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.
The show took place at the foot of the Shard, Renzo Piano’s skyscraper, a gigantic architectural dildo pointed toward the clouds like an indecent prayer. It was hard not to suspect that this vertical vision had inspired the collection, which seemed designed to be seen from afar, very far, ideally by someone astigmatic, like the Pyramid of Queen Magot in Paris.
The models, draped in sequins like anthropomorphized disco balls, paraded in front of the London skyline for a flyover above a nest of consenting hens. It looked like a Swarovski-sponsored bachelorette party.
Last summer, Macdonald had discovered the Shard at dusk after a gin cocktail generously topped with Elton-style vermouth. Moved by the iridescent reflections, he obtained permission to stage his show there. He attempted to recreate those colors in a glittering collection, proving once again that imagination can be a very beautiful filter for fogged-up glasses after sleepless nights. Continue reading
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.
Before any fabric takes shape, the Donna Karan team travels the world in search of rare materials, questioning wools, vegan leathers, and jerseys as one might question promises of the future. From this textile pilgrimage is born a quiet innovation, nourished by travel and craftsmanship. 
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.
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.
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.