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.
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.
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.
The leather coats, almost stubborn in their rigidity, conveyed a dark and severe impression. Their sharply defined back vents, along with fastenings reminiscent of harnesses, seemed to carry within them the memory of martial discipline, as though these garments had been shaped not only for the body, but for an idea of authority and constraint. They evoked a world in which the individual bends to a greater, impersonal force that no one can ignore.
Seeing certain silhouettes recently emerging from Kim Jones’s ateliers, a question hangs in the air like an overly cold fragrance: does couture still breathe? Draped in a deliberately bloodless aesthetic, these elongated figures with yellowed hair seem less to walk than to float, deprived of weight, of sex, at times even of humanity.
An almost wild fervor and eternal youth seemed to emanate from these aviator jackets, heavy with memories and conquests, and from these bomber jackets where one could sense the soul of skies traversed.