The persistent absence of women in top creative roles at major fashion houses is too striking to ignore. Yet when the doors to these positions remain closed, a saying comes to mind: If the mountain will not come to Muhammed, then Muhammed must go to the mountain. Ilenia Durazzi should choose this motto as her...
Freddy Coomes and Matt Empringham are the designers behind Aletta, the quirky London startup they named after Coomes’s mother. This bright pair of Central Saint Martins graduates (BA class of ’24) is currently giving the long-established school of English eccentricity a fresh face. Their brand is “in its infancy”—this was their second collection—and the two...
“When everything fades, what remains is the essential,” said Giorgia Gabriele more than once. She was keen to stress that essential is not a synonym for aesthetic minimalism. Rather, it is a work of subtraction conceived as an invitation to permanence. “In such a chaotic and complex moment, the pressure and expectations of the market...
Say it ain’t so. This was the final time we would ever see newly designed clothes conceived by Giorgo Armani on the runway. Although in many ways, of course, they weren’t new at all. For as the 50th-anniversary exhibition installed upstairs in Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera so beautifully demonstrated, Mr. Armani’s aesthetic might have been...
In fashion, designers almost never get to script their own farewells. The industry is partial to the pomp of a corporate beheading, delivered with a press release dipped in rosewater by the executioner. You’re “parting ways amicably,” though your head’s already neatly in the basket. What follows is the usual mess of bruised egos, crocodile...
Philipp Plein, preppy? It may sound like a shocker, but Plein sent out V-neck tennis sweaters with stripes, navy blazers with crests and all-white tailored suits, onto his shadowy, glitter ball runway on Saturday night. It was an homage, he said, to the pure, monochrome uniform of tennis players before Andre Agassi landed on the...
Today, the devil wore Dolce & Gabbana. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana had the celebrity gets of the season: With movie-perfect timing, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci, dressed in character as Miranda Priestly and Nigel Kipling of Runway magazine, swooped in just as everyone else had taken their seats. Newcomer Simone Ashley, whose role in...
“I’m in the candy box,” Louise Trotter told a group of reporters backstage. Her appointment to Bottega Veneta last December made Trotter the sole woman to score a creative director job in a sweeping round of designer musical chairs that consumed fashion for the better part of a year. Rachel Scott getting the keys to...
Elisabetta Franchi’s spring show was held once again at Palazzo Acerbi, the opulent 17th-century building in the Baroque style in central Milan. The designer revealed backstage that she had just completed the acquisition of the palazzo and explained how she was first intrigued by the legend surrounding it. “The devil protected this building. I am...
Galib Gassanof’s work is more attuned to artistry and research-intensive craft than mundane dressmaking. For his recent solo fashion project Institution, the designer’s aim has been so far, and is for now, to explore what a brand with commercial goals – and restraints – simply could not. A perfecto jacket with no armholes? Check. A...