CULTURE

For two decades, Erdem Moralioglu has imagined wardrobes for women whose lives exist somewhere between history and fiction. Now, his first major retrospective in Doha turns the designer's own creative history into a museum narrative. Erdem Moralioglu has spent much of his career dressing women he has never met. Historical figures, artists, performers and aristocrats have provided the starting points for elaborate fictional wardrobes, allowing the designer to imagine their pri

An upcoming Paris auction places extraordinary creations by Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet, Dior and Balenciaga under the hammer Imagine being offered a choice between a contemporary designer handbag and an evening dress created by Gabrielle Chanel nearly a century ago. One represents the current luxury market, complete with its increasingly ambitious prices. The other is a surviving piece of fashion history, created during a period when designers were fundamentally reconsidering

Gabriela Hearst's Spring/Summer 2027 collection brought Afghan women's history and craftsmanship to the Paris runway. It also raises an important question about what fashion owes the cultures and communities from which it draws inspiration. A woman in Afghanistan creates an intricate piece of embroidery. Thousands of kilometres away, that craftsmanship appears on a luxury runway in Paris, admired by editors, photographed by international media and eventually offered to custom

A new Viktor & Rolf retrospective at 10 Corso Como brings together more than 20 couture looks from three decades of work. There are fashion designers who make difficult clothes, and then there are Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, who have spent more than 30 years occasionally behaving as though the practical requirements of clothing are an inconvenience they would rather negotiate later. Dresses have become paintings. Gowns have appeared sideways. Garments have swallowed the

Alessandro Michele gave Valentino's Spring/Summer 2027 guests an unusually revealing dress code: bring a book. Fashion-week arrivals are normally an exercise in controlled revelation. The clothes tell us something, although usually something negotiated between a celebrity, stylist and fashion house. The bag has probably been selected. The jewelry certainly has. Even the apparently spontaneous sunglasses may have a reason for being there. At Valentino's Spring/Summer 2027 show

For 40 years, Mumbai's Chanakya has helped create extraordinary textile work for some of Europe's most famous fashion houses. Fashion has taught us to recognise its signatures remarkably well. We know what Dior looks like. We can identify the codes of Fendi, Gucci and Armani, recognise the work of major creative directors and recite the histories of European houses whose names have become shorthand for luxury itself. What we know considerably less about are the networks of sp

The Musée des Arts Décoratifs owns more than 80,000 pieces of fashion. For its new anniversary exhibition, it has chosen just 40. Most clothes disappear eventually. They are worn out, discarded, altered, donated, inherited or simply forgotten, and even extraordinary garments can vanish once the people who made and wore them are gone. What survives is rarely an accidental sample of everything that once existed. Somewhere along the way, somebody decided that one object was wort

Burberry is celebrating 170 years by putting ten pieces of outerwear on 170 people around the world Burberry has spent much of the modern era trying to answer a deceptively difficult question: what exactly does Britishness look like? Sometimes the answer has been aristocratic, sometimes rebellious. It has moved through country estates, London streets, music scenes, football culture, rainy weather, royalty and the trench coat that somehow manages to belong to all of them. Burb

Hussein Chalayan has been asking what happens when clothing refuses to remain static for decades Olivia Rodrigo stood beneath artificial rain in Hartford wearing a white Hussein Chalayan dress, and as she performed “The Cure,” the water began to destroy it. The fabric softened, broke apart and gradually washed from her body, revealing a red corseted look underneath. There was no backstage quick change and no convenient camera cut. The transformation happened while Rodrigo was

At the Brooklyn Museum, more than 140 of Iris van Herpen's couture creations sit among fossils, skeletons, scientific specimens and contemporary art There is a strange question hanging over almost any major fashion exhibition: are we looking at clothes or are we looking at art? Museums have spent decades making the case for fashion's cultural importance, while fashion has become increasingly comfortable borrowing the language, spaces and institutional credibility of art. Iris

A major new Dalí exhibition has opened in Milan just as fashion is once again making ordinary clothes behave strangely There is something wonderfully appropriate about opening an exhibition dedicated to Salvador Dalí and fashion in the middle of Milan Fashion Week. Walk through the Spring 2027 collections and fashion is already behaving a little strangely. At MM6, shirts become dresses, sweaters migrate to the hips and trousers reconsider whether they would rather be skirts.

A century before fashion began its contemporary conversations about gender fluidity, a Texan trapeze artist named Barbette was captivating Paris There is a moment in Barbette's performance that fascinated Jean Cocteau. For most of the evening, the audience believed it was watching a beautiful woman fly above the stage, balancing across the high wire and performing acrobatics in feathers, jewels and an elaborate blonde wig. Then the performance ended. Backstage illusion became

Matthieu Blazy takes Fall 2026 inside Gabrielle Chanel’s legendary Rue Cambon apartment, and makes one of fashion’s most sacred spaces feel unexpectedly alive There are few rooms in fashion burdened with quite as much mythology as Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment at 31 Rue Cambon. The Coromandel screens, gilded objects, lions, books, wheat motifs and famous mirrored staircase have been photographed, documented and interpreted so often that the apartment can sometimes feel less li

Plastique Fantastique transforms an icon of Italian jewellery into a monumental golden intervention in New York Serpenti has left the scale of the body behind. For Bvlgari’s latest Serpenti Infinito chapter, Berlin based artist duo Plastique Fantastique has transformed the house’s enduring serpent into auruBOROS – Urban Memory and Collective Dream, a monumental public installation winding through New York’s High Line. Reflective, immersive and deliberately temporary, the work

Dior’s relationship with cinema is entering new territory. The house has joined forces with A24 for a two year partnership spanning film, theatre, fashion and live programming, with New York’s historic Cherry Lane Theatre at its centre. Bringing Jonathan Anderson’s expanding cultural vision together with A24’s filmmaking world, the collaboration suggests a more ambitious role for fashion in entertainment, one that moves beyond dressing stars and placing products to participat

At the 2026 Venice Film Festival, Cartier transformed an evening at the Gritti Palace into the beginning of something larger With Amal Clooney in scarlet, Emma Corrin in liquid black, diamonds catching the light above the Grand Canal and filmmakers mingling with fashion’s familiar faces, the debut of the Cartier Cinema Club captured the peculiar alchemy that has made Venice one of the most compelling places to watch style unfold. Venice understands entrances. There are few ci