Paris has been chattering all week about the empty creative-director seat at Givenchy, tossing out names and wondering about timelines. The studio team was responsible for this collection. Givenchy has been through so many hands in the past decade—Riccardo Tisci, Clare Waight Keller, Matthew M. Williams—that the audience has lost its handle on what Hubert … Read more
Politics. Wars. Brexit. Economics. Family stuff. Non-paying retailers. Last time we chatted, Ashish Gupta was gripped by a glumness sparked by circumstance. So for the new season this usually sunny soul decided to regroup. He decided to pay fresh attention to London, seek fresh stimulation in a new category (knitwear), and to lean on some … Read more
Nehera’s fall collection, which bookended the one preceding it, represented a progression from ominous thunder clouds straight into the eye of the squall. Ladislav Zdút identified the two sources stirring up this tempest as the AI revolution and the current state of global politics. Bratislava, where Nehera is based, is about 600 miles from Kyiv. … Read more
We were back at Rick Owens’s Place du Palais Bourbon manse today. As he did during the January men’s season, Owens traded the bombast (his word) of his Palais de Tokyo shows for a setup more intime. Owens’s singular, sweeping vision remains plenty big enough for the monumental Palais. Batwing shoulders scraped the earlobes, puffer … Read more
Meet Steve O Smith, who’s just arrived fully-fledged from London with his startlingly beautiful debut collection. As you may guess when you scroll through his lookbook, Smith started in fine art, and is now transferring his expressive drawings into making clothes. “I think these are both drawings,” he said, holding a sketch in one hand, … Read more
High glamour was the order of the day for Jenny Packham’s fall collection, which neatly picked up where her pre-fall left off: reveling in the glitter and hedonism of the 1970s. “I was thinking about David Bowie last time, which led me on to Starman and it all got a bit cosmic,” she said. Aside … Read more
Between the sound of a woman’s breathing, a white, tensile installation that responded, swelled, rose and fell with it, and the slits of the low center-front pockets which every model had one hand tucked into—well! Nicholas di Felice was so clearly talking about the pleasures of sex and fashion at his Courrèges show that his … Read more
Rochas is gunning for a comeback under the creative direction of Alessandro Vigilante. There’s a lot of work to do here—after all, Rochas is best known for fragrances these days—so logically enough the designer started back at square one, draping a salon in the Hôtel d’Évreux in hibiscus pink and rustling up some Marcel Rochas … Read more
Charaf Tajer, founder and creative director of Casablanca, explained backstage that this collection told the story of ancient Greece and “the bridge between them and us—how they influence us in architecture, philosophy, mathematics, psychedelics…” Hold on a sec… You, like me, may have had no clue that the ancient city of Eleusis near Athens was … Read more
How Tracy Reese chose to introduce her Hope for Flowers fall 2024 collection—at a trade show and not with a splashy runway production—mirrored the nature of her most recent designs: relaxed, pragmatic, and made to resonate more so with her customer than with an editorial eye. “Runway shows were so much fun,” she says. “We … Read more
