees Park team,’ says Bradley Sandlant.

The world record bale is stored in a glass display case in Loro Piana’s Quarono factory in Piedmont, Italy until the record is beaten again. The other bales from these farms are reserved by the clothing brand for their most loyal clients, creating luxurious merino garments that are entirely traceable – from the year the exact animal was shorn, its origin location, and the fibre’s unique micron measure. ‘The Loro Piana Record Bale Award shows the maison’s dedication to sourcing the world’s finest wool and the commitment to exceptional quality, the quintessence of luxury,’ say Loro Piana.

loropiana.com