ESSENTIALS is the weekly newsletter of nss magazine, delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.

The final week of May turned out to be more intense than expected. The world seems to be reacting to the sudden rise in temperatures with an increasingly palpable sense of nervousness. Opening this twenty-third week of the year were the discussions surrounding AI, as Pope Leo XIV, on the occasion of his first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, is set to discuss in Rome with atheist and Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah the development of technologies capable of serving the common good. Setting moral questions aside for a moment, Jeremy Scott instead delivered a speech at the Kansas City Art Institute on the importance of creativity and the infinite possibilities of the human mind, impossible for a computer to replicate.

While waiting for further developments, all that remains is to deal with the seasonal wardrobe transition, perhaps leaving sneakers behind for a while, since the loafer now seems to be establishing itself as the ultimate shoe. And if you still don’t own a pair, you can always join the livestreams organised by Farfetch, which resemble cable TV shopping channels more than a new way of purchasing luxury goods. And should you feel guilty about a new purchase, don’t worry: there are countries where citizens spend over 730 dollars a year between boutiques and online platforms. After all, one must be prepared for the scorching temperatures awaiting us.

• Tassoni offers a reflection on its signature product: Cedrata Tassoni, whose “Giallo Napoletano” tells not only the story of a drink that accompanies everyday life, but also the culture of a city: Naples.

• Summer 2026 is shaping up to be magical, suspended between pop romanticism and fairytale creatures. Here’s how to dress and do your makeup to live through a true fairy summer.

• A major update to Google’s iconic search bar is on the way. How will browsing and online searches change?

• Remaining in the realm of fantasy, on the occasion of her new album we spoke with Francesca Michielin about her camp aesthetic and her references, from Game of Thrones to witches.

• In Italy, pizza has always been a serious matter. Here’s how Italian pizza makers became stars.

• June is almost here, and it’s best not to be caught unprepared. To find out what awaits you, you can check the horoscope sign by sign.

• While waiting for “Backrooms”, we revisit the urban legend on the big screen. A journey through the backrooms of cinema, from David Lynch to Kane Parsons.

• Have you ever wanted to smell like pizza or gasoline? Some perfumes are not made to please.

• How is Gen Z using TikTok and Instagram as LinkedIn? The Guardian explains it.

• The Atlantic tells us how the “Injection Age”, shaped by fillers and aesthetic treatments, is becoming an integral part of American identity and its citizens’ sense of self.

• Social media has once again become central to British political debate. The BBC reports Keir Starmer’s intention to introduce stricter measures to protect minors online.

• What happens when New York mayor Zohran Mamdani arrives on Twitch? Vulture explores how political dialogue can be reimagined for Gen Z.

Lately, I find myself more and more often being called upon to defend the relationship between fashion and literature, despite the fact that even today many people still seem to consider it an anomaly. Why does fashion need literature? people ask me (and it makes me laugh that the opposite is never asked, perhaps because the answer would be too obvious). And what do books and clothes possibly have in common?As curator of the Miu Miu Literary Club, founded and directed by Miuccia Prada since 2024, these are all questions I have had ample opportunity to reflect on.

At first, I enthusiastically tried to articulate points of connection. For example, I would say, there is this relentless search for the great classic, the universal novel capable of enduring beyond time, just like that iconic handbag that survives the rapid succession of trends; and then there is style, which (I discovered through studying) is a concept shared by both worlds and derives from the Latin word stylus, the pointed object used in antiquity to write on wax or clay tablets. Today, both in literature and in fashion, style is that thing which leaves a mark, which is not easily forgotten after reading a story or after meeting someone who is not only well dressed, but who stands out in a uniquely personal way.

Finally, there is the question of the plot: the plot of a book, the weave of a fabric. This point has often given me the perfect opening to say that, after all, both fashion and literature are ecosystems driven by the desire to tell stories. They do so by intertwining elements that signify themselves but also something beyond themselves, and in part, even without directly intending to, they always have something to say about the society and context that produced them.

And yet, although these observations are received with interest by my interlocutors, they are not enough to answer their questions, because on their own they fail to dismantle the prejudice, alive on both sides, that fashion belongs to the realm of frivolity while literature belongs to that of knowledge, often perceived as difficult and dusty.

Recently, during an afternoon of doomscrolling, I came across a post commenting on what the author considered the paradoxical choice of using Simone de Beauvoir’s image for an event related to the fashion industry. There is even an interview, the social media user pointed out, in which the French philosopher supposedly said that fashion was literally the last thing on her mind.

That made me smile.

It was obvious that the person who had written those remarks had not read the entire interview, published in The Observer under the title My Clothes and I and now easily accessible online.

I had first discovered the article thanks to Maria Luisa Frisa, during a fascinating conversation precisely about the renewed connection between fashion and literature. The piece was written by Cynthia Judah, a journalist who, together with photographer Jack Nisberg, visited Beauvoir’s home in 1960 to peek into her wardrobe and talk about clothes. It is true that right at the beginning of the conversation the intellectual gives a somewhat disconcerting answer: «I must tell you that I am not at all interested in clothes. I have so many other things to think about, so many other interests that they are not at all on my mind.» But these are only the opening lines of the interview. Paragraph after paragraph, in what becomes a long report from the writer’s home, we are introduced to her favorite garments, little coats, furs, dressing gowns, hats, each accompanied by its own story. Alongside the description of each object, Beauvoir delights in recounting the shopping trips that led to their purchase during her travels around the world, from Madrid to Moscow, from China to New York.

On that occasion, the philosopher confesses to the journalist that as a child she did not particularly care about clothes, which she instead associated with her parents and their overly bourgeois, conventional lifestyle. However, once she began teaching at the Sorbonne, she started to play with fashion, at first to help herself step into the role of a professor - fashion therefore as disguise, as the construction of a social role - and later to express herself, to the point that by her second year of teaching some female students had even started copying her.

I challenge anyone to read this interview without sensing all the joy and amusement the woman feels while talking about her clothes, pulling out the details of where each garment came from. As when, for example, she recounts a trip to New York and the hours she spent shopping there: «I had a lovely time: I bought a white coat, beautifully made - I still wear it - and a fur coat. I don’t know what sort it was but it was all fluffy.» Not to mention her exotic phase, when she developed a passion for silk blouses and dressing gowns. Purchases she could afford precisely thanks to her writing.

By the end of the conversation with the English journalist, it seems Beauvoir has let her guard down. Swept along by the power of stories, the adventures that had led to the acquisition of her personal “treasures”, the resistance that had prompted her at the beginning to declare herself completely uninterested in fashion begins to dissolve.

In the beginning, it was artists - writers, philosophers, aesthetes - who dictated the rules of style, priests of aesthetic meaning whom people regarded with fascination, admiration, and sometimes amusement. Then counterculture arrived. Around the middle of the twentieth century, a fracture emerged between fashion and literature, one that still survives today in the form of a stereotype: on the one hand, the glossy surface of the fashion world; on the other, intellectual commitment supposedly detached, even if only apparently, from matters of style and trends. In 1960 Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most prominent engagé intellectuals on the international scene, and it seems to me that her first answer in the interview was above all a perfunctory response. Or perhaps, and this is also likely, by fashion she meant “trend,” and in trends she saw conformity, she who had used clothes to tell the story of herself, her rigor, the refinement of her gaze.

What is certain is that more than sixty years after those declarations, something is changing, and to me it seems above all a matter of possibility: on one side, for literature, which thanks to fashion is able to expand its readership, gaining global visibility in contexts that are sometimes unexpected and that it would have struggled to reach on its own; on the other, for fashion, which thanks to literature emerges strengthened in its power to tell stories, adding further meanings to the galaxy of symbols of which it has always been composed.

ESSENTIALS is the weekly newsletter of nss magazine, delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.

The end of May is getting closer and closer, but even if the arrival of summer seems to calm the waters of the fashion system, there is still no chance to let your guard down, not even for a moment. Speaking of storms, Demna opened the week with Gucci Cruise 2027, unveiling a new «GucciCore» staged among the led walls of Times Square, dozens of celebrities, and an idea of a timeless wardrobe distilled into black.

There is also an air of upheaval surrounding the market dynamics of fashion: while Dior attempts to rewrite the meaning of “accessibility”, Shein is venturing into territories far removed from its usual corporate policies, as demonstrated by its recent acquisition of Everlane. At a moment when conversations around resignification and a market dynamism that inevitably shapes fashion and the creative visions moving through it are becoming increasingly central, it was Kering’s Italian employees who closed this third week of May with a bang, calling for a strike in Scandicci. In short, this is no time to lower your guard.

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«What you truly love remains, the rest is slag», are the words recited by Ottavia Piccolo for the press opening of the 61st Venice Art Biennale. Authentic words, free of any respectability, not chosen by chance to underline how love, in a higher sense, and respect for cultural traditions are fundamental for the survival of an institution. Especially in times like these, in which the inversion of values and of the perception of the world order is rewriting geopolitical balances.

I listen to them on my way back from the Lagoon: two days are not enough, but certainly necessary to frame the event and understand what remains for the public beyond the exclusive clamour of the inauguration. In order: a popular prize established in place of the one that should have been awarded by the resigned jury; a Russian pavilion open, but closed to visitors; the Israeli and American pavilions deserted by the public; the promise of the opening of the Iranian one, but not for the entire duration of the exhibition.

And yet, of the references to Ezra Pound’s Canti Pisani at the Piccolo Arsenale Theatre, little more remains than an ANSA news flash. After all, putting order in the syncopated flow of occupations, strikes and protests is not simple. Especially when what is happening takes on an exceptional character: it was in fact since 1968 that the very architecture of the Biennale had not been so openly questioned, already accused then of elitism and profit orientation, and criticized for its hierarchical award mechanisms.

That Pussy Riot occupied the Giardini, that marches and performances crossed the alleys around the Arsenale and Via Garibaldi, and that the doors of the pavilions remained closed during the first workers’ strike in the history of the event, are concrete facts that, almost sixty years later, confirm a partially crystallized situation. They reveal a collective malaise not reducible to a simple clash of egos — to quote Ezra Pound again. The question is inevitable: is it time to rethink the participatory model of the Biennale?

Meanwhile, the Chinese artist Yang Yexin scatters part of his thousand gold grains among the flowerbeds of the Giardini, inviting the public to ask whether one comes to Venice «for art or for gold», over seventy artists declare they do not recognize the legitimacy of the Golden Lion awarded by the public. A significant fracture, not so much because I too, as an entitled voter, voted, but for a question of coherence with what art should be: a space capable of questioning the status quo, stimulating critical thought and fostering empathy.

«Approximately one hundred countries participate today in the Biennale, in compliance with national and international law», the president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco reminded the more than 4000 professionals involved. Denying this would place the institution on the same level as those countries that are repeatedly violating it. And we all agree that it is not true that “international law applies, but only up to a certain point”, right?

«The Biennale is not a tribunal», he added: «It is, since 1895, the year of its foundation, a place where one exhibits, discusses, listens». Words difficult to separate from the images of Gaza and from the stories of child abuse in prisons collected by Save the Children.

But we are children of the Enlightenment and cannot renounce a posture of coherence. «I am surprised that the world born from the French Revolution, from secularism and from the will to build a complete democracy, has turned into its opposite: a laboratory of intolerance, censorship and exclusion». It is legitimate to ask: «how did we end up discussing who should be there and who should not, who represents what and what guilt they carry, while real wars and tragedies are ongoing? With civilians dying more than in a past in which we believed we had closed the chapter on abomination. We do not want to admit it, but there are communities that have reinstated the death penalty», again words that speak of violence, genocide, Gaza.

Of the 29 national participations in the Giardini, 25 at the Arsenale, 46 in the historic centre, 7 are new, each with its own story guaranteed by the aforementioned right: the hereditary absolute monarchy of Qatar, which entrusted the project for the temporary pavilion to the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija; the Republic of Guinea and Equatorial Guinea, defined by international observers respectively as a hybrid regime (or in transition) and, the second, formally presidential but in reality a dominant-party regime; the Republic of Nauru, in the central Pacific Ocean, one of the smallest countries in the world; the fragile Federal Republic of Somalia; and the presidential Republic of El Salvador. «Let us not dwell on affiliations», insists Buttafuoco. «Let us not lose sight of the Moon».

The Biennale, despite its inevitably asymmetrical structure, still tries to represent the world as it is: fragmented, conflictual, marked by a global war that knocks on everyone’s daily life. «Closing the door to someone makes it harder to open it for others. If the Biennale were to start selecting not artworks but affiliations, not visions but passports, it would cease to be the place where the world meets». It is an uncomfortable position, but a central one: complexity is not governed by polarizing the debate, but by taking responsibility for the tensions that question the present.

But let us turn to In Minor Keys, the project of the late Koyo Kouoh. The exhibition does not simplify: it stratifies. The collective work of the curatorial team has built an ecosystem of spaces, relationships and different sensibilities that transform the Biennale into a place of crossing rather than representation. An archipelago of oases, courtyards and residences, but also “houses”, inside and outside the institution: from Kunsthaus Paradiso, the house within the house curated by Caroline Corbetta at Palazzo Molin Querini, to the expanded and collective domestic space of Chiara Camoni at the Italian Pavilion, up to the dystopian dimension of Florentina Holzinger, who metaphorically drowns Austria and its artists in vats of bodily fluids.

Also significant is the work of Walid Raad, built over more than thirty years: Far from quieting is a sequence of trompe-l’œil paintings and drawings illustrating the shelters of Yasser Arafat. «It is said that the PLO leader never slept in the same bed for two nights in a row. Having survived more than forty assassination attempts, he could not afford to lower his guard», and so he lived — and slept — always in motion. In this horizon, the home becomes an unstable place, a shifting space, a human condition rather than an architecture.

This is why the 110 invited artists do not claim the still-open fractures between the Global North and South, highlighted also by the aesthetic codes of the pavilions, but inhabit them with lucid awareness: the works on display observe, record, and return in relation to the public. The installation by Wolff Architects is a lateral art, far from traditional centres of legitimization, which precisely in the gap, in what until now has not been loved (re-quoting Pound), finds its strength.

At the entrance of the Giardini and the Arsenale, the installation Soft Offerings to Silenced Voices and to All Who Have Turned to Dust by Otobong Nkangale and the verses from If I Must Die, the collection of poems written by Refaat al-Areer, killed in Gaza in December 2023 during an Israeli bombing, are introductory works functioning as perceptual thresholds. The visitor is warned: what follows requires time, attention, permanence.

Forward, let us enter. In the Central Pavilion, regenerated by Labics, the clay sculptures of Seyni Awa Camara seem to emerge from a world suspended between semi-consciousness and wakefulness: a ritual gathering that precedes the interspecies communication staged by the Peruvian artist and activist Célia Vàsquez Yui. Her The Council of the Mother spirit of the Animals is an imaginative parliament of zoomorphic sculptures whose history draws on a spiritual conception of ecology, according to which each species has a mother spirit. Nearby, María Magdalena Campos-Pons in Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison portrays respectively the first African woman curator of the Art Biennale and the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and focuses on the frequency of storytelling, while Buhlebezwe Siwani interrogates colonialism, history and the representation of the Black female body. The curatorial gesture is clear: it no longer aims only to show, but to involve.

Also central in the development of the narrative at the Arsenale is the choice to alternate fragrances, sounds and immersive devices. The practices of Daniel Lind-Ramos and Guadalupe Maravilla, for example, both work on trauma and collective memory: the former through assemblages of recovered materials linked to Caribbean history, the latter transforming his own biographical and clinical experience into a sonic ritual. Garden of the Broken Hearted by Theo Eshetu instead stages an olive tree traversed by projections that dematerialize it, bringing the gaze back to the violence we consume daily on screens. Next to it, Khaled Sabsabi builds a contemplative space inspired by Islamic mystical tradition.

From Lebanon to Marseille: Mohammed Joha, inspired by the practices of the Gazan brothers trapped in cycles of endless destruction and reconstruction, overlays scrap materials that he transforms into canvas works. The series No Shelter was born while on his TV screen the images of the near-total annihilation of Gaza were playing: the layers of collage he composes release an emotional charge that moves. It is called empathy, a word in some sense exhausted for us Westerners, and of which we desperately need. To save the world from ourselves and for others. On the ground, posters of protest, some still legible, others trampled and violated as if they were bodies.

But the system, despite everything, remains open: a work that does not seek synthesis, but welcomes all points of view. To shake, to listen, and then, hopefully, to act again.

ESSENTIALS is the weekly newsletter of nss magazine, delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.

The second week of May seems like any other, but it isn’t. The Met Gala buzz had barely died down before the Cannes Film Festival kicked off, though its red carpet has lost some of its appeal in the eyes of brands lately. The really important things for fashion, however, happened in America: Dior’s Cruise 2027 show in Los Angeles and, in New York, the sale of Marc Jacobs to WHP Global, which is actually not bad news. In the meantime, the new Audemars Piguet x Swatch collaboration has arrived in stores worldwide. It surprised everyone, but not us. We know how strong bag charms are doing right now. And the week isn’t over yet: tonight in New York, Gucci will present the second show of the Demna era. Better hold on tight.

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We stuff them at the bottom of wardrobes to make space, we fill them with objects, books, and trinkets, we hate them when they slip off our shoulder while we’re trying to tie our shoes, we desire them wholeheartedly when they are gifted to us, but soon we forget about them. Tote bags are a design object that over time has acquired an inestimable value, evolving from a simple, cheap and sustainable cotton bag into a customisable canvas. As a perfect advertising vehicle, the tote bag has adapted to cultural shifts year after year, thus resisting the test of time. So much so that, in the first three months of 2026, it entered the Top 10 most searched fashion items online according to Lyst.

Between a pair of Saint Laurent sunglasses, Chanel pumps designed by Matthieu Blazy, and a pair of lace-up shoes by Celine, the Trader Joe’s tote bag has secured a place in Lyst’s Top 10 Hottest Fashion Products. It is not the first time a non-luxury item has entered the platform’s Top 10: this time too, alongside the aforementioned luxury items, there are more accessible options such as a Kangol flat cap and an adidas sweatshirt, but it’s the first time such an inexpensive item like the 3 dollar canvas bag from the American supermarket chain appears.

As the low price of the Trader Joe’s tote bag highlights, it is not luxury that contributes to the bag’s exclusivity. Initially available only in the United States, but now resold for hundreds of dollars on platforms such as the American eBay, the Japanese Mercari, or the Lithuanian Vinted, the bag has reached international status. Looking at it closely, it appears to be nothing more than a simple canvas grocery tote with thick handles that make it seem quite durable; not even its defining color schemes - such as navy blue paired with a red logo, or the pastel variations of the mini totes the chain has more recently produced (already sold out) - make it such a desirable object. And yet, people spend hundreds of dollars to obtain it from overseas.

Lyst explains the phenomenon behind the huge price gap between items in its latest ranking in a rather simple way - just two places above the Trader Joe’s tote bag is the Chanel Maxi Flap Bag, priced at $8,500. «This continued decoupling of status from price reflects a broader shift in how consumers assign cultural value to fashion. What unites the quarter’s hottest products isn’t a look, it’s a moment, a community, or a story.» Indeed, a short walk through central London is enough to understand that the Trader Joe’s tote bag epidemic is not just a Gen Z and Millennial obsession with accessible fashion, but something more. But is it really possible that cultural value carries so much weight?

It was the 1980s when The Strand, a historic independent bookstore in New York, launched a custom tote bag. Easily recognisable thanks to its large logo print, it soon became a status item among New Yorkers - first among Manhattan residents, then across the entire city, thanks also to new store openings in different neighborhoods of the Big Apple. Although the item represented a sustainable and practical alternative to less elegant plastic bags, the real success of the tote bag lay in the cultural meaning of the bookstore it belonged to.

Wearing The Strand tote bag («the undisputed king of the city’s independent bookstores,» as described by the The New York Times in 2016) does not only signal a passion for niche literature, but also support for self-funded businesses, free from the commercial pressures of large publishing groups or investment funds. If the main priority of an independent bookstore is, at least on paper, the promotion of intellectual culture, its merchandise transfers that moral value onto the wearer: carrying a tote bag from such a store is, in this sense, a statement.

This is why, when in 2020 The Strand laid off most of its staff despite receiving a state loan and later invested over $200,000 in Amazon stock, many New Yorkers expressed disappointment toward the bookstore. By that point, the tote bag market was about to explode, a trend driven both by growing consumer interest in sustainable lifestyles and by post-COVID revenge spending. More shopping called for more shopping bags: quite an ironic paradox between unchecked consumerism and conscious practice.

The Strand and Trader Joe’s are not the only businesses to have seen their canvas bags transform from advertising initiative into a full-fledged business. The tote bags of Shakespeare and Company (the Paris bookstore in the 5th arrondissement that in the 1920s was a meeting place for authors such as Ezra Pound, Hemingway, and James Joyce), featuring the store’s façade in blue, have given rise to a counterfeit market; the same has happened with Daunt Books, an independent London bookstore with striking oak interiors.

Also worth mentioning is the tote bag of The New Yorker, sent to anyone who subscribes to the magazine but also sold online for hundreds of dollars, as well as the thousands of personalised bags distributed every year at the Fuorisalone to anyone willing to endure hours of queueing.

The cherry on top of this list comes from Dior, which after selling cotton bags with its logo for years, under the creative direction of Jonathan Anderson has printed iconic literary titles - like Dracula by Bram Stoker, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - on cotton shoppers sold for thousands of euros. Not only that: in the welcome gift offered by the Maison to guests of today’s Cruise 2027 show, May 13, a mini version of the bag featuring the title American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis is included.

In short, whether obtained through a subscription, the purchase of books, attendance at a conference, investment of savings, or an invitation to an exclusive fashion show, the tote bag must be earned. And perhaps this is exactly what increases its value: it is not an object recognizable to everyone, but to a restricted group of people who have taken part in a movement - be it political, aesthetic, or moral.

In the case of The Strand, wearing the tote bag signals support for independent literary activity; in the case of Trader Joe’s, it shows that one has shopped at one of the most famous organic supermarkets in the world (in one of the least “organic” countries in the world). «Health is wealth,» as English speakers would say, and said «wealth» is able to grow even more when, alongside health, a hefty price tag is added.

Monocle describes tote bags as «the concert T-shirts of our era»: some wear them out of belief, others to pose, some by accident, others to show off their wealth. Considering that just three years ago Saint Laurent was selling Nirvana T-shirts for $4,500 while Bottega Veneta was «paying homage» to The Strand with a leather replica of the famous tote bag, it seems that every street-born trend is now destined to the same fate.

As one Reddit user advises to an aspiring tote bag producer: «If you make it super niche to a video game, tv show, movie, or anything like that, you could for sure have a successful business.» It really is that simple.

ESSENTIALS is the weekly newsletter of nss magazine, delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.

The first week of May is usually one for the books in the fashion world, largely because the Met Gala takes place on the first Monday of the month. This year’s theme, “Fashion is Art,” pointed toward a broader shift we’ve been quietly witnessing for some time now: fashion’s growing obsession with the art world. And there could hardly have been a more fitting moment to underline this new romance between the two industries than the opening week of the Venice Biennale. The real question, though, is whether fashion genuinely cares about art or if it is simply the latest cultural territory to be absorbed, exploited, and eventually abandoned, much like cinema and hospitality before it.

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In life, the best tastes are the ones acquired. And the same can be said of the Versace SS26 collection, today remembered with the more practical nickname of “Versace by Dario Vitale”. When it was presented, with a more intimate show than many expected, it initially divided public opinion. A grand reinterpretation of Gianni Versace’s imagery or a simple exhumation of the 1980s in its most shocking colors? It was a strong impression, which however suddenly changed the perception of Versace, wiping out the platinum glamazons and the mega-logoed sneakers that had become synonymous with the brand in recent years. But after the first shock, a second one arrived.

After being at the brand for just nine months, producing a single collection, a sneaker collaboration and an interesting 3-in-1 campaign, Dario Vitale was fired by the new/old owners of the Prada Group who in the meantime had acquired Versace, putting an end to his short season in the sun. Now, the brand awaits the arrival of another no less masterful designer, Pieter Mulier, responsible for Alaïa’s renaissance. In the meantime, the recognizability and fame gained by Vitale, as well as the hundreds of editorials and covers in which the collection appeared, have led industry insiders to talk about a “revenge” for the designer who was a victim of market logic.

The collection is therefore in a very particular position: not only appreciated by insiders and highly recognizable, but also, given the creative director’s rapid exit, almost a limited edition worthy of being collected. There’s more: The fashion community loves an underdog and Dario Vitale is the perfect underdog: young, a respected professional but also a highly appreciated creative who was denied an opportunity by a major industry group right on the verge of a change that will be epochal for Versace.

Yet, we could argue, it was precisely his rapid exit that partly created an almost anomalous appreciation for the collection. Anomalous not for lack of merit, but for the unusual intensity and emotionality it carried. From this story, can we therefore draw some broader lessons about creative directors and the psychology of the fashion public?

«Right from the start, the collection shocked and made people talk about Versace in a completely different way than before», Francesco Rudi of @versaceeventi, the most important fanpage dedicated to the brand, told us. Rudi compared the collection to the silent protagonist of Pasolini’s Teorema since «it catapulted itself into the habitual and repetitive life of each of us and upended it». Rudi continued his comparison: «In Teorema, the guest of the bourgeois family appears unexpectedly, and simply by existing, without too many glances or provocations of any kind, arouses the sexual desire of all the family members. The attraction they feel towards him leads them to experience sides of themselves never tried before».

Just like the mysterious guest in Teorema, Dario Vitale disappeared relatively quickly, leading the brand’s new audience to first develop a real obsession with this great fashion what if. Unlike archive fashion, however, here the collection can be bought: on the website and in boutiques everything is available and, according to Rudi’s information, the collaboration with Onitsuka Tiger was so successful that new colorways will soon be announced. As Rudi says, «it was anything but reassuring for Versace’s typical clientele: it disoriented, bewildered, confused, and in some cases even disappointed» but according to his information «as for sales, it sold. Not only for the aesthetics and the narrative, but also for the exclusivity of the pieces. There will never be another Versace by Dario Vitale. The point is precisely that the fact that Dario left is what made everything more desirable».

Of course, Rudi continues, «the fan of Versace by Donatella, made of baroque prints and excesses, did not always fully identify with Versace by Dario, which was much more appreciated by the brand’s historical clients, i.e. Gianni’s fans, and by the new generations. There has never been so much attention towards Versace from such a young audience». Unlike the very long era of Donatella Versace, for Vitale «everything was based on desire, and on wanting to explore it, on the level of sex, with different codes» but also on practical goals since «the goal [of Vitale, ed.] was not to aspirationally dress talents for the Met Gala, but to reach people’s homes».

For Rudi «the problem with Versace by Donatella is exactly what happens to every artistic movement: when it reaches its peak, before fading and making way for the next one, it becomes exasperated. She did the same, she took all the characteristics of Versace to exasperation: bondage, prints, leather… everything». Without managing «to move away from the old Hollywood myth to explore new and innovative forms».

The cultural effects of Dario Vitale’s Versace were fundamental realignments of the notion of desire at the base of the brand itself. Even before his early exit, the collection was at the center of covers around the world, ended up on all conceivable celebrities (from historic faces like Julia Roberts to the new face Connor Storrie) and received validation from mega-stars like Addison Rae, Robyn and Dua Lipa, obliquely managing to become an instant cult for the queer community.

In many ways, Dario Vitale’s Versace exists in the same extended imaginary as the works of Tom of Finland and Fassbinder’s Querelle. And together with Chanel’s, the Versace SS26 collection was the only other one that pushed numerous editors and insiders in the system to show up in store, try on the collection and post about it on social media. A truly rare thing today.

The reason for this interest is surely the sense of exclusivity Rudi spoke of, i.e. the actual temporal limitedness of a collection that will have no follow-ups or replicas and, therefore, already when it appeared in stores it resembled one of those Supreme drops that pushed fans to make a pilgrimage to the store. Entering and exiting in nine months and signing a single collection, Dario Vitale’s Versace may not have been able to express its full potential but, at the same time, it was immediately delivered to fashion history as a unique phenomenon.

On the narrative level, this creative era cut so short did not appear broken, but miraculously concise. In an era in which creative directors who debuted in the last year have already signed five or six collections in as many months, Dario Vitale’s single collection was not weighed down by insistences, redundancies or commercial exasperations.

Something similar, although less commercial, had happened when Jean-Paul Gaultier entrusted the Haute Couture collections to different guest designers each season, creating a series of unique event-collections and for this reason memorable. Considering that in recent years changes of creative director have become more frequent in tandem with the decrease in the duration of mandates assigned to designers, could we look at this phenomenon as the announcement of a new model?

@ermes_stylistI’m in love with Versace by Dario #versace #fashiontiktok #springcollection #fyp

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The role of the creative director has changed a lot in recent years, becoming celebrity, ending up at the center of gossip, being announced as the saviors or redeemers of this or that brand. Today’s great debate revolves around the question of how much power to assign them. LVMH and Chanel, for example, like to invest in a solid creative direction and turn their creatives into superstars - it is no coincidence that Pharrell also appears in campaigns and collaborations of other brands in the group and Jonathan Anderson has signed a talent contract.

Kering, on the other hand, is re-discussing the power of these figures: after the shock caused by Alessandro Michele’s exit from Gucci, which led the brand to three years of creative confusion now concluded with Demna (hopefully), the new CEO Luca De Meo immediately said that the fate of a brand cannot be tied to a figure whose rapid turnover is now a consolidated factor to be planned for, with an average change every 5 years or less. According to rumors, his proposal was to entrust creative directors with the image and about 20% of the brand’s production, leaving everything else in the “safe” of carry-over collections and guaranteeing a form of continuity. According to this reading, creatives are both an asset and a liability, both a resource and a risk.

Of course, even though there are many examples of luxury brands that work even without the protagonism of a creative director, these are still very specific brands, which perhaps produce only bags or shoes. But it would be worth entertaining the thought: since the logic of the market has changed, the logic of fashion itself should also change. The brands of mega-groups and independent designers are, after all, now completely different creatures, not even remotely comparable and if the latter still need an authorial voice, the former have implicitly renounced authorship for some time, delegating and spreading decision-making power through increasingly capillary structures.

In this sense, the case of Dario Vitale at Versace could represent the serendipitous realization that a single and very intense season, when well calibrated, can have a much higher impact than a decade-long creative direction that however churns out new products every three months, eventually losing that factor of specialty and uniqueness that a “one-act play” could instead have. Which however would entail a complete change of pace in the narrative of the entire industry. But it would be appropriate to ask whether the market is not moving from an idea of price exclusivity to one of time exclusivity.

ESSENTIALS is the weekly newsletter of nss magazine, delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.

Design Week is over at last, leaving Milan like a fever leaves a body. Three topics dominate the conversation among fashion insiders: Chanel’s Cruise 2027 show, which brought the strangest shoes seen in quite some time; the long-awaited Italian release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, and finally, the Met Gala taking place on Monday under the dubious (unsettling?) aegis of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. Perhaps in six months, or perhaps next year, all of fashion could have changed, but in the meantime, numbed to announcements of the next and forever-postponed apocalypse, the industry is getting ready to do another round. Better enjoy it while it lasts.

• As we were saying, everyone is talking about Chanel’s latest show. But not everyone is talking enough about the history of the Newspaper Dress presented by the brand and its backstory.

• May has begun and the stars say it will be a very particular month. Read our monthly horoscope here.

• The history of Italian design also runs through the marketing of the country’s major companies, such as Lactalis, which brought a unique event to nss edicola.

• Don’t know what to do over the May Day long weekend? Immerse yourself in culture with the best exhibitions of the month.

• Much has been discussed this week about Silvia Salis and her outfits. But why does the public get so irritated when fashion and politics are mentioned in the same breath?

• With the new season of Euphoria, Maddy Perez is back on everyone’s moodboard.

• New York is gearing up for the Met Gala, but protests against Jeff Bezos, who is sponsoring it, are also beginning. Why?

• We uncover the behind-the-scenes of the life, work and creative world of make-up artist Luciano Chiarello.

• Fashion is hoping for a new boom in luxury spending in China, but something has changed. Jing Daily tells us about it.

• Memes are a fun internet phenomenon. But, as Wired reports, their spread risks making us take geopolitical conflicts less seriously.

• According to Dazed, the chore jacket created by Palantir may seem cool but is no less problematic than everything else the company does.

• Everyone wants a personal trainer, not everyone wants to pay for one. The New York Times talks about the rise of AI personal trainers.

In these past two weeks you will have zigzagged through hundreds of guides telling you what was unmissable, what to see, what is in. I, if I can be honest, don’t know. I don’t know as I write this piece, and I won’t know even once the week is over and this piece is published. Not out of disinterest, I know, because in recent years my experience has always been the same: too much noise, too much stuff, too many opinions. I feel overwhelmed even before I begin. A continuous horizon of events, installations, openings, invitations and then, queues queues queues. People everywhere, in a state of excitement, FOMO is felt on the skin and smelled in the air.

Milan Design Week has a density that seems to compress space and distort it, forcing you into a perpetual motion of seven days in which - in order to see everything you “should” see - you must not work, have a life, or even sleep. You survive on olives and lukewarm prosecco, and meanwhile you accumulate images, encounters, impressions. But the feeling is always the same: not being able to truly choose. And above all, there is no time to understand what you are looking at, even when you do choose: the experience is determined more by flows than by attention.

If for some Design Week is a perfect machine, it is also an ecosystem that is increasingly difficult to inhabit consciously. It divides the public between enthusiasts and perplexed observers, but still forces them into the same condition: that of rapid, hit-and-run consumption of experiences.

To understand how we got here, we need to take a step back.

The Salone del Mobile was born in 1961 as a trade fair with a clear function: to connect companies and buyers, showcase products, activate the market. For years its perimeter remains defined. It is between the 1980s and 1990s that something changes: outside the fair spontaneous events begin to emerge - exhibitions, installations, studio openings. They are not yet a system, but they intercept a different need: not only to see design, but to experience it.

Thus the Fuorisalone is born. Initially marginal, almost parasitic, it grows until it becomes an autonomous phenomenon. In the 2000s it becomes structured, attracts investment, and brands begin shifting more and more attention outside the fair, transforming the city into a diffuse exhibition space.

After Expo 2015 this model fully consolidates: Milan stops being just the site of a fair and becomes a stage. The sum of Salone and Fuorisalone produces an experiential architecture in which market, culture, tourism and communication are inextricably intertwined.

Design is no longer just object: it is experience, narrative, content.

And it is precisely here that a less visible but perhaps decisive shift occurs. What begins as a spontaneous expansion - a way of experiencing design beyond the product - progressively becomes an autonomous system, increasingly oriented only toward visibility, presence, the continuous production of content. The city ceases to be the context of design and becomes its device: it no longer hosts, it performs. And when everything becomes an event, the risk is that experience loses depth, in both senses, turning into a continuous sequence of stimuli that are almost impossible to sediment and process.

It is here that Milan Design Week becomes interesting not only for what it displays, but for what it reveals to us. It is not simply an event, but the symptom of a broader urban model: a city that organizes itself through temporary intensities, flows, peaks of attention. A city increasingly capable of functioning as a platform and less and less willing to exist as a place.

As Guido Martinotti observed in Metropoli: la nuova morfologia sociale della città (Il Mulino, 1993), contemporary cities are increasingly traversed by “city users”: people who do not inhabit them, but use them. During MDW this dynamic becomes dominant. Milan fills with temporary, mobile, fast bodies. Bodies that consume not only objects, but images, experiences and relationships. The city offers itself as an aesthetic surface: every courtyard is a set, every installation content, every district narrative. Milan makes itself available to the gaze, becoming itself content: neighborhoods behave like temporary brands, aesthetics become economic infrastructure, experience becomes commodity. It is a city that produces value - economic, symbolic, relational - and sometimes it also produces culture, truly.

But it is also a city that, precisely through this intensification, tends to reduce the conditions necessary to build meaningful experience over time. As Lucia Tozzi suggests, the model of “weeks” produces an intermittent and unstable city, where immediate value prevails over the construction of a lasting fabric. The bulimic and disorienting excess of offer does not automatically translate into quality, but often into overlap, into noise. In this context, design itself is transformed. More and more often it is designed to function above all in the immediate: to attract, to surprise, to be shared. It is no longer just project, but becomes above all content. No longer just object, but an experience to be lived, often too quickly, and for this reason just as often unsatisfying.

Design Week makes these dynamics visible, showing both the city’s attractive force and its structural fragilities. What appears as vibrancy is in reality what tends to impoverish Milan, the result of a pervasive and precise capitalist logic: continuous growth, intensification, accumulation. More events, more presence, more visibility. More of everything.

But not everything that grows manages to turn into meaning. Milan, during Design Week, functions perfectly. That is the point. It functions as a platform, as a productive machine, as a system of continuous activation, but precisely for this reason it increasingly struggles to make space for what is not immediate, for what requires time, and perhaps has a greater chance of building relationships.

And perhaps it is precisely here that its deepest contradiction lies: not only in the absurd quantity of what it produces, but in the difficulty of holding onto anything. Because the city is not the one we cross during the various “weeks”, but the one that is built beyond and around them. In the dead times, in unprogrammed relationships, in spaces that do not need to perform in order to exist. And perhaps it is there, too, that it would be worth returning to imagine, work and commit to.

ESSENTIALS is the weekly newsletter of nss magazine, delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.

Milan Design Week, Fuorisalone, Salone del Mobile. Call it whatever you want, it still feels like Milan’s holy week. This time around, though, fashion brands seemed to miss a few chances to truly open up to the public, likely reflecting an increasingly fragile economic and political climate. Still, between vernissages, aperitivos, and endless queues, MDW 2026 delivered its share of highlights, starting with Edicola Italiana, nss edicola’s first free press. After an intense start to the year – packed with back-to-back fashion weeks, destination shows, and the Olympics – you can’t help but wonder whether creatives are finally due for a well-earned break. In the meantime, today marks Italy’s Liberation Day, so let’s celebrate properly.

• Have you ever paid attention to newsstands after hours? We have, together with Xiaomi for nss edicola’s first free press, Edicola Italiana.

• Barcelona confirms itself as one of fashion’s rising capitals – here’s a recap of the 37th edition of the 080 Barcelona Fashion Week.

• Religion emerged as the underlying thread of this year’s MDW, with new codes of spirituality being reimagined.

• The story of the looksmaxxer who uses his own tears to soften his hair (this is not clickbait).

• We put together an exhibition for Fuorisalone in collaboration with Xiaomi – here’s how it went.

• With the new season of Euphoria, Maddy Perez is back on everyone’s moodboards.

• What is the new Frictionmaxxing trend? An ode to inconvenience.

• Adéla Jergová is our new favorite pop girl, and she should be yours too.

• Because of MAGA rhetoric and looksmaxxing, people are now injecting peptides. Here’s what The New Yorker has to say about it.

• Coachella confirmed that the Biebers are an unmatched commercial force – according to Vogue Business.

• The Guardian noticed that the subreddit dedicated to baldness is actually a wonderful place.

• Young people are no longer interested in fashion. According to WWD, they’re all about interior design now.

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It is well known the aphorism by Hegel according to which reading the newspaper is the modern man’s morning prayer. More precisely, it refers to a form of realistic prayer addressed, it is not entirely clear to whom, in the hope of giving shape and order, for at least one day, to the chaos of the world. We live in days in which the agents of chaos are hegemonic.

And to read newspapers and tame chaos, newsstands are needed to sell them. The newsstand [from Lat. aedicŭla “small temple”, diminutive of aedes “temple”].

According to Treccani, it is

For at least a century, the newsstand has been a perfect semiotic machine: a threshold. It was not a shop, because one did not really enter it; it was not a square, because one did not linger there for long. It was a liminal device, a boundary space, in which the citizen encountered the materialized form of the Encyclopedia — not the one contained in a volume, but the one in the collective mind of an interpreting community.

In front of the newsstand, every morning, a ritual negotiation of reality took place. The reader did not simply buy a newspaper: they bought a possible world among many competing worlds, each organized by a different regime of truth. The world described by Repubblica was very different from that described by Corriere, that of Manifesto from that described by Libero or La Verità, a paradoxical Italian version of the Soviet Pravda.

The nine-column headline did not simply say “this happened”, but “this deserves to be believed before anything else”. The newsstand was therefore the daily theatre of the struggle between interpretations, presented under the reassuring form of an ordered stack.

The newsagent performed a priestly function but not a dogmatic one: they guarded the temple without ever commenting on the orthodoxy of the faithful. They knew that whoever asked for the newspaper was not asking for the same newspaper as the person next to them; deixis — “can I have the newspaper?” — worked because there existed a shared encyclopedia completing the utterance. It was a perfectly cooperative linguistic act: the conversational rules of the English philosopher Paul Grice applied to cities and provinces in the space of the newsstand. At the corner of the square and of our childhood.

My father bought the newspaper every morning with the same stubbornness with which he paid taxes: not because he trusted the State, but because he wanted to know exactly how the State was getting things wrong. The newsagent was not a merchant, but a witness. He saw men before they became their evening opinions. He knew who read politics, who crime news, who sports pages to avoid talking to their wife at breakfast. For much of the twentieth century, the newsstand was a form of sentimental education. My father would have kept buying the newspaper. Not to believe the news, but to have something to argue against.

With the advent of digital technology, the function of the newsstand dissolved not because information disappeared, but because the threshold disappeared. The internet does not display: it immerses. There is no longer a difference between showcase and archive, between edition and update. The reader no longer chooses between visible interpretations but receives a personalized sequence of confirmations, an unlimited semiosis governed by automatic procedures that no longer distinguish between news, commentary, and emotional reaction.

In the print world, news was necessarily finite: paper imposed a halt to interpretative proliferation. The next day a new newspaper arrived and the semiotic universe was reordered. In the digital world, instead, every event produces an infinite chain of metatexts — comments, reposts, corrections, ironies — which do not erase the previous one but incorporate it, like footnotes that consume the main text.

The newsstand survives today as a functional relic: it sells tickets and services, but preserves a symbolic form. It is the concrete memory of a time when truth had a support and therefore a duration. Yesterday’s newspaper was used to wrap fish because its informational function was over; the digital one cannot wrap anything and therefore never ends.

Perhaps this is why the newsstand continues to reassure us. Not because it represents the past of communication, but because it represents the possibility that the world can still be organized into a sequence of pages. A typographic illusion, certainly — but every civilization also lives through its well-ordered illusions.

The surviving newsstands in Italy are 12,000. In 2000 they were nearly 40,000. Over the last 25 years the number has decreased by about 70–75%, mainly due to the crisis of print media, changing reading habits, and economic factors.

The remaining newsstands also sell books. Crime, science fiction, espionage, and romance series such as Gialli Mondadori, Urania (founded in 1952 and historically directed by figures such as Fruttero and Lucentini), Segretissimo, Harmony. The Gialli Mondadori series is nearly one hundred years old, founded in the summer of 1929.

It marks the birth of a historic publishing brand, a unicum in Italian and global publishing, so iconic that it has become representative of an entire genre, extending beyond literature into cinema, theatre, and real events. From Agatha Christie to Patricia Cornwell to the apocryphal series dedicated to Sherlock Holmes, one can read very well at the newsstand.

And then books attached to newspapers, including prestigious collections dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini or Umberto Eco, often linked to anniversaries or deaths: Michela Murgia. Noir series or comics, while I write there is a major collection dedicated to Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt. Or a series on investigative journalism collecting major international press names, Pulitzer Prize winners, and historic journalists of the Corriere della Sera. Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya, The City of the Living by Nicola Lagioia, V13 by Emmanuel Carrère, All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Dispatches by Michael Herr, The Moro Affair by Leonardo Sciascia, The Short Cut by Italo Calvino, Terrestrial Chronicles by Dino Buzzati, The Long Road of Sand by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Repubblica responds with major American writers: Carver, DeLillo, Everett, Morrison, Oates, Foster Wallace. Print runs between 10,000 and 20,000 copies. Low price, high quality. Beautiful books.

When the internet arrived, the structure of the day — morning, afternoon edition, Saturday supplement — was replaced by a continuous present. The homepage replaced the display window: everything simultaneous, everything already open. The newsstand, which lived on waiting, suddenly became out of sync. Yet it did not disappear. It changed function. It became a place to buy bus tickets, stickers, phone top-ups, parcels delivered by couriers who no longer know where the city ends and logistics begins. Paper is no longer the main reason but an accessory memory: one of many goods, not the most profitable (average margin on a newspaper about 18–20%), but the one that gives dignity to the rest.

Meanwhile, reading has become privatized. Reading on a phone means never having to declare what one is reading: no visible covers, no aesthetic belonging. The newsstand, instead, was a form of involuntary exposure. Buying a political weekly or a puzzle magazine was a micro-public confession, recorded by the neutral gaze of the newsagent and the less neutral gaze of passersby. Today the algorithm knows tastes better than them, but it does not look at them: it calculates them.

The fundamental difference lies perhaps in time. The printed newspaper, once outdated, immediately became the past: its authority was inseparable from its planned obsolescence. The digital, on the contrary, simulates eternity, but at the cost of memory. News accumulates without sedimenting; journalism never becomes archive but remains a flowing surface. The newsstand was a device of urban stratification: today’s headlines above yesterday’s, beneath monthlies, next to almanacs. A geology of contemporaneity.

Today many pass by newsstands without stopping. Not because they do not read, but because they read everywhere. Yet the newsstand still performs a symbolic function: it reminds us that information was, for a long time, a physical encounter. Something to hold, to wait for, to share by accident.

If digital media has turned news into a flow, the newsstand remains a minimal dam, almost ornamental, against the indifference of continuity. It does not sell only paper: it sells the possibility that the world, at least once a day, has a precise edge.

ESSENTIALS is the weekly newsletter of nss magazine, delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.

Design Week is upon us, Coachella’s live sets are setting music fans worldwide on fire, the biggest luxury groups have released their quarterly results this week, and Kering has finally unveiled its ambitious turnaround plan. Yet all of these stories pale in comparison to the chaos that Donald Trump is unleashing against Italy — a country that is, indeed, on everyone’s lips right now. It started with the Pope, with a beef that began last week and has only grown more heated, reaching levels of involuntary comedy: the Vice President trying to explain theology to the Pope, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense thinking he’s quoting the Bible but actually quoting Pulp Fiction. Though from either of them (or their boss), we honestly don’t expect much culture.

Then it was Giorgia Meloni’s turn. After calling Trump’s attacks on the Pope “unacceptable,” she became his new target. Now Trump says Italy will get nothing from the United States. This attack seems to have woken up the Italian government, which after three and a half years of media circus has suddenly rediscovered the concept of “national interests.” Better late then never, right? Hoping we’ll soon be spared the media violence of hearing Trump’s name every single day (we’ve already been helplessly enduring this for a decade), we can only say: «Greetings from Italy, Mr. Trump!»

• With Design Week kicking off, you’ll need some orientation. As every year, our 2026 Design Week Map is here to help you navigate it.

• We interviewed Elettra Lamborghini, who told us about her life away from the spotlight and her relationship with social media.

• We attended CUPRA’s surprise event for the launch of the new CUPRA Raval and covered all the best moments of the night — including Mahmood’s concert.

• We’ve entered Taurus season. Will it relieve some of our troubles or bring new disasters? Find out in our latest astrological analysis.

• So… is Trump the new Jesus? We think he’s more closely associated with the competition, but maybe Americans can’t tell saints from devils.

• Summer is arriving early, bringing sun and stifling heat with it. You’d better get ready to protect your well-being — here’s how.

• The new Spring Collection 2026 from Ami Paris has finally arrived, and the brand has enlisted an exceptional face to present it: João Neves.

• Do you feel better talking about your problems with ChatGPT or with your friends? If you picked the first option, we have news for you.

• The Economist wonders why Italy, the third-largest economy in the EU, suffers from such a massive inferiority complex compared to other countries. The answer: we always want to be friends with everyone, at any cost.

• Trump has a problem with his voter base, and that problem is called “Iran.” The Atlantic breaks it down.

• The success of Geese was apparently entirely artificial. A new investigation by Wired.

• The Japan Times reports on how AI is being tested by monks in local temples to engage with the faithful — and not everyone is happy about it.

The Design Week 2026 is looming over Milan with all its branded pop-ups, but among the highest-profile events on the calendar, two in particular best illustrate the current state of fashion and its protagonists. The events we are referring to are the debut of Kris Van Assche at the Fuorisalone, with the series “Nectar Vessels Bronzes” and the new “Rosamar” ceramic collection for Serax, and the group exhibition INSIEME curated by Sabato De Sarno for Vanity Fair at Piscina Cozzi, which aims to tell the story of Italian craftsmanship through twelve projects created specifically for the show.

Neither exhibition is strictly about fashion, yet both speak directly to its audience given the importance the two creatives previously held as creative directors — a role both Van Assche and De Sarno have stepped away from in order to pursue broader cultural vocations. Their fame in the fashion world has allowed these projects to break out of their relatively niche spheres, while the credibility of their names has cemented the importance of the respective initiatives. This correspondence is no coincidence: theirs is simply the most extreme example of the evolution that the classic role of creative director is undergoing today.

In fashion, there is no shortage of cases where creative directors eventually become creatives, period. The most illustrious examples are Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang, who fully transitioned into artists after bidding farewell to fashion. We can also mention Jean Charles de Castelbajac, Miguel Adrover, Oliver Theyskens, and Hedi Slimane. The curatorial role of the modern creative director is already expressed at the brand level, as seen in the exhibitions Jonathan Anderson curated during his time at Loewe or the fixed cast of celebrities assembled around Alessandro Michele during his Gucci years, which ultimately came to define the brand’s personality.

But during Design Week, several designers will take on the role of curators for their brands’ initiatives: Demna will bring a retrospective exhibition on Gucci’s archives, Antonio Marras a multi-collaborative space intertwining fashion, design, and gastronomy, and Margherita Maccapani Missoni will open a pop-up store featuring artisanal objects, her own designs, and a collaborative capsule with The Luxury Collection. Just as brands have evolved from clothing manufacturers to narrators of a lifestyle — and thus of a culture — their creative directors have shifted from authors to curators through constant, cross-disciplinary dialogue with specialists from different fields.

Van Assche and De Sarno have taken the fundamental “quantum leap,” abandoning the role of interpreters within large maisons to exercise it personally — moving, in other words, from actors to cultural operators. In this transition, the two designers no longer simply sign collections for others but become the very center of the identity they construct. Freed from the mandate of a maison and its industrial logic, creatives can finally align their personal vision, aesthetic research, and narrative without compromise, defining their own rules, rhythms, and cultural references.

@yasirs.archive“My career is based on doing multiple things at once.” Virgil rejected the idea that you have to choose one identity (designer, DJ, architect, creative director). He believed working across different fields makes your ideas stronger @virgilabloh #virgilabloh#creatives#inspiration#fashion#motivation

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The great “authors” of fashion have always created and curated a multifaceted image across various media: from Yves Saint Laurent’s dialogues with artists like Mondrian and Maria Callas, to the connections between fashion and pop music explored by Gianni Versace or Ann Demeulemeester, the reference collages of Jun Takahashi, and the many projects Lee McQueen (already a great serial connector of artists like Philip Treacy and Shaun Leane) created with Nick Knight.

But in the modern era, it was the revolutionary Virgil Abloh who legitimized the cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary nature of the creative director role — perhaps the most important updater of the concept of contemporary creative director. With him was born the idea of a creative who produces an all-encompassing culture in which the wearable product is only the visible tip, but whose true weight is the sum of dialogues with music, product design, interiors, modern art, and publishing.

Of course others had preceded him (think of the long collaboration between Prada and Rem Koolhaas), but Abloh made that role the industry standard. After him, it became impossible to think of a fashion creator as a single isolated author, and brands themselves understood they could leverage the relevance and credibility of their collaborators while also achieving commercial returns — whether through Saint Laurent’s films and sushi restaurant or the Zara Home furnishings signed by Vincent Van Duysen.

An indirect revolution brought by Virgil Abloh to the concept of creative director was the reinvention of authorship itself. In the world of mass-produced fashion sold globally, no one can still believe that the creative director personally designs every single product that ends up in stores. This is why the figure of the “author” stylist has been replaced by that of the “coordinator” creative: pure sartorial skills have given way to taste and pure vision.

Authorship is replaced by the authority to choose, connect, elevate, and educate. The brand is no longer just a name but an aesthetic sensibility. That sensibility is both personal and applicable to every imaginable sphere of human creativity. The next step was short. With the creative director’s role now expanded beyond clothing to other areas of design, the person in that position finds themselves at the center of a dense network of connections in which clothes are ultimately the most earthly and commercial aspect, while the cultural dimension can expand to unforeseen scales and heights.

Considering the cynical commercial side of fashion, the inhuman production rhythms, the unrealistic expectations of investors, and the often philistine tastes of the public, it is easy to understand why a creative director might prefer to become a creative tout court. Which leads us to a new reflection: could the desire for emancipation we are seeing among fashion designers — even at Design Week — stem from the search for a more significant cultural impact than the sales percentages of a bag or a pair of shoes?

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The world no longer seems the same. And while the President of the United States appears so unhinged that he is clashing with the Pope himself, and while truces and wars continue in a chaotic whirlwind, the rest of the West finds itself living with an ever-deepening cognitive dissonance. People are returning to dance at Coachella and debating on social media about the behind-the-scenes beef on Euphoria, but on the other side of the world, missiles are falling. Preparations are underway for the Cannes red carpet and Design Week, yet the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Fashion thinks about sponsoring, runway shows, and expanding, but the very pillars of the earth are shaking beneath its feet. It’s a mad, mad April. But even madder is our indifference to a world out of control—one to which we have now become numb.

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In the latest trailer for the highly anticipated The Devil Wears Prada 2 we see the character of Nigel, played by Stanley Tucci, styling Andy Sachs by pulling pieces from various brands out of a large wardrobe: the first is Fendi, quite predictable; followed by Brunello Cucinelli (“We loooove that,” comments the character) and finally Toteme. A significant choice, since these are the only brands mentioned in a trailer that in just over 48 hours has surpassed 6 million views and that, therefore, enjoy extremely high visibility in the film’s communication.

The only other brand mentioned is Chanel, whose garments Andy Sachs has given away because they were too “important” for her editorial job. A choice that Miranda’s new assistant comments on with shock: “Who gives away Chanel?” But in a film with such high impact, whose filming involved Milan Fashion Week itself, a Vogue cover in which Meryl Streep posed alongside Anna Wintour, and product placement worth tens of millions (we’ll have to see how much of a blockbuster the film will be, but it looks like it will be), the name-dropping of brands reflects the change taking place in the world of luxury.

While in the 2006 film screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna mentioned fairly conventional brands, later immortalized by the film’s most famous lines, the brands cited in this sequel’s trailer speak of a new luxury world in which it is no longer just the big fashion houses dominating the scene, but a multipolar ecosystem of brands. The hegemony of the major names appears to have weakened in favor of a more fragmented scenario. But what picture of today’s fashion does The Devil Wears Prada 2 seem to offer?

In the first The Devil Wears Prada, the brands mentioned were highly institutional: Chanel, Dolce&Gabbana, Valentino, Calvin Klein, and Hermès are the first that come to mind, in addition to Prada, of course. Along with Miranda Priestly’s vintage pieces by Bill Blass and Dennis Basso, it was a relatively mainstream and recognizable fashion that spoke of pop brands in a rapidly expanding industry: it was the prosperity preceding the 2008 crash, the moment of the it-bags, flashy accessories, and bling.

In the sequel, some things have remained the same but many others have changed. Would a brand like Brunello Cucinelli have had a place in the first film? Probably not, but now that it has become a global player, it has launched its own it-bag, and above all is increasingly cited and mentioned in the ultra-luxury discourse, its inclusion makes perfect sense. The inclusion of Toteme is also indicative: the Swedish brand is among those that, riding the quiet luxury wave, have expanded the most in recent years, first becoming a commercial success, then the emblem of a contemporary luxury alternative to that of the big Parisian and Italian brands.

The fashion landscape that the film now seems to describe is much broader than in 2006. Alongside Dior and Armani garments, the new trailers are full of pieces by Dries Van Noten and Rick Owens; there’s a Phoebe Philo t-shirt and a sacai skirt, as well as pieces by AGOLDE, Gabriela Hearst, Monse, and Ulla Johnson, to name just a few. These choices demonstrate that, in the golden age of magazines, the truly famous brands were the most canonical ones, while today we see a fragmentation of the market — that is, a transition from a concentrated industry driven by a few mega-brands to a multipolar landscape, where dozens of micro-markets coexist with different logics of price, identity, channel, and perceived value. But what has changed?

@newtakefive„We definitely need an embroidered two-piece #Toteme set but not the terracotta because you‘re SO pale.“🫢 #thedevilwearsprada #annehathaway #stanleytucci #devilwearsprada2

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If, thanks to social media, fashion has become practically part of the entertainment industry (a phenomenon that the 2006 The Devil Wears Prada effectively helped create), the new digital media that appeared between the original film and the sequel have led to an extreme fragmentation of the luxury landscape. At the time of the first film, it made sense to focus on the most mainstream names, because brands like Maison Margiela, Helmut Lang, or Comme des Garçons would have been unknown to a large part of the audience, even though they were just as relevant as Valentino, Armani, Fendi, and all the others.

According to a report by the Boston Consulting Group, Gen Z, which represents 40% of fashion spending in the US, buys on average from 15-20 brands per year compared to the ten per year they bought in 2005. They discover them mainly through social media and influencers and are 1.5 times more likely than those over 28 to discover brands via social media and 1.3 times more inclined to judge a brand’s status based on follower count or social engagement. Above all, the new generation makes product-driven choices rather than brand-driven ones, preferring parameters such as price, quality, durability, and comfort over mere heritage or brand history.

Already a year ago, McKinsey’s The State of Fashion 2025 report indicated that only 29% of Gen Z’s wardrobe came from the same brand, while for those over fifty the percentage rose to 52%. Only 33% of the latter had said they explore and buy new brands, compared to 50% of Gen Z. Therefore, not only is an increasingly high percentage of new consumers effectively indifferent to heritage, but what analysts see as market fragmentation represents for many a plurality — that is, an increase in valid options to choose from.

It is no coincidence that Brunello Cucinelli and Toteme are two extremely product-driven brands, recently popularized by influencers. In this sense, the film already seems to describe from the trailer a double parallel trend that is dividing the fashion market. The first is the polarization between high-end and aspirational luxury. Product-focused brands, just like Brunello Cucinelli but also Hermès or The Row, are growing at double-digit rates at a time of crisis for mega-group luxury. The other is the rise of the segment defined by BoF as “advanced contemporary”.

Toteme is in this sense the symbol-brand of that mid-market luxury which, according to the latest The State of Fashion 2026, «is the fastest growing segment, replacing luxury as fashion’s main value creator». In Andy’s wardrobe, this trend is also signaled by the inclusion of Golden Goose boots and several pieces from the New York brand TWP by Trish Wescoat Pound. Even Miranda wears Jacquemus heels, which BoF includes among the best-known brands in the accessible segment, along with Aritizia, another brand seen on Andy Sachs.

Then there is the world of the major brands, represented in the trailer by the name-dropping of Fendi and Chanel. Fendi is a brand that, let us remember, despite generating low organic media buzz outside viral moments like the centenary show or Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut, remains absurdly popular on social media thanks to secondhand: the Baguette is among the 10 most searched bags of 2025 on Fashionphile, while a few days ago Vogue described how the Spy Bag has become more expensive and thus more sought-after on The RealReal after its reintroduction on the runway.

Meanwhile, Chanel is mentioned by Andy Sachs when she says she gave away (resold?) her old pieces, indirectly mentioning the existence of a secondhand market. Elsewhere, among the costumes of Andy Sachs seen in paparazzi photos there is a second-hand 1990s Jean-Paul Gaultier suit and an 1980s Coach Metropolitan Briefcase. Could it be that the film’s costume designer, Molly Rogers — who is once again replacing Patricia Field, as she did with And Just Like That — wanted to tell us something about the state of contemporary fashion through the scenes of a film that precisely talks about generational change and fashion at the crossroads between traditional print media and new digital media? We can only hope that the screenplay lives up to the wardrobe.

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Amid the less fortunate news surrounding the looming energy crisis and the worsening clashes in the Middle East, there are also updates that bring a sigh of relief - at least for a moment. In Shanghai, during the local Fashion Week, several independent designers such as Mark Gong and Samuel Gui Yang are bringing a fresh wave of creativity to the runway. The two designers draw inspiration from European style but infuse it with a highly personal touch, offering a new perspective that the fashion industry greatly needs. During the same week, Glenn Martens presented his new creative direction for Maison Margiela in China, with a show that certainly made an impact, polarizing both the press and the brand’s fans.

In short, amid all this disorder, fashion is still managing to find a glimmer of hope - just in time for the Easter weekend, when it can finally get a bit of rest.

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Cities change, habits change, and clothing changes with them. Since its foundation in 1971 by Massimo Osti, first under the name Chester Perry, C.P. Company has approached design as a way of reading the present through function, research and material experimentation. Over the decades, the brand has become one of the defining names in Italian sportswear, not for following trends, but for turning the realities of contemporary life into garments.

It was precisely this research-driven approach that made possible one of the brand’s most significant eras: Urban Protection, a collection that redefined what clothing could mean in the modern city.

When Moreno Ferrari was appointed Creative Director in 1997, he shifted the collection’s focus away from the garment-dyed natural fibres that had defined much of the label’s identity, towards a harder, more industrial vocabulary, one better suited to the anxieties of a city approaching the new millennium.

Where earlier C.P. Company collections had interpreted everyday life through utility, colour, and fabric research, Urban Protection reframed clothing as a system of defence: a response to the instability, pollution, and social fragmentation of the late 1990s metropolis. Ferrari’s starting point was the street itself:

That observation led to a rigorous process of material research. As Ferrari explained, the work began from a deep analysis of safety workwear and the relationship between fabric and polluted environments. The result was Dynafil TS-70, an oil-proof, stab-proof and rip-proof black nylon developed for industrial environments, which became the signature material of the collection and the foundation upon which its entire visual language was built.

From there, Urban Protection expanded into a fully formed universe of garments and accessories conceived for urban survival. Gas masks, emergency alarms, torches, pollution detectors, and headphones were not applied as futuristic decoration, but integrated as functional devices, each one evoking a particular aspect of the modern city as a site of tension, vulnerability and adaptation.

At the centre of this vision stood the Metropolis jacket, first released in SS99. More than any other piece, it crystallised the collection’s central proposition: that clothing could operate as an interface between the body and the urban environment, mediating between exposure and protection, visibility and anonymity. But in the collection, two other objects capture this vision particularly well, each from a different angle.

The Rest, from FW00, was a backpack that converted into a stool. Designed by Ferrari for waiting in the modern non-spaces of contemporary life - airports, transit zones, the anonymous thresholds of the city - it treated urban endurance not as a metaphor, but as a practical problem to be solved.

The Beekeeper coat, from Autumn/Winter 2000-01, operated on a different register entirely. Modelled on an apiarist’s garment and dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini, it introduced a poetic dimension to the collection, born from the tension between rural and urban, between a disappearing Italy and the dystopian city he was designing for.

Together, they define the range of Urban Protection: rigorous and functional on one side, culturally aware and deeply personal on the other.

Urban Protection’s underlying questions soon pushed Ferrari beyond the boundaries of conventional outerwear. The Transformables range, first released in Spring/Summer 2000, pushed that research into entirely new territory.

Made from transparent polyurethane or a rubberised rip-proof two-layer nylon derived from competitive cycling rain shells, the Transformables were objects that refused to stay still. Vests became backpacks, capes became hammocks, jackets became inflatable chairs, kites, sleeping bags, or tents. Ferrari described his ambition in a conversation with Cristina Morozzi in 2000:

Each Transformable carried a deeply personal association. Ferrari was particularly fond of the jacket that transformed into a sleeping bag – for him, a symbol of freedom, independence and nomadic experience. The tents, meanwhile, were inspired by a scene from the French arthouse film Corps à Coeur, directed by Paul Vecchiali, in which a man waits outside his beloved’s house in a tent. That image was enough to convince Ferrari to design an entire range of objects around the emotion of waiting. The jacket that turns into a kite, he says, is «my soul.»

Ferrari’s creative era at C.P. Company remained a defining moment in the brand’s history, but its underlying questions never disappeared. Decades later, the brand returned to that same proposition with Metropolis Series, relaunched in 2020 and named after the jacket that had come to define the original collection.

The premise remains one of protection, but the terms have shifted. Where Urban Protection responded to a specific moment of late twentieth-century anxiety, Metropolis Series reframes that concern in more architectural and enduring terms. Clothing is conceived not as a mask, but as a shield: a structure that allows the wearer to move through the urban environment while preserving discretion, autonomy, and identity.

The collection resists the rhetoric of hyper-visibility that defines much of contemporary fashion. It proposes instead a quieter idea of presence, one grounded in continuity and function rather than spectacle. To understand what Metropolis Series is trying to do, it helps to think about clothing differently.

The cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan argued that garments are not merely coverings, but extensions of the skin itself: mechanisms that regulate exchange between the body and its surroundings while defining the social self. Metropolis Series takes that idea, translating it into a language of essential forms, resilient construction, and purposeful protection.

Where fashion often celebrates transience, Metropolis Series insists on endurance. Clothing conceived not as a seasonal statement, but as infrastructure: built to last, designed to support life in the city with intelligence, resilience, and measure.

ESSENTIALS is the weekly newsletter of nss magazine, delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.

With an energy crisis looming not too far on the horizon, the fashion dream shows no signs of ending. Some have compared the Western markets in recent weeks to a car speeding toward a wall in the hope that, at the last moment, the wall will vanish into thin air. We don’t yet know when the impact will occur, but the first reports are already circulating online about the cost, logistics, and store closure issues in the Middle East that brands will have to face. Could such an unfortunate situation plunge the fashion markets into even greater chaos than that seen in 2025? If this is truly the calm before the storm, we’d better keep track of which way the wind is blowing.

nss G-Club is now on Substack. Subscribe for interviews, opinions, trends, updates, and reflections on the world of beauty and wellness, starting with Under The Beauty Radar, a format dedicated to beauty artists in all its forms.

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Chanel has just launched a new campaign directed by Michel Gondry for the CHANEL 25 bag, starring Margot Robbie. The actress from Wuthering Heights meets all the versions of herself on the street, each wearing a different iteration of the French maison’s new bag.

Recently, the theme of clones, especially digital ones, has returned multiple times in fashion: just think of Prada’s Ritual Identities campaign for the Galleria bag, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Scarlett Johansson, or H&M’s advertisement from last March featuring 33 pairs of “digital twins” created with AI. In all three cases, the common denominator is the clone. Each project tells in its own way not only a different aspect of fashion, but also of the times we are living in.

@chanelofficialThe CHANEL 25 Handbag Campaign​ ​ Starring Margot Robbie and directed by Michel Gondry, the film of the CHANEL 25 campaign unfolds as a contemporary take on Kylie Minogue’s video "Come Into My World". The pop icon herself makes a special appearance in the film, 25 years after the release of her track.​ ​ #CHANEL #CHANEL25​

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Twenty years after the release of the music video for Come Into My World, French director Michel Gondry returns behind the camera to present all the versions of Margot Robbie, each with a different CHANEL 25. As a tribute to the 2002 video, singer Kylie Minogue even makes an appearance in the video, on a set that recalls a Parisian neighborhood.

One might infer that the connotation of the song’s title, together with the choice of Margot Robbie as the protagonist, represents an invitation from Chanel into the new imaginary of Matthieu Blazy. In this sense, the clone device represents two values: the plurality of the Chanel woman imagined by the maison’s new creative director, combined with a surrealist cue that does not hide but rather enhances the sense of technological artifice, bordering on surrealism.

In Ritual Identities, Scarlett Johansson, who already starred in Jonathan Glazer’s 2024 short film, returns to act for Prada, this time directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. From the creative encounter between muse and creator emerges a sort of microcosm in the form of a feature film: Scarlett Johansson performs complex and mysterious rituals, unusual actions in archetypal settings of modern life and, during these processes, she duplicates and meets countless versions of herself. The film explores the concept of fluidity of personality, starting from the actress and then shifting the focus onto Prada.

In this context, the Galleria bag embodies and replaces reality just like a clone, making us think that the focus of the campaign is on Scarlett Johansson and Yorgos Lanthimos, when in truth the real protagonist is the bag itself. Prada, a brand that has always made intellectual collaborations its strength, stages the different identities of the contemporary woman as interpreted by Johansson, reproducing a theater of the everyday in which we all vent, through objects, small neuroses or peculiar gestures that tend to define us as human beings.

The theme of duality and the clone made headlines again last year with a controversial H&M campaign. Starting from the digital scanning of real models’ bodies, the brand created 33 pairs of “digital twins” to replace the “real” ones in the new advertising images. As we might have expected, the project sparked criticism and controversy among both industry professionals and the public, demonstrating how the use of new technologies in fashion remains a sensitive issue.

It is ironic that a reflection on the copy, albeit unintentionally, emerges from an H&M campaign, whose products are often “dupes” of luxury brand items: a short circuit that almost turns AI into a trap, worsening its position as a brand associated with lower-quality copies. Moreover, all this happens at a time when the creative industry is experiencing a certain anxiety about AI, seen as something that could become more performant than humans, even replacing them.

The campaign seems to address this tension lightly, playing on a duality that does not truly put digital and real in conflict, but rather creates complicity: the models joke about having “digital twins”. At the same time, it does not dwell on the deeper issues: can Digital Twins be paid? What is the point of the model figure if she is duplicated or replaced? Is it just a matter of cost-saving or is there something more? The campaign, similar to those created with AI by other mass-market brands, has helped make artificial intelligence not only an ethical issue, but also a legal one: New York’s Fashion Workers Act, which protects models from mistreatment and abuse, now also includes protection from the use of AI.

In a period in which AI has invaded our lives, it makes us question everything we see, from advertisements to the news itself. In response, brands leverage humanity (Prada’s intellectuality, Margot Robbie’s insistence for Chanel, the real-yet-fake models for H&M) to appear credible. Even though, in reality, all three brands have made use of new technologies, AI or not.

Multiplying Margot Robbie, one of the most beloved actresses of the moment, whose very presence - as in Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie - already takes a stance on a complex socio-political context, means reaffirming a precise intent. Reproducing her once, twice, three, five times is not a simple visual device, but a conceptual gesture: Chanel, like many other brands, seems to want to talk about authenticity through contemporary technologies, suggesting that what sells today is precisely authenticity - or, more precisely, its construction.

After all, every day we ourselves are responsible for producing copies of ourselves: continuous adaptations that allow us to adapt to everyday contexts. This is where the discourse becomes even more interesting, at the point where advertising and identity both converge in the same tension toward authenticity. Because, ultimately, a copy is nothing more than a reiterated concept, which finds its affirmation in repetition, or, in the most distracted cases, its dissipation in the multitude.