FASHION

At Dubai Fashion Week, sisters Dalal and Fatema Alkhaja are challenging the conventions of luxury accessories with sculptural, 3D-printed handbags The most interesting accessory at Dubai Fashion Week might not have been made from leather, stitched by hand or constructed using any of the techniques traditionally associated with luxury handbags. In the showrooms at Dubai Design District, Bahrain-based label Touchless presented a different proposition: sculptural bags created th

Following Pieter Mulier's departure for Versace, Alaïa presented its Spring/Summer 2027 collection without a named creative director Fashion loves a creative director. Preferably one with a recognizable face, an interesting wardrobe, a substantial Instagram following and a personal mythology that can be turned into a campaign before the first collection has even reached the runway. The industry has become so accustomed to presenting designers as singular creative geniuses tha

While the traditional fashion capitals compete for attention on the runway, Shanghai is making an equally compelling argument for what happens beyond it. Fashion weeks are exceptionally good at producing the appearance of importance. Spectacular venues, influential front rows and thousands of images circulating online can make a runway show feel like an event of global consequence. Whether the clothes eventually reach customers, whether the designer establishes a viable busin

Print was supposed to be obsolete. Instead, fashion is rediscovering the strange luxury of something slow, physical and impossible to scroll past. There is something wonderfully inefficient about making a magazine in 2026. You spend months commissioning stories, photographing clothes, designing pages, correcting proofs and printing thousands of physical objects that then need to be transported around the world. Once printed, nothing can be updated. You cannot swap the headlin

As luxury searches for ever louder ways to demonstrate value, Hermès is asking whether the greatest display of craftsmanship might be making something extraordinarily complicated look almost weightless. Leather usually announces itself. It has weight, smell, texture and resistance. It creases, ages and records what happens to it. At Hermès, where leather is inseparable from the identity and economics of the house, those qualities have spent generations communicating permanenc

The runway can keep the world looking, but what happens when attention was never the problem? Dolce & Gabbana can still fill a front row, dominate a red carpet and produce one of Milan's most recognizable spectacles. Behind the glamour, the company is confronting rising debt, operating losses and pressure to strengthen its finances. What can fashion's greatest weapon, attention, actually accomplish when attention isn't the problem? There was very little about Dolce & Gabb

At Schiaparelli, Daniel Roseberry is discovering that making clothes wearable doesn't have to mean making them quieter. There is an unwritten rule in luxury fashion that the most unreasonable ideas belong somewhere else. Couture can be enormous, surreal, difficult and spectacular because nobody expects it to solve the problem of getting dressed on a Tuesday. Ready-to-wear has a different job. It has to leave the runway, enter the boutique and eventually encounter an actual wa

John Galliano's new Zara treated one of the world's largest mass-market retailers as though it were a couture house with an archive worth obsessing over. John Galliano could have returned to fashion in almost any number of predictable ways. Another luxury appointment would have generated headlines. An independent label would have invited endless discussion about creative freedom. A conventional high-street collaboration would have offered millions of people the opportunity to

Maxhosa Africa has spent 16 years building one of the continent's most recognizable fashion businesses. When Laduma Ngxokolo brought Maxhosa Africa to Paris Fashion Week this week, the word “first” followed quickly. The South African label became the first brand from the country to stage a full runway show on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar, presenting a collection built around Ngxokolo's unmistakable knitwear, South African wool and a deliberately pan-African idea o

For his Milan debut, Mexican-Ecuadorian designer Neithan Herbert brought the five women who help make his clothes with him Fashion has a remarkably consistent idea of what success is supposed to look like. A young designer attracts attention, buyers arrive, orders increase, production expands, distribution widens and eventually the small studio becomes something resembling a conventional fashion company. More clothes, more stores, more markets, more seasons. Growth and volume

More than 20 Colombian fashion companies and brands are heading into Milan and Paris with an unusually practical objective. They don't just want international attention. They want buyers, distribution and business. For years, fashion has had a fairly predictable way of talking about designers arriving from outside its traditional centres. A young label shows in Paris. A designer from Latin America lands a presentation in Milan. A collective from an emerging fashion market app

After a week of color, romance, strange proportions, serious craft and a welcome return of personality, these are the ideas we are taking away from NYFW Fashion weeks rarely deliver the clean seasonal reset that trend reports would have us believe. Seventy designers do not collectively decide that everyone should wear the same skirt next spring. What emerges instead is a mood, visible in the ideas that keep appearing in different forms and for entirely different reasons. New

At Harrods this September, five designers from Africa and its diaspora are entering one of luxury's most powerful retail spaces On the fifth floor of Harrods in Knightsbridge, five fashion houses have arrived from Accra, Lagos, Dakar, Nairobi and Port of Spain. Christie Brown represents Ghana, Abiola Olusola Nigeria, Sukeina Senegal, Studio Namnyak Kenya and The Cloth Trinidad and Tobago. Their collections form the inaugural retail cohort of Brand63Africa, a social enterprise

In 2026, the story of Scandinavian fashion is no longer contained within one city Twenty years after Copenhagen began transforming itself from a regional fashion week into an international fixture, Scandinavian fashion is entering a more interesting phase. Copenhagen is bigger, more global and increasingly influential. A few weeks later, Oslo offered something deliberately different: a Norwegian platform built around local talent, landscape, craft and culture. Designer: Steph

H&M made designer fashion feel accessible. Its scarcity strategy risks making customers wonder why they bother trying With Elie Saab joining H&M’s long line of designer collaborations, the familiar machinery is already moving: anticipation, press, social buzz and the promise of luxury at high-street prices. But behind the spectacle lies a growing contradiction. Limited stock, enormous queues, overwhelmed websites and rapid resale can turn access into competition. After more t

Luxury has made craftsmanship one of its greatest measures of value. But what does “handmade” actually tell us anymore? There is a particular kind of fashion image we have learned to trust. A pair of hands pulls thread through leather. An embroiderer bends over a frame. Scissors move slowly around a paper pattern. Someone brushes dye across silk, shapes a flower petal or polishes the edge of a bag. The camera comes close enough to catch the grain of the material and the sligh