Lady Dior Rewritten - Jonathan Anderson

.new collection
Jonathan Anderson Rewrites the Lady Dior for Spring Summer 2026

For Spring Summer 2026, Dior turns its attention back to the Lady Dior and treats it with the kind of care usually reserved for things that already carry weight. Under Jonathan Anderson, the bag feels less like an emblem and more like a companion, something held close, something kept.

The Lady Dior has always occupied a particular emotional territory. Formal, recognisable, composed. This season, its presence softens without losing its posture. Anderson approaches the bag through instinct less concept, letting memory, superstition, and craft settle naturally into the object.
The Lady Dior Clover becomes the clearest expression of this sensibility. Four-leaf clovers are scattered across the surface, each one hot-stamped and then embroidered by hand inside the Dior ateliers. The repetition feels meditative, almost ritualistic. The clover carries Christian Dior’s belief in luck and chance, while also tracing a personal line back to Anderson’s Irish background. The symbolism exists, unframed and unspoken.

A small red ladybug appears, easy to miss at first glance. A private sign, revealed through closeness. The D, I, O, R charms follow in softened, talismanic form, less declarative than usual, integrated into the rhythm of the piece. The geometry of the Lady Dior remains intact and the emotion shifts.
The Mini Lady Dior Buttercup opens a different chapter.
Three-dimensional buttercups bloom across the leather in a vivid yellow that feels intentional, almost exacting. A small bee rests among them, frozen mid-movement. The detail speaks to Dior’s symbolic vocabulary, yet it avoids nostalgia. This is surface treated as landscape and ornament treated as structure.

What runs through all of these interpretations is a visible respect for time. Stitching remains present and embroidery reads as touch. And craft is neither hidden nor dramatized. It simply exists, patiently. The Lady Dior feels lived with, carried, and reached for. Its meaning unfolds adorably through familiarity. Shot by David Sims, the Lady Dior campaign images extend this sense of intimacy into the visual language of the season. The compositions feel unguarded and tactile, grounded in gesture, posture, and proximity. The Lady Dior appears within lived-in moments, held close to the body, present without performance.

Within the wider Spring Summer 2026 collection, shaped by memory and the quiet act of revisiting the House’s language, the Lady Dior becomes a vessel. It holds belief, habit, gesture. It carries something human.
Available from January 2026, these Lady Dior interpretations reaffirm the bag’s place within contemporary culture. Recognition gathers through use, proximity, and time. The Lady Dior remains unmistakable, carrying a sense of intimacy that feels personal, intuitive, and enduring.

LADY DIOR Campaign Images seen by DAVID SIMS / (c) all images DIOR Press

Ludovic de Saint Sernin - Leather Chair

.new collaboration
Ludovic de Saint Sernin Brings Intimacy Into the Room

The first time you notice the chair, it sits in the room with quiet certainty, present without asking to be looked at, holding a kind of tension that registers before you understand why. Black leather curves into itself, suspended within a chromed frame, carrying an atmosphere familiar to anyone who knows and loves Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s work.

Chen Zi wears a dress by LUDOVIC DE SAINT SERNIN x ZARA, a choker by MEG KIM and jewellery by BVLGARI

De Saint Sernin has always worked close to the body, attentive to skin, exposure, and the emotional charge that gathers around them. His designs speak about intimacy without explaining it, allowing sensation and structure to do the work. Translating that language into an object feels like a natural progression, one that shifts the conversation from wearing to inhabiting.

Chen Zi wears a total look by CFCL and a choker by LUDOVIC DE SAINT SERNIN x ZARA

Spending time with the chair changes how it reads and sitting down slows the room, weight settles and posture becomes conscious. The object holds the body with clarity and intention. There is a sense of being aware of oneself, of how one occupies space, of how stillness can feel charged.

References to erotic culture are present, though they never announce themselves. They exist in the discipline of the form, in the way tension is maintained, in the quiet authority of restraint. Intimacy emerges through trust and what remains is an atmosphere, something that lingers longer than description.

Chen Zi wears a total look by SIMONE ROCHA

Chen Zi wears gloves by SPORTMAX

Chen Zi wears a coat by LUDOVIC DE SAINT SERNIN x ZARA

The chair resists behaving as an accessory, since it holds its place in a room the way certain garments hold their place in memory. It feels designed to be lived with, to gather time, to accumulate meaning slowly through use and proximity.
Each piece is signed by the designer in black ink on white, the line fluid and finished with a small heart. The gesture reads as disarmingly direct, a reminder that behind the discipline and control sits a human hand, a personal mark, an act of closeness. All profits from the limited collection support the Women’s Earth Alliance, an organization working at the intersection of environmental protection and women’s leadership. It is a quiet extension of the project’s logic, grounding intimacy in responsibility.

Seen in the context of an urban night, alongside a model dressed in black leather and denim, the chair feels at home. The scene suggests a world that understands presence, confidence, and self-awareness with no spectacle. The object belongs to that world naturally, carrying the same sense of calm intensity that defines de Saint Sernin’s universe.

creative direction PHOEBE LEE
seen SOJUNG LEE
styled PHOEBE LEE + YUNYEONG YANG
model CHEN ZI
production coordination YUNYEONG YANG
hair JUYEOP OH
make up JEONGIN LIM
make up assistant SOYEON KIM
nails SEOHYUN LEE
video ZHANG KE
special thanks SUNKYUNG HWANG

Adidas x Arte Antwerp - North African Football Style

.new collection
Adidas x Arte Antwerp SS26
*Football Culture through the People of Marrakech

written MARK ASHKINS

The new adidas x Arte Antwerp capsule turns toward North African football culture with a clarity that feels grounded in the everyday. Marrakech becomes the setting, not as a backdrop but as a place with its own tempo, its own logic, its own way of holding people together around the game.

Photographer Ilyes Griyeb moves through this environment with a steady eye, meeting the neighbourhood at its own pace and letting the surroundings speak through surfaces, faces and small movements that occur without performance.

Arte Antwerp, shaped by the perspective of founder Bertony Da Silva, has always carried a sensitivity toward cultural intersections, and that undercurrent aligns naturally with adidas and its long engagement with football. The capsule reflects this shared ground. Red, green, white and black run through the pieces with a quiet confidence. Embroidery and lace trims bring texture without leaning into decoration.

Tracksuits, knit jerseys, loose trousers and graphic tops take their place within a vocabulary that feels purposeful. Arabic lettering translating to Sport Unites Africa appears on select garments and extends the conversation toward the communities that inspired the collection. Moving through the neighbourhood, Griyeb meets people whose presence gives the work its orientation. Groups gather near open fields, children pass through the frame as part of their routine, and moments of pause unfold in streets that hold the light in a particular way. The clothing settles into these scenes without seeking attention, becoming part of the environment. There is an ease in how bodies and garments share space, and that ease shapes the tone of the entire series.

Brahim Díaz appears in the extended visual material and quietly expands the field of reference. His Moroccan and European background reflects the cultural paths that define much of contemporary football, and his presence adds a subtle resonance. The project treats these layers with restraint, allowing them to take shape through observation, no explanation needed.
Footwear sits within the same framework. The Lightblaze POD ZIP, slides and upcoming sneaker silhouettes enter the visual rhythm without shifting its balance. Their forms respond to movement, dust, and the physicality of the setting, echoing the way the apparel interacts with the landscape. The progression of images feels continuous, guided by the structures, streets and open areas that hold the community together.

What remains is a capsule that finds its place within a lived environment where football is part of the day.

The collaboration between adidas and Arte Antwerp gains its strength from this proximity to real spaces and real routines, and the campaign keeps its focus there, letting the neighbourhood shape the story with a steady and unforced presence.

Campaign photography by Ilyes Griyeb, featuring members of the Marrakech community
all images courtesy of Adidas and Arte Antwerp, PR

Celine

CELINE Charms Collection
Sets a New Code for Personal Jewelry

The CELINE Charms collection sits within the current vocabulary of the house, but it moves with its own logic. Seen on the runway in unapologetically dense clusters, the charms shift the attention toward how people build identity through small objects.

There is no single instruction for wearing them, only the suggestion that jewellery can function as a set of personal signals rather than a fixed decorative layer. The pieces carry a deliberate sense of weight. Some reference the Triomphe, the long-running CELINE code that has travelled across bags, buckles, and hardware. Others push into new shapes that feel more like found symbols than seasonal designs. Together they form an assortment that lends itself to mixing rather than categorising. CELINE frames them as collectibles in the press notes, and the idea fits. They work best when assembled gradually, when the accumulation starts to say something about the hands that put them together.

The collection stretches across gold and silver finishes, sometimes polished, sometimes softened. The tension between the metals gives the charms a lived-in presence, not in a nostalgic way but in a straightforward acknowledgment that jewellery gains meaning through constant use. It is easy to move them from a bracelet to a necklace or to pin them to a jacket, which turns the collection into something closer to a modular system. The wearers decide the scale, the noise, the density, CELINE keeps the structure open on purpose.

As new motifs enter the collection each season, the line grows in a way that feels continuous. Designs shift, earlier symbols reappear, and the combinations evolve with the same casual logic people use when they pick up small objects over time. Some charms stay, others move from one piece of jewellery to another, and a few drift out of circulation entirely. The collection supports that slow accumulation, treating personal editing as an essential part of how the pieces function. It builds an aesthetic that comes together through repetition and daily use.

Placed within CELINE’s larger universe, the charms become a quiet extension of the house without slipping into the language usually tied to jewellery campaigns. Their scale keeps them close to the body in a practical way, allowing them to shift between bracelets, necklaces, and safety pins with no hierarchy in how they should be worn. That flexibility creates a more grounded form of expression. The pieces align with how people handle accessories they reach for constantly, moving them around until the arrangement feels right. In that sense, the relevance of the collection comes from its openness. The line continues without finality. New pieces enter, older ones remain in circulation, and the set adjusts through use. This movement keeps the collection active and connected to the person who builds it.

watch
campaign film

all visuals
CELINE 2025

Polène Paris - Numéro Neuf East-West

Holiday Edit
Polène’s Numéro Neuf East-West

written AMANDA MORTENSON

Polène entered the industry in 2016 with an unusual clarity of purpose. The three founding siblings, Elsa, Mathieu, and Antoine Mothay, built the brand around a conviction that design, craftsmanship, and material should form a single conversation.

They wanted a house that felt contemporary in its rhythm yet grounded in the discipline of artisanship. Within a few years, that direction resonated globally. Polène opened spaces in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, London, Copenhagen, and Hamburg, each reflecting their attitude toward calm precision and intuitive form. The growth felt fast, but inside the brand the focus stayed steady: refine, edit, and let the work speak. What shaped Polène’s rise is their close connection with Ubrique, the leather-making region in southern Spain. More than 2,200 craftspeople bring the designs to life, giving the brand a direct link to a long-standing tradition. The Paris design studio develops the visual language; the artisans translate it into structure, weight, and tactility. This exchange has defined Polène’s identity—clean silhouettes, sculpted leather, organic lines shaped by hand. Their collections show a consistency that comes from respect for the material and for the people who work it.

Polène also thinks in systems. Circularity became part of their process early on. They introduced the Plèi collection, where leftover leather from bag production becomes macramé surfaces, bead work, objects, and collaborative pieces with guest artisans. The intention is simple: use material fully and treat every offcut as something with potential. In 2023, the brand expanded into jewelry, produced by Italian specialists and plated with 24-carat gold. The pieces follow the same design instincts—shaping, folding, and texturing the metal with the same attention given to leather.

Among all lines, the Numéro Neuf collection has become a signature. First introduced in 2020, it reflects the house’s interest in structure softened by movement. Full-grain calfskin is molded, draped, stitched, and shaped until it carries volume and gentleness. It is one of the clearest expressions of Polène’s vision and a marker of how the brand approaches form.

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Camel

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Ebony

This season, the Numéro Neuf East-West marks a new chapter. The design extends the original silhouette into a long, horizontal format and introduces a shoulder-bag version for the first time. It reads as confident and composed, with a contemporary zip closure and an elongated profile that gives the piece a distinct attitude. Available in Black, Camel, Taupe, Chalk, Ebony, Black Cherry, and Sand, the model is crafted in Ubrique using the same meticulous process as the rest of the collection. Every detail shows intention, from the shaping of the leather to the precise seams that hold the draping in place.

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Taupe

Polène Paris
www.polene-paris.com

based in Paris, France and creating handcrafted leather goods produced by skilled artisans in Ubrique, Spain

Polène Paris Numéro Neuf East-West price: 440 €

LE MILE selected the Numéro Neuf East-West for this year’s holiday season recommendations because it represents exactly what we look for: a design with clarity, a strong sense of identity, and craftsmanship that feels immediate when you hold the piece. It aligns with Polène’s broader story of thoughtful growth and with our interest in objects that carry aesthetic strength and quiet emotional presence. As the season approaches, this bag stands as one of the most grounded and assured releases of the year—an example of how contemporary leather goods can be relevant, refined, and deeply considered.

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Chalke

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Chalke

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Taupe

Valentino Garavani DeVain - Age of Electric Couture

VALENTINO GARAVANI
*Craft, Code and the Curious Case of DeVain

Valentino Garavani DeVain appears in the digital ether with a calm, almost ceremonial presence, occupying that peculiar zone where craft speaks to code and the instinct of the atelier leans toward the logic of algorithms. A quiet meeting unfolds between centuries of handwork and the cool hum of computational imagination. The maison’s dedication to gesture, material and emotional precision finds itself mirrored by an AI engine that renders its own forms of ornament and atmosphere, a pairing that feels unexpectedly harmonious and gently provocative, as if couture and circuitry were testing the edges of each other’s worlds without losing their sense of poise.

Thomas Albdorf opens the procession. In his mirrored chambers the bag performs a gentle act of multiplication, slipping between reflection and refraction with the calm confidence of an object aware of its own charisma. His studio becomes a small observatory where materials converse with their own silhouettes and symmetry grows its own contemplative pulse.

Enter The Void descends deeper, their world resembles a dream rescued from a half-remembered video game and dipped in an extraterrestrial ocean. Fishes drift between cacti, hotel chandeliers rise from dunes and the bag glows like a passerby who has wandered into someone else’s subconscious. This is surrealism with the autofill function humming quietly underneath, the kind that feels familiar and feverish at the same time.

Maison Valentino presents DeVain as the new protagonist in a sprawling visual experiment, inviting five artists to take the bag far from the usual marble floors and closer to the evolving frontier where images appear before they exist. In a cultural landscape that worships immediacy, this series arrives as an ode to crafted illusion, stretching the definition of what creative authorship can become when imagination merges with machine logic.

Paul Octavious
still from the film below

Paul Octavious transports DeVain into the long corridors of art history. Sixteenth-century still lifes breathe again, except this time they blink, shift and fold into layered animations. The bag perches among fruits and goblets like a visiting character who has slipped through a tear in a tapestry. Octavious choreographs a conversation between centuries without asking for permission, giving classical composition a sly digital pulse.

Annie Collinge builds a world where objects and cut-out figures share the same mischievous logic, creating a tableau that feels playful on the surface and quietly uncanny underneath. The bag appears among her colours and silhouettes like a character stepping through a handmade stage set, moving through scenes where humour and strangeness sit comfortably side by side. Her universe blurs reality just enough to remind viewers that imagination always has its own rules.

Total Emotional Awareness
still from the film below

Total Emotional Awareness leads DeVain through a landscape where pop forms stretch, multiply and reorganize themselves with dreamlike intent. Geometry expands, colours pulse and the bag moves through a vision that feels sculpted from pure imagination. Their world hovers between play and philosophy, creating a visual rhythm that absorbs DeVain into an ever-shifting field of possibility.

Z_Captures throws DeVain into sharp contrast with everyday pop objects, creating collisions that feel playful and deliberately disorienting. The bag sits among bold colours and unexpected pairings, adopting a presence shaped by tension and surprise. His compositions turn contrast into structure, allowing fantasy and pop culture to occupy the same vivid frame.

Tina Tona finishes the first chapter by exploding the visual field entirely. Her collages vibrate with color and hand-cut energy, weaving fragments of memory, culture and playful rebellion. The bag slips between viewpoints, blooming into countless versions of itself. Tona’s world has texture, movement and a joyful refusal to stay still.

Albert Planella approaches the bag as if it were an apparition. Here DeVain becomes mutable and cinematic, drifting between clarity and haze with a rhythm that feels borrowed from dreams. His images hold their breath while shifting into new states of being, as if the bag were quietly considering who it wants to become next.

For a house that reveres human craftsmanship, this digital series introduces a new tension. Energy-hungry algorithms sit beside centuries of artisanal knowledge. The contrast generates friction, and the friction generates light. The visuals shimmer with a strange kind of beauty, born from human impulse and computational curiosity. DeVain emerges from the experiment slightly transformed, carrying the patina of a bag that has travelled through mirrors, deserts, dreams, archives, memories and machine logic. The result feels like a quiet promise that creativity, in all its evolving shapes, still belongs to those who dare to stretch the image until it reveals something unexpected.

note
The video and image works in this project were created by nine participating artists: Thomas Albdorf, Enter The Void, Paul Octavious, Albert Planella, Tina Tona, Animus Pax, Annie Collinge, Total Emotional Awareness and Z_Captures. The AI-generated visuals were produced by Enter The Void, Paul Octavious, Albert Planella, Animus Pax and Total Emotional Awareness; all imagery by Enter The Void was created with the informed consent of the portrayed models and all participating talents.

KVRT STVFF - New Jeans Line

.new collection
KVRT STVFF’s Debut Denim
*Denim as Body Frame

written AMANDA MORTENSON

When a label born from the intimacy of underwear begins to work in denim, the move feels instinctive. KVRT STVFF’s debut jeans collection expands its vocabulary without changing tone. The body remains center stage, form and movement leading the design.

From its Barcelona STVDIO, KVRT STVFF introduces three silhouettes: Loose, Loose Bootcut, and Straight. Each with its own tempo, each holding quiet confidence. The Loose falls in measured flow, the Bootcut releases a soft curve, the Straight keeps a disciplined verticality. In all three, the human shape commands the rhythm.

The palette is deliberate, Ecru, Espresso, washed Black, Indigo. Shades that refuse drama, relying instead on balance. Fabric becomes language and texture becomes punctuation. Logos stay nearly invisible; patches share the same denim, edges left raw, it all feels like a whisper of craftsmanship.

Inside, a concealed closure—signature to the brand’s design logic—invites openness. The jeans can be worn unfastened, undone, or sealed close. It’s a structural intimacy translated from the brand’s history with skin, nothing ornamental. Each detail exists because the body demands it.

The Straight model rests low, fits close at the seat, falls evenly through the leg. The Loose shape offers volume without weight. The Bootcut lets the hem drift outward in a controlled release. Across all cuts, the same raw-edged waistband patch and tonal restraint maintain unity. Everything begins and ends in the STVDIO. Patterns drawn, prototypes tested, adjustments repeated until balance arrives. Every seam tells of method, not machine, and luxury appears here as precision.
Since its founding in 2018, KVRT STVFF has moved through categories—underwear, swimwear, sportswear—without hesitation. Each step carries the same message: confidence as material. Every garment affirms the wearer’s shape, every proportion aligns with the body’s truth. Boldness is quiet here and strength wears minimalism like second skin.

The denim line follows that same current, clean cuts, technical clarity, human form as blueprint. The jeans sit at the intersection of discipline and sensuality, where structure becomes gesture. A wardrobe piece stripped of everything unnecessary. Sustainability, though never labeled, breathes through the process. Thoughtful sourcing, measured production, slow release. For KVRT STVFF, longevity exists in design that resists the noise of time. The future is already embedded in the present garment. There’s something meditative in how these jeans meet the body. Movement activates them; light changes them. The raw edges begin to fray, the denim softens, the skin writes its own pattern. The fabric records life, one crease at a time.

KVRT STVFF’s denim arrives without fanfare, it rests on the body with certainty, aware of its quiet power. The collection expands the brand’s language, but the tone remains unmistakable—precise, restrained, enduring. Denim becomes another surface for confidence. A continuation of what KVRT STVFF began years ago: redefining how clothing interacts with skin. A conversation between material and anatomy, designed not to cover, but to frame.

KVRT STVFF Jeans are available for Men and Women, priced at €290, via kvrtstvff.com and selected retailers.

GOT BAG Moon Bag Ruffle

GOATS GOT BAG Campaign
*A Herd Becomes a Headline

written AMANDA MORTENSON

Some campaigns arrive through strategy decks. But others fall from the sky. GOT BAG’s latest story started with a shepherd in Albania who typed four letters into Google. G-O-A-T B-A-G. A delivery went out, a herd received its new gear, and soon an email returned with photos of goats on the beach. Each animal carried a GOT BAG as if this was the natural order of things. The team packed cameras and went to see it firsthand. Their result is the brands new campaign called “GOATS GOT BAG.”

watch Film

The images feel like postcards from an unexpected runway. A black goat under the coastal sun wears a pale Moon Bag with complete ease. A taupe bag appears against limestone and tumbling lemons. A shepherd named Sherif, dressed in wool and holding a staff, lifts a hot coral Ruffle like an official badge of style. The herd moves together along a stone wall and Mediterranean light is washing the scene. The film that accompanies the visuals carries the same energy. Sherif speaks about his herd, the way he names them after his children, the way he sees them as family. He smiles, and the herd steps into fashion history.

GOT BAG’s identity has always circled around material, impact, and design. Since 2018, the label has worked under the line “From Trash to Treasure.” Their process starts with discarded matter such as ocean plastic, fishing nets, industrial scraps. Through recycling and refinement, this matter becomes yarn, then fabric, then a surface with style. From that surface, shapes arrive. Backpacks for commuters, shoppers for markets, rolltops for travel, crossbodies for urban rhythm, puffer bags for play. Each design carries a signature of clean lines, strong details, a feel for volume and curve.

GOT BAG Wavy Puffer Moon Bag in oyster

GOT BAG Cloud Moon Bag in soft shell

The campaign shows this spectrum in action. On the goats you spot the Puffer Moon Bag in black, oyster, scallop. You see the Moon Bag Ruffle in hot coral, cobalt, soft shell. You recognize the way GOT BAG expands a family of products into a larger landscape. They form a catalogue that grows season by season, always linked to the same ethos of reuse and redesign.

What stands out is the tone, because “GOATS GOT BAG” is playful, clever, and confident. The visuals have humor, the mockumentary leans into irony, and the whole story carries a wink. At the same time, it signals reach. Fashion audiences see it, lifestyle audiences see it, and global followers share it. The herd becomes a symbol of how far a label can travel when it mixes creativity with a clear core.

Sherif appears in the campaign as a central figure, he lives with his herd by the Albanian coast, cares for them with devotion, and shares their daily rhythm. His story unfolds in the visuals and the film, where shepherd and herd move together through landscape and frame. His goats wear the bags, he tells his story, and the brand steps into new territory. The shepherd and the label stand side by side, each adding weight to the other.

Behind the campaign sits a company that has grown with purpose. GOT BAG operates as a B Corp™, meeting global standards for social and ecological responsibility. Their foundation in Indonesia collects plastic waste from rivers and coastal areas, builds waste systems with local communities, and channels material into new cycles. The impact is measurable, at the same time, the brand designs products that people want to carry. A backpack on a bike lane in Berlin, a crossbody on a weekend flight, and a Moon Bag carried by a goat along the coast.

Sherif wears GOT BAG Cloud Shoulder Bag in hot coral

“GOATS GOT BAG” frames all of this with lightness. The images travel easily and the story sticks. A herd with bags moves across a landscape and suddenly a global audience pays attention. GOT BAG steps into 2025 with a narrative that feels surreal and direct. A shepherd, a herd, and a set of bags that embody design with responsibility. GOT BAG has always spoken through product and this new campaign speaks through image. Together they shape a brand that holds its line, carries its mission, and expands its world. From beaches in Albania to sidewalks in Tokyo, the bags move. They hold objects, they hold meaning, and now they hold a place in one of the most original campaigns of the year.

GOATS GOT BAG Campaign

GOATS GOT BAG Campaign

discover the brand www.got-bag.com

Seoul’s New Perfume Vanguard

SEOUL’S SCENT SCENE
*Inside Korea’s Rising Scent Scene

written LAURA DUNKELMANN

New notes. Untold stories. Visionary visuals. The world’s most restless perfume concepts are now rising from Seoul. To reduce them all to K-pop gloss would be a mistake: these young brands play in different registers – some eccentric, some tender, some unapologetically avant-garde. Always authentic. Always alive. A scent compilation of the city’s new vanguard.

On a small hill, tucked between housing blocks and the Leeum Museum, a thick red upside-down “U” pulses with bass – and base notes. Step through and you’re inside Borntostandout’s flagship, part gallery, part funhouse, part provocation. In one corridor: paintings, porcelain, sculpture. In another: mirrored walls, from whose ceilings hang matte-white flacons like ghostly fruit. The mood is loud, the gestures are bold. With creations like Fig Porn and Dirty Rice founder Jun Lim, once an investment banker, insists on friction. “Inspiration comes from the everyday. Sometimes from something as banal as old chewing gum,” he says. The vibe? More bar-night than boutique. Perfume as an attitude, not flattering accessory. It works – even the branded bags have become covetable objects. Founded in 2022, Borntostandout is already backed by L’Oréal and available in niche perfumeries globally.

Borntostandout, Hannam Flagship Store

Borntostandout
Black Guava

A short walk from Borntostandout down the hill, a different frequency: the dreamlike Pesade, with its hazy unisex blend Blue Eyeshadow and the London-inflected SW19, complete with gelato bar serving flavors that echo the scents, are nestled between internationally known names in the era most dense with scent stores. Few metres further, there’s minimalist Nonfiction, whose in-store-only Odorama Cities channels Korean herbs into an olfactory postcard. And then the city’s scent icon: Tamburins.

Its best seller Chamo is everywhere. A code, a secret handshake. Seoul’s answer to what Santal 33 once was in New York: understated but unmistakable, raw yet soft, a cult in the air. To leave Seoul without a Tamburins bag is almost impossible. Hand cream, balm, eau de parfum – they’re souvenirs as much as scents. Founded in 2017, part of the Gentle Monster universe, Tamburins now runs multiple flagships and pop-ups, Haus Nowhere being the latest dependance. But perfume is only half the story: retail is theatre. Abstract electronic art-pop plays, K-pop stars front the campaigns. In summer, Silent Beach filled a warehouse with sand, performance art, and a limited-edition vinyl tied to the scent. Perfume as gesamtkunstwerk.

From a Western gaze, such staging feels almost alien. And yet, despite the radical packaging and spectacle, most Korean brands still collaborate with French perfumers. The labels may read Made in Korea, but the tradition lingers in the base notes.

Tamburins Store Seoul, new space at the recently opened Haus Nowhere

Not so at Sarangheyo. Here, founder Sung composes with Korean collaborators only. His collection is a memoir in molecules – journeys, encounters, stories refracted through a Korean lens. There’s nothing trendy here, the brand is a reflection of class and timlessness. His studio, hidden in a 1960s office block and far away from any shiny shopping area, it feels like an echo chamber of that heritage: oils he uses to experiment with, glass vials, a vintage hi-fi he implemented into the showrooms soundsystem, humming soft jazz. “My perfumes are a link to my origin,” he explains while putting on his iconic canvas apron. Clients can visit the space for intimate consultations as well. After years at LVMH, Sung left and launched Sarangheyo in 2020. “Everything I do now feels authentic,” he says, showing a traditional korean hanko ink pad – the smell of which inspired his next launch. Once conceived as men’s scents, his range now floats unisex: sweet-bitter contrasts in Chocolatic Nchnt; fragile florals in Flower, inspired by a painter living deep in the Seorak forest, where pine and musk drift together like mist.


Saranghaeyo
91. CHOCOLATIC NCHNT

Saranghaeyo
Founder Sung in his showroom 

Also, Sisiology, founded by Nicole Park – a third-generation insider of South Korea’s beauty world – turns away from spectacle and toward the analogue. The language of the 2022 found brand is quieter, circling around moments of emotion and connection, like photographs held in scent. The perfumes feel like intimate captures, soft as memory. Nicole herself reflects that sensibility: her store sits inside a futuristic building whose architecture, from afar, resembles the silhouette of a face. Inside, the atmosphere is hushed. When she sprays Overflown onto delicately illustrated blotters, she doesn’t ask which notes I detect, but which emotions surface. With this clean, floral, luminous fragrance, a sense of enthusiasm and comfort rises — less a perfume, more a feeling suspended in air.

In contrast, CGS presents the avant-garde in its purest form. The 2025 perfume debut of avant-garde photographer Gi Seok Cho. The most niche of all – and the most otherworldly. A secret showroom above his studio in Gangnam. Appointment only. “How did you find this place?” asks the man at the door. Inside, you step into a surreal topography: photographic collages, sculpture fragments, brutalist concrete pierced by circular shafts of light. Flacons displayed like trophies from a parallel planet. On the rooftop, a massive white statue – fallen angel, street fighter, both. The perfumes themselves? Softer than the world they inhabit. Bad Dreams, one of the three perfumes, with its smoke of tobacco and cinnamon, is strangely tender against visuals of thorned hands and butterfly-winged heads.

Sisology
Overtlowing

Creativity. Authenticity. Otherness. That is the essence. And while these houses could be imagined in Paris, in London, in Tokyo – it makes absolute sense that they flourish here, now, in Seoul. A young city, in a country actively forging its identity, investing fiercely in its culture.
Through sound. Through scent. Through everything in between.

Sisology
Photoenthusiast and Sisology founder Nicole Park

CGS sculpture at the showrooms rooftop terrace 
seen by Cho Gi-Seok

CGS
Love and Hate

Brioni - Les Extraits Collection

BRIONI Les Extraits
*Bottled Obsessions, Hammered Glass

written AMANDA MORTENSON

Brioni insists on elegance as if it were oxygen. The house has been tailoring Rome’s whisper of power since 1945, and now it has chosen to let that whisper linger on skin, in air, in the memory of whoever dared to stand too close.

Les Extraits de Parfum is not a collection in the ordinary sense, more a disciplined experiment conducted in glass and essence, four variations on purity staged like chapters of a book that doesn’t explain itself.

Iris Exquis is iris stripped of politeness, set against lavender, suede, and a shadow of black tea that behaves like a sly accomplice. Encens Minéral glows with incense that refuses to play temple, green edges cut with pepper, a molecule named Mystikal humming like neon behind a curtain. Labdanum Brut moves in velvet, rose liquored up, musk that knows the language of skin better than its owner, a suggestion of vanillin running through it like a signature you can’t quite forge. Papyrus Éternel wears its black tea like a dinner jacket still warm from last night, papyrus rising like smoke, cardamom and vetiver drafted in to remind everyone that refinement also knows how to smolder.

Brioni
Les Extraits Collection / Iris Exquis

The bottles are less containers than geological events, heavy, octagonal, faceted like minerals that decided they preferred couture to caves. A block of glass beaten with hammer-texture until it catches light like a restless pool, ready to sit on a shelf as if permanence were still possible. They are too solid for vanity, too sculptural for bathroom clutter, designed to exist as much as to hold.

Brioni calls the project a symphony of purity and elegance, but it feels more like a private performance never intended for applause, four compositions sealed in silence until released by the warmth of skin. The perfumes breathe in their own tempo, neither asking nor offering permission. They simply are, and that is the luxury.

The house still speaks of sustainability, though here it arrives without the megaphone of trend. Vegan, cruelty-free, responsibly sourced, recyclable—words that have been stripped of their PR costume and pressed back into service as part of the tailoring. Nothing about Les Extraits performs morality; it wears it, like a lining you only notice when you run your hand inside.

Brioni has always operated as if style were less an act than a condition, and Les Extraits extends that condition into air. A suit might command presence, but a scent occupies absence. It lingers where the body has moved on, in the folds of an evening, in the silence after the door closes. Four fragrances, four monuments, four ways of saying the same thing: elegance leaves evidence. Enjoy yourself!

Available from 1 November in Brioni boutiques and select stores, each 80 ml flacon of Les Extraits de Parfum is offered at EUR 290.

Brioni
Les Extraits Collection / Iris Exquis

DANIEL w. FLETCHER SS26

.new campaign
The Thistle’s Whisper
*Spring’s Reckoning with Daniel w. Fletcher

written ALBAN E. SMAJLI

There’s a certain wetness to the Scottish Highlands that announces itself only when trousers surrender completely to the elements, the kind that hovers between rain and fog, an atmosphere born from nature’s own reluctance to hurry, pausing in the air, pressing against skin, gliding over shoulders, a presence Daniel w. Fletcher welcomes wholeheartedly for SS26—a collection conceived far from city grids and studio walls, placed deep in a landscape where thistles claim the horizon and sheep pay attention only to the subtle shift in grass and sky, unmoved by the artificial logic of seasons or palettes.

Hand-painted thistles bloom in reckless, botanical abandon, with each flower growing out from shirt sleeves and collars, each garment transforming into a half-wild meadow, an unmanageable flora arranged for the kind of person who ventures into the landscape and becomes indistinguishable from its restless green. Heather finds its way from hillside to fabric, moving across bodies, seeping into skin, with Fletcher’s colours bleeding mauves and mosses and that elusive purple-grey reserved for Sunday afternoons when the air feels heavy with promise and the sky rehearses for the next storm.

Tailoring enters, never content with restraint or ordinary smoothness—long-line jackets shape the silhouette, Edwardian waists emerge for the gentry and the bold, with military details carving sharp intervals in the softness, toggles and buttons murmuring stories of distant uniforms, each element inventing a wardrobe for escapists in waiting. Double-breasted and single-breasted jackets offer endless invitations, in a territory where rules drift across sheep tracks and lichen. Trousers billow, scarves wrap and spiral, silk chasing wind, lambswool berets balancing on heads, each one poised with the quiet confidence of a secret shared in a hushed room.

Daniel w. Fletcher
SPRING SUMMER 26 Campaign

Daniel w. Fletcher
SPRING SUMMER 26 Campaign

And the formality orchestrates its own quiet spectacle. Ballroom-wear emerges, tuxedos primed for a ceilidh high above the heather, crystal buttonholes glimmer through the mist, organza shirts breathe, drifting with their own internal weather. An urge arises to waltz, or simply to move with intention, carrying each garment across moorland and parquet, each piece calling for nerve, imagination, a willingness to lead it toward uncharted places.

DANIEL w. FLETCHER fills the scene with winks and sidelong gestures—stripes swell with volume, stepping boldly into the foreground, shorts carve themselves close to the edge, displaying knees as new protagonists. Corsets lace up, commanding presence and precision, every tie mapping out new lines for the body’s story. Faux fur overcoats settle across shoulders, weighty and resolute, built for winters that extend as long as one pleases. Each element declares its own prominence, every piece carrying the romance of tradition while responding to the pulse and rhythm of the world outside nostalgia’s reach.

Daniel w. Fletcher
SPRING SUMMER 26 Campaign

Fabien Kruszelnicki’s photography seals the collection in filmic mist, Ruben McDowall flickers between silhouette and apparition, the Highlands rising as protagonist, the model inhabiting the landscape and the lambswool, styling shifting toward the realm of myth. Drama floods the images, comedy bubbles beneath—berets propose riddles, organza murmurs replies, thistles linger with prickly patience, always first to greet a visitor.

The collection drifts toward unsettled ground, finding comfort along the periphery, taffeta trousers sweeping up the grass, faux fur surrendering itself to the force of the wind. Resilience glimmers alongside lightness, each look blends the regal with the ridiculous, composing a wardrobe for those who flirt with romance and savor irony, an assembly of garments that welcomes the world, offers its hand, and releases a trace of heather and irreverence into the air. Art direction by James West, grooming by Sophie Jane Anderson, yet the narrative unfolds with greatest clarity out in the weather, cast across skin, carried forward on bodies in motion.

Daniel w. Fletcher
SPRING SUMMER 26 Campaign

Daniel w. Fletcher
SPRING SUMMER 26 Campaign

Daniel w. Fletcher
SPRING SUMMER 26 Campaign

BDK Paris - IMPADIA

IMPADIA by BDK Parfums
*Rose Parade, Paris Bottled, Ego Included

written Monica de Luna

There are mornings in Paris when the light arrives late, hungover and still dressed for last night’s vernissage, spilling rosé and orange across rooftops as if trying to distract the city from whatever existential crisis it’s currently plotting.

BDK Parfums, always one step ahead and never underdressed, walks into this glowing mess and presents IMPADIA—one hundred milliliters of pure Parisian theatre, rehearsed, bottled, and capped like a miniature monument, ready to colonize wrists from Saint-Honoré to the last seat at Café de Flore.

(c) BDK Paris

Jordi Fernández, the nose with the hands of a botanist and the heart of a poet, assembles Bulgarian and Turkish roses, plucked at the peak of drama, flown in like VIP guests to a garden party where the guest list includes mandarin, bergamot, a pear who claims to have summered in the Marais, and vanilla who refuses to sit still. The result is a floral spectacle that does not whisper, does not hide behind a curtain, does not RSVP—simply arrives, luminous and overdressed, dripping with honeyed sunlight and edible secrets.

David Benedek, founder, ringmaster, and possibly Paris’s most enthusiastic fan, claims every sunrise as a personal gift and every sunset as a brand collaboration. He wanders the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, collecting light as others collect receipts, then promptly instructs the world’s perfumers to bottle the entire scene. The bottle glows, the cap preens, the city sighs—IMPADIA enters the chat, leaving every garden in Paris checking its own scent profile in a pocket mirror.

A spritz of IMPADIA promises transformation; stone turns silk, pigeons turn art critics, lovers discover poetic purpose, and every passing stranger grows suddenly convinced you own the deeds to at least one Haussmann apartment. Rose, in this scenario, is queen, president, and maître d’, commanding attention with every breath, assembling fruit, blossom, praline, and wood as accessories. Each note is a handshake, a double-take, a well-timed shoulder pad in the crowded metro of olfactory ambition. Paris, with its manic energy and inability to ever be subtle, demands a perfume that lives as loudly. IMPADIA obliges, stepping out every day as if the city invented golden hour, layering sunlight over skin, rewriting the myth of the French garden in every atomized plume. Each bottle is a ticket to the performance, and every wearer a cameo in this endless, rose-colored parade. Experience yourself!

(c) BDK Paris

(c) BDK Paris

(c) BDK Paris

—follow BDK Parfums

Melissa x Diesel Collab

.new collab
MELISSA x DIESEL
*Rubber Gods and Other Delusions of Elegance

written AMANDA MORTENSON

Rubber melts memory faster than heat, and in the Melissa-Diesel union, the memory gets rewritten in translucent layers and factory-spun fantasies, where every sole becomes an altar and every arch a design thesis.

The launch breathes with that quiet insistence that only comes from brands long familiar with the performance of excess, the kind of intimacy that happens when a shoe imagines itself both object and spectacle, more monolith than accessory.

The Quantum Thong arrives soft and symmetrical, carrying a shape that recalls diagrams from a manual no one asked to read but everyone wants to own. Pink slides in like bubblegum after midnight, black stands like a nightclub wall you lean against out of rhythm, transparent red and blue offer the promise of temperature shifts that begin at the ankle. Platforms follow, geometric volumes with the attitude of architecture during a full moon and sandals lifted like invitations or warnings.

MELISSA x DIESEL
Campaign

MELISSA x DIESEL
Campaign

Sneaker X completes the trinity with the assurance of something bred inside a sealed studio with fluorescent silence and biometric locks, where gender loses its meaning and all that remains is a shell for movement, polished and aerodynamic. Every size appears, every color holds its own name, and nothing left to adjust. The Diesel D expands across each silhouette like a glyph from an urban folklore, a kind of sigil for the new believers of street couture and synthetic spirituality. The D doesn’t explain itself, it rather rotates, stretches, embeds, and accepts the surface as gospel and the foot as oracle.

Shoppers gather through portals coded to feel clean and frictionless, digital altars where Melissa and Diesel light scented fires made of pixelated gradients and mock-sincerity. Stores function as museums that forgot to lock the vitrines. Feet enter without asking and photography follows with no alarms.

MELISSA x DIESEL
Campaign

The collaboration folds time and flattens the idea of occasion. Morning, evening, somewhere between the club and the convenience store—each moment welcomes a shoe that behaves like sculpture and speaks in capital letters. Melissa carries its decades like an heirloom dipped in gloss, marching through past alliances with architects and provocateurs, never missing a step even when the runway disappears. Diesel, still fluent in the dialect of denim rebellion and factory-born pride, supplies the posture and the push, a language understood without translation.

The launch floats in like it missed the memo but still gets photographed from every angle. Color-coded, algorithm-approved, properly translucent in places where mystery performs best. The calendar says July 15th, the internet stretches and the shelves absorb it. Just plastic shaped like an idea someone once sketched on a napkin at a very loud dinner. Melissa leans in, Diesel flexes. So while the shoes wait, the feet arrive.

MELISSA x DIESEL
Campaign

MELISSA x DIESEL
Campaign

Endless Joy x Gung Ama

ENDLESS JOY
*The Priest, the Chef, and the Camera in the Jungle

written ADRIAN COLTER

There’s a certain way light touches skin in Bali that makes everything look like a ceremony, even when it’s just someone eating rice alone at 11am with one leg curled under the other and a small dog under the table, staring as if it knows something you don't.

This kind of place speaks through silence and sweat and cotton that sticks to the middle of your back in a way that makes you aware of your own pulse. So when Endless Joy decides to tell a story here, one that floats somewhere within fashion and folklore and something they’ve agreed to call Taksu, it becomes clear they offer more than garments inspired by the island. They’re wrapping up a worldview in fabric and tossing it over your shoulders like a wet blessing.

Endless Joy, SS25
seen GUNG AMA

Endless Joy, SS25
seen GUNG AMA

You have to imagine it as a séance conducted by two expats with a really good sense of color and a surprisingly respectful understanding of animist spirituality. Enter Gung Ama, the photographer with a camera that breathes, and a way of standing still that draws people into speaking more truthfully, even in silence. He works with an Afghan box camera, a device built around chemistry and intention and waiting. No assistants, no light rigs, no LCD screens blinking into feedback loops. Just the kind of waiting that makes time expand and eyes look away, then back again, when they realise they’re being seen.

Together, they’ve chosen five Balinese creatives, though “creatives” floats slightly too sterile for what these people do. There’s a priest, quiet in title but expansive in presence; a chef whose food carries the weight of earth and apology; a dancer moving through space with the assurance of someone who has listened to trees; a visual artist with turmeric beneath the nails and memory in the knuckles; and a musician whose instruments continue breathing between each note. Each of them captured mid-being, a state Gung Ama enters with that box of his and that way he listens without nodding. Endless Joy continues to exist in that space shaped by the poetic and the mythological, guided by a density of print that gathers meaning with each layer and a looseness of certainty that allows form to remain open, a kind of slow unfolding that settles through gesture and holds within intention, and here, in the moss-laden air of Ubud, that unfolding reaches a saturation point, the clothing not placed upon the environment but absorbed by it, absorbed into it, held within its breath and dampness and murmur, the fabric gathering story as residue, carrying the cadence of something spoken inward, and once touched, once held, the vibration begins almost imperceptibly, somewhere beneath the surface of language, somewhere between texture and heat. The collaboration expands without circling memory, drawing on the presence of the box camera, the grain of black-and-white film, the full weight of an analogue process that seek to meet, and what comes through is not recollection or reference but contact, direct and immediate, already living, already rooted, already woven into the space between palm frond and ankle bracelet, between the accumulation of sweat and the sound of oil meeting iron in the first breath of morning.

Endless Joy, SS25
seen GUNG AMA

Endless Joy, SS25
seen GUNG AMA

Endless Joy, SS25
seen GUNG AMA

Taksu holds its ground beyond description, evading the frame of search engines and definitions, remaining instead in the charged pause before thought, in the interval that hums just before articulation, transmitting itself through sensation, a force that rises through the hands and exits through the act, made visible only in what it produces, as pulse, as field, as presence that lingers in the eyes, in the breath, in the stillness of those portrayed. The people here carry it completely, through the sheer fact of being, and the garments shaped around them hold that same frequency, neither reflecting nor responding but residing within it, holding it as they move, as they are worn, as they accompany the body through space with an attuned stillness that remains.

Temu Space, where all this unfolded, holds presence in everything it touches, with trees gathering stillness at the edge of movement, stones settled into quiet alignment, and air thick with sound and heat, as the space draws the work inward and lets it grow through rhythm, through repetition, through a making that expands without beginning or end. Intention settles early and shapes the atmosphere through quiet accumulation, as each gesture returns to the last with memory already held in the motion. Endless Joy moves within this field, responding to what surrounds it, and what takes form carries the same density, thread and pigment moving with weight and quiet insistence, folding into the air, holding its place.

Within a visual culture marked by repetition and gestures that circulate with speed, there is a shift here toward authorship that builds from the inside, shaped by the people who hold the language of the place through action, through practice, through the way rhythm moves through the body and the way sound settles into ground. What forms here follows that rhythm, held in depth, and the field continues to vibrate with what has been made as extension. The clothing arrives through this same process, carrying silk, carrying illustration, carrying the line of the portraits, with the surface moving in layers and the depth sitting just underneath, asking for wear, duration, presence, and for the continuation of something that has already begun. The work holds memory, holds gesture, holds temperature, and circulates as a field that stays near the body and moves with it.

Fashion here opens space, reshaping how the body moves and memory holds, as time folds into fabric drawn with intention. Something older moves through each piece—steady, unhurried, fully formed—and once worn, the garment speaks through presence, holding the trace, carrying atmosphere, returning the story into the world.

Dior SS26

.second campaign
Anderson Begins Dior
Dior in Velvet, Dior in Blood, Dior in Fiction

written Amanda Mortenson

Everything begins in velvet. Heavy velvet, red velvet, velvet with history pressed into its folds like pressed flowers too soft for cataloguing.

Dior builds a room, Berlin builds a memory, the Gemäldegalerie breathes through the walls like someone reading Baudelaire aloud in an empty hallway. Paintings hang, modest and glinting, Chardin’s hands still holding onto domestic stillness while outside, the fabrics whisper and the tailoring plots a gentle upheaval. There’s no irony in this, just layers. There’s always another layer.

DIOR MEN'S
Summer 26
Indoor Scenography seen by Adrien Dirand

DIOR MEN'S
Summer 26

Jonathan Anderson stands somewhere behind it all, somewhere beneath a Donegal tweed, somewhere inside a 19th-century waistcoat with a tie that knows its own power. The trousers stretch with the weight of time. The tailcoats carry too much and choose to carry more. The past feels present, loud, unfiltered, embroidered in the way only garments speak when language steps aside. The clothes speak in codes older than sound. They tell stories with buttons and collars and hems that remember how to behave in candlelight. No one argues, the room listens.

The collection arrives in waves. Caprice stares from a corner. Delft spins, unsure whether to seduce or confess. La Cigale lingers like a perfume trapped in architecture. Every dress carries a title, every title carries a timeline, every timeline opens up a drawer of private references and aristocratic gossip. The Bar jacket shrugs over it all, comfortable in its own elegance, aware of its origins, aware of the way form fits when structure takes over and softness submits.

A Book Tote enters, unread but fully understood. First edition Baudelaire, Truman Capote, the kind of library that wears its covers proudly. A crossbody arrives, Dracula tucked inside, blood in the stitching, literature clinging to the lining like it belongs there. Sheila Hicks lends her hands to the Lady Dior, transforming it into a nest, ponytails of linen blooming in every direction. The bag turns feral, beautiful, certain. Accessories carry fiction better than plotlines ever could.

DIOR MEN'S
Summer 26

DIOR MEN'S
Summer 26

Charms dangle. Diorette details scatter across collars and wrists. And roses erupt from seams without warning. Embroidery blooms where thought once sat, the collection breathes deeply, exhales rococo, exhales restraint dressed as exuberance. No moment escapes embellishment, but everything wants to shimmer, and everything does. The show offered style as posture, style as attitude, style as inheritance passed through instinct and silhouette. A museum becomes a mirror and a garment becomes a ghost. There’s a gesture here, a lift of the shoulder, a tilt of the head, a pause in the fabric that allows the wearer to become someone they met once in a book or a dream or a hallway with too much velvet. Style lives in that space between and Dior stretches the horizon, Jonathan Anderson tapes it back together with thread dyed in memory.

Every model walks like they’ve done this before, in another life, under another monarchy. Formalwear tells jokes only archives understand and the trench coat plots. The shirt sighs, the trousers hold secrets without flinching and nothing tries to be wearable. Everything demands to be worn.

The music glows beneath it all, the kind that touches the hem of ceremony. There are no instructions. There are no summaries. Dior sends out clothes with blood in their pleats and novels in their pockets. The audience watches, some lean forward, some breathe through their teeth and others already remember this from a future they haven’t reached yet. Anderson moves like a curator lost in his own collection. Every piece arrives curated, arranged, unraveled slightly. The hemline flutters with purpose.

DIOR MEN'S
Summer 26

DIOR MEN'S
Summer 26

DIOR MEN'S
Finals, Summer 26
seen by Adrien Dirand

credits for images
(c) DIOR / scenography and finale images seen by ADRIEN DIRAND

Mercedes Benz x KidSuper

.new collection
CLASS OF CREATORS
*The Mercedes That Grew Up On Cartoons

written Monica de Luna

Someone gave Colm Dillane a car, which is already funny, but then he turned it into something with turbine wings, cartoon lungs, balloon veins, and a winch on the front like it’s planning a very glamorous rescue or pulling something heavy from the past. The CLA, but make it handmade. Superhero-coded.

F200 wheels, 300 SL mirrors, patched like it got into a fight with nostalgia and came out the other side grinning. It sat in the Louvre, obviously, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, where objects already know they’re being watched, and now this car, full of references and jokes and ideas that maybe only Colm gets, but that’s the point, because why explain when you can install.

Mercedes Benz x KidSuper
Campaign

Mercedes Benz x KidSuper
Campaign

They call it “Class of Creators” but it feels more like a sandbox with corporate approval and very good lighting. Before this it was Ice Spice in Manhattan. Gustaf Westman in London. Next it’s Hot Wheels or Riot Games or both. Colm went full Colm, gave the car a childhood, let it speak in KidSuper. Then made clothes to match.

Mercedes Benz x KidSuper
Campaign

Mercedes Benz x KidSuper
Campaign

Mercedes Benz x KidSuper
Class of Creators
Art Piece Capsule Collection

There’s a trench coat that looks like it could fix your engine or steal your boyfriend. Trousers that mumble in mechanic. A t-shirt nodding politely to the world’s first automobile. Bags that look like they carry tools or secrets. Thirteen pieces, soft power, stitched from canvas, jersey, cotton, poplin, wool, vegan leather. The logo is vintage, but the feeling is future. Everything smells faintly of burnout and joy.

And the car? Still there, still grinning, still dressed like the first day of school when you try too hard but somehow pull it off.

TAAKK SS26

.new collection
TAAKK SS26
*The Quiet Confidence

written Malcolm Thomas

It's been five years since I attended Paris Fashion Week. In my absence, brands have come and gone, and the industry has crowned new creative directors yet TAKKK remains exactly how I remember it. Intentional. 

Intentional like the creation of a simple TAAKK Spring/Summer 2026 show tee, a gift to its guests. Made from recycled nylon resin, processed and spun from discarded fishing nets collected across Japan. The band in which the tee is wrapped and program both made of recycled materials.

TAAKK
SS26 Show during PFW

TAAKK
SS26 Show during PFW

TAAKK
SS26 Show during PFW

Already a master of textiles, Taakk has now added a deeper dive into sculptural embroidery and gradients, for which they're known, first with colors, now with materials, i.e. shifting a shirt to a suit, to their oeuvre. Yes, they're magicians, too.

Yet, despite this, Taakk remains elusively under the radar with a quiet confidence that I can only attribute to the mores of Japanese culture. Humble, polite, and inconspicuous. But Creative Director Takuya Morikawa, in my humble opinion, has lots to brag about.

TAAKK
SS26 Show during PFW

TAAKK
SS26 Show during PFW

TAAKK
SS26 Show during PFW

Titled "The Common Baseline of Art and The Ordinary," the program mentions an evolving quest for "the essence of creation." A less lofty interpretation, "Everyday wear and art. Necessity and disruption." It's easy to wax poetic about the many processes and the impressive self-awareness of this small brand, but I'll let the clothes speak for themselves. So, I encourage you to have a look around, and maybe you'll see why Taakk remains one of my favorites.

about the editor
When not reviewing shows or writing features for Le Mile Magazine, (or constantly hitting refresh on his wardrobe), Malcolm spends his time as Founder & Editorial Director of Malcolm + Friends Agency. A full-service agency powered by a global community of freelancers, consultants, and creative partners from leading brands and institutions. 

Wooyoungmi SS26

.new collection
Wooyoungmi SS26
*A Little Bit of Romance

written Malcolm Thomas

Enjoying a glass of cold champagne to the sounds of a violin rendition of Philip Glass in the beautiful stately courtyard of the Maison de la Chimie.

There is, quite frankly, no better way to end a very hot menswear season (and I'm not just talking about the shows). Mix in perfumed guests (many in Wooyoungmi themselves) with a discreet celebrity or two, and you have subtle cues that even before the runway music starts, you're in for something good.

Wooyoungmi
SS26 Show during PFW

Wooyoungmi
SS26 Show during PFW

Wooyoungmi
SS26 Show during PFW

Then the moment comes. It begins with a sultry jazz melody and as soon as the first look is shown, a pulsating backbeat. Inspired by Seoul summers, which according to the program are equally hot, and the joys of dressing, the offerings this season are meant to be filled with "levity" and "elegance", of course. 

The collection—light on pants but heavy on sex appeal took to task many renditions of the men's Edwardian bathing suit. A once modest early 20th century essential subverted for the 21st century man. Another notch to add to the bedpost of menswear’s liberation.

Wooyoungmi
SS26 Show during PFW

Wooyoungmi
SS26 Show during PFW

Wooyoungmi
SS26 Show during PFW

Most importantly, this is a man who has places to go and beaches to see. Lounging on a private beach in Monte Carlo by day and enjoying an old-fashioned or two in a members-only lounge, by night, perhaps. Think jumpers, vests, and knitted tops paired with oversized intarsia raffia bags and backpacks paired with silk viscose tailcoat button-ups. Did I mention he's also a multitasker?

Rooted in staples: smart tailoring, fine fabrics, and elevated colorways—Wooyoungmi is not here to tell you what to wear but to suggest it. Wooyoungmi is not here to tell you who you are but to remind you. 

Who said romance was dead?

about the editor
When not reviewing shows or writing features for Le Mile Magazine, (or constantly hitting refresh on his wardrobe), Malcolm spends his time as Founder & Editorial Director of Malcolm + Friends Agency. A full-service agency powered by a global community of freelancers, consultants, and creative partners from leading brands and institutions. 

KVRT STVFF Women

.new collection
Her Body. Their Rules.
KVRT STVFF Underwear.

written Sarah Arendts

First there were briefs. Then there were viral briefs. Then there were viral briefs on viral boys. Now there’s KVRT STVFF WOMEN — a proper new chapter, fully formed and stretching in every direction. A full-bodied rewrite stitched with intent, flesh, and very good lighting.

The brand that made swimwear feel like a controlled substance is no longer just for the male-coded torso. They’ve taken what already existed — Chad, Core, Mechanic, those infamous swim briefs that looked like they were designed by a Greek god with a design degree — and turned them, carefully but not cautiously, toward bodies that haven’t traditionally been at the centre of the KVRT STVFF lens. Until now. There are 100 new pieces. Underwear, swimwear, and that slinky category they’re calling bodywear — all made to mix, match, or ignore entirely. Sizes run from XS to XXL. Some cuts are unisex, some aren’t. It doesn’t really matter, because everything stretches.

KVRT STVFF
Espresso Core Bikini Shorts

KVRT STVFF
Macchiato KVRT Cheeky Bikini Bottom

Announcing nothing, explaining even less — just new shapes arriving like they’ve always belonged. The lines stay minimal, the energy moves forward, the proportions land exactly where they should. It’s KVRT STVFF, rerouted through hips, heat, and instinct. Like something a really hot science teacher would wear if science teachers taught physics in thongs.

It still starts in Barcelona, stitched and prototyped under the sharp eye of the KVRT STVFF STVDIO. The aesthetic remains tight, part techno nostalgia, part ‘90s sportswear fantasy, part softcore reconstruction. Not trying to be viral. Just inherently designed that way.

KVRT STVFF
Black Chad Cami Crop Top

KVRT STVFF
Ecru Mechanic Crop Top

KVRT STVFF
Black Chad Classic Boxer Brief

Sexiness speaks the same dialect, still cut in confidence, still built like it knows exactly what it’s doing. Now it lives in more bodies, stretches across more shapes, travels through more ways of standing in a room and taking up space. Underwear, system, uniform, suggestion — call it whatever fits. It shows up stitched to the point, ready before the question even lands. This isn’t a rebrand. This is the body, centre stage, lit from every angle. The frame just got bigger, thanks KVRT STVFF!

Walter Van Beirendonck SS26

.new collection
Walter Van Beirendonck SS26
*Reaches For The Stars

written Malcolm Thomas

“If you are sad and wondering: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” to quote the show notes, they were probably body-deep, pushing their way into the Walter Van Beirendonck show (wallflowers, no).

Loud, experimental, and playful as ever, yes. Proudly displaying their Walter Van Beirendonck wears and hoping, albeit praying, for a chance to get inside the Odeon Theater. The kind of frenzy that can only be conjured by a designer who really resonates with his audience. An audience whose whimsy for fantasy is even more needed today.

Walter Van Beirendonck
SS26 Show during PFW

Walter Van Beirendonck
SS26 Show during PFW

Walter Van Beirendonck
SS26 Show during PFW

A fantasy hopping and skipping its way down memory lane. Here, you’ll find childhood photographs in black and white from the designer’s personal archive printed across suits, trousers, and the like. Anoraks with plush trim (a bit more fantastical in Wednesday’s 100-degree weather). Delicate florals on skeleton suits, a nod to the stylish lives of 18th-century’s most well-heeled children. Also on the menu: polka dot leggings, combs, hot rollers, shoehorns, and more, as cultural icons. Reminiscent of playing dress up in your parents’ things. Speaking of dress-up, when the if-you-know-you-know crowd is spotted wearing shoehorn earrings and hot roller bracelets, don’t say you haven’t been forewarned. More honorable mentions: Stephen Jones bowler hats pierced by paper flowers and those Vidal Sassoon-Esque Beatles bobs—remind us we are all flower children.  

Walter Van Beirendonck
SS26 Show during PFW

Walter Van Beirendonck
SS26 Show during PFW

Walter Van Beirendonck
SS26 Show during PFW

So, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” the designer wrote. “Look back. Look below. Look forward.” They are boys as girls as girls are boys, and we are all human. Cut from the same technicolor rainbow, bubblegum, cotton candy cloth. “From the sunny fields, they wink at us,” Beirendonck continues. “Softly swaying, with Starry Eyes,” he concludes. Hopefully, to a world that will love them as much as Walter Van Beirendonck does.

about the editor
When not reviewing shows or writing features for Le Mile Magazine, (or constantly hitting refresh on his wardrobe), Malcolm spends his time as Founder & Editorial Director of Malcolm + Friends Agency. A full-service agency powered by a global community of freelancers, consultants, and creative partners from leading brands and institutions.