At the end of 2017, Alphabet — in other words, Google — had a market capitalization of around $730 billion. LVMH was worth $147 billion and Kering, which at the time still included Puma through the Artemis fund, $159 billion. Combined, the two companies that sell desire were worth 28% of the company that sells the order in which search results appear. Flash forward to the end of last July: Alphabet is worth around $4.2 trillion. LVMH is worth €234 billion and Kering €35 billion, or just over $300 billion combined. 7.5%. Publicly listed French luxury has gone from being worth just over a quarter of Google to one thirteenth in nine years. So is it really luxury?

One number deserves to be singled out because it needs to be read twice. Kering today is worth less in dollars than it was at the end of 2017, when Puma was still part of the group. In nine years, it has divested Puma, acquired 30% of Valentino, built a billion-euro eyewear business from scratch and raised prices by roughly 15%. The net result of all that work is less than zero. Meanwhile, Google has created €3 trillion in value, eleven times the combined value of LVMH and Kering. And it did so without warehouses, creative directors or unsold inventory, but with a simple index that updates itself every night, for free, and has never depreciated by a single cent. Luxury has spent nine years explaining that value comes from scarcity. Meanwhile, value went where there was neither scarcity nor even a product. The point, though, is that the money did not evaporate: it changed hands. But whose hands?

The latest half-year reports from the two groups are honest: they contain no lies, they are certified by people paid not to trust anyone, and each runs to more than a hundred pages. They contain plenty of data and reassuring-sounding numbers, but they do not contain the number of garments produced, sold and left unsold; nor average prices, nor the millions of units written off.

It is an entire exercise in euphemism that, in the best Orwellian tradition, relies on a vocabulary designed to manipulate the narrative and blur certain uncomfortable truths. The term “normalization,” for example, means a return to reality, presented as though reality itself were the anomaly. “Positioning elevation” means that groups raised prices by 150% in the wake of Covid and sold far less, keeping revenues high enough for it to be called a strategy while also devastating Italy’s manufacturing ecosystem. Then there is the “aspirational customer”: the vast majority of consumers who live on limited means, cannot really afford luxury and who, at a certain point, simply stopped buying.

Other terms? “Inventory discipline” means markdowns and write-downs. “Network rationalization” means closures. “Distribution ecosystem” refers to outlets. “Creative renewal” means: “we have changed creative director for the third time in five years and this time it will work — at least in the outlet.” Meanwhile, “resilient” means the business is doing badly, but not badly enough to have to write it down explicitly. Things are worse for the smaller brands, reduced to fractions and administrative subdivisions, which lately have started being sold off.

None of these expressions is false, and that is exactly the point. The perfect omission does not lie. It replaces a number with an adjective and relies on nobody asking uncomfortable questions. Let’s call it an “Omissey”: not an omission, which would imply fault, but a long journey through a series of perfectly legal absences, at the end of which the reader returns home convinced they have understood everything.

Here, then, is the thing neither half-year report says, not because saying it is forbidden, but because there is no line item where it lands. Fashion division revenues doubled between 2017 and 2026. Units sold fell by around 40%. Nine years of growth came entirely from price increases applied to a shrinking customer base. That means 29 million units a year no longer leave the stores, as if one of the two companies had shut down its fashion division without telling anyone.

The stock market understood it before the financial statements did, as usual, and withdrew the premium. It did not so much stop believing in luxury as it stopped believing in luxury’s scalability, which is far more serious, because scalability was the only reason a handbag company could ever be worth as much as a software company.

On July 29, the point became visible to the naked eye. In the same trading session, Hermès — the company that does everything right in luxury — lost 11%, while Kering gained 16.9% because Gucci had fallen by 2% instead of 8%. The market punished the company that grew less than expected and rewarded the one that fell more slowly than expected. Neither reaction had anything to do with a garment. Nobody tells us who bought those Kering shares. Nobody tells us who is actually making money.

Twenty-nine million is a number, and numbers have the unfortunate habit of looking like answers. This one is actually a question: were they customers? Because a unit sold and a customer are not the same thing, nor have they ever been. In 2017, a garment could leave a maison’s books in five different ways, and only one of them required someone to actually want it and pay full price for it.

It could be sold directly to a customer. It could be invoiced to a multi-brand retailer, which was itself a customer: even if the item remained unsold and was later heavily discounted, on the maison’s books it remained a unit sold at full wholesale price. It could pass through an outlet, which appears in the accounts as a retail sale just like any other. It could end up with a stockist, which appears in no presentation and absorbs whatever the other channels failed to absorb. Or it could be bought on Via Montenapoleone by a daigou who purchased ten units to resell in Shanghai: in the systems, those were ten sales; in reality, it was one person with a very large suitcase.

The real question is not how many units we lost. It is how many of those units, even in 2017, represented something other than a genuine direct sale. We do not know because there is no line item where that figure is explicitly disclosed. We can, however, set three benchmarks, and each tells a different story.

If every lost unit corresponded to a customer who bought twice a year, the number of lost customers would be 14.5 million. Out of a customer pool that industry presentations estimate at 400 million people, that is 3.5%. Which is already remarkable in itself: losing three customers out of every hundred cost these two companies a third of their market capitalization. It is not credible. A couple of generations of consumers have disappeared here. It is as if Apple had lost €16 billion in revenue over ten years. The luxury industry, dependent on China, no longer knows how to capture new customers.

If, on the other hand, the loss were concentrated among aspirational consumers — those who buy one item every two years and were the first to stop when the cost of money doubled — the figure would be almost 60 million people. Fifteen percent of the declared customer base, gone in nine years without a single press release ever recording it. In fact, financial statements would do well to show negative figures clearly: they would be far more revealing.

Finally, if most of those 29 million units were never really customers but channels, then far fewer customers have disappeared. That is the comforting version, which is precisely why it deserves closer scrutiny. But channels are hybrid and very often off-price. Which means that if a significant share of the units sold in 2017 did not end up with customers but with channels, then the starting base was inflated. Not false in the strict sense, merely quantitatively distorted.

And if the base was inflated, then so were the industrial plans built on that growth, the production capacity sized around those volumes, the store openings decided on those projections and the prices raised by 150% in the belief that demand would hold. There is no good version of this answer. Either 14 million real customers disappeared, or there were never that many of them in the first place.

Let’s start with who did not pay, because that is the shorter list. Neither controlling shareholder paid: they lost wealth, not power. Nor did the executives who set the prices, devised the 2021 expansion plans and then the 2025 closure plans: almost all of them left with multimillion-euro severance packages, the only line item in the luxury industry never to have experienced destocking. Nor did the analysts, who are already selling studies on how to get out of the crisis they had previously predicted would never happen.

Now to everyone else, in ascending order of how little they were consulted. Most of the value destroyed sat in index funds, meaning the retirement savings of people who have never bought a luxury handbag. They financed the opening of a flagship on a street they will never see and paid for its closure four years later. In the industry’s narrative, the shareholder is an abstract and vaguely irritating entity. In reality, it is almost always someone who needs to retire.

Then there is manufacturing. Across Tuscany, Marche and Veneto are the workshops that physically produce what the two groups call craftsmanship. When demand falls by 40%, almost all of that decline is passed down to the link in the chain without a multi-year contract. In 2026, Kering’s Italian factories saw strike participation rates of between 70% and 100%, figures Italian manufacturing had not seen in decades. A clear indication of what is happening to Made in Italy.

Then there are the sales associates. The cost structure per unit sold is virtually identical for the two groups: €392 versus €383. That includes rent, visual merchandising, fit-out depreciation and in-store sales staff. When volumes decline, three of those four costs are contractually fixed for years. The fourth — the sales staff — comes with thirty days’ notice. And selling costs more than producing.

Another category hit is multi-brand retailers. Between 2000 and 2020, fashion moved from wholesale to direct retail, telling its long-standing clients that it was a matter of controlling the brand image. The real intention, however, was to capture the retailer’s margin while also taking on its cost structure — a bet that worked only on the condition that volumes kept growing. When they stopped growing, the multi-brand retailer that could have absorbed part of the risk was no longer there, because the brands had shut it out while explaining that it was for its own good.

Then there is the customer, who paid twice: first at retail, 150% more than in 2017 for iconic leather goods; then again when they discovered, on any resale platform, that the product was actually worth a third of that. Neither the press nor a financial statement explained it to them. The secondary market did, publishing the effective value of every reference every day and becoming, in practice, the only transparency mechanism this industry has ever had. Nobody designed it, which is probably why it works so well.

And finally there is the trade press, which surrendered to flattery, rigged interviews and clueless influencers. It burned through a new generation of talent, using them as cushions for unscrupulous PR departments. Most importantly, it lost all bite and critical instinct. Fabrizio Romano has a firmer grip on reality than Business of Fashion.

We will read that the sector is resilient. That local customers are showing signs of selective recovery. That positioning elevation is proceeding as planned and that the second half will benefit from a more favorable comparison base — again, we are below 2017 — which is an elegant way of saying that last year was so bad that this year it does not take much to look better.

We will not read how many garments are sitting in warehouses, because companies are not required to disclose it. And they are not required to disclose it because the perimeter of financial reporting was designed for an industry that sold machine tools and is now being applied to an industry that sells perishable desire. The problem could be solved in ten lines, using data from systems that already update those figures every night, because otherwise nobody would know what to ship to stores on Monday morning: units produced, units sold at full price, units sold at a discount, units in inventory, average realized price.

It will not happen, and the reason is that the average realized price is not merely a data point: it is the business model. It is the distance between what the customer believes they are buying and what the company actually collects, and it is on that distance that brand value rests. It is like asking the innkeeper to print on the label exactly how much water he added to the wine. Technically simple, commercially inconceivable. Less luxury, more minestrone.

There is, however, one detail that brings the whole thing full circle. Knowing how many people actually buy is precisely what vertical integration was supposed to solve: it is the argument this industry used to shut out thousands of multi-brand retailers, spend tens of billions on directly operated stores, and build CRMs, apps, clienteling systems and customer-recognition tools at checkout. They have the data, but it appears nowhere. Twenty-five years and tens of billions invested to acquire one piece of information, which happens to be the only one that is never published. The data is not missing. The willingness is. Above all, what is missing is the courage to understand that a crisis can only be solved through a revolution.

The latest major luxury studies from Altagamma tell us to move towards experiences, hospitality and fine dining. In practice, they are telling us to abandon ship and climb into the lifeboats. Ultimately, LVMH and Kering will have to study the path taken by Volkswagen, Porsche, Audi and BMW. They are sitting there waiting for the Chinese, after consuming them, to eventually eat them outright.

Then, unexpectedly, the moment for extreme cuts will arrive: first the designers, then the managers, then the stores, then entire departments. But it was all written already. A few got rich; many lost their way. Returning to fundamentals would mean talking less and working more. The long Arctic night has only just begun. The dinosaurs will disappear, but who will rise again?

That is why financial statements should never be read for what they say, but for what they leave unsaid.

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

As August settles in, amidst deserted cities and automated “OOO” replies, even the fashion world seems to be slowing its pace. Copenhagen Fashion Week SS27 has just concluded, and its street style will keep us inspired until we return to the office. While Copenhagen reaffirms its status as the world’s most livable city, we’re learning to survive the summer with a few common-sense rules: from flip-flops to wear with tailored trousers to classic restaurant style faux pas. For those spending their holidays hunting for inspiration, Japanese vintage finds on Vinted might be the perfect starting point. Meanwhile, between dips in the sea, there’s time to reflect on our true selves with Ricky Gervais’ new animated series or test your knowledge with nss magazine’s first-ever fashion crossword.

• The Q2 Lyst Index captures the summer’s mood: it’s the heatwave defining our wishlists now.

• Time to quit the “optimization” mindset. The obsession with “-maxxing” has spiraled out of control; perhaps it’s time to rediscover the simple pleasure of doing things halfway.

• “The Last House“ proves that Netflix loves to entrap its characters. The sci-fi thriller starring Wagner Moura and Greta Lee is streaming from August 7.

• Mercury enters Leo: the season of (the good kind of) drama is here. Significance and impact on every zodiac sign.

• Why are vinyl records being released incomplete? Between cut tracks and tentative messages, the “Vinylgate” saga has engulfed everyone from Charli xcx to Olivia Rodrigo and Raye.

• Five perfumes for the Night of San Lorenzo, inspired by dreams and constellations. From Maison Margiela to Astrophil & Stella, here is how fashion houses interpret the starry night.

• In 2026, luxury in Asia is a gamble: between China and South Korea, Gen Z is prioritizing investments in spirituality.

• From funfetti to seaglass: the essential August 2026 manicure trends.

  

• The Guardian ponders: is nostalgia a crutch or our survival mechanism in an increasingly fast-paced world?

• According to the BBC, Hollywood has rediscovered desire: after years of restraint, cinema is finally embracing the “hot” again.

• Variety explores how video games are working to reshape their reputation.

• The Bratz celebrate their 25th anniversary, and Domus reveals they were ahead of the curve: their hyper-constructed aesthetic anticipated many of the visual codes dominating Instagram today.

Under a beach umbrella, with a pencil in one hand and a slice of watermelon in the other, doing a crossword puzzle has a whole different feel. Whether alone or with friends, it’s the perfect pastime for the hottest days of the year. But if, until now, there had never been a crossword puzzle entirely dedicated to the fashion industry, here it is: forty clues inspired by the greatest designers and brands of all time, to solve with fellow fashion enthusiasts or explain to those who know nothing about it.

The newsletter will return to its regular schedule soon. In the meantime, you can play our very first crossword puzzle:

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

August. The sea. Summer holidays. And yet fashion never seems to take a break. July came to a close on a high note with LVMH and Kering‘s financial results, offering a glimmer of hope in what has been a turbulent period for the fashion industry. Among all product categories, accessories continue to stand out as a reliable source of profit. With such a scorching summer, staying dry has become the new status symbol. But if you’re looking for an alternative to the now overused linen, don’t worry. There are plenty of options to choose from. And speaking of sustainability, Fendi has even launched a denim collection made using banana fibres. For many people, August remains the slowest month of the year. Gen Z, on the other hand, has decided to fill it with new hobbies such as birdwatching. Then there are weddings, the inevitable highlight of the summer season. They may never be as iconic as they once were, but if you happen to belong to a certain elite, there’s still a chance you’ll have a memorable time. The only rule for surviving August? Don’t document your holidays. Nobody cares about vacation content anymore.

• For anyone who can’t stand long days at the beach, or simply doesn’t have a board game within reach, nss magazine comes to the rescue with the first fashion crossword puzzle.

• The path to diagnosis may finally become shorter for one of the world’s most underdiagnosed chronic conditions. Two new tests could transform the diagnosis of endometriosis.

• This is the delightfully light summer of balloon pants. The story behind the trend, from the origins of the salwar to the Spring Summer 2026 runways.

• The August 2026 horoscope has arrived. This month’s planetary transits, predictions and lucky days for every zodiac sign.

• Here are the films not to miss at the 83rd Venice Film Festival. Plenty of Italian titles, comedic mockumentaries and acclaimed auteur cinema, but very few women directors in competition.

• Why do so many celebrities end up joining cults? Hannah Murray’s memoir reveals the real answer.

• Is Gen Z afraid of love? Red flags, reality dating shows and shame. Why romance has lost its sense of faith.

• The hidden side of perfume. The documentaries worth streaming, featuring master perfumers, exceptionally rare ingredients, investigative stories and journeys through the world of fragrance.

  

• The New York Times reports on publishing’s latest obsession. AI written books are flooding Amazon, and the real issue is no longer whether they are good or bad. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell who actually wrote them and who simply generated them.

• Being a tourist is overrated, especially if you’re flying somewhere only to do the same things you could do at home. Perhaps the real holiday is learning to see your own city with fresh eyes, according to The Atlantic.

• The Financial Times explains how the luxury industry is learning to adapt to consumers who are less willing to spend. Because today’s true luxury seems to be convincing someone to make a purchase at all.

• After serving as the home of the gods for thousands of years, Mount Olympus may soon become a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well. The Guardian tells the story of the latest chapter in the ascent of Greece’s most famous mountain.

For many years, the tank top was the garment that nobody really wanted to admit they loved because it was considered too simple to be called fashionable and too ordinary to become an object of desire. It was there, in everyone’s wardrobe, but it never received much attention: hidden beneath a shirt, worn during workouts, chosen on the hottest days when the only rule was surviving the heat. Then, as so often happens in fashion, someone decided to take a closer look at what seemed the least interesting, and that is how the tank top became both the most democratic and, at the same time, most talked-about piece of the summer.

A garment that can cost just a few euros or become a luxury product, one that can be associated with manual labour, the gym, ‘90s minimalism, or the runways of the world’s biggest fashion houses. And this year, those very maisons confirmed the tank top’s evolution from a basic staple to a central element of the wardrobe. The interesting point, however, is something else. The tank top appears to be a neutral garment, almost devoid of personality. Yet simply changing the cut, the fabric, or the way it is styled can transform it completely. So, does a tank top really say who we are?

Let’s start with the most recognisable one. The gym bro tank top is not simply sportswear. It often features technical fabrics, cuts designed to allow greater freedom of movement, and a fit intended to enhance the physique. Its original function is practical, but in recent years fitness aesthetics have moved beyond the gym, making their way into streetwear and everyday fashion. With Balenciaga’s Resort 2026 collection, Pierpaolo Piccioli revisited the founder’s construction-focused approach to create a series of luxury athleisure pieces, including a look featuring a sporty tank top that follows the body’s anatomy.

In FW26, Gucci, the tank top was reinterpreted through a more sensual lens, using glossy, textured surfaces that distance the garment from its athletic origins. Tank tops with a silicone-like finish, with shiny, almost liquid-looking surfaces, blended seamlessly with the models’ physiques, following the contours of their muscles and transforming the garment into a futuristic second skin.

A more minimalist approach comes from Courrèges, the maison that has turned the tank top into one of the defining pieces of its wardrobe. In the SS26 collection, the classic tank top was reinterpreted through stretch cotton styles, both jersey and ribbed, while preserving the maison’s signature language of clean geometries, body-hugging silhouettes, and a sensuality built on the relationship between skin and fabric.

This type of tank top belongs to the kind of person who might start a conversation with “I’m bulking” even though nobody asked. Or to someone who spends more time in front of the gym mirror than under the barbell. Behind this aesthetic lies an important cultural shift: the world of sport has profoundly influenced contemporary fashion. Sneakers, leggings, technical fabrics, and athletic silhouettes have become everyday staples, making the line between the gym and the street increasingly blurred.

The classic white tank top looks like the easiest garment in the world to wear, and perhaps that’s exactly why it’s one of the hardest to pull off. When a piece of clothing is extremely simple, every detail becomes essential: the quality of the cotton, the shape of the shoulder, the length, and the way it falls on the body. The ribbed tank top has arguably undergone the most interesting transformation. More classic than its sporty counterparts, it carries with it an aesthetic rooted in manual labour and the men’s wardrobe.

Yet today, brands have reinvented it by creating a vintage-inspired aesthetic that looks to the past without truly trying to recreate it. It’s a filtered version of the past, where the tank top is paired with tailored trousers, statement jewellery, oversized blazers, and luxury accessories. Its strength lies precisely in this contradiction: it is the perfect example of how contemporary fashion loves to take everyday items and turn them into symbols.

White tank tops appeared in both Fendi’s Haute Couture collection and Balenciaga’s, while Vetements, Saul Nash, and above all Dolce&Gabbana and JW Anderson also brought them back in their SS27 collections. A white tank top also peeked out from beneath unbuttoned shirts in Tom Ford’s Pre-Fall 2026 collection, in Stella McCartney’s Resort 2027, and in Bottega Veneta’s FW26.

Looking effortless often takes a great deal of effort. Loose and relaxed, the oversized tank top immediately conveys a sense of ease. It is the answer to an era in which a wardrobe is no longer expected simply to flatter the silhouette, but also to express a certain attitude. The rise of this style is closely tied to American streetwear in the 2010s, when brands like Yeezy transformed the concept of basics into an exploration of proportions.

And then there’s the extra-oversized version. While the first retains the garment’s recognisable structure, simply making it wider through the torso and softer in shape, the second pushes volume to the extreme. The almost endless armholes inevitably recall the tank tops worn by construction workers in August: hanging off their shoulders, stained with cement, and completely soaked with sweat by eleven in the morning. The difference is that, in the fashion world, that very same silhouette is styled with tailored trousers and £1,000 trainers.

Versace, in Dario Vitale’s debut and final SS26 collection, reinterpreted the oversized tank top through a far more relaxed sense of sensuality, with exposed torsos and silhouettes inspired by the maison’s archives. Throughout the SS27 season, oversized versions also appeared at Yohji Yamamoto, Kiko Kostadinov, and Rick Owens, each with its own avant-garde interpretation. More decorative and embellished were those by Dries Van Noten, Egonlab, and Simone Rocha during her Florence show. A white tank top made of ultra-light organza also appeared in Chanel’s Spring Haute Couture collection.

Of all the tank top’s transformations, the lingerie version is perhaps the most elegant. It reflects an important shift: what once had to remain hidden can now take centre stage. Silk, lace, sheer fabrics, and delicate straps are no longer invisible layers.

This interplay between underwear and outerwear is one of the recurring themes of contemporary fashion. Lingerie is constantly being reinterpreted because it allows designers to create contrasts: something delicate paired with something structured, a feminine garment combined with a masculine element. Lingerie worn as outerwear is the new obsession inspired by the 2000s style of celebrities and similar cultural figures.

We are talking about one of the strongest womenswear silhouettes of the season, presented, for example, in Dior’s Resort 2027, Chloé, and sacai, as well as in Saint Laurent’s Pre-Fall 2026 collection and in Miu Miu’s FW26, which is perhaps one of the brands most specialised in lingerie designed to be worn externally. Perhaps even more interestingly, a deconstructed version also appeared in Maison Margiela’s SS26 collection.

There is a tank top that is never worn on its own but serves purely as a styling element. It is the one that appears as soon as temperatures rise above thirty degrees and the asphalt begins to melt. It can be made of linen, lightweight cotton, or crochet, perhaps in neutral shades: white, light blue, sand. It is the tank top of someone who, even if they are still in the city, is already mentally by the seafront. It belongs to an ideal wardrobe that includes oversized sunglasses, soft trousers with a tailored feel, and an open shirt worn over it.

Similar versions appeared in Jacquemus’ SS27 collection, presented in Corsica, where the tank top was reinterpreted through more sophisticated versions made from thin paper-effect leather, bonded crêpe, and organza-crafted details. It is the tank top of someone who, while on holiday, allows themselves what would seem out of place in the city: a particular texture, a brighter colour, a more precious fabric.

It is one of the most interesting versions because it describes a very intimate relationship with clothing: it wants to simply suggest a feeling. A slow afternoon. A sunset spritz. A day without schedules. In practice, a better life than the real one.

Perhaps no other garment better represents a contradiction of contemporary fashion. Spending a lot on something that, at first glance, appears extremely simple. At a time when luxury is increasingly shifting towards the appreciation of materials, construction, and quality, with a designer tank top the price is worn openly on display.

From Prada to Miu Miu, passing through Loewe, The Row, Toteme, and Saint Laurent, the designer tank top has become an everyday small luxury as well as a highly profitable category. Prada uses its most recognisable element: the enamelled logo triangle, generally placed on the chest or side of the tank top, or a simple triangle applied on the back. Miu Miu often embroiders or applies its own logo in a smaller format on cotton pieces; Loewe identifies its most recurring symbol as the logo made up of four interlocking “L”s, which can appear as tone-on-tone embroidery or a discreet detail on the fabric. Saint Laurent, on the other hand, adds the Cassandre logo, the three interlocking YSL letters created by Adolphe Mouron Cassandre in 1961, as a small metallic detail or embroidery on tops and tank tops.

Often true luxury works in reverse: it is something noticed only by those who know. It is the same logic that has led the fashion world to reassess jeans, white T-shirts, and other everyday garments, based on the idea that what matters is not how complex a piece is, but how carefully it has been made.

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

August is so close you can almost touch it. Summer is also looming for the fashion industry, and, in fact, the only news making headlines these days are the announcements of the runway schedules for Fashion Month at the end of September. Yet there’s a less creative, but no less important, side of the fashion world that’s buzzing right now: the analysts. In fact, all the major publicly traded groups are currently presenting their half-year or second-quarter results. And this year, they seem promising: Richemont, Moncler, and Zegna are all showing growth. We’ve come to take Hermès’ success for granted by now. But we all know that the results that really matter to us, the ones that tell us something, are those from LVMH and Kering. Because in the end, that’s what fashion is all about: results, results, results…

• “Lidl Hug - A Hug of Convenience” is the campaign that captures how we do our grocery shopping. Discover more.

• Zendaya’s press tour for Odyssey has set the make-up trend of the summer and (spoiler) it should be nearly invisible.

• Prada will open the next Milan Fashion Week, which is unusual for a brand typically very set in its scheduling habits. Could it have something to do with Vogue World coming to town?

• In the midst of all this, Leo season has begun. Read here to find out what to expect in the coming days.

• We’ve listed all the films not to miss at the upcoming Venice Film Festival. Study the list from your beach towel.

• Everyone loves niche fragrances. Everyone loves Italy. But does everyone love niche fragrances made in Italy? We found the most beloved ones you may not have known about.

• What does it mean to be a teenager today? We asked ourselves that starting from the world’s most famous teenager: North West.

• The usual boors left the usual boorish comments because Ghali uses skincare products. But if a hyaluronic acid serum makes you feel less masculine, the fault is certainly not the serum’s.

• Amy Odell is among the most intelligent fashion commentators working today. And this week, in the New York Times, she gave us another gem: the problem of fashion slop.

• The Guardian tackles something nobody in Italy has the courage to say out loud: when a restaurant has a woman making pasta in the window, it’s a tourist trap. Not that tourists seem to mind.

• Fashion’s clientele has finally figured out that polyester is best avoided. According to BoF, we are in the worst moment for the fabric that dominates fast fashion across half the world.

• Jing Daily has also clocked that wealthy spenders drop serious money in boutiques, but half the market is made up of aspirational customers. So how do you solve the problem?

This year Pitti Uomo 110 kicked off during one of the worst heat waves ever recorded in Europe. In mid-June, while the city of Florence was burning under nearly 37 degrees Celsius, editors, buyers and influencers tried to present the best version of themselves in front of dozens of photographers fully equipped to capture the best street style looks of the season. Faced with an endless number of fans and just as many sweat stains in Florence’s showrooms and squares, one cannot help but wonder whether fashion is doing enough to protect its customers from extreme heat. Will a linen suit really be enough?

We don’t know if you know, but it’s almost impossible to convince a peacock at Pitti to leave at home the tailored jacket they planned to wear for their favorite event of the year. Judging by the weather conditions of the latest edition, however, sooner or later even they will have to abandon the suit in favour of a T-shirt: according to the latest report on Indicators of Global Climate Change (IGCC), given current emission levels, by 2030 the world will exceed the critical temperature threshold needed to avoid the irreversible effects of climate change. In short, in four years peacocks will have to pose in temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius.

While on one hand fashion is not doing enough to fight the climate emergency - so much so that in recent years it has actually reduced efforts and investments in sustainable initiatives - it seems to be starting to take an interest in producing collections engineered to combat heat, protect from the sun and guarantee breathability. This is the case with the TechWear from Balenciaga’s Pre-Fall 26, which includes breathable, antibacterial, quick-drying garments with integrated sun protection, or Claudent, an emerging clothing brand creating UV-protective apparel that is beginning to gain attention among American celebrities and the like.

«As temperatures rise, the idea of technical garments as urban luxury feels not only plausible, but increasingly inevitable», confirms Nick Paget, Senior Menswear Strategist at WGSN. Clothing designed for extreme heat represents the next growth opportunity for European luxury, adds the expert, also because until now the sector has generally focused on creating garments that protect against cold and precipitation - see the water-repellent linen from Loro Piana Rain System® and the treated fibre from Middle Distance, the Glasgow-based brand that collaborates with Stone Island, Massimo Osti and C.P. Company, among others.

To develop highly functional wardrobes, with breathability and integrated sun protection, luxury will have to take inspiration from sportswear, which has already made enormous progress in the field. Just a few days ago, Norwegian athlete Stian Dahl Sommerseth won the Eiger Ultra Trail 100K in the Swiss Alps wearing Satisfy, a brand founded in Paris in 2015 from the need of founder Brice Partouche for sportswear that was highly performing but not boring. Among the specific technologies launched by Satisfy this year is HeatCrush™, a type of mesh and micro-jersey developed in Japan that is sweat-reactive to enhance cooling during physical exertion.

Breathable fabrics, temperature-regulating materials, UV protection and monitors for sole wear and hydration levels are becoming essential elements for outdoor training enthusiasts. But you don’t need to run 101 km with 6,700 metres of elevation gain under the July sun to appreciate protective clothing: the trend is being driven by technical brands such as Satisfy, but it is also influencing those positioned between sportswear and urban lifestyle, such as Lululemon, Arc’teryx and Gramicci. According to analysts’ forecasts, the protective clothing market is growing rapidly, valued at $1.74 billion in 2025 and expected to reach $3.34 billion by 2034.

Soon, consumers will look for the same performance offered by sportswear in luxury clothing, and this is the result of the new positioning that the world of sport has achieved internationally. «For Gen Z especially, fitness and wellbeing have become synonymous with luxury: the luxury of having the time, space and resources to stay healthy», adds Paget.

While being able to afford the right clothing for training has become synonymous with luxury, more and more athletes are entering the fashion world, with the most recent example being Erling Haaland and his collection of Hermès bags. Meanwhile, more and more brands are becoming interested in sport-inspired aesthetics, from tennis to Formula 1. The boundary between the two worlds is becoming increasingly blurred, and their respective wardrobes are merging as well.

«Consumers now expect clothing to work much harder - continues Paget - A garment needs to feel comfortable on the couch, support performance in the gym and still look considered in social settings. It signals a kind of successful, wellbeing-led lifestyle». According to this new status symbol, casualwear is no longer casual, but developed with next-generation materials, even when it comes to a pair of sweatpants worn while watching television on the sofa, post-workout. Using Moncler as an example, Paget adds that «performance as status is already deeply embedded, especially among urban consumers who may not technically need extreme performance gear but still value what it represents».

In short, very soon breathable shorts and UV-protective T-shirts could manage to replace designer shirts and sunglasses, transforming events such as Pitti and Fashion Weeks into survival competitions, where the winner is the one who sweats the least. However, as demonstrated by the hailstorm that hit Milan during Bad Bunny’s show last Saturday, sun protection might not be the only type of protection that fashion will have to bet on.

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

The thirtieth week of the year turned out to be packed with twists and turns. From the release of Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated new film, The Odyssey, which is already beginning to show its effects on fashion, as evidenced by statuesque silhouettes, to the increasingly stormy waters of the fashion system. While luxury continues to sink, Richmond seems to stay afloat, perhaps because major brands are becoming exclusive circles for the select few once again. On the fast fashion front, Shein debuts on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, while H&M attempts to swim back upstream with yet another rebrand, following in Zara’s footsteps. Speaking of great heroes, rumors are swirling about a certain rivalry between Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson. Meanwhile, a new threat has reached the shores of the Île-de-France: Olivier Rousteing is Rabanne’s new creative director. At this point, all that’s left is to wait, embracing that peculiar dopamine-fueled thrill of anticipation. A bit like Koreans downloading a delivery app that, in reality, doesn’t actually deliver.

• “Lidl Hug - A Hug of Convenience” is the campaign that tells the story of how we shop for groceries. Through Caffeina’s ironic lens, in collaboration with Lidl Italia.

• We’ve entered the era of tanmaxxing. How the pursuit of the perfect tan remains a mission to accomplish at any cost.

• “Critical thinking is finally making a comeback in pop culture.” A conversation with Matières Fécales, the duo redefining Paris’ fashion scene in unprecedented ways.

• In Japan, during the 1990s, magazines dedicated exclusively to nail art emerged. A dream, or simply nostalgia?

• Fashion should learn from football to take itself less seriously. On TikTok, and offline too.

• Not everyone experiences summer the same way and that’s a fact. Summer is still not a season for every body.

• Vivienne Westwood’s new campaign explores Italian punk with Ilona Staller. Juergen Teller shot it inside the showroom of Belloni, a century-old Lombardy-based furniture company.

• Ghali’s skincare routine literally drove us crazy. We played a game trying to identify every product in his bathroom.

• The Atlantic explains why birdwatching is winning over Millennials and Gen Z, transforming from a niche hobby into a new cultural phenomenon.

• The New Yorker explores, through Isaac Butler’s book The Perfect Moment, the appeal and contradictions of the idea that a single image can capture the truth of a moment.

• Several major publishers have decided to sue Google, accusing Gemini of using copyrighted books to train its AI models. The Guardian breaks down the story in detail.

• The Wall Street Journal explains why clothes once owned by Diane Keaton are fetching record-breaking prices at auction, and asks whether wearing garments that belonged to deceased celebrities is a tribute or a taboo.

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Men, as we know, are quite rigid when it comes to wearing colors. The palette of neutral tones already has everything needed to cover the clothing requirements of every season, and the only real color many men experiment with, against their better judgment, is blue: if they were as bold with the rest of the color spectrum as they are with certain cobalt blues for their suits, we would live in a different world. Be that as it may, in the latest season of runway shows and presentations, almost every brand proposed a solution very appropriate for the summer season, namely the “sorbet colors”.

These are a family of vibrant and fresh colors that evoke the freshness of fruit sorbets. Some of them are pastel colors in every sense, others are not exactly pastel, but they all share a consistently bright hue. From lemon to raspberry, passing through pistachio, mint, mango, peach, watermelon pink (which those more versed in preppy aesthetics will identify as “Nantucket Red”) and finally the shades of orange, blueberry, and strawberry, these colors are saturated, luminous, and, to use an imprecise but expressive term, very sugary. But where did we see them this season?

It all started in Milan when, on Prada’s very black-and-white runway, the rigor of the palette was interrupted by a series of pink, light green, and lemon yellow leather sets. Other splashes of color in the show included true yellows, fuchsia, and bluish purples. A similar trio was also seen at Saint Laurent in Paris, where, halfway through the show, three looks appeared with tailored trousers and waterproof jackets in mango orange, mint green, and again lemon yellow. Nor were black cherry sweaters, antique pink shirts, and even a lime-colored top under a gray suit missing here.

In homage to the preppiness of Nantucket Red (a model invented by Murray’s Toggery Shop in the 1960s — red trousers that faded into a dusty pink) and the American tradition of go-to-hell pants, Jonathan Anderson at Dior put these candy colors in several trousers in his men’s show. Meanwhile at Louis Vuitton, Dries Van Noten, and also Celine, there was a lot of play with shades of green ranging from mint to pistachio. Also in the shows of Dries Van Noten and Celine, these sucrose pastels were very present as splashes of shocking pink or red, but also in more delicate shades.

At Willy Chavarria and IM MEN strong shades of strawberry pink were also seen, while other softer pinks, almost milkshake-like, appeared at Comme des Garçons Shirt, Thom Browne, and Ernest W. Baker. Some, like Zegna and Dolce&Gabbana, experimented a lot with these shades this season, pairing the cooler mint tones with more or less burnt oranges. Others experimented with purple, as at LGN Louis Gabriel Nouchi; at Egonlab, where a men’s suit with short sleeves and legs in light purple was seen; and even at Kiko Kostadinov, who included a kind of delicate lavender in his techwear collection.

Elsewhere it was the dominion of greens, and especially kiwi, which so many used, like Saint Laurent, to animate suits with unexpected combinations. Sunflower in Florence, Auralee and Paul Smith all used a bright light green sweater to animate suits or paired it with an extremely intense light blue. Vetements used the same green-with-light-blue trick, while Junya Watanabe, Soshiotsuki, Kolor, and Amiri preferred almost the same pure green.

Among the presentations, there was obviously the champion of sorbet colors, ERL, who built an entire collection on vivid pink and pistachio green paired with light blue; but also Givenchy, which, in addition to a light yellow coat, recreated the leather tracksuit worn by Timothée Chalamet in unsuspicious times in such an intense bubblegum pink that it hurts the eyes. Always pink, but lighter, and banana yellows were seen at Acne Studios and Lazsloschimdl, while Undercover closed with a group of very colorful waterproof capes in its SS27 lookbook. Isabel Marant’s closed with a watermelon red sweatshirt, while the more caramel-like shades of pink appeared both in the Hermès collection and in that of Umit Benan.

As mentioned at the beginning, the vast majority of the men’s market does not like to experiment too much with colors. And all brands know this, including those in mass distribution. Just open the homepage of Zara, for example, to see that the brand’s summer collection features perhaps two shocking pink tops, a butter yellow t-shirt, and another purple one. In general there are bright colors, but it wouldn’t be wrong to say that 80% of the total is made up of white, black, blue, and beige.

The logic behind this mix is that men will always tend to buy those more familiar colors and therefore it would be a waste. Color is thus used in smaller quantities but, precisely because it must stand out, luxury uses that minority of colored pieces as a positioning tool, not as a commercial bet. Even if Shein works with intense colors, a certain precise shade, with that specific rendering, is simply irreproducible at certain price levels. The emerald green of a Prada leather suit is not “a green” but the result of a specific tanning and material, of a dyeing process that no fast fashion supplier can replicate.

The precious fiber holds color differently from cheap cotton or polyester, returning a saturation and depth that simply do not exist as an option elsewhere. That precise shade, with that precise rendering, is materially available only to those working at a certain level. In this sense, the “sorbet colors” can be read as new status markers. This makes the luxury colored garment easier to “justify” for the male customer: in addition to visually distinguishing, only a luxury brand can produce it in that shade and with that rendering.

Finally, one must consider that in recent years, thanks to quiet luxury (which was very monochrome with its nautical palette), other summer codes traditionally associated with wealth such as crochet cotton polos or certain floral and Hawaiian patterns have now been widely absorbed by the mass market and only signal conventionality or, in modern terms, submission to the algorithm. Sorbet color, on the other hand, remains one of the few elements still capable of tracing that subtle but perceptible line between those who can afford to dare and those who simply make the most prudent choice.

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.

• Diesel launches Only Desire, its first feminine fragrance. With an immersive installation in Milan that invites us to confess our desire.

• 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.

• This weekend, nss and Raffo will transform Piazza Buozzi into a true “Piazzetta Pugliese.” Find out all the details here.

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• 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?

• Solaris combines style and technology to help you find the perfect sunglasses for this summer.

• 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.