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There are beings whose clothing becomes the reflection of their soul, and Diane Keaton was one of them. Each fabric she wore seemed to gather a fragment of her thought; each accessory, a tremor of her free spirit. It was a style all her own a wide-brimmed hat worn like a diadem of defiance, glasses that filtered the world’s light, vests or turtlenecks embracing the discreet grace of a woman’s neck, ties or scarves chosen not to seduce but to signify independence. Pleated trousers, as ample as a breath, harmonized with jackets sometimes tweed, sometimes velvet and in that blend of daring and restraint, she found her truth.

They called it the “Annie Hall style.” They were mistaken. It was not a role but a revelation the “Diane Keaton style.” From her very first appearance in Woody Allen’s film, this language of clothing became an eternal signature and consecrated her as an icon. An Oscar was bestowed upon her, as one crowns a muse for her brilliance, yet even then, the tribute fell short of what she embodied: the freedom to be oneself.

Fifty years passed, and fashion, like a river, changed its course; but Diane remained faithful to her own shore. Designers often came to draw from it, copying her lines, imitating her light. On red carpets, she could still be seen a clear, determined silhouette dressed sometimes in a masculine suit, sometimes in a flowing dress cinched with a wide belt, as if to remind the world that elegance is first and foremost an inner vow.

Last year, she lent her grace to fashion shows Ralph Lauren’s in New York, Thom Browne’s in Paris where her presence seemed to bless contemporary creation with a benevolent gaze. At seventy-nine, she still carried within her the quiet fire of beginnings. Continue reading →

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I remember that evening somewhere in Johannesburg, I think. It was for the fifteenth anniversary of Maxhosa Africa. The light fell softly over the carpets that had been laid out before the show. There was in the air an almost domestic warmth, a blend of incense, wool, and silk… I no longer knew whether I had come for work, or simply to find a fragment of the past. Continue reading →

Last night in Paris, the planets bowed. Beneath the dome of the Grand Palais, the universe held its breath: Chanel had just entered a new era. Matthieu Blazy didn’t simply present a collection he launched a voyage to an asteroid. After months of silent gestation, the century-old house projected itself into the future with the serene force of a star aware of its own light. The Chanel galaxy was reborn — denser, more vibrant, perhaps even more human. Continue reading →

In her house of silence, in Paris, Chitose Abe opened a window in time. Spring stepped In, barefoot, holding in its hands needles of air and shreds of cotton.

The garments began to breathe. The jeans borrowed the tenderness of the wind, the t-shirts learned the grammar of clouds. A tank top, a crumpled prayer, covered itself with jet-black dreams: the night had fallen asleep upon its shoulder. Continue reading →

Upon discovering Duran Lantink’s first collection for Jean Paul Gaultier, I admittedly felt strangely bewildered. On Sunday, October 5, 2025, amid the hushed tumult of the runway show, the Dutch designer, who emerged from obscurity in 2018 thanks to Janelle Monáe and her daring pantsuits reminiscent of a woman’s nymph in the Pynk music video, had already provoked outrage. Continue reading →

They say that one day, in a house on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the dresses began to breathe. It was the breath of Chemena Kamali, new guardian of the Chloé temple, whispering to the fabrics of oblivion and rebirth. For two years, she has been summoning the spirits of lightness and sun, searching through the archives as one would search for relics in a perfumed crypt.

Under her hands, sheets of cotton twist like prayers, faded flowers regain their color, and the ghosts of Karl Lagerfeld wander among the mannequins, their silhouettes brushing against the mirrors. They say she learned her enchantments at Alberta Ferretti, where women once wore their dresses like dreams of sea and salt.

But the spring she promises is not an ordinary one: it is born not of soil, but of memory. The babydoll skirts, the tops tied like seashells, the floral prints scented with the past  all seem to drift in a golden light that even time itself has forgotten.

In a corner of fashion’s sky, the spirit of Gaby Aghion still smiles. She, the founder the one who once made freedom walk down the runway at Café de Flore and Brasserie Lipp must look with tenderness upon this new generation trying to clothe the soul in cotton and remembrance. Continue reading →

It’s true that after turning Gucci into a Venetian bazaar for children of the moon, Alessandro Michele wasn’t suddenly going to embrace minimalism at Valentino. But was it really necessary to repaint Rome in the colors of Saint-Germain-des-Prés after a bad trip to San Francisco?

On Sunday, at nap time, in the Piazza Dati sacred temple of Italo–Parisian couture the neo-hippie sanctuary on LSD, Michele held his grand mass for Valentino. The setting? A dark hall with ceiling lighting that irritated Di Meo, sitting next to Marisa, who was made up like a stolen car. An inclusive fashion festival sponsored by a Pantone color.

On the runway, a procession of baroque angels dressed in crumpled taffeta, lace, and drapery vaguely reminiscent of an over-ironed opera curtain. The models seemed to recite a pagan prayer to lost beauty, repeating, so far, so good. It was pure Michele: a blend of bourgeois woman in search of sex and a chic Notting Hill flea market.

The fans cried genius, the investors simply cried. The new Valentino, apparently, wants to “reconnect the soul of the house with the youth of the world.” Translation: sell Zara-style shirts to Gen Z kids convinced that nostalgia is sustainable and production in China is artisanal. All, of course, at prices that would make a Saudi princess blush. Continue reading →

Sarah Burton’s first runway for Givenchy had already betrayed signs of an over-manufactured sensibility, and her second confirms the slope: a couture of loud affirmation in the Chiuri vein, believing itself feminist simply because it exhibits. The clients, living trophies of this supposedly liberating fashion, paraded that evening in a pale yellow duchesse satin pea coat, cinched in black, as if to proclaim loudly and clearly their right to ostentation.

We are told of the lightness of deconstructed jackets, now reduced to the limpness of a cardigan, as though stripping away all structure were synonymous with freeing women. Progress indeed! Erase poise to better expose. And that coat-dress of once majestic curves, now undone, its lapels ripped from the shoulders to let fall, miserably, the straps of a bra. Emancipation served up as freedom at any price, under the pretext of deconstruction.

The full vocabulary is there: gaping collars, slanted jackets, hems hitched up, skirts dragged barely below the navel like a misfitted cloth fastened in haste. The body is no longer celebrated but turned into a noisy battleground of claims, a loud textile manifesto that mistakes provocation for power. Burton herself admits it: “the mind for business, the body for sin.” Thus the message of female power reduced to a shop-window slogan, Marilyn Monroe recycled in black-and-white motif to wrap a counterfeit ideology. Continue reading →

The procession of “Owensgroupises” filed in line with quiet discipline, awaiting their oracle. True to his fierce singularity, his models stepped onto the still waters of the Palais de Tokyo fountains, like an ancient procession crossing a mirror of azure. Hieratic figures, draped in modern boldness, they wore trouser-boots so towering they could make the ” Burj Al Arab” blush. Thus, the swell of skirts embraced the wind of sails for shipwrecked souls. Continue reading →

Wednesday evening, Olivier Rousteing raised, on the edge of the sumptuous ballroom of the InterContinental in Paris, a singular ode to femininity. His collection, stripped of the armors that once made the glory of the “Balmain army,” allowed itself to be caressed by the sea breeze. As in the days when Yves Saint Laurent, in the ochre gardens of Marrakech, transfigured the desert into a palace of colors, Rousteing too seemed to seek the impulse of a fashion that breathes, that pours out, that surrenders. Continue reading →

Fendi has made its choice sorry, the Lord has spoken and it is Maria Grazia Chiuri who takes over the artistic direction of the Roman house. This appointment comes in the midst of a chaotic reshuffle: Kim Jones’s departure, once expected to embody the creative breath of both haute couture and ready-to-wear, has left a void that Fendi is now scrambling to fill. Silvia Venturini Fendi, meanwhile, has been asked to step back, relegated to the more symbolic role of honorary president but given her last collection, this hardly comes as a surprise.

The thorny question remains: is Maria Grazia Chiuri truly the embodiment of Fendi’s future? Her years at Dior left a mixed legacy. Celebrated for her feminist slogans, criticized for a style often deemed repetitive, the Italian designer has hardly achieved unanimity. Before that, at Valentino, she worked in tandem with Pierpaolo Piccioli… and some still wonder whether she was ever truly the soul of the duo. Continue reading →

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This collection was born from a secret oath between the splendor of yesterday and the vigor of today (says the designer). From the magnificence of the French court, she borrowed grandeur, brocades, solemn braids, and radiant crosses; but instead of letting them slumber in the dust of palaces, she set them against the wild momentum of our century, so that they might clash and fertilize one another in a dazzling embrace.

Each garment is a burning cuirass: it protects, it adorns, it proclaims. It is a silent language that crosses the centuries, a grammar of drapings and symbols that speaks to restless souls. She has shaped these armors with regenerated fabrics, proud cuts, signs carved like prayers, questioning humankind about its time, its identity, its spiritual quest, at the heart of a storm-stricken world.

Three breaths preside over this edifice: the quest for the invisible, the defense of one’s own, the impulse of combat. Three immemorial forces, engraved in the human soul since dawn, which she has translated into silhouettes, into icons, into attitudes standing like statues of flesh amidst the crash of the present. Continue reading →

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On Wednesday in Milan, Silvia Venturini Fendi unveiled a motley collection for Fendi, bursting with flowers and references to the 1990s. The exercise is clever: taking what, until yesterday, was considered “cheap” elastic cords, adjustable straps, flimsy windbreaker zippers and elevating it to the status of a new chic ornament on Calais lace “made in China.” Luxury has always loved recycling the banal since the man from Toledo, provided it’s wrapped in a carefully crafted narrative and staged with theatrical flair. It was as if we were laying the first stone of a memorial dedicated to the victims of stoning.

This is anti-fashion, a kind of “Haute Ready-to-Wear Couture” for shapeless school smocks worn three days in a row, destined, with Micron’s blessing, to become the uniform of Catholic institutions. As for trousers, we’re talking about sweatpants desperately trying to slip into the category of wardrobe “essentials.”  Continue reading →

Summer not the heatwave one, but the world’s summer that clings to old Britpop rags. Shabby tracksuits and drooping polos with fishtail parkas dragging through the mud like the Gallaghers, priests of nothing and celebrants of noise…

Iceberg, or the runway with its puppets on the podium, parading with arms crossed, hard but empty stares, and shoes in hand against doll-like stilettos replaced by flat, soulless sandals… all this to play “90s youth.” A fake rebellion, collars buttoned up to the throat, for bourgeois ladies as spotless as a sink, with knobby knees discreetly hidden—because the Bible doesn’t make the monk.

And the music—Champagne Supernova—closing the show, nostalgia for the zombies. Of course, it has to be, since the English love their mud as much as their noise. But James Long, the rag maestro, sly as an iceberg, sniffed out Milan and the polite chill of luxury, diving deep and dripping money from every seam and button…

That is the world we applaud, we buy, we forget, and will endlessly reproduce again in 25 years.

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