Like people, perfume houses eventually find their way back to what they once were, as though time, after taking a thousand detours, were ultimately nothing more than a road leading home. Estée Lauder, whose golden age was marked by some of perfumery’s most celebrated creations, now appears to be following that very path.
We remember, or at least we should remember, for the memory of fragrances is a fragile thing, even more fragile than that of men, White Linen, Pleasures, Beautiful, names that once promised happiness bottled in glass. The brand, which has perhaps never stopped hoping to recapture those years, will launch a new eau de parfum on August 6: Glimmer, perhaps “a glimmer of hope,” cast into the world like a message in a bottle, buoyed by the slightly naïve yet deeply touching faith that accompanies every fresh beginning. At $160 for 100 millilitres and $130 for 50, the price of hope, if one may put it that way, varies according to the size of the bottle. Continue reading
Once upon a time there was a young woman who believed you could stitch a broken world back together with a sewing machine and a handful of good ideas. Her name was Marina Serre. She was twenty-six, armed with genuine talent and the kind of innocence luxury conglomerates can smell from miles away, like vultures circling something that’s still breathing. 
The winds of winter are about to blow over the ancient stones of Trinity College Dublin, as a humble invitation card, like the herald∗ (Middle Ages: an officer whose duty was to carry messages) of a new destiny, announces that Jonathan Anderson will unveil Dior’s pre-fall show on the fourth day of December.
Origins and Education
To present a dress, some designers are content with a runway, a spotlight, and a model striding straight ahead with the expression of someone about to miss her train. Then there is Gaurav Gupta, who has quite clearly decided that a dress alone is never enough. You also need acrobats suspended from the ceiling, poetry recited in midair, and an audience in Mumbai tilting their heads upward as though awaiting an announcement from heaven rather than the opening of a fashion show. They call it the start of a runway presentation. I call it a declaration of war on restraint, and I have a particular fondness for wars of that kind.
Chemena Kamali, artistic director of Chloé, has been named president of the fashion jury for the 41st edition of the Hyères Festival, running October 15–18 right when half of Paris heads south to shutter the holiday house before racing off toward the French Riviera’s happy hour.
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the fashion industry, embedding itself into every stage of the business, from collection design to the purchasing journey. China best illustrates this acceleration: in a single month, Shanghai made “AI + Fashion” a national strategic priority through its 2026-2028 Action Plan, while Chinese companies launched more than 300 new AI products worldwide. This is no longer about isolated experiments, but a coordinated convergence of public policy, aggressive commercial deployment, and continuous innovation, turning AI into a genuine industrial pillar. 
Kering has just crowned a new prince for Bottega Veneta. His name is Romain Spitzer, he will take up his post on September 1st, and as befits these modern courts we call luxury groups, he will answer to Luca de Meo, CEO of Kering, before finally taking his seat at the table of the executive committee that assembly where one speaks of turnover the way others, once, spoke of God.
There are houses that refuse to be confined by the comfort of their own legend. Rabanne belongs to that rare family which prefers the exhilaration of the future to the tranquility of memory. The appointment of Renaud de Lesquen as president, the departure of a creative director, and the unveiling of a new interpretation of its iconic fragrance, 1 Million Black, mark not so much a break with the past as the opening of a new chapter. For truly great houses never thrive on certainty alone. They move forward, carried by that curious alchemy in which boldness eventually finds its place in time.
There are hours when the memory of peoples resembles those mysterious machines that abolish the distances of time. No sooner do we contemplate them than they set us down on the threshold of that dawn of the twentieth century, when Paris, clothed in her universal glory, seemed to have summoned beneath her sky all the nations of the earth. The iron tower, once an object of scorn, now dominated human hopes like those monuments that genius raises despite men, before they consent to admire them. It was the Universal Exposition of 1900; it was the moment when the Hôtel Régina opened its gilded salons to a generation of women whose names History did not yet know, because they were busy giving themselves that name. They no longer asked for freedom: they embodied it. 
Indifferent Nature, knowing nothing of men or their vanities, you had chosen, on this autumn day masquerading as summer, to drench the entire Palais de Tokyo in blazing heat. And it was beneath this most unseasonable warmth that Kévin Germanier, with the quiet irony of someone who has turned adversity into an art form, remarked that his collection seemed tailor-made for a heatwave.
AI Is Redesigning Fashion: China Takes the Lead. Should France Be Concerned?
Thus come to an end the long, mournful echoes of a bygone era. After thirty-seven years of a reign as discreet as it was sovereign, Véronique Nichanian has left the gilded ateliers of Hermès, the way one leaves a familiar forest at dusk, with the quiet grace of someone who knows that nothing ever truly dies. The House, like those old Breton manors weathered by the winds of the English Channel, still bears the imprint of her genius within its walls.
Let’s be clear, once and for all: Louis Vuitton did not create a surf collection. Louis Vuitton created a collection about surfing, which is about as credible as Berlusconi giving lessons in chastity. Cowabunga Bunga is the name of the collection because, apparently, someone had to make a joke, even if nobody understood it.
There is a particular cruelty in the luxury industry’s promises. Not the cruelty of excess that, consumers accept gladly, even eagerly — but the cruelty of the broken covenant. When a client walks into a Dior boutique in Gangnam and hands over a limited-edition handbag worth seven million won, she is not merely commissioning a repair. She is renewing an act of faith. The house understands this. It has built its entire mythology on it. Which is precisely why what happened next is so damaging.
One month of real-world use. Two pairs. Two failures. One verdict.
The Spring 2027 collection, which its progenitors deigned to christen Vacanze Siciliane, unfurled behind the runway a screen of theatrical magnificence. For in Milan, in June, one requires some vast illusion merely to survive the journey from rosy dawn to purple dusk, through the crushing heat that settles upon the city. Thus were bodies exhausted by the Milanese summer invited to plunge, by proxy, into Mediterranean waters both crystalline and cruelly out of reach.
Not so long ago, a man’s bathroom looked like the scene of an archaeological crime: a mummified bar of soap dating back to the Sarkozy era, a fossilized can of shaving foam, and a bottle of cologne gifted by Aunt Ginette in 2014, never opened, never missed. Male hygiene could be summed up in one simple philosophy: “if it stings in the shower, it must be cleaning something.”
For decades, the world’s largest corporations were led by financiers. MBA graduates from prestigious business schools sat at the top of organizational charts, armed with spreadsheets, ratios, and a command of capital that seemed to be the universal key to economic power. But something profound has shifted. Look at the figures who dominate the global economy today: