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.

Today, the Arnault dynasty has modernized the concept. No more dusty castles: now there are office towers, yachts, and Hermès bags that cost more than a yearly salary. Their control of LVMH now exceeds 50%. Translated into 19th-century language: “we’ve found the ultimate rent, and now it’s global.” Analysts rub their hands together like accountants in front of a champagne fountain: “Yes, everything’s fine, profits are down, but never mind, they’ve still won the real-life Monopoly.”

Imagine for a moment: a world where everyone works while a few own the capital, the brands, the display windows, the bags, and the perfumes. The 19th-century rentier had land. The 21st-century rentier has yachts, jets, and Louis Vuitton almost speaking for them. Continue reading →

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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.

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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.

Botanical references have become a refuge for designers short of structural ideas. Talking about flowers is a way to avoid talking about cut. Evoking magic is a way to avoid discussing construction. Here, the discourse is luxuriant, but the clothes are meagre. No prints, decorative applications, silhouettes that seem lifted from a Pinterest moodboard rather than a couture workshop.

The phenomenon is sadly familiar: some designers confuse their talent with the power of the house that employs them. As long as they have dozens of pattern-makers, embroiderers and tailors, they sign collections. Once alone, they sign intentions.

This collection is an intention. Vaguely poetic, vaguely feminine, vaguely contemporary. But fashion does not thrive on vagueness. Everything here mimics the language of luxury without possessing its syntax. The volumes fall like badly hung curtains; the materials scream quick toile, first try. Continue reading →

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.

While Albanian is her mother tongue, it was the English of PR agents that she mastered most quickly. As a teenager, she worked simultaneously in catering and as a nightclub waitress a gogo dancer, they say before becoming a model for ASOS at sixteen. She left the platform when a manager suggested she lose weight: the first founding act of a perfectly marketable feminist narrative.

Since then, she has endorsed Jaguar’s electric car British luxury on life support and some describe her, with a dubious sort of tenderness, as “beautiful as a brand-new truck” or “made up like a stolen car.” An industrial metaphor for a mechanically constructed muse. Continue reading →

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.

Becoming the “furrier of wealthy women” made Basso a symbol: that of a luxury world that continues to celebrate fur despite decades of criticism, activist campaigns, and ethical shifts adopted by much of the industry. While many fashion houses have abandoned the material in the name of animal welfare and social pressure, Basso chose continuity, claiming fur as a field for aesthetic experimentation, almost playful, where sequins and bold colors replace the gravity of the debate.

This stance is neither provocative nor militant; it reveals a world in which fur remains a marker of symbolic power, a social code reserved for an elite that can afford to ignore the controversy. Continue reading →

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.

Holstein viewed the world through Orson Welles’s mirrors. F for Fake, the 1973 film that had once shaken her like a revelation, had become her compass. She chose to embrace a theme dear to fashion journalist F.M.: counterfeiting, imposture, that essential little deceit without which humanity could hardly survive. After all, is it not by counterfeiting ourselves that we become who we are?

The fall collection was a dark romance, almost a confession rendered in fabric. A velvet bustier dress, tragic like a heroine who no longer dares to love, was paired with a grandiose silk gazar skirt, as if the 1980s had returned to reclaim their lost illusions. Victorian black lace blouses, worn over long, narrow trousers, lent rigor the sensuality of a morality quietly transgressed. Continue reading →

Isla Johnston, wet hair: the most common gimmick in fashion photography since the invention of water. Water, that conceptual fig leaf that turns any model into a siren for exhausted art directors. The black leather jacket with its “impeccable cut” evokes an unzipped diving suit. But above all, what boldness! Because in 2026, we are still discovering that leather can resemble neoprene, and we now eagerly await the revelation that cotton looks like cotton. Continue reading →

The autumn of 2026 will inscribe, in the book of time, the forty-fifth year of Michael Kors’s career. To mark this anniversary, he invited the elegant set, on a weekday evening, to the Metropolitan Opera House, that modern temple where art and vanity meet beneath vaults of light.

He recalled his journey, long as a Manhattan avenue, and confessed that the secret principle of his work had always been a love of refinement, glamour, and luxury, tempered by an inclination toward nonchalance, that comfort which is like the sweetness of resting at the edge of the world. Continue reading →

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.

Enter Grow-Good Beauty, a name that sounds like a probiotic yogurt for exhausted billionaires. A brand born from a collaboration with Revolve Group, that Californian consortium that sells “lifestyle” the way others sell freedom-scent in a plastic bottle. They call it a “multi-category offering.” We call it a buffet for obese vanities who think the height of sophistication is the phone book.

While glaciers melt, we celebrate the capillary rebirth of a fluorescent wig. While drones stitch surgical seams across Ukrainian villages, we applaud a tour called Little Miss Drama .

The drama, though, is not in the mascara. The drama is in this very small, very closed circle of celebrities, spinning like perfumed hamsters in a gilded cage. They live outside our world, in an air-conditioned bubble where the air is filtered “Le Bel Aire,” problems are sponsored, morality is Photoshopped, and blindness is considered a point of view. Continue reading →

Scott’s first show at Proenza, led by the Jamaican designer, was awaited like the dawn over an open sea. The signs had already appeared: a preliminary show, a campaign devoted to authenticity, preludes to a promised metamorphosis.

She approached the house with an almost monastic fervor, studying its colors, its materials, the gestures of the atelier, as one deciphers the remnants of a civilization. The founders had loved women; she, herself a woman, gave them an inner voice. Continue reading →

The fashion crowd returned like a scented tide, Anne, Ariana, Emilia, Lana, and other constellations of women sitting in the gallery as if in a secret chamber of fashion’s time.

The walls breathed hand-painted forests, velvet curtains held back the night, ancient rugs whispered vanished footsteps, and tired leather kept the memory of bodies. Everything was a dreamed house, and the clothes were seasons layered on the skin, as if autumn were something one could touch. Continue reading →

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.

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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.

Tall and slender, with a deliberately understated air, often clad in the now-clichéd uniform of the contemporary designer a long-sleeved white T-shirt Mulier took the reins of Alaïa three years after the death of its founder. Azzedine Alaïa, an obsessive sculptor of the female body, left behind a house both exacting and mythologized, sanctified by an almost monastic vision of the silhouette.

Mulier did not attempt imitation; he chose instead to shift the statue. Onto the Alaïa heritage, he grafted a nervous modernity, at times experimental, always self-aware. A sharpened, emancipated femininity, less devotional and more conceptual, one that never forgot that at Alaïa, the body remains the compass. The result? A house set back in motion, stripped of patrimonial mothballs without sinking into lazy quotation. Continue reading →

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?

In truth, this is a world that collapses without even the decency to do so gracefully. A world where the utterly mediocre are hoisted to honor, where color is slathered on like plaster, where reality is hacked apart with a trowel so that everything shines, so that everything explodes in the end like Bolotnikov’s rebellion. We nitpick the elephant, atomize good taste, and ultimately inflict upon the mind’s eye the same pain as sunlight glinting off a sheet of tin. Vulgarity is never beautiful, and repainting it does not ennoble itit only makes it louder. Continue reading →

At the end of the nineteenth century, a singular device appeared in Europe’s major cities: the Kaiserpanorama. Now almost forgotten, it nonetheless remains essential for understanding a particular historical regime of vision. This collective optical machine took the form of a circular wooden structure, pierced with small viewing lenses, around which spectators gathered to observe animated stereoscopic images. Continue reading →

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.

This is precisely the language Roseberry seems to have learned by heart. Haute couture, in his hands, is not a caress but a defensive strategy. The woman he dresses does not drift, she bristles in a shell dress, a white armor of duchesse satin. She knows how to protect herself.

In The Agony and the Ecstasy, that is the title, silhouettes advance like hybrid organisms. Scorpion tails burst from the backs of impeccably structured corsets, a reminder that danger often comes from behind, from the place we no longer watch. Elsewhere, bodies transform into birds mid-flight. Winged jackets, trompe-l’œil feathers, silks painted and then cut into vibrant bouquets. Nothing is decorative. Everything is intentional.

Materials converse like species forced into coexistence. Lace in bas-relief, almost geological. Layered tulle, saturated with color, creating a carnal sfumato. Feathers soaked in crystals of light. Mimosa embroideries in silk threads, fragile in appearance yet stubborn. Continue reading →

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.

And yet, unless it is the other way around, unless this strange discipline, austere like an inner cloister, is my only path toward a higher, rarer joy. For in condemning me to writing, it also grants me the right to approach the unsayable, to name shadow and light, to make meaning rise where reality offered only mute chaos. Happiness then is not given, it is earned, through effort, through accepted solitude, through the ascetic practice of words aligned day after day. Continue reading →