This week, Hermès opens the doors to its new London Maison at 166 New Bond Street, one of the largest in its network, alongside Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, Madison Avenue in New York, Ginza in Tokyo, Dosan Park in Seoul and Maison Shanghai.

The new location, comprising six Grade II listed buildings, 165, 166, 167 New Bond Street, 16 Grafton Street and 22 and 23 Albermarle Street, was built in 1769 by leading neoclassical architects of the mid-Georgian period, Sir Robert Taylor and RJ Worley. The site boasts a total of 2000 sq m of space, spread over five floors and made up of five staircases, four elevators, two roof terraces and 55 rooms, each with a distinctive design scheme.

A tour of Hermès Maison Bond Street

New ornamentation, colour and decor, much sourced in the United Kingdom and commissioned from British craftsmen and artists, includes panels of patinated copper, boiserie shaped in straw and horsehair marquetry, bespoke cloth wallcoverings, hand- finished walls and ceilings in powder pink mineral mortar, traditional wood panelling, Lancashire-made textured wall coverings, first developed in Victorian times, hexagonal patterned parquet in oak, reclaimed oak floors and geometrical carpeting created to reflect the cherrywood-panelled ceiling or patterned with a large English floral motif.

These one-of-a-kind custom finishes and details sit side by side with historic Georgian, Victoria and Edwardian elements, and the furnishing of the Maison is completed with more than 500 unique artworks, selected for this address by Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès’ artistic director.

The ambitious interior project was entrusted to RDAI, Rena Dumas Architecture Intérieure, under the artistic direction of Denis Montel, who we sat down to talk to about the site, working with listed buildings and the challenges of bringing everything together successfully under one raised roof.

Wallpaper*: How long ago did you start this project, and what was your first impression of the site?

Denis Montel: We started the project in 2021, so it’s five years, but my first visit was almost 10 years before [Hermès acquired the site in 2009]. My first impression then: [there was] a disconnect between rooms, a lack of verticality, and some of the existing spaces were in poor condition. I'm not referring to the shop that was designed by Foster & Partners in 2004 because it was correct, but all the other spaces we felt were going to be quite difficult to make work. But at the same time, it was really interesting to see that there are a lot of differences [between the buildings] and that was a starting point – for us to play with this huge amount of differences.

W*: How do you begin to create a singular interior scheme within buildings that contain Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian detailing?

DM: We were working on six buildings, they’re almost from the same period. The construction was nearly the same, but they have different styles, different heights. Most of the six buildings are not connected easily because there are steps, and each level is different. I think one of our first intentions was to play with the eccentricity of the English. Everything was eccentric. So instead of trying to harmonise, we took the opposite. We said, OK, we have six buildings; we have to give you an identity for each level and each building. We create a series of atmospheres. And it was also attached to the métiers [Hermès has 16 craft métiers]; they have their own kind of identity, but they can be in two, three, four or five different rooms. Each room is a little bit different.

W*: This is a Grade II listed building, how do you work around planning constraints perhaps limitations and parameters can help lead the scheme?

DM: It’s one part of the multiple parameters we have had to deal with, and instead of being a constraint, it was helpful working with Historic England and English Heritage, as well as the Hermès local team, who helped us deal with the constraints and parameters. It could be restrictive, because they were sometimes a bit difficult, but at the end of the day, it was really helpful. We had to keep all the chimneys, some materials, some mouldings, some ceilings, even though some are almost destroyed, others are in good condition. And once again, we use this parameter as a tool. You play with it.

W*: How do you begin the challenge of connecting 55 rooms, five staircases and four elevators?

DM: A difficult part of the project was making this work because there was a lack of verticality and connection. So we spent quite a bit of time with the local Hermès team to work on the layout, the horizontal layout, the vertical layout, to make sure each space is accessible by a lift or by stairs, as well as the best location for the different métiers in the buildings.

W*: You have used Scottish, English and Welsh materials and commissioned British artists and artisans for this project, why was that important?

DM: It's important because the context is really, really strong in this project. We are working in historical buildings; they are fundamentally British. And we love to play with context, and we try as much as we can to work with local materials and know-how. It's not 100 per cent British. I have to admit we also have beautiful French know-how, but it was logical for us to try to work with local know-how too.

W*: What is a ‘British’ interior according to the French?

DM: Eccentricity. Not only today, because even if you are looking at the 19th century, at the architecture of John Soane, or whatever, it’s bold, it’s eccentric. And what is interesting is that it's quite often a combination; the English will mix up modernity and classicism. On top of that, you can have many patterns, a sense of comfort and eclecticism. For us, we often laugh when we talk about the English carpet, because in France, a good carpet is one centimetre high, in England it is three. So there’s a sense of comfort. I can also say that compared to French interiors, there is a little bit of paradox in the English decoration: precise, but with imperfections.

W*: What have been your favourite discoveries during the design and build process?

DM: We discovered during the demolition an amazing mosaic floor in one of the buildings, not in very good condition, but we restored it. So that was really nice to discover. And then, what we call the purple staircase, actually today it’s yellow, because when we visited the site, it was painted purple, so we call it the purple staircase, but we did some tests to see what the colour was behind that, and we found out that the original colour was yellow. So now it’s yellow again.

W*: In certain areas, the colour extends through more than one room. So how have you used colour to connect the spaces?

DM: We give a colour identity to each building and each level, and we change the colour level by level. And colour is attributed to each métier. So, if you have five rooms for a métier, it's going to be a range of blue, or a range of yellow, or a range of red, and that's the way we attribute the colour. There is no logic of association. Sometimes it might be a bit clashing, as you change from one colour to another, but it was intentional.

W*: Do you have a favourite part of the store?

DM: I love lots of places. But as an architect, I have to say I like what we achieved on the ground floor. The ground floor was the only blank canvas in the building and project. It was the only occasion to have real volumetric work; what we have done with the ceiling, starting from the vaults of the facade, with the effect of perspective. I like the way we had the opportunity really to create a space before talking about atmosphere and decoration.

Hermès Maison Bond Street, 166 New Bond Street, London, W1S 4RB

hermes.com

The latest addition to Hermès’ canon of leather accessories is the ‘Clou de Forge’ handbag, which first appeared as part of the house’s A/W 2026 womenswear show in March. Its name is taken from another enduring Hermès accessory: the ‘Clou de Forge’ bangle, a metal bracelet notable for its horseshoe-inspired shape.

It is a nod towards the Parisian house’s roots as a harness-maker in the early 19th century (equestrianism remains a perennial influence for Hermès’ designers and craftspeople, with everything from saddlery to horse blankets inspiring its 16 métiers).

Here, the bangle’s distinctive silhouette is abstracted to become the bag’s closure in contrasting gold and silver, providing a jewellery-like flourish to the otherwise reduced silhouette – a neat, flap-front design cut from structured box-calf leather, with a cross-body strap adjustable with horseshoe-shaped hardware.

The result is a handbag that traverses day and evening: a reflection of Nadège Vanhée’s A/W 2026 collection, which the French designer said was designed to capture the ‘liminal realm’ of twilight, when ‘colour turns nocturnal [and] life distils to its essence’.

And earlier this month, the French designer presented a ‘Chapter Two’ of the collection in Los Angeles, also featuring the ‘Clou de Forge’ handbag. ‘It’s this idea of having an open horizon; the promises of the beyond,’ she said of the show, which mined the romantic potential of sunrise and sunset.

A version of this article appears in the July 2026 Design Directory Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 4 June in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

In recent years, Nadège Vanhée, artistic director of Hermès’ womenswear collections, has presented a ‘Chapter Two’ of her Autumn/Winter collection in locations away from the house’s native city of Paris – a take on other brands’ Cruise shows, and an opportunity to flex a creative muscle outside of the confines of home. Her previous ‘Chapter Two’ collections, taking place in New York and Shanghai, have indeed felt like Vanhée has found a feeling of liberation in the far away – we wrote of the Shanghai show that there was ‘new frisson of eclecticism and play’ to the French designer’s work, and the same could be said of the New York show the year prior, where she drew inspiration from ‘pace, energy and optimism’ of the city where she once worked (before Hermès she was design director at Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen’s The Row).

Yesterday evening in Los Angeles, Vanhée continued this trajectory with her latest travelling show – a ‘Chapter Two’ of March’s A/W 2026 womenswear collection, playing out in the city’s Bel Air neighbourhood. She likened the show set, a pale-yellow ‘pavilion’ designed to echo the golden hour sunshine of the city at sunset, to a stage: an apt setting for a locale which has long attracted those who wish to be seen. In choosing Los Angeles, she echoed what has become a trend for this season’s Cruise shows: last month, Jonathan Anderson also chose the city to stage his Cruise 2027 show for Dior (the cinematic outing took place at LACMA and mined Christian Dior’s time in Hollywood for inspiration), while later today, Zegna will show its S/S 2027 menswear collection in Malibu.

Hermès takes to Los Angeles for latest chapter

Though despite a distinctly Hollywood line-up (guests included Miley Cyrus, Keke Palmer and Kerry Washington), Vanhée shifted the idea of performance away from the silver screen and into the dance studio – a fertile reference point for designers who have long mined the dancer’s uniform for its feeling of unrestrained movement and ease, as well as its focus on the body. Unfolding on what Vanhée described as the show set’s ‘luminous stage’, references came in a series of satin dresses inspired by the construction and texture of traditional ballet slippers, while velvet gowns were cut with a languid glamour – a little Golden Age Hollywood, a little Martha Graham (Vanhée said she was fixated with dance as a child).

Indeed, the highly contoured silhouette of the original A/W 2026 collection – which drew on the equestrian uniform, from jodphur pants to dressage blazers – was largely eschewed for roomier leather outerwear (like a terrific parka with quilted shoulders) and wraparound satin jackets, while semi-sheer chiffon skirts and gowns had a feeling of lightness and romance, some etched with the house’s Soleil de Soie Tattoo print. ‘Precision gives way to fluidity in a quiet interplay of tension and release,’ said Vanhée via the collection notes.

As the sun set, a closing series of looks cut from glimmering black velvet or satin, ‘recalling the infinite expanse of a star-strewn sky’ did provide a throughline between the A/W 2026 collection’s first and second chapter. Back in March, Vanhée said she wanted to capture the ‘liminal realm’ of twilight, with the show taking place amid a show set of moss and soil, the dimly lit space lit by glowing purple orbs. The sky, said Vanhée, continued to inspire the collection, though here the perpetual twilight of the A/W 2026 collection was replaced by the romantic potential of sunrise or sunset – a symbolic act of throwing open the windows and letting the light in. ‘It’s this idea of having an open horizon; the promises of the beyond,’ she said.

Her adeptness at these travelling collections stands Vanhée in good stead for her latest challenge: the house’s very first couture offering, shown in Paris this July as part of the city’s haute couture week. Already operating in the realm of the superlative, the show will offer even further opportunities for Vanhée to demonstrate the artisanal might of Hermès, a house which continues to thrive despite the luxury slowdown elsewhere (in the first quarter of 2026, revenue was up 6 per cent at constant exchange rates compared with 2025). ‘The idea is to have the ultimate gesture of handmaking,’ she recently told W Magazine. ‘Each piece is going to be one of a kind and belong to one person.’

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

Prada opera gloves (above left)

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

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

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

Celine sunglasses

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

Givenchy’s ‘Boudoir’ mules

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

Chanel’s resin necklace

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

Fendi’s ‘Lui’ bag

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

Dior’s ‘Lady Dior by Sheila Hicks’ bag

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

Limited-edition Hermès lipsticks

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

Bottega Veneta’s ‘Baby Veneta’ bag

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

Mulberry denim hat

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

Louis Vuitton’s summer scents

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

Loro Piana’s ‘Just Bag’

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

Fashion/set assistant: Alice Heluin-Afchain

Shop the story

Anyone watching the new Peaky Blinders film and with an eye to style will no doubt overlook the flatcaps and tieless shirts and note the readiness with which the anti-heroes reach for their waistcoat pocket to find their watches. The pocket watch was a slightly antiquated choice even by the era depicted, during the Second World War. Now, you might imagine, it would be positively anachronistic.

'But the pocket watch remains an object of emotion even if it’s rare to see it in everyday use now,' says Guido Terrini, the CEO of Parmigiani Fleurier, which recently released its La Revenale, a Lepine pocket watch with a minute repeater and a restored, historic, ultra-thin calibre, to mark the birthday of the company’s founder. It’s one of three pocket watches Parmigiani has released to date.

‘A pocket watch gives you more volume to play with [from the design and mechanics standpoint] and, horologically speaking, pocket watch movements are extremely interesting. But of course, pocket watches also come with the allure of a certain kind of expression,’ continues Terrini.

Indeed, Parmigiani is not the only high-end brand to release a pocket watch to mark an occasion or as statement of its heritage. Earlier in 2026, Audemars Piguet unveiled its limited-edition 150 Heritage pocket watch, with a universal calendar and mechanical calculator among its 30 complications, making for a hefty piece that would likely require a reinforced pocket. And it was with its Les Cabinotiers Berkley pocket watch that, in 2024, Vacheron Constantin produced the most complicated watch yet made, with 63 complications.

But there’s also a steady stream of pocket watches from brands offering a more accessible product, and/or a more contemporary one. Hermès, for one, has become a regular maker of pocket watches, with its blue enamel Arceau Chevaloscope Neon a standout.

Urwerk, which launched a pocket watch a decade ago, has it in mind to use the format again for a portable atomic clock project. 'The size is such that it would feasibly work inside a pocket watch case, and we’ve come up with some cool designs,' says co-founder Martin Frei. 'The pocket watch may be a bit “show off” for some people, but it’s a way of carrying time that shouldn’t be overlooked.'

The British independent brand The Camden Watch Company this year launched its first pocket watch – in a modern-meets-Victorian style – following customer requests. And when Studio Underdog and Christopher Ward teamed up on a timepiece at the end of 2025, they opted for a (now sold out) 100-piece-edition pocket watch, The Alliance 02.

'Pocket watches are just cool – and watch designers don’t often get the opportunity to work on one,' enthuses Studio Underdog’s founder Richard Benc, who has a second pocket watch collaboration in mind. 'In the world of mechanical watches, it’s a niche within a niche within a niche, but the pocket watch’s appeal may be that it speaks to a different pace of life in that it makes checking the time more intentional. It’s the opposite of the Apple Watch in some ways.'

'Watch collectors will look to pocket watches because they see them as an important part of horological history,' adds David Steyffer, head of archive for IWC, which last launched a pocket watch in 2018 to mark the brand’s 150th anniversary. He notes that, sadly, many gold pocket watches are being melted down because the precious metal is of such high value at the moment. 'Certainly, fashion plays a part in the pocket watch’s appeal too. There is a Peaky Blinders Effect. But, critically, the pocket watch doesn’t have to be received as old-fashioned at all.'

Nor does using one necessitate the cosplay-lite of wearing a waistcoat: Benc has found that customers of The Alliance 02 are just as happy to simply slip it into their jeans pocket, or use it as a desk clock. Indeed, aren’t we used to pulling a mobile phone out of a pocket to check the time? Isn’t that essential, especially to those many, and particularly younger, people who don’t wear a watch, and have no interest in doing so? Could that habit prove a gateway to the mainstream return of the pocket watch?

Terrini is not so sure about this idea. Yes, he says, reaching for a pocket watch is, he says, ‘a beautiful gesture – it’s looking at the time with more care’, but he thinks to go from smartphone to pocket watch appreciation – by-passing wristwatches – is to miss ‘an entire and necessary educational phase’. Maybe pocket watches remain for the more dandyish connoisseur after all.

Tierney Gearon’s collection of Hermès beach towels started by chance: as the American photographer was holidaying in St Barths with her family in the early 1990s, she stumbled upon a small shop run by French husband and wife team Catherine and Pero Feric. ‘It was a magical experience,’ Gearon recalls. ‘The husband would stand at the door and decide who could or could not enter. If you were lucky enough to be invited into their carefully curated space, the first thing you would see was a wall of shelves towering stacks of colourful towels [...] juxtaposed with idiosyncratic Caribbean décor.’

For years, the towels, sporting eccentric colour palettes, bold graphics and artistic interventions, were part of Gearon’s holiday traditions: to her, it felt like wrapping her children in art as they came out of the sea. By 2020, the collection featured about 30 towels, but after they started popping up in her online searches for collectible objects, she soon built an archive of more than 300 pieces.

For the past three years, Gearon has taken a few dozen towels with her whenever she was travelling, photographing them around nature, architecture and local spots. ‘Their beauty inspired a unique creative project: a travelogue that merges my love for design, photography and exploration,’ she says. Her self-published, limited-edition book, The Collection, documents both her travels and her archive of colourful towels: you’ll see them spread on the floor of a Moroccan courtyard, bathed with light against the backdrop of a Mexican house, fashioned into a tent in the Hamptons, engaging with architecture in Japan, or wrapping a hut in Colorado.

‘A towel, through the right lens, is not just a towel. It’s a fragment of a larger story, a symbol of home, childhood, escape and joy. The Collection is the intersection of my life as an artist, traveller, mother and impulsive collector. This project is my visual diary. It is a meditation on beauty, place and time,’ she writes in the book’s introduction. ‘A celebration of how the simplest object can become art when framed by imagination.’

The Collection: A Visual Diary of Towels and Travel, published in a limited edition of 1,000, $125, is available at tierneygearon.com and at alexeagle.com

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

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

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

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

The best of Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026

Dior

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

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

Saint Laurent

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

Dries Van Noten

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

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

Acne Studios

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

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

Alaïa

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

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

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

Rabanne

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

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

Rick Owens

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

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

Loewe

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

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

Issey Miyake

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

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

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

Lanvin

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

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

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

Givenchy

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

Junya Watanabe

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

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

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

Celine

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

Hermès

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

Comme des Garçons

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

Balenciaga

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

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

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

Jean Paul Gaultier

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

Chanel

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

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

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

Louis Vuitton

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

Miu Miu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shop the story

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

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

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

12 horse-inspired designs for equestrian chic

Over the years, we’ve been pretty spoiled by Hermès’ ability to transform every objects, no matter how mundane, into extraordinary expressions of craft, design and artistic originality. The house is constantly finding new ways to express its ingenuity, from lipsticks to light switches.

Cue Hermès’ ‘Off Piste 8 Feet’ American pool table, fitting neatly into this modus operandi as a precious yet simple reinvention of an indoor sporting staple.

Crafted in matte leather with curved lacquered legs, the pool table features four matching hornbeam and leather cues, as well as a discreet drawer to stash away the balls in their bakelite rack when not in use.

As usual, the devil is in the details – a set of balls reinterprets the traditional look with a timeless palette and contemporary graphic treatment, while a billiard chalk comes covered in Regate taurillon grained leather and equipped with its own Hermès case. In the hands of the French maison, pool is a whole new ball game.

‘Off Piste 8 Feet’, $265,400, available from Hermès

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

Despite having been in the role for close to four decades – making her the longest-running creative director at a major fashion house – Véronique Nichanian, the artistic director of Hermès’ men’s universe, is not prone to nostalgia.

In fact, when I interviewed her for the March 2023 Style Issue of Wallpaper* at the house‘s offices in central Paris, she told me that she had rarely visited the archive, nor dwelt on past collections. ‘We don’t have the same materials, we don’t have the same life. So we are [instead] always thinking: what is the classic of tomorrow?’ she said.

Véronique Nichanian bows out at Hermès after a landmark tenure

Nor was she one for runway spectacle. This is not to say that her collections were not thought-provoking, nor joyful (they were). Instead, she simply allowed the clothing to speak for itself: for Nichanian, the magic was found in a change of a centimetre on a pattern piece, an obscure colour shade, or what she would call the ’sensuality of fabric’ (material innovation was at the heart of her Hermès project).

So it was little surprise, then, that for the designer’s swan song this evening (24 January 2026) after 38 years at the house, despite the more dramatic setting than usual seasons – Palais Brongniart, which Napoleon I commissioned to house the Paris Stock Exchange – Nichanian did not turn on the theatrics. Instead, she remained steadfast in her vision of timeless style, where the greatest pleasure is found when you try the garment on.

In the collection notes, Nichanian said that the A/W 2026 collection is one where ‘everything fits together, but everything is mobile, alive, enduring, seamlessly, continuously, through a season made for a lifetime’. As ever, it began with menswear archetypes: the blouson, the parka, the peacoat and the double-breasted suit all featured in the collection – some of which were drawn from silhouettes from past seasons – here recut in effortless style, and in Hermès’ superlative fabrications. Shearling emerged as the season’s protagonist, alongside the house’s signature calfskin, while high-shine crocodile, technical satin and a featherweight wool and silk faille, the latter used for tuxedo-style eveningwear, added flair.

Nichanian will be succeeded by British designer Grace Wales Bonner, winner of the 2016 LVMH Prize, who will begin at the house later this year and present her first runway show in January 2027. Known for poetic collections that riff on themes of Black masculinity, migration and luxury – where quotidian garments are elevated through handcraft – the appointment was met with rare positive consensus among both industry insiders and on social media, with many noting that such a position was long overdue for the designer.

‘Exactly why such demonstrably influential – and commercially sharp – women such as Grace Wales Bonner and her elder British counterpart Martine Rose have not yet been hired by a house or a brand is less a mystery than a total disgrace on the industry,’ wrote Vogue critic Sarah Mower in her review of Wales Bonner’s S/S 2026 runway show, published a few months prior to the hire. In a recent interview with Business of Fashion, Nichanian said she was pleased with her successor: ‘she will write a new page of the book,’ she told Tim Blanks.

At the end of the show, Nichanian took her final bow to a minutes-long ovation from the assembled guests, marking the culmination of a tenure defined by critical and commercial success. Though she will not leave the house entirely – Nichanian will remain a consultant on scarves and maroquinerie, drawing on her encyclopedic knowledge to continue to define what Hermès calls its ‘men’s universe’.

After the show, the space was quickly transformed for a party, where Paul Weller – a favourite of Nichanian’s – provided the musical accompaniment, while waiters circulated with French fries and champagne. Above us, screens lowered from the ceiling played clips of the runway shows which defined her years of the house. Watching back, they were a testament to an extraordinary career: one of endless evolution over seismic change, an unerring pursuit of pleasure and perfection, and, above all, a testament to taking one’s time.

Follow along with our Paris Fashion Week live coverage for more updates.

All make-up is an illusion, designed to create the appearance of something that, once it’s removed, no longer exists. At least, that was the case until a few years ago, when brands started creating make-up that left a lasting effect on the skin. Case in point, Hermès’ latest product, the Plein Air Luminous Matte Skincare Foundation – honoured among other standout beauty launches in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 – which is formulated with an 82 per cent skincare base to improve skin health with every wear. Essentially, when you wear it, skin looks poreless, bright and blemishless. When you take it off, skin is more hydrated, smoother and plumper.

‘It’s a paradox that my team and I spent years working to create something you barely see,’ says Hermès Beauty’s creative director Gregoris Pyrpylis. ‘I didn’t want it to feel like a band-aid, something just to fix a problem. It isn’t meant simply to correct visually, but to help the skin improve over time. That’s the only way Hermès could do a foundation. It had to be done that way.’

Pyrpylis began developing the foundation when he took up his position in 2021. At the time, Hermès was formulating its Plein Air Complexion Balm, a hydrating cream that provides a lightweight veil of colour and SPF protection. Pyrpylis saw what the team was doing with that product launch – namely, creating make-up that benefited skin long-term – and knew he wanted to channel it into a higher-coverage foundation.

Five years later, the final product is formulated with a core trio of active ingredients: niacinamide to nourish, hyaluronic acid for moisture, and white mulberry extract for ​​brightening skin and reducing pigmentation. Recognising that each individual’s skin shade is a unique blend of surface colour and undertone, Hermès has developed five colour intensity groups – light, light-medium, medium, medium-deep and deep – and three undertones for each (cool, neutral, and warm). All 35 shades have a matte finish and medium coverage, making them ideal for those looking to improve the appearance of discolouration and pores.

I wore the foundation over the course of a few particularly cold winter days, and can attest that it evened, brightened and kept my skin moisturised, even as I moved between icy outdoor environments and drying, indoor heat.

The foundation launched is accompanied by a Perfecting Primer that can be worn underneath for extra coverage, or alone for a subtle, pore-blurring effect on days when you need less coverage. The collection also features an application palette, a spatula and a brush, designed by Pyrpylis to make the act of putting on your make-up feel like a special, ritualised moment of the day.

‘We are a house of craftsmanship, and I understand how important tools are in any discipline, including make-up,’ he says of the application tools. ‘I wanted to honour that moment each day when a woman or man decides to apply their make-up. I know we all have busy lives and often feel pressed for time, but I wanted to create a ritual – not just a foundation and primer that work perfectly together, but also a moment. Whether you take five, ten, or 15 minutes is up to you, but the idea is to elevate that moment into an act of self-care.’

Like all Hermès Beauty products, the packaging has been designed by the creative director of Hermès jewellery, Pierre Hardy. The foundation and primer come in frosted glass bottles, with a black-and-white lacquered metal cap topped with the house’s ex-libris motif in gold. The Le Perfecteur blending brush has a bevelled shape that nods to the appearance of a horse’s hoof and is engineered to evenly distribute product around the skin. Meanwhile, the make-up palette is inspired by an artist’s palette, with an easy-grip indent and an accompanying brush designed for mixing, collecting and applying the products.

As with everything Hermès does, the emphasis with this collection is on taking the time to do a few things perfectly, rather than hurrying to do many things well. For creatives like Pyrpylis, this slow pace can sometimes be frustrating, especially in a world that encourages the opposite; but ultimately, it’s a blessing more than a curse.

‘We often talk about “Hermès time”, [a pace] that means we can come out with more deliberate and intentional collections,’ he says. ‘[In a creative field], sometimes you have this vision and want to materialise an idea [quickly], but it can have more complications than expected. Still, when you take the time to do things well, the idea is executed in the most impeccable way. Even if it means the product comes out a year or two later, then it is worth the patience.’

The Hermès Plein Air Luminous Matte Skincare Foundation will be available to purchase in the UK from 23 January 2026 from hermes.com.
In the US, you can order already, $145 at hermes.com

No matter who you are, every day of your life contains a multitude of tasks to be undertaken. The mark of a well-designed object is when it makes those tasks more pleasurable – sitting down to work, for instance, is easier with an elegant, ergonomic desk chair; bracing the cold weather is more pleasant when you can do it in a cocooning overcoat. The following beauty products have been selected as winners because they each have their own way of transforming one aspect of daily life into a simple, effective routine that you actually look forward to.

The Ziip Halo is a sleek, handheld device that offers the transformative effects of a high-end salon facial in the comfort of your home. Designed to be an all-in-one skincare solution, the Halo uses gentle microcurrents that promise to firm skin, diminish wrinkles, boost collagen, reduce acne and even out skin tone (such claims have been backed by clinical studies). It can be linked to an app with video tutorials on how to address concerns like dullness or breakouts with a personalised programme of electrical currents sent to the device via your phone. Each pre-programmed facial takes only a few minutes and is so easy to use, it can be done while having your morning coffee. The impact on your skin is instantly noticeable.

The same is true of Chanel’s Le Lift under-eye patches, which are formulated with hyaluronic acid and the brand’s signature eye complex to reduce dark circles and puffiness, while also reducing the appearance of discolouration and wrinkles with prolonged use. Playfully emblazoned with the Chanel logo, the patches are designed to be left on for five minutes a day and, once removed, excess product can be rubbed into the surrounding area to create an ideal base for make-up application.

When it comes to make-up, few recent launches have been more impressive than Hermès Beauty’s Plein Air foundation, which creative director Gregoris Pyrpylis began developing when he joined the house four years ago. Its purpose, says Pyrpylis, is ‘not to cover or mask the skin, but to care for it’. To that end, the foundation is formulated with an 82 per cent skincare base that is designed to hydrate, nourish and plump the appearance of skin with continual use. It can be paired with the line’s new primer and applied with tools inspired by the traditional artist’s palette and brush. ‘We are a house of craftsmanship, and I understand how important tools are in any discipline, including make-up,’ says Pyrpylis. ‘We all have busy lives and often feel pressed for time, but with this collection, I wanted to create a ritual that asks you to take a moment – whether it’s five, ten or 15 minutes is up to you – and elevate it into an act of self-care.’

The same attention to craftsmanship can be seen in Victoria Beckham’s line of make-up brushes, all of which are inspired by calligraphy tools and feature synthetic bristles specially developed for exceptional pick-up and easy application of everything from foundation and eyeshadow to lipstick and eyeliner. ‘I’m incredibly particular about design, and everything I create has a purpose,’ Beckham told Wallpaper* after the brush collection’s launch last year. ‘Nothing is chosen at random; there’s always intention behind every element.’

The same is true of Loewe’s recently launched Crafted Collection, a line of three perfumes that each take a commonly used note in perfumery – oud, iris and vanilla – and transforms them into idiosyncratic new scents. Roasted Vanilla, for instance, has a warm, creamy heart that is complicated by the spiciness of pink pepper and the alcoholic sweetness of cognac, while Bittersweet Oud brightens its familiar animalistic scent with a touch of bitter orange and warming sandalwood. Iris Root, the lightest of the fragrances, has a powdery, creamy quality made even more intriguing with the addition of herbaceous angelica seed and citrusy timut pepper. All three fragrances are housed in weighty, handblown glass vessels with a tactile granite cap – on a shelf or counter, they look like small sculptures, a testament to Loewe’s continuing dedication to transforming even the simplest objects into a showcase for exceptional craft.

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

At Paris Design Week, Hermès presented their new porcelain table service: dubbed Natures Marines, the 34-piece collection made its debut inside an old carpentry workshop on a tidal landscape formed of sand on the cement floor.

For this tableware collection, Hermès’ Artistic Directors of Home Universe Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry turned to Brighton-trained and London-based illustrator Katie Scott, who imagined a marine landscapes beneath the sea.

Discover Hermès' Natures Marines

Four years in the making, the original brief was broadly referencing marine life, but the artist narrowed the focus down to only sea plants, after visiting the marine herbarium at London’s Natural History Museum – a collection dating back to the 17th century of more than 60,000 dried marine algae specimens. It was there that Scott got to study algae, seaweeds and other marine life, pressed into books like flowers, and the way some seaweed samples were ‘as long as a room’ once unfolded from the books, inspired the way Scott drew them and eventually placed them on the porcelain shapes.

Working originally with pen on paper, Scott’s sketches were then scanned and digitally coloured. Each of the 34 pieces is decorated with up to five individual elements, such as sea algae, wakame, kallymenia, samphire and sea fans, and not one is repeated. Dinner plates, dessert plates and bread plates come with between two and four decors each, so you can have fun setting the table as no two pieces are the same.

Even though the collection revolves around just three main colours (pink, green and sand), to achieve the same depth of tone found in the original pressed samples, the full palette includes about 30 different shades. Scott credits the collaborative nature of working with Perelman and Fabry for this perfect translation onto the porcelain. ‘We wanted to remain true to the original drawings, and the plates end up as close to the possible original drawing,’ say Perelman and Fabry.

No stranger to Hermès, Scott's collaboration began in 2018 with her first scarf design, and she has also created blankets, beach towels and some fashion accessories. Perelman and Fabry were attracted to Scott’s ‘very rigorous approach, where the figurative becomes very geometrical’ as well as the ‘right degree of formality and the right approach to composition’.

Natures Marines is a departure from the recent services like A Walk in the Garden by Nigel Peake and Hippomobile by Gianpaolo Pagni, which are decidedly more graphic. Although the pair are less ‘comfortable’ with the figurative, they felt safe in Scott’s hands thanks to ‘her rigorous composition, good eye for colour as well as how the elements are laid out in a kind of geometry’.

The service was used to serve dishes by Arles-based chef Céline Pham who prepared tarts, pickles and translucent rice rolls, all made of delicate layers of coloured root vegetables, bitter leaves and nasturtiums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For A/W 2025, high jewellery encompasses bold and colourful forms. From Fernando Jorge's fluid silhouettes to Buccellati's pop of colour and Hermès' intricately rendered cuff, it's all about the details.

For Louis Vuitton, silhouettes are oversized, while Cartier's delicately sized earrings champion the pared-back. Van Cleef & Arpels and Tiffany & Co demonstrate their mastery of embellishment, while Piaget's delicate watch swinging from a necklace of precious stones rewrites jewellery rules entirely. Taken together, these pieces make for high jewellery that is exciting, bold and very modern.

This article appears in the November 2025 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 9 October. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Last week (16 October 2025), it was announced that Véronique Nichanian would be stepping down from her role as artistic director of Hermès’ men’s universe after a record-breaking 37-year tenure (the longest of any working creative director at a fashion house).

Five days later, her successor has been announced: the lauded British designer Grace Wales Bonner, whose eponymous label saw her win the LVMH Prize in 2016. She is expected to hold her first show in January 2027, following Nichanian’s swansong in January 2026 (though not confirmed, this means Hermès is likely to take a season away from the runway in June 2026).

‘I am deeply honoured to be entrusted with the role of creative director of Hermès men’s ready-to-wear,’ she said in a statement. ‘It is a dream realised to embark on this new chapter, following in a lineage of inspired craftspeople and designers. I wish to express my gratitude to Pierre-Alexis Dumas and Axel Dumas for the opportunity to bring my vision to this magical house.’

A graduate of London’s Central Saint Martins, Wales Bonner made her debut at the then-London Collection’s: Men – a menswear offshoot of London Fashion Week – with her A/W 2015 collection, ‘Ebonics’. The captivating collection, shown with the support of London talent incubator Fashion East, explored themes of Black masculinity, migration and luxury – throughlines of her work.

‘It was meant to be excessive and abundant; I wanted it to feel very rich,’ she said at the time. ‘This collection was quite historical, going further in to the history of how black people were represented in paintings in the 19th century, and how that manifests itself today. It’s about looking back and then, looking forward.’

After her 2016 LVMH Prize win, she would show a number of acclaimed collections, including a S/S 2023 collection as part of Pitti Uomo’s guest programme in Florence. Held at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi amid a site-specific artwork by Ibrahim Mahama, she looked towards Alessandro de Medici, Duke of Florence, who was said to have been born to a servant of African descent who worked within the Medici household (as such, he is considered modern Western Europe’s first Black head of state).

‘It’s about taking something from the past in order to pass it forward and make it useful for the future,’ she told Wallpaper* at the time. ‘And that is the spirit of this collection.'

After that show, Wales Bonner was rumoured to be taking a number of creative director roles at major houses, including Louis Vuitton and Givenchy (though she has undertaken a major multi-season collaboration with Adidas Originals). Being passed over, though, might well be serendipitous: she has previously stated that Hermès is the house she would most like to work with, while the idea of handcraft – something intrinsic to Hermès – has long run through her work. The appointment will also make her a rare Black woman creative director in an industry still largely dominated by white male designers.

‘I am really pleased to welcome Grace to the Hermès artistic director family. Her take on contemporary fashion, craft and culture will contribute to shaping Hermès men’s style, melding the house’s heritage with a confident look on the now,’ says Pierre-Alexis Dumas, general artistic director of Hermès. ‘Grace’s appetite and curiosity for artistic practice strongly resonate with Hermès’ creative mindset and approach. We are at the start of an enriching mutual dialogue.’

In an era obsessed with speed, a new Hermès workshop stands defiantly timeless. The venerable Parisian house’s twenty-fourth facility of its kind, focusing on leather goods, unfurls across the French countryside in a 5,800 sq m modern structure that houses 260 craftsmen and women committed to the radical act of taking time to produce goods by hand. Based in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine hamlet of L'Isle-d'Espagnac, a town of approximately 6,000 inhabitants, the contemporary building rises boldly yet unobtrusively out of the rustic plain, as if it has always belonged.

We tour the new Hermès workshop in France

This is not nostalgic romanticism masquerading as commerce; this is Hermès doing what it has honed over nearly 200 years: elevating the human hand to an art form, insisting that some things simply cannot – and should not – be rushed. As one craftsman puts it, 'the quality [produced] is [based on] the know-how. It’s having the leather in our hands. All types of leather are different. Even the dyes – the colours – respond differently.' He continues, 'We work with each piece of leather and anticipate its reaction. You need to have this manual approach. This is something that machines cannot do.'

Perhaps ironically, a modern building like this seems like a contradiction; handcrafted leather work continues in what is a thoroughly modern space. However, the synthesis of natural light, organic, and ,where possible, locally sourced material, makes the building look and feel just as it should.

As this facility is situated in an agrarian region that produces some of the world’s leading wines, custardy canalé and other culinary delights, being intentional about creating distinctive architecture that manages to feel natural is an achievement. That seamless design was the product of Bordeaux-based studio Guiraud-Manenc, which conceived a structure that functions as both sanctuary and statement.

Paying homage to the hand craftsmanship carried out in the facility, its design feels precise and careful. Straw-based insulation contributes to creating an aura of age-old craft techniques and facilitates integration with its surroundings. Charente stone anchors the design to its regional terroir, striking a balance between heritage and innovation.

The workshop is organised around a central aisle, with working and communal areas designed to benefit from natural daylight. Solar-panelled roofs catch light and distribute it into the workspace, where apprentices will spend years mastering fabrication techniques that machines could theoretically accomplish in minutes, but perhaps without the same quality and certainly without the emotional connection to the material.

Designed with the natural ecology in mind, the workshop is a positive energy building consistent with Hermès’ 'Harmonie' sustainable real estate framework. Sustainable architecture features include large glass façades that allow natural light to flood the interior, a partially planted roof fitted with 1,800 sq m of solar panels, a geothermal system for heating, and an energy-efficient technical framework.

In addition, the landscaping preserves flora and fauna native to the site. The facility is accessible by public transport, and greenways encourage sustainable commuting. According to the design firm, most materials used are low-carbon and were sourced within 250 kilometres of the site.

The architecture doesn't merely house artisans; it amplifies their gestures, matching human rhythm to natural surroundings with an almost choreographic grace. This is Hermès demonstrating that, in a world of mass production, architecture itself can be an object of luxury—a space where design doesn't just function but transcends it.

guiraud-manenc.com

hermes.com

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

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

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

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

Explore the shoot below.

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

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

Power trip (top left)

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

Thigh high (top right)

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

Buffer zone

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

Swan song

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

Magic eye

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

Dark arts

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

Wild ones

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

Hat trick

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

Pump action

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

Carry all

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

Body work

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

Take shape

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

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

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

‘I didn't come up with the idea of turning the anchor chain into a piece of jewellery, Robert Dumas did, but I would have liked to have thought of it first,’ says Pierre Hardy, creative director of Hermès’ jewellery. ‘Back in 1938, Dumas also had the ship's chain made for women, on whose wrists the masculine bracelet looked particularly delicate and feminine.’

It is a history Hardy is drawing on with the launch of the new Chaîne d’ancre collection, which subverts a familiar form with a reinterpretation of the classic heavy link. Elongated, maximised, rounded, lengthened - silhouettes here are gloriously eclectic, in simply minimalist rings or in rows of juxtaposed styles wound around the neck.

Functionality is a key component of the design throughout, with the clasp, worn at the front, central to the aesthetic. A link can become an earcuff, or jumbled together to form a minaudière, worn swinging from the shoulder.

‘This collection is about an icon of the Maison,’ Hardy adds. ‘We focused on a single object, like we did in the Kellymorphose collection in 2021, which was inspired by Kelly's locks and brought out all the potential and messages it contained.’

Nautical and fluid references here, too, are faithful to Hermès’ historical references. ‘There are a lot of stories and messages in it. Among them, we can think of the robustness and fluidity, or solid and liquid, reminiscent of the origin of the motif, the maritime theme. The chain is both strong and fluid, like the flow of water. Thanks to this, we were able to emphasise the robustness within Chaine d'Ancre while also highlighting the chain's smooth movement, which became a great theme. Depending on the materials and the presence of diamond settings, we were able to meet Chaine d'Ancre in completely different forms.’

When cast in white and rose gold, and studded with diamonds, spinels or sapphires, the chain takes on a seductive new identity. ‘Accumulating, merging and fluidifying, I explored several territories starting with the archetypal form,’ adds Hardy.

An artistic endeavour

Bill Prince, Editor-in-Chief

Last week Wallpaper* joined the artist Shezad Dawood for the unveiling of his latest work in the public realm, Cascade, two vertical 6m ceramic panels on the restored façade of the original Gaumont Palace on London’s King’s Road. It's been reimagined as The Gaumont, a new creative hub for Chelsea developed by Cadogan as a 220,000 sq ft mixed-use facility featuring a rooftop bar, a cinema, an office, and a residential and retail space that includes a bookshop and hi-fi bar. It's a location Dawood knows well, having been taken there as a child to see Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The artist constructed an artwork in fired terracotta that encapsulates the area’s history of creative endeavour, from early experiments in cinema, through to Led Zeppelin, Mary Quant and Vivienne Westwood – a masterclass in memory and materials.

A Mexican escape

Anna Fixsen, US Editor

It may be peak vacation season here in the US, but it was blissfully quiet in Mérida, Mexico, from where I’ve just returned after a ten-day holiday. Unlike the east coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, home to traveller hotspots like Cancún and Tulum, Mérida isn’t plagued by over-tourism, meaning the city’s pastel-washed streets and points of interest are unhurried and uncrowded. In fact, we were among just a handful of guests at Hotel Cigno, an elegant and intimate boutique property located in Mérida’s historic heart. After a few days’ soaking up the city’s rich history (not to mention xtabentún, the local firewater), we ventured further afield, paying visits to the dazzling Uxmal, one of the Mayan world’s most important archaeological sites; taking dips in a cenote, the naturally occurring limestone sinkholes filled with azure fresh water; and ultimately, flopping on a white-sand beach at Casa K’u, a tranquil property an hour’s drive to the coast. Perfecto.

Back to school

Nick Vinson, Contributing Editor

Last week I went back to school, enrolling at Hermès’ Academie du Dessin at the Lycée Chaptal in Paris. On arrival, I was given a green coat, placed in the ‘emerald' class and then asked to make my own diorama. I named the work 24 ways to wash a cornichon. We then headed to the playground for a break (it was adults only, so we were served ‘horses-d’œuvres’). After a quick assembly, we learned the art of print, using stamps that were dipped in ink before making their mark on silk. We were then treated to a lecture from Professor Pierre-Alexis Dumas, before dinner – me sandwiched between the artistic directors of Hermès Maison. After dessert, it was the awards ceremony, and I was presented with a diploma. I offered to donate my diorama, which I considered to be a masterpiece, to the maison’s conservatoire, and my diploma was upgraded to a degree with honours in conceptual stage design. Hermès’ introduction to its themes for the year ahead – for 2025, it’s ‘Drawn to Craft’ – was charming.

A Michelin-starred meeting

Ellie Stathaki, Architecture and Environment Director

A work meeting earlier this week brought me to Benares, the Michelin-starred Indian Mayfair restaurant that reopened earlier this year following an extensive refurbishment and full menu revamp. The combination of warm, fresh interiors by Dale Atkinson of Rosendale Design and a mouthwatering culinary experience by executive chef Sameer Taneja made the visit a treat. Offerings included elevated street snacks, contemporary dishes such as oyster vindaloo, and a range of scrumptious, traditional curries.

An evocative exhibition

Gabriel Annouka, Senior Designer

Opening night of ‘LMK WHEN YOU REACH’ by Bernice Mulenga felt like diving headfirst into a collective memory already in motion. At first glance, the gallery feels chaotic: images pinned at unexpected angles, discordant shots. But resilience builds curiosity, and as you lean into the space each photograph emerges on its own terms: powerful, tender, defiant. These aren't rehearsed images, but breathing, living moments charged with care and visible solidarity.

A neighbourhood mooch

Charlotte Gunn, Director of Digital Content

The week was mostly spent bobbing around my neighbourhood of Golborne Road/Ladbroke Grove peeking at all the new openings. There's Frankie's, a cute little wine and charcuterie bar that's just popped up at 331 Portobello Road. Then there's Thomas Straker's new outpost Acre (just across the road from his eponymous restaurant) which I'm eyeing up for weekend brunch. Marvee's Food Shop offers elevated Caribbean food with some truly spectacular sauces, whether they're smothering goat or banana blossom, in an unassuming spot under the Westway. And Eel Sushi – new on Talbot Road – has been packed since opening, I'm told because the sashimi and nigiri is excellent.

Refillable beauty has revolutionised the industry, with the aim of reducing surplus packaging waste; only about nine per cent of that packaging would have been recycled, according to the British Beauty Council.

Here, across make-up, skincare, fragrance and haircare, Wallpaper* edits a selection of the best refillable beauty packaging designs that you’ll want to keep in pride of place on your vanity table or bathroom shelf, from the likes of Dries van Noten, Hermès, Noble Panacea, Perfumer H, Davines and more.

The best of refillable beauty design, edited by Wallpaper*

Refillable make-up

Refillable skincare

Refillable fragrance

Refillable haircare

The best beauty products of the month, as selected by Wallpaper*, span skincare, make-up, fragrance and tech. They include Dyson’s latest hairdryer release, the Supersonic r, a revolutionary piece of design that makes light work of the at-home blow-dry. Also, there's Hermès’ new limited-edition Les Mains nail polish collection, with a zingy colour palette that packs a punch for the warmer days ahead. And, if your skin barrier requires some TLC, look no further than a moisturiser, a serum and a face oil by Dr David Jack, Omorovicza and Dr Barbara Sturm respectively.

The best beauty products of the month, according to Wallpaper*

Skincare

A healing elixir by Omorovicza

A multi-tasking face oil by Dr Barbara Sturm

A lipid-rich moisturiser by Dr David Jack

Make-up

An ‘explicit’ lipstick by Nars

A powder duo by Westman Atelier

A zingy edit of nail polish by Hermès

Fragrance

An inspired eau de parfum by Yves Saint Laurent

A honeyed scented candle by Loewe

A brave new fragrance by To My Ships

Tech

A ‘revolutionary’ hair dryer by Dyson

A world first microcurrent device by ZIIP

Milan Design Week 2025 saw the fashion contingent put on its most comprehensive showing at the design fair to date, taking up residence in some of the city’s storied landmarks to do so.

From Gucci’s ‘Bamboo Encounters’ staged in the cloisters of San Simpliciano and Aesop’s ‘The Second Skin’ exhibition in the sacristy of the Chiesa del Carmine, to Loewe at the Palazzo Citterio and Prada Frames taking over the iconic Milano Centrale station, the showcase proved a heady melting pot of sensorial immersions and design collaborations.

Here, Scarlett Conlon highlights the standout fashion moments of Salone del Mobile and Milan Design Week 2025 – from Loewe’s playful artist-designed teapots to a blockbuster Charlotte Perriand exhibition from Saint Laurent.

Georg Jensen’s ‘Gelateria Danese’

Danish design house Georg Jensen provided Milan Design Week’s most palatable pit stop: Gelateria Danese, an ephemeral ice cream parlour that drew inspiration from the interiors of Copenhagen’s Palace Hotel (opened in 1910, Georg Jensen provided furnishings and silverware) while referencing Milanese café culture. On the menu was traditional affogato (coffee was sourced from local roastery Prolog), while an array of ice cream flavours were dreamed up by Copenhagen-based Italian chef Chiara Barla. Each was served on Georg Jensen silverware, from coupes to tub-shaped cups, as well as spoons taken from ‘The Artisans Series’. ‘You’ll find pieces you’d typically associate with ice cream, but instead of being disposable, they’re crafted in silver,’ said recently appointed creative director Paula Gerbase. ‘Not only creating durable objects, but elevating the fleeting moments we use them in.’

The Row’s first homeware offering

In signature understated style, The Row launched ‘Home’ at Salone. Comprising a collection of three handwoven throws and a quilted blanket, the Olsens’ first foray into luxury home design was presented elegantly draped over steel and bronze rails by Julian Schnabel in the frescoed rooms of what will shortly become the New York-based brand’s Milanese HQ. Created with artisans in Kashmir, India, each blanket takes between 600 hours to craft and employs a different weaving technique from which they take their name: the Classic, The Row Weave, and the Himalayan Weave, arriving in four colourways – mink, ivory, brown and black. Lightweight at less than 14.5 microns and discreetly embroidered with the brand’s initials, they stand to become one of the year’s most coveted IYKYK home improvements.

Prada Frames boards a restored Gio Ponti train

As the city’s most majestic portal, Milano Centrale station proved the perfect location for the fourth edition of Prada Frames, ‘In Transit’. The annual event curated by Formafantasma that invites panellists from all areas of design, including architecture, engineering and environmental planning, into thematic dialogue has become one of the most popular attractions at Design Week, taking place in iconic landmarks around the city. This year, attendees were invited into the station’s Padiglione Reale that once served as the waiting room for Italian royalty and heads of state before boarding the Arlecchino train designed by Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti in the 1950s and recently restored by the Fondazione FS Italiane (out of the entire original fleet, this was the only one viable to be brought back to its former glory). Over the course of the week, discussions on digital, global, material and hacking infrastructures, along with interrogations of infrastructures of power, played out on board, seeking to examine ‘the impact of digital revolutions and global distribution networks on daily life’. Once again brilliantly introduced and contextualised by Alice Rawsthorn, several key takeaways included the necessity for infrastructure to collaborate rather than colonise, integrating ancestral knowledge to reframe industrial design, and the urgent need to re-evaluate industrial infrastructures to work in conjunction with the natural world rather than see them as separate entities.

READ: Aboard Gio Ponti's colourful Arlecchino train in Milan, a conversation about design with Formafantasma

Stone Island’s ‘sonic experience’

Stone Island invited visitors to its ‘sonic experience’ called ‘Friendly Pressure: Studio One’, staged in collaboration with Friendly Pressure, the London-based sound system studio founded by Shivas Howard Brown. A study of the textures of sound, the week-long programme of events took place in spaces that had bespoke hi-fidelity audio systems installed by Friendly Pressure in direct response to the precise dimensions of the space to rouse emotions akin to ‘the golden age of recorded music, treating sound as both a sensory and physical experience,’ the brand relayed. Studio One, where the events took place, was inspired by Carlo Scarpa, while inside soundproofing by Soundwave Jasmine and CC-Tapis rugs ensured the desired sound dispersion. Mirroring Stone Island’s sartorial approach to how materials respond to their environment, an allegorical experience emerged, parallelling reactions to touch and sound.

Louis Vuitton’s latest Objets Nomades series

Louis Vuitton revealed its 2025 home collection by staging a takeover of the neoclassical residence of Palazzo Serbelloni in the centre of Milan alongside its Objets Nomades series. Featuring designs from leading artists that the Paris fashion house has collaborated with over the years – including Patricia Urquiola, Jaime Hayon and Atelier Biagetti – it drew special attention to the work of futurist artist Fortunato Depero and Charlotte Perriand, whose textile work for the house was realised for the first time. Elsewhere, a special-edition trunk celebrating the house’s original design icon, the Malle Vaisselier, opened to reveal a service of refined porcelain and delicate glasses. It was the more whimsical items on display that drew the most attention: the Odyssée table football and a pinball machine inspired by the A/W 2025 fashion show by creative director Pharrell Williams were designed for Studio Louis Vuitton by Estúdio Campana and balanced the splendour with a cheeky wink.

Miu Miu’s ‘Literary Club’

The doors to The Miu Miu Literary Club opened once again during Salone, inviting guests into the Circolo Filologico Milanese that had been given a modernist Miu Miu makeover. Conceived under the direction of Miuccia Prada and curated by writer and researcher Olga Campofreda, the theme for this year was ‘A Woman’s Education’ and saw two days of panel discussions exploring the subjects of girlhood, love and sex education through the pages of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1954 coming-of-age novella ‘The Inseparables’ and Fumiko Enchi’s groundbreaking 1957 novel charting female desire, ‘The Waiting Years’. On day one, author Lou Stoppard moderated a panel discussion exploring ‘the power of girlhood’ in the context of De Beauvoir’s work with Lauren Elkin, Geetanjali Shree, and Veronica Raimo, and on day two Kai Isaiah Jamal delved into Enchi’s with through the lens of ‘love, sex, and desire’ with Nicola Dinan, Naoise Dolan, and Sarah Manguso, both championing the voices of female literary voices past, present and future.

Valextra’s ‘travelling sculpture’ with Zaven

Milanese leather goods brand Valextra is famed for sitting at the intersection of fashion and design with an archive dating back to 1937 that includes collaborations with AG Fronzoni and the first Compasso D’Oro award. For its Salone project this year, it continued its Vocabulario Project, inviting the Venice-based design studio Zaven to work with one of its most famous creations from the last century and recontextualise it through an idiosyncratic lens. The result is the ‘Costa 70 x Zaven’ suitcase, an identical re-creation of the Giovanni Fontana-designed luggage that dates back to the 1960s filled with a series of abstract resin objects that Zaven designed to be engineered into a build-it-yourself home sculpture. ‘Responsive and thought-provoking design has been at the core of Valextra’s DNA since 1937 and Zaven mirrors our own passion in realising objects of excellence in both a functional and meaningful way with this exceptional reinvention of an archival icon,’ says Valextra CEO Xavier Rougeaux.

READ: Valextra’s collaboration with Zaven is a ‘travelling sculpture’ with its own suitcase

Brioni bottles a rare fragrance with Lalique

If time is regarded as one of the greatest luxuries, then Brioni bottled it for Salone. A project four years in the making was unveiled at its Via Gesu flagship to mark Brioni’s 80th anniversary. Beloved for its exquisite attention to sartorial detail, the brand unveiled the Dualité Crystal Edition Perfume in collaboration with Lalique, an ode to artisanal craftsmanship and the art of olfactory. The glass bottle – of which only 18 are available – stands at nearly 40cm high and features an internal sculpture that was created using the cire-perdue method, the lost-wax technique first used by René Lalique in 1893 and passed down through generations of glassmakers. Inside, the Extrait de Parfum scent was created by master perfumer Michel Almairac over a seven-year-period and features notes of green apple, violet, Ambroxan, and rare iris butter. ‘This collaboration between our maisons became one of shared passion, representing everything we stand for: a dedication to time, the selection of precious raw materials, exquisite artisanry and the difference that human touch makes,’ says Brioni design director, Norbert Stumpfl.

Luca Faloni collaborates with Winetage

Luca Faloni partnered with Winetage, the fellow Italian brand that upcycles wine barrels into original design objects, to create a daybed upholstered in its exquisite brushed linen fabrics. Crafted from wood that still bears the red-wine stains and aromas from years of maturing the best Italian vintages, the daybed is furnished with padded tubes in fruity Bordeaux-red tones. Designed to spotlight the best of Made in Italy, the finished product combines fashion, wine, and design, providing the perfect resting spot to indulge in all three.

Missoni Home opens new Milan store

Missoni Home might be a mainstay in many a Milano dwelling, but it didn’t have its own spot in the city it calls home until this design week. Beside the brand’s Via Solferino showroom, the first dedicated Missoni Home boutique opened this week with its interior decor riffing on several of the brand’s most distinctive signatures, including degradé-painted pillars, zig-zag wallpaper, and its joyful rainbow colour palette, featuring a special curation of its expansive home offering.

Tod’s celebrates Made in Italy craft

As one of Italy’s most recognisable design icons, the Tod’s Gommino driving shoe holds a special place in the Made in Italy playbook. For Salone, the brand released a limited edition of the driving shoe (above) and unveiled a special coffee-table photography tome, ‘Italian Hands; Artisanal Stories From Italy’. A celebration of the processes and products that are exported all over the world, it features prominent Italian tastemakers alongside the artisans with whom they collaborate and promote – including master Murano glassblower Giberto Arrivabene, master of terracotta Rosario Spina, artisan of brass and bronze Ernesto Carati; and pesto connoisseur Christian Belforte. ‘This book is a tribute to those who, every day, with passion and commitment, contribute to keeping a fundamental part of our cultural identity alive,’ says Tod’s group president Diego Della Valle. ‘It is a recognition of those who know how to enhance craftsmanship, making it a symbol of authentic, timeless quality, even for new generations.’

Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters

Few materials are as synonymous with Gucci as bamboo. One of the fashion house’s defining motifs since it was first used on its iconic handbag in 1947, its legacy defines the innovation inherent to the Florentine brand. For Milan Design Week this year, the house invited seven artists to give their take on the material in their own mediums for its installation ‘Gucci Bamboo Encounters’. Curated by 2050+ founder Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and staged in the cloisters of the Chiostri di San Simpliciano, works ranged from a sculpture by Swedish-Chilean artist Anton Alvarez and a collection of baskets featuring hand-blown glass accents by Palestinian architect, artist, and researcher Dima Srouji, to a jubilant collection of bamboo kites by the Dutch design collective Kite Club. They were joined by artists Nathalie Du Pasquier, Laurids Galleé, and Sisan Lee, each of whom explored the shapeshifting possibilities of this chameleonic material.

READ: Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli on curating Gucci Bamboo Encounters at Fuorisalone: ‘We didn’t want to produce commodities’

‘La Prima Notte Di Quiete’ by Loro Piana and Dimoremilano

Loro Piana may have staged its design week event in the Cortile della Seta courtyard of its Milan headquarters, but there was nothing familiar about this space. Realised in collaboration with design duo Dimorestudio (founded by Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci), the usually light-flooded space had been transformed into a decadent 1970s film set meets affluent Milanese penthouse accessed via a cinema foyer draped in red theatre curtains. Invited through the curtains, visitors were presented with a fully furnished home, featuring furniture designed by Dimorestudio for Loro Piana Interiors alongside exquisite vintage pieces upholstered in Loro Piana’s luxurious home textiles and art from Tornabuoni Art, Cardi Gallery, and Galleria Gracis e Secci Gallery. Immersing visitors in the space for four-minute intervals was a soundtrack curated by music composer and multimedia artist Nicola Guiducci that ranged from excerpted dialogue on a rainy evening to a phone ringing and a piano playing that both heightened the cinematic experience.

Saint Laurent’s homage to Charlotte Perriand

When it comes to the design world, Yves is never far from Saint Laurent. For its design week installation, creative director Anthony Vaccarello looked to one of the design heroes of the French fashion house’s founder, Charlotte Perriand, commissioning four pieces of furniture she conceived between 1943 to 1967 that have only existed as sketches or prototypes until now. Comprising the rosewood and cane sofa designed for the Japanese ambassador’s Paris residence in 1967; the rose and cherrywood Mille-Feuilles table that she made a reduced-scale model of in 1963; the Indochina Guest Armchair she designed for her own home in 1943; and the Rio de Janeiro bookcase she designed in 1962 for her husband Jacques Martin’s apartment, the collection has been produced in full scale for the very first time for Milan Design Week. Standing in homage to the design talents of both Perriand and Saint Laurent, each piece in the collection will be available on an exclusive made-to-order basis following the showcase.

Versace’s celebration of the ‘Art of Living’

The Versace brand may be undergoing creative changes following the announcement last month that Donatella Versace would be stepping down as creative director, but its extravagant proposition for home design remains steadfast at its Milan Design Week presentation, The Versace Art of Living. Described as a ‘universe that brings a fantasy of poise, extravagance and heritage to life’, the star of the show this season was the reinvention of the ‘Harem’ chair, its steel frame made bountiful with the addition of thick padded satin cushions and, of course, a large gold Medusa head, alongside an update the of the 1994 wooden chair the ‘Vanitas’, upholstered in velvet. The house referenced Versace’s last fashion show at the event, stating that, like its ready-to-wear offering, ‘to embody Versace is to embrace a way of living at once proudly historied and decidedly modern, and to live it – to wear it, eat from it, sit on it, sleep in it – with uncompromising intention.’

Dolce & Gabbana’s ode to ‘love and hospitality’

The master of Southern Italian charm, Dolce & Gabbana, brought the verdant coastal landscapes of its founders’ native Sicily to the northern design capital for Salone with Verde Maiolica, a porcelain service in green and white. Celebrating the handmade craftsmanship of the region, its botanical design finds its roots in the Mediterranean shrub, while the collection – comprising tea and coffee sets alongside tableware, flatware and glassware – ‘represents and narrates the tale of love and hospitality’, relayed the brand at its Via Broggi cocktail presentation.

Fendi Casa’s collaboration with Lewis Kemmenoe

Fendi Casa continued its Design Miami collaboration with British designer Lewis Kemmenoe in Milan, seeing him take over the windows of its Via Manzoni flagship with his large-scale abstract panels. Acting as a metaphor for the savoir-faire behind the Rome-based brand’s furniture, they encapsulated the duality of the new interiors collection that is at once sumptuous and minimal. New to its line-up this year was ‘Cover’ sofa, designed to be ‘dressed up or down’ – a sartorial reference to reliable wardrobe staples; the ‘Twist’ chair by Stefano Gallizioli, a wood structure upholstered in leather with armrests resembling the swirls of a ribbon; and the modular ‘Later’ sofa, designed by Ceriani Szostak and inspired by the rationalist architecture of Fendi’s iconic Rome HQ that is famously both imposing and inviting.

Issey Miyake’s ‘Type-XIII Atelier Oï’ lighting

Issey Miyake invited guests to its Milan flagship to unveil ‘Type-XIII Atelier Oï’, the fruits of its collaborative project between the Swiss design studio Atelier Oï and A-POC Able Issey Miyake, which explores the seemingly limitless possibilities of its iconic ‘A Piece of Cloth’ concept. Unveiling lighting prototypes that use one piece of wire and a piece of cloth in several formations, the house presented two distinctive series. The first, the ‘O Series’, draws inspiration from the Japanese art of Ikebana, with five sculptural lights designed to take on the same decorative presence as flower arrangements that can be easily moved around the home with the recycled polyester ‘Steam Stretch’ material used in A-POC Able’s clothes-making process appearing to blossom in spontaneous directions. The second, the ‘A Series’, pays homage to Miyake’s iconic 1997 APOC show that saw a formation of models take to the runway connected by one continuous roll of fabric. Here, a pre-knitted roll stretches out to create a three-shade interconnected light installation that can be cut to size to suit the space it is destined to take pride of place in.

READ: A-POC Able Issey Miyake’s lighting collaboration with Atelier Oï is based on its philosophy of ‘a piece of cloth’

Hermès’ brilliant white box

In a departure from the darkened rooms of recent years, Hermès turned its La Pelota venue into a brilliant-white box. ‘To design an object, to make it, a box is needed,’ visitors were told before stepping into the stark space. Designed by Charlotte Macaux Perelman, architect and artistic director of Hermès collections for the home, the cavernous box-like room presented four polyhedron shapes descending from the ceiling and emitting a fluorescent glow beneath.‘Like a sculptor's marble block, [the box] contains the object, the idea we have of it, and the dream it inspires,’ the house continued. Each of these suspended structures featured this year’s ‘Objects For The Home’, including the ‘Contrepoint Dinner Service’ by Nigel Peake and Pivot D’Hermès side table by Tomás Alonso alongside the ‘Double D’Hermès’ jugs and ‘H Partition’ throws by Studio Hermes. Positioned both inside the cavities and on cutout shelves along their surface, the intersection between an object of function and admiration was brought to the fore.

READ: A bit of all white: Hermès unveils its latest home collections in Milan

Armani Casa’s ‘Oriental Inks’

After two years of delighting Milan Design Week-goers by throwing the doors open to his historic Palazzo Orsini home on Via Borgonuovo, Giorgio Armani opted to redirect attention back to the sprawling Armani Casa flagship on Corso Venezia to mark 25 years of Armani Casa and unveil its new homewares collection, ‘Oriental Inks’. Working in collaboration with De Gournay, iconic items of furniture in the permanent Armani collection were transformed with exquisite silk and beaded embroidery and gold-leaf appliqué depicting bamboo, dragons and jungle landscapes, chosen for being ‘auspicious symbols of strength, flexibility and endurance’ designed to transport their owners – and admirers – elsewhere. The ‘Amedeo’ bed, in particular, took over 200 hours to embroider its monkey-inhabiting canopy scene. ‘The display and the new pieces, authentic examples of the highest level of craftsmanship, are visible through the windows to anyone passing by,’ shared Mr Armani. ‘I quite like the idea of a surprise that captures attention, a suggestion that broadens horizons, now that horizons are often becoming narrower.’

Loewe’s artist-designed teapots

Former Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson may have left the building, but one of his proudest legacies lives on at design week. Marking its ninth craft exhibition during the city-wide showcase, the brand presented ‘Loewe Teapots’ featuring 25 different interpretations of the ubiquitous vessel by 25 international artists and the last curation from Anderson to be presented by the Spanish house. From the coral-like glaze application of South Korean artist Jane Yang-D'Haene’s pot to the surrealist two faces of Spanish ceramicist Laia Arqueros Claramunt’s design, the collection ranged in depiction from classic ceramic to convention-defying proportions, with each piece representing the intimate ceremony in which a teapot takes the lead.

READ: 25 artists reimagine the teapot at Milan Design Week 2025

Dior expands ‘Ode to Nature’ collection with Sam Baron

Dior Maison worked with French artist Sam Baron to expand its ‘Ode To Nature’ collection with three one-metre-high glass vases that were every bit as intricate as one of the French fashion house’s couture creations. Each depicting its own garden of intertwining branches, petals and foliage, the bodies of the hand-blown and hand-constructed vessels were inspired by the first Miss Dior amphora perfume bottle from 1947. Starting as a ribbed glass tube, each was gently blown and fired over several hours to create the distinctive shape before the exacting process of applying the delicate decorative details could begin. Designed to conjure the bouquets of flowers that founder Dior insisted on having in his salon, each of the three designs is available in a limited edition of eight – Monsieur Christian Dior’s lucky number.

Stay tuned for more of the best fashion moments at Milan Design Week 2025.

Amidst the cacophony of Milan Design Week, there are always a small handful of shows each year that set the agenda and become talking points for everyone attending. In the decade or so since Hermès first showed its homeware at Milan, its exhibition quickly emerged as a bellwether, not just in the week, but in the annual calendar; Hermès shows appear on moodboards of design houses, years later. Rich in texture, narrative, materials and meticulous detailing, the Hermès shows are benchmarks of quality, expression and inspiration that live on.

This year, visitors to La Pelota, the post-war former swimming pool on Via Palermo, were surprised this year to witness a starkly different approach by the French luxury house. The cavernous space was a white box, brightly lit, with various geometric-shaped boxes suspended in the air, each housing a different novelty. Pools of coloured light were reflected on the floors beneath the boxes. Increasingly, when everyone else at Milan was concerned with layers of context and theatrical stagings, Hermès took a different approach: clinical, pristine, ethereal and otherworldly. Stepping into the room was like entering a hallowed, sacred space - or an operating theatre. The essence of the showcase was to encourage us to consider the emotion of an object, laid bare in all its glory. ‘Inside the box is the latent object, the perfect object, the power of imagination, on the threshold of an intermediate world. It is not an illusion,’ read the official statement.

Such an unforgiving setting asks a lot of the objects on show. These boxes weren’t mere plinths, but more like inverted altars, inviting us to worship their contents, or at the very least, to study each display with forensic attention. Only Hermès could be confident of the quality of their homeware to be so bold, and this year’s collection had moments of exquisite beauty, intrigue, charm - as always. Standout pieces included Tomás Alonso’s coloured glass side tables with a swivelling cedar box for a surface, Amer Musa’s cashmere throws and Nigel Peake’s hand-painted, geometric porcelain collection.

If the Hermès show leads the way as the poster-child of Milan Design Week, what are we to take from this show? What does it say about the times in which we find ourselves, in design and beyond? As visitors emerged from this controlled environment, blinking into the Spring sunshine, there was a general sense of bewilderment. Where were the stories and the materials, the echoes of process that proliferate as hallmarks for integrity elsewhere? Perhaps these heavily contextualised displays that we’ve come to expect serve, beyond storytelling, as distraction from the objects themselves. Maybe it’s time we looked more closely to consider the essence of things as they are, in design and life.

Charlotte Macaux Perelman, architect and artistic director of Hermès collections for the home with Alexis Fabry are the masterminds behind Hermès scenography, and they sat down with Wallpaper* to explain their process and journey to this radical departure.

Wallpaper*: This is a very different and striking exhibition approach compared to your previous shows, and also against the prevailing theme of theatricality elsewhere in Milan. I’m interested to hear what the idea was behind the change of direction from shows that have been rich in materials to this spectacle of white boxes?

Charlotte Macaux Perelman: We challenge ourselves to keep moving. Even yesterday we were already asking ourselves what we might do next year. Our starting point is to look at the values of Hermès. Last year we looked at the Hermès legacy of materiality. This year we asked ourselves: ‘Why is it that an object has an aura? Why is it that gives any object a particular presence? How does a neutral object acquire an emotional connection with a human?’

Alexis Fabry: A few years ago Tomás Alonso designed a lamp for Hermès. During an interview, when asked what defines an Hermès object, he replied: ‘Something that is rightly done; well done.’ In the years since, we have often quoted Tomás on the subject of ‘rightness’. And over the last year we realised we should go further and express something deeper than materiality. In this show, we are examining the inestimable qualities of the object itself.

W*: It’s interesting that the scenography elsewhere in Milan this year is richly layered and contextualised, more concerned with showing objects in real life settings. Here, you have abstracted the object, allowing us to focus on the pieces forensically. Was your intention to invite us to build a connection between viewer and object without distraction?

AF: Yes - we have in the past shown objects in specific contexts. A great aspect that distinguishes Hermès from other houses is its confidence in the so-called ‘rightness’ of an object. Hermès is willing to invest in the long-term to ensure any object is absolutely brought to life in the right way. Such faith in the object itself means we do not have to rely on context or communication to support or tell its story.

W*: Tell me about some of the works that represent the ethos of the collection.

CMP: We love Tomás Alonso’s table. It is interesting that we have used industrial glass in combination with a beautifully crafted tray, exemplifying the quality of Japanese woodwork. The clash between the two materials is intriguing. In the past, we would have concentrated more on the crafted wood, and less on the industrial glass. This layering of two different materials and material approaches demonstrates that we have evolved. It feels right for now.

AF: This table is truly miraculous. We describe Tomás as a tightrope walker. If you look at the tray atop the glass and the way it rotates, it is so precise in mechanism, construction and movement, it is Tomás demonstrating his skill as a tightrope walker.

W*: How do you work together?

CMP: We are lucky that there are two of us. We reinforce our convictions, if we hesitate or feel a little swamped, then we strengthen each other mutually. There’s an unspoken trust between us.

AF: We agree so often that Charlotte and I sometimes ask ourselves if one of us is perhaps superfluous. That said, we always look at objects from a different viewpoint so, even though we converge, we come from separate standpoints, which is interesting - we bring different perspectives to a shared conclusion.

W*: When you first showed in Milan, it was as if we were being shown the craft within design; the celebration of craftsmanship, skill, expertise and material intelligence. With your latest offering, it feels like we are celebrating the art of design. Is this a conscious evolution or a reflection of the times in which we live and our values therein?

CMP: Perhaps the white box approach reminds one of art galleries. I don’t think this was our inspiration or concern. We wanted to have a contrast with our show last year, of course. But the idea was to encourage examination of feeling; to explore what gives an object an emotionally involving presence. The question we asked ourselves is simple: what is it within an object that touches us? There is great craft, skill and quality here but each object has a primary intention in its manifestation too. The white universe lays this bare.

AF: We were attracted by the idea of exposing these limits: our points of strength and perhaps also our weaknesses. By questioning inherent emotional values within objects, we are examining something opaque and mysterious. Why is it that some designs manage to emit this and some don’t, even though they have been made in the same environments? Is it about the objects themselves, or is it something within us?

hermes.com

Hermès Horloger has set the scene at this year’s Watches and Wonders with a collaboration with artist Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit, who has created an immersive backdrop for the watch releases.

This year’s new watches include a deep blue Arceau Petite lune watch, which sees diamonds sink into a gem-set steel case, three new versions of the Arceau L’heure de la lune watch first unveiled in 2019 and an artistic interpretation of a horse sweeping across the dial of the Slim d’Hermès Cheval brossé watch.

Desbenoit draws on these references for an artistic exploration of time for her scenography, which encourages visitors to pause, and take in their surroundings more mindfully. ‘I have always been fascinated by mechanisms—whether engines, electrical circuits, railway systems, or aviation,’ she says, on what inspired her design here. ‘Their repetitive motion, rhythms, and aesthetics captivate me; they are meditative and hypnotic objects. The watch mechanism shares this same beauty and precision, but it also carries a universal language: that of time. In the world of Hermès, time is not a simple linear measure; it frees itself from usual constraints and opens up to fantasy. Every moment becomes an invitation to recreation, to escape, where the suspended moment becomes a precious parenthesis.’

Desbenoit has interpreted the images synonymous with the watches, such as the horse itself, which comes to represent a break in the ordinary in her design. ‘The space itself becomes a clock at the scale of the body,’ she adds. ‘Every stop in the movement reveals a watch from the Hermès collection, suspending the moment. The spectator is immersed in a continuous loop, a steady pulse where time imprints itself into the architecture. The watches are not merely displayed objects; they serve as anchors, structuring the perception of time. Sound also plays a crucial role: a composition created with musician Julien Perez punctuates these pauses, transforming the ticking of a watch into a meditative breath, far from its usual urgency. The longer the spectator lingers in the space, the more details emerge, prolonging this sensation of suspended time.’

hermes.com

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

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

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

Designers explored a ‘raw glamour’

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

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

Textures and prints got animalistic

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

The waist was accentuated

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

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

Things got turned back to front, or upside down

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

Looks were cocooning, wrapped or concealing

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

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

It’s been five years since Hermès debuted its beauty métier. The first ever collection, Rouge Hermès, is a range of matte and satin lipsticks in colours extracted from the house’s archive. Textures are inspired by suede and calfskin leather, with the lipstick bullets (scented by Christine Nagel) contained in Pierre Hardy’s ergonomic and aesthetically striking cases.

‘It’s first of all sensual; about revealing, as opposed to masking. It’s about enhancing what is naturally there, and creating elegance and comfort and pleasure in being the best version of yourself,’ Pierre-Alexis Dumas, artistic director of Hermès, told Wallpaper* upon the launch.

Now, marking this milestone, creative director of Hermès Beauty Gregoris Pyrpylis has expanded its lipstick offering with a new compilation: Rouge Brilliant Silky. As the name suggests, instead of leather, this time around Pyrpylis looked to Hermès silks when devising the collection’s diaphanous – yet buildable, pigmented and longwearing – formulas.

Here, he takes Wallpaper* further behind the making of Rouge Brillant Silky.

Hermès Beauty: the making of Rouge Brillant Silky lipstick

Wallpaper*: What was the starting point – and inspiration behind – the Rouge Brillant Silky collection?

Gregoris Pyrpylis: After five years of Hermès Beauty, I wanted to celebrate this moment. So it made sense to introduce a new lipstick – a new signature, a new expression – for Hermès Beauty, which is complimentary to the Rouge Hermès collection that we began with, back in 2020. The finish of Rouge Brillant Silky is more of a delicately coloured yet intensely glossy finish. It’s intuitive and playful. It’s not about precision.

The collection draws inspiration from a memory from my childhood; the first time I felt silk against my skin. My mom used to wear a lot of long, ethereal silk scarves, either around her neck or attached to her handbag. I was only small – around six or seven years old – and when she would come and pick me up from school I would walk alongside her at knee-height and the silk would brush against my face.

W*: How did you capture this sensation in the Rouge Brillant Silky formulation?

GP: We worked closely with the Hermès silk métier, which provided different samples from the archive. I then borrowed elements from these samples for the lipstick formula and texture. There’s the transparency of silk chiffon; the suppleness of silk twill; the luminosity of silk lamé.

The ingredients were key to achieving this. There’s Abyssinian oil, which is incredibly hydrating and nourishing. We also infused the lipsticks with sesame seed extract, to soften and smooth the lips, and raspberry leaf extract, which has a subtle plumping effect. Then there’s the Morus Alba, or white mulberry, a core ingredient running throughout Hermès Beauty, which has antioxidant properties.

W*: How did you translate the intense colours of Rouge Hermès into more of a sheer finish?

GP: The shades in the Rouge Brillant Silky collection are emblematic of Hermès, such as Rouge Casaque, Rouge H and Rose Épicé. I stayed as close as possible to the true colour payoff, in this sheer formula. The lipsticks elevate the natural shade of the lips, rather than covering entirely.

There are also new shades that I developed. One of my favorites is called Brun d’Ambre, which is a beautiful beige, infused with golden, pink and copper-toned pearls. So, when you apply it, it just warms up the skin in a very subtle way. And it works on every skin tone. Another of my favourites is Rouge Brique, another signature Hermès colour, that we hadn’t used in the beauty métier before now. It’s a dark terracotta red. It’s a lipstick that elevates and reveals the natural colour of the lips, rather than covering.

W*: What is the ‘gesture’ – or application technique – for Rouge Brillant Silky?

GP: A Rouge Brillant Silky lipstick doesn’t follow the rules. There are so many ways to apply it. Of course, you can start with one swipe on your lips and stop there, which will provide a very lightweight veil of colour. Then, you can build up the intensity if you continue with a second or even a third layer. By pairing it with one of the Trait d’Hermès pencils, you could create a shade sur mesure.

When used alongside a corresponding lipstick from the Rouge Hermès collection – for example, Rouge Casaque paired with Rouge Casaque from Rouge Brillant Silky – you can achieve a lacquered finish. For an ‘almost there’ tint, try applying one of the lipsticks to the back of your hand and dabbing it onto the lips with your fingertip. I think the gesture has an addictive power. Those who have worn the product so far have told me that ‘they cannot stop applying it’.

W*: The refillable lipstick cases and protective canvas pouches for Rouge Brillant Silky are new. Also, the bullets are slanted. Why is this?

GP: Pierre Hardy has made Hermès Beauty so unique that the moment you touch the object in your hands, you instinctively know it’s Hermès. So when it comes to this new chapter, I explained to him that Rouge Brillant Silky is a melting and enveloping texture that needs to be guided by the shape of the bullet and the case. The slanted bullet will facilitate the gesture when you apply it; it’s not flat, so you won’t hold the lipstick in a way that feels unnatural. The slender shape of the case also aids in this gesture.

This year we are also celebrating the 100th anniversary of Rouge H – a distinctive colour for Hermès. It’s a Bordeaux red with a hint of brown and a slightly blue undertone, which dictated the design of the new canvas pouch.

W*: And what about the metallic-finish limited edition cases?

GP: At Hermès, we’re always trying to create objects that have long lasting life. To me, the limited edition cases are like treasures you want to keep forever. Rouge Brillant Silky is about how colour interacts with light. So here, I looked at artists who have explored this approach, such as James Turrell. And Pierre Hardy worked his magic yet again.

W*: What’s next for Hermès Beauty?

GP: The Hermès A/W 2025 show was on Saturday last week (8 March 2025), in which Hermès Beauty had a very significant presence with a bold make-up expression. As for what’s next, the beauty métier feels almost complete in terms of its core offering. So the aim is to enrich our existing collections, going a bit deeper into each segment but always sticking to the foundation of Hermès Beauty. The next launch is coming in September this year. I think it’s going to be one of my favourites and may be surprising to some as it’s quite unexpected for Hermès.

Rouge Brillant Silky, from £63, from hermes.com

For the Wallpaper* March 2025 style issue, we imagined six intoxicating perfumes through six different looks, photographed by Grace Difford and styled by Jason Hughes.

Dior, Poison: Notes of coriander, tuberose absolute and vanilla (above)

Derived from the French word for ‘wake’, ‘sillage’ is a perfumery term used to describe a lingering scent trail. Although its wearer may have left the room, any powerful fragrance will remain behind, like an olfactory phantom. ‘Long after one has forgotten what a woman wore, the memory of her perfume lingers,’ said Christian Dior of an intoxicating fragrance’s ability to haunt and beguile.

Of the many perfumes in the history of Dior, Poison, created by Edouard Fléchier in 1985, distinctly encapsulates this statement. Containing plum, coriander, anise, tuberose, incense and honey, this bombastic, syrupy scent could diffuse a nuclear aroma of grape flavoured candy with a single spritz. (Such was its intensity, some offices and restaurants outlawed those who dared to wear it.)

Escentric Molecules, Escentric Molecule 001: 100 per cent Iso E Super

Fléchier’s predecessor, master nose Edmond Roudnitska, who created perfumes for Dior between 1948-1976, would surely have admired this polarising elixir, believing that ‘the beautiful perfume is the one that gives us a shock’. Roudnitska was the first perfumer to make commercial use of hedoine, or methyl dihydrojasmonate, a synthetic molecule found to activate human pheromone receptors and areas of the brain associated with emotion.

Iso E Super is another synthetic ingredient said to trigger a similar pheromone response. Geza Schoen founded his fragrance brand Escentric Molecules in 2006, inspired by the moment he smelled this compound in isolation. ‘Iso E Super is highly unusual. You can never get enough of it. One sniff and you want the whole bottle. It’s like a drug,’ he said. ‘It’s brought alive by the warmth of the body. It blossoms on the skin, adding a velvety radiance to your own individual scent signature. You want to nestle into it, it’s sensual, cocooning.’ The first perfume by the brand, Escentric 01, is crafted from Iso E Super alone. One review on Fragrantica describes it as so ‘addictive to my own nose that I keep burying it in my shirt’.

Loewe, 001 Woman: Notes of jasmine, linen and musk

The synesthetic quality of perfume is celebrated by Serge Lutens in his Collection Noire, a capsule of fragrances with ‘strong Proustian accents’. This includes the 1993 scent Ambre Sultan, designed to evoke a ‘fragment of amber resin picked up by Serge Lutens during a wander through the souks of Marrakech, which lay forgotten for years inside a thuja wood box.’ Resinous, smoky and sweet, thanks to a welcome underscore of vanilla, it recalls the feeling of stepping into a sauna and imbibing the terpene smell of hot cedarwood.

In 2016, reflecting on another intimate setting, Jonathan Anderson put forward the initial perfume offering for Loewe under his tenure: 001 Woman and 001 Man. These ‘reinterpret the scent of a skin caress’ and are ‘suggestive of the morning after’, with shared notes allowing them to be worn together, as if lovers entwined in bed. The jasmine and musk in 001 Woman combine with notes of linen for an enveloping effect.

Hermès, Oud Alezan: Notes of rose oxide, rose hydrolat and oud

For Christine Nagel, head perfumer at Hermès, it was a close encounter with a chestnut mare named Scheherazade, in the stables at the annual Saut Hermès competition in Paris, that led to the creation of Oud Alezan. ‘I could feel the hair across her head… her palpitating heart in her neck,’ she said in an interview with us last year. ‘One day, I was given some blotters. The supplier didn’t say what was on them. When I smelled one of them, it was as if I was smelling Scheherazade’s neck again.’ On those blotters was an exceptionally rare oud that would form the foundation of Oud Alezan. Enveloping and supple, the sharpness of rose oxide slices through it in the manner of a craftsman’s blade through leather.

Celine, Reptile: Notes of cedar, pepper, tree moss, leather and musk

Celine’s Reptile and Black Tie also evoke the tactility of fabric, referencing the clothing designs of the then creative director Hedi Slimane. According to the brand, the former is an ‘olfactory twin’ of the stage outfits made for the designer’s rock star muses, while the latter nods to the textures of grain de poudre and satin. Intensely powdery via musk and white orris butter, a Fragrantica user attests to Black Tie’s addictive qualities: ‘What has this done to my nerve endings?’ Another adds that Reptile is ‘like I’ve stuck my nose into a fine leather handbag’.

Slimane’s penchant for designing perfume that elicits a visceral response is, in part, thanks to his one-time mentor Yves Saint Laurent, who, alongside his A/W77 Les Chinoises collection, debuted Opium, a heady blend of myrrh, patchouli and vanilla. ‘I chose Opium for the name because I hope that it will diffuse through its incandescent powers, divine fluids, magnetic waves, and the things that most appeal to the heart,’ explained Saint Laurent. ‘The charms of seduction, which give birth to passionate love, when you fall head over heels, fatal ecstasy…’

Yves Saint Laurent, Opium: Notes of cloves, cinnamon, incense and sandalwood

‘Saint Laurent oversaw the entire creative process, from the choice of scents and the shape of the bottles to the press kit and the advertising campaign featuring Jerry Hall photographed by Helmut Newton,’ notes the Musée Yves Saint Laurent website, adding that the fragrance caused global controversy for its association with the narcotic. Opium’s scandalous legacy continued under Tom Ford, whose 2000 advertising campaign, shot by Steven Meisel and starring a nude Sophie Dahl seemingly in the throes of ecstasy, was banned by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority after receiving an unprecedented number of complaints. Four years later, Ford left Yves Saint Laurent to set up his own brand. A beauty line soon followed, and with it, the first Tom Ford fragrance: Black Orchid. ‘This is not about an ordinary orchid, it’s about something a little more strange and rare,’ Ford said at its launch in 2006.

Tom Ford, Black Orchid: Notes of truffle, plum, rum, ylang-ylang, black orchid and patchouli

‘For the last decade, I think we’ve launched fragrances that have become so stripped-down, so transparent in terms of colour and scent,’ he continued. ‘For me to put a story back into fragrance and put the fragrance into a beautifully designed bottle and shoot it in a very lush way, this is a reaction to a decade of minimalism that has left people starved for content and substance. I wanted a potent product.’ In a world where audacious fragrances are, at times, more diluted than ever before, we could do well to heed Ford’s words.

Model: Maaike Klaasen at Platform Agency. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Stelios Chondros at Julian Watson Agency using Bumble and Bumble. Make-up: Claire Urquhart at Julian Watson Agency using Nars. Manicure: Abena Robinson at Agency 41 using Margaret Dabbs London. Prop maker: Sienna Murdoch. Photography assistants: Adam Roberts, Bradley Polkinghorne. Fashion assistant: Nathan Fox. Hair assistant: Kate Hussey. Make-up assistants: Fernanda Paz, Tasmin Ballingall. Retouching: Art Post

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

A new Hermès store has opened on Via degli Strozzi in Florence. The space, which was designed by Rena Dumas Architecture Intérieure (RDAI), under the artistic direction of Denis Montel, replaces the Hermès store on Via Tuornabuoni, which has been home to the brand since 1991. The move reflects the maison’s need for more space to display products from its 16 metiers.

The Renaissance building that houses the new store dates back to 1578. Its new interior includes many emblematic design details, including the house's ex-libris motif in metal as you step inside; Hermès’ signature Faubourg pattern on the floor; and Grecques lighting originally from the Paris flagship at 24 Faubourg Saint Honoré.

Floors are finished in terrazzo, marble and marmorino and covered with colourful handmade rugs. An elliptical staircase leading to the first floor is finished in Hermès leather. Glazed terracotta tiles line the beauty area; copper lacquer covers the ceiling; and stucco, marble and ribbed paper wallcoverings are rendered in subtle colours – mainly terracotta and green. The windows, made entirely of straw by Milan-based designer Andrea Mancuso, depict the Ponte Vecchio, Palazzo Vecchio and other Florentine monuments.

Elsewhere, a monumental billiards table, made by Hermès’ bespoke department, Ateliers Horizons, in Pantin, outside Paris, is finished in green felt with a green lacquered base. This, alongside a special case for carrying Tuscan wine, are two of the exceptional pieces made for the store.

Around 70 artworks adorn the walls above the displays – some of these are from the Émile Hermès collection and Hermès Collection of Contemporary Photographs, including images from Italian photographer Paola De Pietri and American Alex MacLean.

The Florence outpost is one of 12 Hermès stores in Italy, which is the brand’s most important market after France, where Hermès manufactures its products. The opening on Friday 14 February 2025 coincided with the maison reporting an impressive 17.6 per cent growth in fourth-quarter revenue. Interestingly, Hermès has fewer stores than it did ten years ago, but the locations tend to be larger.

Hermès Firenze
Via degli Strozzi, 16
Firenze
hermes.com

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

Trompe l’oeil (top left)

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

Cut-outs (top right)

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

Reimagined plaid

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

Hybrid accessories

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

Spiralling silhouettes

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

Puzzle-piece construction

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

Blown-up tailoring

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

Shifted waistlines

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

Brown

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

Transparency

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

Open arms

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

Deconstruction

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

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

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

One of the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025 winners includes a recent collection of eye and lip pencils from Hermès Beauty, named Trait d’Hermès. ‘I vividly remember that I was one of those kids who loved stationery and having a huge palette of colours in front of me,’ Hermès Beauty’s creative director Gregoris Pyrpylis said of the collection upon its launch in October 2024.

Conceived in collaboration with the brand’s packaging creator Pierre Hardy, it reflects on these childhood memories and is designed to resemble a kaleidoscopic set of new crayons. ‘Make-up has become even more joyful and more playful than ever,’ he continued. ‘And Trait d’Hermès is an invitation to explore this to its fullest.’

Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025: make-up collections by Hermès, Dior, Celine, Chanel and Prada selected by beauty editor Hannah Tindle

A grown-up invitation to play with make-up application has felt like a running theme over the past year in beauty. Peter Philips, Dior’s creative and image director of make-up, channelled a similar line of thought into the reimagined Diorshow Mono Couleur eyeshadows and Stylo eyeliners, encouraging spontaneity and experimentation with an array of colours and textures. In the accompanying Diorshow ad campaign, Philips drew abstract black and pastel-toned stripes across model Deva Cassel’s eyes – paying homage to Serge Lutens, whose radically illustrative work for Dior creative director Marc Bohan used every inch of the face as a surface for painting and drawing with make-up.

During his tenure at Celine, Hedi Slimane mined the modernist archives of its founder Céline Vipiana. (Besides clothing, Vipiana produced the brand’s first perfume, Vent Fou, in 1963, alongside accessories and lifestyle objects.) Before announcing his departure last October (2024) Slimane marked a new chapter, launching Celine Beauté with a single product: a satin lipstick in an effortless red dubbed Rouge Triomphe. As quintessential as a piece from Slimane’s ready-to-wear collections, it’s a lipstick so universal that the individual ways it can be worn seem almost endless.

Back in 2022, Chanel set up its Cometes Collective, a group of emerging make-up stars hand-picked by the brand to formulate a seasonal, limited-edition collection – ‘independent thinkers united, above all, by the conviction that beauty comes from the freedom to be and to become yourself in all your richness, complexity and nuance,’ says the house.

The first make-up artists selected were Ammy Drammeh, Cécile Paravina and Valentina Li, with the collective’s debut launching in 2024, courtesy of Li. A painter before she turned her hand to make-up, she sports a blue bob (Li considers the colour to be a ‘reflection of her inner world’). As a result, her Spring 2024 collection traversed a range of blues from cobalt to pale azure in a Les 4 Ombres eyeshadow quad, Stylo Yeux eyeliner and Lumière de L’Océan illuminating powder.

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons described their vision for Prada’s S/S 2025 collection as ‘rallying call against the internet algorithm’ and a rejection of the ‘derivative and expected’. Casting director Ashley Brokaw assembled a roster of new and eclectic looks for the runway show, with Prada’s global creative make-up artist Lynsey Alexander taking an equally tailored approach to beauty. Using products from the brand’s namesake make-up line – including the Memphis Milano-esque Dimensions eyeshadow palettes, which Alexander described as a ‘juxtaposition of ugly and beautiful, coming together to create something quite extraordinary’ in a 2023 interview with Wallpaper* – each model received a unique look, corresponding to their facial structures and personalities.

As artist Cindy Sherman once said, ‘I’m good at using my face as a canvas. I’ll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face.’ It’s a statement that speaks to the current mood in contemporary make-up and beauty, where the face becomes a canvas in every sense of the word.

Models: Mouy Onak at IMG, Essoye Mombot at Oui Mangement, Marie Loridan at Women Management. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Rimi Ura at Calliste Agency. Digital assistant: Farouk at Dope Paris. Photography assistant: Theophile Parat. Make-up assistants: Toma Marandeau, Ekaterina Mignery.

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

Paris Design Week rumbles on, with design professionals and aesthetically-minded members of the public perusing various locations to discover the latest collections in decor and interiors.

The event, born from the trade-focused Maison&Objet, showcases more than 150 brands who, via affiliated occasions like Paris Déco Off and Maison&Objet in the City, welcome attendees into their showrooms. The doors of workshops and ateliers are thrown open and Paris' sequestered design spaces unlocked, extending collections and archives usually reserved for industry insiders, to the public.

Attendees can take various routes around Paris to discover these collections, exploring the spots that make up its design ecosystem. Head of Interiors, Olly Mason, spent a couple of days traversing the capital’s arrondissements, dipping in and out of studios and getting the rundown on exhibiting brands.

We catch up with Olly for her highlights, reflections and meditations on Paris Design Week…

Melodic tableware at Hermès

Hermès presented En Contrepoint, a tableware collection, at the Conservatoire National Des Artes et Métiers, a former abbey in Paris’ third arrondissement. The 33 porcelain pieces are lined with friezes in 30 shades, from pinks and violets to blues, greens and oranges. Motifs are vibrant and geometric, hand-drawn and painted by artist Nigel Peake.

‘The collection was really beautiful,’ says Olly. ‘The word “contrepoint” actually refers to a style of musical composition that uses multiple melodies, and the whole collection related to this.’ En Contrepoint is all about refrain and tempo – this is transposed onto the designs via metrical patterns and rhythmic shapes; the repetition of these shapes becomes hypnotic, arranged into different permutations, as music is on a score.

Acidic upholstery at Sahco

Sahco presented its collection in the whitewashed surrounds of the Galerie Dumonteil. Room Service, an installation predicated around the theme of ‘icons of Modernism’, was staged by American designer Rafael de Cárdenas, who took Modernist motifs and imbued them with Sahco language.

Set among vintage and classic furniture and objet d’art, Sahco’s pieces also felt, in some ways, archaic and artisanal. In making them, however, traditional techniques were combined with high tech.

References came thick and fast: the colours recalled Franz West, the Austrian artist known for his unconventional objects, and designer Ulf Moritz, who shaped Sahco in the 1980s. A fringed sheer made with fil-coupé alluded to the glamour of Marilyn Monroe, and a snakeskin motif was unexpectedly rendered in heavy jacquard. ‘The first thing that struck me was the colours,’ says Olly. ‘But then you saw that the designs stood up to this.’

Looking back at Liberty

Next on Olly’s agenda was the Rue de Seine to preview Liberty’s 150th anniversary collection, The House of Liberty. ‘This was a deep dive into Liberty’s archival designs, which the brand had taken abstracts from and reworked, some more literally than others,’ she says.

The collection, which consisted of interior fabric and wallpaper, drew on key moments from Liberty’s past, with the intention of bookending the last 150 years to make way for a new era. Dusty, leather-bound books containing charcoal hand-drawings of original designs left audiences in little doubt about the scope of Liberty’s 60,000-strong archive.

In The House of Liberty, the stories of these fabrics were told and celebrated, reimagining Victorian paisleys, bohemian botanicals and 1970s florals. Palm Parade, for example, discovered as a fabric fragment in an 1880s pattern book, references an artwork originally made using woodblock printing. With every nod and reference, the collection sought to revive and update the craftsmanship at the heart of Liberty.

Modular minimalism at Liaigre

Interior architect Liaigre reissued the Bloc collection at its Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré flagship with a new edition of the Bloc Library, a collaboration between architects Gaëlle Lauriot-Prévost and Dominique Perrault. The bookshelf – which builds on a design created in 1995 for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, reimagining this at a domestic scale – is all about conservative minimalism and clean lines. It’s extensively adaptable, being fully modular, with almost limitless customisation options.

A special setting at The Invisible Collection

The Invisible Collection’s presentation took place at the enchanting Féau Boiseries workshop, which houses stacks upon stacks of antique wood panels, at its 150th anniversary. Stepping inside the appointment-only space was another standout for Olly: ‘You go through this unassuming door on a Parisian street and it’s like a warren – you head through room after room filled with wooden panels through different eras and styles.’

The Invisible Collection partnered with Mobilier national, the institution for French decorative arts, to present their latest furniture acquisitions in this idiosyncratic setting. These included a collection of Fauvist rugs by BENI, Laura Demichelis’ Rhino Table, Sophie Dries’ Nogye Table, and Alice Gavalet’s Guéridon.

Olly was particularly drawn to Elliott Barnes’ latest creation, White Endless Summer II, a limited edition bench in white Synderme, a material made from natural leather fibres mixed with paper and latex – notable for the fact that it uses vegetable leather to structure as opposed to just cover. Placing this state-of-the-art material in such rich, textural surroundings only enhanced its impact.

Old meets new at Nordic Knots

Nordic Knots' debut installation, The Grand, celebrated the intersection of contemporary design and ancient artistry. The venue for the presentation, therefore, could not have been more perfect, says Olly: ‘Galerie Chenel is known for housing these beautiful, ancient sculptures, and I loved the way that Nordic Knots mixed its pieces amongst them.’

The Scandinavian textile company exhibited its most covetable rugs and curtains draped on and around Galerie Chenel’s Roman artworks. The brand’s broad palette and rich textures were on full show, with plush rugs and all-wool curtains rendered in burnt reds, soft lilacs and sunshine yellows popping against mottled marble and centuries-old stone.

Functional ornaments at Christofle

The French silverware stalwart, which has been going since 1830, launched its Perspectives collection by Mathias Kiss. The French artist took the motif of moulding and dissected and reconstructed it to create candleholders, candelabras and a vase.

Because of the nature of moulding, the objects are tightly structured, while managing to feel slightly surreal. Kiss imagines a new functionality for ornamentation, using classical forms to create modern objects.

‘The motif was repeated with different angles and dimensions to create a collection that feels really architectural and contemporary,’ says Olly. ‘And, because of the way they play on a continuous line, each piece can be sat within other pieces to create your own composition.’

Contrasting fabrics at Dedar

Contemporary fabric and wallcovering specialist Dedar brought its 2025 collection to Paris Design Week: a lively amalgamation of contrasts, juxtaposing the classical and contemporary, as well as figurative, abstract and narrative elements. Oriental concepts sometimes crept in, with motifs of mountains, waterfalls, clouds, skies, butterflies and branches. Embroidery was combined with other, usual techniques, sometimes occasioning a clash of materials. Streaks and special dyes created a fusion of saturated, pale and mélange tones, and textures also ebbed and flowed: the Plain Classics, for example, are characterised by a woollen side and a silky side.

Evolution at Rubelli

Rubelli presented a textile collection developed under the creative direction of Formafantasma, Teorema. The collection, the brand has said, aims to better meet the demands of high-end markets, making use of high-performance fabrics such as wool, and angles to disrupt the perception of Rubelli as exclusively employing silks and other luxury textiles. This was a mission statement about the preservation of identity alongside the diversification of offering. Thus, Teorema can reasonably be described as innovative for Rubelli.

Colours were largely neutral, accompanied by some more extroverted shades. Patterns moved away from the botanical – ‘the most archetypal decorative apparatus of the fabric’ – to the abstract and geometric, in a way which echoed the theme of evolution.

The anniversary of a watch’s debut is often marked with an impressive new release, ably demonstrating the brand’s technical progression since the original’s launch. Lately though, a slew of brands have come full circle and returned to consider the founding watch itself. We’ve taken our pick of the year's best watch reinterpretations.

Casio commemorated its 50th anniversary with the re-release of a collection that has surely earned its status as a cult classic. Originally appearing in 1974, the ongoing re-release of digital watches brings back models from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

G-Shock, too, is making the classic contemporary again, marking its 40th anniversary with the Remaster series, featuring sharp new design details including transparent cases and useful tech. Elsewhere, Audemars Piguet translated an original 1960s design into a brutalist-inspired asymmetrical creation, [Re]master02; Hermès has rethought the Arceau watch 50 years after its release; Piaget revisited the Polo Date to mark 150 years; and Patek Philippe has imbued the Golden Ellipse, originally launched in 1968, with a 1970s-style gold mesh strap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full article here.

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

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

Read the full article here.

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

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

Read the full article here.

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

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

Read the full article here.

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

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

Read the full article here.

Fendi perfumes in Wallpaper* July 2024: The Design Directory

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

Read the full article here.

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

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

Read the full article here.

Solid soap in Wallpaper* September 2024: The Style Issue

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

Read the full article here.

Celine Beauté lipstick in Wallpaper* October 2024: Guest Editors

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

Read the full article here.

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

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

Read the full article here.

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

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

Read the full article here.

Dior perfumes in Wallpaper* December 2024: The Entertaining Issue

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

Read the full article here.

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

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

Read the full article here.

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

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

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

Nadège Vanhée on a decade of womenswear at Hermès

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

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

The story behind Kim Jones’ first Dior Men couture collection

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

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

Willy Chavarria on rewriting American fashion

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

READ: How Willy Chavarria is rewriting American fashion

The renaissance of Tory Burch

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

READ: Inside the renaissance of Tory Burch

A rare conversation with Jil Sander

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

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

Demna’s thoroughly modern haute couture for Balenciaga

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

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

Martine Rose on bringing her disruptive vision to Milan

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

READ: Martine Rose on her disruptive Milan Fashion Week debut

Molly Goddard on creating a community of brides

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

READ: Molly Goddard on creating a community of contemporary brides

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

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

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

Jony Ive on collaborating with Moncler

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

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

It’s been two years since Hermès Beauty welcomed Greek make-up artist Gregoris Pyrpylis as its creative director. Beauty is the house’s 16th and youngest métier, debuting two years before that in March 2020. (Although it has been creating perfumes since 1951, make-up and skincare were an entirely new category for the French Maison to explore).

‘Hermès Beauty is part of who we are: a house where everything comes from creation, driven by artisans who seek to accompany the men and women of today with elegance, and with the integrity and authenticity that we represent,’ CEO Axel Dumas said to mark its first launch, a range of 24 matte and satin lipsticks scented with a fragrance by Christine Nagel, that were everything one might expect from an Hermès beauty product, and more.

From the get-go, it was abundantly clear that the beauty line would be an expansive celebration of craft and colour; from the Pierre Hardy-designed refillable tubes to the bullets themselves, the lipsticks drew upon the 75,000 shades of silk and 900 tones of leather in the house archive. And each subsequent product category, from lip oils to nail polishes, has demonstrated this in a way that only Hermès could.

The latest in the ‘Trait d’Hermès’ eye collection, is perhaps the most playful offering yet: 40 eye and lip pencils (plus a liquid liner) that riff on the nostalgic feeling of receiving a new set of stationary at the start of a school year. Here, Pyrpylis shares the story of their design process with Wallpaper*.

Hermès Beauty’s ‘Trait d’Hermès’ eye and lip liners

Wallpaper*: How did the concept for the ‘Trait d’Hermès’ eye and lip liners start out?

Gregoris Pyrpylis: Last year (2023), we introduced the first collection for the eyes with ‘Le Regarde’. Within this chapter, you had ‘Les Ombres d’Hermès’, the eyeshadows, and ‘Les Traits d’Hermès’, a mascara. The new eye and lip liners are a second part of this, to complete the expression of the eyes. Their design is organic to the ethos of Hermès, referencing the tools we use to create.

W*: Yes, the collection is reminiscent of a new set of stationary – how did you communicate this in a way that felt right for Hermès?

GP: I vividly remember that I was one of those kids who loved stationary and having a huge palette of colours in front of me. It gave me this feeling of freedom. And this is what I wanted to communicate with the eye and lip liners. Hermès sees ‘design’ as a vehicle for telling stories. Just as the Hermès horse is a method of transportation, a design by Hermès can transport your mind.

I sat down with Pierre Hardy and told him my idea. He almost immediately began to draw out the designs on a piece of paper. The pencils are crafted from lacquered sustainable wood; he wanted to reference show jumping poles to tie everything together with the codes of the house. Then, the eyeliner pen is like a fountain pen, with a refillable cartridge. There’s a sharpener, too: it’s a beautiful object in itself and from a practical perspective it has four strong magnets inside so that when you travel, the pencil shavings don’t fall out

W*: Can you talk about the formulations of the liners and how to use them?

GP: I like make-up to be practical for everyone out there to use: for my friends, my mom, the Hermès client. So I wanted to create a pencil that combines the function of a kohl and a classic eyeliner. They have a texture that is very soft, but not greasy; it’s hard enough to define the eye, but soft enough so it will melt in contact with the skin. You can wear them in the waterline and the product delivers a pure colour.

There’s a small smudger on one end that will help to diffuse the colour, but if you want to keep the line precise, this is also possible. We enhanced our collection of brushes with a new design: ‘L’Estompeur de Précision’. It has a combination of natural and synthetic hair, so you can blend the liner, but in a very controlled way.

W*: How did you arrive at the final colour palette we see in the collection?

GP: We had to make an extensive edit. So we arrived at 24 eye pencils – which is the house’s lucky number – and 16 for the lips. For the lip liners, the exercise was a bit tough in the beginning. My goal was to have one for each of our lipsticks, that wouldn’t impact the colour of the lipstick. There are reds – blue reds and warmer yellow-toned reds. So we have, for example, ‘Rouge Bleu’, which is one of our most well-known lipsticks, and ‘Rouge H’. We also have rose and orange shades. But we also introduced beautiful beige colours as well, in a way that you can wear them on their own, without pairing them with lipstick, just to define and reconstruct the lip, if you wish.

W*: And what about the eyeliners?

GP: It was important to me that there were classic colours essential to everyone – a beautiful and strong black, different browns, metallic browns, bronzes – but also to bring Hermès’ singular approach to colour. So at the same time, we have the likes of ‘Jaune Impérial’, a kind of mustard yellow in the same shade as one of my favourite nail polishes, and ‘Bleuet’, a vibrant baby blue that is almost like the sky in Greece. ‘Brun Sanguine’ is a terracotta orange that is sublime when you put it on green or blue eyes.

To me, in 2024, make-up has become even more joyful, and more playful than ever. And this new chapter of ‘Trait d’Hermès’ is an invitation to explore this to its fullest.

hermes.com

A version of this article appears in the November 2024 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands from 10 October, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Christine Nagel, Hermès’ in-house perfumer, is a synesthete and a storyteller. I met her for the first time in person earlier this year (2024) to discuss ‘Oud Alezan’, a warm and heady scent inspired by Nagel’s emotive encounter with a chestnut mare named Scheherazade, at the annual Saut Hermès in Paris. Her words, softly spoken in French, were relayed through an interpreter. But I was captivated nonetheless.

‘Barénia’ is Nagel’s latest creation for the house since her appointment ten years ago – and has taken almost as long to produce. It’s also the first-ever chypre scent profile in Hermès’ portfolio of fragrances. (The chypre fragrance family is characterised by the contrast of fresh top notes, usually floral or fruity, and woody, mossy base accords).

Of course, in the hands of Nagel, Hermès’ iteration of a chypre is both exceptional and poetic. As she explains when we reconnect over a call, it’s a fragrance that almost ‘melts’ into the skin, shifting over time, like the patina of the soft ‘Barenia’ leather it is named after.

The story behind Hermès’ ‘Barénia’, a perfume that took Christine Nagel nearly ten years to make

Wallpaper*: ‘Barénia’ is the first chypre fragrance you have created during your tenure at Hermès. What was the development process like?

Christine Nagel: When I arrived at Hermès’, I immediately knew that I was going to make a chypre. Because, first of all, I love a chypre scent. It has the most elegant structure. It’s sensual and it’s timeless. Hermès is a timeless house. But nobody had directly asked me to make it, so I worked on the idea in my little corner, so to speak.

I wanted to take my time to get to know Hermès and the Hermès woman. I kept coming back to the idea over the years. I couldn't just leave it alone. And that’s surprising because normally when you work on something for a very long time, often you get bored with it and move on to something else. But this truly captured me.

W*: Can you expand on the notes and ingredients used in ‘Barénia’?

CN: When I was developing ‘Barénia’ I was keen to find raw materials for a chypre perfume that are surprising and new. So, for the head notes, I used a bespoke Calabrian bergamot, made only for Hermès’. For the floral bouquet, it’s not rose, but a little flower that comes from Madagascar, which is called the butterfly lily. This is the first time it has been used in fragrance-making and is a delicate version of the big white lily that we all know. When it comes to oakmoss, I prefer to use another part of the tree, the roasted wood, which almost makes you salivate. It makes you think of a rum; sweet but also savoury.

I chose to work with two different types of patchouli. For the first, I asked for Robertet to make a patchouli extract traditionally. I wanted a very authentic patchouli, very strong. I combined it with a second, synthetic patchouli obtained through biotechnology from Givaudan called Akigalawood, which resulted in a truly unique signature.

W*: How does the miracle berry come into play?

CN: When I was around ten years old, I had a complete collection of legends and fairy tales from all over the world. One stayed with me – it was about a magician living in a baobab tree. He had magical powers of making everything that was bitter, turn sweet, even human nature. I thought that story was so beautiful.

So when I became a perfumer, I tried to look for something that would do this. Three or four years ago, I discovered the miracle berry, which contains a protein called ‘miraculin’. This makes everything sour and bitter taste sweet. I got in touch with a young Frenchman who was importing them and I asked to receive 15 kilos to make an extract. What I ended up with was a bit like dried apricot. It makes your mouth water, but it isn’t too sweet.

W*: The fragrance is named after Hermès’ ‘Barenia’ leather. Can you explain how the two are connected?

CN: After presenting the fragrance to Pierre-Alexis Dumas, and receiving his approval, I met with Philippe Moquet, who would design the bottle, to tell him the story of the scent. The design is based on Hermès’ ‘Collier de Chien’. Then, we had to think of name. Naming it after ‘Barenia’ felt obvious, because that’s the leather I love the most.

All perfumers are different. Some associate fragrance and music. I’m part Italian, so I speak with my hands. For me, tactility is very important. I describe my perfumes in terms of texture; soft or round, hard or crispy. And it was important for me to make this chypre something that you want to plunge into. It’s the same sensation that I have with ‘Barenia’ leather; I want to touch it. Artisans say that Hermès’ ‘Barenia’ leather ‘gives back the caress’. A chypre fragrance is a fragrance for the skin; it too gives back the caress.

W*: How does ‘Barénia’ speak to the character of the Hermès woman?

CN: A chypre is the essence of the Hermès woman: elegant, but not ostentatious. It’s an elegance that is almost instinctive.

And I must say, all the women who have inspired me in my career have always been women with very strong instincts: Peggy Guggenheim, Sonia Delaunay, or Nancy Cunard, for example. I think the campaign is beautiful; the choice of Malgosia Bela felt fitting.

W*: Your perfumes always tell an emotive story. Why is this important to you?

CN: Perfumers look to so many different sources for inspiration. It could be a chance encounter, a meal at a restaurant, or a story from the history of the house they are creating a fragrance for. But the story has to feel authentic for the perfume to be authentic. And every time, with every new fragrance I make for Hermès, there will be an authentic story to tell.

hermes.com

For its first sports watch for women, Hermès stays faithful to the distinctive, offbeat design principles that characterise all its products. Epitomising simplicity – with a twist - the Hermès Cut watch is not quite a square, not quite a circle, but rather strikes a rounded, angular silhouette of its own.

Creative director of Hermès watches, Philippe Delhotal, is a master of the discreet design touch, here naming the watch after the mirror polished ‘slices’ on the left and right sides of the satin-finished case, which lend the watch its distinctive form. Typography, too, is carefully considered, with the imperfectly rounded numbers eschewing a traditional symmetry.

Unusually for Hermès, there is no leather, with the watch available on metal bracelets or a playful, easily interchangeable selection of brightly coloured rubber straps.

£12,550, from hermes.com

This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 5 September on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

At the heart of high jewellery collections lies a dedication to showcasing the rarest and most precious gemstones, putting them in the best possible light. For this year’s new releases, high jewellery houses zoned in on colour, eschewing traditional pastels for a generous rainbow of hues, from the muted and abstract to the brilliant and bold.

Shimmering prisms are the central focus for Hermès’ creative director of jewellery, Pierre Hardy, who continues his exploration into the brilliant refraction of coloured stones with his ‘Les Formes de la Couleur’ collection. Hardy, who studied colour theory for his art degree, is a master of illusion, conjuring up geometric plays with architectural cuts of an array of precious stones, including rubies, beryls and sapphires. The collection marks the first time in the house’s history that such a large selection of stones has been used, with semi-precious and precious stones sitting together in a wide-ranging celebration of nuanced gradients. Teasing, modern references run throughout, such as with the ‘Color Icon’ bracelet, the hypnotic patterns of the stones coyly nodding to a pixellated, digital image.

A play on storytelling also characterises Chaumet’s offering. The ‘Chaumet en Scène’ collection is divided into three inspirations, music, dance and magic, with each drawing on the house’s far-reaching links with the arts. Chaumet’s Paris HQ is at 12 Place Vendôme, which was once home to Chopin, and it was here that he was said to have begun his last work, the Mazurka Op. 68, No.4. With this in mind, the sweeping lines of the house’s graphic ‘Mélodie’ necklace reference the grids and curves of a musical composition. For Francesca Amfitheatrof, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director for watches and jewellery, historical references are united with a freedom of spirit. Her latest jewellery collection for Louis Vuitton is epitomised by elaborate ornamentation and rich design detailing, encapsulated in pieces such as the ‘Splendeur’ necklace. Technically accomplished, it can be worn three ways.

Creative freedom also characterises Tiffany & Co’s ‘Blue Book 2024’ collection, which pays tribute to the artistic legacy of French jewellery designer Jean Schlumberger, intertwining fantasy and celestial themes in a romantic mish-mash. Peacocks, shooting stars and whimsical symbols are drawn in a juxtaposition of diamond cuts and thickly drawn gold – in the ‘Flames’ ring, the medley of cuts become a diamond firework, on the point of exploding in the sky.

Traditionally-cut diamonds are the focus of a heritage bracelet by Van Cleef & Arpels. Dating from 1923, the piece is faithful to the style of the time, when a trend for ‘white jewellery’ – a mix of diamonds and platinum – reigned. The house continues to champion these vintage designs in its ‘Heritage’ collection, which unites pieces created between the 1920s-1990s. A classic diamond bracelet is typical of its time, embracing the art deco sensibilities of clean lines and geometric forms, simplifying a floral design into an elegant arabesque.

Alongside diamonds, milky-hued pearls are perennial favourites in the world of high jewellery. They are a natural choice for Tasaki, which has cemented its status as a pearl specialist since its beginnings in the 1950s, when it became experts in both farming and selling cultured pearls. It has continued to build on this reputation in various ways, including collaborations with Ritz Paris, which began in 2016 to commemorate Tasaki’s first boutique in France and the reopening of the hotel.

The design of its ‘Lumineux’ collection nods to the Ritz’s heritage with the curved silhouettes reminiscent of the hotel’s sweeping staircase, once the centrepiece for the grand balls organised by César Ritz for the crème de la crème of Parisian society.

A European flamboyance is also prevalent in the ‘Diorama & Diorigami’ collection for Dior, designed by Victoire de Castellane, who drew on toile de Jouy, the patterned cloth featuring pastoral scenes that was popular in the 18th century and a distinctive feature in Christian Dior’s aesthetic (he clad his original boutique, Colifichets, in the fabric). In de Castellane’s collection, the flora and fauna are richly interpreted in colourful precious stones. Meanwhile, at Gucci, the mazes and symmetry of a traditional Italian garden form the inspiration for its ‘Labirinti Gucci’ collection. Striking a balance between meticulous planning and wild beauty, a form of ordered chaos is reflected in the smattering of blue-hued stones and the rigorous diamond grid.

Elsewhere, natural themes take a playful turn in Cartier’s ‘Nature Sauvage’ collection. Animals appear where you least expect them: crocodiles coil around the finger, the sinuous body of a snake splits in two to caress the curve of the neck, a snow leopard picks its way across a diamond and rock crystal icecap, while a turtle rests contentedly on a lapel. We feel the call of the wild.

This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 5 September on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The secret garden above Hermès’ Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré store in Paris proved an early inspiration for Jonathan Baldock for his transformation of the windows of the French maison’s New Bond Street store. The British artist, whose works appeared earlier this year in a solo show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, displays a deep-rooted affinity with the natural world and the rhythm of the seasons, embodied by his bold use of colour and sacred geometry. His work is saturated with humour and wit, and his pieces, often in ceramic or textile, have an uncanny, allegorical quality that channel his interest in myth and folklore.

For the five windows that wrap around Hermès’ London flagship, Baldock has imagined a Parisian autumnal scene, creating a series of brightly-coloured hedges dotted with peepholes that offer a portal into a fantastical world of imagination. A recurring motif in the artist’s work, the peepholes turn the windows into an interactive experience, a game of hide and seek in which the passerby can participate. Baldock often takes a theatrical approach to his practice, presenting hidden detailed worlds to those who care to look closely, and in these windows, he presents a light-hearted blurring of the lines between public and private, outside and inside, real and imaginary. Look between the branches to find a whimsical cast of characters, each busy in different scenarios, with pieces from Hermès’ A/W24 collections taking on a playful role.

The installation, entitled ‘Take a Peek’, was created using hundreds of individual leaves to reflect the shifting shades of autumn. Made entirely of leather, the leaves were carefully cut from unused materials sourced from Hermès’ sustainable development department, and will go on to have a new life after the installation is removed.

'Take a Peek’, by Jonathan Baldock, will be on display until 1 November at Hermès, 155 New Bond Street, London W1, hermes.com, jonathan-baldock.com

For people who are obsessive about clothes, Sourcewhere is an app bound to be on par with your Google Maps – so essential once you have it, you can’t quite remember how you functioned without it.

Founder Erica Wright, who launched the app at the beginning of 2022, came up with the idea after years of working in communications for several luxury e-commerce companies. ‘Over the years, I noticed that stylists and editors were frequently looking for sold-out or past-season items that were no longer available,’ she says. ‘This made me realise that if industry insiders were struggling to access these items, how much harder must it be for the average customer?’

Sourcewhere: ‘We’re helping people find exactly what they’re looking for’

So Wright got to work building a network of acclaimed personal shoppers, archive collectors, and boutique sales advisors who could help her realise her vision: a platform where users can source luxury fashion in a manner once only available to people who could spend significant amounts each year on a personal shopper. Sourcewhere users can log into the app to shop from an extensive catalogue that includes sold-out contemporary items and rare vintage pieces. They can also put in a request for a specific item to be found by a member of the Sourcewhere network.

The platform is a perceptive response to shifts within the luxury retail industry, which is more frequently catering to an educated consumer base who know exactly what they are looking for. These customers are also willing to shop for luxury goods on digital platforms, and would rather invest in a few exceptional pieces they will enjoy over time rather than purchase items just because they are from the latest season.

Wright created Sourcewhere in direct response to these new trends and hopes the app is the first step towards establishing sourcing as its own industry. ‘We’re already seeing a shift in how people engage with luxury,’ she says. ‘Rather than focusing on fleeting trends, there’s a growing desire to invest in items with personal significance – pieces that clients know they’ll keep and appreciate over time. Our goal is for sourcing to play a crucial role in this by extending the life of these luxury items, helping clients find exactly what they’re looking for, whether it’s something to keep, or re-sell in the future.’

When it comes to the brands people are looking for, The Row is consistently high-ranking, with people particularly interested in the ‘Bindle’ bags in mesh nylon, the ‘Margaux’ bag and ‘Mini Envelopes’ in leather. Limited-edition collaborations like Bode x Nike and Miu Miu x New Balance are also popular, along with Lemaire’s project with folk artist Joseph E Yoakum and Loewe’s A/W 2021 menswear collection, which featured the works of artist Joe Brainard. Customers also seem to prefer original vintage designs over re-editions, with the Prada 1995 zip-top patent bag, famously worn by Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, ranking highly among requests since March 2023, along with the previously discontinued Jean Paul Gaultier ‘shoulder Birkin’, created during his tenure at Hermès, which was reimagined as part of the house’s A/W 2024 collection.

In regards to the most impressive rare finds Sourcewhere has made so far, Wright cites a Céline buttoned jumpsuit from Phoebe Philo's A/W 2015 collection, ‘a piece that truly defines her era at the brand’, and an A/W 1999 Hermès black suit tracked down by one of Sourcewhere’s Margiela-era Hermès experts, fulfilling the request 18 months after it was first made.

Now that it is here, it's hard to believe an app like Sourcewhere wasn’t created sooner. As Wright says: ‘In this digital age, it seemed almost unthinkable that customers still had to spend so much time scouring search engines, marketplaces, and even calling stores to find elusive items. We felt it was the right time to create a digital tool that made sourcing accessible for everyone.’

Sourcewhere is available from the Apple App store.

sourcewhere.com

Hygiene is considered to be something of a modern preoccupation, but there is evidence that soap was invented by ancient civilisations nearly 5,000 years ago. Archaeologists unearthed traces of it in Babylonian clay artefacts, which were also inscribed with recipes for soap-making.

In Aleppo, olive oil, laurel berry oil and lye were melted down, then cooled underground to form a vast, avocado-green sheet, a process that remains largely unchanged today. (Some myths recount Cleopatra bathing in milk, using Aleppo soap). Echoing this ancient wisdom, Santa Maria Novella – the oldest pharmacy in the world, with roots that trace back to 13th-century Florence – produces a buttery milk soap bar that is available unscented or containing botanical ingredients such as gardenia or verbena.

Why solid soap is the most pleasurable object to wash with

A bar of soap also recalls the midtwentieth century era, when brands such as Pears and Cussons would vie for airwave supremacy through their sponsorship of radio and TV programmes, leading to the shows being dubbed ‘soap operas’.

The celebrated 20th century photographer and society darling Cecil Beaton was once asked, ‘What is elegance?’, to which he simply replied, ‘Soap and water!’ One can imagine one of his muses – Maria Callas, Barbra Streisand, Baroness Fiona Thyssen-Bornemisza – returning to their bathrooms after a day shooting with Beaton and using a rose-scented Dior soap bar to dissolve heavy, camera-ready make-up. The house offers up a contemporary iteration of this product in its ‘Prestige Le Savon’ soap.

Hedi Slimane also captures a sense of 20th-century nostalgia in his bath and body collection for Celine. The round soap medallions, engraved with the fashion house’s Triomphe motif, are fragranced with signature scents, from the citrus notes of Parade to the zesty, slightly sugary accord of Cologne Céleste.

‘Bathing is an essential gesture that systematically plunges me back into the soothing atmosphere of childhood,’ says Slimane. Rich in Parisian glamour, these soaps can also be slipped dry into drawers, infusing clothes and linens with their scent.

Smooth, shiny and pebble-like, with branding satisfyingly embossed or debossed into its surface, a new bar of soap can conjure up similar emotions to those inspired by a freshly unwrapped chocolate bar. Perfume house Diptyque, in particular, has a knack for creating solid soaps that almost look too good to use. It can feel like a heart-wrenching act to gradually wash away the grooves of typography, watching them grow faint before the final act of disappearing entirely.

The ephemeral poetics of soap have not been lost on contemporary culture. For her 1993 piece Lick and Lather, performance artist Janine Antoni created 14 busts of her head and shoulders, seven in soap and seven in chocolate – she then licked the chocolate and bathed with the soap to reshape her image. Meanwhile, in Thomas Bärnthaler’s 2015 book Do It Yourself: 50 Projects by Designers and Artists, John Baldessari provided instructions on soap carving, in a work he called A Large Piece of Soap Becomes a Small Piece of Soap Eventually.

At this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, Belgian architect Nicolas Schuybroek celebrated the form and functionality of soap in a collaboration with Aesop. His installation, Form Follows Formulation, used hundreds of the Australian skincare brand’s body cleansing slabs – which contain purifying oils, bergamot rind, ylang ylang and lime – to build a monolithic brickwork structure in Aesop’s Piazza Cordusio store, in the centre of which a treatment therapist performed a daily choreographed facial treatment.

‘Restricting materiality to something as simple as a soap bar resonates with the principles of the arte povera movement, while also echoing Superstudio’s iconic monochromatic grid structures from the 1970s,’ says Schuybroek.

Some designers have looked to combat the transient, slippery nature of solid soap by inviting it to inhabit the domestic landscape as both beauty product and decorative object. Loewe’s ‘Scent of Marihuana’ soap bar, which is studded with exfoliating particles of red algae and emits the soothing aroma of the sativa plant, can be decoratively hung using its integrated linen rope, in a similar way to the rotating, wall mounted soaps by French brand Provendi.

Liquids, gels and foams share a common goal: to sanitise, enveloping bacteria and microbes so they can then be washed away. But while a bar of soap is just as good at cleansing the skin, it can be so much more, creating a decadently pleasurable experience that’s been enjoyed for millennia.

This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

Sunscreen is a non-negotiable skincare step all year round, but never more so than now, as we head into summer. As Baz Luhrman’s 1999 spoken word track Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) proclaimed: ‘If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.’ In 2026, it’s a sentiment taken as gospel, reflected in the ever-evolving roster of sun care products now available. So finding an SPF you truly love involves a degree of trial and error – particularly when it comes to those designed for the face.

Some SPFs can cause sensitive skin to break out, or be unsuitable for your skin tone, while others might ‘pill’ when mixed with certain make-up products. There’s also a choice to be made between physical (mineral) or chemical sunscreen. The former sits on the surface of the skin, creating a ‘shield’ that stops harmful UV rays from penetrating, whereas the latter absorbs them. In addition, compliance regulations – rules by medical or governing bodies written to ensure SPF products are created with safety and efficacy – vary from country to country. Dermatologists usually recommend an SPF rating of 30 or above, however, for maximum protection against UVA and UVB rays. UVA is responsible for ageing, whilst UVB causes burning, so opting for a ‘broad spectrum’ SPF ensures you get the best protection from both.

Here, beauty editor Mary Cleary and contributing editor Hannah Tindle have whittled down a definitive list of facial sunscreens with the Wallpaper* stamp of approval. From a luxuriously tinted balm by Hermès to sport-ready protection from Hard Sun – plus quintessential French and Korean formulations from La Roche-Posay and Beauty of Joseon – if you’re in the market for a new SPF, this article is the place to start looking.

The best sunscreens for your face, selected by the Wallpaper* beauty editors

Beauty of Joseon

Emma Lewisham

Horace

Alta Marea

Hermès

Hard Sun

Dr. Barbara Sturm

Herbar

Raeso

Dr. Dennis Gross

Mecca Cosmetica

Supergoop!

Dulcie

Rationale

La Prairie

‘I’ve always been very exposed to this strange state of alienation,’ says Nadège Vanhée, the artistic director of Hermès’ womenswear collections. After moving to Antwerp to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in her twenties – the school that had memorably birthed the Antwerp Six, among them Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck and Dries Van Noten – for the next 15 years, she would largely live outside of her native France. First, there was a stint at Delvaux in Brussels, then Maison Martin Margiela in Paris, before joining Phoebe Philo at Celine in London. In 2011, she moved to New York, becoming design director at Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s then-burgeoning label, The Row.

So the role at Hermès – one of France’s best-known luxury exports and an emblem of Parisian style – marked something of a homecoming for Vanhée. But, as she sits amid objects from the house’s 16 métiers (there is a ceramic dining set, trails of jewellery and, of course, plenty of handbags) in Hermès’ sunlit showroom on Rue d’Anjou, she says that she still feels like something of an outsider in her home country. She calls English her ‘sentimental creative language’. ‘I always feel like I have been floating between the two,’ she says.

Nadège Vanhée on ten years of womenswear at Hermès

Vanhée was still in New York when she was approached for the job in 2014, taking over from Christophe Lemaire, who had left earlier that year. ‘I felt a bit like the last French person they could have chosen,’ she says. ‘Which was really nice.’ Returning to France from the US ‘felt almost ecstatic’, though it was not always easy. ‘For the first six months, I had to realign myself with my Frenchness,’ she smiles. For his part, CEO Axel Dumas says she was the only person he approached for the job. The first time they met, they discussed Plato. She was hired not long afterwards as one of Dumas’ first major appointments (a sixth-generation member of the Hermès-Dumas family, he began his position as sole CEO earlier in 2014).

This is not to say that Vanhée is not now at home in her role, nor that she is blasé about the cultural importance of Hermès to the French populace (‘you have the king, we have Hermès’). Rather, her design philosophy is one of quiet rebellion, teasing at the edges of what the Hermès woman can be, as often only an outsider can do. In some ways, her perspective reflects a shift in the Hermès consumer, who is increasingly international and, like Vanhée, shifts between countries and cultures in their life and work. It has helped the company garner impressive sales in recent years, even as the luxury market slows, which Dumas recently credited to the ‘loyalty of our clients worldwide’ (for the first quarter of 2024, profits were €3.8m, up 13 per cent). Hermès is no longer the reserve of a closed circle of wealthy Parisian bourgeoisie.

In Vanhée’s collections, contrasts abound: sensuality and toughness, masculinity and femininity, the quotidian with intricate flights of craft. She is often deemed ‘enigmatic’, largely eschewing the spotlight, and absent from social media. Where you expect her to go in one direction, she diverts – if subtly – to another. A recent collection saw her use the craftspeople who usually make the outré feathered outfits for the Moulin Rouge dancers to create a series of pieces that appeared like horsehair. ‘They have the aesthetic of being feathers, but they also look like horsehair and are super light,’ she says. ‘I like the surprise element of Hermès.’

As we talk, Vanhée is putting the finishing touches to a special New York show, meeting music producer Frédéric Sanchez that afternoon to finalise the soundtrack (the show later took place in June at Pier 36). It marked an opportunity for the designer to connect with the growing American market with both the show and a series of activations and events across the week. ‘New York is a place of resilience,’ says Vanhée, who notes the city retains a personal significance. ‘It gave me the chance to be who I am – without my time in Manhattan, I don’t think I would have had a chance to work with Hermès.’

The show was the second instalment (titled ‘The Second Chapter’) of the designer’s A/W24 collection, which was presented earlier this year on a wet afternoon at Paris’ Republican Guard during the city’s fashion week. Inside, the heavens had opened, too: in the darkened show space, a theatrical trick saw water pour from the ceiling and on to the runway. It marked a shift from the season prior, whereby the same space had been transformed into a brightly lit Edenic meadow, complete with undulating mounds of wildflowers and long grasses through which models wove. ‘[This time] I was really inspired by central London, like Soho. It’s very dark, [there’s] all of this black paint. And the rain,’ she smiles. ‘But I find the rain very beautiful.’

The collection itself was titled ‘The Rider’, straddling inspirations from both equestrian-wear (Hermès began life as a harness maker in 1837) and motorcycle riders (‘astride a horse or a motorcycle… boldly she rides on,’ said the collection notes). ‘It was this feeling of how do you put more pepper in the Hermès woman than there already is?’ says Vanhée, who likened this season to ‘a self-portrait in a mirror’. Though, as she asserts, not of herself. ‘It’s more about a contemplation within yourself, about finding the strength within.’

‘I started by looking at portraits that had struck me, like those by Lucian Freud,’ she says of the collection’s nexus, noting a particular interest in ‘the different skin tones he was developing in his paintings’. ‘There’s something about the gesture of the stroke,’ she comments. ‘I was thinking: what is a portrait of a woman? Not in an academic way, but something more sensual.’ As is traditional for a Hermès collection, it started with colour (colour cards are used across the different Hermès métiers, and often begin the process of creation). For A/W24, she said her choices looked back to the ‘roots of Hermès’: étoupe greys, earthy browns and deep reds, alongside tones she had discovered in Freud’s paintings. ‘It’s really about instinct,’ she says of how she chooses the palette each season.

Next comes the collection’s textures, which this season largely comprised what Vanhée describes as ‘heritage fabrics’, among them aged calfskin, corduroy and moleskin. ‘Hermès is about this notion of touch so, as a technician, you will always qualify a fabric material by its touch in the hand – we call it ‘le main’.’ Indeed, Vanhée talks about a new urgency to celebrate tactility after Covid lockdowns. ‘We were not even able to sit down and talk. So when we came out of that, I really wanted to push the sensuality. It’s this idea of redefining what is sensual or sexy through the intuition of a woman.’

And though Vanhée claims not to design clothing for herself, she admits that there is ‘a little of me’ in each collection, but also those around her (she says, gesturing at the Hermès team who join us in the showroom). ‘It’s a great balance between what I love and what I want to explore – my obsessions, my feelings. What I want to wear, yes, but also pieces that go out of my comfort zone.’ However, she admits, ‘with ‘The Rider’, I would wear every piece’. The title of the collection came from thinking about the ‘link between an individual human with a machine or an animal… the spirit of the open road’. For Vanhée, the motorcycle – or indeed, the horse – is a ‘phenomenon of freedom’. At Maison Martin Margiela, she remembered constructing trousers from the saddles of motorbikes; here, the ‘imprint’ of an equestrian saddle appeared in the construction of the back of a leather jacket.

The idea of telling stories, says Vanhée, is at the heart of Hermès. Tales of the house’s history will often be overheard in corridors, or passed on by the artisans who work across the house’s métiers (some of who count their time at the house in decades, not years), while each year, creative director Pierre-Alexis Dumas (the great-great-great grandson of Hermès founder Thierry Hermès) chooses a yearly theme that unites the métiers. For 2024, it is ‘The Spirit of the Faubourg’, referring to the first Hermès store at 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which he calls ‘the beating heart of the house’. Previous years have been ‘Astonishing Hermès’, ‘An Odyssey’ and ‘In the Pursuit of Dreams’. ‘Hermès is a house of intelligence,’ says Vanhée. ‘It’s so based on the idea of meaning. There is also this bridge between modernity and tradition. Hermès has a capacity for assimilation; it really absorbs the changes in our lifestyles.’

The term ‘luxury’ does not resonate with Vanhée. Instead, she sees what Hermès does as ‘a preservation of quality’. She wants to create a uniform to ‘protect against the erosion of life’. Clothes, for her, are ‘a portal to create an identity’, a tool of self-definition that has followed her from her teenage years when she would dress up in her mother’s old clothing and pieces that she found in secondhand stores. ‘In the 1990s, there was this total emancipation from the question: is it beautiful, is it not beautiful? I was in the right place at the right time. I could open myself up.’

Now, she hopes that her collections at Hermès can have a similarly liberating effect on their wearer. ‘You are really connecting with the vulnerability of the person… there’s a direct touch to your skin,’ says Vanhée. ‘The people who wear my collections have different psychologies, different personalities,’ she continues, noting that she would never dictate how an item of clothing is worn. She likes to see women smiling. ‘I don’t want to sound naive, but I want them to be proud, emboldened, confident. I’m really just observing different types of women and their needs. I like to go outside my comfort zone and ask: what is the life of a woman in Hong Kong? A woman in Sacramento? One advantage of our civilisation is that we have this super-globalisation: we can see, we can go, we can check. We are no longer locked in our little ivory towers.’

Model: Dalton Dubois at Milk Management. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Yumi Nakada-Dingle using Bumble and Bumble. Make-Up: Faye Bluff at Of Substance Agency using Hermès Beauty. Nails: Jessica Ciesco at Snow Creatives using Hermès. Photography assistant: Pietro Lazzaris. Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor. Production assistant: Ady Huq. Retouch: Camillo Bernardi Studio.

This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

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For the September 2024 Style Issue, our fashion and creative director Jason Hughes and fashion features editor Jack Moss have chosen to explore the sensual delights of tactility, texture and touch. It’s a theme that runs throughout the A/W 2024 collections, where the clothes implore you to reach out and stroke them, and Hughes and Moss were determined to capture this form of sensory pleasure in words and pictures.

The results are starkly alluring. Photographed for our main womenswear fashion story by Nicole Maria Winkler, this month’s cover star, seminal American model Kelly Mittendorf, is styled by Hughes in leathers, shearling and faux furs, all touchpoints for the new, sensual approach to dressing.

Meanwhile, photographer Matthieu Delbreuve and stylist David St John James highlight the fundamental appeal of menswear fabrics and silhouettes in a series of intimate portraits entitled ‘Quiet on set’.

In Paris, Moss talks to Kim Jones about his first dedicated couture collection for Dior Men (shown as 20 looks at the end of the runway show) and interviews Nadège Vanhée, artistic director of Hermès womenswear, whose A/W 2024 collection encapsulates what the designer describes as ‘a preservation of quality’.

The same mood of enlightened permanence can be found in Simon Chilvers’ exploration of seasonal menswear trends for The Glossary – a surge of energy in contemporary tailoring that sees the likes of Martine Rose, Giorgio Armani and Luca Magliano reinterpreting the suit in imaginative new ways. (Magliano also shares his insider’s guide to his native Bologna for this month’s Navigator.)

Elsewhere, Hannah Tindle explores the sensory pleasures of solid soaps, Daniel Scheffler takes a trip to Arc’teryx’s new ‘creation centre’ in Tokyo, and Orla Brennan meets up with Studio Boum, the London-based events and production agency behind some of fashion’s most memorable runway shows and experiences. We also take an exclusive tour of Karl Lagerfeld’s bookshop and library 7L, which is being revitalised with a programme of cultural events, and get a first look at Celine’s latest Bijoux d’Artistes Project, which sees Hedi Slimane design jewellery pieces inspired by artist and sculptor Jean Arp.

All in all, an issue for the ages, and the senses. Enjoy the issue.

Bill Prince
Editor-in-Chief

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

You will likely have encountered Veronica Ditting’s work, even if you do not know her name. The highly influential creative director and designer – who comes with a string of awards to her name – conceived the distinctive original design for The Gentlewoman (she worked at the magazine for 12 years, from when it was founded, leaving in 2021) and has worked on a slew of projects for brands including Maison Margiela, The Row, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co and Hermès. For the last, she guest art-directed Le Monde d'Hermès magazine, one of the industry’s highest accolades.

A new exhibition in Kyoto, Japan celebrates Ditting’s career so far, particularly her work in printed matter, the medium for which she is best known. Titled ‘Folio Folio Folio: Print by Veronica Ditting’ (until 28 July 2024) and taking place at the city’s ‘ddd gallery’, the exhibition – curated by London-based design historian Emily King – spans two decades of print projects including books, magazines, exhibition design and other ‘printed delights’. These include The Gentlewoman – memorable covers shown as the exhibition include those featuring author Zadie Smith and gymnast Simone Biles – as well as a series of printed ephemera created for the launch of Hermès’ beauty line.

‘Folio Folio Folio: Print by Veronica Ditting’ at Kyoto ddd gallery

For the latter, process images of the ‘colour chapters’ show how Ditting achieved the ’intense and beautiful’ combinations of colour by manipulating physical pages to see how she could replicate it on-screen. Meanwhile, a slim, narrow book echoes Pierre Hardy’s design for the Hermès lipstick. These works – among several others – are displayed in the exhibition on custom stands created by the Veronica Ditting Studio, while a series of vivid large-scale images by Beijing-born photographer Qiu Yang capture models, dummies and proofs in graphic style. The process images were photographed at Ditting’s home in the Barbican, London.

Here, as the exhibition continues in Kyoto, Wallpaper* catches up with Ditting about the career-spanning project.

Wallpaper*: How did this exhibition come about? Do you have a link with Kyoto?

Veronica Ditting: ‘ddd gallery’ in Kyoto is one of the few galleries in the world dedicated to graphic design, alongside its sister gallery ’ggg’ in Tokyo. While their online presence is sparse, I have been aware of some of the shows at the gallery over the years. Then in autumn last year, London-based design historian Emily King asked me if I’d consider a solo exhibition at ddd. Emily had curated a show about British graphic designer Alan Fletcher [a Wallpaper* cover artist] at ggg back in 2008 and she’s kept in touch with the team ever since.

Without being fully aware what I was actually committing to, I pretty immediately said yes. The chance to work with Emily in an in-depth manner and to finally visit Japan – my first time – in such an engaging manner seemed too good to be true.

W*: How has it been to see your work collated in this way? Do you enjoy looking back on past projects?

VD: These days, I mainly work in fashion and it seems like we never pause and reflect. Everything is always about moving forward. Taking the time to go back into my archive and look back on projects has for the most part been quite joyful, and at times also confronting.

For months, Emily and I would meet at my Barbican office, deep-diving into my archive, working on the selection and phrasing the approach to ‘Folio Folio Folio’. As a creative director, my work covers many different aspects – from image-making to graphic design. Therefore a show could take many shapes depending on the approach.

Given the context, we decided to primarily focus on graphic design and particularly on printed matter. You could say the exhibition is a celebration of printed matter and everything it entails. Maybe in a different space it would be a significantly different exhibition.

W*: When it comes to print design, why is it a medium you have gravitated towards? What is it about the physicality of print that is appealing?

VD: Working closely with printers and bookbinders is something I treasure deeply. Print is the aspect that is most closely related to craft within our practice. At the start of my career, I would even press-pass business cards [‘press pass’ refers to the process of travelling to the printing press to run final checks while your project is being printed]. Obviously I don’t have that type of time commitment any longer, but realising how much you can influence at the press has fine-tuned my eye.

When Emily and I started discussing what the approach at ddd could be, we fairly quickly decided to focus on the physicality of my works; a lot of them have a specific construction or folding technique applied to them.

Over the course of many months, my team built display stands by hand, each specifically designed for the pieces on show. 155 in total! Standing at various heights and angles, these stands allow several vantage points on the pieces. The display emphasises the materiality and three-dimensionality of the works, essentially creating a topography that visually underlines the fundamental characteristics and sensibility of the pieces.

W*: What are some of your personal highlights from the exhibition?

VD: It’s hard to pick favourites, but I would say one of the highlights which works really well in the space and the display method is the Hermès Beauty chapter. I’ve been working with Hermès since 2015 on different projects and with the Beauty métier since 2019. In the exhibition, all press publications and invitations created since are shown. The specific ratios and the publications chapter pages are revealed in a significant manner. The communication for the women’s ready-to-wear department of Hermès also stands out as all of the pieces relate to the aspect of construction and folding.

Then two early projects come to mind. In 2008 I designed ‘Andy’, a newspaper to accompany the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Working to an extremely tight deadline and budget, I decided to concentrate on Warhol’s appearance in popular media such as advertising campaigns and editorials. The newspaper shows Andy modelling and acting on TV shows. Footnote images and fun facts are scattered throughout the publication, in the middle of the publication is an index of all people mentioned in its pages. It was an expansion of my graduation project, and these visual devices anticipated the information layering that became a central feature of The Gentlewoman magazine.

Another highlight is the publication A Study on Colour by Dutch artist Katja Mater, published in 2009. It shows Katja’s photographic series ‘The Human Colour Wheel’, an experimental work partly inspired by Isaac Newton’s colour theory and partly by Katja’s own formulations. Designed in close collaboration with Katja, the publication was one of my first projects touching upon art direction and commissioning. It’s a humble publication, but still meaningful to me.

W*: Tell me about the photographic project by Qiu Yang, and how that came about?

VD: Twelve large-scale posters photographed by Qiu Yang show work-in-progress material from my archive. Models, dummies, proofs and design sketches are included and each image relates to a specific focus of my practice. All [of them] are photographed at my office and home in the Barbican. Qiu and I studied together at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and have been collaborating ever since on different types of projects. He documented some of my projects last year and the way he lights and frames my projects feels appropriate. Significantly, the posters speak to the commissioning of images, which is a pivotal aspect of my work as a creative director.

One poster shows a vast amount of dummies created for the Hermès women’s ready-to-wear runway shows. When asked to create a new classic invitation for the shows, I considered both the moment the card would be received and when the invitee would be rushing from show to show. Significantly, the design is small enough to fit into a bag or pocket and rigid enough not to bend in transit. During the design process, we eventually arrived at an innovative construction involving two small rigid cards held together with a sheet of paper. Flipping the invitation open reveals a colour or texture related to the design direction of the particular season. In the exhibition space, the super-large posters are installed on the walls, giving a sense of the process behind the designs on display in this exhibition and also of their tactility.

’Folio Folio Folio: Print by Veronica Ditting’ runs at Kyoto’s ’ddd gallery’ until 28 July 2024.

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Nadège Vanhee is no stranger to New York. It is almost ten years to the day that Vanhee, who was previously based in the city as design director of The Row, was approached by Hermès to take over the Parisian house’s womenswear collections after the departure of Christophe Lemaire. Despite a lifelong love affair with New York, there are some offers – particularly as a French designer – you don’t turn down. In March 2015, she showed her first collection for Hermès; in the decade since, she has proved a steadfast presence, her pragmatic but sensual collections achieving a rare combination of critical acclaim and commercial success (no doubt part of the reason Hermès’ profits in 2023 rose 28 per cent to almost €4.3 billion).

And so, even though Vanhee is now based in Paris, and was born in Seclin, close to Lille on the French-Belgium border, yesterday evening’s one-off Hermès show held at Pier 36 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, felt like something of a homecoming. Indeed the collection – which although shown as part of the resort season was titled Hermès A/W 2024 ‘The Second Chapter’ – saw Vanhee pay ’ode to the pace, energy and timeless optimism of New York City’, and had a celebratory mood. In the venue, New York’s recognisable yellow traffic lights hung from the ceiling, recalling the city’s busy intersections, and the seemingly endless flow of people on Manhattan’s sidewalks.

‘Pace, energy, optimism’: Hermès A/W 2024 The Second Chapter in New York

The collection itself was a colourful echo of Vanhee’s first A/W 2024 outing, shown in Paris earlier this year amid a deluge of rain (it was purposeful: Hermès had erected an enormous water system in the Garde Républicaine show space for the dramatic downpour). Titled ‘The Rider’, it saw Vanhee imagine a woman on the move: ‘astride a horse or a motorcycle… boldly she rides on’, said Hermès, with Vanhee combining traditional equestrian wear, a nod to the house’s roots in saddlery, with the tough, armour-like uniforms of bikers. Citing an ‘urban energy’ – in part influenced by observations of women in the street in New York, Paris and London, where she also spends time – pieces spanned richly luxurious takes on the biker boots and riding jacket, alongside sensual ribbed knitwear and quilted overcoats recalling those used for traditional outdoor pursuits.

For ‘The Second Chapter’, Vanhee struck a similar mood – once again, she noted the demands of city living as an inspiration point – albeit here in a boldly colourful palette of vermilion red, ’ginger’ yellow, and viridian. The richly layered looks drew inspiration from the city’s ‘layers of history, of exchange and desire’, here figured in an elegant pile-up of texture and pattern: from the silk Hermès carré tied around the waist or appearing in-set within ribbed knitwear, to soft leather boiler suits, quilted trousers, dots of studs, or the gently frilled necklines of turtle-neck sweaters that ran throughout.

Another reference was the house’s ‘Rocabar’ motif, originally inspired by the designs found on racehorse blankets of the 19th century. First appearing on an ochre-coloured woollen Hermès blanket with stripes in blue and coral, it has since been reimagined by the house in a multitude of colours and iterations, appearing across homeware, accessories and clothing (it is even the name of a 1998-launched fragrance). Vanhee chose the motif not simply for its vivid colour and graphic design – a mood which ran throughout the collection – but for the way it ‘conjures a tradition of play and collaboration across cultures and languages’, befitting Hermès’ transatlantic jaunt. So the story goes, in the 1930s, a Scottish saddler visiting the Hermès workshop called it a ‘rug à barre‘, a strange amalgam of the English word ‘rug’ and the French word for striped, ‘à barre’. After that, ‘Rocabar’ – another linguistic play – stuck.

The evening ended – as an Hermès show so often does – with a party, seeing the show space transformed into a for-one-night-only ’Rocabar’ nightclub, complete with performances by Rahill, Caroline Polachek and Honey Dijon, which, in homage to the city that never sleeps, went on long into the warm Manhattan night.

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Hot and heady summer days inspire Véronique Nichanian’s latest collection of Hermès menswear, which was infused with a mood of languid sensuality, as if her man for the season was traipsing back home after a day spent sun soaking on the beach. Indeed, the collection’s gossamer layers – gauzy tailoring, sheer checkered shirting and scoop-neck vest tops – almost appeared misted from ocean spray when she first presented the collection on a fittingly sweltering Paris day last June in the light-filled atrium of the 1939-built Palais d'Iéna during Paris Fashion Week Men’s S/S 2024.

Sheer delight: Hermès S/S 2024 menswear

The S/S 2024 collection encapsulates the mood of lightness that runs through Nichanian’s collections for the house, her design philosophy centring on a desire to make clothes that are as much a pleasure to wear as they are to look at. The French designer – who has been at Hermès for over three decades – described this season’s offering as ‘soft and sweet as a summer breeze’, making for a seductive array of diaphanous layers which will provide solace on even the warmest of summer days.

Alongside is an equally seductive array of accessories – from roomy beach bags adorned with colourful silk scarf-style prints or in wide grids of knotted cord, to fishermen’s sandals made for clambering over rock pools and coves.

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

Discover Hermès’ S/S 2024 menswear collection at hermes.com

Fashion by Kris Bergfeldt.