#surrealism-in-fashion

#surrealism-in-fashion

Schiaparelli's timeless designs spun glamor out of the avant-garde, showcasing a unique blend of high fashion and artistic expression that continues to inspire.

In 1971, Manolo Blahnik created shoes for the designer Ossie Clark's catwalk show in London. Relatively new to shoemaking, the Spanish designer forgot to put steel pins in the heels of the shoes, which meant that models wobbled, unbalanced, down the catwalk.

Clare Vivier and Heather Taylor have perfected the art of hosting by dividing responsibilities, with Vivier focusing on wine and Taylor on flowers and dessert. Their friendship of 20 years has led to a seamless collaboration that enhances the dinner party experience.

"We're constantly striving to strike a balance between work that respects academic rules of composition, established visual codes and good readability, with something more spontaneous, adventurous, playful, even naive."

ROOM FOR DREAMS becomes a living manifesto for utopian optimism, creative courage, and the power of imagination through a multilayered approach where large scale installations, cinematic storytelling, live conversations, and ritual-driven encounters converge.

The name - the Antwerp Six - was coined by the British press, a tidy shorthand for six entirely distinct sensibilities crammed onto a second floor between copies of Lady Diana's wedding dress.

Future serves. He volleys. He shouts '15/Love' from the baseline. Now you know. This knowledge comes courtesy of Louis Vuitton's latest campaign, dubbed, appropriately, 'In My Bag.'

Participating in London Fashion Week is not a luxury but a necessity for any emerging brand aiming to go global. It's your ticket to the world of international fashion. - Katie England, Creative Director of Topshop and curator of the New Generation program

The question of how fashion is archived - what enters the museum; what is deemed worthy of preservation; whose clothes are considered culturally significant enough to outlast the bodies that wore them - has long sat uneasily at the centre of fashion history itself. Institutions have tended to answer it, or ignore it, in much the same way: couture gowns under glass, luxury garments mounted on conservation-grade mannequins in blockbuster exhibitions - an implicit hierarchy of the designed over the worn, the authored over the anonymous.

Fifteen years after the death of Lee McQueen, the brand is struggling to maintain momentum. The founder is a hallowed name in the fashion industry, and one of the few modern designers to whose character and story the wider public feel a connection. But the generation who wore McQueen's original bumsters have aged out of shock-value fashion, and the name has less power over younger consumers.

Gucci previously commissioned digital artists to produce visuals, including AI-generated images, auctioned as non-fungible tokens by Christie's. In December, it released an AI-generated video of a model strutting down the runway while photographers behind her fall over themselves - literally - to capture her.

MADRID - The most famous portrait of Maruja Mallo depicts the artist covered from head to toe in seaweed. She is crowned and draped with long, rope-like strands of kelp, her arms raised triumphantly like an all-powerful marine goddess. This unconventional photograph, snapped in 1945 by the poet Pablo Neruda on a Chilean beach, was no doubt carefully orchestrated by the Spanish artist, who viewed herself as an extension of her unique work, where female energy is a conduit for natural and even cosmic forces.

Stylist and writer Orla Dempsey tried on some ties for a week, following a big fashion trend for 2026 and following in the footsteps of some famous faces

Travelling for art can be incredibly virtuous and culturally rewarding, like collecting souvenirs for your eyes (and from the post card rail in the gift shop). Remembering to research what is on before I book flights is a lesson I learnt all too well after I missed the Metropolitan Museum's fashion exhibition in 2016 by one day. As a fashion obsessed 20 something, I did not take this well and have since improved my itinerary planning and exhibition calendar checking.

In the show, "dirty" extends to anything that breaks fashion's pact with propriety. Here are clothes caked in grime, blotted with makeup, stiffened by salt, pieced from trash, frayed, and faded. The garments span decades, from the 1980s through the mid-2000s, when the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier built their fame on defying convention, to today, when corporatization has made such daring increasingly rare. But forgoing practicality frees certain designers from the demands that the body be polite-and thereby policed.

Embroidery is a historic mainstay of traditional clothing in Asia or the Middle East, as well as Western Haute Couture, but it is increasingly present in Paris, Milan or New York on modern men's shirts, bomber jackets or blazers. Designers at Dior, Dolce Gabbana, Kenzo or Gucci have adopted it in recent runway shows, while Louis Vuitton's celebrity rapper-designer Pharell Williams dedicated his entire June collection to India after visiting the country.

The end of the show did not mark the end of the trip. Back at the Le Grand Bellevue the group divided between fireside hot chocolates and the hotel's spa. The hotel's Le Grand Spa is over 3,000 square metres and has eight different types of saunas, several ice showers, foot baths and an outdoor bubble pool (named thus as it's bigger than your standard jacuzzi).

Chanel's Spring Summer 2026 haute couture show transforms the Grand Palais into a pale, immersive landscape of oversized mushrooms, cascading pink foliage, and gently curving pathways. Following his celestial debut for the house (find designboom's coverage ), Matthieu Blazy continues to frame his Chanel era through world-building, shifting from a cosmic universe to an intimate, dreamlike terrain. Scattered across the pale pink floor, monumental mushroom structures rise at varying heights and diameters.

Speaking backstage before the show, Anderson, dressed in his signature faded Levi's jeans and a navy cashmere sweater, described the collection as another character study, explaining that this time he set out to explore the idea of a new aristocracy, questioning what it means today and what can it be? The-41-year old designer said when it came to the social hierarchy he wanted to ignore the aspect of money and instead home in on their eccentricity.