The sun, that worldly critic of Parisian high society, had decided to attend the show. It blazed with the insolence of a poorly aimed spotlight, turning the Tuileries Garden into an incandescent tearoom borrowed from Piton de la Fournaise. The traditional tent had vanished, exiled like an idea deemed too timid. In its place stood a mirrored architecture, delicate as a mischievous jewel, encircling a small octagonal lake. A runway hovered above the water, suspended between sky and reflection. My neighbor leaned over and whispered, “It’s the fashion duck pond.”
It was as if fashion, weary of its own riddles, had chosen at last to speak plainly. Gone was the conceptual labyrinth of the early days. Here was clarity, polished like a pebble. The designer had traded esotericism for sovereign simplicity, that rare virtue requiring far more courage than ornament.
Beneath the glass walkways, the heat rose with the slow drama of an opera. The front row guests, among them Jisoo and Anya Taylor-Joy, battled the temperature with the dignity of Greek statues suddenly aware of their own skin. A few influencers, scarcely returned from Dubai, wore that minimal makeup which claims spontaneity. Their complexions carried the carefully engineered freshness of a scheduled sunrise at Dubai Airport. They looked as though they had stepped out of an air-conditioned mirage, or perhaps a Mirage 2000, depending on one’s sense of humor. Continue reading
To celebrate twenty years of his career, Erdem Moralıoğlu unveiled a collision of genres so extravagantly theatrical one might have sworn Madame de Pompadour was flirting with a punk in a post industrial club beneath a Bohemian crystal disco ball. In a world where the economy feels like a corset laced too tight, his devotion to couture borders on romantic heroism. London, ever eager to applaud its prodigies, watched him as one watches an alchemist turn anxiety into embroidery.
Remember the 19th-century rentiers… those legendary creatures who invented the revolutionary concept of “doing nothing and being adored for it.” They lived off their rents like dragons on their gold, got up at noon, ate with the air of a Greek tragedy, and wondered why the world didn’t admire them enough. Society, they claimed, was “unjust”… especially for those who actually had to work.
There are, in the history of fashion, figures who sculpt time like marble sculptors, and others who sculpt above all their own legend, the way one sculpts the mushroom of a Nymph. Maria Grazia Chiuri undoubtedly belongs to this latter category, that iconoclastic brotherhood that confuses communication with creation and the slogan with vision.
After three years of absence, and a final article that had the effect of a monsoon in a spit on his career, the designer decided it was time to return to the catwalks. London, soaked to the bone, provided the perfect backdrop for this climatic miracle: Macdonald, the messiah of polyester, came to bring the sun, but what we saw was an eclipse.
Foday Dumbuya’s latest “collection” was a public trial of the abysmal mediocrity of contemporary fashion, closer to a declaration of war than to a runway show. So-called traditional catwalks emerge from dusty altars of déjà-vu, and seemed to burn under the impact of this textile barrage, as if originality had returned to reclaim its territory through bursts of color and memory.
Each season, there is a collection that brutally reminds us why the great houses exist. This season in London, it was this one. Designer Phobe English, emancipated from a major atelier, delivered a collection she describes as “an illustration of the beauty of plants in full bloom” and “a bit of magic”. Illustration is indeed the right word. Fashion, much less so.
Her name is Dua Lipa: “Dua” means “love” in Albanian, and “Lipa” is her surname, of Kosovo-Albanian origin. Having fled the Yugoslav Wars for London, Lipa has long spun a success story of exile and resilience.
Dennis Basso embodies this almost timeless figure of American luxury, a designer who built his legend on fur, a material both spectacular and deeply controversial. His rise, sealed in the 1980s by the endorsement of New York’s elites, tells as much the story of fashion as it does that of a particular relationship to power, prestige, and social visibility.
There was an installation that seemed to have emerged from an overly lucid dream, a Matrix-like hallucination filtered through the intelligence of an architect in love. Catherine Holstein’s husband had constructed a setting that said everything while revealing nothing: ambition, solitude, the quiet exhilaration of a designer now firmly seated in the unstable pantheon of New York fashion. One sensed that strange, almost guilty certainty of having succeeded.
While the world cracks like an old mirror at the Palace, while wars chew through entire cities, and the ultra-rich compress the air like a luxury product, a new planetary emergency emerges: Cardi B’s repaired hair. Yes, hair. Not children, not bombs, not famines. The hair of the most distinguished of singers.
For Marc, as the fashionistas call him the fashion world, spring 2026 is anything but an enchanted interlude. It’s a pause. An almost solemn silence in an industry that speaks too loudly. A kind of act of memory rather than nostalgia a reminder that fashion, when sincere, can be a tool for reflection as much as a spectacle.
There were fireworks, choreographies, Mariah Carey singing Volare and proving that she could deliver a service for the occasion, and this wonderful idea that, decidedly, nothing is impossible, especially when you have a 400,000 watt sound system.
Another departure, one more. In the grand couture transfer market, where artistic directors are traded like tired number tens, Guillaume Henry leaves Patou after a seven-year term. Today, that already counts as a presidential-length career.
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?
