When Dita ventured onto social media in March 2025, she blossomed overnight. The sudden result of a decade that began in journalism – her very first interview was with Azzedine Alaïa – before moving into styling for some of fashion’s most coveted titles. Those years sharpened a literary sensibility into the voice of a fashion critic, precise and unsparing. She has just published Démodé, an incisive, deeply researched essay that casts fashion as a mirror and a lever of political and social change, hands both newcomers and seasoned insiders the keys to understanding the industry, and makes one central plea: to slow down. Dita is a member of the ASVOFF 2026 jury.
Can you improvise your way into being a fashion critic, or does the eye impose itself, built through years of looking, learning, and thinking? Dita never chased the title, it settled on her anyway. Born in Paris, she studied accounting, “to please my parents”, even though she quickly realised it wasn’t for her. Fashion came later. “I was never really fascinated by fashion. I simply enjoyed dressing up. I was flamboyant and eccentric by society’s standards, so people assumed I was interested in fashion, when that wasn’t the case. I simply used clothes to be true to myself.”
“Meeting Mr Alaïa taught me that fashion means so much more than just clothes. I was struck by how detached he was from all the circus of the industry.”
In 2011, fresh from graduation, she entered the fashion industry pretty much by chance. Two friends were launching a fashion magazine, Virgine, and asked her to give them a hand because she was bilingual. “I had no idea what to do, so I just went for it,” she recounts. Her very first interview was with Azzedine Alaïa, even though she’d never written a single line before. “He invited me for lunch at his studio on Rue de Moussy before the interview. He was lovely and incredibly generous. He guided me, and sometimes protected me. We’d run into each other regularly in the Marais and have a chat.” The piece landed at a pivotal moment, during the Galliano scandal, and spread fast through the nascent fashion blogosphere. Dita was struck by the distance Alaïa kept from the surrounding turmoil. “He had criticised Anna Wintour and I hadn’t realised that the quotes needed to be edited before publication. I remember waking up the next morning and seeing that people were tagging me everywhere. It remains a very happy memory,” she remembers. She then interviewed Jean Paul Gaultier. “After that, my friends suggested I try my hand at fashion styling and introduced me to Sohei Yoshida, one of Japan’s leading stylists, who trained me.” Sohei Yoshida is a Tokyo-based stylist whose work has run through Vogue Japan, Vogue Taiwan and Harper’s Bazaar, among others.
“When I wore Vivienne Westwood for the first time, it felt like wearing a piece of armour that would protect and reveal me at the same time.”
This perspective was further developed at Byronesque, the vintage-contemporary platform founded by Gill Linton. “Gill has become a very close friend,” says Dita. “How could we redefine vintage fashion, which seemed outdated at the time, in a contemporary way, and understand the influence and impact of those past collections? Gill was fascinated by punk and New Romantics, and that’s what brought us together.” Working with archives changed her approach. “It taught me to view fashion not as a succession of trends, but as a living memory, sometimes poorly assimilated. When you work with past collections, you swiftly understand that a garment is not merely a garment. It is an era, a social tension, an aesthetic obsession, and sometimes even a disappearance.”
“On social media, I try to come up with a properly structured narrative.”
Her voice reached a wider audience in March 2025, when she downloaded TikTok and posted her first video without any real plan. She began with the now-iconic line ‘Vous me faites tous chier,’ which one could politely translate as ‘you are all getting on my nerves’. “Lots of friends were asking me questions about fashion and pushed me towards social media. As an old boomer, I only used to post photos of flowers on Instagram! One evening in March, I decided to download TikTok and figure out how it worked. I did it simply to talk about the Azzedine Alaïa interview, and I was genuinely surprised that people were interested, or even that some of them remembered it.” The reaction was immediate, and the audience wider than she’d imagined. “When I switched to Instagram, I saw that I was reaching my own generation, but also the one before, and even the one before that.” She is often associated with Lyas, another sharp and outspoken voice. “Others have done it before me. Lyas and I are always linked, and he too has a harsh tone, though with a very different style.” On Substack, this approach becomes even clearer: “The aim is never to criticise for the sake of criticising. That would be pointless. There’s no point in provoking for the sake of it. People sometimes think I’m criticising specific individuals, whereas I’m not criticising anyone. I criticise systems and I quote people to illustrate those systems.”
“If you take the road less travelled, it will be all the richer for it.”
Démodé, her new book, began as a series of interviews before a lost iCloud password changed its form. “I am such a grandmother and I couldn’t find my password so I worked on an essay instead,” she laughs. “I don’t claim to hold the universal truth, but to explain, with what I know, how the industry works, how it could be improved, and to provide context for interested readers.” The book will examine figures such as Helmut Lang, Hussein Chalayan and Rei Kawakubo, and will include a chapter on Vivienne Westwood as part of a broader reflection on subcultures. “I’d really like people who read this book to be able to step back from everything we might believe about the industry. To tell them that following an established way of doing things doesn’t guarantee success.” This year, she joins the ASVOFF jury. She is particularly looking forward to the “Climate Warriors” category, ASVOFF’s competition for young filmmakers imagining the future of the planet. “I’m very happy to have the opportunity to do this with Diane, the other jury members. I can’t wait!”
There has never been more noise around fashion. What the moment calls for is criticism patient and in-depth enough to hold fashion’s real paradox in view, serious enough to shape how we see the world, light enough to still let us dream. That’s the job. Dita does it well.
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All photos by Sonnyphotos
Dear Shaded Viewers,
Rachel Scott staged her second Proenza Schouler collection last night in the former Rubin Museum — once home to Barneys’ women’s store, the house’s first retailer, which gave the evening a nice sense of homecoming. Her thesis was New York itself: a city where a gown can be casual and the rules of dressing bend to the woman wearing them. Cowling and rounded hips softened the tailoring, seaming layered one silhouette over another, and merino knits were left looser and more undone than the house’s usual precision suggests.
Color did the most talking — saturated hues set against each other, sheer layers creating new ones, and a fluorescent pink velvet with real density. The tiger and rose motifs, worked through intarsia, tufting, and rose-made cyanotypes, showed genuine craft, even if the tiger’s repetition across techniques occasionally felt like demonstration for its own sake.
The evening’s real news was PS1 Walker, the softened, Reed Krakoff–assisted update to the house’s signature bag — a shrewd evolution rather than a reinvention, and confident for knowing the difference. Overall, a coherent, well-argued collection: not a showstopper, but a clear sign Scott knows what she wants this house to be.
Later,
Diane
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Miguel Villalobos and Zaldy
Dear Shaded Viewers,
Fashion has always depended on patrons — the difference now is who they are and what they’re willing to risk. This Sunday, September 13th, at 9:00 p.m., Zaldy presents his Spring/Summer 2027 collection, Johnny Overboard, in the Bard Room at the Chelsea Hotel, as the first designer supported by Auger, a new incubator founded by Dave and Leigh Anne Clark to give proven, industry-respected talent the resources and visibility that an increasingly contracted retail market makes so hard to come by.
It is not a small thing to say out loud right now: building and sustaining an independent fashion label has rarely been harder. I have spent my career around designers who are adored within the industry — reviewed, photographed, dressed on celebrities, awarded — yet still struggle season after season to find the backing that would let them grow past that recognition. Talent has never been the shortage. Runway slots, production budgets, and the kind of patient capital that doesn’t expect an immediate return on a collection are.
Dave and Leigh Anne Clark know something about building things at scale. Dave spent twenty-three years at Amazon, rising to CEO of its worldwide consumer business, and in 2024 he and Leigh Anne co-founded Auger, a supply-chain AI company that has since raised $150 million. Leigh Anne serves as Auger’s co-founder and president of fashion and beauty, and was recently named to the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Foundation Board — a fitting extension of a career spent close to the industry’s supply-chain realities, if not always its spotlight. Together, the Clarks have chosen to put some of that same operational instinct — and a meaningful amount of their own generosity — toward something with no obvious return at all: giving a single designer, each season, the platform to be seen properly.
For Auger’s first season, that designer is Zaldy.
Born Salvador Goco in Cheshire, Connecticut, in 1966, Zaldy trained at Parsons and finished his degree at FIT before modeling for Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and Vivienne Westwood — an apprenticeship in fashion from the inside of the garment as much as behind it. He became head designer for Gwen Stefani’s L.A.M.B., his first real foothold in ready-to-wear, before moving fluidly between fashion, nightlife, and pop spectacle in a way few designers ever attempt, let alone sustain. He has built costumes for Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, and Pink, and remains the designer behind Katy Perry’s Las Vegas residency, PLAY, including her now-iconic Beer Can dress. His work for Cirque du Soleil spans three productions — Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour, the permanent Las Vegas production Michael Jackson ONE, and Volta. He designed Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid in 2019 and the 2024 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
And since 1992, he has dressed RuPaul — a collaboration now well into its fourth decade, and one that has earned Zaldy three Emmy Awards and a Costume Designers Guild Award for his work on RuPaul’s Drag Race. His namesake label launched in 2002, and this past February he opened a men’s line, Boys Like Me, folding the same performance-proof construction that defines his stage work into ready-to-wear tailoring.
It’s a résumé that would suggest a household name, and yet, like so many designers of real substance, Zaldy has built his career largely out of the retail spotlight — celebrated by the industry, worn by icons, but without the infrastructure that turns a body of work into a brand people can actually buy into season after season. That gap is precisely what Auger’s incubator is built to close, and Sunday’s show is its first test.
Sunday, September 13, 2026, 9:00 p.m. — Johnny Overboard, Spring/Summer 2027 — The Bard Room at the Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd Street. Cocktails follow in the Solarium.
Later,
Diane
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Dear Shaded Viewers,
Démodé, Dita’s blistering, funny, and deeply necessary new book from Hugo Document, reads like finally exhaling after years of holding your breath through fashion week.
Dita has built a following by saying, in public and with a straight face, what everyone in the industry mutters after two glasses of wine at a dinner they didn’t want to attend. Démodé takes that same voice — sharp, unfiltered, allergic to spin — and turns it into something more ambitious than a viral thread: a genuine argument. The premise is simple and, once stated, obvious: fashion has become an industry obsessed with buzz instead of ideas, and it has forgotten that it used to be one of the great artistic mirrors of its era, catching political and social upheaval in a hemline before anyone could put it into words.
What makes the book sing is that it isn’t nostalgic griping dressed up as criticism. Dita isn’t asking fashion to go back to some imagined golden age — she’s asking it to remember it was capable of greatness at all, and naming the names who proved it: Vivienne Westwood, Azzedine Alaïa, Alexander McQueen, Rei Kawakubo. These aren’t decorative references. They’re the yardstick the rest of the book measures the present against, and it is not a flattering measurement. But the anger here is the good kind — the kind that only comes from loving something enough to be furious it’s being wasted. Sophie Fontanel put it exactly right: the arguments are corrosive and colorful, but they come from love, not hatred. Daphné Bürki’s line lands the same way — Dita simply says out loud what the rest of the industry no longer dares to think.
For anyone who has spent decades inside this world — watching genuine craft get elbowed aside by algorithm-bait — Démodé reads less like a hot take and more like vindication. It’s the rare fashion book that trusts its reader to want more than gossip: it wants you to leave with a sharper eye, a lower tolerance for hollow spectacle, and a renewed appetite for the designers who still treat clothing as a serious idea.
Chic, merciless, and very, very funny — Démodé is the manifesto fashion has been overdue for. Buy it, underline it, and hand it to the next person who tells you fashion isn’t political.
It’s only in French at the moment — but something tells me the English translation is just a matter of time.
Démodé by Dita, published by Hugo Publishing (Hugo Document), out September 10, 2026.
Later,
Diane
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Dear Shaded Viewers,
There is a particular ache in dressing for a life you haven’t yet lived, and Julian Klausner staged his third winter for the house inside an actual schoolroom — Lycée Carnot, its corridors still smelling faintly of chalk and adolescence — as if to say: growing up is the only inheritance any of us really get. The clothes agreed. Uniform blazers came cinched at the waist and piped in colors no dean would sanction; baseball jackets went oversized and crested in gold, half-armor, half-daydream. Plaid, that most institutional of fabrics, was coaxed into sleeveless dresses with ruffled collars rising like a held breath.
But the deeper theme was borrowed clothing — not costume, but inheritance. A father’s coat. A mother’s floral print, transplanted onto a vinyl trench like a memory refusing to fade evenly. Patchwork coats were pieced together the way an old blanket is, out of scraps too loved to discard. Kimono pajamas carried embroidered crystals across flannel, as if someone had cried a little glamour into a garment meant only for sleep. Nothing here postured. Klausner’s genius was in letting the clothes look slightly borrowed, slightly too big or too soft in the shoulder — the exact tenderness of a teenager swimming in a parent’s sweater.
The palette read like weather changing its mind: grenadine red, matcha green, dissolving blues that felt underwater one moment and forest-lit the next, deep orange breaking through like a low winter sun. Gobeline tapestry and jacquard carried Flemish still lifes — Klausner’s nod to Antwerp’s own 16th-century polyglot soul — while satin jackets took on Japanese-cut collars, and somewhere a Peruvian bonnet appeared, unbothered by geography, because feeling has never respected a map. Jazz — Maki Asakawa, 1969 — hummed underneath it all, more elegy than soundtrack, the sound of a decade that also believed in starting over.
What lingers isn’t a silhouette but a mood: the specific, unrepeatable joy of the fresh graduate, coat still creased from someone else’s closet, walking out into a life not yet worn in. Klausner didn’t dress nostalgia so much as he dressed its opposite — the moment just before memory, when everything old still feels new because it’s newly yours.
Later,
Diane
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Dear Shaded Viewers,
Two Paris landmarks are lending Jérémy Pradier-Jeauneau their walls this week, and they could not be more different: one is stone that has stood since Napoleon, the other is paper so thin it turns light into something you can touch.
Tonight, at 7 p.m., La Tempête opens to the public at the Arc de Triomphe. A few blocks away at the Hôtel de la Marine on Place de la Concorde, a group of French designers puts hanji — the Korean mulberry-fiber paper that craftsmen have made by hand for a thousand years — through paces it was never meant to survive. Pleated, braided, thickened into forms that no longer read as paper at all. The show is called Hanjimania, curated by Catherine Lurault and An KangEun to mark 140 years of diplomatic ties between France and Korea, and it reads less like a trade fair than a conversation conducted in material rather than language. Pierre Yovanovitch, Constance Guisset, Aline Asmar d’Amman, Studio KO and Harry Nuriev each took a turn with it. So did Pradier-Jeauneau, whose sculptural piece was realized with Atelier Foh in Korea — a fact he seems genuinely moved by, the collaboration mattering to him as much as the object it produced.
It is a smaller gesture than what he is doing a few blocks away, but perhaps the more telling one. At the Arc de Triomphe, where La Tempête has just opened, he has become only the third person given carte blanche inside the monument — after Victor Hugo and Christo, which is not a comparison most artists would survive, let alone invite. His answer to that pressure was to go looking for the building’s own unfinished business: the crown Chalgrin drew nearly two centuries ago and never got to build. Visitors now climb through historic salons toward a terrace that has not been open to the public since 1836, past abstract sculpture, scent, sound, glass and hand-worked textiles, in what amounts to a slow argument that a monument can still be unfinished, still be asked new questions.
Put the two projects side by side and what stands out isn’t scale but temperament. La Tempête is Pradier-Jeauneau alone with two centuries of French stone, deciding what belongs at the top of it. Hanjimania is Pradier-Jeauneau as one voice in a room, working someone else’s material by someone else’s rules, evidently glad to be there — “a real joy,” in his own words, to stand alongside that particular crew. Most artists having the kind of week he is having would lead with the Arc de Triomphe and mention the group show in passing. He does the opposite, and it tells you something more useful about him than either exhibition does on its own: that scenography, for him, is less about authorship than about hospitality — building the room so that someone else’s craft, or history’s, can be seen properly.
La Tempête opens tonight at the Arc de Triomphe at 7 p.m. and continues through October 4. Hanjimania opens tomorrow, September 10, at the Hôtel de la Marine from 7:30 p.m., running through the 20th (on view through the 27th).
Later,
Diane
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Dear Shaded Viewers,
Impossible Couture
*Peter Brant Jr. opens his Gilded Age carriage house for one night, before twenty-three lots by Galliano, Alaïa, Schiaparelli, McQueen, and Saint Laurent go to auction.*
On Friday, September 11th, an intimate audience of editors, collectors, and familiar faces from art, fashion, and luxury will gather inside Peter Brant Jr.’s Gilded Age carriage house on New York’s Upper East Side. There will be no runway in the usual sense — just a single, intimate show, these exceptional pieces presented in movement and on the body, in the spirit of the great Paris couture presentations of the 1950s. A fitting frame for a collection that treats fashion less as costume than as sculpture.
This is The Impossible Couture Collection: twenty-three lots, curated by Peter Brant Jr. and brought to auction through Fair Warning, spanning five decades and as many houses — John Galliano, Azzedine Alaïa, Elsa Schiaparelli, Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent.
**The highlights**
The pieces likely to draw the most attention come from Naomi Campbell’s own archive: Alexander McQueen’s celebrated *Plato’s Atlantis* “Armadillo” ensemble, together with a pair of the legendary Armadillo shoes she wore for Fashion for Relief in 2010 — python-printed, curved, nearly architectural on the foot.
Beside them, Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 Mondrian dress — the shift that turned a canvas into couture and remains, sixty years on, one of the most quoted silhouettes in fashion history.
And a run of rare Galliano — the Parrot Tulip gown from “Le Papillon et la Fleur,” a cutwork showpiece worn by Naomi Campbell herself, and the matador-inspired look from “Dolores del Rio” — alongside runway dresses from the personal archive of Jørgen Simonsen, the designer who worked directly at Galliano’s side.
**Further afield in the twenty-three**
Elsa Schiaparelli’s gold insect collar, from her 1938 “Pagan” collection —
Martin Margiela’s papier-mâché gilet, torn newsprint stitched into an Artisanal Line showpiece —
A Paco Rabanne dress built entirely of gold-linked plates, worn like armour —
And Sarah Burton’s honeycombed “Bees” ensemble for McQueen, alongside Alaïa’s hooded gown and sequined column dress. Each one, as the collection’s own framing has it, less a garment than a defining artistic object of its time — which feels exactly right.
**Key dates**
– **Friday, September 11** — Unveiling, by invitation
– **September 12–16** — Private viewing, by appointment
– **Thursday, September 17, 3PM** — Live auction, conducted by Jussi Pylkkänen, former Global President and principal auctioneer of Christie’s, broadcast globally through the Fair Warning app, by invitation only
*The Impossible Couture Collection is presented by Fair Warning.*
Later,
Diane
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Dear Shaded Viewers,
New York has always been generous to designers who refuse to choose a single lineage. TANAKA, the unisex label founded there in 2017, has made that refusal its entire premise — and this year, the industry caught up with what its followers already knew. The brand’s win of the TOKYO FASHION AWARD 2023 wasn’t a debut so much as a confirmation: proof that a label built on patience, technique, and a deliberately unfashionable time horizon can still win on fashion’s own terms.
TANAKA’s founding idea is almost architectural in its ambition: clothing that spins together the past and the next hundred years. Not clothing for this season, or even this decade, but garments conceived as new classics — masterpieces in the old sense, built to be loved long after the trend cycle that produced them has been forgotten. It’s a philosophy that could easily curdle into nostalgia. TANAKA avoids that trap by working from craft outward rather than from mood board inward, grounding every collection in modern Japanese denim and the artisan techniques behind it, then letting that discipline meet the borderless, multicultural pulse of New York itself.
What results is a kind of quiet border-crossing — between East and West, between art and utility, between the hand and the machine. TANAKA moves through art, craftsmanship, traditional textile technique, and technology not as separate departments but as one continuous practice, using clothing as the connective tissue between people, memory, culture, and society. It’s an unusually ambitious brief for a young label. That Bergdorf Goodman selected TANAKA as a Radar Designer, and that Blue Bottle Studio in Kyoto entrusted the brand with reimagining its uniforms — reconstructing workwear into something that reads as both utilitarian and quietly beautiful — suggests the ambition is being met rather than merely stated.
The 2025 launch of Art of TANAKA sharpened that mission into something closer to a creative instrument. The line exists to ask, directly, what a designer today can leave behind for the next hundred years — and to answer that question by fusing the authority of the human hand with the possibilities of technology. It is less a collection than a mechanism: a way of putting the brand’s founding philosophy into practice with each new object, rather than simply repeating it as tagline.
That same patience shaped the brand’s relationship to its own home. In August 2026, TANAKA AOYAMA was relocated and reborn as TANAKA ATELIER STORE — not a rebrand so much as a physical translation of everything the label has been building toward, a space meant to be walked through as an extension of the philosophy itself.
Taken together — the award, the Bergdorf recognition, the Kyoto uniforms, Art of TANAKA, the new atelier — TANAKA’s story so far reads less like a rise than like the early chapters of something meant to be read slowly. In an industry addicted to speed, that may be the most radical position a brand can take.
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Dear Shaded Viewers,
There is something remarkably interesting and important about the general attitude to the announcement and subsequent cancellation of the John Galliano exhibition. The views nearly all agree on one thing, his contribution to fashion history. This has prompted me to think about something; narrative.
“Once upon a time; Alice in Wonderland; when you wish upon a star…. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore; last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
It is the very heart and spirit of fashion that through clothes we are telling a story, from the origins and inspiration behind the clothes, the presentation of the collection, the advertising, right through to the way a client wears the pieces. We are all presenting a narrative to the observer.
The enthusiasm for Galliano, especially amongst those whose fashion years are few, is about his spectacular story telling, and it throws intro relief the fact that we are no longer telling stories in fashion to the same extent, and certainly not exciting ones. It is not nostalgia or a constant harking back amongst those of us who lived through those years, it is across a broad swathe of fashion ages.
Vivienne Westwood, Dries van Noten, Jean – Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, and John Galliano presented the audience, the clients, and the press with a story. The show was about their seasonal statement. Although they were all vastly different in so many ways, at their height they offered a romantic escapism and a drama. They told us about dreams and escapades, adventures, and intrigues. The box was opened each season and the treasures displayed. The invitation heralded something already, the introduction to the event, in an envelope, a box or whatever, from a key to a scroll, from the thickest and stiffest of cardboard to flimsy tissue. The journey continued from arrival at the venue, the setting, the music, the casting, and the spell cast while we watched was all embracing. We jumped from the madness of a silent museum for Comme des Garçons to the screaming crowds at Halle de La Villette for Gaultier. John Galliano offered narratives so complex we sometimes even sniggered. McQueen, especially before Givenchy, had us staggered by his audacity, in the threatening danger and unnerving us in our seats. Banshee at the Café de Paris in 1994 was a special favourite of mine.
Now there seems to be a lack of real ambition to challenge fashion, and the rise of making money has erased much of this and deadened much of what we see into “another collection.” The heavy hand of the finances department of a house, brand or label has snuffed out much of the boldness. Selling product now outweighs creativity, sales figures spells success.
Demna Gvsalia, Alessandro Michele, Pier Paolo Piccioli, Olivier Rosteing, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Mathieu Blazy, Jonathan Anderson, famous and successful designers, each and every one, all seem to have a story that’s watered down before delivery. It ends up being bogged down by commerciality and it’s always about the clothes, from sportswear to retro, it makes no difference. Long before discrete luxury and the trend of “buy less buy better,” the power of Bottega Veneta, Prada and The Row was in the power of commerciality. This is an observation and not a criticism, and being good at creating clothes people want to buy is no easy task, but it is only one aspect or section of the fashion business. Where are the dreams?
Galliano and McQueen especially jumbled the stories through overlapping layers, multiple inspirations, and a firm belief in each season’s power to excite and to grab our attention and our fashion imagination. It wasn’t just “I had a holiday in Venice, so my collection is based on Venice.” It was so much more than that, and in spite of history revealing just what the price was they paid for endlessly giving us a new story, it’s now history. Surely, it is time to refresh and renew, rethink and reinvent in 2027, which will be seventeen years next February since McQueens’ death, and sixteen years next March since Galliano’s last Dior collection.
I then realised as I wrote this, there was another reason to love the stories of the runways, because we are totally lacking great and inspirational stories elsewhere. The truth is there is also a lack of stylists being offered the opportunity to make magic. Grace Coddington told stories, and retold nursery rhymes, if necessary, to fill glossy magazine pages with aspirational escapism. Carlyn Cerf du Dudezeel and Tonne Goodman sold fashion but through subtlety, their beautiful stories might look escapist and amazing but also showed clothes and accessories to dream about. Huge spreads page after page, torn out and pinned on the wall, treasured back issues. We look back on Diana Vreeland and of course Polly Mellon and Verushka are unrepeatable and unbeatable, but coming up to date the great fashion editorials are no longer being produced. As we watch the movie, September Issue now looks like a golden age and next year it will be twenty years since that 2007 Issue was created.
Another thing we no longer have are great advertising spreads of page after page telling us stories. For example, remember the Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Edwardian travellers, back in 2012, there is nothing like that any longer.
Now the stylists don’t take clothes by the scruff of the neck and pull them into adventures, they are instructed by the houses to not mix names, they lack the creative impetus to improvise, to mix their own finds with the designers’ clothes. There isn’t a huge excitement to much of the styling work since many of them are now de opting so much time to dressing one person for performing at concerts or a series of movie premier events. In this regard I also find it is fascinating that menswear is often more adventurous right now than womenswear? Will we finally enter the new dandy millennium?
So, John Galliano threw parties on the runway, he plagiarised and he plundered cultures, then he took the models and painted them. He took us physically to Versailles and he conjures up Paris under snow. Martin Margiela showed the same collection in adjoining venues but one was white, one was black, he dragged us into a filthy disused Metro station only lit by candles, or he dumped us in a sorting office for post and parcels. Rei Kawakubo showed to only the sound, back then, of the hundreds of cameras clicking. Karl Lagerfeld showed the dozens of variations of the Chanel suit and the little black dress, but took us to the beach, launched a rocket, or installed a formal garden. Soundtracks were extraordinary, models were actresses and we could watch them perform different roles across the days. Dries van Noten put us on mattresses to watch the show, piled us into a tiny street of artisans, and served us tea. There are myriad examples of amazing shows in the past supplementing and even boosting the seasons narrative.
Of course, not every collection and every designer needs to be taking this same route, but that’s never been true anyway. We need variety, we need variations on a theme. Many designers have successfully run houses without each season promoting a strong theme or explaining the story and the inspiration. Have we become over sensitive in using cultural influences, has bad cultural appropriation caused a complete lack of interest in other cultures and heritage in subtle or hommage ways? Has the commercial become so important that designers do not add in catwalk or special order pieces? Back in the day at Gucci all the special Tom Ford pieces, like the blue sequinned mohair coat were limited edition or like the printed silk shirts, to order only. Indeed, Gucci had a “commercial collection” to underpin Mr Ford’s wonderful work, which the press never saw. The balance was there. I am pretty sure most of the boutique collections during Galliano’s Dior years were the job of the studio teams, it certainly bore little resemblance to what was shown at full throttle on the runway. Listen, we all know you have to make money to survive but it appears it’s gone in the other direction, inspiration, and aspiration in both the collections, and the main glossy magazines has faded away.
One of the reasons we love Rick Owens is the narrative. The consistency of his story flows from catwalk to boutique, from top to toe, from menswear to womenswear, but it’s a continuing story. He is a brilliant talent but we others who offer insanity in ideas, we need collections to argue about, and the current fashion rules need challenging.
I do have one John Galliano question for you, dear reader, to ponder upon. How were Andrew Bolton and his team planning to present the pieces? Removed from the attention to every detail from the shoes to Stephen Jones chapeaux, the superb models of the time, the setting, the atmosphere and the the event, how do you replicate that in a museum gallery? I personally dislike fashion exhibitions as a general rule, Olivier Saillard part, who is a genius, I call them dead clothes. Unworn, not seen in 360 degrees and moving, static on a mannequin, how was the magic narrative of the designer going to be conveyed?
Once upon a time…………
Tony Glenville
]]>To each artist his material, and what’s more moving than the useless one, serious frivolity given form. A hat. Stephen Jones carved out a space of freedom in a London that gave none away, and has never since stopped whirling inside it, unhindered, shouting into it and overturning it, in the highest joy and at the highest pitch of his craft. He began on the heads of Jean-Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler, and still carries the torch at the House of Dior, where he has worked since the John Galliano era. Through it all, he keeps the same knowing half-smile, the look of a man who takes his work with complete seriousness and himself not entirely so. Stephen Jones is President of the ASVOFF 2026 jury.
In Stephen Jones’s office the walls are entirely covered in books, floor to ceiling, the whole memory of fashion displayed behind him. “Oh, that’s only a part, there’s plenty more on the other side,” he quips. Born in West Kirby, on the Wirral Peninsula, and raised near Liverpool, his fascination with beauty was sparked early. “My mother took me to art galleries, and I remember her explaining William Hogarth’s paintings to me, eighteenth-century portraiture, how an embroidered dress would represent wealth. It was often about clothing.” The sense that what we wear speaks for us was in him from the beginning. “What message do you send by wearing a white shirt? Or me, by wearing my navy one? It all means something. And maybe an evening dress means less than a white shirt does. I learned that fairly early on.” Do not expect the well-worn tale of a boy swooning before a single canvas, awakened to some transcendent, saccharine communion with art. From the start it was a matter of perspective, of a bond with the whole rather than the part. “As a child, going to a gallery is a bigger experience than any one painting. You see marble columns. You see things that aren’t like home or school. It’s the overall experience that’s impressive. When you go to the Louvre, for instance, it’s about the whole experience of going to the Louvre, because of everything it represents, the absolute monarchy, all those symbols. And maybe that matters more than the Mona Lisa.” This isn’t provocation; it echoes a long-standing theory of art, that beauty doesn’t always live in the object but in the frame we place around it. A milliner knows this in his hands better than anyone, and Jones spends his days turning the most frivolous of objects into a frame for a face.
“When I was at college in the 1970s, there were huge strikes in London. It was very depressed, and music was the only way out. We felt there was nothing out there for us, so we had to create our own world.” He came down from the north still half a boy, the provinces clinging to his shoes. “I’d never lived in London before, and I didn’t know what to do, or think, or who to see. I just knew music, and that was the great communicator.” The city he walked into was the sick man of Europe – a Britain of runaway inflation and shuttered industry, where a three-day week had recently switched off the lights and the government had just gone to the International Monetary Fund for the largest loan it had ever granted. “It was a poor country, much poorer than France, much, much poorer than Italy. It was nihilistic. There was a vacuum, and we created within that vacuum.” Punk had just detonated, and out of the emptiness a generation set about building a world of its own. Why be afraid when there’s nothing left to lose? “It was like: we do it now, or tomorrow we die. You’re not scared of what you don’t know, and I knew nothing about London, so I thought, let’s get on with it.” Jones is quick to strip away the joke-shop clichés. “Punk had nothing to do with safety pins or rubber trousers. It was a way of carving out an actual path for people, and there’s an idea of hope in it too.” The courage was real, though he won’t dwell on it. “I knew lots of people who got beaten up,” he says of a time – as it still is – when playing with the other gender’s codes could cost you dearly. Throughout, the hierarchy held firm: clothing in service of music. “When you think of David Bowie, you think of the music first, then the incredible look. Same with Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry.” At art school, the path was anything but settled. “I applied to study architecture and decided not to. I didn’t know if I wanted to do ceramics, or interior design, or textiles. But because I was interested in appearance and music, fashion seemed the logical choice. Also, I wanted to go to the party and look great.”
“I made my first hat with an old dress of my sister’s and a box of cornflakes to give it structure, and some plastic flowers. I still have the flowers, because they’re 1970s plastic, and long after I’m dust, and everybody’s dust, these flowers will look exactly the same.”
At Saint Martin’s School of Art in the late 1970s – which became Central Saint Martins a decade later – he studied fashion, one of the very few men in his year. During the summers he was sent to Lachasse, a small London couture House belonging to his tailoring tutor Peter Lewis-Crown, whose milliner, Shirley Hex, would later go on to teach Philip Treacy. “I had no idea this is what my career was going to be. I still don’t! I was a petite main in the tailoring workroom, and next to it was a hat workroom – I just liked the people there. The first hat I made was because I wanted to move ateliers. The première said, well, have you ever made a hat? Make one this weekend, I’ll see it Monday morning and decide.” Hex approved it, charmed by a modernity she took for a deliberate choice. He left Saint Martin’s in 1979 with the craft in his hands and a sharp perception already his own. “When I was a student, we had a film club. We thought these were stupid old films by Fellini – the arrogance of an eighteen-year-old. Our tutor, Rosetta Brooks, said, you’ll like this one, it’s got some beautiful costumes. We were shown a really scratched print, a copy of a copy of a copy, of Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965). The credits said the costumes were sponsored by Bri-Nylon, and because we were punks, we thought – cool, it was inspired by a nylon company. That’s what turned me on to Fellini, and I’ve been obsessed with him ever since.” There’s a lesson buried in all this about the perception of time – one the age of instant gratification has swept away. “There was no internet. If you wanted to find a record, you had to spend a day digging through thousands of old 78s, if you wanted to find Nina Simone singing Strange Fruit. You had to earn it. So when you found it, it was yours, and it really meant something.”
“Thierry Mugler loved drawing. He would do a drawing of a hat, then I would do another in return, then he would correct it. It was like a conversation. Jean Paul Gaultier loved the idea of randomness, of the thing that doesn’t logically fit.”
He threw himself headlong into his career, and a year after graduating, in 1980, opened his own millinery salon in Covent Garden. Paris came for him through Jean Paul Gaultier, who in 1984 gave him his first project for a Parisian House. “First he asked me to model in his fashion show. He’d seen pictures of me in The Face, but I couldn’t do it because I’d broken my leg on a motorbike. A few months later when I visited him to see the film of the men’s show, he asked, would you like to contribute to my women’s collection? I said, well, yes – I hadn’t expected he’d ask. And he said, I’m going out for lunch now, I’ll be back in an hour and a half and I’ll look at your sketches when I return. I was in complete panic, but that’s how I started.” Thierry Mugler followed soon after, and the two temperaments quickly declared themselves kindred spirits. “Jean Paul was more in the British tradition. Thierry was more the Hollywood tradition, where everything matched perfectly – a whole picture, completely detailed.”
“With John Galliano, we’ve managed to keep our professional relationship going. So we have a lovely friendship through hats and through design, which is how we’re still friends 40 years later.”
“I met John because my assistant, Sibylle de Saint Phalle, later became his assistant, so we knew each other socially. He was a big star. He’d moved to Paris, and his assistant Steven Robinson called me and said, John would love to work with you, could you come to Paris, please? This was when he’d been given an atelier by the businessman Fayçal Amor, of the company Plein Sud. I went to visit, we got on well, and we started working together. I saw him last week, and I’m even delivering a hat to him on Sunday!” Side by side they went, from Galliano’s own label to Givenchy, and in 1996, when Galliano ascended the throne at the House of Dior, Jones was anointed House milliner. When Galliano’s Dior came to its abrupt end, Jones stayed on, and has crowned every era since Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri for ready- to-wear and Haute Couture, Kim Jones for Dior Homme, and now Jonathan Anderson across them all. “With Raf, we did some hats, but he wasn’t very ‘hatty,’ because he didn’t want to look like a copy of John.” Chiuri arrived with a brief he still admires. “Maria Grazia said to me, I want to make a hat that every fashionable young girl in the world can wear and I was made Creative Director of Hats. The style that really became a huge hit was the little bob hat in navy blue cotton, lined with Dior Oblique. It became the thing to have, especially during Covid, because people were doing sales appointments over the phone, and you can’t fit a dress over the phone – but if you put on a hat, it looks fun! It was something happy in a time that was very frightening.”
“A hat is spiritual in the abstract sense. It really makes you dream of who you could be. It’s not there to remind you who you are – we already know that. It’s like, oh my God, I can be somebody else, just by putting this thing on my head. And it’s just a hat.”
A hat is among the last toys of fashion an adult can still play with – the one object that turns a fitting into a game of dress-up, and lets a serious person be a child playing in a costume box for an afternoon. “So often you see people advising you to be who you really are, mirror your inner self, and sip some kale juice. At least transform yourself – do something more!” The proof he loves best played out in front of the whole world. At the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics in 2024, in the last minutes before the flame went out, the French singer Yseult sang Frank Sinatra’s My Way in a black faille reworking of Dior’s 1947 New Look, crowned by a hat Jones had revived from the House archive. The image drew a wave of online cruelty, which she rose above, and the two have been friends ever since. “Of all the different outfits she’s worn, and everything Dior has made, that was by far the most notable, because suddenly it wasn’t a white person, and it wasn’t a skinny girl. It just showed that everybody’s different – thank God, otherwise how boring the world would be.” Asked if there’s one designer he wanted above all others to work with and never had the chance, he answers quickly. Issey Miyake died in 2022, and the closest they came was an encounter Jones still tells like a small miracle. “I was in Paris, and a car drove past, the window went down, and a guy jumped out and said, excuse me, are you Stephen Jones? I said yes. And he said, I’m Issey Miyake. I almost fell over on the spot, because he was the most famous person in fashion. And he said, a few years ago you made a wedding hat for a junior assistant of mine to go with her dress. I didn’t think the dress was good enough, so I made her a special dress to go with your hat. He said, this afternoon is my men’s show, I’d love you to come.” As he speaks, a book devoted to Miyake’s work watches over the conversation from the far side of the screen, as if the master were keeping an eye on things.
The same generosity runs the other way now. Comme des Garçons’ and Dover Street Market’s CEO, Adrian Joffe, called two years ago about a young pair he was backing, Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, who show in Paris as Matières Fécales. He was startled to hear that Jones already knew them, from their student days in Montreal. He’d met them there at a festival, and when the pair stood stranded on a stage in the sun, he’d gone and fetched them water. “We hadn’t seen each other in years, and we hugged and hugged and just laughed at how silly and how wonderful life is.” He admires what the otherworldly duo has done since – keeping the savoir-faire and the classical bones of fashion, while giving it all their whole, sincere strangeness.
“Every day is a Dior day.”
Today his work is shown in fashion museums the world over. The Palais Galliera in Paris gave him a retrospective across the winter of 2024 – ‘Stephen Jones, Chapeaux d’artiste’ – the first show the institution had devoted to an accessory in over forty years. His hats sit in permanent collections from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with the largest holding outside his own archive at MoMu in Antwerp. He still crowns every Dior collection, and works on the House’s exhibitions as they travel the world. Going back through the Dior archive, he comes now and then upon his own old handiwork. “You look on the inside and you see the stitches – sometimes the stitches I put in years ago. Quite a strange experience.” He is now chairman of the British Hat Guild, the elder statesman of a craft he did as much as anyone to bring back into fashion.
For this whole portrait I have held back the obvious pun, the small helpless urge to take off my hat to the man who spent a life making them. Just this once, then. Hats off.
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