I didn’t go in with a plan. I just photographed whatever stopped me. Something intricate, something beautiful, something I wanted to remember the shape of. By the end, I had 144 pictures and no regrets about the $30 it cost to get in.

It wasn’t until later, flicking back through my camera roll, that I saw what the curators had been up to. Hardly anything in the show is left on its own. Almost every dress has a companion pulled from the museum’s permanent collection: a marble figure, a Greek vase, an engraving, even a Van Gogh. A red gown from 2022 shares the frame with a carving from the 1300s. A 1980s bustier sits beside a breastplate that’s more than two thousand years older.

The pairings aren’t a side note. They are the show. And without making a fuss about it, they settle an argument that’s been going on for a very long time.

The old argument

Is fashion art? It sounds like a dinner-party question, but people have argued about it for centuries.

Immanuel Kant set the tone in 1790. In his Critique of Judgment he listed things that sit around a work of art without really being part of it, which he called parerga. One was the frame of a painting. Another was the drapery on a statue. The clothes, in other words, were the extra bit.

Nearly two hundred years later, the argument arrived at the Met itself. In 1983 the Costume Institute gave Yves Saint Laurent a retrospective, and many art historians were scandalised. A living designer, selling clothes, in an art museum? It still hasn’t been settled. Valerie Steele, who runs the museum at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, says “there is by no means a consensus that fashion is art,” and plenty of designers, from Karl Lagerfeld to Rei Kawakubo, have refused the label.

My favourite answer comes from someone who changed the question. The art historian Anne Hollander, in Seeing Through Clothes (1978), argued that painting and dress have always shaped each other. Paintings teach us what a body is supposed to look like, and we dress to look right by the pictures’ standards. Even the nudes, she wrote, are “wearing the ghosts of absent clothes.”

Four conversations I didn’t expect:

Stone pretending to be silk

Raffaello Monti’s The Veiled Woman (1854) is a marble girl under a veil so thin you can see her face through it. It’s stone. It looks like you could lift it off.

Next to her is a John Galliano dress for Maison Margiela (autumn/winter 2020-21 couture) that does the exact opposite. It’s sheer silk gauze, cut in circles and layered until it looks carved. The label has a lovely term for this: wet drapery. It comes from ancient Greek sculpture, where carved cloth clings so closely that you can see the body underneath. A few steps away, the designer Dimitra Petsa of Di Petsa does it for real. She drapes wet mesh straight onto the body and sews every ripple in place by hand. Her dress stands beside a cast of a Nereid, a sea nymph, from a Greek monument built around 390 BCE.

Kant called the drapery on a statue an extra. Standing there, it looked like the hardest thing in the room to make.

A painting you can wear

One wall holds Van Gogh’s Irises, painted in 1890 in the garden of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, while he was a patient there. In front of it stands a jacket.

It’s Yves Saint Laurent’s, from his spring/summer 1988 couture collection. The irises are embroidered in silk ribbon, and the label says it took six hundred hours of handwork. The label also points out something you’d never guess from how joyful it looks: Saint Laurent, like Van Gogh, struggled with his mental health for most of his life.

Painters as fashion reporters

Franz Xaver Winterhalter painted queens and countesses in the mid-1800s, and his portraits are basically fashion photography before cameras could do it properly. His 1859 portrait of a Russian countess hangs above a real dress from around 1865, with the same huge bell-shaped skirt held out by a crinoline.

Nearby is a print from 1777 called Les Adieux. A woman is leaving a room, and her skirt, held out by hoops called panniers, is so wide she has to go through the doorway sideways. It hangs beside a Dior dress from 2023 by Maria Grazia Chiuri, built on a hooped frame inspired by Catherine de’ Medici.

Same instinct, centuries apart

Some pairings aren’t about copying at all. They’re two people, centuries apart, having the same idea.

Thierry Mugler’s green bustier from 1980 is moulded leather and fibreglass, shaped like a muscled chest.

Beside it is a Greek bronze breastplate from the fourth century BCE. “The greatest tribute I can offer to women,” Mugler once said, “is to sculpt the shapes of their bodies.”

Maria Grazia Chiuri’s gown for Dior, from resort 2026, takes the same idea and makes it sparkle. Thousands of glass beads trace a breastplate over the body. Beside it hangs a replica of a Roman trophy relief, the kind of monument the ancients built out of a defeated enemy’s armour. It’s where the English word trophy comes from.

And Chet Lo’s spiky knitted gowns, in soft grey and blue-green, hang beside Picasso’s The Blind Man’s Meal (1903). In the painting, the blind man finds his bread by touch. For his spring/summer 2025 show, Lo invited guests who are blind or have low vision to feel the fabrics and listen to live descriptions of each look.

This is the pairing that stayed with me longest. Clothes are made to be worn, touched, and moved in, and a museum asks you to do none of those things. Lo’s knits look soft and sharp at the same time, and the only way to know which is the one thing you can’t do in a room where even leaning in gets you a warning.

So, is it art?

At the Met, at least, a Saint Laurent jacket gets the same wall, the same light and the same polite warning to step back as a Van Gogh. I’ll take that as a yes.

The side I didn’t get to

This piece only follows one thread. The whole show walks you through the body room by room, from the Naked & Nude Body and the Classical Body to the Pregnant, Anatomical and Aging Body, and finally the Mortal Body, with its mourning dress and skeletons.

Before you go, wherever you are

I learned most of this after the visit, by googling and bouncing my questions off AI tools until the pieces made sense. It changed what I saw in my own photos, and I wish I’d done it before.

So whatever city you’re in, if you love learning and want your money’s worth from a ticket, do a little homework first. Look up the show’s themes, the words on the walls you might not know, and the artists the designers are talking to. And check what’s free.

If you’re in London, here are two places to start. The original Nereid Monument, the one Di Petsa’s dress stands beside in plaster, is in the British Museum. Wet drapery, in real stone, and free.

The National Gallery is free too, and full of painted silk, velvet and lace. Anne Hollander curated a whole exhibition there in 2002, Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting, so the building has form.

-AE.

Notes:

• Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (1978). The book that argues painting and dress shape each other. About Hollander

• Peter Campbell on Hollander’s Fabric of Vision at the National Gallery, London Review of Books, 2002

• Sung Bok Kim, “Is Fashion Art?”, Fashion Theory 2:1 (1998), pp. 51-71. Listed in FIT’s reading list

• Valerie Steele on whether fashion is art, interview in Hyperallergic

• Elaine Showalter on the Armani show at the Guggenheim, London Review of Books, 2001

• Kant’s parerga, the frame and the drapery, overview

• The Met on Costume Art, which runs until 10 January 2027, press release

Details about the pieces and pairings come from the exhibition’s wall labels.

These were the questions behind an evening with the Wardrobe Icons team at Theory’s Regent Street store in London. The challenge was simple: one rail, five days, five different realities of working life. Wardrobe Icons’ fashion director built a Monday-to-Friday wardrobe entirely from Theory, with each look designed around a familiar dressing dilemma.

I went along, took notes and left thinking less about individual outfits and more about how the right pieces can work together. Here are five looks worth borrowing from, alongside a few things I learned about the fabrics and thinking behind them.

The Brand founded on a single trouser.

Founded in New York in 1997, Theory built its reputation around a simple idea: the perfect trouser for a woman at work. There is something appealing about a brand that starts with a wardrobe staple and builds outwards.

A representative from Theory’s New York office, who has spent almost two decades in the industry, described the attention that goes into each piece, from buttons and stitching to fit. Colleagues wear-test garments in offices and stores before they reach the shop floor, with the aim of creating pieces that work together rather than compete for space in your wardrobe.

The Cloth

Three materials from the evening caught my attention:

• Admiral crepe is designed to drape well and resist creasing. Theory says its triacetate uses wood pulp from certified responsibly managed forests; the fabric also contains polyester.

• Regal wool is fine merino that, according to Theory, can be traced from a farm in New South Wales to a family-run mill in Italy.

• Organic Pima cotton offers a softer option for jersey layers beneath tailoring.

Each serves a different purpose, from keeping trousers looking sharp to adding a comfortable layer under a jacket. Traceability gives us a clearer picture of where a material comes from, though it is only one part of understanding a garment’s wider environmental impact.

One practical tip from the evening: forget the number on the label for a moment:

“Fit is about how you want a garment to sit, not the size you think you ought to wear.”

The Theory representative had sized up in her T-shirt for a more relaxed fit, while the brand notes that its Tiny Tee runs small.

Monday: The Soft Opening

Begin the week with denim, met by a cropped trench in suede. The pairing lends the familiar a quiet structure without tipping into formality.

A gentle reminder that the working wardrobe need not begin and end with a matched suit.

Shop the look: Cropped trench coat in suede · Mock-neck top in soft rib · Slim-straight jeans in essential denim

Tuesday: The Suit, Two Ways

A well-cut suit is a decision already made. Its power lies in its economy: one coordinated gesture, polished, asking nothing further of you. The only test is that fit and fabric still feel generous once the day accelerates.

Beneath it, the Tiny Tee in organic Pima cotton: white on the night, linked here in black. Close to the body, clean at the neck, it is a base layer that adds nothing it shouldn’t.

Then the shoes finish the sentence. Trainers render the suit relaxed and contemporary; kitten-heel slingbacks return it to polish. The clothes remain. The context shifts.

Shop the look: Cutaway jacket in mélange crepe · Double-pleat trousers in mélange crepe · Tiny Tee in organic cotton

Wednesday: In Transit

The brief: a flight, then meetings back to back, and no moment to change. Here I’ve taken a liberty with the rail and introduced colour, lifting a practical travel look without loosening its polish.

A long, single-breasted coat in trench cotton: lighter than the classic trench, easier to shrug on, and forgiving of the creases a long journey leaves behind.

Underneath, I’ve chosen Theory’s Marcee trousers in Admiral crepe: high-rise, a straight stovepipe leg, equally at ease with a loafer or a heel, in a cloth designed to resist creasing. After a flight, a small luxury. A regal wool turtleneck cardigan adds fine merino to adjust as the temperature shifts, and a brushed merino-and-cashmere triangle scarf falls over one shoulder like a light wrap.

For me, the point is simple: comfort and polish needn’t compete. It’s about finding pieces that work with the realities of travelling without looking as though you’ve dressed solely for the airport.

Shop the look: Long single-breasted coat in trench cotton · Marcee trousers in Admiral crepe · Turtleneck cardigan in regal wool · Brushed triangle scarf in airy wool cashmere

Thursday: After Hours

Some days leave barely a breath between the last meeting and the evening ahead. For Thursday: a midi skirt in cacao lamb leather, set against a frost-blue stretch-poplin shirt from Theory’s menswear. The women’s team, I learned, often borrows from the men’s rail for the cut. Sleeves rolled, knee-high boots: polished, never stiff.

An oxblood patent Silvie shoulder bag lends a flash of lacquer, while a double-breasted melton overcoat in deep eggplant brings a distinctly ’90s attitude: strong shoulders, and a more flattering reading of traditional menswear tailoring.

It is a coat I’d wear far beyond this look, thrown over jeans, a T-shirt and loafers. And therein lies the alchemy: crisp cotton, supple leather, plush wool, each texture lending the whole its own voice.

Shop the look: Circle skirt in sleek leather · Tailored shirt in superior cotton · Silvie shoulder bag in patent leather · Double-breasted overcoat in plush melton

Friday: WFH

The final problem: to look composed on camera without dressing as though you’re about to leave the house.

Relaxed, straight-leg trousers in double-knit jersey keep the body at ease, while a regal wool sweater tee brings structure without forfeiting the nonchalance of a T-shirt. It reads a touch more considered on screen, before the first call has even begun.

The sweater tee moves between seasons, too: alone when the weather is mild, layered beneath a jacket as it cools. Dressing for home shouldn’t mean choosing between comfort and feeling like yourself. Sometimes it is simply a more refined version of what you would have worn anyway.

Shop the look: Sweater tee in regal wool · Relaxed straight trousers in double-knit jersey

One rail, more than five outfits

The cleverest thing about the rail was how easily the pieces moved between looks. Tuesday’s jacket could work with Monday’s jeans, Thursday’s overcoat could lift Friday’s trousers, and the Wednesday scarf could find a place across all five outfits.

This, to me, is the true promise of a capsule wardrobe: not that a handful of pieces will solve every dilemma, but that fewer can say more, with less effort. A change of shoe, an extra layer, a bare leg, and the same pieces walk into a new season.

What stayed with me from the evening was the focus on fit, fabric and how individual garments work together. Trends will always have their moment. But the pieces we return to are the ones that keep working long after the moment we bought them.

Behind the scenes

I also filmed a short clip from the evening, a glimpse of the work behind the event, from Theory’s London store team to Wardrobe Icons attending to its members.

What struck me was how differently styling advice lands once it leaves the endless scroll and enters a room. You see how a piece truly falls. You ask questions. You listen to people who have built careers in this industry. For anyone short on time or inspiration, having someone edit the possibilities into something manageable is a genuine luxury.

What struck me was how differently styling advice lands once it leaves the endless scroll and enters a room. You see how a piece truly falls. You ask questions. You listen to people who have built careers in this industry. For anyone short on time or inspiration, having someone edit the possibilities into something manageable is a genuine luxury.

If you love fashion but crave more direction than another saved folder of outfit references, Wardrobe Icons is worth exploring.

-AE.

Halfway through Vogue World Milano on 22 September, a troupe of robots walked out onto the runway. The audience laughed and lifted their phones. Alessandro Michele, sitting front row, barely moved. His “pained expression” went viral within hours, and Miuccia Prada’s face travelled just as fast.

By the next morning my feed was full of creators, among them @selloutartist, @glo.guide, @theluuhoo, @jaytibbitts, @nakullax, @eugbrandstrat and @twinbrett, asking some version of the same question. What even is Vogue World? One creator offered a million dollars, and a robot, to anyone who could explain it.

I can’t claim the prize, but I can try. I spent my master’s dissertation studying Vogue World, and the confusion everyone is describing isn’t a side effect. It’s the clearest sign of what the event is for, and of where it’s starting to crack.

What it actually is

Start with the money, because that’s the easy part. Vogue World launched in New York in 2022 and has since moved to London (2023), Paris (2024) and Hollywood (2025). This year it took over Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Each edition mixes a runway, a concert, celebrity cameos and a charity cause, and it’s all livestreamed.

Print advertising has been shrinking for years. British Vogue’s circulation fell by more than 30% between 2006 and 2013 alone. A magazine can no longer live on the pages people buy. What it still owns is a name and a guest list, and those can be sold as events. The Met Gala, the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and Vogue World are now among Condé Nast’s most important revenue streams. One of the experts I interviewed called them Vogue’s “biggest source of revenue.”

The sponsors explain the rest. This year’s presenting sponsors were Alo, eBay, Eli Lilly and Meta’s smart glasses, with extra support from FedEx and OpenAI. None of them sells couture. What they buy is proximity: a few hours inside fashion’s world and some of the cultural prestige that fashion still has and that they lack.

So yes, it’s marketing. But calling it a stunt explains nothing. The interesting question is why it still works, and that’s where my research comes in.

What I found in London

My dissertation looked at Vogue World London in 2023, staged at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and directed by Stephen Daldry. I analysed its imagery and interviewed five people who work in fashion journalism, PR and cultural strategy. Three findings matter for Milan.

First, Vogue’s authority hasn’t vanished. It has shrunk. There was a time when Vogue decided what fashion meant. Now, my interviewees said, it still matters enormously inside the industry, but much less outside it. One cultural strategist I interviewed called it “a fashion echo chamber.” A placement in Vogue still impresses buyers and investors. It no longer sets the mainstream. The events exist partly to fill that gap: if you can’t command attention through the page, you stage something people can’t ignore.

Second, the inclusivity is real on screen and much thinner in the room. The defining image of London 2023 was a red double-decker bus carrying Victoria Beckham, Mayor Sadiq Khan, TikTok star Khaby Lame and members of the NHS Choir. It said: this belongs to everyone. Tickets to the actual show cost between £150 and £2,500, in a theatre of about 2,000 seats. Anyone could watch the livestream. Very few could be in the room. As one interviewee put it, “you’re literally paying to be in that world.”

Third, and most important, spectacle has a breaking point. Vogue World works by stacking things up: celebrities, heritage, music, charity, sponsors. Each layer adds attention. But I found that when the layers stop adding up to a story, the effect flips. Instead of prestige, people see noise. I called this the coherence threshold. A fashion journalist I interviewed described London as “random” and “lacking a clear message.” In 2023, that was an insider’s complaint. In 2026, it’s what everyone is saying out loud.

What Milan tells us

The Milan edition was Vogue World’s first in Italy. Its theme was that the future is made by the hand. Much of the show lived up to it. Gigi Hadid opened in a Valentino couture gown by Alessandro Michele, pieced together from recycled Venetian quilts over about 1,680 hours of handwork.

Imaan Hammam wore a Versace catsuit inspired by Gianni Versace’s Spring/Summer 1991 collection. Houses dipped into their archives and put real craft back on display.

Then came the robots. A celebration of human craftsmanship, backed in part by OpenAI, sent humanoid robots down the runway. You don’t need a dissertation to see that the message and the medium were pulling in opposite directions. That is the coherence threshold, staged in a single moment.

What has really changed since London is who is paying. In 2023 the sponsors were Coach, eBay and the car brand Genesis: retail and luxury names that sit close to fashion. In 2026 eBay is still there, but now beside an AI lab, a social media giant and a pharmaceutical company. Through the lens I used in my research, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of turning money into prestige, this is a big shift. Fashion used to sell its prestige to its own industry. Now it is selling it to tech, which has huge economic power and is short of cultural credibility.

Several of the creators I watched made the same point: tech is trying to turn its money into cultural credibility. I agree. But the deal has a cost for Vogue too. Every sponsor that doesn’t fit the story makes the story harder to tell.

Eli Lilly is the sharpest example. The company makes Mounjaro and Zepbound, two of the best-known GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. It was a presenting sponsor of a show that also put plus-size models on the runway, and health campaigners raised concerns. Lilly's own film at the event never mentioned its drugs, but for many viewers, the logo raised the question anyway.

So when people say they can’t explain Vogue World, they aren’t missing something. They are reading it correctly. The event is now built to carry so many messages, for so many paying partners, that it has stopped carrying one of its own.

So what should Vogue do?

It would be easy to end on “fashion is dead.” I don’t think that’s true, and the best parts of Milan prove it. When the clothes were on stage, the craft, the archive and the history were exactly what Vogue is uniquely able to show. No influencer can borrow Gianni Versace’s 1991 collection for a night.

The problem is that Vogue World keeps adding layers without asking what the evening means. My interviewees agreed that Vogue still matters, but its authority now depends on whether people trust its judgement. Spectacle buys attention. Only coherence turns attention into trust.

A fashion archivist and lecturer I interviewed offered one way forward: Vogue World could do more to connect the spectacle to that wider ecosystem. You could imagine a creative agency or hub, a stronger link to existing education programmes, or a real commitment to the craftspeople the Milan theme celebrated. Any of these would give the events something to point back to.

Next year Vogue World goes to San Francisco, the home of the tech industry that is now helping to pay for it. Announcing it, Anna Wintour praised the city’s “history of rebelliousness” and its “incredible innovation.” That will be the real test. Either Vogue shows tech what culture looks like, or Vogue World becomes what its critics already suspect: a beautiful stage, rented out to whoever can afford it.

-AE.

Notes:

Interview quotes and London 2023 figures come from my own dissertation. Everything else is linked below.

• Sponsors, date and venue: Vogue Scandinavia, How to watch Vogue World 2026: Milano

• Robots, Unitree, OpenAI’s role and designers’ reactions: TechCrunch, Vogue sent robots down the runway at Vogue World, and people were not impressed (23 September 2026)

• Eli Lilly sponsorship, plus-size models and Lilly’s film: The Guardian, Chloe Mac Donnell (27 September 2026); ABC News Australia (30 September 2026)

• Unitree on the Pentagon 1260H list (8 June 2026): WilmerHale client alert; The Next Web

• Vogue World 2027 in San Francisco and Anna Wintour’s quote (announced 6 August 2026): NBC Bay Area

• Host cities 2022–2025: TODAY, Vogue World: Hollywood will celebrate the connection between film and fashion

• Gigi Hadid’s Valentino gown: ARY News

• Versace archive looks: Vogue Scandinavia, All the top models who walked Vogue World 2026: Milano

• London 2023 figures and interview quotes: the author’s MA dissertation, King’s College London (2025)

A childhood spent among fibres

Ao’s story is the foundation of the brand, not a marketing line. His grandmother spun linen by hand, pulling and twisting raw fibres with quiet, repetitive precision. Before he thought about fashion, he understood craft: slowness, patience, and the value of things made by hand.

His label describes itself as “clothing as structure, memory as method, process as philosophy.” It exists to give shape to the unseen, honouring the labour and emotional memory held inside a garment. That’s a lot to ask of a coat or a shirt collar, but watching the show, I could see it.

“No More Longer Guided”

His latest collection is called No More Longer Guided, and the idea I loved most is how he sees clothes for both genders. Nothing felt like menswear or womenswear with a token crossover piece. It was simply a wardrobe, and I would have worn nearly everything on the runway, men’s and women’s looks alike.

It also felt very London. The trench coat was reinterpreted rather than repeated; the most British of silhouettes turned into something newer. Cuff and collar details ran through the collection, the kind of considered finishing I always notice and always want in my own closet.

The styling details stayed with me: knee-high socks that suit London’s cold mornings and warm afternoons, romantic bow neck ties, mini pleated skirts and respectful shorts, and stripes and feathers that balance discipline with softness.

Why it worked

What impressed me most is that the collection didn’t feel like a designer chasing a moment. The trench, the tailoring details, the layering all felt rooted in something real. When a designer has spent his life thinking about how clothes are made, and by whom, the results are quieter than trend-driven design but they last longer.

It also mattered that the clothes were wearable. After the show I was thinking less about spectacle and more about which pieces I’d reach for on an ordinary Tuesday, and that says a lot.

If you get the chance to see his collection in person, take it. And keep an eye on his site at yuhanao.com.

-AE.

New York, London, Milan, Paris. Then Copenhagen, Seoul, Shanghai, Tbilisi, and a growing list of cities with their own fashion weeks. We talk about them as if the calendar has always existed this way, as though fashion simply decided that September and February would belong to the runway. But someone had to invent the idea, so I started digging:

P.S. (I went down a bit of an academic rabbit hole with this one, and some of what I found can get dense. I’ll try to translate it as we go, but if a name or a term loses you, skip ahead.)

By the late 1800s, Charles Frederick Worth (considered the father of Haute Couture) was already sending live models through his Paris salon to show private clients his latest designs.

By 1903, New York department store Ehrich Brothers was staging something that looked remarkably close to a runway show, using fashion as a way to pull shoppers in from the street.

These events could be theatrical, commercial, even glamorous. But they were still just that: individual events. One designer, one store, one audience, one occasion. They happened across a city, but they weren’t connected to one another by any shared calendar. There was no week about them, and this distinction matters.

• A fashion show is a designer presenting a collection.

• A fashion week is something else entirely. (It is an institution: a coordinated, recurring calendar that brings multiple designers, editors, buyers, photographers and other industry figures into the same city, at roughly the same time, moving between shows that are part of a much bigger system.)

Obviously, the two are inseparable. You need shows to make a fashion week. But the existence of one doesn’t automatically create the other. The show came first. The week had to be invented.

The actual invention

It happened in New York, in July 1943, in the middle of a world war. With Paris occupied and the usual flow of fashion between Europe and America disrupted, American publicist Eleanor Lambert organised “Press Week”: a series of shows by New York designers, presented to editors on a fixed schedule at the Plaza Hotel.

Lambert essentially built a substitute infrastructure, a “synthetic Paris”, because the real one was not accessible. Other cities followed, each formalising what had previously been a looser, more ad hoc set of individual couture presentations:

• New York — 1943

• Milan — 1958

• Paris (its own federated calendar) — 1973

• London — 1984

What scholars actually argue about

Academics haven’t argued much, specifically, about why fashion week exists as an institution. But two main ideas come up, and they’re worth walking through because they’re not actually arguing with each other. They’re answering two different questions.

The first idea: fashion week is basically a trade fair. Think about any industry that’s scattered across the world but still needs to exchange information regularly: wine, tech, publishing. Instead of everyone flying around to see everyone else all year, the industry picks one week and one city, and everyone shows up at once. That’s the argument made by scholar Lise Skov: they give a spread-out, competitive industry a place to gather, see what everyone else is doing and exchange information that would be too expensive or difficult to share otherwise (Skov, 2006).

Two other researchers, Harald Bathelt and Nina Schuldt, gave this idea a name: the “temporary cluster.” In plain terms, it’s a pop-up version of a permanent industry hub, the kind of place where everyone in a trade works close enough to each other to pass that information. Fashion week recreates that closeness for a few days a year, because the industry is too, geographically spread out to maintain it all the time (Bathelt & Schuldt, 2008; see also Maskell, Bathelt & Malmberg, 2006).

The short version: fashion week exists because it’s easier to compress a year’s worth of meetings, conversations and industry contact into one packed week than to try to keep that level of connection going all year.

The second idea: fashion week is a stage for hierarchy. This one comes from Joanne Entwistle and Agnès Rocamora, who studied London Fashion Week through the lens of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Put simply, their argument is that fashion week isn’t just about exchanging information. It’s also about making status visible. Who gets invited, who sits front row, which spaces are reserved for buyers and which are for the show itself: all of these things reveal who has access, who has status, and where people sit within the fashion world (Entwistle & Rocamora, 2006).

So, two explanations, one functional and one symbolic. Here’s where it gets less tidy.

Complication one: even the theory’s own author had already questioned it. Four years before Rocamora co-wrote the London Fashion Week study, she’d published a separate paper critiquing Bourdieu’s ideas. Her point, in short, was that Bourdieu’s framework paid too little attention to physical objects and materials, and largely overlooked mass-market, everyday fashion, making “the field” of fashion seem much tidier and more self-contained than it really is (Rocamora, 2002).

So one of the most influential arguments about fashion week making hierarchy visible comes from a scholar who had already pointed out some of the limits of the theory behind it.

Complication two: there’s a genuine, unresolved question about what fashion week does outside the cities that invented it. If fashion week helps make hierarchy visible, does that work differently when the fashion week takes place somewhere that wasn’t at the centre of that original hierarchy?

Harriet Hughes, who studies Lagos Fashion Week, argues that it can go both ways. On one hand, Lagos Fashion Week gives African designers a platform outside a Western system that has historically excluded them. On the other, it can still reproduce some of that system’s logic, particularly through its focus on the individual “genius” designer, while the artisans doing much of the actual handwork remain uncredited (Hughes, 2022).

This is not a small version of the whole argument. There is a much bigger question about whether fashion week, as an institution, can really separate itself from the hierarchy it inherited from the cities where the system began, particularly Paris and New York.

So, does the “location” still matter in 2026?

Here’s the question. Both of the functional theories above, Skov’s trade fair and Bathelt’s temporary cluster, only work if being physically in the room is genuinely valuable. The whole point was that you had to show up in person to catch the “buzz.”

But that assumption is shakier than it used to be. Shows are now livestreamed to audiences in over a hundred countries. Several NYFW 2026 participants showed digitally rather than physically. A growing number of designers, Thom Browne and Rodarte among them at various points, have simply opted out of the traditional host-city calendar altogether (see reporting collected in Quartz’s 2019 piece “Do fashion weeks still have a purpose?”).

So here’s the real question: if fashion week’s original justification was efficient physical clustering, and physical clustering is no longer required to reach the audience that matters, is the city part of “fashion week” still doing any real work? Or has it quietly become ceremonial, a stage set the industry keeps building out of habit, even after the actual exchange it was built for moved somewhere else?

And the location question isn’t only “digital versus physical.” It’s also about which cities get to hold the ritual at all. Fashion weeks now exist well beyond the original four, not to mention across Eastern Europe, with events like Lagos Fashion Week which are already testing whether the institution itself can be picked up and rebuilt somewhere it wasn’t designed for (Hughes, 2022). That, to me, is a more interesting version of the “does place still matter” question than the streaming one.

-AE.

Adding here some show invites across the years that have caught my eye:

Notes:

• Bathelt, H., & Schuldt, N. (2008). Between luminaries and meat grinders: International trade fairs as temporary clusters. Regional Studies, 42(6), 853–868.

• Entwistle, J., & Rocamora, A. (2006). The field of fashion materialized: A study of London Fashion Week. Sociology, 40(4), 735–751. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038506065158

• Fishko, S. (2016, June 10). Beyond Paris: How New York Fashion Week created American style. PRI/The World. https://theworld.org/stories/2016/06/10/how-new-york-fashion-week-created-american-style

• Hughes, H. (2022). Performing postcolonial identity: The spectacle of Lagos Fashion Week. International Journal of Fashion Studies, 9(2), 281–298. https://doi.org/10.1386/infs_00072_1

• Maskell, P., Bathelt, H., & Malmberg, A. (2006). Building global knowledge pipelines: The role of temporary clusters. European Planning Studies, 14(8), 997–1013.

• Quartz. (2019). Do fashion weeks still have a purpose? https://qz.com/quartzy/1702320/is-nyfw-still-relevant

• Rocamora, A. (2002). Fields of fashion: Critical insights into Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. Journal of Consumer Culture, 2(3), 341–362. https://doi.org/10.1177/146954050200200303

• Skov, L. (2006). The role of trade fairs in the global fashion business. Current Sociology, 54(5), 764–783. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392106066815

The light shifts, the trend reports arrive, and suddenly I find myself collecting evidence of everything I’m supposed to want next. I’ll quietly bookmark a dozen iterations of the same six ideas, passed between six different accounts, each beautifully shot and each carrying the faint suggestion that the girl I was last September is due for an update.

This year, it was funnel necks and chartreuse, suede in every conceivable form, animal print, cigarette jeans, deep purple. A tidy little syllabus for the season ahead. I saved every slide.

Then, a few days later, a note from Allison Bornstein appeared in the middle of my carefully curated forecast and quietly undid the whole exercise:

“Your friendly reminder that just because the seasons change, you don’t need to reinvent your style. riffing off of what you wore last year (or last season) will actually help you cultivate a consistent and defined personal style.”

I have read a great deal of style advice. Very little of it has ever told me to do less. This did. And it was right. It sent me back through those saved trend cards with a different question altogether.

The wrong question

The question the trend forecast wants you to ask is what do I need to buy. But there’s a better one, the honest one that surfaces every time the season turns: is it worth investing in this trend, or will it have vanished in a few months. It’s the question sitting underneath all the saving and the screenshotting. And most of us answer it by buying anyway and hoping.

Bornstein’s note points at a third option the forecast never offers, because there’s no shopping list attached to it. What if the right response to a new season isn’t acquisition or restraint, but recognition: looking at the season’s ideas and asking not what’s new but what of this do I already own, in spirit if not in fact.

It turns out that when you read a trend report that way, most of it stops being a list of demands and becomes something closer to permission.

Reading the season backwards

So I did exactly that. I put the six trend cards next to my actual wardrobe and read them as continuity rather than instruction.

The colours are the easiest tell. Chartreuse and deep purple, and browns too, are doing the rounds as the shades of the season, and there’s a real temptation to treat that as a mandate to go and buy the acid-green coat. But a colour trend is almost never asking you to overhaul anything. It’s telling you which of the things you already reach for will suddenly feel current. If you’ve owned an olive or a moss coat for years, chartreuse is just the season handing your old favourite a fresh compliment. If your entire wardrobe runs to navy and grey, a single deep-purple knit is the whole trend, absorbed, for the price of one jumper. This Benetton wool-and-cashmere crew is exactly the kind of single-piece nod I mean. The trend is a nudge, not a renovation.

Suede is a texture you probably already trust. “All the suede” is everywhere this year: the trench, the barn jacket, the slouchy tote, the belt. But suede has never really left, because it’s the material that reads expensive and lived-in at the same time. If you own one good suede thing, you already understand the trend, and the forecast is simply confirming that the piece you were slightly precious about is exactly right for now. This is riffing off last year in the most literal sense: wear the thing you were saving. And if you are adding rather than rediscovering, a high-neck suede jacket or a pair of suede loafers will earn their place for years rather than for one season.

Cigarette jeans are a correction, not an invention. The denim story this season is the slim, straight, ankle-grazing cut, arriving after years of everything getting wider. I’ll admit my bias here: I have never been the one for the oversized, low-rise denim, and I quietly hope the trend keeps fading away. A slim, high-set cigarette leg is the shape I keep coming back to. That said, a genuinely good pair isn’t easy to find, so my suggestions are to look at the straight-slim variations and the JW Anderson collection at Uniqlo, and the denim section at Me+Em. Anything classic you never got rid of during the baggy years is about to look intentional again.

And then there’s animal print, which arrives every autumn dressed as a trend and is really just a neutral wearing a costume. Leopard has been a wardrobe staple for the better part of a century. Treating it as “new” each September is the fashion industry’s most charming and most transparent trick. If you have the coat, the flats, the little bag, you are not chasing anything. You are simply reaching, again, for something that works, which is the entire point Bornstein was making.

The only card that asks anything genuinely new of most people is the funnel neck, that high, standing collar on coats and jackets, which Massimo Dutti is quietly full of right now. And even that isn't a purchase so much as a way of wearing things you own: collar up, scarf tucked high, the neckline doing the work. A gesture, not a shopping trip.

The case for the same girl, in autumn

What I find quietly radical about Bornstein’s note is its refusal to treat consistency as the absence of style. Maybe consistency is style.

We’ve been taught to think the opposite: that having a point of view means changing with the seasons. New silhouette. New colour. New version of yourself. Proof that you were paying attention. But the women whose style I actually admire are rarely the ones reinventing themselves. They’re the ones you can describe in a sentence and recognise from across a room. They found the collar, the colour, the silhouette that felt like theirs, and then they kept returning to it. Season after season. Sometimes the trends catch up. Sometimes they don’t.

That isn’t narrowness. It’s editing.

It’s knowing yourself well enough to let the forecast be a mirror, not a map. To look at the season’s six big ideas, recognise the two that already feel like you, leave the other four alone, and feel no particular sense of missing out.

At some point, the trend report stops being homework. It becomes confirmation. You’re not looking for a new wardrobe; you’re looking for the pieces, proportions and ideas that make sense within the one you already have.

So yes, I saved the slides. I’ll probably save the spring ones too. There is pleasure in seeing fashion move, in watching an old silhouette return with a new name or a colour you’ve overlooked suddenly become the one everyone wants. The difference is that I no longer see every forecast as a reason to intervene.

Sometimes a trend arrives and gives you permission to wear something you already love a little more often. Sometimes it reminds you why you never liked something in the first place. And occasionally, of course, it makes you want something new. That’s part of the fun. The point is simply that wanting something new and needing to become someone new are not the same thing.

Maybe that’s the real luxury of personal style: having enough of a point of view that fashion can influence you without dictating you.

The season changes. Your style can change with it without starting over.

It took me an embarrassingly long time, and four sentences from a stranger on the internet, to realise that this was never the problem; it was the point.

-AE.

I was a teenager in the 2010s, and most of the fashion I was drawn to seemed to exist somewhere else: in the translated books about Western designers I'd find in bookshops, in the collections I'd pull up online and study. I was reverse-engineering something, trying to work out what I was good at, what moved me and what I’d actually do with all of it. Fashion, as an industry, wasn’t really looking at Romania yet. It wasn’t a career you announced at dinner. There was no established fashion council, no major fashion week, no real sense that Romanian designers could build an industry of their own.

So a handful of brands did the raising instead.

They existed anyway, before the spotlight, before it was safe or obvious, and they became the thing I measured my taste against. I didn’t just follow them. I own some of them now. And looking back, I can see that they weren’t the background to my education in fashion. They were the education.

I learned to love this world through the Western houses in those magazines/books. So I’m going to introduce these designers to you in the same way I first found my way around fashion: through a few familiar references:

• Murmur, for the sensuality and sculptural corsetry of Jean Paul Gaultier.

• Seen Users, for those drawn to McQueen’s darker, more subversive side.

• PNK Casual, for the relaxed femininity of Zimmermann.

• Dualitae, for those drawn to the quiet precision of Max Mara.

• Ami Amalia, for those who love Missoni's colour and craft, and want it made to last generations.

• Maria Lucia Hohan, for anyone who stops for Elie Saab's romance.

• Rafaela Pestrițu, for those interested in Demna-era Balenciaga’s tension and experimentation.

• Ionuț Răzvan, for anyone fascinated by the theatricality of Galliano’s Margiela.

These comparisons aren't meant to define the designers, or suggest that they're Romanian versions of those houses. They're just the connections I made up for myself while I was learning, my own private shorthand for reading a silhouette, a mood, an aesthetic, and for grasping how many different worlds fashion could hold.

PNK Casual

Founded in Bucharest in 2002 by Georgiana Curuia, one of the older names on this list, and one of the first homegrown labels I remember registering as a brand. Modern and classic at once, made in limited editions, cut to flatter real bodies, and built, in the designer’s own words, around women’s confidence.

I own a couple of their linen and silk skorts, which have become my summer cycling uniform. They look like little skirts, but the shorts underneath mean I can actually get around the city without thinking.

→ pnkcasual.com

Sources: PNK Casual — About Us

Maria Lucia Hohan

Founded in Bucharest in 2003, the most internationally established name here. Hohan is known for ethereal evening and bridal gowns in hand-pleated silk mousseline: liquid, goddess-like silhouettes finished at couture level in her own Romanian atelier. Her gowns have been worn by names like Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez and Taylor Swift, and the label sells in more than 25 countries.

→ marialuciahohan.com

Sources: Maria Lucia Hohan — About, L'Officiel Monaco — In Conversation with Maria Lucia Hohan

Murmur

Founded in Bucharest in 2011 by Andreea Bădală, who trained at London College of Fashion and worked at Alexander McQueen and Richard Nicoll before coming home. Murmur takes the language of retro lingerie and couture corsetry and reworks it into wearable, ready-to-wear pieces: sculptural, sensual, built around a woman’s relationship with her own body. Everything is made in their Bucharest atelier.

I own the Satin Sculpt corset. Owning something beautiful is one thing; wearing something that changes the way you carry yourself is another. This one does.

→ murmurstore.com

Sources: Murmur — About Us, Not Just A Label

Seen Users

Founded in Bucharest in 2017 by Cristina Săvulescu. Seen Users comes out of streetwear culture but treats clothes as a way of carrying a mood. The brand talks about ambiguity, duality, and the power of the present moment: the idea that a garment only really means something once you give it that power. More recent collections have turned toward Romanian iconography and folklore, reworked through a contemporary, subcultural lens.

→ seenusers.com

Sources: Seen Users — About Us, BIG SEE

Ami Amalia

Founded in 2017 by Amalia Săftoiu, from a Norwegian-Romanian family, with the label’s own microfactory in Transylvania in 2019. Sustainable luxury knitwear made from natural, biodegradable yarns: slow fashion built to last generations, not seasons. The collections lean on Transylvanian folklore and colour, with the traditional Romanian blouse as a recurring centrepiece.

→ amiamalia.com

Sources: AmiAmalia — About Us, Maison Ë

Dualitae

Founded in 2022 by Alina Lazariu, who left a twenty-year banking career to build it. The whole label is built on the idea of duality: sharp, masculine tailoring reinterpreted through a feminine lens, structure and softness in the same piece. Refined minimalism, produced in limited series and made entirely in Romania. It was featured in British Vogue’s designer profiles in October 2025.

I had the chance to meet Alina and spend some time with her, and what stayed with me was her belief that it's never too late to build something of your own. That meant a lot to me, especially because fashion can sometimes feel like an industry where you have to start young and have everything figured out early. She was honest about how much work goes on behind the scenes and how much it takes to build a brand you actually believe in. And this August 2026, Dualitae joined the official Copenhagen Fashion Week SS27 schedule with its first activation, presenting the ‘‘Silent Horizons” collection. I find that pretty inspiring.

→ dualitae.com

Sources: Dualitae — About Us, Dreamingof interview

Rafaela Pestrițu

Founded in 2022 and based between London and Bucharest. Pestrițu grew up in Slatina, trained as an actress, then took an MA at Central Saint Martins, and it shows in the theatricality of the work. She calls it East European understandings of couture: Balkan storytelling fused with avant-garde technique, trompe l’oeil, embroidery and patchwork, often built from discarded materials. An aesthetic she describes as “existing in a glitch.”

→ rafaelapestritu.com

Sources: Not Just A Label, ap0cene, OE Magazine

Ionuț Răzvan

The newest voice here. Răzvan launched his eponymous label in 2023, straight out of the National University of Arts in Bucharest, where his graduate collection won the fashion department’s prize. His work is avant-garde and deeply narrative: each collection reads as a chapter of an emotional story, full of theatrical tension, deformed silhouettes and what he calls an aesthetics of ugliness. He now shows at Bucharest Fashion Week.

The newest name here, and the one I'm most curious to see grow up. No website yet, so I just follow @ionutrazvan_ and wait to see what he does next.

→ instagram.com/ionutrazvan_

Sources: Les Nouveaux Riches interview, IRK Magazine, KALTBLUT, Dreamingof

What Was Already There

For years, this felt more like a private education. I loved these brands a little defensively, the way you do when you care about something before there is much cultural agreement that it matters.

Now, the landscape around them is starting to look different.

In just a few seasons, Bucharest has turned its fashion week from an idea into an established platform, now in its fourth edition, with collections presented in places as significant as the Throne Room of the National Museum of Art. The Council of Fashion Designers of Romania is now part of the European Fashion Alliance, alongside the French, Italian and British councils. Editors and buyers are paying attention. Made in Romania is becoming less a quiet description of origin and more a marker of design, craft and a point of view worth seeking out. In 2027, Condé Nast will add Vogue Romania to that growing fashion ecosystem.

None of this makes the designers themselves more legitimate. They didn’t need the international fashion system to discover them in order to be worth discovering. What has changed is the scale at which their work can now be seen, discussed and, perhaps most importantly, taken seriously.

For me, there is something quietly satisfying about watching that happen. The brands that shaped my eye when I was younger, when Romanian fashion felt like something you had to seek out for yourself, are becoming part of a much larger conversation. The infrastructure is catching up with the creativity that was already there.

And perhaps that is what makes this moment feel personal. I spent years looking outward to understand fashion, only to realise that some of the things teaching me how to look were much closer to home.

-AE.

Notes:

Bucharest Fashion Week is officially Mercedes-Benz Bucharest Fashion Week (MBBFW). Its official site: https://mbbfw.ro

Council of Fashion Designers Romania’s official site: https://cfdr.ro/projects/cfdr-sustainability-program/

CFDR on Instagram (official handle): https://www.instagram.com/cfdr.ro/

She meant it literally. She never thought of clothes as clothes; she treated them as arguments. Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art is the first UK exhibition devoted to her house, and it goes the full distance, from her earliest Paris work to Ariana Grande’s 2025 Oscars gown. I arrived expecting beautiful things. So, here’s what caught me, roughly in the order she made it.

• First, the colour. Schiaparelli didn’t use colour so much as detonate it. This is the woman who invented shocking pink and then had the nerve to name a perfume after the feeling. Reds that refuse to apologise. Blocks of tone slammed against one another with the confidence of someone who has already won the argument. You don’t so much look at these clothes as get spoken to, firmly, by them.

• Then the day jackets, and this is where the show turned personal. Structured shoulders, embroidery done with real conviction (not decoration so much as insistence), and, to my surprise, entirely wearable. I stood in front of them quietly doing sums about my own wardrobe, which is not the reaction a museum usually wants but is, I’d argue, the highest compliment fashion can be paid.

• Lastly, the one thing the theory cannot quite prepare you for: how a colour can follow you out of the museum. Schiaparelli’s purples, rich, saturated, almost theatrical, made me start thinking about how much more of it I want to wear. I left with a note in my phone to find the right purple button down before the weather turns. With purple emerging as one of the colours to watch for AW26, it was fascinating to see how differently Schiaparelli had already made the colour speak across decades.

The 1930s: The Making of a Schiaparelli Woman

The first piece I lost time in front of was an evening dress from her Summer 1936 Parachute collection. The silk organdie is so sheer it reads as cloud, cut into seamed panels that seem to billow and slow, like fabric caught mid-descent. The idea was pure Schiaparelli autobiography: a childhood memory of leaping from a window under an umbrella to soften the fall, crossed with parachutists she had watched on a trip to Russia. A vibrant purple satin sash and silk-velvet hem are the ballast, the weight that keeps all that air from floating off.

Then came my favourite ensemble in the whole show, and I suspect it will stay that way. A 1936 ensemble, designed in Paris and made in her London salon: an emerald cape of cock feathers over a bias-cut gown of shimmering brown silk satin. Soft against liquid, cool green against warm chocolate. The cleverest touch is the quietest. The cape’s emerald returns as a bright lining that traces a daring split up the skirt and edges the train, so two very different pieces answer each other in colour. That hidden rhyme is what makes it couture, and what made it unforgettable to me. Schiaparelli, by the way, invented colours with names as playful as the clothes: Pirate Red, Pierrot Blue, Ocean Green.

For Schiaparelli the embroidered jacket was a whole language, and these two speak it in very different moods. The Winter 1936 piece is peak fantasy: black fulled wool turned into a warm night sky, gold palm trees rising in bullion and paillettes from the collar all the way down, a motif that has nothing to do with practicality and everything to do with escape.

The Zodiac jacket was impossible to overlook. Midnight-blue silk velvet becomes deep space, sprinkled with beadwork stardust, gold and silver planets, crystal moons and comets, the twelve signs of the zodiac embroidered in gold down the front. Embroidered by Maison Lesage for her Winter 1938 collection, it carries Ursa Major, the Great Bear, on the left shoulder. It was her personal good-luck emblem, ever since her uncle, an astronomer, noticed the beauty spots on her face were arranged like the Big Dipper.

The war, and the nerve to keep making beauty

Then history presses in, and the clothes change with it. Her Summer 1939 Bustle collection turned deliberately backward for comfort, reviving the 19th-century bustle just as war loomed. One red silk grosgrain evening coat does all its drama at the back, a long train that gathers into soft, bustle-like folds held by a single flower button. In a collection born of dread, choosing that joyful, defiant scarlet feels like its own quiet act of courage.

By Spring 1940 the fantasy has hardened into function. A gilded, gold-embroidered jacket from her thirty-city American lecture tour still glitters, but tucked into its flared peplum are the famous “cash and carry” pockets, big enough to replace a handbag when a woman might need to carry her papers at a moment’s notice. Vogue said she arrived with “limited luggage, unlimited chic.” What lingers is her refusal to choose between beautiful and useful, gold embroidery and a pocket that actually works.

Post-War: The Colours Change, the Spirit Doesn’t

You can feel the war in the gap between the 1938 jacket, which was pure fearless imagination, a woman wearing her own lucky stars across her shoulders, whereas the 1947 one feels gentler, almost wistful, as if the same hands that once embroidered the whole cosmos now just wanted to grow something quiet and blooming.

This Spring 1952 dress sets a bright orchid, close to the Shocking Pink Schiaparelli made her signature, against a deep violet skirt. The slim column would read almost severe on its own, so she wraps it in a great asymmetric swag of ruched satin that spirals from bust to hip, adding volume exactly where a plain sheath would have none.

The Same Nerve, New Hands

Halfway through, the show leaps to the present, and the current creative director Daniel Roseberry more than holds the line. The Mille-feuille gown, from his Autumn/Winter 2024 Phoenix collection, is named after the layered French pastry and built like one: a laced satin corset that blooms at the hips into hundreds of circle-cut organza layers, raw-edged and swirling. Majestic, and a little frightening. The layers are sliced so fine you feel that if you touched them, they might cut you.

His Spring 2025 Icarus collection is where he goes looking through the great couturiers, Madame Grès, Poiret, Worth, for how they sculpted the body. One gown pulls an exposed, boned corset into an almost impossible waist before releasing into gold-embroidered duchesse satin and an endless train. It felt less like a dress than an object. So sculptural, so precisely feminine, like a bibelot you might keep on a shelf and never quite stop turning over in your hands.

And then the pieces you will recognise from your feed. The custom black velvet gown Roseberry made for Dua Lipa’s 2024 Golden Globes reworks Elsa’s 1938 Skeleton dress, her Salvador Dalí collaboration, into three-dimensional gold bones climbing the torso above a mermaid skirt. It nods to her 1938 line about “black sprinkled with purest gold,” and carries a final layer the museum cannot display: the viral clip of Dua Lipa unable to sit down in it. That gap, between couture spectacle and a chair you cannot quite lower yourself into, only makes me love it more.

Nearby is the glittering red gown Ariana Grande wore to the 2025 Oscars, which hides its best joke at the floor: red heels under the hem, and a single heel rising from the back of the dress, a wink at Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz (1939), and to Elsa Schiaparelli’s own Shoe hat, made with Salvador Dalí in the 1930s. The more you look at this dress, the more it gives you.

The Shock of the Wearable

The grand thread, the one you’re meant to leave with, is nerve. A feather cape from the mid-1930s and a 2025 Oscars gown, ninety years apart, share the same refusal to be quiet, the same wit tucked inside pure glamour. Though if I’m honest, what actually followed me home was smaller and more selfish: the jackets, the embroidery, the glamour, the colour thrown together like a dare. The nerve, it turns out, is contagious.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art is at the V&A South Kensington until 8 November 2026. If you’re anywhere near London, go. If you’re not, go and read about Elsa instead: she’s even better than her clothes, and her clothes are extraordinary. Start with Shocking Life, her memoir.

-AE.

Notes:

• V&A large print guide: https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/schiaparelli-fashion-becomes-art-exhibition-large-print-guide

Reviews & features

• CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/28/style/elsa-schiaparelli-exhibition-vamuseum

• WWD: https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/fashion-art-collide-schiaparelli-show-victoria-and-albert-1238689320/

• SHOWstudio, Amy de la Haye’s review: https://www.showstudio.com/news/review-schiaparelli-fashion-becomes-art

• Forbes (object detail, the jackets): https://www.forbes.com/sites/joanneshurvell/2026/03/29/schiaparelli-at-the-va-2026-londons-blockbuster-fashion-exhibition/

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Definition of Art” (Danto/Dickie): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Definition of Art” (easier to read): https://iep.utm.edu/definition-of-art/

• Pierre Bourdieu, “Haute Couture and Haute Culture,” in Sociology in Question

• Elsa Schiaparelli, Shocking Life (1954), her memoir

That’s why I called this The Allure of the Everyday.

Chic is a judgement. Allure is a pull. It’s the thing you find yourself choosing before you’ve worked out why. Not necessarily the most fashionable thing in the room, or even the most beautiful. Just the thing that keeps drawing you back.

I’ve spent a while writing about looking: being seen, being understood, being the fashion girl and wondering what that was for. This is the quieter companion. Not the theory of taste. The evidence. A stone, a ring, a fan, lucky nails, a lip balm. The things I reach for often enough to have stopped calling them choices.

The Allure of Shape

Give me a ruffle. I know the ruffle is supposed to be difficult, twee, or fussy, or too much, and I have never once found it so. A ruffle is just movement made visible, the garment continuing to speak after you’ve stopped.

Then asymmetry, the hem that starts a conversation on one side and finishes it on the other. I have never much wanted to be the center of the frame. I want the better view of it: the seat a few rows back, the vantage that lets you watch the whole room without being watched in return. An off-kilter hemline is that instinct made wearable, present but slightly to the side of where you were looking.

Long skirts and A-line skirts, for the drama of walking. And a scalloped edge, anything with that soft repeating curve, a hem or a neckline finished like the edge of a shell. I like a little theatre. I just prefer to keep it in the fabric, where I can hang it up at the end of the day.

Reaching for: Aje Athena ruffled dress · Zimmermann Alchemy asymmetrical skirt · Claudie Pierlot polka-dot pleated skirt · Farm Rio Richelieu embroidered cotton midi · H&M bubble-hem crêpe top

The Allure of the Imperfect

Here is where I’m least reasonable and most myself. I love a semi-precious stone, the honest ones, cloudy and particular, no two the same. I had a handful of dainty necklaces made in turquoise, lapis lazuli, jade, garnet and rose quartz, and I reach for whichever one suits the mood I woke up in. Some mornings it’s the blue, some days the green, and I’ve stopped questioning why one colour pulls harder than another on a given day. That shift is the whole pleasure of them. Against a plain city outfit, a single stone is a small, deliberate catch for the eye. By the sea, at the beach clubs, the same stones travel south: a body chain at the waist, a fine one at the ankle, an easy, sun-warmed allure. City to coast.

I stack them, too. Bracelets up the wrist, necklaces layered short to long, gold against silver in defiance of the old rule that you must choose. I have never been good at choosing, and jewellery is the one place where that reads as taste rather than indecision.

Reaching for: Parfois beaded and stone necklaces

The Allure of Ceremony

And then the fan. A folding fan, carried at all times, opened with what I like to think is a small amount of ceremony. For years this read as pure affectation, a decorative thing, a bit of theatre.

Not a prop, a forecast. As European summers get hotter, the fan stops being an affectation and starts earning its place, as reasonable as the sunglasses sitting next to it. That’s the part I find interesting: an object dismissed as merely pretty turning out to be genuinely useful, cooling a face on a platform in July with nothing to charge and nothing to plug in. Beautiful and useful were never opposites. We just stopped expecting a thing to be both.

The Spanish hand-painted wooden ones are the ones I’d buy again and again: they last longest, look the most handsome, and cost less than almost anything else you’ll be tempted by this season.

Reaching for: Spanish painted-wood hand fans

The Allure of the Small

The pinkie has range.

Once, it wore the family signet: wax seals, inherited gold, a quiet announcement of where you came from. Now it can be a plain band, a vintage signet, or something entirely your own.

Palmistry gives it to Mercury, which seems appropriate. Wit, self-expression, wealth, fortune. A finger with ambitions. I like the idea of the pinkie ring as a small charm. Not quite jewellery, not quite superstition. Something between the two.

The ones who know wear a proper signet there: Retrouvaí, Foundrae, Jessica McCormack if the budget sings. Or a plain, worn-thin gold band that looks inherited whether or not it is. And if the budget doesn’t sing, Etsy is quietly full of good ones, vintage signets and made-to-order bands for a fraction of the fanfare.

Reaching for: Retrouvaí · Foundrae · Jessica McCormack · vintage signets on Etsy

The Allure of Luck

I’ll take a nail sticker over a salon appointment every time. Art at the fingertips, applied on the sofa, changed on a whim. High delight for almost no effort, my favourite ratio. Lately it’s the lucky ones I reach for, the clovers, the ladybirds, the little fish. You make your own luck, and reminding yourself of it every day by glancing down at your own hands is, I maintain, very chic. A charm you can’t lose, because you’re wearing it.

Reaching for: summery nail stickers

The Allure of the Familiar

My beauty favourites are a short list, and a stubborn one. I’ve kept every one of them for years, replacing nothing. The DHC lip cream is the one I buy without thinking, the one that has outlived every attempted upgrade, every glossier and pricier thing I’ve carried home to replace it and quietly gone back on. The Vichy sunscreen in the orange tube, the matte one, the same tube for six years now, because I want protection that behaves as though it isn’t there. The L’Oréal Lumi glotion for the mornings I want light back in my skin, the Nivea sunstick for the ones where I want to reapply without dismantling my face. The essence lip marker, a small silly joy, colour that stains and stays and never dries tight. And blotting tissues, unglamorous and essential, the small vanity of meeting the day matte-faced and unbothered.

What the list says about me, if I’m honest, is that I want things that work quietly. I like a little theatre, but I don’t want maintenance to become a lifestyle.

Reaching for: DHC lip cream · Vichy Capital Soleil Mattifying Dry Touch SPF50 · L’Oréal Lumi Glotion in Fair Glow · Nivea Korean Silky UV Stick · essence lip marker · Sephora blotting papers

The Allure of Knowing Yourself

The allure of the everyday isn’t the outfit you plan for weeks.

The girls I know tend to ask me the same two things: what to buy, and when. What’s coming. What’s about to be everywhere.Knowing has its uses, of course. But the quieter move is to stop chasing the forecast and become one.

To find what’s already yours and keep reaching for it, season after season, until the pieces stop being purchases and turn into your classics: the same fan, the same stone, the same worn-thin ring. Wearing them again and again isn’t a lack of imagination. It’s a signature. It’s how people come to know you for you, and not for whatever the month decided.

Because perhaps taste isn’t knowing what to want next.

It’s noticing what you already love, and continuing to choose it.

-AE.

In late July 2026, Loro Piana, the house owned by LVMH since 2013, confirmed it is opening an 18,000-square-metre leather-goods facility in Barberino Tavarnelle, in the heart of the Chianti, on a site it bought from the family behind Furla for roughly €23 million. It opens in the first half of 2027.¹

^{(Loro Piana’s future leather-goods facility in Barberino Tavarnelle, Tuscany (Il Sole 24 Ore)}

It is not a one-off. Louis Vuitton is building one of the largest leather workshops in Italy in Sieci, a small town outside Florence, under an agreement with the Tuscany region that will nearly double LVMH’s local headcount.² It has already opened eco-designed ateliers in Vendôme, France, dedicated to leather goods.³

There is something worth sitting with here. The world’s largest luxury group is quietly investing in the ability to make its own products by hand, in the very regions that have shaped those traditions for generations. This is not simply a marketing decision. It is a decision about control, heritage, and the foundations that allow a brand to keep meaning something.

The strongest brands have always understood that desire is built long before a customer sees the final image. Luxury has mastered one side of the mirror: the world it creates for people to look at. But the brands shaping the future understand the other side too: the person looking back. Visibility, it turns out, has never been one-directional.

The supply side: LVMH

A label is only ever as strong as what is actually behind it.

It would be too easy to call the Tuscan workshops a story about authenticity. LVMH is not buying manufacturing simply so it can say its bags are made by real hands. It is buying control: over supply, over scarcity, over capacity, over the kind of know-how that cannot be repurchased once it has dispersed into other people’s factories. Craftsmanship is not really the point. Craftsmanship is control over the conditions that make authenticity possible. When you own the workshop, you own the pace at which the story can be told and the margin protected. Marketing stopped being enough on its own because a name is only as durable as the thing it is attached to.

This is the quiet, expensive lesson of luxury. You protect the meaning by investing beneath the surface, in the part the customer will never directly see, so that the surface has something to stand on.

The individual: Rhode

Newer brands have arrived at the same lesson, just by walking in through the other door. They are not investing beneath the brand; they are investing inside the person.

Because people rarely buy from brands that simply understand them. They buy from brands that make them feel understood.

Ask a typical lip-gloss brand who its customer is and you will probably get: “women in their twenties.” A neat little demographic box. A number. An age bracket. Useful for a spreadsheet, perhaps. Less useful for understanding an actual human being.

Rhode knew a person. Not just a woman in her twenties, but a woman with a very specific everyday reality: someone who wants to feel polished, even when convenience matters more than a full beauty routine. That single insight is the only reason the Rhode phone case exists: a silicone iPhone case moulded to hold a Peptide lip treatment on the back. It launched in early 2024, went viral almost at once, and the design was distinctive enough that the company patented it.⁵ A year later, e.l.f. Beauty acquired Rhode in a deal worth around a billion dollars.⁶

^{Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment phone case (Pinterest)}

A phone case that holds a lip gloss makes no sense until you understand who you are building it for. Then it makes perfect sense. One brand knows an age range. The other knows a person.

The brands that truly understand people rarely begin with a survey. They begin by paying attention. They notice the language people use when they think nobody is watching: the Reddit confession, the saved Instagram post, the comment left under a video at one in the morning. Before someone becomes a customer, they are already revealing something about the person they want to become. The work is not about extracting answers. It is about noticing the things people tell you without realising they are telling you.

The community: Merit

Merit is perhaps the clearest example of this, and the most revealing, because it built the understanding before it built anything else.

Before Merit was a brand, before it had a product, a logo, or even a face, founder Katherine Power built something less tangible: an audience gathered around a feeling. A few months ahead of launch she put up an Instagram account under the handle @____mood: a mood board.⁷ No product. Just reposts about sustainability, about the everyday routine, about a way of seeing. And she watched. What got reposted, what got saved, what people said in the comments. Every post was a test, and with each one the positioning grew sharper.

By early 2021 that account had more than 10,000 followers waiting on a brand that did not officially exist yet.⁷ Then, almost overnight, she turned the mood board into Merit and announced there was a brand. Two weeks later the product went live on Merit’s own site. By Power’s own account, it did $100,000 in sales on the first day.⁸ That day the site sold a Merit product every 17 seconds, and it held close to that pace long after.⁷

^{Merit Beauty imagery (Instagram)}

It would be easy to misread this as a case for the product not mattering. It did. A beautiful Instagram account cannot rescue a bad lipstick, no matter how carefully curated the mood board is. Merit had the formulation, the positioning, the distribution, and a founder with enough credibility to bring the whole thing to life.

But the lesson is not that product comes second. It is that meaning often arrives first.

Power did not create something and then hope people would find a reason to care. She created a shared understanding of what the brand stood for, listened closely, and let that shape what came next. By the time Merit launched, thousands of people already felt recognised. The purchase was not the beginning of the relationship. It was simply the moment the relationship became tangible.

Look again at what these three brands have in common.

LVMH is protecting meaning by investing beneath the brand: the workshops, the craftsmanship, the hands that make the name worth believing in. Rhode and Merit are protecting relevance by investing inside the consumer: the habits, desires, and values that make someone feel like a brand was created with them in mind.

Different industries. Different strategies. The same underlying idea: understanding is the foundation.

LVMH says, in effect: we understand what luxury means, and we will protect the conditions that allow it to keep meaning that. Rhode says: we understand your everyday life. Merit says: we understand the world you want to belong to.

None of them wins by simply being louder. They win by making someone feel recognised. The customer sees something familiar reflected back at them, while behind the name sits the work that made that recognition possible. Luxury has spent decades perfecting the first side. The brands worth watching now understand the second.

Because visibility was never really about being everywhere. It was about being recognised somewhere, deeply enough that people remember why you matter.

A brand can be seen. It can be documented. It can be found. But none of that lasts unless, when someone finally looks closer, there is something real looking back.

-AE.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Notes:

The three core stories, the customer-insight argument, the Merit launch, and the LVMH manufacturing push, come from the original source material. The specifics and figures below were verified against reporting rather than taken from memory.

1. Loro Piana (owned by LVMH since 2013) is opening an approximately 18,000 m² leather-goods and accessories facility in Barberino Tavarnelle, in the Florentine Chianti, on a site formerly belonging to the Furlanetto family (owners of Furla), for around €23 million, with operations beginning in the first half of 2027. Sources: Il Sole 24 Ore; MilanoFinanza; La Nazione²

2. Louis Vuitton’s workshop in Sieci (Pontassieve, near Florence) is set to be the largest in Italy dedicated to making its leather goods, under a three-year Memorandum of Understanding with the Tuscany region expected to raise LVMH’s regional workforce from 270 to 450. Source: Reuters, via Business of Fashion

3. Louis Vuitton’s eco-designed leather ateliers in Vendôme, France (including the “Oratoire” site at Azé) were built to lower energy consumption through natural ventilation and light, and specialise in leather goods. Sources: Louis Vuitton; WWD

4. LVMH is the world’s largest luxury goods group. As of early August 2026 its market capitalisation was approximately €239 billion (about $275 billion), a figure that moves daily with the share price and sits well below the group’s 2023 peak. The “€300 billion” figure sometimes quoted reflects that earlier high rather than the current valuation. Source: Morningstar

5. The Rhode “Lip Case,” a silicone iPhone case moulded to hold the brand’s Peptide Lip Treatment or Tint, launched in February 2024 at around $38, sold via a waitlist, went viral, and the design was patented. Sources: Marie Claire; Rolling Stone

6. In May 2025, e.l.f. Beauty (NYSE: ELF) announced a definitive agreement to acquire rhode, the brand founded by Hailey Bieber, in a deal worth up to $1 billion: $800 million payable at closing plus a potential $200 million earnout tied to the brand’s growth over three years. Sources: e.l.f. Beauty press release via Business Wire; CNBC

7. Merit, founded by Katherine Power, launched in January 2021. Before launch, Power ran a teaser Instagram account under the handle @____mood, telling the brand’s story and building an audience that exceeded 10,000 followers ahead of debut; the direct-to-consumer site went live on 11 January 2021, and the brand sold a product every 17 seconds on launch day. Sources: Forbes; Retail Dive

8. The pre-launch strategy of building an audience through the @____mood account before revealing Merit as a brand is reported by Forbes, which quotes Power on the mood board and the more than 10,000 followers anticipating the debut, and Power’s customer-first, audience-led method across her brands is documented by Fortune. The finer mechanics described here (treating each post as a test and reading engagement to sharpen positioning) and the “$100,000 in sales on the first day” figure come from Power’s own retelling in interviews; independent reporting confirms the launch momentum (a product sold every 17 seconds, see note 7) but not the specific first-day dollar amount.

I’ve never really been asked where I learned to think about fashion. It’s more a question I put to myself, usually halfway through a video, half-listening while I get on with something else. The honest answer is that most of it happened long before university, through creators whose channels I’ve come to trust. The ones in my headphones while I’m doing the washing up, or on the walk to work.

So while it’s quiet, here they are. Maybe some of them keep you company too.

A few of them taught me how to think before I speak.

HauteLeMode taught me to slow down before having an opinion. He’s my dream meeting, and I already know I’d stand there with nothing to say. What I’d want isn’t really a conversation anyway. I’d want to watch him work: to see how he builds a video, where he starts, what he reads before he films. The analysis always lands so easily, and having tried to write things myself now, I know that easily is usually the part that takes the most work.

Understitch and Underskin taught me that nothing in fashion or beauty is really an accident. Underskin takes a brand apart for you: the founder, the history, what the thing was before it became the product you buy now, and honestly does it better than I could. Articulate, clear, easy to follow the whole way through. Understitch, the original channel, does the same for fashion. Between them, they've quietly become part of my education. If you ever wanted to understand this industry without a degree in it or a stack of books to get through, I'd start there.

Others taught me that none of this has to be solemn to be interesting.

Loïc Prigent reminded me that fashion is often funniest when nobody is trying to be. My dream here is more specific: I want him to catch me at a show and point the camera at me for ten seconds. He takes you backstage in a way almost no one else manages. Dry, funny, never reverent, letting a moment be as ridiculous or as beautiful as it actually is. If you remember Vogue’s behind-the-scenes films from around 2015, the ones from the big photoshoots, it’s that feeling, but sharper.

Mina Lee made me realise that fashion criticism doesn’t have to sound academic to be thoughtful. I put her on when I’m not trying to concentrate, and then find myself concentrating anyway. Fashion, culture, film, it doesn’t seem to matter what the subject is, and I still can’t work out how she chooses them. She has a way of making an argument feel like the most obvious thing in the world, so I always finish a video thinking, of course, why didn’t I see that?

ModernGurlz does something similar for me, but with film, and with costume especially. The clothes in a movie and everything they’re saying that the script isn’t. The pop culture references land every time. Mostly it just brings me joy, which I’ve stopped treating as a lesser reason to watch something.

And then there’s one I don’t only learn from.

Ali Andreea I feel differently about, because we share a nationality and we both built lives away from home, and she’s a little further down the road than I am. I call her my cool aunt from Paris. I admire the work: how hard she clearly works, how carefully she curates her clients, the life she’s built and lets us glimpse. She’s proof, I suppose, of a version of all this I can actually picture for myself.

Looking back over this list, I notice almost none of them are really talking about clothes. They're teaching me how to pay attention: to history, to images, to branding, to people, to the details everyone else scrolls past. These are the voices that have been keeping me company. I'd love to know whose have been keeping you company, and who I should be listening to next.

-AE.

I’m not going to pretend London is a cheap place to dress well. It isn’t. The charity shops in the nicer postcodes price like boutiques now, the vintage dealers know exactly what they have, and if you’re hoping to wander in and find a hidden gem by pure luck, you’re probably about fifteen years too late.

What London has instead is supply. So much design happens here that the city gets first pick of everything falling out of the system: last season’s stock, the samples made during production, the runway pieces that only ever existed as one-offs, the review garments quietly cleared out of press offices twice a year. All of it has to go somewhere.

I didn’t understand how unusual that was until I went home and tried to shop the same way. Secondhand exists there, of course. What doesn’t exist is this: rails of luxury, in good condition, priced to move. The supply simply never arrived, because the wardrobes it would have to come from were never there in the first place.

There was also the other thing, which took me longer to notice. Growing up, buying your clothes from a secondhand shop was quietly looked down on. It meant your family didn’t have the money, and that was the end of the conversation. Never mind that it was the most sensible thing a parent could do, given that a child outgrows everything in a season anyway and nobody was getting their money back on a coat.

Hand-me-downs were another matter entirely. Bags arriving from a family friend whose daughter had shot up a size. Things going back out the same way. Nobody thought of that as secondhand. It was just what you did, and it was lovely, and half of what I wore as a child came to me that way.

Which is very funny to me now, because that is exactly the clear-out-your-wardrobe evening everyone has with their girlfriends. Same clothes, same logic, better branding.

So the bargain isn’t lying around waiting. But the volume passing through this city, and the condition it’s in when it passes, is genuinely unusual. What follows is where it lands. Addresses are at the bottom, so you can read this without a notebook.

The dress agencies: where good taste goes to be resold

A dress agency sells other people’s clothes on their behalf and takes a cut. Nothing is bought in, nothing is ordered, and the shop has almost no control over what arrives. Which means you aren’t really shopping the shop. You’re shopping the neighbourhood, and that single fact explains why they cluster where they do.

Which is why you start in Chelsea. Loop Generation on Draycott Avenue is the friendliest way in: beautifully curated, but at a price point that surprises people, Gucci and Prada hanging a rail away from Ganni. Ask the staff to pull for you. That’s the part everyone forgets a consignment shop offers, and it’s free.

The one I’d actually send you to first is nowhere near Chelsea. One Scoop Store on Stoke Newington Church Street sources rather than donates, which is to say the owner goes out and finds the pieces herself. That’s why the condition is consistent and the prices don’t behave like west London’s. Somebody at Who What Wear called it the fashion industry’s worst-kept secret, which is usually said about a place shortly before it stops being one.

A word of honesty about agencies generally. Consignment is a curated bargain. The quality is high, and the digging is done for you, and you pay a little for that convenience, which is why the next category exists.

The vintage rooms

If the dress agency sells last year, the vintage room sells decades when even ordinary clothes were made with more care. At that point, shopping isn't really about getting a bargain anymore. It's about learning what quality actually looks and feels like.

Circa Vintage, tucked away south of the river, is the pilgrimage. Actual vintage couture, Chanel and Dior and Ossie Clark, Victorian through to the 1990s. Go even if you aren’t buying. You are there to touch construction that simply isn’t made anymore: the hand-finishing, the weight of the cloth, the seams with fabric left in them to let out.

Then east, to Aro Archive in Shoreditch, which is three floors arranged more like a small exhibition than a shop. It specialises in the Japanese and Belgian designers, Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons among them, and if you care at all about how a garment is put together, this is the room to stand in. Those are the designers who made construction the entire point rather than something hidden under a logo.

The sample sale

This is the one most people never use, and it’s the closest London gets to couture at high-street prices.

A sample sale is where a brand offloads excess stock, production samples, and sometimes actual runway pieces, usually at between half and ninety per cent off, because the clothes are last-season or one-offs that have already done their job. London is unusually rich in them because the designers and their press offices are here, so the city gets the clear-outs first.

There is a catch. The good ones get busy, you queue, and the venues rarely have changing rooms, and go early. The first hour is the whole game.

Two venues do this year-round. The Music Room in Mayfair runs near-weekly designer sales, and The Box in Hackney hosts them constantly, including the occasional archive sale worth building a week around. But the real skill is tracking, because the best sample sales are deliberately low-key. They don't advertise much, and by the time one appears in a Google search, the best pieces are often gone. Two websites are worth bookmarking: Chicmi, which has the most complete calendar, and London On The Inside, which is more selective. Keep an eye on both and you'll rarely miss a good sale.

The charity shops, and the myth about them

Everyone will tell you to shop the charity shops in the wealthy neighbourhoods, on the logic that rich wardrobes go in and charity prices come out. Half of that is true. The wardrobes really do go in, and the selection in places like Notting Hill and Primrose Hill can be extraordinary: the Mary’s Living & Giving shops especially, where you’ll find labels you’d never see in a charity shop anywhere else in the country.

The prices are the bit nobody warns you about. Most vintage shops know exactly what their stock is worth. Some check resale prices, some have people whose job is to price it, and it shows. You’re often paying not much less than you would at a dress agency, sometimes the same, but with less choice and no returns.

So go for the selection, not the bargain. If it’s bargains you’re after, look in the charity shops nobody writes guides about, in neighbourhoods with no fashionable reputation, where a good coat is still just a good coat. Ganddee is useful for finding second-hand shops and charity shops across the city, especially those that haven’t become destinations yet.

And for the days you can’t leave the house

Vinted is the platform I use most. Nobody is curating it, plenty of sellers don't know what they have, and not everything is priced with the resale market in mind. Vestiaire Collective is different. It authenticates higher-value items before they're shipped, so it's the place to go when certainty matters. eBay sits somewhere in between. It's still one of the best places to find archive pieces and deadstock.

Then there’s Dotshop, which is the odd one out and worth knowing for that reason. It isn’t resale at all. It’s curated, vintage sitting on the same page as new, and it’s doing the opposite of everything else here. Vinted hands you a haystack and trusts your eye. Dotshop has already done the looking, and you’re paying for someone else’s.

Why any of this is worth the trouble

I want to be clear that none of this is really about saving money, though you will.

The whole apparatus of new retail is built to do your looking for you. To make the price vouch for the quality, the campaign vouch for the price, and the assistant vouch for all of it, so that you never have to develop the one skill that would let you judge for yourself. Buying backwards, in a city like this one, is a small refusal of that arrangement. You do the looking. You turn and check the article over. You decide.

One last thing, because I know most of you aren’t reading this from London. If you ever find yourself here, even for a few days, this is worth building an afternoon around. Not as a shopping trip particularly. As a way to see a city without queueing outside anything. And if you never make it over, the online half of this works from anywhere, which is where most of my own finds have come from anyway.

Which brings me to the part I’m actually writing this for. I want yours. The shop in your city that nobody writes about. The site you’ve been quietly gatekeeping. The charity shop two towns over where the pricing hasn’t caught up yet.

-AE.

Notes:

¹ Joy Montgomery, “This Is Instagram’s Coolest Secondhand Brand,” Who What Wear: https://www.whowhatwear.com/who-what-wear-curates-one-scoop-store

Dress agencies Loop Generation, Draycott Avenue, Chelsea One Scoop Store, Stoke Newington Church Street (closed Mon and Tue) Sign of the Times, Elystan Street, Chelsea, the grande dame of the category The Exchange, Gloucester Road, mother and daughter run, reliably reasonable

Vintage Circa Vintage, Lansdowne Way, SW8, ring ahead Aro Archive, French Place, Shoreditch Rellik, Golborne Road, serious archive, closed Mon Found & Vision, Portobello Road, founded by two stylists and a tailor Alfies Antique Market, Marylebone, dealers across several floors, closed Sun and Mon Blackout II, Covent Garden, measures and dates everything, so no guessing whether a 1950s waist will close

Sample sale venues The Music Room, Mayfair, near-weekly The Box, Hackney, year-round

Also worth knowing Ganddee maps secondhand and charity shops across the city, useful for finding the ones that nobody has written about. Kerry Taylor Auctions is the most well-known specialist fashion auction house. She has sold Audrey Hepburn’s clothes, Amy Winehouse’s, and ten of Princess Diana’s dresses. Mostly out of reach, but the catalogues are free and an education in themselves.

A lot of that not-knowing comes down to how I was raised. My parents taught me that unless someone actually tells you no, you carry on as though it’s possible, and even then, if a door closes, a window opens. That kind of encouragement got me through all my time abroad, but it also left me feeling like a hamster running on a wheel, no proper stop, no real direction, just going straight ahead. The part of that wisdom nobody ever taught me is what you’re meant to do once you reach the crossroads. So that’s the bit I’ve had to work out on my own: if you actually know what you want and where you need to be, there won’t be two roads. There will always be the one that resonates with you at your core.

Writing became the place where all of that noise got quieter. And Substack, somewhere along the way, stopped being about publishing and became about feeling less alone. One of its unexpected gifts is feeling like I’ve met people before I’ve ever met them. It’s difficult to understand someone’s way of seeing the world through small talk. Writing skips that stage entirely.

I think what I’ve really been chasing this month is guidance. Not necessarily answers, because I’m not sure anyone can really give us those, but the feeling that someone has walked this road before me.

So when writing isn’t enough, I read. Memoirs, mostly. There’s something comforting about someone else’s thoughts arranged into a story when your own feel all over the place, and it reminds me that being unsure isn’t some personal failing. Usually, it’s just the start of a chapter you can’t see the end of yet.

And without a mentor of my own, I’ve been borrowing that guidance wherever I can find it in the writing. In the women I read. Lately, I’ve found four of them, and sitting with their books feels less like studying success stories and more like sitting across from someone who already knows exactly who she is and is happy to tell you how she got there.

I’d start with Diane von Furstenberg, who has captivated my whole July. She reminded me that reinvention rarely starts with certainty. It usually starts with deciding to move before you know exactly where you’re going. Then, if you like that intimate kind of writing, Diana Vreeland, who made me want to look at the world less literally, gave me permission to treat my own imagination as something worth taking seriously instead of a distraction. After her, Elsa Schiaparelli, who quietly convinced me that doing things the conventional way is often just the least interesting option on the table. And finally Anna Wintour, though hers is the outside view rather than her own words, since she’s said she’ll never write her memoirs. What I took from her is that the unglamorous work, discipline, and consistency are usually what’s holding up the careers I admire from a distance.

So that’s where my head has been this month. Still applying, still waiting to hear back, still working it out. But writing it down beats letting it spin around on a loop, which is really why I keep coming back here every week.

I never really think of a reading list as finished. I always close one memoir already wanting the next, so if you have your own, especially the ones about people whose lives look nothing like the ones I come across day to day, I’d happily add them. They don’t have to be about women.

One last tip: buy them on Vinted. They cost a fraction of the price, and every now and then you’ll find a copy with someone else’s notes in the margins. It feels a little like reading with company.

-AE.

(Official Chanel Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2026–27 poster. Image via Instagram, @chanel. Source: Instagram post)

I didn’t expect the most practical thing I would take away from Chanel’s Haute Couture show this season to be a lesson in buying shoes. Matthieu Blazy’s second couture collection for the house felt less like a runway and more like stepping into a storybook. Feathers became forests. Embroidery resembled moss and wildflowers. Every look carried a little bit of fantasy. The clothes deserved every headline they received. But I couldn’t stop looking at the shoes. Of all the things to fixate on, I know.

There were tiny woodland scenes built into heels. Golden eggs cracked open beneath pumps. Green peapods balanced on stilettos, each one cradling three pearl “peas.” They looked less like something you would wear than something you would find in a museum.

(Close-up of Chanel Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2026–27 heels. Image via Instagram, @hypebae. Source: Instagram post)

It would have been easy to dismiss them as whimsical. The internet certainly tried. Some critics described them as theatrical, others questioned whether they were wearable at all, while social media quickly turned them into one of the week’s most shared runway details. Reuters noted the collection’s fairy-tale atmosphere, while Harper’s Bazaar Singapore argued that Blazy had transformed shoes and accessories into narrative objects rather than simple finishing touches. Footwear News, meanwhile, focused on the extraordinary engineering hidden beneath the fantasy, from sculpted heel structures to carefully balanced constructions that made these miniature artworks possible.

And that was the detail that fascinated me. Not the peapods. Not the pearls. The engineering. Because underneath every whimsical idea sat an extraordinary amount of invisible work. Hidden support structures. Hand-sculpted forms. Hours of balancing a heel that looked impossible until it suddenly wasn’t. That’s the quiet paradox of couture. The more effortless it appears, the more invisible the craftsmanship becomes. Which made me realise something. If couture teaches us to admire shoes as works of art, why doesn’t it teach us how to recognise a well-made shoe when we’re the ones paying for it?

Because that’s the strange thing about luxury. We’ve become remarkably good at recognising prestige. We can identify a handbag by its clasp, tell you which creative director has just moved to which fashion house, and probably estimate the resale value of a sneaker before we’ve finished tying the laces. But ask why one leather shoe costs £250 and another £2,500, and the conversation suddenly becomes much quieter. Most of us simply don’t know what we’re looking at. And honestly, neither did I.

The things nobody tells you

Not long ago, I spent six months working for a luxury footwear brand in London. It didn’t make me a shoemaker. And it certainly didn’t turn me into one of those people who can identify the tannery a piece of leather came from just by touching it. What it did do was change the way I look at shoes. Not dramatically. Quietly. I stopped looking at the logo first. I started looking underneath. I realised how much of a shoe’s quality is almost completely invisible to the person buying it. Not hidden. Just unnoticed. We spend thousands on leather we’ve never learned to identify, on construction we never inspect, and on craftsmanship we simply assume must be there because the price insists it is. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it really isn’t.

So this isn’t a buying guide. It’s simply the mental checklist I now run through every time I’m about to spend serious money on a pair of shoes. You don’t need to become a collector. You don’t need a trained eye. You just need to know where to look.

Turn the shoe over

The first thing I do now when I’m considering a pair of shoes isn’t look at the front. I turn them over. It feels almost rude. Sales assistants spend so much time polishing the leather, arranging the display, and making sure the shoe looks perfect from every angle, only for me to pick it up and immediately look at the bottom. But the sole tells you more than the logo ever will.

• Look at the edge, from the side. Where the sole meets the upper, a fine row of stitching, or a thin strip of leather running around the edge like a little shelf, means the sole is stitched. It can be resoled, more than once, by almost any cobbler. A smooth, uniform edge with no visible stitching means it is only glued, and when the adhesive fails, the shoe is finished.

• Ignore the jargon, mostly. The technical names are Blake and Goodyear, but “stitched or glued” tells you almost everything. Worth knowing: “Goodyear welted” has become a marketing term that some brands stamp on shoes with weak materials, so it matters alongside the leather, not instead of it. (Beckett Simonon breaks the constructions down.)

• Do the free bend test. Bend the shoe gently. It should flex at the ball of the foot, where your foot bends, and stay rigid through the arch. A sole that folds everywhere, like a sponge, will support nothing.

For a deeper dive into construction methods and why a shoe that lists no construction at all is almost always glued, Primer has an excellent guide.

The leather: how to spot the good kind

• Smell it, then touch it. Real leather has a warm, faintly animal smell. Synthetic smells of plastic, or of nothing. Natural leather has irregular pores, a pattern that never repeats, and it warms to your hand. Man-made grain is printed, perfectly regular, and cold.

• Press with a finger. Good leather forms fine wrinkles that settle back, like skin. Synthetic makes a hard crease that stays.

• Watch the label trap. “Genuine leather” sounds premium, but it is one of the lowest grades of real leather, the bottom layers of the hide, heavily processed and coated. Below it is bonded leather, which is basically scraps glued together. The words you actually want are full-grain or top-grain. (A clear breakdown of the grades.)

• Check a cut edge, if you can see one. Full-grain and top-grain show a uniform fibrous texture. The weakest grades show a split layer or a core that looks like plastic.

The heel: where it sits

• Look at where the heel sits, not just how high it is. The most stable heel sits under the centre of your heel bone, in line with your centre of gravity, and drops straight down, perpendicular to the ground. Heels that tip forward, or balance on a tiny point, make you wobble and throw your weight onto the front of your foot, which is exactly where the pain shows up. (Podiatry on heel stability.)

• Wider base, more stable. A thicker heel with a broader footprint is noticeably steadier than a thin spike.

• Trust the try-on. You should feel balanced, not tipping forward, and be able to stand still without clenching your toes.

• If you wear heels often, the American Podiatric Medical Association suggests lower, more stable heels, under about five centimetres.

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The last: the shape you cannot see

• This is the form the shoe is built on, wood or plastic, and it is why two shoes in the same size can fit completely differently. A good last spreads your weight, supports the arch, and leaves room for your toes without letting the shoe sprawl.

• You feel it in the first ten seconds. A well-made shoe sits on the foot from the start, without the stretch of misery politely called “breaking in”. If it hurts in the shop, on the promise that “it will give”, most of the time it will not.

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The details inside

• A stitched leather insole, not just cardboard with leather glued over the top.

• A lining that covers the whole interior, with no carelessly cut edges.

• A quality heel tip at the base of the heel, one that does not wobble and can be swapped easily at the cobbler.

None of these details will ever appear in an advertising campaign. They don’t photograph particularly well. They’re almost impossible to appreciate on Instagram. And yet they’re often the difference between a shoe that lasts two years and one that lasts twenty. It’s strange, really. The most important parts of a shoe are often the parts nobody asks to see.

One of the biggest misconceptions about luxury is that price and quality always move together. A beautifully made shoe can come from one of the world’s biggest fashion houses. It can also come from a small workshop whose name you’ve never heard before.

If you ever find yourself travelling through places such as Italy’s Marche region or parts of Tuscany, where generations of shoemakers still manufacture footwear for Europe’s biggest luxury houses, you’ll discover something interesting. Many of the same craftspeople producing shoes for famous labels also make footwear under their own names or for small independent workshops. The difference isn’t always the craftsmanship. Sometimes it’s simply the logo.

That’s not to say everyone should commission bespoke shoes. Most of us can’t, and honestly, we don’t need to. The point isn’t that expensive shoes are bad, nor that independent makers are always better. The point is that craftsmanship deserves to be judged on its own terms. Not borrowed from the reputation stitched inside the lining.

When I think back to Chanel’s show, I don’t remember the peapods first. I remember what they made me realise. Those shoes weren’t designed to survive ten years of walking through London. They were designed to demonstrate what becomes possible when craftsmanship isn’t limited by commercial practicality. They made craftsmanship visible. Ironically, the pair most of us buy asks the opposite of us. It asks us not to look too closely.

Fashion has become incredibly good at teaching us what to desire. It’s been less interested in teaching us what deserves that desire. Maybe that’s because recognising quality is slower. It takes touching the leather. Turning the shoe over. Looking inside. Asking questions. Paying attention to details that were never designed to become marketing campaigns. Looking down, in other words.

And perhaps that’s why I keep thinking about those impossible Chanel heels. Not because they changed what I want to buy. Because they changed how I want to look. The next time I’m standing in a shoe shop, I’ll probably do exactly what I always do. I’ll pick up the shoe. Turn it over, but this time, I’ll know what I’m looking at.

-AE.

Notes:

1. Reuters, “Chanel shows fairy-tale inspired haute couture,” 7 July 2026: https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/chanel-shows-feathered-ruffs-slit-tweed-skirts-fairy-tale-inspired-haute-couture-2026-07-07/

2. Harper’s Bazaar Singapore, “Matthieu Blazy’s Dreamscape Takes Shape”: https://www.harpersbazaar.com.sg/fashion/runway/matthieu-blazys-dreamscape-takes-shape-chanel-haute-couture-fallwinter-2026

3. WWD / Footwear News, “Chanel Haute Couture Fall 2026 Shoes”: https://wwd.com/footwear-news/shoe-trends/chanel-haute-couture-fall-2026-shoes-1239056945/

4. Galen Leather, “How Leather Is Graded”: https://www.galenleather.com/blogs/news/leather-grades

5. Podiatry Today, “When Patients Insist On Wearing High Heels”: https://www.hmpgloballearningnetwork.com/site/podiatry/when-patients-insist-wearing-high-heels

6. American Podiatric Medical Association, “Avoiding a Sandal Scandal”: https://www.apma.org/patients-and-the-public/tips-for-healthy-feet/avoiding-a-sandal-scandal/

This is worth slowing down on, because it isn’t really a fashion story. It’s a story about attention, and fashion is just where you can watch the mechanism most clearly, since fashion is by definition the business of being looked at.

So start with a rule that governs every crowded room, online or off. When there is more to look at than anyone has time for, attention becomes the scarce resource, and things begin competing not to be good but to be noticed, which is a different contest entirely. The economist Herbert Simon, who later won the Nobel, saw this coming in 1971, before the internet existed to prove him right: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.¹ More to see, less attention to go round. And in that scramble, whatever is easiest to see tends to win, not because quality stops mattering, but because quality usually can’t be judged at a glance, and a glance is all most things get.

Fashion is the ideal laboratory for this, because so much of what it sells is invisible from a distance. Take the job everyone spent the season discussing: the creative director. It helps to know what one actually is. When we say “Dior” or “Chanel,” we are not naming a living person. Christian Dior died in 1957, Gabrielle Chanel in 1971. A house is a name, a history, and a set of visual codes, and a single hired person decides what all of it means each season, rather like a novelist inheriting a character and being trusted to write the next book. Replace that person, and the entire voice changes, though the name above the shop never moves.

So the reshuffle genuinely was enormous. But notice which half of it drew the oxygen. An appointment is legible: a famous name, a headline, a clean story of before and after. The clothes that follow are not. It takes years of collections to know whether a hire was wise. So the industry lavished its attention on the part it could see at once, roughly fifteen debuts in a single season (Demna to Gucci, Piccioli to Balenciaga, Anderson to Dior) ², and treated each like a football transfer window. The announcement is loud. Getting quietly better is silent.

Fashion's Class of Spring 2026:

Demna moved from Balenciaga to Gucci, and Pierpaolo Piccioli went the other way into Balenciaga; Glenn Martens took Maison Margiela, Louise Trotter took Bottega Veneta (one of the few women running a major house), and Michael Rider took Celine. Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez left Proenza Schouler for Loewe, replacing Anderson; Duran Lantink went to Jean Paul Gaultier, Simone Bellotti to Jil Sander, Meryll Rogge to Marni, and Maria Grazia Chiuri, the woman Anderson replaced at Dior, moved to Fendi. Image: Vogue.

The same law runs all the way down to the high street. For a decade, the reward went to the loudest garment: the legible logo, the print you could read across a road. Craft went quiet, because craft doesn’t photograph. A beautiful seam vanishes on a phone screen, while a monogram survives it. None of this is new. In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen gave the habit a name, “conspicuous consumption,” the buying of visible, expensive things to advertise status. Then, with an entirely straight face, he devoted a whole chapter to dress, on the logic that clothing broadcasts your standing faster than almost anything else you own. The maximalist logo is simply his idea with the volume turned up: a signal built to be read, instantly, by strangers.

But signals carry a fatal flaw, and this is the part that lets you predict what comes next. A signal only works while it’s hard to fake. Once everyone can flash the logo, whether real, counterfeit, or churned out by the thousand, it stops meaning anything, and status quietly flees somewhere harder to see, which is exactly the shift underway. Resale is now expected to grow two to three times faster than the traditional market by 2027 ³, logos are fading, and the new flex is the thing only an insider can clock: the cut, the cloth, the name you have to already know to notice. Status has gone deliberately illegible. The seam is taking its revenge on the monogram.

I’m not narrating this from some cool distance, arms folded. When the reshuffle produced Jonathan Anderson at Dior and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, I was as thrilled as anyone. Anderson is now the first single creative director to run Dior’s women’s, men’s, and couture collections at once, and both men make the kind of clothes I would actually want to wear. The point was never that spectacle is the enemy. It’s that those two happen to carry both halves: the loud arrival and the quiet substance beneath it. Most of this year’s noise had only the first.

Which is the line the whole thing turns on. Whether we’re talking about fashion shows, luxury branding, or long-form publishing, being seen and being heard are not the same ambition. Writing about brands on Substack, Camila Walter makes a similar argument. Readers, she suggests, increasingly want “to follow a mind, not a faceless logo,” ⁴ and brands that chase visibility alone end up sounding like advertisements, while those willing to cultivate a genuine point of view earn something rarer: sustained attention. Although her focus is publishing rather than fashion, the underlying logic is the same. Once visibility becomes abundant, attention shifts toward what requires time, interpretation, and trust rather than instant recognition.

Being seen is a transaction, finished the instant the photograph is taken. Being heard means something was received and kept. An attention economy is superb at manufacturing the first and quietly starving the second. Fashion’s loudest room has never been more visible. I’m not sure it has ever had less that outlives the feed.

And that is the case for the cheaper seats. From the front row, you are inside the noise: reacting, being reacted to, and too busy being looked at to describe what you are looking at. A few rows back, the picture holds still long enough to read. You can tell the hollow, loud thing from the quiet thing that will last, the garment built to be worn from the one built to be posted. In an economy that pays for visibility, the ability to notice what visibility hides may be the last valuable thing left. Which is the whole reason I took this seat.

-AE.

Notes:

¹ Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Martin Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), pp. 40–41.

² Sixteen creative directors debuted at the spring 2026 ready-to-wear shows. See “Meet the 16 designers set to debut for SS26,” Vogue Scandinavia: https://www.voguescandinavia.com/articles/new-creative-directors-ss26

³ McKinsey & Business of Fashion, The State of Fashion 2026: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/state-of-fashion

⁴ Camila Walter, "What we actually want from brands on Substack," Pull up a Chair:

Pull up a Chair

What we actually want from brands on Substack

Last week, two and a half hours into a microdose morning, I found myself thinking about brands on Substack. Until now, I hadn’t spared them much thought. The platform has largely felt like a place where commentary about brand culture could exist without brands needing to participate directly…

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10 months ago · 231 likes · 61 comments · Camila Walter

Not backstage either, although I have spent time there through the jobs I have had so far, and I love it: the noise, the sweat, the frantic running, the nervous energy, the sheer stress of it, all the things the people waiting in the front row never get to see.

But if I had to choose one seat to watch from, it would be a few rows back. Close enough to see every stitch coming down the runway. Far enough that no one is looking at me. That is the third row. It is also the perspective from which I write.

The third row is less a seat than a feeling. Close enough to know what is happening. Far enough to stay out of it. It is the freedom of the edge of the room: you get the whole picture, and the picture does not get you. That is where I have stood for as long as I can remember, a half-step to the side of whatever everyone else was doing.

If I am honest, it is still where I like to be.

For a long time, I read that preference as a fault. I told myself I hung back because I had nothing worth saying, nothing relevant or clever enough that anyone could actually learn from. I half-wished I cared less about the front row and half-wished I were the kind of person who felt she belonged in it. Wanting the spotlight was embarrassing; suspecting I hadn’t earned it was worse. It was a no-win situation, made faintly ridiculous by the fact that I was the only one keeping score.

What took me a while to understand is that being seen and being heard are different ambitions. The front row is built for the first one. Everyone in it is partly on display, too busy being looked at to describe what they are looking at. But you can be heard without being seen if you find the right way to speak. For me, that turned out to be writing. The third row is where you get to watch long enough actually to have something to say, and the page is where you finally say it. Seeing clearly, it turns out, is its own kind of power. And it tends to belong to the person at the side of the room rather than the one at the centre of it.

I should be honest about the catch, though, because the third row can quietly become a hiding place. In a creative industry, you sometimes have to be seen to be heard at all. Some moments ask you to stand up, to turn the spotlight on yourself on purpose, and knowing which moments those are is a skill I am still learning. Stay seated too long, and watching tips into avoidance.

Fashion or not, knowing when to make your point and when to step forward to reach the thing you actually want is one of the quieter arts of life. The third row only works if you remember you are allowed to leave it. Fashion, for me, has never really been the subject. It is the medium, the thing I keep looking through to notice everything else.

Bill Cunningham spent half a century photographing fashion from the edge of every show and every pavement. When asked about the work, he insisted it had to be done “discreetly, quietly. Invisible to the world.”¹ The irony, of course, is that he became one of the most recognisable figures in fashion. Anna Wintour knew him. Designers knew him. Entire generations of editors, photographers, and fashion insiders knew him. But that was never really the point. He wasn’t invisible. He was uninterested in being the story. He was interested in the view.

So that is what Third Row Thinking is. A third-row read on fashion, culture and life: close enough to care and far enough to notice.

-AE.

¹ Bill Cunningham New York (dir. Richard Press, 2010). See also Laura Neilson’s interview with director Richard Press, “Bill Cunningham New York”, Cool Hunting, 4 February 2011: https://coolhunting.com/culture/bill-cunningham/

Further viewing

If you've never encountered Bill Cunningham before, I highly recommend the trailer for “Bill Cunningham New York”. What I admire most is that he spent a lifetime paying attention to everyone except himself.

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