Christopher John Rogers typically holds runway shows once a year, so this season he was back in his lower Manhattan studio, showing Collection 16 by appointment. “Looking back, last season we were maybe looking at a lot of the external expectations, about what people were expecting from us, and leaning more into evening in a...
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...
