Honestly, I wasn’t even in the mood for one. I was in that strange, flat, post-everything state where you wander into a store just to kill time, test blotters with zero expectations, and assume — correctly, most of the time — that nothing is going to move you. Fragrance fatigue is real. Everything smells either aggressively sweet, aggressively clean, or aggressively… expensive in a boring way.
Okay, so here’s the thing—I didn’t expect The Tiger to rattle me the way it did. I thought it would just be another stylish Gucci short, you know, something I’d watch while scrolling and pretending I wasn’t actually invested. But then Demi Moore walked in with that slow
I find myself writing this only days after returning from Milan, where the air—still weighted with the residue of late-summer humidity and the faint, persistent tremor of industry anticipation—felt almost eerily aligned with the release of Lord Piana’s latest campaign. It is a campaign that, for reasons both aesthetic and personal, has already been described by several contributing editors as “a soft revolution,” the sort of work that slips in quietly but lingers long after the typical commercial cycle has moved on.
Okay so—Heidi Klum. The Queen of Halloween, which sounds dramatic until you realize it’s actually true. Like, I used to think Halloween was about face paint and those last-minute CVS wigs that smell vaguely like burnt plastic and regret, but Heidi… she made it an art form. Every year, this woman shows up to her own party looking like something between a science experiment and a fever dream—and I mean that in the highest possible compliment.
The looming possibility of a Versace sale cast a long shadow over tonight’s show, turning the usual spectacle into something more charged, more uncertain. As the fashion crowd settled into the tram depot where it was staged, the murmurs were inevitable—was this Donatella Versace’s final bow? And if so, what would Versace even be without Donatella?
Just yesterday, archaeologists announced the discovery of new frescoes in Pompeii—thirty to forty A.D., depicting the initiation rites of Dionysus’s devotees. Perfect timing. Fausto Puglisi, for his part, had already decided that his latest Cavalli outing would center on Pompeii—the ancient pleasure palace of a city, decadent and doomed in equal measure, smothered in volcanic ash nearly two millennia ago. It was love at first sight for him, or so the story goes—he first visited as a child, and it stayed with him, the way ancient beauty and sudden catastrophe tend to do.
After the Prada show, a photographer—cheeky, exasperated, perhaps both—asked what, exactly, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons had been up to this season. When the answer came—“interrogating femininity,” specifically, “what is feminine beauty today?”—he snorted: “Er, double Ds.” It was a joke, obviously, but not an inaccurate one. Idealized beauty remains the defining obsession of our age, only now it’s purchasable—nipped, tucked, lasered, and filtered into a kind of eerie digital perfection, a symmetry so precise it could only exist in the uncanny valley.
If there was ever any doubt that Adrian Appiolaza is head-over-heels, madly, obsessively in love with fashion, today’s Moschino show erased it in a blizzard of confetti and a full-throttle celebration of the art, science, and pure alchemy of making clothes. At the preview, Appiolaza traced his inspiration back to Franco Moschino’s 1992 Mannequin dress—now part of the Costume Institute’s collection—a cheeky riff on the Stockman dressmaker’s dummy, except Moschino, ever the branding visionary, swapped out the Stockman logo for his own. (And for those keeping meticulous fashion history spreadsheets, yes, Moschino did it half a decade before Margiela.)
Matteo Tamburini is settling into his rhythm at Tod’s, refining the precise, pared-back aesthetic he first introduced three seasons ago. But today, his approach felt fuller—warmer, more layered, more assured. And let’s talk about the outerwear, because it was some of the best yet.
Fur has been everywhere this season—some of it good, some of it unnecessary, some of it a little too self-consciously ironic. But Etro? Etro sent out the kind you actually want to wear. Case in point: the opening look—a shaggy, near-regal wool fur coat, its bold black-and-white stripes giving just enough drama, shrugged over paisley-print trousers and a knitted waistcoat, insouciant and easy.
