At Doublet, clothes are not made, they are interrogated at length, and sometimes they answer, but beside the point. The AIR collection, for example, does not merely take the pulse of the times. It asks for their papers, treats them with suspicion, takes them into custody, and finally prints them. Air? Yes, CO₂, that discreet gas with no loyalty card, yet always present when it was not invited, in order to ape Owens.
To pull off this sleight of hand pollution, Doublet smokes us out. Literally and symbolically. Which is only fitting, since symbolically we have been smoked out for a long time already. The inks now come from exhaust pipes. Practical. It saves the trouble of looking elsewhere for inspiration. Diesel black, ring-road grey, Friday night traffic-jam anthracite. A subtle palette, post-industrial, post-breathable. My neighbor, Hermès scarf firmly pulled over her nose, watches the CO₂ settle in. “I’m staying,” it says. “The atmosphere is good.” She is an atheist, but above all lacking in good “faith,” which is far worse.
At Doublet, no one is playing. Or rather, they play very seriously at not knowing what they are doing. Fabrics shrink under heat, textures sulk, surfaces undergo an identity crisis. Even the designers doubt. They look at their prototypes the way one looks at a yogurt three weeks past its expiration date, with a certain scientific curiosity. One wonders whether science can still do anything, or whether it has moved away.
In the luminous evening of Los Angeles, where the city awakens in a murmur of gold and stars, I gazed as one gazes at a dream that slips away upon the bewitching procession of women. Their figures glided across the paving of the world, ancient goddesses entwined with modern bohemians, and my heart, faithful to its eternal haunting, did not know where to turn for love blinded me for each of them.
Alaïa closes one chapter and opens a gilded door onto Milan. Pieter Mulier is preparing to leave the Parisian house to join Versace, under the watchful eye of the Prada Group, now the owner of the Italian label. The official announcement is expected next week, like a curtain rise deliberately delayed.
We live in a world in crumbling decay, a world where the Élysée bestows the Legion of Honor upon a minor Pharrell Williams a man once condemned in New York for mistaking homage for a photocopier, plundering Marvin Gaye’s genius. A world where medals are handed out like metro tickets, at the speed of a Shinkansen at full throttle, and now it’s Beckham’s turn, adorned with the Order of Arts and Letters—= she who has never stitched a dress nor sketched anything beyond the arch of an eyebrow. But after Jacquemus, why not?
There are creatures that do not seduce, they warn. Scorpaenids, with their dorsal fins raised like a row of sabres, elegant yet lethal, remind us that beauty is never innocent. A single sting and pain spreads like a narrative poison, invading the body, unsettling the mind, suspending time for hours. Nature here does not whisper, it threatens.
I often think of those solitary souls, too full of isolation, who walk alongside the world the way one follows a riverbank without ever stepping into the water. Without this vice of writing every day, one or two pages or more, without this strange habit that tears me away from the restfulness of ordinary hours, I might perhaps have tasted a simpler happiness, made of shared silences and self-forgetfulness. My pen, always ready to dip itself into the ink of my own reveries, exiles me from an immediate happiness, easy, almost vulgar at times in its obviousness.
As Véronique Nichanian, the patient and sovereign guardian of Hermès menswear for thirty seven years, prepares to leave the stage, a deep and solemn emotion moves through the evening like a slow ripple beneath vaulted ceilings. What for so long had been an almost monastic appointment at the Palais d’Iéna has shifted, at the hour when daylight withdraws, to the Palais Brongniart, transformed into a vast ceremony of remembrance. There, in the golden half light, gratitude seems suspended in the very air one breathes. It radiates from the assembled faces, from the well known figures who crossed her path, as much as from the unseen artisans who walked beside her in quiet fidelity.
The leather coats, almost stubborn in their rigidity, conveyed a dark and severe impression. Their sharply defined back vents, along with fastenings reminiscent of harnesses, seemed to carry within them the memory of martial discipline, as though these garments had been shaped not only for the body, but for an idea of authority and constraint. They evoked a world in which the individual bends to a greater, impersonal force that no one can ignore.
Seeing certain silhouettes recently emerging from Kim Jones’s ateliers, a question hangs in the air like an overly cold fragrance: does couture still breathe? Draped in a deliberately bloodless aesthetic, these elongated figures with yellowed hair seem less to walk than to float, deprived of weight, of sex, at times even of humanity.
An almost wild fervor and eternal youth seemed to emanate from these aviator jackets, heavy with memories and conquests, and from these bomber jackets where one could sense the soul of skies traversed.
Valentino Garavani passed away last Monday, in the hushed silence of his Roman residence, at an age when life already resembles a legend. Chic. “A short word, a vast kingdom.” This phrase, spoken during the filming of The Last Emperor, became the chronicle of his final fashion show in 2008 and illuminates the man in his entirety.
“I have the impression of being the guardian of the Zegna family wardrobe,” Alessandro Sartori remarked, and in that single sentence he opened a gallery of memories whose walls seemed lined with ancient linens, imbued with repeated gestures and respectful silences. A guardian, not in the sense of watching over a motionless treasure, but rather of tending a fire passed from hand to hand, its flame changing shape without ever being extinguished.
After two years of media frenzy and a trial in Milan, Chiara Ferragni walked free, hair perfectly in place and smile finely calibrated, cleaner than coke once it has been rebranded as cola. “Pandoro Gate” and the Easter eggs affair melted away like overheated chocolate on Instagram.
FM: You say “unlock the invisible.” What exactly do you mean by that?
Beneath the dome of the Institut de France in Paris, a new chapter opened this week for the luxury titan, a familiar silhouette with international stature, stepping onto the green carpet.
At the Lord’s house, talent management is a delicate art, akin to rotating bottles of grand cru. At LVMH, one does not speak of “internal mobility”. That would be vulgar. Instead, one prefers a “trajectory”, a “journey”, even an “HR odyssey”, complete with Manhattan views, champagne on ice, and a perfectly pressed CV. On Tuesday, the luxury giant announced three top-level HR appointments. Three promotions, three emotional continents, and one certainty. At LVMH, talent does not stagnate. It travels first class.