Casey Cadwallader brought Mugler into the modern era with his creation of the body-conscious, paneled catsuit. The design was iterated upon for many seasons and became a favorite of pop stars the world over, from Dua Lipa to Beyoncé. Now, though, the Cadwallader era of Mugler is officially over, and the relatively unknown designer, Miguel Castro Freitas, is taking control.
The news of Cadwallader’s departure was announced in March, in time with Freitas’s appointment. Most recently, Freitas was the creative director of Sportmax, but before that, he worked at Dior under both John Galliano and Raf Simons, Yves Saint Laurent under Stefano Pilati, and Lanvin under Alber Elbaz. He also spent some time as the head of womenswear at Dries Van Noten.
“It is an honor to join the spectacular house of Mugler,” Freitas said in a statement. “As one of the twentieth century’s great couturiers, Mr Mugler reimagined the power and limits of fashion. Alongside the teams, I am thrilled to bring my own vision, story, and emotion to this monumental heritage.” He will show his first collection for the brand this fall during Paris Fashion Week.
Pam Hogg, the daring Scottish fashion designer known for dressing some of rock’s biggest stars, has died. Her family confirmed the news on Wednesday. Hogg will be remembered for her impact on the London fashion, nightlife, and music scene. A musician herself, contributing to the punk, noise, and acid house genres, Hogg was also part of the famed London “Blitz Kids” scene of the ’80s. Her Lycra catsuits and colorful psychedelic designs helped to bolster British fashion’s reputation for the adventurous and avant-garde.
“The Hogg Family is deeply saddened to announce the passing of our beloved Pamela,” reads an Instagram caption announcing the news. “We are grateful in the knowledge that her final hours were peaceful and surrounded by the loving care of cherished friends and family…Pamela’s creative spirit and body of work touched the lives of many people of all ages and she leaves a magnificent legacy that will continue to inspire, bring joy and challenge us to live beyond the confines of convention. Pamela will continue to live in our hearts and minds. A glorious life lived and loved.”
We don’t know the designer’s exact age, as she never revealed it, but we do know she was born in Paisley, a town not far from Glasgow, Scotland, and went on to study fine art and printed textiles at the Glasgow School of Art. There, she was recognized for her talent early on, winning honors including the Newbury Medal of Distinction. She went on to gain her Master’s of Arts at the Royal College of Art in London. Hogg also became interested in music, joining her first band, Rubbish, in 1980, and opening up for the Pogues. Around that time, she began to frequent Blitz nightclub, becoming a regular at the establishment—known for enforcing an outlandish dress code. She began designing her own looks to get in the door.
Boy George and Pam Hogg in 1997.
Dave Benett/Dave Benett Collection/Getty Images
In 1981, when she was in her 20s, Hogg launched her first fashion collection, initially selling her designs at Hyper Hyper, a then-popular market for young designers, on Kensington High Street, and later opening a shop in London’s West End. She was known for her unique and progressive collection names, including “Wild Wild Women of the West” and “Best Dressed Chicken in Town.”
At the same time, she continued pursuing music, working with British acid house band The Garden of Eden, and performing in Nashville as part of the industrial noise band Pigface. In 1993, she got the opportunity to perform as a supporting act for Debbie Harry, leading her to form the band Doll just five days ahead of the show.
Hogg also contributed to cinema, creating the fashion film Accelerator, which starred Italian-German actress Anita Pallenberg and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie. In 2009, she returned to the runway and eventually made her debut at Paris Fashion Week in 2012. In her more recent collections, she worked heavily with PVC, tulle, and leather to create dresses and catsuits that combined aspects of the BDSM subculture with hyper-feminine silhouettes. In 2014, she presented “Future Past,” a collection inspired by war and peace, featuring designs made entirely of recycled materials and reworked archival pieces, including one apron dress embossed with the words “The soils of war.”
Pam Hogg after her spring/summer 2020 presentation.
Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
Her passions for music and fashion combined when she got the opportunity to design for Siouxsie Sioux’s world tour in 2004. Sioux continued to wear Hogg’s designs for many years. Throughout her career, Hogg has dressed numerous famous women within both the music and fashion industries. She created the looks for Kylie Minogue’s “2 Hearts” music video and designed pieces for Lady Gaga, Rihanna, longtime friend Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and more.
In 2014, when asked about her placement within the fashion industry, she said, “I’m not mainstream, I don’t create for commercial success; I create because I can’t not.” She continued, admitting that some sense of commerciality needs to exist for upkeep, but in general, she designs “the pieces that I’d want to wear, pieces that I can see other people wearing.”
Lady Gaga wearing Hogg in 2010.
Sylvia Linares/FilmMagic/Getty Images
On her website, Hogg is described as “the antithesis of high fashion, provocative and original, brimming with humor and audacity.” She always had shocking yellow hair, further proof of her disinterest in blending in. Due to her many endeavors throughout her life, she considered herself a “creator” more so than any other title. “I capture these fragments that float around my head, tiny shards that collide and eventually fall into place like a jigsaw,” she said.
French designer Antonin Tron is stepping in as the new creative director of Balmain following Olivier Rousteing’s departure last week. He’ll start work this month and is set to show his first collection in March as part of the fall 2026 presentations in Paris.
“Balmain has a truly inspiring history,” Tron said in a statement. “At its heart, the house embodies savoir-faire, culture, sensuality, and elegance—fashion that is radiant, precise, and bold. This resonates deeply with me, and I feel privileged to have the opportunity to build on this incredible legacy.”
Fashion insiders will know Tron as the 41-year-old designer behind Atlein, a Paris-based label he founded in 2016. The brand’s wearable but elegant draped jersey dresses garnered early acclaim. Named for the Atlantic Ocean and inspired by Tron’s love of surfing and nature, Atlein became an instant hit, gaining wholesale clients including Bergdorf Goodman, Galeries Lafayette, and Net-A-Porter. In 2016, Tron was awarded the ANDAM Prize for his work with the brand, and a year later, he was named a finalist for the LVMH Prize. He has continued to release new collections each season while simultaneously collaborating with other labels. That includes a 2024 capsule collection with Kylie Jenner’s Khy. Though he is now putting Atlein on pause in order to focus on Balmain.
Tron presenting his collection as part of the 2017 LVMH Prize.
The Royal Academy of Fine Arts graduate has an impressive resume outside of Atlein as well. He began his career designing menswear at Louis Vuitton. He then moved over to the womenswear teams at Givenchy and then Balenciaga. It was at the latter house that we worked with three subsequent creative directors—Nicolas Ghesquière, Alexander Wang, and his former Royal Academy classmate, Demna. Most recently, he was working with the design teams at Saint Laurent.
The executives at Balmain have high hopes for Tron and his future at Balmain. “Antonin’s approach to design, rooted in the art of draping and the physicality of fabric, marks a continuation of Pierre Balmain’s foundational belief that ‘dressmaking is the architecture of movement,” said Matteo Sgarbossa, Balmain’s Chief Executive Officer. Rachid Mohamed Rachid, Mayhoola CEO and Balmain Chairman, added, “We are exceptionally pleased to welcome Antonin Tron to the group and to Balmain. His thoughtful approach to design, rooted in craftsmanship and artistic sensitivity, makes him an exciting talent for the house.”
Tron following Atlein’s spring/summer 2025 collection.
SAVIKO/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
It will be interesting to see how Tron translates his expertise into the house codes of Balmain. Under Rousteing, the House became known for maximalist, embellished styles that often resembled modern armor (frequent customers were known as the Balmain Army, after all), but Tron is known to have a softer touch. “Restrictive construction is something from another century,” he told Wback in 2017. “A woman should always feel free.”
Tron has quite a legacy to live up to. Rousteing spent 14 years at Balmain, turning it into a cultural touchstone. As for Rousteing’s next move, that is still up in the air. The designer posted on Instagram following his departure announcement, writing, “Today, I leave the House of Balmain with my eyes still wide open—open to the future and to the beautiful adventures ahead, adventures in which all of you will have a place.” As of now, though, those “beautiful adventures” remain undefined.
Just when we thought the churn of the fashion world waters had finally started to calm, another tidal wave has come through. On Wednesday, November 5, Balmain announced that Olivier Rousteing, the brand’s creative director, has stepped down after almost a decade and a half in the position.
“I am deeply proud of all that I’ve accomplished, and profoundly grateful to my exceptional team at Balmain, my chosen family, in a place that has been my home for the past 14 years,” Rousteing said in a statement. His departure from the brand marks the end of a partnership characterized by its creativity and cultural significance. It also ends one of the longest creative director tenures in recent fashion history.
Born in Bordeaux in 1985, Rousteing moved to Paris at a young age to study at Ecole Supérieure des Arts et Techniques de la Mode. He began his career at Roberto Cavalli in 2003, where he worked as the head of the brand’s women’s ready-to-wear collection for five years. In 2009, he moved on to Balmain and began working closely with the French house’s then-creative director, Christophe Decarnin. Two years later, at just 25 years old, he was named creative director at Balmain, becoming the youngest replacement designer to lead a major Paris fashion house since Yves Saint Laurent took over Dior. He was also the first Black designer to lead a French house ever. Rousteing was basically unknown at the time of his appointment, making the choice a risk, albeit one that paid off. According to Vogue, over his tenure, Rousteing increased annual revenue tenfold, from €30.4 million in 2012 to an estimated €300 million last year.
Rousteing was successful in placing Balmain back in the cultural landscape, with highly energetic and embellished collections that caught the public’s fickle eye. His friendships with celebrities like Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Kim Kardashian helped to push his designs further into the mainstream. In 2014, Kardashian wore a pearl-covered mini dress from Rousteing’s fall 2012 collection to her Parisian bachelorette, a moment that had a significant impact on Balmain’s cultural street cred. It also helped to create the Balmain Army, the name associated with the following that soon materialized around Rousteing and the brand, inspired by Rousteing’s armor-adjacent designs.
Kardashian in Balmain at her bachelorette party in May 2014.
Neil Mockford/GC Images/Getty Images
In 2015, Rousteing became the latest designer to design a collaboration collection with H&M, which featured pieces inspired by Rousteing’s first few seasons with Balmain. The collaboration was a huge hit, with fans sleeping on the streets to get an opportunity to shop the pieces, which sold out in just hours.
During his time at Balmain, Rousteing was always moving the brand forward. Not long after joining the house, he facilitated the opening of the first Balmain stores outside of Paris and, in 2019, he presented couture as a guest designer on the schedule (and acted as the guest couturier for Jean Paul Gaultier’s fall/winter 2022 haute couture collection). In 2023, he launched Balmain beauty and fragrance with Estée Lauder, expanded the brand’s accessories category, and co-designed a collection with Beyoncé.
It wasn’t always easy. In his 2019 documentary Wonder Boy, Rousteing opened up about his adoption and the search for his birth parents. In 2021, the designer suffered an at-home accident, which left him severely burned. The incident inspired his spring 2022 collection, which featured gauzy bandage dresses. “My last show was about the celebration of healing over pain,” he said on Instagram. “I remember when they took out all my bandages it felt [like] FREEDOM.”
A look from Balmain spring 2022.
Photo by Dominique Charriau/WireImage
Rousteing completely transformed Balmain from a quiet, ivory tower fashion house to a cultural phenomenon. In that same time, Rousteing grew from a 25-year-old kid to a celebrity designer working with some of the biggest names in the world. Of course, the question now is, who will attempt to fill Rousteing’s shoes and what will he do next? Though he has experienced a lifetime of milestones, Rousteing is only 40, and therefore, likely has a lot of creativity left in him.
Chitose Abe is sitting at a conference table in a bare-bones office upstairs at the Paris headquarters of her company, Sacai. The building is a Haussmannian-style hôtel particulier with a stately entrance, but the inside is utterly minimal, with Eiffel-like girders holding up the showroom’s glass canopy roof. Abe is beaming, having just soaked up the last of the congratulations for her men’s and women’s presentation, which is a series of looks arranged on rows of mannequins assembled below us. She says, through an interpreter, that her most recent output is “a return to basics.” But that’s always been true of Sacai.
Since she started the company, in 1999, Abe has created her own language of smartly remixed wardrobe staples—tuxedos, sailor-stripe T-shirts, seersucker, denim, and khaki—and has become a designer’s designer in the process. Devotees like Pharrell Williams, Sofia Coppola, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, all instinctively good dressers who have access to everything, still choose her. “They might have contracts with different brands, but they’re friends who want to wear Sacai in their private life. So when they’re in Tokyo, they come to see me,” she says.
The days of fashion editors changing multiple times a day during show season to wear clothes by the house they’re visiting are over. Still, in the crowd downstairs—fashion insiders checking out the collection up close—there are many who are wearing their own Sacai. Before my interview with Abe, I spotted a pleated oxford-striped tennis dress, a reproportioned trench, one of those hybrid striped T-shirts with the draped fabric back that Abe has perfected over the years, and numerous off-the-shoulder poplin shrug tops, on people of all shapes and sizes.
Sacai is often described as an intellectual brand. Maybe that’s because Abe’s pieces are never just one thing—in fact, they often contain several contrasting statements. Delicacy meets strength in tailoring with sheer inserts that reveal flashes of skin; workwear goes sensual through draping and slouch. Yet, for all their symbols and signifiers, the clothes don’t wear their owners. “Chitose makes quite masculine ideas feel very sensual, and also new and unexpected,” says Anita Templer, a branding consultant who was a loyal Sacai customer long before she started collaborating with Abe on retail and media strategy. “There’s something artful about her clothes, but they’re relatable and easy to wear. I have this bomber jacket with a sweater detail on the front, and I must have had 30 people stop me in the street to ask where it was from. I think it’s to do with her being a woman and wearing the clothes herself. She’s a working mom. She likes to go out in the evening. She likes to dance. Some people might lazily reach a conclusion that if it’s design that comes from Japan, there has to be something somber or strict about it, but there’s a happiness and lightness to Sacai.”
Jacqui Hooper wears a Sacai jacket, dress, and gloves.
Abe was her own unfussy muse when she started customizing her clothes as a teenager, and she launched Sacai to indulge her desire to rethink the basics she always loved. Back then, her dress code was “simple clothes: dress shirts, chinos, cardigans,” she explains. She had left her job as a patternmaker at Comme des Garçons after finding out she was pregnant, and was home with her daughter when she started Sacai, initially with a small range of knitwear. She would try out her designs on tiny dolls. “There were so many brands and so many clothes around the world when I started,” she says. “I wanted to create something that didn’t exist, something new and interesting, but that I would wear in daily life.”
Today that’s an asymmetric black ruffle skirt with an oversize black men’s T-shirt that reads all day, every day, a nod to Abe’s firm belief that clothes should be completely versatile. It’s low-key until you get into the details, like the delicate knife pleats of the ruffles on the skirt, which swirl onto themselves, or the neck of her tee, stretched out just so. The quiet subtlety vanishes, though, when you get to Abe’s wrist, where there’s a magnificent, giant honking watch I can’t stop staring at. It’s a men’s Rolex GMT-Master II in heavy yellow gold, the lug covered in pavé diamonds, the bezel ringed in emerald-cut rubies and sapphires.
I tell Abe it’s fabulous, and she whips it off her wrist and hands it to me with a big smile. “It’s heavy,” she says. “I got it 15 years ago. It wasn’t a special occasion, but I fell in love with it and felt like I would regret it if I let it go. It wasn’t cheap, but I felt like it was worth it.”
No need to apologize or justify. Sacai is a very successful business, and Abe is its sole owner. Back when there were just a few employees, Abe did the books herself; now the brand employs 160 people, is stocked in more than 35 countries, and has ongoing capsule collaborations with Nike, Carhartt WIP, Astier de Villatte, and J.M. Weston. Many of these came about through friends like Fraser Cooke, a director of special projects at Nike. “Our marketing approach is very personal,” says Abe.
It would have to be, because for all her boldface admirers, Abe is deeply unthirsty. She doesn’t bother with the red carpet. She doesn’t do social media. She doesn’t even know who any of the new stars or influencers are. “I don’t have all that much information,” she says. “Whenever the team talks about celebrities, I don’t know who anybody is.”
Betsy Gaghan wears a Sacai vest, shorts, gloves, and boots.
Abe wasn’t even that clear on what Labubu was when her friend Federico Tan, the Hong Kong–based art world connector, gave her one of the dolls with the idea to broker an introduction to Labubu’s designer, the artist Kasing Lung. Next thing you know, Abe had put 14 hysteria-inducing Labubus onto Sacai x Carhartt WIP knit jumpsuits and star necklaces that were sold at a UNESCO charity auction through Pharrell Williams’s online platform, Joopiter, in collaboration with the K-pop group Seventeen. They went for $30,000 each. “We weren’t really familiar with this chaos of Labubu in the world,” says Abe. “It was just a friendly conversation.”
Abe’s team, which includes a network of textile suppliers with whom she creates her own fabrics, has been with her for a long time. When she talks about her inspiration, success, or longevity, she always refers to her collaborators. Her circle extends to the creatives she taps for her lookbooks and runway shows. Karl Templer, who styled this photo shoot, has worked on all of Sacai’s presentations since Abe’s first, in 2011. That show came about through the advice of Sarah Andelman, who was then running the legendary Parisian boutique Colette. “Sarah is a big supporter of Sacai still,” says Abe, “and gave very wise advice to me: If you don’t show your clothes to the world, somebody will start copying Sacai, and then Sacai might be seen as copying them. She did really push me to show in a runway format so that people could actually see what we were doing.”
Abe credits that decision as one of the biggest boosts of her career. Templer already had a very good feel for the clothes, because Anita Templer, Abe’s collaborator, is his wife. “Anita had been buying Chitose’s pieces from Dover Street Market for a while, and I was always impressed with how the attitude of the clothes stood out,” he says. “Chitose has such a strong design signature and the ability to revisit archetypes and proportion, rearranging them to create desire constantly. Observers think it’s the styling, but the pieces are just designed that way, so that when you wear them you feel that little bit more in the know and fashionable and special.”
I tell Abe that I admire how she’s been able to stay the course aesthetically for so many years and ask her if it’s a Japanese thing, because so many of the fashion houses with real creative longevity and rock-solid DNA were founded by her countrymen: Junya Watanabe, Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons. Her answer is typically earthbound: “We tend to think that keeping brand ownership is part of the authenticity.”
There’s no question that to maintain your true north through fashion’s increasingly choppy waters, it helps to own the boat. For Abe, it also helps to go to karaoke regularly—lately, she’s been performing songs by the Japanese pop star Aiko—and to play with Legos. There is a bunch of red Lego roses Abe constructed in a Sacai x Astier de Villatte pitcher downstairs in the showroom. Generally, though, she prefers the old-school blocks to the custom kits of today. They’re freer and allow for more imagination.
Hair by Guido for Zara Hair; makeup by Jennifer Bradburn. Models: Betsy Gaghan and Jacqui Hooper at Next Management. Casting by DM Casting Piergiorgio Del Moro. Set design by Sophear at Art + Commerce.
Produced by Endorphyn; Producers: Magali Mennessier, Emanuela Polo; Photo Assistants: Shri Prasham Parameshwaran, Margaux Jouanneau, Charles Hardouin, Jakub Fulin; Digital Technician: Victor Gauthier; On-Set Retoucher: Ines Leroy Galan; postproduction: DFactory; Fashion Assistants: Brandon Williams, Florence Armstrong; makeup assistant: Mical Klip; Set Assistants: Victor Leverrier, Julian Harold.
Paolo Carzana’s studio is just a tiny room above Smithfield Market, London’s main meat market, on the edge of the city’s financial district. Commuter trains rumble in and out of the tunnel underneath the space, which is crammed with clothes. Since starting his brand in 2022, the 30-year-old Welsh designer has made every garment himself here by hand, using intuitive and time-consuming draping techniques. “Each piece is like a life,” says Carzana, whose nails are bitten to the quick. He uses deadstock, organic, and antique fabrics that he dyes with natural ingredients. “I work with logwood, madder, turmeric, red onion skins, avocado stones.… A lot of the time, I’ll mix ingredients. Or I’ll work on a layer, then layer on top, then layer on top.”
So far, Carzana has shown six collections, all with poetic titles like “My Heart Is a River for You to Bend” and “Dragons Unwinged at the Butchers Block.” His last three collections formed the “Trilogy of Hope,” a series “about overcoming, but also being at peace with, darkness—the idea that no matter how far you climb and the obstacles you overcome, you can still be hit and fall to the bottom again.” The first of the shows, fall/winter 2024, was set in heaven; the second was in hell. The trilogy ended in purgatory, in a liminal torment inspired by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings. Knotted dresses looked like they were barely held together.
Carzana’s craft-centric approach runs counter to that of most of his peers—and yet he is one of London’s most feted young talents. On the back of his studio door is a note from Sarah Burton, the new creative director of Givenchy. He was a finalist for the LVMH Prize in 2024; has spent time at Sarabande, a foundation set up by Lee Alexander McQueen to support young talent; and is now the designer in residence at studios run by Paul Smith’s foundation.
Born and raised in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, Carzana took to fashion in high school. He stayed behind in art class during lunch breaks, and his teachers showed him books on McQueen and Gianni Versace. He moved to London to study fashion at the University of Westminster, interned with Walter Van Beirendonck in Antwerp, then went on to a master’s program at Central Saint Martins. One of his tutors was Nasir Mazhar, the founder of the radical London pop-up store Fantastic Toiles and a hero of the city’s fashion counterculture. Mazhar became his mentor. “He encourages me to push myself,” says Carzana. He “pulls out my creativity and constantly questions everything.” Since Carzana started showing, Mazhar has become his collaborator too, contributing ethereal millinery to Carzana’s collections.
The designer Paolo Carzana, in London.
For Carzana, the human form is crucial to his design process. His clothes are often cut on the bias, with “individual pieces put onto a body and sculpted around the model.” There is no fusing, no shoulder construction, no internal scaffolding. The results are sinuous and lyrical, and make it so “skin is revealed in not such a traditional way.” A woman’s dress might be draped so the décolletage wanders down to the navel; the swirl of a toga-like men’s top might leave one side of the chest totally exposed. »
Carzana finds many of his materials at the vintage traders on Portobello Road, in West London. Hand-drawn motifs, like the stenciled large polka dots that appear in his most recent collection, are his newest obsession. But his work grows out of experimentation, not an effort to establish long-term signatures: “I’m actively pushing against honing in. I’m trying to develop and grow and change.”
Earlier this year, Carzana graduated from the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN program, an initiative that has supported designers such as McQueen, Jonathan Anderson, and Simone Rocha. Right now, he has no additional financial backing, so his business is hand to mouth. He has two international stockists—Dover Street Market in Paris and in Tokyo—and sells through Fantastic Toiles and his own website. “Everything feels purposeful and meaningful, but also I’m aware that I have no money,” he says. Yet Carzana remains clear-eyed about his brand’s mission: “I’m trying to achieve something totally away from an attempt to be cool, or look cool—it’s the complete opposite of having a viral thing.”
Hair by Issac Poleon at The Wall Group; makeup by Bea Sweet at The Wall Group; manicure by Pebbles Aikens for Penhaligons at The Wall Group. Models: Tia Edney at IMG London, Aluel Makuach at Elite London, Julia Rambukkana at Milk; Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting; Set Design by Nana-Yaw Mensah; Produced by Angels Production; Producer: Barbara Eyt-Dessus; Photo Assistants: Lucas Bullens, George Hutton; Digital Technician: Emre Cakir; Retouching: Touch Digital; Fashion Assistant: Kitty Lyell; Production Assistants: Ryan James, Maytee Sangsawang; Hair Assistant: Ana Torres; Makeup Assistant: Vivi Melo; Set Assistants: Ella Kenyon, Jemima Maidment.
This year marks the 35th anniversary of Undercover, the Tokyo-based brand you started when you were 21. You have transformed streetwear with evocatively layered references, from punk and music to film and couture. Has your design process changed since you started?
For the past 35 years, I have continued to create with almost no change, always centering on the things that interest me.
What does the name Undercover mean to you?
The name was chosen from the idea of wanting the brand to have a secretive, mysterious atmosphere.
As a student in the late ’80s, you were the vocalist in a tribute band called the Tokyo Sex Pistols. What drew you to punk?
Music and visuals that break preconceived notions, and a contrarian attitude of looking at things from a slanted angle.
You blurred the line between streetwear and high fashion long before that became mainstream.
For me, someone who spent my youth in the 1990s, blending streetwear and high fashion was a natural thing. Although it seems that many products nowadays imitate that direction, what is important is whether there is soul in them.
While you were at Bunka Fashion College in the late ’80s, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake were revolutionizing fashion with their designs. What do you remember most vividly about that era?
A struggle between my first experiences with nightlife and an overwhelming load of homework.
Some of your most memorable collections have been beautiful but eerie—for instance, the dresses inspired by the twins from The Shining, from spring 2018, and the terrarium dresses, glowing and filled with roses and butterflies, from spring 2024. What do you want people to feel when they see those shows?
The complex emotions usually kept locked away deep in the heart.
A look from the Undercover fall 2025 collection.
Estrop/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
Music has played a major role in your collections. How do you translate sound into fashion?
Music is always accompanied by record jackets, artwork, and the visuals of artists. I use these elements and translate them into clothing.
What are you listening to these days?
Recently, I listen mainly to Japanese rock and pop. The Kosmik Musik playlist I’ve been releasing on Spotify includes fantastical songs, tracks that emphasize intensity, songs that convey calmness, and more. I hope to express a progression like that of a movie.
You are known as a big runner. What’s your routine?
Three times a week, each time six to 10 kilometers. I’m eliminating negative thoughts. I consider running a meditative activity for fostering design ideas and mental composure.
Painting has been your personal hobby for years. The first public exhibition of your art, They Can See More Than You Can See, was in Tokyo in 2023. What does painting give you that fashion does not?
Drawing is a more personal and free creative activity. What I gain from it is a self I didn’t know before. That is what I seek.
Your paintings often depict hybrid figures or haunting faces. Are they autobiographical in any way?
Maybe so. I don’t particularly pay attention to it, though.
Do you ever see your painting and fashion practices colliding?
Your fall 2024 show was held at London’s Savoy Hotel, in the ballroom where Christian Dior once showed. Alex Consani opened; the soundtrack included Björk, as well as monologues from the viral star Tokyo Toni; and your muse Tish Weinstock closed the show in a wedding gown decorated with discarded iPod headphones. It was…
A mind fuck!
But in a good way! Your brand, which you officially launched in 2021, is built around sustainability—a majority of your garments are made from deadstock fabrics or postconsumer waste. How do you manage to balance that with humor?
You have moments when you’ve been working for 15 hours, and you zoom out and realize that you’re debating the hem on a chiffon dress. Then you’re like, Wow, this is so silly. Humor keeps a sense of lightness that is more necessary than ever before. The first thing I say about sustainability is there’s nothing sustainable about making new clothes. I just try to ensure that everything we’re doing can be held within my conscience in a way that I’m proud of.
You attended the fashion program at London’s Central Saint Martins and continue to live and work in London, but you were born and raised in Bedford, New York. What were your earliest memories of fashion?
There’s a famous story that my mom always tells: One of her girlfriends was over, and at the age of 2 or 3, I was telling her, “I love the way your boots go with your skirt.”
At your fall 2025 show, one of the most talked-about looks wasn’t actually on the runway; it was a white T-shirt that said “Protect The Dolls,” which you wore to take a bow. You ended up selling them and donating most of the proceeds to benefit Trans Lifeline, a crisis hotline.
I was so uncomfortable with how things had gone in the months prior. Donald Trump was reelected; we were watching rights being stripped away. I had to say something, and it came back to this question of, well, what is being threatened right now? This felt like a small way we could provide hope. I could never have expected the response that we got. As of right now, I think we’ve donated over half a million pounds to Trans Lifeline. It feels like the proudest moment of my career.
Rihanna was an early fan of your brand. How does it feel to have that kind of support?
So many things that I dreamed of happening were arranged or cosigned by her. Adwoa Aboah wore a look from my first collection to the Met Gala in 2017. Rihanna came up to her and said, “Who made this?” She followed me on Instagram the next day. I didn’t realize until one of her fans DM’ed me, like, “Rihanna just followed you. Who the hell are you?” I was literally 21 at the time. It led to working for Fenty, her label with LVMH. She always ensured that whoever had something to say in meetings, she would quiet the room for them. One day she came, and I had stayed up all night doing sketches. I was a mess. She came up behind me and said, “Conner!” I turned around, and she was wearing one of my old T-shirt dresses I had gifted her. She gave me the biggest hug.
If you could place five celebrities, living or dead, in your front row, who would you choose?
Marlene Dietrich, next to Eartheater. I feel like they’d be best friends. Marisa Tomei after My Cousin Vinny—she’s almost an unsung hero. Rihanna’s never come to a show, so we have to get her there. Then Diana Vreeland, because so much of my childhood was spent in the fantasy of fashion.
When a collection is over, how do you unwind?
I love to draw. I’m always doing the work. I really struggle with a holiday. So maybe I need a retreat where someone pries the iPhone out of my hands and is like, “You need to go lie in that field and touch grass for a bit.” That sounds really ideal right now, but I would probably lose my mind.
Hair by Kei Takano for ORIBE at Agency 41; Makeup by Bari Khalique for Gucci Beauty at The Wall Group. Models: Rafe Crane-Robinson at The MiLK Collective, Tish Weinstock at Best Represents. Photo Assistant: Connor Egan; Retouching: Marine Ferrante; Fashion Assistant: Brigitte Kovats; Hair Assistant: Mariana Feliziani; Makeup Assistant: Lucy Beacall.
Stepping into Chemena Kamali’s newly renovated Chloé office, in Paris’s 8th arrondissement, is a bit like stepping into her mind. Both are fresh, focused, and warmly lit—in the case of the room, with a Diptyque Feu de Bois candle; in the case of the woman, with a desire, she says, to “carry on working with the heritage of the house while writing a new legacy for Chloé,” where she has served as creative director since 2023. Try to find a screen—you won’t. Kamali has politely turned her phone face down on a table laid with canisters of cashews, a box of chocolates, and a bowl of blueberries. On her desk, a stack of leather-bound journals overwhelms a closed laptop, and an old-school fan whirls away. “When I arrived here yesterday, I said, ‘Okay, this is a good place to start,’ ” says Kamali, taking in the freshly painted walls in the atelier. “It gives you a clean headspace.”
We’re in the waning days of August, and Kamali has just gotten back from several weeks’ holiday on Patmos. “We were supposed to go to some other Greek islands, but we liked it so much we decided to stay,” she says. There was swimming. There was reading—not one but two Susan Sontag books (On Women and Against Interpretation and Other Essays). Kamali mostly retreated into herself, she says, yet she couldn’t help snapping a few photos, aide-mémoires for a certain intriguing way that women were draping their pareos around their hips. The moment went straight into her memory bank, a reservoir of feelings and impressions from which Kamali draws her best ideas. “I love to catch an atmosphere,” she says. “It’s extremely reassuring for me, because everything moves all the time.” You heard it here first, if a few months from now we’re all dressing in beach towels.
Two years into her tenure, Kamali has solidified her place in the upper echelons of French fashion, infusing Chloé with a modern take on the buoyant, easy spirit that has characterized the house from its founding, in 1952, by Gaby Aghion. Kamali’s acclaimed first collection was shown in 2024, after the designer Gabriela Hearst exited the brand. It featured the sort of patent leather half capes, fluttery lace blouses, and liquidy gowns for which Chloé was beloved in the 1970s, under Karl Lagerfeld, and then in the early 2000s, when the Glastonbury Festival met the legendary Parisian nightclub Les Bains in the designs of Phoebe Philo and Clare Waight Keller. “In the streets of Paris and elsewhere, we missed this Chloé girl so much,” Le Figaro’s fashion critic wrote after Kamali’s debut.
Model Angelina Kendall wears Chloé clothing and accessories throughout.
The Chloé girl might be a Parisian archetype, but Kamali, 43, grew up in Dortmund, Germany, near Düsseldorf. Her parents owned several multilabel boutiques called Euro Mode. “I was never interested in selling, per se,” she explains. “What was so magical for me were the fittings, that ceremony of people trying things on.” It was the late ’80s, and Germany had, basically, two major national icons: “There was Karl Lagerfeld and Boris Becker,” Kamali recalls. She chose the sketch pad over the racket. “We all had these typical German slam books, and you’d fill out your favorite movie and what you wanted to be or whatever, and I wrote ‘Modeschöpfer,’ which is German for ‘couturier.’ ” From the age of 8, she never wavered: “This was quite distinctive from the rest of my friends or classmates. There was a very determined, clearheaded obsession about fashion very early on.”
Kamali has always been a paper person—a lover of print, a keeper of records. “Any family member who asked me what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, I always said magazine subscriptions,” she recalls. The titles piled up: American Vogue, Italian Vogue, W. On the cusp of adolescence, Kamali was probably operating Dortmund’s finest fashion library. “I turned into a very nerdy encyclopedia,” she says. Soon she was cutting out magazine pages and photographs she loved and gluing them into notebooks, collaging them with her own drawings. When she was 11, the family moved to California, where some relatives had already immigrated. “I was incredibly excited to be in a completely different aesthetic world,” says Kamali. “And I still love this European preciseness with a Californian undoneness.”
Even now, Kamali is obsessive about safeguarding references and tracking the creation of every look. “I love recording all the steps of my process, because for me it’s like a creative visual diary,” she explains. “You explore so many different pathways—sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. By recording it, you preserve the ideas, even if they’re killed or modified and become something else.”
This archival urge most often takes the form of photos, shot with iPhone, Polaroid, and digital cameras, printed out, and sorted into boxes that she sources from a specialist art supply store in Paris. (Each box has a digital backup, just in case.) Documenting, for Kamali, is also a way of encouraging transparency in an era in which trends seem to surge up out of the digital morass, with little ownership or explanation. “It doesn’t have to be all about the finished product,” she says. “I think in the times we’re living in, people are interested in seeing where things are coming from—what was the starting point, what were the influences?”
Unlike other designers, Kamali is unusually willing to pull the curtain back on how she works. For this story, she considered Chloé’s essential design signatures—the billowy blouse, mousseline, denim, and lace, among others—and selected a look to capture the spirit of each one. “I love working with the past, and I love working with codes. I’m not afraid of them,” she says. “I don’t want to fight them—it’s about embracing them but making them evolve.” Think of Kamali’s detailed, personal telling of the Chloé story as the opposite of AI slop.
Kamali was 22 and fresh out of Germany’s Trier University of Applied Sciences when she joined Chloé for the first time, as an intern, in 2003. She had gained a highly technical education: garment construction, patternmaking, art history, chemistry. The Paris dream that she had been nurturing ever since her collaging days beckoned, so she begged her way into the atelier, headed at the time by Phoebe Philo. “There was this energy and atmosphere, this complicity,” she recalls. “Women designing for women, and it was so relatable and honest. You kind of wanted to be that girl.”
Over the past 20 years, Kamali has made herself into that girl. After the internship, there was an MA at Central Saint Martins, in London, where she learned to channel her technical prowess into a creative sensibility, followed by stints at Alberta Ferretti and Strenesse, in Milan. Kamali returned to Chloé in 2012 for a little over three years, under Clare Waight Keller. But in 2016, Saint Laurent poached her to become design director of women’s ready-to-wear. The news that Kamali was coming back to Chloé, in the fall of 2023, had the heartwarming logic of one of those wedding announcements that recall how the bride and the groom fell in love in first grade, went their separate ways, and reconnected, with great joy, in midlife. “I always had this really strong affinity for Chloé because the emotional aspect spoke to me very purely and very deeply,” says Kamali. “There aren’t a lot of brands that have this honest voice that goes beyond fashion. I was drawn to the idea of a certain natural femininity, freedom, sensuality, and lightness.”
Kamali came in with a plan. “The pitch was essentially that I wanted to bring back the old fan base,” she says. “Because I knew it was out there—my generation of women who have a memory with Chloé, whether it’s a blouse that they loved or the first perfume they wore.” Kamali’s instincts have proven correct: Her first front row—stacked with millennial icons such as Sienna Miller and Liya Kebede, all outfitted in nostalgic, graffitied cork wedges, their legs crossed so that the shoes hung in the air just so—caused a sensation. (Just don’t mention “boho chic”—at Kamali’s Chloé, the phrase is banned.)
Memory, meme-ified; fandom, activated: Depop, the fashion resale site, reported a 1,137 percent increase in searches since June for the Paddington, the quintessential Chloé bag. Parent company Richemont’s latest annual report noted that sales rose by double digits across its clothing brands, “with an encouraging performance from Chloé.” Kamali says, “In the first and second years, the thing I really wanted to accomplish was to clean up and bring everyone on board and make sure we really navigated the house back to its original roots.”
Now Kamali is moving into the second phase of the plan. It’s all about demonstrating that, in addition to Chloé’s famously fluid look, the house possesses an intellectual suppleness. “What’s really important as I move forward is the understanding that there’s not just one Chloé woman,” Kamali says. In our conversation, certain words surface again and again: “freedom,” “motion,” “flow.” I’m curious about the Chloé palette—famously identifiable, with dusty roses and washed-out sea foams and chalky caramels, yet also famously tricky to wear for women in a certain range of skin tones. “It’s a very valid question, because not everybody loves those colors,” says Kamali. “What I want to do is extend this predetermined idea of ‘Chloé is this’ or ‘Chloé is that.’ It’s good to have these very strong codes that we all associate with a house, but there’s space for moving on from them while preserving the legacy and paying tribute to it.”
Changes that might once have been perceived as heresy feel like a natural progression under Kamali’s gentle stewardship. Chloé was founded explicitly as a ready-to-wear brand, one of the first to encourage women to swear off onerous fittings and instead turn to ease and convenience. Yet, Kamali says, “even though we’re not a couture house, recently I’ve been inspired by the idea of couture.” She continues: “What would it be like if you took all the heavy construction out of those dresses, and you could just put them in the washing machine and completely destroy the preciousness, you know?” Her answer, combining “couture preciseness and light summer cottons,” sounds tantalizing.
Behind us, there’s a magnet wall covered in images and swatches of fabric. It’s not a mood board, exactly, but an extension of the documentation process that Kamali holds so dear, allowing her to get where she’s going by chronicling how she started. We stand up from the table and get closer: There are Guy Bourdin’s leggy, Surrealist women in advertising campaigns for Charles Jourdan, and many pictures from Gaby Aghion’s first Chloé shows, which were held in the late ’50s at Café de Flore and Brasserie Lipp. Kamali is particularly enthusiastic about a book she recently picked up called Shtetl in the Sun: Andy Sweet’s South Beach 1977–1980. She points to the wall, where she’s stuck a picture of senior citizens sunning themselves. “I love the prints, the bathing suits, these old hotels and pools. There’s something so fascinating about these images and the eccentricity.”
I can’t help but notice the hot pinks and lime greens that are popping out of the photos, the apple reds and cornflower blues. “I want to get into some of the colors,” says Kamali, picking up from our discussion about updating the Chloé palette. “I want to go into vivid saturation.” She takes a minute and smiles. “This house really makes me happy and really makes me proud. I brought back the initial, original idea of what Chloé should feel like. But now I’m free to make it evolve, and free to move on.”
Scenes from the model fittings for Chloé’s fall 2025 ready-to-wear show, with some of Kamali’s inspiration images for the collection.
Chemena Kamali: Hair by John Nollet at Forty-One Studio + Agency; Makeup by Anthony Preel at MA+ Group. Photo Assistant: Ryan O’Toole; Digital Technician: Romain Forquay; On-Set Production: Justine Torres at Brachfeld; Hair Assistant: Antonin Gacquer.
Hair by Sébastien Richard at Artlist Paris; makeup by Anthony Preel for Violette_FR at MA+ Group; manicure by Cam Tran for Manucurist at Artlist Paris. Model: Angelina Kendall at the Industry NY. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting. Set design by Hamid Shams.
Head to the website for the LVMH Prize and you’ll be confronted with the headshots of this year’s finalists: nine stoic faces, static in their white squares, plus one knitted in yarn. The doll in question sits on the shoulder of 33-year-old designer Danial Aitouganov, whose own phlegmatic demeanor adds to the cheekiness of his little pal’s presence. It represents stylist Imruh Asha, the other half of Zomer, the Paris-based brand founded by Aitouganov and Asha in 2023. Asha’s dolly likeness perfectly encapsulates what the pair’s partnership and brand are all about. “It’s definitely playful,” Aitouganov tells W. “We use a childlike approach when creating collections. It’s colorful and fun, but there’s a sophistication to it.”
It has been only two years since Zomer’s founding, but the brand has already managed to squeeze itself to the front of the fashion conversation. A debut show during Paris Fashion Week last March immediately got the attention of the industry, thanks in part to Aitouganov and Asha’s mastery of color, texture, and ability to balance show pieces with commercial offerings. While there is an aspect of avant-garde (especially in the fall 2025 collection, which saw many designs flipped backward), there is also an immense sense of wearability. The brand, only a toddler at this point, still lies in the realm of “if you know, you know,” but thanks in part to its finalist spot for the LVMH Prize, placement on Björk, recent book launch, and multiple brand collaborations, it won’t be long until it moves from an insider label to a household name.
Zomer’s marketing skills have contributed to all the attention. The brand’s 2023 “It’s Just Kids” campaign transformed industry icons like Pat McGrath, Grace Coddington, and Michèle Lamy into their childlike counterparts. And Aitouganov and Asha are fans of using stand-ins: their spring/summer 2024 show ended with their child doppelgängers taking bows on the runway. For fall 2024, it was old men. In spring 2025, there were two women. Even when Aitouganov and Asha themselves stepped out to finally give a bow at their most recent fall 2025 show, the designers kept their backs to the audience. “It’s a fun element to surprise people, to make them laugh,” Aitouganov says.
Aitouganov and a knit Asha in Zomer’s LVMH Prize portrait.
Courtesy of Zomer
This lighthearted spirit has been at play from the start. Aitouganov met Asha when the former was still in his final years at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute. He was looking for a stylist, and Asha was styling e-commerce for the popular Amsterdam-based store, Supermarket. “It was the cool place, and that’s where the cool kids were hanging out,” Aitouganov says.
The two became fast friends. “I was intrigued by how bold he was in using color in his work,” Asha says of Aitouganov via e-mail. “That attracted me.” When Aitouganov was selected as a finalist for the 2017 Hyères Fashion Festival, he asked Asha to help. Soon, they started playing with the idea of building a brand together. “But we were realistic,” Aitouganov says. “We were like, ‘We don’t have that much money, we don’t have contacts, we don’t have a network, or experience.” Instead, Aitouganov got a job at Chloé while Asha made a name for himself as a stylist. He also joined the team at Dazed as fashion editor, a title he still holds. (“Sometimes I feel like I have a split personality,” Asha says. “Imruh for Dazed, Imruh for Zomer, Imruh for clients, Imruh for Imruh.”)
In 2018, Aitouganov moved to Burberry, where he worked as a womenswear designer for four years. “It was quite an intense period,” Aitouganov recalls; he often worked until 4 AM and on weekends. Facing burnout, he moved to Paris. “I wanted to have time for myself, finally read a book, go to a gallery.” He also had more time to think—and he found himself scheming on the old brand plan.
Aitouganov and Asha’s stand ins on the spring/summer 2024 runway.
Justin Shin/WireImage/Getty Images
Aitouganov and Asha had stayed in touch via a group chat with Asha’s girlfriend (aptly named “Children,” a part of Zomer’s core ethos. “We were building a foundation,” Aitouganov says. At the same time, Aitouganov had to accept the prospect of entering the spotlight after years behind the scenes. “I’d always work on someone else’s vision,” he said. “I was always protected, so I had to get used to the idea of going into the foreground. But eventually I was like, ‘Okay, let’s just jump.’”
Aitouganov’s experience at Burberry led to some ground rules for Zomer. “We were producing so much without feeling,” he says of his time at the British brand. “So the product, for me, became very flat, and the teams were exhausted.” Aitouganov promised himself that Zomer would never find itself in that position, even if it meant cutting down on production. “Mental health is really important to me,” he says. “I will protect my teams. And I sit them down to say, ‘You’re not competition. You’re going to create something beautiful together.’ I don’t want negativity or fears within the house.”
The good vibes begin with the brand’s name, Zomer, or “summer” in Dutch. “It’s our favorite season,” Aitouganov says. “It’s warm, vibrant, colorful—and that’s what we bring with the brand.”
A look from the fall/winter 2025/2026.
SAVIKO/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
Those are all words that can be used to describe Aitouganov and Asha’s creations. Unexpected details like misplaced collars, origami-like attachments, and noodly fringe add whimsical zeal. But there’s no mistaking it, these are well-made clothes. “We both worked in luxury, so we have a feel for quality,” Aitouganov says. “I’m trying to create the best possible product.”
The two are perfectionists, a trait Asha admits “can lead to obsessive spirals” if they’re not careful. But the benefit of having each other far outweighs the risk of a mutual breakdown. “We push each other, we challenge ideas,” Asha says. “It’s very nice to have a boxing partner,” Aitouganov adds.
A look from the fall/winter 2025/2026 featuring the Karhu x Zomer sneakers.
SAVIKO/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
Zomer gleans inspiration from visual artists like Pablo Picasso—who served as the muse for the brand’s first runway show—along with the Italian painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana, and photographer Rafael Pavarotti. (In the case of Picasso, wood was used throughout Zomer’s spring 2024 debut at Paris Fashion Week; for the Fontana collection, dresses and jackets bore dramatic slashes.) “We’re sponges,” Aitouganov says of his and Asha’s design sensibility. “We soak it up and release it.”
Zomer has done a slew of collaborations, including working with the Brooklyn-based homewear brand, Heven, on hand-blown glass sculptures that models carried down the fall 2024 runway. The spring 2025 collection saw flowers provided by French florist Debeaulieu, with some blooms dipped in chrome by U.K. artists Isabel + Helen. Knitwear has come from designer Cécile Feilchenfeldt, sneakers from Finnish brand Karhu, and jewelry from Panconesi.
The next collab the two are hoping to engage in is with LVMH. Zomer is a finalist in the luxury conglomerate’s annual competition (hence Asha’s rag-doll representative on the Prize’s site). The winner receives 300,000 euros, as well as a one-year mentorship tailored to their needs. To Aitouganov, winning means obtaining some breathing room within the brand. It would be a major step toward his goals to create a “self-sufficient, sustainable” company. But Asha thinks they’re already feeling the benefits. “Win or not, the nomination has already opened doors. We’re just getting started.”
Asha and Aitouganov wave goodbye following their fall/winter 2025/2026 show.
Peter White/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
At the couture shows in Paris this past January, the most talked-about accessory was neither an It bag nor a statement shoe but an alien robot baby—a husky, sparkling tot constructed of electronic panels, pearl-covered circuit boards, wires, cables, and thousands of Swarovski crystals that Schiaparelli designer Daniel Roseberry sent down the runway in the arms of model Maggie Maurer. It was made from what Roseberry referred to as “prehistoric technology”—flip phones, computer chips, and motherboards dating back to the days before going viral on social media was considered the ultimate measure of success.
Such wild creations are not surprising coming from Schiaparelli. The house’s founder was the mother of surrealist fashion, known for making gloves with claws on the fingertips, trimming boots with long fringes of monkey fur, and collaborating with Salvador Dalí to turn a shoe into a hat. Roseberry, since joining the house in 2019, has continued in that same vein. But this year, as other labels began to roll out their fall ready-to-wear collections, it became clear that he wasn’t the only designer turning eye-popping materials into major runway moments.
For his first collection at the helm of McQueen, Seán McGirr took inspiration from smashed phone screens to create a black, irregularly hemmed, rectilinear dress adorned with metal thread and ribbon work, glass beads, and laser-cut shards of clear Perspex that simulated broken glass. On the opposite end of the coziness spectrum, Jonathan Anderson opened his JW Anderson show with a sunny yellow top and skirt made from giant stuffed mohair tubes that functioned as comically oversize yarn—the design team used their arms as knitting needles, stitching the squishy cylinders directly onto a mannequin. The following month, in his role as creative director of the Spanish house Loewe, Anderson sent out a sparklier and even more labor-intensive creation: a voluminous, winged A-line shift dress with a caviar-beaded image of a Brussels Griffon dog sprawled on a grass lawn. The piece—which, on a model, had the effect of a walking tapestry—took 23 embroiderers 1,600 hours to make and was inspired, Anderson said, by antique high-society paintings featuring pets. A silk Balenciaga dress, meanwhile, was “frozen in time” through a process of wetting, bunching, and applying a crystallizing fixative, which makes it look perpetually windswept even when it’s standing still.
The use of unexpected and sometimes downright odd materials to make grand fashion statements is, of course, not a 2024 phenomenon. “These designers are building on a foundation that’s been laid by their predecessors,” says Daniel James Cole, an adjunct assistant professor at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and the coauthor of 2015’s The History of Modern Fashion. Cole sees today’s examples as “the natural progression” of designs by sartorial provocateurs like Martin Margiela, known for such innovations as the porcelain waistcoat (1989), which was made from strung-together smashed plates, and the wig coat (2009), a wearable accumulation of faux hair. But even before fashion was an industry, dressmakers were thinking beyond the loom. In 16th- and 17th-century India, for instance, beetle wings were used as proto-sequins, affixed to fabric to produce a shimmering effect. The practice was appropriated by the Brits during the colonial period, reaching peak trendiness in Victorian England, where women flaunted what were known as “elytra dresses”—white muslin gowns that sparkled with thousands of emerald green bug parts.
At other times, designers eschewed fabric out of scarcity rather than a desire for adornment. In Japan, says Matilda McQuaid, the acting curatorial director at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York, “they were always working with interesting materials, which I think goes back to the lack of resources they had as an island nation.” One example is a 19th-century “sweat protector,” an undergarment meant to absorb perspiration and allow for air flow, which was made from recycled paper ledger books. A century later, Anglo-American designer Charles James also had to get creative when available fabrics failed to meet his needs, says the fashion and textile historian, curator, and conservator Sarah Scaturro, who ran the Costume Conservation Laboratory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, in New York, and is now at the Cleveland Museum of Art. “He started laminating together multiple textiles, including nylon window screening, to get the buoyancy and volume he was desiring for pieces like his four-leaf clover gown.”
Scaturro points out that, over the course of history, innovations in fashion materials have often reflected developments in science and technology. James’s invention is one such example—nylon was first introduced in 1935, just as he was establishing his name. But the 1960s were truly the heyday of this phenomenon. The rapid rise of synthetics brought fads like “paper” dresses—which were usually some blend of cellulose and man-made fibers. First introduced as part of a marketing campaign by the Scott Paper Company, the idea was eventually picked up by various apparel makers and the likes of Andy Warhol, who did a dress printed with Campbell’s Soup cans. (Though it was touted as disposable, the paper dress’s influence on fashion was surprisingly durable: Three decades later, Hussein Chalayan used Tyvek paper sheets to make a jacket trimmed with red and blue airmail envelope stripes. Björk wore it on the cover of her 1995 album, Post.)
The advent of plastics gave rise to “space age” styles made from vinyl and PVC by European designers such as Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, and Paco Rabanne. In the U.S., Betsey Johnson attracted attention with a line of completely clear plastic dresses sold with adhesive-backed plastic shapes that could be stuck on the body to cover up private parts. To Cole, that experiment in customization brings to mind a current-season Alaïa coat with black-on-black dots that can be removed and repositioned for a different look with each wear. The technique, says Alaïa creative director Pieter Mulier, turns the garment into “a canvas for creativity.” Unlike Mulier’s design, however, Johnson’s frocks were definitely NSFW. “A big part of ’60s fashion was about shock value,” says Cole.
The pressure to raise eyebrows has only increased in the Internet age, when attention seems to be its own reward. For the Costume Institute Benefit at the Met this past May, Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing transformed the singer Tyla into a human hourglass by encasing her in a gown made from sand and micro-crystal studs that he’d molded on a cast of her body. And who could forget Lady Gaga’s infamous “meat dress,” stitched together out of raw steak? Whether these attention-grabbing experiments qualify as fashion, or even clothing, feels beside the point. Time magazine deemed the meat dress the “top fashion statement” of the year in 2010, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame reportedly paid $6,000 to have it preserved.
McQueen by Seán McGirr dress.
Still, fashion experts aren’t ready to write off the most recent round of wild looks as mere meme-chasing stunts. Virginia Postrel, the author of the 2021 book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, sees the tech-inspired pieces, in particular, as incisive cultural commentary. “These designers are calling attention to the materials, and that is a response, perhaps, to our dematerialized digital world,” she says. Scaturro sees a pushback against innovations like AI and fashion NFTs (virtual clothing solely for cyberspace) in Anderson’s work, which depends on the hands—and arms—of actual people to produce. “I love that they used their arms to put the knit onto the body,” she says of the JW Anderson yellow set. “The more technology impacts our lives, the more we need to keep in touch with what makes us human, and that’s handwork and craft.”
At Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy did just that, most notably with a handmade coat of embroidered leather strips that were knotted for a shaggy, pom-pom–like effect. Marni creative director Francesco Risso was similarly inspired to imbue his collection with a personal touch: A series of stiff, high-necked dresses was hand-painted with layers upon layers of broad, heavily textured brushstrokes to look like abstract artworks. Especially after the pandemic, he says, members of his team found themselves craving a more “visceral approach to creation”—and so, this season, Risso decided to do away with visual reference points or overarching themes and instead spend “hours and hours” painting fabric in the atelier.
JW Anderson top and skirt.
“Fashion understood as a canvas, as a work of art, requires attention and sensoriality,” he says. “That’s what makes our work exciting day after day. We must protect our magic.”
Set design by Hella Keck at Webber Represents.
Produced by M.A.P Ltd.; Senior Producer: Elizabeth Cooper; Junior Producer: Saskia O’Keeffe; Production Manager: Matthieu Perdrizet; Photo Assistant: Bastien Santanoceto; Lab: Garage Film Lab; Fashion assistants: Martina Dotti, Manon Munoz; Set assistants: Nikki Lavollay, Celine Ruault.
Looking back on her initial resistance to creating clothes for women, former menswear designer Colleen Allen laughs. When she was working at The Row, she says, “they asked me to design women’s, and I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that!’ I was very rigid. I felt like everything had been said in women’s and there was more to say in men’s. But, eventually, there was an itch at the back of my brain. I realized that there were ideas I wanted to explore.”
Those ideas—identity, spirituality, community—culminated in February in the 28-year-old designer’s New York Fashion Week debut, an imaginatively conceived, tenderly executed exploration of femininity anchored by that often maligned archetype: the witch. It was while she was researching how witches have been portrayed over the centuries, she says, that “something clicked for me.”
Models (from left) MJ Herrera, Ayak Veronica, Serena Wilson, Sylke Golding, and JoAni Johnson wear Colleen Allen clothing and accessories.
Allen, who is now based in Brooklyn, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. Her grandmother, a quilter, taught her to sew, and weekend classes in illustration and clothing construction—one instructor was Shane Gabier, of Creatures of the Wind—gave her the foundation to seriously pursue becoming a fashion designer. She arrived at Parsons School of Design in 2014 but headed to Central Saint Martins, in London, for what was supposed to be a junior year abroad. She liked it so much that she persuaded the administration to let her stay on. Allen credits the combination of the two schools’ approaches—rigorous technical training at Parsons, and a studio-based format that stresses research and collaboration at Saint Martins—with giving her a solid footing in both design and production.
Three years at The Row further honed these skills. Once she started pondering womenswear, she quit, took on a few freelance design gigs, and began the process of turning her mental catalog of images and thoughts into a coherent statement. An online lecture by the art historian Susan Aberth led her to the tarot deck of the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, an English beauty who, in 1937, horrified her straitlaced family by running away to France with the painter and sculptor Max Ernst, who was not only married but also 26 years her elder. Brightly colored and shining with silver and gold leaf, Carrington’s cards, first created in 1955, depict feminine energy that is fecund and irrepressible: Her Empress is Medusa-haired and pregnant; her Hanged Man and the Devil have androgynous features. Carrington based her imagery in part on the practice of witchcraft in Mexico, where she spent most of her life, and on the 19th-century secret society Golden Dawn Order, from which Wicca takes inspiration.
Ayak Veronica wears a Colleen Allen dress and cap.
Allen’s interpretation of the witch is less esoteric and more immediately relevant: a woman who is independent and self-empowered. This translates into clothes that reject the bourgeois stereotypes that have bedeviled fashion recently. There are ruffled pantalettes, which sound jokey but aren’t. The collection’s standout piece is a lightly fitted jacket that resembles an intricately seamed Victorian bodice. It fastens with silver hooks and eyes, a nod to a designer whose work Allen admires: Claire McCardell, who loved the subversive appeal of visible hardware. The ruffled shorts are in cotton, while the jacket is made from polar fleece, a fabric that the forward-looking McCardell, who died in 1958, would surely have embraced. The latter piece was inspired by the garb of storybook witches—call it Salem chic—and by a trip to the Scottish Highlands, where Allen was struck by the disparity between the ancient, epic grandeur of the landscape and her 21st-century hiking gear. Wear the jacket and shorts together, and you have a renegade suit that is both practical and distinctive—and, as Allen puts it, gives you “a warm feeling, like there’s a ritualistic presence as you’re walking around doing your everyday thing.”
Less specifically witchy are an orange velvet cape that falls in deep folds from the shoulder and a magenta wrap-and-tie wool jersey top that swaddles the torso. Both, however, are linked to Allen’s interest in religious rites. Orange is associated with spiritual awareness; think of the robes of Buddhist and Hindu monks. Allen conceived of the top after observing young mothers with their babies bundled tightly against them at a Shinto shrine in Japan. “Being held that way, in a spiritual place, was really powerful,” she says. “Plus, I like having a more personal relationship with your clothes than just when you put something on.”
Ayak Veronica and Golding wear Colleen Allen clothing and accessories.
But it’s the character of the witch that animates this collection, and Allen feels that it’s time to celebrate her power. In Jungian psychology, the witch represents the shadow self, the appetites and instincts that we prefer not to acknowledge: rage, sadness, greed, loneliness. It’s a big concept—but, at its best, fashion takes inarticulate ideas and gives them physical expression. “What you put on has transformative power,” Allen says. “I wanted to access that version of myself—the witch—embody it, and then create that space for other women.” For a designer who once thought she had nothing to say about womenswear, it’s the start of a provocative conversation.
Hair by Junya Nakashima for Oribe at Streeters; Makeup by Marco Castro AMAZONICOIL at Born Artists; Models: Ayak Veronica at New York Models, JoAni Johnson at The 11:14 Agency, MJ Herrera at One Management, Serena Wilson at The Society Management, Sylke Golding at Muse Model Management; Casting by DM Casting; Casting Assistants: Brandon Contreras, Evagria Sergeeva; Produced by Photobomb Productions; Senior Creative Producer: Kevin Warner; Project Manager: Nick Lambrakis; Photo Assistants: Mark Jayson Quines, Ashley McLean; Fashion Assistant: Celeste Roh; Hair Assistants: Christine Moore, Vincent Tobias; Makeup Assistants: Shoko Kodama, Arias Roybal; Tailor: Lindsay Wright; Special Thanks to NYC Park Isham Park & Bruce’s Garden.
Accessories have been — and remain — one of the most essential pieces to 3.1 Phillip Lim’s business puzzle. Most iconically, there’s the Pashli, which was introduced in 2011 and was inspired, simply, by people on bikes: “I was so enchanted with this idea of, when I traveled to different cities where the mode of transportation was bicycles, I would see the most chic people on them. It was so effortless in the way they conducted themselves, but also looking so put-together.” It became the brand’s first “it” bag, frequently photographed on the arms of influencers (before they were called that) at fashion week, and inspiration for one of the most popular styles from the Target collaboration. (Leung, for one, still has her first-gen Pashli in her closet. Maguire’s hoping for a Pashli renaissance in his upcoming collection.)
A years-old New York fashion darling taking its celebrated button-downs to the runway for the first time. An LVMH semifinalist traveling from Mexico City to the streets of Manhattan. An editorial favorite celebrating its tenth anniversary with a runway presentation to close out the entire week.
This is just a taste of what to expect from the brands making their debuts at New York Fashion Week for the spring/summer 2025 season. While some years, the list of new faces is expansive, for SS25, the CFDA opened its gates to only a handful of brands, including Melitta Baumeister, Salon 1884, Campillo, and TWP. These four run the gamut in terms of aesthetics, clients, and offerings; more established designers showcasing sculptural, gravity-defying statement pieces, as well as still-bourgeoning labels reworking wardrobe essentials will be well-represented this season. Below, familiarize (or refamiliarize) yourself with these four names before they’re on everyone’s lips.
Melitta Baumeister
Michel Plata and Melitta Baumeister.
Photograph by Michel Plata.
Melitta Baumeister is hardly a new kid on the block. In fact, this year marks the bold, silhouette-forward label’s ten-year anniversary. That milestone—and the recent distinction as the winners of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund—created the perfect excuse for MB to stage its first show at New York Fashion Week. “It proves there is a place for a brand like this,” says MB’s art director Michal Plata of the recognition.
Both Baumeister and Plata, who joined MB in 2016, originally hail from Germany. But when Baumeister presented her MFA collection for Parsons School of Design in 2014, and one particular jacket landed on bona fide brand whisperer Rihanna, there was no looking back. “Suddenly, there was this urgency to do everything now,” Baumeister says of the momentum RiRi created a decade ago. “MB was never planned, it just happened naturally.” Baumeister set up shop in New York, where she’s still based ten years later. Melitta Baumeister quickly made a space for itself in the industry, standing out with artistic pieces that belonged in a museum, not a runway.
But Baumeister is on a mission to prove that her clothes are versatile. When she started her eponymous label in 2014, the designer admits she wasn’t considering the customer, and the resulting pieces reflected that fact. Over the past ten years, she and Plata have been working to maintain the integrity of the design, while creating something actually wearable. “It’s so important that our designs aren’t only in a museum, but also on the street with the customer,” says Baumeister.
Looks from Melitta Baumeister spring 2024.
Courtesy of MB Team
The work has clearly paid off. MB has evolved over the past decade into a cult-favorite brand with a dedicated fan base, and will take the spotlight at NYFW. If such a debut didn’t provide enough pressure, nabbing the closing slot on the calendar surely did. When Baumeister and Plata first decided to stage a runway show, they agreed to keep it small, until they learned they would be shutting down NYFW on Wednesday, September 11. “We were like, ‘Oh, now we need to meet expectations,’” Baumeister says.
Baumeister promises an “essentially MB” collection for spring 2025, with the volume, color, and out-there shapes that are signatures of the label (Baumeister’s and Plata’s favorite saying? “You bring the body, we bring the shape”). And while MB is known for its bold hues, Baumeister usually limits herself to one color per piece—a practice from which she is breaking away this season. Of course, MB’s signature artistry will be at play as well, though Baumeister and Plata remain coy on just how MB will evolve for SS25. “There was a point when everything was oversize and scaled up, and a time when everything was wiggly,” Plata says. “Now, in this moment, we may just turn to another sculptural expression.”
Salon 1884
A look from Salon 1884 pre-fall 2024.
Courtesy of Salon 1884
Andrea Mary Marshall named her brand, which she started in June 2022, after the Paris exhibition where famed American artist John Singer Sargent unveiled his painting, Madame X, to the world. “It was my favorite artwork as a child,” the 41-year-old designer tells W of the then-infamous depiction of Madame Pierre Gautreau, which was criticized at the time for its scandalous nature, specifically Sargent’s choice to paint one of Gautreau’s dress straps slipping from her shoulder. Salon 1884 is an esoteric name, without a doubt, but it works for Marshall’s young label, which has become known for its artful tailoring and dramatic draping. After graduating from Parsons School of Design, Marshall spent over 15 years working on 7th Avenue to fund her off-hours artmaking. She gained experience throughout those years by dipping her toes into gigs ranging from technical design to art direction.
That baptism by fire may have ended up aiding Salon’s quick success. Marshall has proven she has her finger on the pulse, that she knows what women actually want to wear. She makes clothes for the creative women in her life, “women who shop for themselves, dress for themselves, have autonomy over themselves” she says. “I want them to look and feel empowered.” Marshall gleans lots of inspiration from the ’80s, the time of the working girl and power shoulders. Many of Salon’s previous collections invoke the New Romantic era, but not in a way that feels like a nostalgia play.
A look from Salon 1884 pre-fall 2024.
Courtesy of Salon 1884
A look from Salon 1884 pre-fall 2024.
Courtesy of Salon 1884
This season, though, Marshall is turning back the clock a bit further, to 18th-century Venice with a spring 2025 collection she’s calling Casanova. (Inspired by the Italian adventurer and author, Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, whose numerous lovers turned his surname into a noun.) “Casanova had many affairs, but he never had one great love, and there’s a sadness to that,” Marshall explains. “When I designed the collection, I wanted it to bring to mind the feeling of unrequited love.”
Casanova will be presented through a series of self portrait-style photographs, speaking to the hands-on approach Marshall took with this collection. “Craftsmanship is very important to me,” she says. It’s one of the reasons she loves New York City’s Garment District: “I like working with people who make things.” For SS25, Marshall has taken on the pattern-making process for the first time, of which she’s extremely proud. “The thing that is most important to me is that I had my hands on every pattern in the collection,” she adds.
Campillo
Patricio Campillo did not go to school for design—he was a communications and marketing major. “I thought it would be a lot on my parents to come out and tell them I wanted to study fashion at the same time,” he tells W. Instead, the 34-year-old studied abroad in Paris for two years of school, nabbing a job as Tiffany Godoy’s assistant during her days with The Reality Show. “It was either I went to my statistics class or a Dior show,” Campillo says of his time in the French capital. “So it was a no-brainer.” The Mexico City native got swept up in Paris’s fashion scene, but he soon craved depth beyond the nightly parties and events. He began obsessively studying clothing on a more microscopic level.
Photograph by Carlos Martí
In 2016, Campillo founded The Pack, renamed to Campillo earlier this year, when the designer gained sole ownership over the project. Campillo sees his time working for Godoy, as well as his days with The Pack, as his formal fashion education. During the pandemic, isolation as well as an illness in the family brought Campillo face-to-face with his roots. “I became conscious of the culture of baggage that I had, and that my family carried, and what that meant for me as a creative,” he says. “Campillo is about recontextualizing tradition, but doing so through a personal lens.”
One day after Campillo gained ownership of his company, he received the news that he was a semifinalist for the 2024 LVMH prize, the first Mexican-born designer to do so. It’s the perfect time for the brand’s rise, with the current popularity of Americana-Western culture thanks to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and Pharrell Williams’s Louis Vuitton. At the same time, other Latinx-helmed labels, like Willy Chavarria and Luar, have been making major inroads specifically in the New York fashion scene, which is why Campillo feels comfortable showing at NYFW in a few days’s time. “The Latinx community in New York is very important, it’s very relevant, it’s very present. It’s having its moment,” he says. “Willy and Raul [Lopez]’s success has made me feel safe. I know there’s a sense of community in New York.”
Details from Campillo fall/winter 2025.
Photograph by Dorian López
Details from Campillo fall/winter 2025.
Photograph by Dorian López
The collection Campillo will present was created in just four weeks, specifically for the LVMH Prize. He describes it as a purification of the essence of the brand. “I’m defining Campillo through something very simple and clean,” the designer says. “It’s stripped of a lot of layers.” Still, he promises an energy to the collection, one akin to a “volcanic explosion or orgasm.” There’s a creative freedom in the clothes, born from a feeling of restlessness. “I felt like I couldn’t hold it in any longer,” Campillo explains. “I just had to do the things I fantasize about without being scared.”
TWP
A look from TWP spring/summer 2024.
Photograph by Tyler Roste
Trish Wescoat Pound has come a long way since Haute Hippie, the brand she launched in 2008 to great success before selling in 2015. That line was characterized by adornment, prints, and layers—but her current label, TWP is much more pared-back, comprised of versatile basics and elevated sportswear. “I’d describe it as a modern take on American classics,” Wescoat Pound tells W over email. “Everyday, wearable clothes that combine utility and style.”
If the name TWP has crossed your radar, it was likely within the context of its button-downs. The cropped “Next Ex” style and the more classic “Big Joe” have already become must-have pieces among New York’s in-crowd. When Wescoat Pound started TWP in 2021, she focused mostly on the client’s upper half, perfecting these tops before eventually moving on to bottoms. Now, the New Didi, wide-leg, double-pleated trousers, have joined the brand’s pantheon. “They embody a kind of ease and nonchalance that is at the core of everything TWP,” Wescoat Pound says of her most popular items.
A look from TWP spring/summer 2024.
Photograph by Tyler Roste
A look from TWP spring/summer 2024.
Photograph by Tyler Roste
TWP speaks to the concept of wearability, which has been the subject of much chatter within the fashion world over the last few seasons. These are real clothes with a clear purpose, pieces that can easily slot into any closet. “So much of fashion is about a particular ‘look’ but I don’t think that’s how women want to dress today,” Wescount Pound adds. “I design pieces that women can make their own.” Clearly, it’s working. TWP has hit a chord, with dozens of distributors purchasing regularly each season, as well as two bricks-and-mortar stores in Manhattan and Sag Harbor. Wescoat Pound is taking a big step with a runway show just two years after the brand’s launch. “I never thought we’d do a show, especially this soon,” she says. The designer promises it won’t be “a conventional runway show,” but something more intimate. “I like to keep it real,” she adds.
Before you say “yes” to that dream job, you better read the fine print.
Noncompetes, which stop employees from starting their own businesses in the same industry and working for a competitor for a set period after the employment ends, can be devastating, says wedding dress designer Hayley Paige Gutman.
Gutman shared her testimony with a Senate economic policy subcommittee on Monday, three-and-a-half years after the start of a noncompete legal battle with her former employer, JLM Couture,and three months after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced a new rule banning noncompetes.
Hayley Paige. Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Runway Heroes
Gutman was not allowed to work in wedding dress design for five years after leaving her employer because of the noncompete.
“I could start over with a new name, I could open new social media accounts and rebuild, but I could not work in my chosen craft,” Gutman said.
The FTC estimates that around one in five Americans, or about 30 million people, are under noncompetes. According to the agency, banning the agreements would add 8,500 new businesses a year and increase wages for the average employee by $524 per year.
The noncompete ban was set to take effect starting September 4, but legal challenges could delay, or even cancel, its implementation.
Opponents of the ban, however,say businesses could benefit from noncompetes because employees can’t use what they learned to start rival companies. The agreements also help protect trade secrets and retain employees for longer periods.
In her testimony, Gutman detailed how she signed an employment contract with a noncompete clause in 2011, at the age of 25, with JLM Couture. Nine years later, JLM alleged that Gutman had violated the noncompete by using the @misshayleypage social media accounts, which had more than a million followers, to promote other companies without JLM’s permission.
JLM also claimed that the company was the reason for Gutman’s social media fame, and appearances on TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress” and “Say Yes To America” reality TV shows only happened because Kleinfeld Bridal, where “Say Yes to the Dress” is filmed, is one of JLM’s biggest clients.
“I spent every dollar I ever earned designing wedding dresses to fight for my right to do so once again,” Gutman said in her testimony, adding later, “I want to demonstrate how noncompetes operate shamelessly on a one-way highway: if we are not limiting competition among corporations, why are we limiting it among individuals?”
Gutman and JLM ultimately reached a settlement agreement in May that gave her the rights to the “Hayley Paige” name and social media accounts. Gutman agreed to pay JLM $263,000.
Now a small business owner, Gutman reflected on her long legal battle in a June interview with the Independent Business Podcast.
“The thing you work on works on you,” Gutman said, in response to a question about advice she would give fellow small business owners. “The obstacle is the way.”
Giorgio Armani cape; Gina Couture shoes (throughout); stylist’s own briefs.
Lùchen gown.
Yuhan Wang top; Philip Treacy Archive hat; stylist’s own briefs.
ChenPeng dress; custom head wrap styled by hairstylist Mustafa Yanaz.
Balenciaga coat and top.
Fila hooded sweatshirt.
Supriya Lele top and skirt; Emily-London headpiece.
Prada cardigan and skirt.
Feben – Supported by Dolce & Gabbana coat.
Andreādamo jacket and skirt.
Bottega Veneta coat and earrings.
Sheila Bawar wears a Supriya Lele dress; stylist’s own briefs.
Hair by Mustafa Yanaz for Dyson at Art+Commerce; makeup by Lucy Bridge at Streeters; manicure by Lauren Michelle Pires for CND at Future Rep. Model: Sheila Bawar at Ford Models. Casting by Piergiorgio Del Moro and Samuel Ellis Scheinman at DM Casting. Set design by Ibby Njoya at New School.
Produced by Ragi Dholakia Productions; Executive Producer: Ragi Dholakia; Producer: Claire Huish; Fashion assistants: Julia Veitch, Ben Spelman; Production assistants: Libby Adams, Szilard Orban, Tom Beck, Oli Stockwell; Hair assistants: Krisztian Szalay, Tommy Stayton; Makeup assistants: Kyle Dominic, Jana Reininger, Esme Horn, Jemma Whittaker; Manicure assistant: Megan Cummings; Set assistants: Axel Drury, Toby Broughton; Tailor: Alison O’Brien.
We independently select these products—if you buy from one of our links, we may earn a commission. All prices were accurate at the time of publishing.
The kitchen isn’t just a place for cooking and eating — it’s the central hub of the home and a great place to show off your personality. However, outdated hardware can easily tarnish the aesthetic, both metaphorically and literally. From worn-out cabinet handles to old-fashioned faucet designs, these seemingly minor details can make a big impact, turning a once-trendy kitchen into a very dated space.
To be sure your kitchen is up to date (and stays that way), I talked to top interior designers to learn about which kitchen hardware will stay on trend for years to come — and, just as importantly, which ones make your space look instantly dated.
Outdated Kitchen Hardware
I hate to break it to you, but crystal knobs are out. According to Joyce Elizabeth Huston, cofounder and lead designer at Decorilla, “not only do they look dated, but they look out of style and cheap at the same time.” While these kinds of knobs were once loved for their glamorous appeal, they’ve fallen out of favor. Most have intricate designs that often clash with the sleek, minimalist style that characterizes contemporary kitchens.
2. Highly Decorative Cabinet Handles
As the saying goes, less is more, and highly decorative cabinet handles can be too much for the space. Their elaborate patterns and ornate detailing don’t complement kitchens like they used to. “Handles that have intricate designs can look beautiful, but they will also make your kitchen feel and look less contemporary,” explains TileCloud interior designer Courtney Cole.
Plus, practicality plays a role in why they aren’t as popular; the complex designs can make them hard to clean, letting dust and grime accumulate in the crevices. As Huston says, “They definitely were used in the 1800s, but not anymore.”
“If you want your hardware to be modern, then ceramic knobs are out,” Huston says. Their colorful and unique patterns, while adding a touch of rustic or vintage charm, now seem out of place in modern kitchens, which more often highlight clean lines and minimalist design. “[Ceramic knobs] are pretty common in older homes, but because they were so popular decades ago, they’ll make your home feel a bit stuck in the past,” Cole adds. What’s more, ceramic knobs can be fragile and prone to chipping or cracking, making them less durable than other hardware.
4. Overly Industrial-Themed Hardware
Overly industrial-themed hardware was once a top choice when it came to adding a rugged, edgy flare to kitchens, but it has started to feel dated in recent years. “While it became popular during the ‘farmhouse’ era, the pieces will instantly date your space,” says Will Zhang, director of design and product innovation at Emtek. “With the kitchen being a place we spend so much of our time, it’s better to avoid anything too trend-focused and instead opt for timeless pieces.”
These overly industrial hardware pieces often feature heavy, bulky designs with raw finishes like exposed screws, dark metals, and rough textures, which can make a space feel more like a factory than a home kitchen. While industrial elements can add character, when overdone, they can overwhelm the space and make it feel less warm and welcoming.
Timeless Kitchen Hardware
Don’t worry, I also asked the experts what you should opt for instead of the dated features above. “If you want your kitchen to look more contemporary and modern, you should look for products that are more streamlined and polished in the way they look,” Cole says.
“When it comes to kitchen hardware, the simpler the knob or the pull the better,” Huston explains. “This Kela Matte Black Metal Cabinet is a great option because it has a sleek, simple, contemporary design. Black is my favorite because it’s sophisticated yet very versatile.” Additionally, one of the best things about simple knobs is that they’re minimalistic, making them timeless even if other parts of your kitchen change. “This Center to Center Bar Pull is another classic yet modern option that is great for the more traditional person but also has a very sleek aesthetic,” she adds.
2. Brushed Nickel Hardware
Without a doubt, brushed nickel hardware has a classic appeal. “Hardware in a brushed nickel colorway will make your kitchen look timeless and elegant, but without the dated feeling that sometimes comes with timelessness,” Cole says. Plus, brushed nickel can seamlessly hide fingerprints and smudges.
“Another modern option is to go for chrome hardware,” Cole says. “The shine of chrome makes a kitchen look more clean, and because it reflects light, will make the space look more open and warm. This is one of my favorites in the kitchen, particularly if you want an über-modern aesthetic.” What’s more, the polished surface of chrome hardware creates a clean, contemporary look that complements a variety of kitchen styles, from minimalist to industrial.
The Final Verdict on Kitchen Hardware
“When making selections, it’s important to ask yourself if this is a decision you will still agree with in five-plus years,” Zhang says. “Additionally, I always recommend considering if the hardware works outside of the kitchen by taking into account the home’s theme and architecture. Finding continuity between your kitchen hardware and the home’s overall aesthetic typically leads to decisions that work better and last longer.” With all of these considerations in mind, now you’ll know exactly what to pick when you opt for kitchen hardware.
With just three collections under her belt — the first of which, Spring 2024, just hit stores, before Pre-Fall and Fall 2024 lines are set to drop later in the year — Ochs’ touch is already apparent. While under previous creative director Christian Juul Nielsen’s direction, Hervé Léger doubled down on its sexy, club-era roots (albeit in a much cooler, edgier way than the ‘00s could ever deliver) and going-out clothing, Ochs is proposing something more versatile. Clothing that women can wear every day rather than just on special occasions: body-skimming midi dresses that wouldn’t look out of place at an office, romantic fringe-adorned maxis made for date night, and shiny fabrics for a night out that doesn’t involve stumbling out of the club at three in the morning.
With just three collections under her belt — the first of which, Spring 2024, just hit stores, before Pre-Fall and Fall 2024 lines are set to drop later in the year — Ochs’ touch is already apparent. While under previous creative director Christian Juul Nielsen’s direction, Hervé Léger doubled down on its sexy, club-era roots (albeit in a much cooler, edgier way than the ‘00s could ever deliver) and going-out clothing, Ochs is proposing something more versatile. Clothing that women can wear every day rather than just on special occasions: body-skimming midi dresses that wouldn’t look out of place at an office, romantic fringe-adorned maxis made for date night, and shiny fabrics for a night out that doesn’t involve stumbling out of the club at three in the morning.
