Miu Miu for a (Semi) Active Lifestyle

The fall 2023 ready-to-wear circuit is in full swing. From New York, to London, to Milan, to Paris, it promises to be a fantastic season, with a few debuts in store: in London, we’ll get to see Daniel Lee's vision for Burberry, while in Paris Harris Reed will show his first collection for Nina Ricci, and Ludovic de Saint Sernin will debut a new vision for the Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester that has so inspired him. Add to that all our favorite labels, the backstage happenings, celebrity sightings, and of course, the street style—all captured by Acielle Tanbetova and Phil Oh, and well, it's obvious it's our favorite time of the year. Since there's always so much to look at and discuss, we’ve decided to put all our thoughts together for you in one place. Bookmark this page for trend recaps, behind-the-scenes commentary, and much, much more.

José Criales-Unzueta

4 months ago

Liu Wen walking Miu Miu, fall 2023 ready-to-wear.

Mia Goth walking Miu Miu, fall 2023 ready-to-wear.

Happy Miu Miu day to all those who celebrate! And, alternatively, happy last day of Paris Fashion Week. Today's Miu Miu collection was an exercise on observation and subversion, as Mrs. Prada reimagined the now-ubiquitous idea of athleisure with zip hoodies in heather-gray knits and luscious but stiff leathers paired with ordinary pantyhose, tights, and sometimes nothing but panties ("I love it! If I were younger, I would go out in panties!" Mrs. Prada said after the show.) In a season that was so grounded on classic and traditional elegance, this collection was refreshing in that it reflects the reality behind primness and put-togetherness, especially for a generation that is progressively less interested in performing sophistication.

For fall, Mrs. Prada seems to be simultaneously acknowledging the sartorial code of post-workout dressing while actively twisting it with her signature humor. The Miu Miu woman goes to work with her knit set (maybe accidently, maybe not) tucked under her pantyhose. After work, she does a Pilates class, and on her way home she keeps her leggings on—why put on her nice clothes back on after working up a sweat?—and shucks her loafers back on; her formerly perfect middle-part bun frizzy and messed up from the workout. There's a freshness and relatability to this story that was absent in most collections this season. This is how we dress: with messy hair, the wrong shoes, and with our favorite comfy hoodie to keep us warm. Above all, what this collection is is desirable. I need the knit set, I’ll figure out a way of making my athleisure fits replicate the way Liu Wen wears look nineteen. As a friend DM’d me after the show ended, "this collection makes me want to get dressed up to run errands." But the thing is, Mrs. P. is saying you don't have to get dressed up—a little messy goes a long way.

Click here to see the full collection.

José Criales-Unzueta

4 months ago

Louis Vuitton, fall 2023 ready-to-wear.

One year ago, Nicolas Ghesquière's showed his fall 2022 collection for Louis Vuitton which included double breasted jackets cut in a fantastic pulled-forward hulking silhouette with sloped oversized shoulders and pinstripe trousers. It also featured ties, lots of them. At the time, ties didn't seam like something that would take into real life, and the current craze for uniforms had not started yet. Flashforward a year later, and at this fall 2023 season, ties are ruling almost every runway. It's no secret that Ghesquière has always been a largely influential figure in fashion, but now looking at today's Louis Vuitton show, I can't help but wonder which one of the many ideas he put forth are also doubling-up as predictions. Is it the pleated tailoring that opened the show? Or the squared skirts on his day dresses? Something tells me it may be the shoulder-padded sweaters—shoulders keep growing larger by the season, after all. Your guess is as good as mine, but one thing's for certain: Ghesquière is one of fashion's great oracles.

Laia Garcia-Furtado

4 months ago

A look from Alexander McQueen's fall collection possibly inspired. by TÁR.

Back in January, we began TÁR-Watch on this blog as a way to keep track of all the menswear looks that Lydia Tár (from the movie TÁR, starring Cate Blanchett) may have been inspired to wear. It made sense for them to be menswear looks, after all the movie—directed by Todd Philips and nominated for an avalanche of Academy Awards—opens with a scene of the titular orchestra conductor getting fitted for a suit at the Berlin atelier of Egon Brandstetter.

Given how influential—and how absolutely obsessed with the film we all are at the office—it seems a little crazy it took so long for a designer to mention the film as a point of reference for one of the fall collections. Enter Alexander McQueen's Sarah Burton.

From Sarah Mower's review: "Strictness and pulled-together uniform have been surfacing as a theme this season; here, there was a precision and controlled tension of kinkiness where nothing was quite what it seemed.

Burton partly put that down to having watched Cate Blanchett in Tár: ‘That part where you see the tailors making their chalk-marks on the cloth.’"

Designers, they’re really just like us.

See all the looks from Sarah Burton's fall collection for Alexander McQueen.

José Criales-Unzueta

4 months ago

Sara Stockbridge at Vivienne Westwood, fall 2023 ready-to-wear.

Today in Paris, Andreas Kronthaler put together a touching tribute for Vivienne Westwood, his late creative partner and wife, who passed away in December. "Maybe the most important thing you ever taught me was to put the woman on a pedestal," he wrote in a letter to Westwood delivered in lieu of show notes. While this particular note was referring to the platform shoes that have been a Westwood signature since the very beginning of her career, the sentiment also applied to the collection in general, as well as the care that showed in the smallest details; like how the show opened with a model wearing a t-shirt with a portrait of Westwood on the front, or even the casting, like Westwood's granddaughter, Cora Corré, closing the show.

My favorite was the return of one of the late designer's close friends and original muses to the runway: Sara Stockbridge in a playful patchwork look that merges Kronthaler's sensibility with Westwood's own world. The memories came pouring back from when I would spend hours researching archive Westwood shows, pre-Vogue Runway and even pre-fashion school. Back in the late 1980s, Stockbridge, with blonde pin-up looks, had and a keenness for cheeky irreverence and playfulness on the runway that embodied what was arguably Westwood's most iconic time period as a designer. Her first show for Westwood—and as a model—was the legendary spring 1985 "Mini Crini," where she wore, you guessed it, Westwood's now iconic silhouette. She would go on to become a memorable fixture on the Westwood runway, and also became the frontwoman in SARAH CHOICE, a musical project that the late designer put together with Simon Barker. Seeing her back on the Westwood runway today was an emotional reminder of what is now a bygone era, one that shaped most of us in the industry today.

Vivienne Westwood with her muse, fashion model Sara Stockbridge, 3rd October 1991.

Click here to see the full collection.

Laia Garcia-Furtado

4 months ago

What's the weather like? is a game I like to play while scrolling through our street style galleries. It's true that the allure of street style is seeing how people dress "out in the world," but reality is slippery these days anyway, and when you add to that at shows there's a mix of people who are getting dressed to go to work (editors, buyers). and others who are working by getting dressed (influencers, celebrities), reality starts to become a lot less real life and a lot more The Real World.

All this to say that as I was scrolling through the latest batch of Phil Oh's Paris images, I thought, "oh, it must be really cold there!" (Other thoughts included, "what am I looking at?," "Where is this person's head?," "Where are the arms?," "What direction is their body facing?," and of course, "are they using their phone as a sort of periscope?") It's perfect.

Then I scrolled, scrolled, a bit more and…

A half-dress! A bare leg. She looks not a teeny bit cold. She is also perfect.

And then a simple thought: Inside of you, there are two wolves.

Laia Garcia-Furtado

4 months ago

Victoria Beckham

Looking through Acielle's newest batch of backstage images today, I noticed these ginormous jeans from Victoria Beckham's fall collection. Extra big, gathered at the front, with a waxy effect that seems to lock in place a sunny shade of powder blue—and paired with a crochet tank with… well, hair trim—they immediately struck me as the right pair of jeans for right now. (I was also delightfully surprised at how left-of-center her collections have been since she moved to Paris).

As I made my way through the "Latest Shows" tab, I noticed Beckham's jeans weren't the only ones walking the Parisian runways today (she also had a deconstructed denim maxi skirt like so many of us wore in high school, but I’m not sure I’m quite ready to go there just yet).

Coperni

Meanwhile at Coperni, Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer sent a pair straight-leg jeans with a foldover waist that was melded the bottom half of a denim jacket with the traditional breast-pocket styles. Vaillant and Meyer often seem preoccupied by modernity and the future, and while this often manifests in performance bits at their runway shows, this particular pair of jeans also seems to also do the job, capturing a very now emotion even if it's just a new take on the skirt over pants trend.

Loewe

I'll admit I cheated slightly for my third pick, because at Loewe, Jonathan Anderson technically did not show any jeans. What he did show was an ensemble of an off-white long shirt worn with stonewash blue trousers—a suggestion of denim from a look that was in fact completely made entirely from goose feathers. A new classic.

José Criales-Unzueta

4 months ago

I love waking up to a new Loewe collection. Since Jonathan Anderson's shows for the label always take place during the morning in Paris, us on the EST timezone get to have the new lineup of the designer's imaginative creations for breakfast. Last season it was all about anthurium tops and balloon shoes, though the looks that stayed with me the most were the Minecraft-esque pixelated hoodies and khakis (which A$AP Rocky wore recently to celebrate Rihanna's birthday). These were a perfect example of Anderson's exploration of the liminal space between the real and fabricated, and the URL versus the IRL.

A substantial story in his fall collection were blurry images of garments—floral and solid frocks, a gabardine trench, a fur coat—printed onto white silk dresses (yes, very Margiela). Anderson has been toying with the surreal through trompe l’oeil looks of late (the collection also featured cardigans with prints of…cardigans) in a very specific René Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" sort of way. But these dresses are a part of a broader conversation he seems interested in having about technology and its altering and misguiding effects in our relationship to reality and craft. In the age of NFTs, Web3, AI, et al., how do we know what's real from what isn't? Is a dress less real if it's a digital image of a dress on another dress? Ceci n’est pas une pipe?

José Criales-Unzueta

4 months ago

Opening look at Schiaparelli, fall 2023 ready-to-wear.

In Paris today, Daniel Roseberry debuted his vision for Schiaparelli's ready-to-wear collection on the runway. It was the opening piece that quickly established Roseberry's vision for the new offering and may be the must-have on every Schiaparelli person's closet. This coat-dress of sorts is a deliciously-cut boiled-wool piece tailored to perfection. The rounded sleeves are the main detail, and every decision supports this extravagant—yet understated in the Schiap world— shape. The shoulder is slightly sloped and rounded to accommodate the curved sleeve; the sleeve hem appears to be ever so slightly diagonal to balance the outer versus inner curves of the sleeve; the front bodice is paneled at the princess seam and darted to create a subtly svelte close-to-the-body shape; the front closure is slightly curved as it builds from center front upwards to the princess seam. All of these decisions are about balance—how else do you make an extravagant shape seem so subdued and clean? "‘Quiet’ doesn't work for our women," Roseberry said in a press release. And amongst faux animal heads and big celebrities all done up, this coat spoke the loudest.

Laird Borrelli-Persson

4 months ago

Salvador Dalí, 1951.

Paco Rabanne, fall 2023 ready-to-wear

Fashion's fascination with Salvador Dalí goes back decades—besides producing indelible images, the man had great personal style—and so far this season that amour fou has been rekindled several times over. In London, Feben created a collage print that referenced the artist's 1931 painting Gradiva, which depicts a partially dressed woman with pointed breasts and a rose in her womb. A few days later in Milan, Jeremy Scott translated elements of Dalí's masterpiece, The Persistence of Memory (depicting melting clocks) into wavy asymmetric hems and motifs at Moschino. "We’re living in distorted times," the designer told Nicole Phelps. "Things that seem familiar aren't familiar. I mean, isn't it hard to figure things out?" Now the mustachioed surrealist showed up in Paris at Paco Rabanne's fall show. Rabanne was friendly with Dalí, and working with the Gala-Dali Foundation, Julien Dossena reissued two of the artist's jewelry designs and showed five dresses featuring Dalí's otherworldly artworks. "Chasing Dreams," the title of the collection, is a good description of one of the purposes of art, and fashion.

Feben, fall 2023 ready-to-wear

Moschino, fall 2023 ready-to-wear

Paco-Rabanne, fall 2023 ready-to-wear

Irene Kim

4 months ago

From left to right: Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Dries Van Noten

At Paris fashion week, there is a seeming embrace of the working woman. The pencil skirt has long been the uniform of corporate women, gaining popularity in the ‘50s and ‘60s and then again in the 2000s, before becoming the de-facto going-out look for nights out thanks to celebrities like Kim Kardashian.

While skirt preferences have changed in recent years towards the more voluminous, the pleated, or the mini, the fall collections seem poised to bring back this staple into our closet rotations. At Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri embraced a more simple approach to fashion, opening her show with a white button-down and black pencil skirt. A big proponent of the circle skirt, Chiuri chose a new direction, showing the silhouette in a range of solid neutrals and printed fabrics.

At Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello was thinking of actual Working Girls–Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver, that is—and focused on the pencil skirt as the premiere example of a certain forgotten elegance, with a heavy dose of YSL sexiness. He included variations of the skirt in sheer fabrics, form-fitting leather, and even pinstripes. Meanwhile at Dries Van Noten, a more bohemian take on the pencil skirt, this time featuring hand-embroidered embellishment and metallic prints.

José Criales-Unzueta

4 months ago

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There are few things Instagram fashion-philes love more than an unearthed piece of archival footage, and brands seem to have caught on this season. To tease and promote their fall collections, Dior, Paco Rabanne, and Saint Laurent all posted archival footage of their respective seasonal muses on Instagram. At Dior, archival clips of Edith Piaf, Juliette Greco, and Christian Dior's younger sister Catherine Dior, that served as a short introduction to the women's histories were shared on Instagram. The three women were the inspiration behind Maria Grazia Chiur's vision for the season. Meanwhile Saint Laurent shared1990s clips of Catherine Deneuve reacting to her friend's collections. Deneuve, a friend and muse of Monsieur Saint Laurent, was in attendance at the show in Paris on Monday night.

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Most poignant were the clips posted to the Paco Rabanne account, which featured the designer, who passed away last month at the age of 88, in conversation with his friend, the French model and artist Amanda Lear, who often wore his pieces. Lear was also a muse of Salvador Dalí, who featured heavily on Julien Dossena's fall lineup for the label. Much has been said about how designers at heritage houses have revived the past for today, but sometimes the past needs to come with a little education, and what better way to teach the kids than with an Instagram post.

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

José Criales-Unzueta

4 months ago

Opening look at Dries Van Noten, fall 2023 ready-to-wear.

Opening look at Saint Laurent, fall 2023 ready-to-wear.

Today in Paris, Dries Van Noten opened his fall 2023 ready-to-wear show with a pinstripe coat. Last night, Anthony Vaccarello's first look at Saint Laurent was a pinstripe skirt suit. And two weeks ago, during NYFW, Thom Browne dedicated a segment of his show to remixed pinstripe tailoring. The pattern is back for fall, just not the way our dads wore it.

Van Noten explored texture, layering, and a sense of undoneness for fall, reimagining tapestry florals as distressed or washed, silks left raw and un-hemmed, and wool suitings with gold foil accents. Te designer's gilded pinstripes offer a new take on the generally sober textile; while Thom Browne used the fabric—in a variety of widths and colors—to create extravagant silhouettes by unconventionally draping and deconstructing jackets and trousers. Vaccarello, on the other hand, looked to harness the traditional elegance of menswear fabrics to amp up the uber-sophisticated energy of his Saint Laurent (though he did tell Vogue's Mark Holgate that he was also thinking of Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl). Similarly, Nicolas Di Felice cut streamlined tailored separates in classic pinstripe suitings, intentionally twisting them with circular cutouts or mirrors as accents.

While the wave of subversion of academic and corporate uniforms in fashion is nothing new, there seems to be an ever-growing interest in challenging conventional concepts and materials. If in the past pinstripes belonged to power-brokers in the corporate world, then in today's post-pandemic world where corporate dress-codes have easened up, they belong to everyone. You too can wear a pinstripe suit! Just remember, the pinstripe is still a cipher of power, the only thing that's changed is who gets to wield it.

Backstage at Courrèges, fall 2023 ready-to-wear.

A closer look at Thom Browne's pinstripe exploration for fall.

José Criales-Unzueta

4 months ago

Saint Laurent, fall 2023 ready-to-wear

Anthony Vaccarello has been on a roll. At Saint Laurent, his latest collections have become favorites to everyone from celebrities to critics and fashion editors, in part because of the balance he manages to strike between their freshness and their endearing closeness to the work of Yves Saint Laurent himself. Nowhere was that more evident than at the set for today's show, where he transformed the Eiffel Tower-adjacent space that's long been the home of his ready-to-wear collection into the ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel, where Saint Laurent himself showed his haute couture collections from 1975 to 2001. The piéce de resistánce were likely the opulent and striking bronze chandeliers, which, when inserted into the sleek contemporary black-box setting, painted the perfect picture of Vaccarello's presence at Saint Laurent: modern, elegant, and considerate of its past in order to step into the future.

Yves Saint Laurent, spring 1980 haute couture.

José Criales-Unzueta

4 months ago

Today in Paris, Anrealage's Kunihiko Morinaga revisited the photochromic fabrics he first started using a decade ago. Staged at the Théâtre de la Madeleine the fall 2023 collection featured UV light-sensitive fabrics, a fact that was showcased through a futuristic-looking process at the show: models stood in pairs as a UV lamp was lowered in front of them, changing the colors or the patterns of their clothes (they then turned around and the process was repeated).

But Morinaga was not looking to just make something cool, but rather to make a statement about our relationship with the environment and a celebration of diversity of points of view and the possibilities these offer. The designer took the concept of "Umwelt" (German for ‘environment’), developed by the German philosopher and biologist Jakob Johann Baron von Uexküll, which explores how living organisms perceive their environment, to establish a narrative about the different perspectives cohabiting in our world. As such, the colors and patterns will change according to the light that surrounds them; designed to evolve through the days and seasons, existing in conversation with the environments they’re placed in.

See the rest of Anrealage's collection here.

Laia Garcia-Furtado

4 months ago

Vaquera once again kicked off Paris Fashion Week with a collection that was a perfect combination of their downtown NYC aesthetics and the glamour of their adopted city. Among the coolly wearable black washed denim dresses and wide leg trousers, lingerie-inspired details—including a red silk thong placed on the front of a pair of jeans—and a range of covetable coats and jackets, was a strapless sequin dress with exposed bra straps and a furry trim. a "Vaqueraified version," as Nicole Phelps put it in her review, of a Chanel dress from the fall 2005 couture collection.

A look from Chanel Haute Couture's fall 2005 collection.

Earlier this year, the dress code for this year's Met Gala, "Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty," was declared to be "In Honor of Karl." We have to hope at least one cool young star has already called "dibs" on this dress. We’ll be watching.

Click here to see Vaquera's latest collection.

Irene Kim

4 months ago

Video by Acielle/ Style Du Monde

While RM and Kelela were the internet's two favorite front-row stars at the Bottega Veneta show last night, the Runway group chat lit up when we spotted our editors Nicole Phelps and Tiziana Cardini. With a notebook in hand alongside their evening-ready looks, they show real working women's style.

Irene Kim

4 months ago

Video by Acielle / Style Du Monde

Unlike other luxury houses who have optimized their social and marketing power through ambassadorships with the world's biggest celebrities, Bottega Veneta had so far flown solo. Could that be changing this season? RM, BTS's leader, attended the brand's fall 2023 show in look 47 from the spring 2023 collection. The rapper, like the brand, is known for his quiet yet understated personal style. Will an announcement be soon made? We'll stay tuned.

Left: RM at the fall 2023 ready-to wear show. Photo: Stephane Feugere / Courtesy of Bottega Veneta. Right: Look 47 from the spring 2023 ready-to-wear show. Photo: Filippo Fior/ Gorunway.com

Laia Garcia-Furtado

4 months ago

Fall 2023's animal kingdom inspiration continued at Trussardi, where creative directors Benjamin Huseby and Serhat Işık paid homage to man's best friend. Initially inspired by the tropes of Milanese society, including the faded medieval tapestries that are often found in palazzos, they chose to focus on historical depictions of Italian greyhounds, turning them into a Gobelin jacquard. Their vision was the perfect marriage of history and modernity—with a sense of humor— especially its use in a wrap skirt that looked like it was coming undone.

See Trussardi's full collection here.

José Criales-Unzueta

4 months ago

Sartorially speaking, there is nothing I love more than zooming into a perfectly tailored jacket. When I was in college, a pattern-making professor of mine told me that great tailoring is the combination of several exact choices, and it's the lens through which I take in tailoring every day. This Ferragamo coat, part of Maximilian Davis's sophomore collection for the label, is the perfect example of this approach—I simply love every choice made here.

The silhouette is long and streamlined—as expected from Davis—and every detail is in service of this proportion. The lapel is placed high up, double-breasted, slightly shrunken, and notched, fashioned close to the body to establish slimness. The shoulder is cut sharp and protrudes form the body ever so slightly, but is sloped in conversation with the angle of the front lapel. The chest pocket is placed higher than usual and slightly angled up, toying with the button holes, which angle downwards. Finally, the bodice is cut slightly inwards (with perfectly placed princess-line darts) to follow the curve created by the sloped shoulder and a slightly elongated three-piece sleeve. This sparks joy.

See the Ferragamo fall 2023 collection here.

Laia Garcia-Furtado

4 months ago

Today in Milan, Jil Sander's Lucie and Luke Meier presented a collection that indulged in every possible texture: supple leathers, felted wools, brushed wools, tonal knits, faux furs, burnout velvets, and yarn appliqués that resembled eyelashes. Even handbags got the embellishment treatment, like a chocolate bucket bag appliquéd with bright red leather loops. It wasn't entirely obvious from the runway images, but thanks to Acielle Tanbetova's backstage photos, it was apparent that the designers also experimented with reflective fabric, commonly used as a detail in sports apparel, but here turned into a trench coat and a pair of wide-legged trousers with a zipper details that added a modern edge to their usually minimal silhouettes.

See the rest of Jil Sander's collection here.