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

The second week of July was nothing short of relentless. Beyond the scorching temperatures, the FW26 - 27 Paris Haute Couture Week has just wrapped, and there wasn’t a single moment to let our guard down. The week kicked off with Taylor Swift’s private-though hardly secret wedding at Madison Square Garden, an event eagerly anticipated by fans and endlessly debated by the wider public. After all, New York is firmly reclaiming its place at the center of the cultural conversation. Across the Atlantic, however, Paris is holding its own. Haute Couture Week delivered no shortage of unforgettable moments, beginning with Pierpaolo Piccioli’s highly anticipated debut as Balenciaga‘s creative director, one of the most closely watched premieres of the season. Meanwhile, Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Jonathan Anderson at Dior once again proved to be the driving forces of the French capital, captivating audiences with dreamlike, pastoral collections. Love it or hate it, fashion is still very much alive. And it continues to surprise us, even when the summer heat seems determined to stand in its way.

• Innovation can create even more room for creativity. “Technology shouldn’t replace the human element, it should set it free”. A look at the future of wholesale with NuORDER by Lightspeed and Mandatory.

• The cup cut is this season’s most versatile haircut. Here’s everything you need to know about the style that’s giving long hair a fresh new lease on life.

• Serena Brancale unexpectedly lit up Milan’s Piazza Bruno Buozzi with a DJ set and a traditional Puglian bocce tournament. Here’s what went down during Raffo’s “Piazzetta Pugliese” weekend.

• Why Disability Pride Month still matters: an international movement that continues to grow and push for greater inclusion.

• It’s time to find a pen pal. Gen Z has rediscovered the joy of writing letters.

• July’s beauty playlist is all about embracing the sound of summer rather than performing it. This month’s mood, curated by Nu Genea, Paris Hilton, and more.

• The ultra-rich are now building private snow rooms. Here’s everything you need to know about the latest luxury obsession.

• Which summer movie protagonist are you? Find out with July’s tarot reading.

• The New York Times explores the role of data in the emerging AI economy, explaining why it could become the most valuable resource of the next decade.

• The Atlantic examines how artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are making the case that artificial intelligence can become a powerful creative partner rather than a threat to artistic expression.

• How has the way we look at our own faces changed? The New Yorker has the answer.

• According to The Atlantic, we’re entering a “post-literate” era in which reading is becoming increasingly peripheral with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Do you also have the feeling of drowning in Dior and Chanel? With this Haute Couture season, Jonathan Anderson walked for the eighth time in a year and Matthieu Blazy for the sixth. It seemed (and, in some ways, it was) just yesterday that we were talking about both brands’ Resort shows and Instagram moodboards hadn’t finished posting the last details of the re-see that the carousel started spinning again. And after the summer break, in September, there will be another two shows. And almost certainly another two before Christmas arrives. Needless to say, at this pace the various collections start to merge into one another.

But there is also the doubt about how it is possible to creatively manage and handle in the smallest details such an intense output. Who can humanly generate so many ideas in such a short time and remain brilliant? At a certain point one will have to repeat oneself or end up insisting on oneself. To make a comparison, the same Armani Group has brought six collections to the runway since the passing of the legendary founder, which are the same as Chanel’s, but divided into three brands, which makes the production pace certainly more “calm” albeit equally demanding. But why, for mega-commercial brands like Dior and Chanel, is presenting every 60 days so essential?

The main factor behind this extreme presentialism concerns the nature of the modern client. «If we are faced with consumers who today are more stable, who change less, with a lower arrival of new consumers, we must increase the speed of innovation», said Luca Solca yesterday speaking with journalists gathered for the presentation of the latest BCG-Altagamma report. «Because these consumers who have been in the market for a while already have yesterday’s or last year’s products». If at the time of the democratization of luxury, which took place from 2000 to 2007, niche brands that became large producers still had to fill the world’s wardrobes with their iconic products, today much of that void has been filled.

«I believe the point [of so many shows, ed.] is precisely to bring novelties and capture the consumer’s attention», Solca continued. «And then build all the engagement activity, social media and start this “snowball” that feeds itself». The game actually works: even if 56% of total fashion clients don’t even know who the creative director of a given brand is, it remains true that a quarter of ultra-rich clients (i.e. half of the market) buy from a brand precisely because there is a creative director while, in 15% of cases, they stop buying from a brand for the same reason.

«The creative director himself may not be recognized», said Solca, «but the fact that the product is new, that there is something new happening is recognized». And indeed the data confirm that the effect of novelty, the oldest trick in the marketing book, works. «We have seen that traffic in Chanel and Dior stores has doubled this year while that of Hermès is down 30% in our surveys». Obviously the new, by itself, is not enough. Using the example of Chanel, Solca pointed out that Blazy has been successful because he brought «something new that is consistent with the sentiment of the market but also consistent with the history of the brand and its DNA and with what we as consumers have in mind about the brand».

That said, since the frequency of Chanel and Dior’s releases actually helps to create curiosity with clients and increase in-store traffic, one must ask whether such a continuous cycle of novelty impacts the status of Haute Couture as a category. For the home audience, i.e. the vast majority of the public, who watch the shows through screens and images, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish one collection from another, especially since ready-to-wear collections often include extremely elaborate garments and Haute Couture ones can include very simple ones. It is clear that the difference exists, but when everything is resolved in the image it is difficult not to lump all these shows together into a single continuous block.

And when the shows are so frequent and close together, almost taking your breath away, even the ideas of the excellent creative directors risk seeming repetitive and the work, for example, of defining a silhouette and a style flattens into a sense of déjà vu and repetition. The frequency of the releases, no matter how excellent, tends to deprive them of specificity and memorability given that the relentless bimonthly show schedule creates a nail-driving-nail effect in which the concept of the single show gets lost and one cannot even analyze those distinctive details that have now become too minute or too connected to niche artists to be understood.

The question, in the end, does not concern the quality of the work, which in both cases remains beyond discussion, but the context in which this work is shown and consumed. Haute Couture was born as a category of the exceptional, the rare, the unreplicable: a biannual appointment that had the time to settle in the collective imagination before the next one replaced it. Today that time no longer exists, and the consequence is not a devaluation of the garments themselves, but a devaluation of the moment, of that ability to amaze which, by definition, requires a minimum distance between one appearance and the next.

Haute Couture thus risks becoming one collection among dozens of others. Chanel and Dior will continue to produce extraordinary work, and their clients will continue to know it. But for everyone else, for that public that watches from afar and builds desire through images, the risk is that Couture stops seeming like an event and simply becomes yet another piece of content: beautiful, impeccable, and already forgotten before the next one arrives.

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

Between Men’s Fashion Week and the upcoming Couture Week, fashion usually starts pulling down the shutters. The inbox gets quieter, the industry heads for the coast, and the news cycle slows just enough to make room for long lunches and longer holidays. But not this summer. This week, we unveiled Paris Noir, the third and final issue of nss france, closing a three-year editorial journey dedicated to telling the French dream through the eyes of nss. Inside its pages, you’ll find exclusive conversations with Etienne Russo and Michèle Lamy, as well as Ellen Hodakova, Matières Fécales and many more stories about the new generation reshaping the city’s cultural landscape, all connected by the same desire to blur the line between fashion and reality. So while the industry may be slowing down for summer, we’re keeping the lights on – dimmed, of course.

• «Let us all resist together» is the cover story of Paris Noir, an intimate conversation between Etienne Russo and Michèle Lamy.

• The wedding of all weddings is happening this weekend: what do we know about the much-speculated Swift/Kelce Madison Square Garden extravaganza?

• Lacoste and Alpine just unveiled a historic collaboration.

• Is it really tragic to use expired makeup? Here’s our rundown.

• Your favorite fashion icons are romanticizing surveillance, and it’s a problem.

• Elodie is dating a woman – and men are upset.

• The biggest fashion trend to come out of Men’s SS27 is glittery clothes.

• Want to know how your summer 2026 love life will go? Our horoscope is a tell-all.

• Gay men are falling for AI deepfakes, more on Vox.

• The Cut argues that only three fashion designers know what people want currently – find out who they are.

• People yearn for fewer digital connections, and Dazed reports that landline phones are “so back”.

• The New Yorker claims that Fro-Yo, Millennials’ favorite summertime sweet treat, is viral again.

After extensive field analysis and microscopic examination, we arrived at the underlying disease of fashion management: short-term, indeed, ultra-short-term, strategies. A planning horizon that stretches only to the next quarter, a vision that lasts only until the next bonus. The short-strategy CEO (whom, for convenience, we will call ShortSight) optimizes the present, mortgages the future, and then presents both as a triumph, because by the time the bill comes due, it will already be addressed to someone else. The obvious temptation, of course, is to fire them.

Fashion’s ShortSights are not cured by replacing people, but by transforming their education. Not with yet another MBA or a more prestigious pedigree; fashion is saturated with pedigree and starved of ideas. What is needed is something else entirely: a profound external recoding.

This recoding rests on three words that share the same initial letter and have no decorative purpose whatsoever. They arrive at exactly the right moment, because the new AI framework is rewriting the rules of work and stripping ShortSight of its last remaining alibis. Anticipating, interpreting, and synthesizing are no longer rare talents but the minimum requirement, leaving the short-range manager with nowhere left to hide: the machine already does, and does better, what he used to pass off as vision. What remains is only what the machine cannot do. And it is precisely there that the three U’s become the scarce commodity.

1. Humility of role

Humility of role means distancing oneself from the symbols of luxury, the right car, the right watch, the right table at the right restaurant, and understanding a physical law that nobody teaches: displayed prestige is inversely proportional to real authority. It means being visible in the company, on the sales floor and in the warehouse, instead of barricading yourself in a glass office answering only the emails that matter. It means staying informed about the world, not just about clothes, because those who know only their own collection, upon closer inspection, do not truly know even that. And it means having the stomach to study competitors and even respect them, rather than dismissing them with a joke over dinner: anyone unable to mention a rival respectfully has, almost invariably, failed to understand them.

2. Unity of values

Unity of values means, above all, the opposite of cliques and alliances: no factions, no camps, no private elevators reserved for friends of friends. A team united by values argues during meetings and then rows in the same direction; a company split into factions rows in twenty directions and calls its own shipwreck “politics.” Values are the only glue that holds under pressure. Alliances, by contrast, melt away at the first change of leadership, like ice cream left under the August sun.

3. Uniqueness of the team.

The uniqueness of the team is the only truly non-replicable asset, and it is built in two steps. First: bring out everyone’s talent, not just the usual four familiar names, because talent is distributed throughout an organization far more democratically than is convenient to admit. Second: raise the overall standard every single day, beginning with the quality of communication, the most merciless reflection of the quality of thought. People are chosen for who they are, not for the boxes they fill, and their uniqueness is protected rather than sanded down until they become as interchangeable as screws.

This is where the most delicious paradox emerges. In the fashion world of the post-luxury era, which I would define as autistically randomized, all signals without a message, all movement without direction, it is precisely these three U’s that reward new models of growth and a different generation of managers. People less interested in the labels on lunch invitations and more attentive to the details of individuals. While the old guard counts the seats around the table, the new one counts the right minds in the room. The problem is that, until yesterday, we rewarded the exact opposite and called them leaders. They were simply the ones who were best at looking like leaders.

It is on this foundation that the following framework is built.

1. Autonomy

The first competency is also the rarest: the ability to decide without asking for permission. Not from the board at every turn, nor from a consultant with every new slide deck. A CEO must own their authority, not borrow it on loan and keep it vacuum-sealed for fear of wearing it out. Those who cannot decide on their own do not lead the company: they merely keep it warm for someone else, who will eventually make the decisions in their place, by the hour and on invoice.

2. The Ability to Lead from the Ground Up

True authority does not descend from the organizational chart; it rises from the cash register, the warehouse, the showroom, and customer service. A leader who has never sold, never made a mistake with an order, never faced an angry customer head-on commands by position rather than by competence, and everyone can see it from a mile away. Leadership should be cultivated from the ground floor upward, earned rather than inherited by virtue of occupying the right office.

3. Cultural Proximity to Consumers

Not the target audiences on PowerPoint decks, people. What they watch, what they listen to, what makes them laugh, what they desire, and what they stopped desiring just last month. The cultural distance between those who design the product and those who buy it has become a chasm, patched over with market research skimmed diagonally between flights. A fashion CEO must live within the customer’s culture: we need people who can recognize consumers on the subway and who understand that consumers do not need luxury itself, they need the emotion of a promise.

4. Strong Functional Literacy

Being able to personally read, not delegate, a company’s income statement, cash flow, channel profitability, and understand the difference between pricing and costing, between depreciation and impairment. A business survives on EBITDA and cash. Anyone who understands only product, or is merely “good with customers”, is a guest in the boardroom, not the owner of the house. The strongest leaders often also have the advantage of a genuine technical background.

5. The Spirit of Improvisation

Improvisation in the sense of jazz, not karaoke. Knowing the structure so deeply that you can depart from it at exactly the moment it becomes necessary. It is not chaos, it is trained responsiveness. The market does not follow the fashion calendar, and a CEO who can operate only within the written score freezes the moment the music changes key.

6. Inclusive Listening

The most valuable signals come from those who are lowest in the hierarchy and furthest from headquarters, where information is still raw and truthful before it is cooked, plated, and served up the chain of command seasoned to the boss’s taste. Inclusive listening means trusting the periphery more than your inner circle, and being more suspicious of unanimous agreement than of isolated dissent.

7. Anticipatory Thinking

Thinking ex ante, the revolutionary idea of recognizing problems before they explode. Apparently too exotic a concept for an industry that has turned the autopsy into its preferred management method. The ShortSight CEO does not prevent problems; they comment on them. They arrive at the disaster scene with the solemn expression of a coroner and exactly the same usefulness. Long-range vision must be cultivated, even if many executives will inevitably be diagnosed with the very convenient condition of rent-seeking myopia.

8. Orchestral Vision

Conducting the entire score, EBITDA and product, retail and digital, people and technology, instead of endlessly strumming the one instrument you know by heart, usually public relations. Our management ranks are crowded with soloists convinced they are conductors: they wave the baton, the orchestra plays whatever it pleases, and they call the resulting noise “leadership.” Very few can actually read the score. Even fewer suspect that the score exists at all.

9. The Courage to Rewrite the Rules

The audacity to challenge a principle that everyone reveres as though it were a law of nature, simply because it was already there when they arrived. Rewrite the rules instead of following them more diligently than your predecessor in exchange for a reassuring pat on the back. But asking for courage from someone who built an entire career on never disturbing the status quo is like asking a courtier to abolish the court: they will nod, smile, perhaps even become emotional, but they will not lift a finger.

10. Agentic Fluency

Understanding AI for what it truly is, not buying yet another overpriced ERP system just to wear the innovator’s badge, nor outsourcing “digital” to the intern simply because they are the only person in the company with a TikTok account. Everything is moving ex ante; everything is becoming agentic. Fashion management responds with a fifteen-second dance video, convinced that it is enough to appear younger. Spoiler: it is not. Everyone can see that beneath the baseball cap is a grandfather dressed up as his grandson, and by then, even the grandson has already looked the other way.

There is, finally, one competence that is not a competence: symbolism. The new CEO must change both wardrobe and grammar. Less ostentatious luxury and more genuine casualness, less ceremony and more construction site. Not the armor-like suit that keeps everyone at arm’s length, but the clothes of someone ready to truly get them dirty. The leader we need does not stand on a pedestal, posing for portraits with the right lighting and a saintly air of inspiration. They stand inside the furnace of problems, where the real bread of the company is baked, and where, incidentally, bishops never show up. The pedestal is comfortable, of course, but from up there you can see everything except the floor that is collapsing beneath your feet.

These ten investments are not a checklist for HR; they are a vaccine against the ShortSight CEO. Autonomy against dependence on consultants. Long vision against quarterly horizons. Literacy against bluff. Courage against ritual. And as their foundation, the three U’s: humility of role, unity of values, uniqueness of the team.

But the real question is not what a new CEO must know. It is what they must be made of. Temperament, availability, assertiveness, education. A personality infused with curiosity, the real kind that asks uncomfortable questions instead of collecting reassuring answers. A spirit of sacrifice that is not performed in interviews but visible in actions, and a chosen, not imposed, frugality, because ostentation in a leader is almost always the first symptom of insecurity: the peacock spreads its feathers precisely when it is most afraid. And someone capable of managing their agenda and anticipating priorities through a modular model.

Finally, there must be an almost obsessive attention to younger generations. A new manager must already be in the field before the age of thirty, which today is almost impossible. Within three years, every company will have its own prompt management, its own grammar of work with machines, and therefore its own semantics: a unique way of naming things and making them happen. That semantics cannot be embodied by a bishop-like CEO, elevated and robed, who blesses from above and never descends from the throne. It can only be embodied by a frontier CEO, someone who walks the ground, able to stand on both sides of the wall, between clients and colleagues, between juniors and seniors, without feeling diminished by anyone.

This is the leap fashion has never had the courage to make: from the Euclidean geometry of EBITDA, precise and useful but desperately flat, to relativity, where a leader bends the company’s space and time instead of being bent by them. Not to ride the political shift of the month, but to demote politics to what it should be: an accessory, not the core of one’s value system. The day our top executives keep politics in their pocket and values in their hands, not the other way around, we will truly have stopped producing ShortSights. Not a moment sooner.

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

As if the tropical heat sweeping through the city wasn’t already enough to test our limits, Fashion Month has arrived, bringing with it a wave of change. At Moschino, the ground is shaking once again: Adrian Appiolaza is stepping down as creative director, reopening one of the most closely watched stories in Italian fashion. Meanwhile, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons continue to tighten Prada’s signature silhouettes, as speculation keeps growing that Dario Vitale could become the next creative director of Emporio Armani.

In Paris, the mood shifts from techwear couture to designers who finally seem to have found their balance. Jonathan Anderson, with his SS27 collection, continues to build Dior’s new creative ecosystem. From the sweltering heat and Peter Wu’s workwear, the week moves into the almost therapeutic calm of the all white world imagined by Lemaire for SS27. Louis Vuitton, meanwhile, carries on as though the world around it weren’t burning, confidently relying on its own certainties, while Valentino is beginning to show a few cracks. And if we’re all looking for some relief, a sense of balance or simply a patch of shade, perhaps the new wave of jelly shoes promises nothing more than deceptive comfort. Thankfully, Dries Van Noten’s SS27 reminds us that summer can still be embraced with a little more enthusiasm or, at the very least, with impeccable taste.

• How did HEYDUDE’s TAKE A HEYCATION event go in Rome? From afternoon into the evening, the Fuori di Viale Parioli kiosk was transformed into a beach club.

• When secretly photographing women becomes so normalized it turns into “Art”. Beyond the Ray Banhoff case.

• A Prada x Gentle Monster collaboration Is on the way. Could it be the partnership of the year?

• It’s too hot for Pride. Extreme heat is making public space less inclusive. Making Pride truly accessible means rethinking schedules and formats.

• “You’ve made clothes, but have you made fashion?” An interview with Andrew Groves. We met the professor, archivist and designer during Milan Fashion Week.

• The best salty fragrances for summer. Scents with marine notes that capture the smell of skin after a day at the beach, in countless interpretations.

• The latest season of The Bear is frustrating and that’s exactly why it works. A farewell to one of the most influential series of modern television.

• “The true success of a fragrance lies in balance”. An interview with Vanina Muracciole, independent perfumer at Jeroboam.

• AI could become the world’s greatest teacher. But, as The Atlantic argues, the smartest investment is still in people.

• To survive fashion’s crisis, more designers are turning to tailor-made. The Financial Times explores the return of garments created for one person and one person only.

• More and more consumers are using AI to get refunds from online retailers. Now, WWD reports, retailers are beginning to worry.

• Brands are replacing influencers with people who don’t exist. The Guardian explores how AI generated avatars are taking over social media advertising.

When people talk about fashion archives, everyone’s mind immediately goes to runway pieces. But not Andrew Groves, founder and director of the Westminster Menswear Archive, the UK’s first public menswear archive. What interests him most is what fashion can say when placed in the context of reality and history, the testimony it can offer, not so much of the abstract fantasy of certain designers, but of how a particular garment, even an anonymous one, can tell the story of the intersection between dress history and society. «There’s something nice when you go to an archive: you arrive with an idea of what might be in there,» he told us. An idea, parenthetically, that always gets overturned in some way.

On the occasion of Milan Fashion Week Men’s SS27, Groves and the University of Westminster brought the final collections of Master of Fine Arts students to Milan, to show them in the spaces of the Slam Jam Center in Brera. Here, alongside the collections, an installation called Visible Systems was created, in which ten objects from the Westminster Menswear Archive are shown alongside ten objects from Archivio Slam Jam through a series of thematic pairings. The idea is to create a series of thematic pairings that read fashion as a set of systems: garments that conceal and alter the body, surfaces that produce meaning, visibility that shifts from a simple function to a tool of identification, social roles and hierarchies, equipment for movement and work, organisation of space and mobility.

At the same time, many of the pieces on show tell how the design process evolves through prototypes, how simple signs on ordinary garments can change their meaning, how design identity circulates through branded objects, and how copies and imitations manipulate the language of branding to generate new meanings. A selection that includes items such as knock-off Comme des Garçons and Supreme T-shirts, but also tambourines created by Lidl for the Oasis reunion, police riot helmets, functional reflective garments paired with Alyx and Been Trill samples, as well as prototypes, staff garments, and customised football shirts.

To better understand how this exhibition was put together and what idea of fashion lies behind it, we met Andrew Groves at the Slam Jam Center to ask him a few questions.

What interests you about preserving and archiving mass-produced products?

Andrew Groves: If it’s a one-off, it normally means it’s a show sample. No one ordered it, no one’s bought it. If it’s production, it means someone ordered it, someone bought it, someone chose to wear it. It had an audience. I think there’s a danger that you get seduced by the show and runway pieces. But what matters is the fact that it had an audience.

If you think of that McQueen’s Dante masks or the Mr. Pearl corset, that’s amazing. But there’s only one of those. I’d much rather see what was designed from that, which then became a product that people could buy. Margiela always says his garments are proposals until they get bought. And for me the interesting thing is that as soon as someone wears it and they’ve paid for it, it becomes a garment, clothing. Before then, it’s just an idea. It’s the act of putting things together that turns them into fashion, because you’re fashioning it.

So much of fashion exhibitions is based on high-end womenswear, making you feel: aren’t you lucky to see this very rare Dior dress? Sometimes when I look at couture shows, I think, well, this is great on one level, but what relevance does it have to anyone I know? I think this is a way of thinking about what these things mean, and what they mean when you put them next to other things: a Louis Vuitton show jacket next to the Lidl trainers. By physically putting them in the same room, it changes both. What they’re doing here is very much about a culture that’s based around dress, fashion and clothing. Designer and disposable garments exist in the same world, and now they exist in the same room — in the archive.

What is it about non-fashion garments, like the riot helmet or the Covid T-shirt, that interests you?

Andrew Groves: I think these are garments that are going to disappear very quickly. But they’re of a moment, so it’s important we capture that. And although they’re only of a moment, they still operate within the system of military garments, and their meaning comes from the person that wore them. There were about twenty people that all decided to come up with a design for that T-shirt. So it’s design produced by people who aren’t trained designers. They used that military graphic idea about how you represent something new, like Covid. But they’re still making aesthetic decisions within a system about what’s possible to manufacture. That’s why I’m interested in the distinction between clothing and fashion.

It’s also interesting to have the prototype and then the final production, and to see what’s changed and why it’s changed. Normally we’re only showing fashion as being successful and spectacle and amazing. Whereas things that aren’t quite doing that, I think, are far more interesting.

And what do you find interesting in the more unusual objects — the football shirt, the Lidl merchandise, the branded carrier bag?

Andrew Groves: We’ve got a huge collection of football shirts, and nearly all of them are not player-worn shirts because it’s about thinking about what value does a garment have, and how do you make a garment have value. If its only value is that it was worn by a person, the value is the person. It’s not the garment, is it? The value is transferring from the person to the garment. The referee’s shirt with the all-seeing eye graphic, paired with a bomber jacket featuring the same motif, both are working out ideas about what a garment can be.

This is the idea of things that are ideas of fashion that circulate in ways that maybe are unusual. The carrier bag, the idea of the carrier bag as sometimes as important as the garment within it, because it’s something you show off and people understand: oh, you’ve been to this shop, you’ve bought something. And then there’s the Lidl tambourine, produced for the Oasis reunion last year, the product of a supermarket that most people think exists outside that hype culture, but this is completely swept up in it.

What is the function of such a heterogeneous archive?

Andrew Groves: It’s quite precise in terms of what’s useful for teaching students, and what’s interesting that’s also happening in industry that we should capture. By forcing things together, I think it gets students to think about things they might not think about. There’s also that tension between what brands want people to focus on and what we might focus on. Brands only want to tell you the story that works for them now. Quite a lot of our collecting [which also includes commercial ready-to-wear garments, ed.] is making sure that doesn’t get lost. We collected Covid masks because I thought: two or three years from now, brands will pretend none of this happened and won’t want anyone to know about it.

So you created the archive primarily to improve access to garments?

Andrew Groves: That’s one of the reasons. Students were seeing the garments on the runway, but weren’t seeing them even in the shop. What the archive does is force you to engage with all these different garments and find your own route through them.And I also realised that everyone thinks everything’s available because it’s available digitally, without realising that things disappear digitally all the time. People build up their Instagram feed and suddenly it’s gone.

Our archive goes from what you might call designer — from a Cold War jacket to Vivienne Westwood — then garment types: tailoring, shirting, trousers; to activity: motorbikes, hunting, hiking; to utilitarian: uniforms, an underground train driver’s uniform, military. They get drawn in by what they think is fashion, and then they actually get excited by what the clothing is. And then think: my job as a designer is how to take the idea of clothing but to turn it into something whose meaning is relevant now, which makes it fashion. Have you made clothes, but have you made fashion? What ideas are other designers thinking about that you’re adding to? And that’s the hard bit, isn’t it?

A good student or a good designer is someone that understands the fashion system and where it is, and can see another way it could go, like Margiela, who really understood how that system works. The archive helps us show them things they might never have seen and say: this could be a positive thing, this could be a possibility. How radical do you want to be?

And how have you seen fashion change in recent years?

Andrew Groves: Surely one of the roles of design is to think about all the things going on. Ideas about gender and sexuality and all of that happening in the wider world, with fashion designers really thinking about the body and how they engage with that as subject matter. I don’t think that discussion occupies the same central position it did in the 1990s, when many designers were engaging with those questions directly. So it felt like there was a quite healthy discussion between those different designers. That doesn’t feel like it’s really happening anymore. Students come to us and they want to be a creative director — and what do they think a creative director is? Do they not think it’s part of a system that doesn’t really work?

In recent years the industry has just been trying to push prices up as much as possible just because they’re luxury, rather than thinking: what am I getting in return for that, better creative thinking, better use of materials, or not? That’s just exploitation, isn’t it? We’re saying the branding is worth more, so we’re going to charge more for that. I’m much more interested in who’s doing things that are more interesting in terms of their thought process. You could come back to Hussein Chalayan and McQueen, couldn’t you? What was interesting was what they were thinking fashion could or couldn’t be. People might not buy those clothes at the beginning, but you’d look at Hussein and think: my God, there’s someone really thinking about it.

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

The second half of June has proven particularly eventful for the fashion system. Over the past few days, conversations have revolved around the future of some of the industry’s most influential names: from Coperni, which appears to have returned to the centre of attention, to Alaïa, where rumours point to Nicolas Di Felice as a potential new creative director. Speculation also continues to circulate around a possible creative shift at Moschino, while Undercover has officially been acquired by Nigo, a development that could lead to some intriguing new directions.

As for what is cool and what is not, university seems to have lost some of its appeal among Gen Z, while the popularity of alcohol-free beverages continues to grow. After all, today’s ultimate status symbol is no longer a degree, but the ability to turn creativity into a profession, as evidenced by the rise of the food designer. And if you’re unsure what to buy to refresh your wardrobe, AI may soon do the shopping for you. For those who still prefer the experience of shopping in person, Chrome Hearts remains a benchmark of coolness, while vintage stores continue to thrive not only as places to discover unique pieces, but also as spaces for connection and community.

• adidas and Bad Bunny have teamed up for an exclusive capsule collection created for the Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour. Ahead of the artist’s two shows at Milan’s Ippodromo SNAI La Maura, the collection dedicated to the city is now available in-store.

• How do you announce that you’re single? Apparently, no one knows anymore how to communicate their romantic availability.

• Five things to expect from Milan Fashion Week Men’s SS27. A packed schedule, or not?

• Here’s what went down at Levi’s pop up in Milan: summer kicked off with workshops, DJ sets, and open-air cinema.

• If the future of sexual health depends on Botox, the problem is not only economic. Planned Parenthood is now turning to aesthetic treatments in order to survive.

• A new documentary on Jean-Michel Basquiat is on its way. Jean-Michel Basquiat, acquired by Netflix, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

• Did you know Sam Smith has a TikTok account dedicated to reviewing food? Surprisingly, it feels like a breath of fresh air.

• Who would have thought that grandmother-inspired nails would become a trend? Enter the era of Grandma Nails.

• Personal taste has gone out of fashion in the age of algorithms, argues The Guardian.

• The United Kingdom is preparing to ban social media for under-16s. The BBC explains what Keir Starmer’s proposed plan would entail.

• The New York Times reveals Silicon Valley’s latest favourite party game. The premise? Pretending to kill one another.

• AI-generated music is making its way onto radio playlists. Is that a problem? The BBC set out to answer the question.

The current edition of Pitti Uomo 110, which is taking place these days, is dominated by foreign designers. Little or nothing emerges in the trade press about the 720 brands present, while there is constant talk of the super foreign guests, for several years now the true media draw of Pitti: from Simone Rocha to Sunflower, passing through Kei Ninomiya, Jiyong Kim and William Palmer. At a media level, it sounds more exciting that the Italian platform of Pitti attracts more or less famous foreign talents, precisely because they certify its global appeal and relevance. It is a shame, however, that the only Italian Guest Designers of recent editions have been just Niccolò Pasqualetti and Magliano, two rising stars of Italian fashion who, incidentally, normally present in Paris. We could call it, quoting the Sanremo Festival, “Super Guest Fever”: aren’t there local designers who would deserve their own show at Pitti?

Something similar is happening with the Milan men’s schedule. Besides the handful of historic brands that almost by necessity must present in the city, the real attractions of the next season bring American names: Thom Browne and Ralph Lauren. It is not a problem that these designers show in Milan, but it is a problem that their presence has become structurally necessary to bolster a fashion show calendar increasingly populated by names (many of them also foreign) that one has to Google to recognize. On the contrary, many emerging Italian designers have to settle for the presentation format.

The implicit message in this Italian foreignophilia is twofold: on one hand, the desire is to communicate openness and cosmopolitanism, but on the other, it implies that what is produced internally is not exciting enough to stand on its own. The problem is also the prevalence of presentations. While some luxury brands feel comfortable with them, including Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli, a new brand that needs to establish its own narrative requires the incisiveness of a real show. And both for reputational reasons and visibility, it would be much better if these designers could have a proper show on the calendar and not a mini-presentation for one day on the outskirts of the city. Something that elsewhere, especially in London and New York, has been understood.

@nssmagazineAmong the most anticipated debuts of this Milano Fashion Week Men's was Mordecai, the emerging Milanese brand founded in 2022. A pioneer of a new Made in Italy, combining the heritage of Italian tailoring with the functionality of technical fashion. For FW25, The Intelligence of Others, Mordecai decided to dedicate the new collection to resilience, take a look! #milanfashionweek #fashiontiktok #TikTokFashion #fashion #mfw25 #mfw2025 #milanfashionweek2025 #dietrolequinte #fw25 #fashionshow

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In Milan as in London and New York, numerous brands rely on the support of incubators that provide a shared show space for several brands. In recent years this has become the norm almost everywhere, also for reasons of efficiency. In Milan we have Fondazione Sozzani and Spazio Lineapelle, in New York there is Storied NYC which has hosted several shows in the context of NYFW Collections, in London there is the NewGen Space at 180 Strand.

A difference that is noticeable between abroad and Italy, however, is that both on the production side and on the media attention side (think for London of the shows by Tolu Coker and The Vxlley) emerging talents enjoy the same degree of consideration and polish as more established realities. In general, especially for Milan (and partly also for Pitti) young Italian designers face an urban and symbolic landscape that marginalizes them or confines them in boxes, categorizing them in the ancillary position of the promising newcomer.

Both for presentations and shows, they are often offered stages that are literally and metaphorically smaller and more makeshift, “limited enclosures” whose existence even the Vanessa Friedmans and Suzy Menkes of this world, as well as the big buyers, probably do not even suspect. In fact, hosting several shows in the same space (always a budget issue) tends to subtract something from a brand’s personality. Yet in America something is changing.

Since last September, a production company called N4XT Experiences has begun changing the way New York Fashion Week works. Instead of leaving every designer to find and pay for a space for their own show, the organization KFN was created to secure venues and cover their costs for selected brands. In the SS26 season, N4XT made available several types of spaces scattered across Manhattan, including proper venues for runway shows by the bigger brands, a shared space for smaller brands that could organize in turns, and showrooms for those who preferred to show the collection by appointment only.

The important thing is that N4XT took on the cost of the venue itself and all the logistical aspects: permits, backstage setup, makeup and hair equipment, lighting, and even catering. Designers were left to think only about things like PR, security, and models that is, the creative and organizational part of their show, without the economic burden of the space itself. This first phase was very successful, so much so that over a hundred participation requests arrived from brands, even if only a portion were actually accepted.

Given the positive feedback, for the February 2026 season N4XT decided to relaunch the project under a new name: NYFW Collections. Designers, selected once a year, can participate for free for two consecutive seasons, continuing to receive venues and logistical support without having to worry about space costs. For this new season, locations such as the New York Public Library and an expanded space for multiple designers together in the building that housed the Chelsea Factory were added, while the showroom headquarters remains at High Line Nine, with the area of activity concentrated between Hudson Yards and the Meatpacking District.

Instead of every brand searching for, renting, and paying for its own room independently, N4XT Experiences and KFN have made the right spaces available for free in different points of the city and handle all the practical behind-the-scenes work, leaving designers the freedom to focus on the collection. But above all, emerging brands are not placed in their own “kids’ area” but are inserted into the main flow of industry communication. Whether the location of a certain show is an abandoned warehouse or an old palace matters little, Margiela and McQueen worked miracles in condominium courtyards and old warehouses in sketchy, cheap areas. After all, any newcomer has to cut costs.

Looking at this model, it is natural to wonder why in Milan too the Municipality and the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana cannot move in a similar direction. Today it often happens that presentations and shows by emerging designers end up concentrating always in the same two or three addresses, perhaps for budget reasons or organizational convenience. But the result is a flattening effect that gives the fashion week a subdued, almost improvised air.

Seeing the same rooms, the same backdrops, the same photographed corners repeat season after season communicates a sense of narrowness and lack of care, as if the event did not have the economic and cultural strength to renew itself. If instead a “New York Model” were followed, making available, free of charge or at a nearly symbolic cost, a network of publicly or institutionally owned spaces, scattered in different areas of the city, the effect would be twofold. On one hand, it would remove from young designers the economic burden of finding and renting a location, leaving them the energy to focus on the collection and the staging, exactly as happens with the New York model.

On the other, it would finally give a jolt to the geography of Milan Fashion Week, bringing shows and presentations to neighborhoods that today remain on the margins of the official circuit: former industrial areas, historic courtyards, underused cultural spaces, peripheries that deserve more visibility. This would not only mean making the experience more interesting for buyers, editors and the public, who would discover new corners of the city instead of always circulating among the same blocks, but would also build a richer urban narrative, capable of portraying Milan as a city that renews itself and not as a city that repeats itself due to lack of resources or vision.

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

This past week was relatively light, yet packed with events and news that are set to redefine global pop culture. The New York Knicks’ victory in Game 4 of the NBA Finals shifted the spotlight onto the Big Apple and its stars - not so much the players themselves, but rather the courtside VIPs. A few days earlier, the Monaco Grand Prix provided the backdrop for Kimi Antonelli’s continued rise in the sport, accompanied by the fashion moments that have become a staple of one of the world’s most renowned racing circuits. From Timothée Chalamet’s Chrome Hearts x Timberland boots at Madison Square Garden to Kim Kardashian’s full Gucci looks at the Grand Prix, fashion and sports went hand in hand this week. One could add that it was the perfect narrative introduction to the World Cup that has just kicked off in America.

• A new era for Onitsuka Tiger has begun. The brand, which has been part of Asics until now, will once again become an independent company after 49 years.

• Primavera Sound took over Barcelona – and so did CUPRA.

• Perfumes that feel like journeys: 5 fragrances inspired by iconic destinations.

• Is AI ruining Vinted too? Not only refund scams, but fake listings as well.

• From Rachel Sennott to Addison Rae: why Fake Instagram accounts have become the most interesting profiles on social media.

• Are vintage stores the new frontier of fashion communities? A new experiment by Dsquared2 in Milan seems to suggest so.

• A review of Office Romance, featuring Jennifer Lopez as a CEO navigating the challenges of love and work.

• adidas and Willy Chavarria created the most iconic moment of the 2026 World Cup.

• The protests against Dua Lipa and Callum Turner’s wedding in Palermo have reignited the debate around overtourism, tourism-driven gentrification, sustainability, and luxury.

• What’s behind the latest boom in celebrities’ personal-item auctions? The Guardian investigates.

• Pope Leo XIV has given a lesson on The Lord of the Rings to tech bros, who continue to misunderstand the series. Wired explains why.

• Your next Bottega Veneta bag? It could be made from mushrooms, according to Vogue Business.

• Can AI gurus answer our most pressing spiritual questions? Dazed explores the topic.

For entire decades, resort locations such as Capri, Taormina or Portofino were unchallenged domains of pure luxury, settings in which the Hermès or Prada boutique seemed almost part of the landscape, as natural as the sea or the jasmine. That image still exists today (perhaps more so for American and Asian tourists in perennial search of the Dolce Vita) but luxury brands with historic boutiques in Mediterranean holiday destinations are beginning to find themselves with a new kind of neighbour.

Over the past two years, a wave of premium and middle market brands have opened stores in the same resort locations where luxury once reigned unchallenged. Alo has arrived in Cannes and Saint-Tropez. In Taormina, following the arrival of Guess, forte_forte and Sephora Playa have also landed, alongside the takeover projects of Liu Jo and Tommy Hilfiger. Farm Rio has brought seasonal stores to Marbella, Capri, Saint-Tropez, Ibiza and Mykonos. Also in Capri, Orlebar Brown and LaDouble J have opened. Staud has arrived in Positano and Autry has signed a resort collaboration in Mallorca. But why?

@razvanc19#italy #amalficoast #positanoitaly #fyp

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The aesthetic of the dolce vita has always been a cultural heritage of luxury, one of its founding languages. But when the places of this dolce vita fill up with tourists who still want their souvenir, two things happen: the first is that luxury ceases to be the sole interlocutor as the mix of brands and stores becomes democratised; the second is that the very idea of the Dolce Vita and the Mediterranean aesthetic changes, shedding its old aristocratic trappings and finding new images and references.

Indeed, given the degree of tourist cannibalism reached across the Mediterranean, places like Capri, Positano, Portofino or Taormina are no longer exclusive destinations — quite the opposite. All of these towns are overtourism destinations, submerged by flows of visitors arriving via Airbnbs split four ways, while the wealthy of old entrench themselves in their vast luxury resorts and panoramic restaurants.

The shift in audience also implies a shift in perception of the destinations themselves. This is followed with almost scientific precision by the evolution of the retail offering. In short, even the Dolce Vita has gone mass market with the conversion of entire local economies into pure tourist platforms. And the more democratic target of premium brands has begun frequenting the destinations that once were the bastions of the most exclusive luxury clientele, almost enclaves.

To understand the reasons behind this retail democratisation, one must look at what has happened at the top of the consumption pyramid. With rising prices and the systematic exclusion of the aspirational consumer who today turns to vintage, sales across fashion (with few exceptions) have become stagnant and the entire sector now finds itself in a crisis further aggravated by numerous geopolitical tensions.

Today luxury is trapped at the top of the pyramid, unable to come down, and premium brands have understood this. Roberta Benaglia, CEO of Style Capital — the Italian fund that controls Autry — said as much explicitly when speaking with Fashion Network: “The luxury segment above 500 euros is clearly suffering today, while the premium segment continues to perform very well.” Adding that “the sharp price increases [...] have profoundly altered consumer expectations. They no longer want to buy just for the logo; they seek quality, authenticity and the right price.”

Autry, the CEO continues, is aiming precisely to fill that market gap. It is doing so with the opening of a boutique in Cannes and the takeover of the Hotel Corazòn in Mallorca. Many other premium brands are following the same strategy: physically occupying luxury tourism locations to intercept both regular and fashion-conscious customers with a better value proposition and to capitalise on the so-called “cheerleader effect” of more premium commercial areas. Opening in Cannes doesn’t just mean selling in Cannes — it means becoming part of its myth.

As consultant Michal Kurtis observes in Vogue, the fact that a contemporary brand establishes itself in one of these locations “signals that the brand ‘understands’ the cultural and aesthetic mood, making it more relevant and on-trend for the aspirational audience.” But there is a second layer that cannot be ignored and is deeply intertwined with the first: the entry of these brands has gone hand in hand with a radical transformation of the destinations themselves, now perceived as more accessible by broader and more diverse audiences.

@fivefourfive.itTrailer of Estate Italiana ‘26 #Fivefourfive #estateitaliana #eurosummer #summerfits #trending

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Ever since Aimè Leon Dore demonstrated, in the post-Covid moment, that the future of streetwear would head down the path of preppy aesthetics, many brands across lower and mid-to-high price ranges have leveraged their geographical proximity to resort locations to place themselves within the myth of the Mediterranean resort aesthetic. Pull & Bear has organised dinners and campaigns in Mallorca, Zara in Naples and along the Amalfi Coast. In the streetwear space, 545 has set summer campaigns on Lake Como and more recently in Pantelleria, an island once known as Giorgio Armani‘s summer residence, an old photograph of whom appeared in some of the brand’s promotional materials.

In Spain, Ibiza has become the regular location for annual activations by TwoJeys and Nude Project, where some of today’s most prominent celebrity influencers cruise between sailing boats and stunning villas with views, while Cold Culture and Eme Studios have set campaigns in Lanzarote. Danish brand Les Deux shot its latest spring collection poolside at a French château, Aimè Leon Dore promoted its latest summer collection from the pristine beaches of Koufonisia, one of the gems of the Cyclades, while Alo Yoga shot its Summer Atelier collection aboard a yacht in Cannes.

The myth of the Mediterranean, of resorts and of the euro-summer is therefore changing both its destinations and its audience, shedding the Old Money imagery that now belongs precisely to those premium brands that have begun colonising local shopping streets. Luxury fashion campaigns, in exchange, have taken on a more neutral and muted tone, favouring poolside or studio shoots (Gucci, Loewe and McQueen would be the exception) over the world of sailing boats and aristocratic coastal villages in Liguria or Campania.

Beyond the social considerations (and the overtourism turning Italian cities into theme parks is a serious matter), what emerges from this cartography of openings, pop-ups and campaigns is a signal of market vitality that deserves attention. This is no longer about brands aping luxury, but about a vast segment that is emerging and claiming its place — both physically on the commercial level and narratively through campaign imagery. In doing so, it is building new hierarchies of desire and new senses of belonging for a changing fashion audience. The Dolce Vita, in short, no longer belongs to luxury alone, but to those brands that manage to convince new generations of consumers to believe in their own young mythology.

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

We started the week crying over the Euphoria finale and closed it with some interesting gossip about a probable changing of the guard happening at Rabanne. What happened in between? Despite a brief recovery in spending in China, fashion has started cutting costs left and right to focus on a “return to quality growth” as the experts have called it (if you want to dig deeper, check our Editor’s Picks), while behind the scenes of the world’s major fashion capitals the gears and wheels are turning in preparation for the imminent menswear fashion month, which this year is leaner than ever. At least in Milan.

And while all your followers with their mysterious sources of income are already deep into their holiday Instagram Stories, all we can do is savour the discreet charm of summer in the city.

• Have dating apps turned desire into a kind of social performance? We think so.

• Pride month is here. We’ve put together all the most important events on the calendar of this month’s celebrations across Italy.

• Bad Bunny’s world tour is in full swing, but it’s the set design of his stage that has been drawing a lot of attention. Any guesses why?

• Want to take care of yourself this summer? Here you’ll find a list of the wellness trends we love and the ones we’d steer you away from.

• Alone and friendless? So are these influencers. Except unlike you, they’ve figured out how to monetise it.

• Il Punto G-Club is back with The Candle Cluub, on 10 June in Milan: find all the information here.

• Pharrell has teamed up again with Moët & Chandon for a campaign set in Saint Tropez for the new Ice Impérial design.

• Are we overusing the word “cortisol” instead of just saying “stress”? Possibly. Not that it does anything to lower ours.

• Luxury, explains BoF, has entered its post-growth era. But what does that mean?

• In what sense is K-Pop becoming more popular but “less Korean”? CCN explains it.

• According to the New York Times, LinkedIn is finally leaving its cringe era. But is it true?

• Have you also noticed that the tattoos people get are becoming increasingly pretentious? Dazed has, and has something to tell you.

Walking around Milan with the thermometer exceeding thirty degrees, the sun beating down like a hammer and a heat from which there seems to be no escape, it is easy to come across men wearing jackets and ties despite the crazy temperatures. While in start-ups or creative companies in the city shorts are tolerated (but tank tops are not yet), a whole series of professions ranging from real estate agents to consultants, notaries, lawyers and various financiers have to deal with wearing tailored suits even in the middle of summer.

This raises two orders of problems. The first type concerns productivity: as demonstrated by a much-cited 2006 study, «performance increases with rising temperature up to 21-22 °C and decreases when the temperature exceeds 23-24 °C. Maximum productivity is reached at a temperature of about 22 °C. For example, at a temperature of 30 °C performance reaches only 91.1% of the maximum, i.e. the reduction in performance is 8.9%». The second concerns gender dynamics: women’s clothing can be much lighter than men’s, but in an office the temperature will tend to be kept very low because of the men in jackets and ties, triggering what CBC has defined as the “thermostat battle”.

If the problem is (literally) burning in the West, in Asia the difficulty increases. The number of offices is much higher, the temperatures often higher too, and corporate dress codes much stricter than in Europe or the USA. In Japan, since 2005 the Cool Biz initiative has encouraged the famous salarymen (i.e. the country’s employees) to go without jackets and ties, but this year, between heat and energy saving, they went further: the governor of Tokyo invited workers to wear shorts. Something unheard of in the formal world of Japanese offices and actually in the whole world. Which leads us to ask ourselves, will climate change also become a sartorial change?

As nss magazine wrote in a recent article, the heatwaves of recent years are making cities one of the hot spots (pun intended) of the climate battle. According to UN sources, there is a 75% chance that the average temperature from now until 2030 will rise above 1.5 °C of the average of the last century. In cities, as the IPCC writes in the Sixth Assessment Report, the urban heat island effect can add up to 2°C to local warming. Tokyo is the most recent and striking example: Japan recorded the hottest summer since the end of the 19th century, and the national meteorological agency had to introduce a new climate category, kokusho (“cruel heat”) to describe the terrible but now habitual temperatures.

One of the most controllable sources of this problem is city design, not designed for such high temperatures, and which now would require the planting of hundreds of trees (not always possible) but also a whole series of re-designs such as permeable soils, reflective materials, reduction of asphalt, green roofs, shading of stops, depaving and climate shelters that cannot be implemented with a snap of the fingers. On the contrary, they would require a radical rethinking of urban planning as we know it.

So here the most immediate solution is to dress with less. It is a solution that has been operational for decades in much of the planet: it is the so-called “tropical officewear”, already typical of countries like Singapore, Indonesia, Brazil, Hawaii and the Philippines. In fact, for years the prophet of menswear, Derek Guy, has been telling millions of followers how Southeast Asian businessmen wear formal clothes in the heat, citing among the fabrics linen, Solaro and tropical wool. In short, fashion cannot be a solution but it can be a component of the solution to the fight against heat.

In addition to the rarer seersucker and tropical wools, associating linen with summer fashion is the default textile option. Not only has the fabric been used since the time of the pyramids, but as soon as summer arrives, every conceivable page and magazine starts talking about it as if they had invented it yesterday. And in reality what makes us understand how climate change has already pushed us to adapt as a society comes precisely from the fact that every single brand or retailer in every market category, let’s say from Uniqlo upwards, has started to offer linen wardrobes for the summer. It is interesting to see what luxury fashion has made of it, however, given that the margin for textile and design innovation in this field is quite minimal.

In the recent Chanel Cruise 2027 collection, for example, Blazy introduced several striped fabrics in a linen and cotton blend inspired by the tradition of Basque linen and produced on the looms of the ACT3 company. The idea here was to remake many of Chanel’s classic pieces, including tweed jackets and suits, in a linen that was smooth to the touch and maintained its appearance as a luxurious material. At Zegna, on the other hand, in the latest summer show in Dubai numerous linen suits were seen, a silk suit that weighed only 300 grams and even garments that incorporated cellulose into the fabric.

The examples are abundant anyway: from the “stabilized” linen with silk used in Louis Vuitton’s Pre-Fall 2026, to the linen transformed into tassels that cover one of the new Lady Dior bags in Jonathan Anderson’s debut for the brand and linen transformed into the textile base for almost an entire collection in Loro Piana‘s Resort 2026. With something ingenious, Phoebe Philo produced for the recent summer collection the Golf Jacket that looks like leather or PVC but is actually a “lacquered” linen canvas to appear shiny.

Elsewhere, for example in India, a highly successful brand like Kartik Research makes extensive use of linen by employing and collaborating with the many local textile artisans and thus giving its collections a deeper and more authentic cultural resonance. In short, the response of fashion (even outside of luxury if we think of innovations like Uniqlo’s AIRism) to an increasingly hot world has not been the abandonment of decorum, but its reinvention through textile innovation.

@misstranslationThe heat is picking up here in Tokyo 🔥 stay hydrated out there! Who’s bringing the heat in the office though 😏 #japanlife #japanthings #lifeinjapan #livinginjapan #workinginjapan #gaijin #relatable

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The change that Tokyo has made official with the shorts of its officials, however, seems more the anticipation of a global norm than an exception to traditional dress codes. If we think about it, for example, today the fashion of the 19th century or early 20th century, when men were in suits all year round and women were suffocated by corsets, crinolines and long dresses even in the bathtub, seems impossible that someone could stand it. Perhaps it will happen like this in the future too: office clothing, which has basically remained unchanged since the European post-war period, was built for a climate and an economy that no longer exist and simply needs to be changed.

The process will have at least three directions. The first is material: technical and natural highly breathable fabrics or even new fabrics such as bamboo fibers will replace synthetic blends in professional wardrobes. The second is formal: the office silhouette will widen with wider cuts, fewer layers, less constriction at the neck and wrists. The third is cultural: as cities warm up, the very etiquette of clothing should evolve but always respecting the dress code of managerial offices which is perhaps the environment most impermeable to fashion that exists. But leaving the offices and moving on to how people dress on the street, things can change. After all, until last year seeing people wearing flip-flops in the city was crazy and today it is fashionable.

But returning to Japan, the Cool Biz initiative has already shown that advantages exist: in Japan, twenty years of lighter summer clothing have saved over two million tons of CO₂ per year, according to estimates by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment, without anyone missing the tie. The question is no longer whether the office wardrobe will change, but how quickly the rest of the world will manage to adapt to what Singapore, Jakarta and Honolulu have already been practicing for generations and which major brands around the world have already translated into clothes to buy.

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.