Author Magazine 6/28/26 Author Magazine 6/28/26

What the Best Rooms in the World Have in Common That Photography Never Shows

After two decades in which the most discussed painting was largely abstract or conceptually driven, a generation of figurative painters is producing work that argues, with considerable force, that the human body in paint is the most complex subject available.

“A room designed for duration looks different from a room designed for the photograph. The furniture is at the height the specific people who will sit in it actually need. The proportions are calibrated not to the photographed state but to the inhabited state.”

Pierre Yovanovitch describes the design process for a private commission as a conversation about duration. Not about style, not about reference, not about the visual language that will make the photographs work — about duration: what the room feels like at 7am in February, at 3pm in August, at 10pm with twelve people in it, at 11pm with two. A room designed for duration looks different from a room designed for the photograph.

The furniture is at the height that the specific people who will sit in it actually need it to be. The light comes from where the light needs to come from for the activities that occur in that room at the times they occur. The proportions are calibrated not to the photographed state but to the inhabited state, which is a different brief and produces a different result.

The quality that distinguishes rooms that are irreplaceable from rooms that are simply beautiful is not available in the photograph. It is temporal: the sense, in the room, that the space has been made for this specific accumulation of hours, for this specific combination of people and light and purpose, for a life rather than for an image of one.

This quality is produced by a design process that begins with questions about how the room will be inhabited rather than how it will look, and it is, for reasons that are entirely legible, less common than it should be at the highest price points. The rooms that generate the most visible proof of excellence are the rooms that photograph best, and the rooms that photograph best are designed, consciously or not, for the photographic state.

Axel Vervoordt makes rooms that are notoriously difficult to photograph. The quality of surface he pursues — the worn, the aged, the material that carries time visibly — loses in compression to high-gloss finishes and saturated colour. His rooms, in photographs, often look spare to the point of austerity. In person, they produce a quality of presence — the sense of being in a space that is alive in a way that newly made spaces rarely are — that people who have experienced them consistently describe as the closest thing to inhabiting a work of art that a domestic space can offer.

The specific things the best rooms have in common, described by the designers who make them: natural light arriving from more than one direction; acoustic properties that allow for the specific silence of a room that absorbs rather than reflects sound; furniture at the right height for the actual people who will use it; and the quality that Yovanovitch calls surprise — a detail, a material, an object that the eye finds unexpectedly and returns to, giving the room its quality of inexhaustibility.

The inexhaustible room — the room you can live in for years and keep finding something new inside — is the highest aspiration of residential design. It requires the designer to have thought not just about the room's composition but about the relationship between the composition and time.

How will the experience of this room change as the occupant changes? What will it offer the person who has known it for twenty years that it cannot offer them in the first month? These are questions the photograph cannot ask. They are what the design process, at its highest level, answers.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 6/23/26 Author Magazine 6/23/26

The Matthieu Blazy Chanel Era Has Begun. Here Is What It Means.

He spent five years building one of the most critically admired practices in luxury at Bottega Veneta. His first Chanel collection suggests he understands something most incoming creative directors miss: the house already has the answers. The question is which questions to ask it.

“He used the codes as materials rather than requirements. The tweed in unexpected weights. The chain as structure rather than decoration. The jersey in constructions as rigorous as anything in his Bottega vocabulary. This is how you enter an archive.”

The difference between a designer who has done the archival work and one who has merely researched the archives is subtle but, in the work itself, unmistakable. Matthieu Blazy has done the archival work. You can see it in his first Chanel collection in the way details appear not as references but as consequences — the braid trim at a particular angle, the proportion of the collar to the shoulder, the specific way the jersey moves — as if the garment were produced by someone who had spent time in the atelier understanding how these decisions had been made before.

Blazy arrives at Chanel from Bottega Veneta, where his five-year tenure produced what many critics consider the most sustained creative run in recent luxury fashion. The achievement there was specific: he made clothes that were, technically and formally, the most sophisticated in the market, and that were also, in their feeling, easy. Not casual — Bottega is not casual — but worn. As if the person wearing them had owned them for years.

The question for Chanel is whether the same intelligence can operate inside one of the most symbol-laden houses in fashion history. Chanel is not a blank canvas. It is a system of codes — the tweed, the chain, the camellia, the costume jewellery, the shoe with the black cap toe — whose meaning has been accumulated across a century. The failure mode is a creative director who manages the codes rather than uses them, producing work that is recognisably Chanel without being specifically anything.

Blazy's first collection did something different. He used the codes as materials rather than requirements — the tweed in unexpected weights and scales, the chain as a structural element rather than a decorative one, the jersey in constructions as formally rigorous as anything in his Bottega vocabulary. The collection was described by Wallpaper as a calibration rather than a revolution — exactly the right beginning.

His Chanel Cruise 2026 show in Biarritz extended the argument into a more relaxed register without losing its specificity. The travel wardrobes, the beach-to-dinner transitions, the question of what a Chanel woman wears when she is between obligations: these are the collections that reveal a creative director's understanding of a client's actual life rather than the life the brand mythology imagines for her.

The client question is interesting at Chanel specifically because the Chanel client is, by demographic and by self-understanding, one of the most confident consumers in fashion. She has been buying Chanel for years. She knows what she wants from it. She does not need to be told what Chanel is. She needs a creative director who respects what she already knows and can show her something she had not yet seen inside it.

Blazy's intelligence at Bottega was consistently about the something-not-yet-seen inside a vocabulary the client already understood. The vocabulary at Chanel is richer and more complex. The intelligence, so far, looks equal to it.

The bags will be the early commercial test. The Bayswater, the Lily, the Postman's Lock — what Blazy does with the Chanel bag archive will tell us more about his vision than any runway look.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 6/15/26 Author Magazine 6/15/26

Salone del Mobile 2026: The Six Things That Actually Mattered

Four hundred thousand visitors. A thousand exhibitors. Six days in April. Here is the edit — the works, the ideas, and the sensory shift that will be visible in the best interiors of 2028.

“The most memorable experiences of the week were not primarily visual. Design arguing for the primacy of physical experience at the exact moment when everything else is trying to move us away from it.”

The first thing that mattered at Salone del Mobile 2026 was not an object. It was a method: the most memorable experiences of the week were not primarily visual. The USM and Snohetta Renaissance of the Real exhibition was built around scent, sound frequencies, and diffuse light rather than around visual spectacle. The listening sessions, the floral-scented aperitivo at the Marimekko osteria, the specific texture of materials that demanded to be handled rather than photographed: this was design arguing for the primacy of physical experience at the exact moment when everything else is trying to move us away from it.

Second: process shone brighter than product at SaloneSatellite. All three top winners had invented the experimental systems behind their objects. The first prize went to Russo Betak, a Copenhagen studio that 3D-prints flat sheets from a blend of oyster, mussel, and scallop shells collected from restaurants — natural diffusers of light — shaped by hand. Sustainability not as a concept. As a formal decision.

Third: B&B Italia marked its return to Salone after a 25-year hiatus with a Formafantasma-designed booth whose coffered ceiling evoked a midcentury office while marble partitions offered privacy and intimacy. A statement about how to honour a house's archive without being trapped inside it. Formafantasma's answer was spatial intelligence: a booth that was an argument about how you move through a room.

Fourth: orange emerged as the most commercially consequential colour at the fair, appearing across multiple categories from Nilufar's collectible sconces to Knoll's new Johnston Marklee chair. This is not a colour trend in the superficial sense. It is a warmth trend — a design world moving away from the cool greys and whites of the previous decade toward something that acknowledges the specific pleasure of a room that feels inhabited rather than curated.

Fifth: Moncler wrapped 10 Corso Como in a giant inflatable octopus by set designer Andy Hillman, its tentacles snaking through windows past 24 mannequins dressed in the Summer 2026 collection. What was different this year was that the most discussed spectacular moment was also, in its formal extravagance, genuinely funny. Humour in luxury design is rarer than it should be and more valuable than the people producing it sometimes recognise.

Sixth, and most important for the long term: the EuroCucina return brought AI kitchen integration to the forefront, with invisible induction hobs embedded directly into countertop material and ovens with AI vision to identify food and suggest cooking parameters. The intelligence being built into kitchen infrastructure in 2026 will determine what the kitchen looks like — and does — for the decade that follows.

The edit of Salone is always an act of preference. What these six share is that they are all, in different registers, arguments about the same thing: that the best design is in conversation with the person who uses it, at the level of the senses, not just the level of the eye.

The next Salone opens April 2027. The ideas announced this year will take until 2028 to reach the rooms where they belong.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 6/4/26 Author Magazine 6/4/26

Grace Wales Bonner Is About to Change Hermès

The British-Jamaican designer who built one of the most intellectually serious practices in contemporary fashion takes over Hermès menswear creative direction in early 2027. Here is what she brings that nobody else could.

“Her entire practice has been about finding the meeting points between vocabularies. The Hermès brief is not a constraint for Wales Bonner. It is a vocabulary. And she has spent a decade learning how to read one.”

The announcement that Grace Wales Bonner would succeed Véronique Nichanian as artistic director of Hermès menswear felt, to anyone who had followed her practice closely, less like a surprise than an inevitability. The logic was almost mathematical: here is a house whose deepest values are craft, intellectual seriousness, and the proposition that a garment carries meaning beyond its material — and here is a designer who has spent a decade building her entire practice on exactly those three things.

Nichanian's tenure — thirty-seven years, the longest-serving creative director in fashion history — was extraordinary in its consistency. She made menswear that was quiet in the way that very expensive, very considered things are quiet: the kind of quiet that only reveals itself over time, in wear, in the specific way a garment improves with the body rather than despite it. Her swansong AW26 collection was described by those who attended as deeply moving — a valediction from a designer who had spent nearly four decades inside a house and had, by the end, become part of its character.

Wales Bonner arrives as something different and, for Hermès, genuinely new. She is not a classicist. She is a synthesist — a designer whose practice was built, from her 2016 Central Saint Martins graduation collection onward, on the meeting of European tailoring intelligence and Black Atlantic cultural history. Her Adidas collaborations brought archival football culture into dialogue with serious research. Her runway collections — small, precise, each one a study in the relationship between form and feeling — have consistently produced some of the most admired pieces in contemporary fashion.

What she understands that the Hermès brief requires: the saddle-making tradition, the leather knowledge, the specific quality of material intelligence the house has maintained across a century and a half is not a constraint for Wales Bonner. It is a vocabulary. Her entire practice has been about finding the meeting points between vocabularies — the West African kente tradition and the Savile Row jacket, the Caribbean cricket whites and the Parisian suit — and producing something that carries both without reducing either.

The specific dimension of her practice that the menswear world is watching for is colour. Her palette — warm, specific, rooted in the cultural traditions she researches rather than in trend forecasting — has been one of the most recognisable signatures in contemporary fashion. How that palette interacts with the Hermès archive, with the house's relationship to natural dyes and traditional materials, is one of the more intriguing open questions in fashion right now.

She is also, of the generation of designers currently reshaping the major houses, one of the most deeply read. Her interviews reference not just fashion history but anthropology, literature, and the cultural theory she has been in dialogue with since her graduate research. This is not academic posturing. It is what produces, in her work, the specific quality of intelligence that her critics call cerebral and her admirers call moving — the sense that the garments are carrying a conversation that began long before they were made.

The Hermès client — the man who has been dressing with the house for years, who understands the specific pleasure of its leather and its proportions and its quietly stated confidence — is not a guaranteed audience for intellectual experiment. But the Hermès client also, by definition, has the taste to recognize when a new language is being spoken fluently.

Wales Bonner speaks several. She will arrive at the house fluent in its own. Her first collection is expected in early 2027. The fashion world is already watching.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 6/3/26 Author Magazine 6/3/26

What Jonathan Anderson Is Actually Doing at Dior

His first two collections have been about something more specific than a new direction. They are about returning the house to the idea that a garment should make the person wearing it feel like a version of themselves they had not yet met.

“He wants Dior women to feel observed without being watched, present without being on display. That is a specific and sophisticated brief — and the collections so far suggest he knows exactly how to answer it.”

There is a moment in Jonathan Anderson's A/W 2026 Dior show — staged in the Tuileries Gardens on a platform the exact green of the Luxembourg chairs — when a model walks out in a Bar jacket that has been reimagined as something between architecture and a pressed flower. The silhouette is Dior to its foundations. The feeling is not. The feeling is of something alive, slightly unruly, entirely pleased with itself.

That pleasure is the thing Anderson is restoring to Dior. Not rebellion — he is too respectful of the archive for rebellion — but the specific joy that Monsieur Dior himself described in his memoir as the joy of making a woman feel she had arrived at herself. The SS26 debut, in the Tuileries with Greta Lee and Louis Garrel in the front row, was a controlled detonation: denim skirts paired with couture capes, bold reinterpretations of overcoats, the Dior Bow bag introduced with an invisible closure that suggests considerable thought about what a woman does with her hands when she carries something she loves.

The AW26 collection deepened the argument. Water lily motifs wove through suiting and gowns. Impressionism was the reference — not as decoration but as philosophy: the idea that a garment, like a Monet, might be best understood from a specific distance, in specific light, by someone who has given it time. Anderson told press that the collection was about seeing and being seen. What he meant, specifically, is that he wants Dior women to feel observed without being watched, present without being on display.

The couture debut in January was the most explicit statement of intent. Staged as a Wunderkammer — a cabinet of curiosities — the show drew from the Dior vaults with the confidence of someone who has done the archival work and has no need to demonstrate it ostentatiously. The proportions were not quotes from the archive. They were arguments derived from it.

His accessories instinct is where the commercial transformation of the house is most legible. The Lady Dior is being re-pressed into service with new hardware and new textures. The Bow bag is already one of the most discussed new introductions in the market. The Cruise 2026 show, held in Los Angeles, carried California light into every seam without becoming a resort line in the lazy sense.

The question the industry circles without asking directly is whether Anderson's intellectual ambition is compatible with the commercial scale of the business. Dior is the world's top-grossing luxury house. The creative director of Dior is not making art. He is making proposals about what the aspirational object should look, feel, and mean for millions of people across dozens of markets.

Anderson's answer — given in the work rather than in interviews, which is the only answer that matters — is that intelligence and accessibility are not opposites. The Tuileries show was the most discussed collection of the season and also the most wearable. The couture Wunderkammer was intellectually serious and emotionally open. The Bow bag is coveted by people who have never read fashion criticism and by people who have read all of it.

What Dior under Anderson is becoming is a house where the person who dresses carefully and the person who dresses intellectually are, increasingly, the same person. That is not a small achievement. It is, in fact, the thing the house was always supposed to be.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 5/30/26 Author Magazine 5/30/26

Issey Miyake: The Philosophy That Outlasts the Founder

He died in 2022. The house he built — on the premise that clothing is a conversation between the body and the future — has never been more alive.

“The garment begins with the material, and the material is chosen in response to what the body needs from it. Not what the market wants. Not what the editorial images will support. What the body, moving through the world, actually requires.”

There is a garment in the Miyake archive that was made in 1993 and that, when worn today, looks like it arrived from a decade that has not yet occurred. This is not nostalgia's paradox. It is the result of a design philosophy so grounded in first principles — in the relationship between fabric and body, in the investigation of material behavior, in the conviction that clothing should be a form of liberation rather than a form of constraint — that it operates outside the time signature of fashion cycles.

Issey Miyake died in August 2022, at eighty-four. In the fashion press, the obituaries were generous and correct: they noted the Pleats Please lines, the A-POC concept (A Piece of Cloth), the Bao Bao bags, the collaborations with scientists and engineers and architects that produced some of the most formally innovative textiles in the history of the medium. What they struggled to articulate — because articulating it requires a language that fashion criticism has not fully developed — was the philosophical dimension: that Miyake was not, primarily, a designer. He was a researcher. His question, held across fifty years of practice, was: what can cloth do?

The question arrived from a specific origin that Miyake was always willing to discuss and that his work always, in some form, addressed: he was in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, seven years old, two kilometers from the hypocenter of the atomic bomb. He saw what destruction at that scale does to the human body, and to the fabric that clothes it. He decided, in the years that followed, to spend his life in the opposite territory: making things that honor the living body, that create conditions for it to move and breathe and persist.

This is the foundation on which the house was built, and it is the foundation on which it continues. The current Miyake company — three main lines, multiple collaborations, an ongoing materials research program that is one of the most serious in the global fashion industry — operates with the coherence of a practice that knows what it is for. This is rarer than it should be.

Yoshiyuki Miyamae, who heads Issey Miyake Women, speaks about the design process in terms that would be recognizable to anyone who has studied the founder's stated philosophy: the garment begins with the material, and the material is chosen or developed in response to what the body needs from it. Not what the market wants. Not what the editorial images will support. What the body, moving through the world, actually requires from the fabric that covers it.

The Pleats Please line, which has been in continuous production since 1993 and shows no sign of reaching its expiration, is the most legible version of this philosophy: permanently pleated polyester that fits every body, travels without care, maintains its appearance through use, and is, in its combination of technical sophistication and radical accessibility, the most honest garment in luxury fashion. It is sold at accessible price points relative to comparable quality. It is available in a range of colors and forms that respond to bodies of every kind. It was designed, from the first, to be worn and lived in and washed and worn again, not preserved in tissue paper.

The paradox of the Miyake legacy in 2026 is this: in a fashion moment defined by conspicuous investment and the performance of exclusivity, the house remains committed to the opposite proposition — that the most significant design achievement is the democratization of quality, the making available of something truly excellent to the widest possible range of people. This is not a marketing position. It is a philosophical one, and it was Miyake's from the beginning.

The materials research program at Reality Lab, Miyake's research and development arm, has in recent years produced textiles made from food waste, from recycled ocean plastics, from steam-molded single pieces of material that eliminate the seam and therefore the most common failure point of the garment. The research is ongoing and has a timeline that does not submit to the fashion calendar: some of the materials currently under development have been in research for seven years and are not expected to be production-ready for three more.

This is the deepest form of the Miyake inheritance: the willingness to work on a timescale that the market cannot accelerate. The conviction that the thing worth making is worth waiting for. And the understanding that the body — the actual, moving, sweating, aging, breathing human body in its full specificity and its full dignity — is the right subject for a lifetime's serious attention.

He left behind a practice that knows what it is for. In the history of fashion, this is one of the rarest and most valuable things.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 5/19/26 Author Magazine 5/19/26

Ann Demeulemeester: The Language She Left Behind

She retired from fashion in 2013. The world has spent the intervening decade discovering that what she made was not a collection. It was a vocabulary — and the conversation is still happening.

“I never wanted to make fashion. I wanted to make a world.”

In the last year of her time at the house that bore her name, Ann Demeulemeester gave an interview in which she said: "I never wanted to make fashion. I wanted to make a world." She said it without grandiosity — she is constitutionally incapable of grandiosity — in the flat, precise way she says everything, as if stating a fact that had always been obvious to her and that she was now willing to share.

The world she made is still there. It exists in the wardrobes of a specific category of person — the person who discovered Demeulemeester in their twenties and never recovered, who wears the pieces from that period with the loyalty of someone returning to a text they cannot finish understanding — and it exists, increasingly, in the culture's reassessment of what the Antwerp Six meant and what it means now that the fashion system has absorbed the surface of everything they did without the substance.

She trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, graduating with the group that was called the Antwerp Six when they showed at the British Designer Show in 1986: Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Walter Van Beirendonck, Marina Yee, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Demeulemeester. The name was given by the press, which needed something to call them. What they shared was less a style than a seriousness: the conviction that fashion was a form of thinking, not a form of entertainment, and that the human body in a garment was a subject worth the full force of an artistic intelligence.

Demeulemeester's particular intelligence ran toward the poetic. Her references were consistent across twenty years of work and were, in their consistency, a statement: Robert Plant in the 1970s, Patti Smith in the 1970s, the specific quality of romantic darkness that is not Gothic but is adjacent to it, the relationship between softness and structure that is resolved only when both are present at the highest level. The clothes were always black, or white, or the precise grey that exists between them. They were always constructed from materials with texture and weight. They were always, in their proportions, slightly wrong in a way that was more right than right would have been.

The RTW pieces from the late 1990s and early 2000s are now among the most sought objects in the high-end resale market: not for their collectability in the investment sense, though the prices have moved significantly, but because the people who want them want to wear them. They want to put on a Demeulemeester coat and feel what the woman who made it understood about the relationship between a body and a garment and a world. That feeling is not reproducible. It exists in these specific objects or nowhere.

What Demeulemeester understood — and what the secondary market is now pricing, imperfectly but genuinely — is that a garment is a philosophical position. This coat says: I am interested in darkness and in the beauty that exists inside it. These trousers say: I believe that the relationship between the masculine and feminine in a body is not a problem to be resolved but a complexity to be honored. This dress says: I am not trying to please you. I am trying to tell the truth.

The current house — which continues under the creative direction of Stefano Gallici, who has approached the stewardship of Demeulemeester's language with seriousness and intelligence — is engaged in the genuinely difficult task of continuing a conversation that its originator had with her own interior. The results are sometimes moving and sometimes reveal, through their distance from the origin, precisely how singular the original voice was.

Demeulemeester herself has not spoken about fashion in the years since her retirement. She lives in Antwerp and makes sculpture and raises chickens and tends a garden. When asked, occasionally, about the work, she deflects — not out of false modesty but because she seems to have moved to a different conversation, one that fashion was always adjacent to but never identical with.

The vocabulary remains. It is used now by designers who came after, by stylists who understand what it means, by the person in their thirties or forties or fifties who puts on the coat they bought in 2002 and finds that it still fits — not the body, which has changed, but the thought.

That is what happens when a garment is made from a genuine philosophy: it outlasts the season, the collection, the company, the decade. It continues to say what it was made to say. And the people who need to hear it find it, eventually, however long it takes.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 5/17/26 Author Magazine 5/17/26

The Japanese House: An Education in How Space Can Be Thought

The machiya row house. The sukiya tearoom. The engawa threshold. A vocabulary of space that the Western world is still learning to read.

The boundary between inside and outside is not a wall. It is a negotiation. The architecture creates a grammar of approach and withdrawal, and within that grammar, the person is always making choices.”

The first time you step into a traditional Japanese house, something happens in the body before the mind has organized a response. The threshold — the genkan, the entrance where you remove your shoes and transition from the social world to the domestic — is not merely a practical convention. It is a perceptual instruction: you are entering a space that operates by different rules. The rules are spatial, material, and temporal, and they are all, at every scale, the product of a coherent philosophy.

This philosophy does not have a single name in Japanese. It is distributed across concepts that require accumulation rather than summary: ma (the meaningful interval between things), wabi (the beauty of imperfection and impermanence), sabi (the beauty that comes with time and wear), iki (the elegant restraint that is the highest form of taste), shakkei (the principle of "borrowed scenery," by which the garden incorporates the landscape beyond its walls). These concepts are not independent. They are facets of a single way of understanding the relationship between space and time, making and meaning, the human body and the world it inhabits.

The machiya — the traditional townhouse of Kyoto, which still survives in significant numbers in the old commercial districts of the city — is the most accessible introduction to this way of understanding. It is narrow (frontages were taxed by the street in medieval Kyoto, so houses ran deep into the block), built around a series of transitional spaces that mediate between public and private, interior and exterior, the business of the street and the intimacy of the family. The facade is timber. The floors are tatami or polished cedar. The shoji screens divide and reveal simultaneously: closed, they create privacy and filter light; open, they dissolve the boundary between adjacent spaces.

The quality of light in a machiya is the thing that Westerners most reliably cannot prepare for. Junichiro Tanizaki, in his 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, articulated what Japanese architecture had known for centuries: that beauty in these spaces is inseparable from indirection. The light comes through multiple layers of shoji and engawa before reaching the interior, losing its directness and gaining, in exchange, a quality he calls "the glow of gold in shadow." The effect is of a space illuminated from within rather than from without — which is, in a quite precise way, what occurs.

We spent three weeks in Japan — in Kyoto primarily, but also in Nara and in the rural Nantan area where several well-preserved minka farmhouses can be understood in their original landscape context — studying the relationship between these historic spaces and the contemporary Japanese architectural practice that has grown from them.

The architects working in this tradition — Kengo Kuma, certainly, but also Junya Ishigami, Sou Fujimoto, and a generation of younger practitioners whose work has not yet had the international exposure it deserves — are not engaged in nostalgia. They are working with a spatial vocabulary that is, in their assessment, more sophisticated than the one Western modernism developed, and more capable of answering the questions that contemporary life poses to architecture. The questions of density, of privacy, of the relationship between interior and exterior, of how space can affect the quality of attention and the quality of time: Japanese architecture has been answering these questions for a thousand years.

Sou Fujimoto, whose work combines the traditional Japanese interest in threshold and transition with a formal language that owes nothing to historic precedent, speaks about the influence of the machiya in terms of principle rather than form: "What I learned from traditional Japanese space is that the boundary between inside and outside is not a wall. It is a negotiation. The space is always asking: how close are you willing to be? How far? The architecture creates a grammar of approach and withdrawal, and within that grammar, the person is always making choices. You feel, in a good Japanese space, that you are the one deciding where you are."

This — the sense of agency within a spatial grammar, the feeling that the space is offering you possibilities rather than constraining you within a plan — is what the great historic spaces actually do. The tearoom, which reduces the world to approximately three tatami mats and a tokonoma alcove with a single flower, is not a room for humility in the penitential sense. It is a room for the specific kind of attention that can only happen when there is nothing else present. The reduction is not denial. It is clarity.

Contemporary Japanese architects have found ways to translate this into high-rise apartments, public libraries, museums, and private houses that range from the extremely traditional to the formally radical. What they share is the underlying question: what does this space make possible in the person who inhabits it? The answer, at the level of great Japanese architecture, is consistently the same: it makes attention possible. And attention, in a world that attacks it from every direction, is the most luxurious thing that space can give.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 5/13/26 Author Magazine 5/13/26

The Couture Client: An Intimate Portrait of the Women Who Still Commission Clothes to Be Made

Fewer than four thousand women in the world are couture clients. Here, for the first time, three of them speak.

“The garment knows me. My proportions, my posture, the specific way I carry my weight. There is a precision in the fit of a couture piece that is not about vanity. It is about truth.”

She requested that we not describe her apartment. She was specific about this — not coy or vague, but precise: "The apartment is not part of the story." This is itself part of the story, and part of why we agreed: the women who commission haute couture at the level we are discussing have a relationship with privacy that is not about hiding but about proportion. They understand that the way a thing is framed determines how it is understood, and they have spent their lives controlling the framing.

The three women we spoke with for this piece are, between them, clients of at least five Parisian houses. Their combined annual couture expenditure is, in the language of the houses themselves, "significant." They are not the youngest clients — none is under fifty — and they are not the most famous, which is partially by choice and partially by the logic of a world that reserves its largest couture budget for women who came to it through inheritance, extended relationship, and the particular kind of commitment that the houses describe, with diplomatic understatement, as "loyalty."

What they share is harder to describe than their differences. They are, as individuals, extraordinarily unlike each other: a Mexican gallerist in her early sixties who began commissioning couture after a period of illness that she describes as "the thing that clarified my relationship to beauty"; a Japanese businesswoman in her late fifties who has worked with a single house for twenty-two years and has attended every show in that time; and a European woman of considerable inherited wealth who asked us not to specify her nationality and who speaks about her relationship with couture with the directness of someone who has long since stopped being self-conscious about it.

We did not ask them about the cost. The cost is, in this context, genuinely not the point — not because they do not know it, which they do, but because the relationship between the cost and what the garments represent is not a financial relationship. It is, as the European woman puts it, "the relationship between time and form. You are paying for the time of very skilled people over many months. What you receive is not a garment. It is an object that contains those months."

The Mexican gallerist speaks about her commissions in terms she would also use for the works she acquires for her gallery: provenance, intention, the relationship between the maker and the made. "When I think about why I buy couture rather than the very best ready-to-wear," she says, "it comes down to this: the garment knows me. My proportions, my posture, the specific way I carry my weight, the shoulder that is slightly lower than the other. The garment has been made for these facts. No off-the-rack garment, however expensive, has been made for those facts. There is a precision in the fit of a couture piece that is not about vanity. It is about truth."

The Japanese client speaks about the relationship with the house in terms of obligation — the Japanese concept of on, which implies a debt of gratitude for care received that is repaid through loyalty and attention — and about the shows as something approaching a ritual. "I go to the show to understand what the designer has been thinking for the past six months," she says. "Then I go to the fitting to understand which of those thoughts speaks to me. It is a conversation. Not a transaction."

The European woman is the most expansive on the subject of time. She owns pieces from forty years of commissioning, most of which she still wears. She can describe, without reference, the circumstances in which each significant piece was made, who was at the fittings, what was happening in her life. "A couture garment," she says, "is a document of a period of your life. Not just of the body you had at that time — though it is that, and it is strange and moving to try on a piece from twenty years ago and feel the difference — but of where you were in yourself. The houses know this. The best ateliers understand that they are not just making a garment. They are making a moment."

We asked all three women the same closing question: what do they feel, in the final fitting, when the garment is ready? The gallerist said: "Recognition. Like meeting someone you had imagined but never seen." The Japanese client said: "Peace. A very specific peace." The European woman thought for a long time. Then she said: "I feel that I was right to want this. I feel that the wanting was justified."

This is, perhaps, the deepest function of couture: not the garment itself, but the justification of the desire for it. The confirmation that beauty, pursued with seriousness over time, produces something that deserves the pursuit.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 5/10/26 Author Magazine 5/10/26

The Return of the Salon: How Collectors in Four Cities Are Rebuilding the Lost Art of Living with Art

Not galleries. Not white walls. Not investment-grade isolation. The renewed practice of surrounding yourself, daily and chaotically, with things that matter.

“I have been looking at this painting for forty years. I understand it better this year than last year. I expect to understand it better next year. This is what it means to own something.”

There is a dining room in Antwerp that has not had a bare wall since 1987. This is not the result of acquisition for its own sake — the woman who lives here is deliberate to the point of severity in what she brings into the space. It is the result of a philosophy about what it means to be in the same room as a painting over years and decades: the way it changes, the way your relationship to it changes, the way it participates in the life of the room.

She is a retired textile designer who spent forty years making fabric for the couture houses of Paris and Milan. She has never had money of the kind that makes news — no single work cost more than what she calls "a medium amount, for the painting, not for the market." She owns approximately sixty works of art, of which perhaps eight would be recognizable to the international art market. The others are by artists whose names the market has not found, or has found and lost, or will find eventually and which she intends to be beyond caring about by then.

The tradition she represents — let us call it the inhabited collection — is one of the oldest forms of cultural engagement and, in the era of the investment-grade artwork stored in a Geneva freeport, one of the most endangered. The idea that art is something you live with, daily, in changing light, through the various seasons of your own life, and that this continuous relationship is what the art is for — this idea has been obscured, in the culture's imagination, by the more glamorous narrative of acquisition and value.

We spent time, over the course of several months, with collectors in four cities — Antwerp, Palermo, Mexico City, and Seoul — who are practitioners of what might be called domestic art life: people for whom the relationship with the objects they own is an ongoing and evolving conversation rather than a completed transaction.

In Palermo, a retired surgeon in his late seventies has been collecting Sicilian and Southern Italian painting since 1972. The work spans five centuries. The oldest piece — a fifteenth-century panel painting of a saint whose name he is no longer certain of — hangs above the kitchen table. He eats under it every morning. "I have been looking at this painting for forty years," he says. "I understand it better this year than last year. I expect to understand it better next year. This is what it means to own something."

In Mexico City, an architect in her early fifties has organized her collection around a principle she calls "productive dissonance": she deliberately places works that would not be shown together by any curator — a pre-Columbian fragment beside a contemporary Japanese painting beside a neon piece by a Mexican artist whose politics she disagrees with and whose work she finds impossible to live without. "The disagreement between the works," she says, "keeps me in a conversation with all of them. If everything agreed, I would stop looking."

In Seoul, a couple who have been collecting together for twenty-five years speak about the domestic collection as a form of shared language — works acquired during periods of their life that have embedded in the objects something that is now, necessarily, about memory and time as much as about aesthetics. "We don't know what this painting is worth," one of them says, gesturing at a large canvas over the sofa. "We know what it was. We know what it is now. These are very different things."

What these collectors share is not wealth — the range of economic resources is wide — and not taste, in any unified sense. They share a practice: the practice of continuous looking, of returning to the same works in different states of mind and different qualities of light, of allowing the relationship between yourself and an object to develop at the pace that relationships actually develop, which is slow.

The white wall of the gallery is a provisional space: it shows the work to the maximum number of people under the most neutral possible conditions. It is a democratic gesture, and a valuable one. But it is not how the work was made to be seen. Most paintings — most great paintings, from the Flemish cabinet pieces to the Rococo ceilings to the abstract works of the twentieth century — were made to be lived with. To be seen repeatedly, in the peripheral vision, across the table, from a particular chair in a particular corner of a room. To be part of the texture of a life.

The dining room in Antwerp has a painting over the mantelpiece that she bought in 1994, by a Belgian artist who died in 2003. She has spent thirty years with it. She knows, she says, every square centimeter of its surface — not intellectually but physically, the way you know the faces of the people you love.

When I ask what the painting is of, she hesitates. "It is of a woman in a chair," she says. "But mostly it is of time."

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 5/2/26 Author Magazine 5/2/26

The New Black: How a Generation of Designers Is Building Fashion's Most Radical Proposition

Not trends. Not seasons. A permanent, considered, utterly contemporary wardrobe — and the designers in four cities making it possible.

“The value of a garment is inseparable from the quality of thought that went into it. And quality of thought requires time — time to source the fabric, to arrive at the cut, to make the decision about whether the thing is genuinely ready.”

There is a woman in Copenhagen who has not bought a trend garment in nine years. This is not asceticism. She is extraordinarily well dressed. Her wardrobe is, by her own account, approximately forty pieces, each of which she bought with the same level of consideration she would bring to an architectural decision, and each of which she still wears with the same frequency and satisfaction as the day it arrived.

She is not a minimalist, in the strict aesthetic sense. The pieces are not all white or all black or identically structured. They are, rather, unified by a quality of resolution — the sense that the designer, when making them, had arrived at a final answer rather than a provisional one. She wears Auralee. She wears Studio Nicholson. She wears a Japanese brand called Comoli whose annual output is so deliberately limited that acquiring pieces requires effort. She wears things she found in archives and things she had made to measure and things that are, technically, menswear. The wardrobe is, as a whole, a portrait of a specific intelligence applied to clothing over time.

This is the conversation that the fashion industry is not having, because it cannot afford to. The industry runs on novelty: on the proposition that what exists now is not sufficient and that what arrives next will be better. This proposition is, for a growing number of the most thoughtful dressers in the world, simply not credible. They have found the things that work. They are not waiting for something new.

The designers who serve these people are not household names, largely because household names require a scale of production and a pace of output that is incompatible with what they are doing. Auralee, founded in Kyoto in 2015 by Ryota Iwai, produces small runs of fabric-forward pieces in natural materials chosen with an obsessiveness that borders on the theological. The touch of the cloth is the point. Not the silhouette, not the reference, not the season. The cloth.

Studio Nicholson, founded in London by Nick Wakeman, operates on a similar premise: that the value of a garment is inseparable from the quality of thought that went into it, and that quality of thought requires time — time to source the fabric, to arrive at the cut, to make the decision about whether the thing is genuinely ready. Collections are small. They sell out slowly. They remain in use for decades.

The Japanese designers in this conversation — Comoli, Outil, Auralee, and a handful of others whose names do not translate well into international press — operate within a tradition of clothing philosophy that has no direct equivalent in Western fashion. It proceeds from the principle that a garment is a relationship between maker, material, and wearer, and that this relationship has a dignity requiring care at every stage. You do not rush it. You do not compromise the material for the deadline. You do not make something you would not wear yourself.

The conversation extends to Europe: Margaret Howell in London, whose practice has been making the same essential argument since 1970; Norse Projects in Copenhagen, which approaches the Nordic wardrobe tradition with the same intellectual seriousness; the Paris-based Officine Générale, whose founder Jean-Michel Millot trained at Charvet and brings a shirt-maker's precision to the whole vocabulary of dressed life.

What these designers share is not a visual aesthetic — the work spans a considerable range of looks — but an approach to the problem of making. They are, in different ways and from different traditions, asking the same question: what is the most honest version of this garment? And then, crucially, making it.

The commercial model is, in each case, different. Some work with retail partners. Some sell direct. Some produce so few pieces that their entire output could fit in a single room. What they have in common is financial sustainability without scale: they have found the number of people in the world who want what they make, and they make that amount, and they are not trying to grow beyond it.

This is, for the fashion industry, a revolutionary proposition. The industry is built on the premise that more is always available and always better. These designers are making the case — with their practices, their materials, and their results — that less, done with absolute commitment, is the more powerful argument.

The woman in Copenhagen has been approached by several of these designers, who found her through the slow accumulation of her public appreciation for their work. She has met some of them. She says, of these encounters: "They dress exactly the way I thought they would." This is, in the context of what we are discussing, the highest possible compliment.

By Oona chanel

Author Magazine 4/29/26 Author Magazine 4/29/26

Loewe at the Crossroads: What Mc Collough and Hernandez Inherit —and What They Must Invent

Jonathan Anderson left. Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez arrived. The most watched handover in fashion right now — and what it means for the house that craft built.

“Anderson organized the house around craft, around art, around the idea that fashion could be a site of genuine intellectual curiosity. This is the rarest form of luxury brand-building — and the most difficult to replicate.”

The exit was graceful and the entrance is careful. This is, in fashion, the best possible combination — and it is not always available. When Jonathan Anderson announced in March 2025 that he was leaving Loewe after eleven years, the industry had the unusual luxury of knowing what came next: Dior, where he is now Creative Director of both women's and men's collections, writing what will be one of the most scrutinized chapters in the house's history. And at Loewe, effective April 7, 2025: Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the Parsons-trained American duo who built Proenza Schouler from a graduation collection into one of New York's most respected fashion names over twenty years.

The handover matters beyond the personnel because of what Anderson built and what it will now be asked to sustain. In eleven years, he took a Spanish leather goods house founded in 1846 — respected within the industry, essentially unknown outside it — and made it one of the most culturally alive brands in fashion. The strategy was not conventional: rather than chasing trend velocity or celebrity adjacency, Anderson organized the house around craft, around art, around the idea that fashion could be a site of genuine intellectual curiosity. The Loewe Craft Prize, which he established in 2016, was not a marketing gesture. It was a philosophical position: this house believes that the knowledge held in skilled hands is among the most valuable things in the world.

The results were commercial as well as critical. Revenues multiplied more than seven times over his tenure, approaching two billion euros. The Puzzle bag became one of the most coveted objects in contemporary fashion. The shows — which referenced William de Morgan tiles, Bloomsbury textiles, the work of Donald Judd — were among the most discussed of each season. The house went from peripheral to central not by becoming louder but by becoming more serious. This is the rarest form of luxury brand-building, and it is the most difficult to replicate.

McCollough and Hernandez are serious people. Their twenty years at Proenza Schouler produced a body of work that was consistently, intelligently itself: the PS1 bag, the woven leather and textile collaborations with Jack Lenor Larsen, the downtown New York cool that never tipped into irony or emptiness. They left their own house in January 2025 — their twentieth anniversary, they said, prompting "a deep reflection" — and arrived at Loewe two and a half months later. The speed of the transition suggests either very efficient conversations or conversations that began some time before the official announcements.

The open question — which the industry is discussing with a level of engagement that reflects how much Anderson's Loewe meant to it — is not whether McCollough and Hernandez are good enough. They are. The question is whether the specific thing Anderson built at Loewe is transferable or whether it was, in the deepest sense, his: the product of a singular sensibility operating in a specific cultural moment, which produced a specific result that cannot simply be continued by new hands, however skilled.

The Loewe Foundation's CEO Pascale Lepoivre, speaking at the announcement, was careful: the new directors will carry the creative responsibility for all collections, but the house's cultural infrastructure — the Craft Prize, the Casa concept, the foundation's art program — is larger than any individual creative director and will continue. This is true and also insufficient as an answer to the deeper question. The Craft Prize without the sensibility that made it mean something is a grant program. The cultural program without the fashion to give it context is philanthropy. The question is whether the new directors can make the connections feel necessary rather than institutional.

What McCollough and Hernandez bring that Anderson did not have — and that is genuinely valuable at a house this size — is the specific knowledge of running a business independently for twenty years, of making every decision with full accountability, of understanding the relationship between creative vision and commercial reality without the buffer of a large group structure. They know what it costs to make things. They know what craft means when you have had to negotiate for the budget to do it properly.

Their first collection, expected in Paris this September, will be the first real evidence of what the new chapter looks like. Until then, the house is in the most interesting state available to a luxury brand: between stories, carrying the weight of everything that has been built, navigating toward something that does not yet have a name.

This is, in its own way, a form of craft: the making of something that does not yet exist, from materials that have to be understood before they can be used. McCollough and Hernandez have been doing this their whole careers.

The question is whether they can do it here.

By Oona chanel

Author Magazine 4/25/26 Author Magazine 4/25/26

The Unseen Hand: Inside the Ateliers Where the Greatest Clothes in the World Are Made

“What they know is not in any database. It is in their hands and their eyes and their understanding of fabric that has come from decades of touching it every day.”

You will never own what they make. But understanding how it is made changes everything about the way you dress.

Lesage embroidery atelier - chanel
Maison Lesage *YVES SAINT LAURENT, Paris*

The first lesson they teach at the Lesage embroidery atelier on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré is how to thread a needle. This is not a metaphor. You thread it in a specific way, between specific fingers, with a specific tension in the wrist that takes three months to make unconscious. Everything that follows—the centuries of accumulated technique, the vocabulary of stitches that do not exist anywhere in written form because they were never written down, the capacity to look at a designer’s sketch and understand what it requires before it is explained—everything flows from that one physical fact: the thread and the needle and the hand that holds them.

This is what haute couture is. Not the show. Not the photograph. Not the celebrity in the front row or the price tag or the cultural moment. The show is forty minutes. The photograph lasts thirty seconds. The garment on the body of the person who will wear it—if it is a true couture piece, made in a true couture atelier—contains something in the order of two thousand hours of human thought. That is the thing most people never see.

We were granted unusual access to three of Paris’s most significant specialist ateliers over a period of six weeks in early 2026. The Lesage house, now part of the Chanel Métiers d’Art family since 2002, employs fourteen embroiderers. The average tenure is nineteen years. The oldest practitioner, who requested anonymity, has been working here for thirty-seven years and retains in her hands techniques that have never been documented and exist nowhere but in her. She is sixty-one. There is no succession plan.

The featherwork atelier of André Lemarié—also Chanel, also Métiers d’Art—is a different kind of silence. Featherwork is one of the most particular skills in the world: the preparation and application of feathers to textile requires a physical sensitivity that cannot be taught from a book, a manual, or a video. You learn it from a person who learned it from a person. The chain of transmission is direct and human and always, at its furthest end, fragile.

What strikes you, moving through these spaces, is not their beauty—though they are beautiful—but their quality of concentration. The women (they are almost all women) do not look up when you enter. They are not being rude. They are being honest: what they are doing requires a level of attention that cannot be partially extended. To look up is to break the thought. And the thought, in this work, is measured in millimetres.

The irony of where haute couture finds itself in 2026 is this: never has the category been more financially robust—the major houses report record couture revenues, driven partly by new wealth in Asia and the Gulf—and never has the knowledge required to execute it been more endangered. The practitioners who hold the most specific and irreplaceable skills are, almost universally, in the last decade or two of their working lives. Their apprentices exist, but in smaller numbers, and the apprenticeship is long—five to seven years before genuine independence—and the compensation, particularly in the early years, does not reflect the rarity of what is being transmitted.

François-Gauthier Destailleur, who runs the couture business of the house of Balenciaga, puts it with characteristic directness: “What we make is possible only because of what these people know. And what they know is not in any database. It is in their hands and their eyes and their understanding of fabric that has come from decades of touching it every day. If we do not solve the transmission problem, we do not have haute couture. We have very expensive prêt-à-porter.”

The transmission problem is, in the end, a question of will and money and status. A civilization that decided the knowledge of an embroiderer was worth preserving would preserve it—would pay for the time required to transmit it properly, would create the conditions in which a young person could reasonably choose this life without sacrificing the ability to eat. That this has not yet happened in any systematic way is a fact about the values of the fashion industry that the fashion industry would prefer not to examine.

We sat for a long time in the Lesage atelier on the last day of our visit, watching a woman whose name we were not given working on a piece that was not described to us. She was applying gold thread to black silk in a pattern so dense it was difficult to identify as pattern at all—it appeared, at distance, to be a field of light. She had been working on this particular section, she said, for eleven days. She expected to be finished by the end of the following week.

We asked if she ever grew tired of it. She considered this seriously. Then she said: “No. Every day it is different. The light is different. My hands are slightly different. The piece is slightly different. You cannot grow tired of something that is never the same.

By Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 4/23/26 Author Magazine 4/23/26

Salone del Mobile 2026: The Fair That Decided Design Has Something to Say

Visualisation of *Aurea,* an interpretation of an imaginary luxurious, cinematic hotel

The 64th edition ran April 21–26 in Milan. Author was on the ground. Here is what mattered — and what it means for the future of the designed world.

“The best objects here were not the most expensive or the most photographed. They were the ones that seemed to know, with certainty, who they were for and what they were for. In a fair of hundreds of thousands of objects, this quality is extremely rare — and absolutely unmistakable.”

The concert at La Scala opened it. This detail, which was new for 2026, was either a statement of cultural ambition or a piece of theater, depending on your degree of cynicism — and at the Salone del Mobile, the world's largest furniture and design fair, the degree of cynicism you arrive with tends to determine what you see. Those of us who arrived willing to be surprised found, over six days at the Rho Fiera fairgrounds and across the city's showrooms, installations, and galleries, something that felt genuinely different from previous editions: a fair that had, for the first time in several years, a point of view.

*Metamorphosis in Motion* by Lina Ghotmeh is part of the dynamic *MoscaPartners Variations* exhibition, designed to reflect Fuorisalone’s theme

The point of view is not yet a consensus, and it is not without contradiction. But it is present: a widespread, if unevenly executed, conviction that design in 2026 must grapple with value — not market value, which the fair has never lacked for, but meaning. What is an object for? What does it ask of the person who lives with it? What does it give back? These are old questions. The fact that they are being asked loudly, at a fair of more than 1,900 exhibitors across 169,000 square meters, is new.

The most significant structural change of this edition was the debut of Salone Raritas — a dedicated section for collectible design, limited-edition pieces, and what the organizers call "outsider objects," curated by Annalisa Rosso and given physical form by the exhibition design of Formafantasma, the Amsterdam-based Italian design duo whose practice operates precisely at the intersection of material intelligence and cultural argument. Raritas was positioned in Pavilions 9–11 with a circular layout conceived so that every element could be disassembled and reused — a formal commitment to the sustainable logic it was supposed to embody rather than merely describe.

*glo art* 2026 is an immersive installation symbolising connection and belonging

What it contained was the most interesting collection of objects in the fair: pieces by Nilufar, whose founder Nina Yashar has spent twenty years insisting that the line between design and art is a bureaucratic distinction rather than an aesthetic one; Salviati working with Draga & Aurel in Murano glass; Brun Fine Arts with a selection of mid-century European pieces that needed no curatorial context; and a sequence of independent studios from Mexico City, Seoul, and São Paulo whose work the international design market is still catching up to. Raritas was, among the hundreds of thousands of objects on display this week, the place where you felt most strongly that you were looking at things that had been made with a genuine idea of who they were for.

Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades Bulbo by the Campana Brothers

Beyond the fairgrounds, in the Fuorisalone that transforms Milan into the world's largest temporary design city every April, the most discussed installation was Ai Weiwei's engagement with Rubelli: the artist using silk — a material he had not worked with before — to envelop the Venetian fabric house's showroom in a lampas-woven installation called About Silk, accompanied by a documentary on the parallel origins of the material in China and its craft history in Venice. This was, in the context of a week full of brand activations masquerading as cultural interventions, a genuine cultural intervention.

Circular and sustainable material innovations will be displayed at the exhibition, *The New State of Materials*

At Palazzo Serbelloni, Louis Vuitton's Objets Nomades program presented a reissue of Pierre Legrain's 1920s Art Deco furniture alongside new commissions from Raw Edges and Estudio Campana — a proposition about the relationship between archive and future that the house has been developing with increasing confidence over several years and that, this year, felt fully resolved.

Salviati x Draga & Aurel, Salone Raritas

The Alcova platform — which has been, for several years, the fair's most intellectually honest corner — took over the Baggio Military Hospital for the second consecutive year, placing independent design within a rawness of context that the corporate showrooms of the Brera Design District cannot provide. Alcova's selection this year was more internationally diverse than any previous edition and more willing to include work that was not yet finished in the commercial sense: objects that were still becoming something, presented in the spirit of genuine research rather than product launch.

Ai Weiwei's engagement with Rubelli: the artist using silk

Rem Koolhaas delivered his lecture on the transformation of collective spaces with the intellectual violence that characterizes everything OMA produces at this scale: a diagnosis of what hospitality, retail, and public space have become and what they might be made into by the Salone Contract initiative that will make its full debut in 2027. Whether the Salone can actually execute on the ambitions Koolhaas articulated is a question that will be answered over the next several years. The ambition itself — to connect design to the large-scale construction of environments rather than merely the furnishing of them — is correct.

SaloneSatellite, the fair's platform for designers under 35, reached its twenty-seventh edition with a theme that felt more urgent than most curatorial premises manage: the relationship between handcraft and emerging digital fabrication technologies, and the question of whether these are opposites or — as the strongest work on display argued — a single continuous investigation into what the human hand can do when its range of tools expands. The answer, in the work of the most interesting young designers here, was consistently that the digital and the manual are not in competition. They are in conversation.

The fair closed, as it always does, with the city slightly exhausted and the industry slightly altered. Not transformed — the Salone is too large and too commercial to transform in a single edition. But the argument that was made across Raritas, Alcova, Fuorisalone, and the lecture halls was coherent enough to constitute a direction: design in 2026 is trying to remember that it is, before it is a market, a practice. A way of thinking through objects about how human beings should live.

Left: Haworth & Cassina by Patricia Urquiola at Villa Pestarini; right: Supaform at Baggio military hospital

The best objects here — a few dozen, in a fair of hundreds of thousands — embodied this. They will be in the rooms of people who understood what they were looking at, being looked at and used and understood more fully over years. That is what the Salone, at its best, has always been for.

By Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 4/20/26 Author Magazine 4/20/26

Schiaparelli at the V&A: When Discomfort Becomes Legacy

Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealist disruption enters the museum — and confronts its own afterlife in contemporary fashion

Schiaparelli did not design to beautify the body — she designed to destabilize it. The museum can preserve that gesture, but it cannot restore its original force.

The Victoria and Albert Museum is not simply presenting Elsa Schiaparelli. It is doing something more complicated than that: it is placing one of fashion’s most destabilizing minds inside the calm machinery of cultural recognition. That is no small act.

The exhibition, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, is framed as a celebration of genius — and of course it is. Schiaparelli was a genius. But celebration is never neutral. It tends to imply resolution, and Schiaparelli was never resolved. Her work was too sharp, too strange, too psychologically charged to sit entirely comfortably inside a narrative of heritage.

What she made was not merely imaginative fashion, nor even simply couture in conversation with art. She approached dress as a form of interference. Working in close proximity to Surrealism — not as an aesthetic moodboard, but as an intellectual and cultural force — she understood the body as unstable terrain. Her collaborations with Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau were not ornamental alliances. They were extensions of a deeper inquiry into distortion, desire, displacement, and the instability of appearances.

Surrealism, for Schiaparelli, was never fantasy in the soft sense. It was rupture.

That is what the strongest garments still communicate. The skeleton dress does not merely depict anatomy; it inverts the logic of the body, pulling what should remain hidden outward into view. The lobster dress does not decorate the surface so much as disrupt it, placing something faintly erotic and faintly absurd exactly where composure would normally reside. The shoe hat is not whimsical in any harmless sense. It is an act of displacement, a refusal of function, a joke with consequences. These clothes did not simply adorn the body. They made the body strange.

That is the essential point, and also the one most at risk of being softened once Schiaparelli enters the museum. Institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum do what museums are designed to do: they preserve, organize, contextualize, and canonize. They take what was once unruly and place it inside historical continuity. They explain what once unsettled. They convert aggression into significance and difficulty into legacy. This does not erase Schiaparelli’s radicalism. But it does change its temperature.

Inside the museum, her work is no longer encountered as interruption. It is encountered as knowledge. The garments are lit, framed, and narrated. Their strangeness is made legible. Their provocation is translated into innovation. Their discomfort becomes part of a lineage. That, in itself, is fascinating, because the exhibition arrives at a moment when Schiaparelli has already been returned to the center of fashion under Daniel Roseberry. And here the story becomes more layered than a simple opposition between original radicality and contemporary appropriation.

Roseberry’s achievement should not be dismissed. On the contrary, what he has done with the house is, in many ways, extraordinary. He has understood Schiaparelli’s codes with real conviction: anatomy, exaggeration, surreal scale, bodily symbolism, the charged relation between ornament and object. He has taken a dormant house and returned it to cultural life, not timidly but with force. He has made Schiaparelli visible again. He has made it desirable. He has made it part of contemporary fashion’s central conversation. That matters. And it is not, in itself, a betrayal.

If Elsa’s work emerged in an era when fashion could still interrupt from within, Roseberry is working in a system governed by instantaneous visibility. The red carpet, the editorial image, the social feed, the global cycle of fashion imagery — all of this demands immediacy. A garment now has to register in a split second. It has to survive the speed of attention. In that context, the contemporary Schiaparelli does something very different from Elsa’s original work, but not necessarily something lesser. It translates her language into a new condition. The difference is not that the house has become superficial. It is that the surreal now operates under different terms. Elsa used surrealism to destabilize the body. Roseberry often uses it to monumentalize it. Elsa’s garments introduced tension and left it unresolved. The contemporary house sharpens that tension into image, into icon, into desire. The grotesque becomes luxurious. The strange becomes aspirational. The unsettling becomes highly legible.

This is precisely why the house is polarizing, and precisely why it is effective. From one perspective, something is inevitably lost: opacity, friction, the refusal to be easily understood. But from another, something significant is gained. Schiaparelli is no longer a historical reference or a niche intellectual fascination. It is living fashion again. It circulates. It provokes. It generates longing. Its objects are wanted. And want, in fashion, is never trivial. It is one of the central mechanisms through which cultural power is expressed.

What the V&A exhibition captures, perhaps more clearly than it intends to, is the tension between those two Schiaparellis: Schiaparelli as rupture and Schiaparelli as system; Schiaparelli as disturbance and Schiaparelli as desire. The distance between them is not a failure of the exhibition. It is its real subject.

The broader shift the show exposes is the movement from rarity to repetition. Schiaparelli’s original works were singular interruptions. They appeared against expectation and violated it. Today, her codes are endlessly reproduced, cited, circulated, and identified at a glance. Anatomy, surreal gesture, bodily symbolism, conceptual ornament: all have entered the visual vocabulary of contemporary luxury fashion. And with repetition comes recognition. Recognition, in turn, changes the emotional charge of an image. What once produced unease now often produces instant comprehension. What once demanded interpretation now invites identification. This is not unique to Schiaparelli; it is the condition of contemporary fashion itself, in which ambiguity is constantly pressured by the need for visibility. Still, the exhibition does not collapse under that pressure. Because the garments remain stronger than the narratives around them.

Even under glass, they retain friction. They do not sit entirely still. They resist pure admiration. There remains, in the best pieces, something unresolved, slightly insolent, faintly improper. They still suggest that elegance can be contaminated by absurdity, that glamour can coexist with aggression, that beauty can become psychologically unstable without losing its force. That is where Schiaparelli continues to matter.

Not only as a genius, though she was one. Not only as a pioneer, though she was that too. But as a designer who understood that clothing could do more than seduce or signify status. It could produce disorientation. It could disturb the body’s image of itself. It could make thought visible.

The real question the V&A raises is not whether Schiaparelli deserves celebration. She does.

It is whether fashion can still sustain that level of discomfort once it has been institutionalized, aestheticized, and absorbed into the economy of desire.

Can surrealism still unsettle once it becomes a luxury language?

Can the body still be destabilized by a garment designed to circulate instantly and beautifully?

Can fashion still think critically in a culture that rewards immediate legibility?

Elsa answered those questions one way.

The contemporary house answers them another.

The V&A, perhaps unintentionally, places both answers in the same room. That is what makes the exhibition worth taking seriously. Because what it finally offers is not a simple retrospective, nor a straightforward celebration of genius, but a confrontation between two conditions: the original disturbance and its afterlife. The museum can preserve Schiaparelli. It can elevate her. It can explain her. But it cannot fully restore the moment when these clothes first appeared as acts of elegant sabotage. That moment is gone.

What remains is the trace of it — and, if you look closely, the discomfort has not disappeared. It has merely changed form.

By Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 4/15/26 Author Magazine 4/15/26

Pierre Yovanovitch’s Exacting Interiors

Pierre Yovanovitch is often grouped into the broad, exhausted category of quiet luxury. The label is useful for branding and almost useless for criticism.

What defines his work is not quietness, nor luxury in any generic sense, but control.

Yovanovitch’s interiors are highly disciplined exercises in proportion, scale, and spatial pressure. They are designed to appear effortless, but their effect depends on rigorous calibration. A room is pared back, but never empty. A chair is oversized, but never clumsy. A wall is left almost bare, yet it carries as much visual weight as a decorative scheme in a lesser interior. His work is not about reduction as style. It is about composition as structure.

That distinction matters.

Before founding his studio, Yovanovitch worked in fashion at Pierre Cardin, and traces of that training remain visible in the precision of his interiors. He understands line, silhouette, and the relation between softness and construction. He places furniture the way a couturier places volume on a body: to correct, elongate, balance, or interrupt. The result is that his rooms do not read as decorated spaces so much as controlled environments.

His most iconic interiors make this clear. Whether in Paris, New York, London, or Provence, the rooms tend to be built around a few decisive formal elements: a sculptural armchair, a massive fireplace, a monolithic table, a carefully judged threshold between one volume and the next. Nothing is there to fill space. Each object has a structural role.

This is why his interiors hold.

They are not image-led rooms, despite how often they are photographed. They are rooms constructed through spatial logic. Their success depends on proportion before palette, on mass before mood.

The so-called Papa Bear chairs are an instructive example. They are frequently treated as charming signatures, almost mascots of the studio, but their real importance is architectural. Their exaggerated curvature softens strict interiors without sentimentalizing them. They introduce tactility and scale at once. They are comfortable, certainly, but more importantly they organize the room around themselves.

Yovanovitch is strongest when he resists prettiness.

At his best, he works within a lineage of twentieth-century French interior design without lapsing into citation. One can detect echoes of Jean-Michel Frank in the restraint, Jean Royère in the sculptural ease, and broader postwar modernist principles in the handling of volume and material. But these influences are absorbed rather than performed. His rooms do not depend on vintage nostalgia or collector signaling to establish authority.

That is one of their strengths.

The material palette is similarly controlled. Oak, plaster, stone, ceramic, bronze, velvet, bouclé: these materials are not deployed as luxury markers but as tonal instruments. Yovanovitch understands that texture is not ornamental. It determines how light behaves, how the eye travels, how the body registers a room. Matte plaster can quiet a space more effectively than decoration. A single polished surface can sharpen an otherwise soft composition.

There is also a notable severity beneath the warmth. This is where his work avoids the common failure of contemporary luxury interiors, which often confuse softness with ease. Yovanovitch’s rooms may feel calm, but they are not casual. They are exact. Their atmosphere is produced through discipline, not relaxation.

That rigor is what gives the work durability.

In an era of over-resolved interiors designed for immediate legibility, Yovanovitch remains committed to slower effects. His rooms are not built around instant recognition or excessive visual incident. They reveal themselves through use, movement, and duration. The eye adjusts. Proportions begin to register. The authority of the room emerges gradually.

This is a more serious proposition than lifestyle luxury.

Pierre Yovanovitch’s best interiors demonstrate that restraint is not an aesthetic mood but an architectural method. Their refinement lies not in what they display, but in how precisely they are composed. That is why they endure.

By Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 4/14/26 Author Magazine 4/14/26

Why Pedro Pascal Matters to Chanel Now

The house’s newest ambassador is less a celebrity announcement than a clue to how Matthieu Blazy may be recalibrating Chanel’s image, business and future.

At Chanel, faces are never just faces. They are signals — of mood, of market, of who the house believes it is speaking to next.

So Pedro Pascal’s appointment as a house ambassador should be read less as a celebrity endorsement and more as an insider clue to the direction of Chanel under Matthieu Blazy. The real interest lies not in the headline itself, but in what it reveals about where the house may be moving aesthetically and commercially.

Chanel has always understood the power of a singular face. In the modern era, the house has built entire chapters of its mythology through women who did more than wear the brand — they defined its emotional era. Think of Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrmann’s No. 5: The Film, still one of luxury’s most culturally resonant campaigns, where Chanel sold not perfume but cinematic desire. Then came Keira Knightley for Coco Mademoiselle, the Parisian heroine in motion, followed by faces like Vanessa Paradis, Lily-Rose Depp, Margot Robbie and Penélope Cruz, each representing a different calibration of femininity, age and cultural relevance.

The point was never simply recognition. It was narrative. Each face told the market what Chanel wanted to feel like. Pedro Pascal is different because he extends that narrative into territory Chanel has historically touched only selectively: male image-building without a formal men’s fashion line.

That alone makes the appointment noteworthy.

Chanel has, of course, worked with men before. Men have fronted watches, fragrance and eyewear campaigns — Gaspard Ulliel for Bleu de Chanel remains perhaps the most iconic example, followed by Timothée Chalamet for the same fragrance in a more contemporary register. But those were product-specific roles. A house ambassador title carries a broader symbolic weight. It places Pascal not inside a single campaign, but within the architecture of the brand itself.

That is a more strategic move.

And it comes at an important moment for Blazy.

What Blazy achieved at Bottega Veneta was not simply product success. It was the re-scripting of desirability through precision, restraint and highly intelligent casting. During his time there, faces and bodies were never incidental. The casting language was part of the design language. Quiet power, tactility, real-world sensuality, and a cultivated seriousness became part of the brand’s image economy. There was always an intelligence to who embodied the clothes.

Pascal fits that logic.

He brings not only visibility but a very specific kind of cultural capital: intellectual warmth, emotional credibility and a masculinity that feels contemporary without being trend-dependent.

This matters because Chanel, unlike many houses, does not need relevance in the obvious sense. What it needs under a new creative era is recalibration.

Blazy inherited one of the most fortified visual identities in fashion. At Chanel, the challenge is not reinvention. It is adjusting the emotional temperature of the house without destabilizing the codes. Pascal does precisely that. He softens the image architecture without diluting authority. This is where the insider read becomes more interesting.

The appointment may not necessarily signal an imminent full menswear line — that would be a much larger strategic decision for a house whose business remains heavily driven by womenswear, handbags, fine jewelry, watches and beauty — but it does open the conversation around male luxury adjacency in a more expansive way.

A men’s capsule is not impossible. In fact, it would be commercially logical.

Luxury houses are increasingly using capsules and limited category drops to test appetite before building out full divisions. Chanel has the infrastructure, the atelier discipline and the cultural leverage to do it successfully if it chooses. A Pascal-led capsule — tailoring, knitwear, outerwear, accessories — would be an immediate global conversation. But financially, the more likely implication is not runway menswear. It is beauty, fragrance and accessories expansion aimed at a broader male luxury customer. That is where the money is. Fragrance remains one of Chanel’s most globally scalable businesses, and a broader male ambassador strategy strengthens that universe considerably. Pascal broadens the emotional territory of the house’s male-facing categories without requiring the cost structure of a full men’s collection.

That is intelligent luxury business.

The appointment also suggests something more subtle about Chanel’s customer strategy. Pascal’s audience is multigenerational and unusually cross-market. He speaks simultaneously to prestige cinema, mass culture, digital audiences and mature luxury consumers. Few figures today can move across those layers with such ease. For Chanel, that translates into reach, but more importantly into trust transfer. Consumers increasingly buy not only product but the emotional credibility of who represents it. Nicole Kidman once gave Chanel cinematic grandeur. Pedro Pascal gives it human warmth.

Under Blazy, that shift may be exactly the point. This is less about celebrity and more about emotional repositioning. A house that has historically been defined by immaculate control now seems interested in making that control feel more lived-in, more human, more emotionally resonant. That is not a minor branding decision. It is often how a new era announces itself before the clothes fully do. And in fashion, the face is usually the first clue.

By Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 4/13/26 Author Magazine 4/13/26

Inside Dolce & Gabbana’s Transfer of Power

**Domenico Dolce** and **Stefano Gabbana**.

As Stefano Cantino steps in and the house confronts a harsher luxury market, the question is no longer whether it can command attention, but whether it can convert that attention into endurance.

There are moments in fashion when a change in title is merely administrative, the sort of corporate rearrangement that briefly animates the trade press before dissolving into the daily churn of collections, campaigns and quarterly reports. And then there are moments that reveal something more structural: a shift in how power itself is held inside a house.

Dolce & Gabbana appears to be entering the latter.

Stefano Cantino’s appointment as co-chief executive alongside Alfonso Dolce, following Stefano Gabbana’s step back from the chairmanship, is not, at least on the surface, a creative break. The visual language of the house — black lace, Sicilian romanticism, devotional excess, familial mythology, sensuality sharpened by sentiment — is unlikely to disappear. Stefano Gabbana remains creatively involved. The runway, one imagines, will continue to speak in the house’s unmistakable grammar.

What is changing is something quieter and in many ways more consequential: the structure around the brand.

For decades, Dolce & Gabbana has existed as one of the last truly founder-sovereign houses in luxury, a company whose commercial and symbolic authority were deeply intertwined with the force of its creators. In stronger years, that model could read as purity. The brand remained singular, emotionally authored, and resistant to the flattening effects of corporate luxury.

But markets change faster than mythology.

Today, the house finds itself operating in a markedly different environment — one in which cultural visibility no longer guarantees retail momentum, and where even the most iconic brands are being asked to justify themselves not only in editorial terms, but in financial ones.

That is what makes this leadership shift important.

The real challenge facing Dolce & Gabbana is not relevance. Few houses remain so immediately legible. It is one of the rare brands that still carries a fully formed world, instantly recognizable across runway imagery, celebrity dressing and social media. The problem is not attention.

The problem is conversion.

Luxury, in this cycle, is experiencing a deeper separation between symbolic power and commercial performance. Consumers continue to engage with brands as cultural events, but purchasing behavior has become far more selective. Admiration travels quickly. Sales do not necessarily follow at the same velocity.

This is where Dolce & Gabbana becomes a particularly revealing case study.

The house remains culturally loud, but the broader market has cooled. Global discretionary spending has softened, and even within resilient luxury segments, customers are buying with more restraint and sharper intent. Aspiration remains intact. Impulse has weakened.

For a house built on emotional heat, that distinction matters enormously.

Cantino’s arrival should therefore be read less as a stylistic intervention than as an institutional one.

His background — spanning Prada, Louis Vuitton and Gucci — places him squarely in the disciplines that matter most in a market like this: communications, brand architecture, commercial structure and operational clarity. He is not being brought in to give Dolce & Gabbana a new face. He is being brought in to give it a more durable framework and durability is the operative word.

The company is navigating a more demanding financial climate, with debt refinancing and profitability pressures making it increasingly important to reassure lenders, partners and markets that the business can function with greater discipline.

That does not mean softening the brand.

If anything, the greater challenge is the opposite: how to professionalize without neutralizing.

Dolce & Gabbana’s value has never resided in moderation. It has always drawn power from excess — visual, emotional, symbolic. Its authority comes from certainty, from a world so fully authored that it resists dilution.

That is precisely what makes institutional restructuring so delicate.

The risk for founder-led houses is rarely irrelevance. It is overdependence on founder force as an operating system.

What works brilliantly as vision can become fragile as structure. This is the broader question now facing the company: can founder energy continue to function as a sustainable commercial model in a harsher luxury cycle?

Beauty is likely to be central to the answer.

As fashion becomes a less predictable volume business, adjacent categories such as beauty, fragrance, accessories and home increasingly carry the burden of scale. These are the categories through which aspiration becomes repeatable revenue.

Fashion creates the halo. Beauty monetizes it.

That logic becomes especially important in an economic downturn, when the customer may hesitate on high-ticket purchases but still wants access to the symbolic world of the house.

This is where the next phase of Dolce & Gabbana will likely be decided.

Not in whether the runway changes dramatically, but in whether the business around the runway becomes more coherent, more diversified and more financially legible. The coming year will therefore be less about aesthetic reinvention and more about proof. Proof that the house can remain emotionally powerful while becoming operationally disciplined.

Proof that founder mythology can coexist with institutional maturity. Proof that visibility can once again become velocity. That is the more serious story unfolding here. Not simply who sits in which chair, but what kind of company Dolce & Gabbana now needs to become.

For all the industry’s obsession with spectacle, this may be the more telling transition: a house long defined by the force of its creators arriving at the point where image must answer to structure.

In fashion, that is rarely just a leadership story.

It is the beginning of a different era.

By Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 12/8/25 Author Magazine 12/8/25

The Desert Rose: A Diamond’s Cultural Afterlife

Andres White Correal - Sotheby’s Chairman | Jewellery, EMEA

On how a 31.86-carat stone becomes a symbol, not just a commodity.

In the jewellery salon at St. Regis Saadiyat Island, the room doesn’t fall silent when you walk in. It tilts.

At the centre of that tilt is a single stone: a 31.86-carat Fancy Vivid Orangy Pink diamond known as The Desert Rose — the largest of its kind ever graded by the GIA, estimated at $5–7 million USD.

To call it “a diamond” feels almost insufficient. It is a colour field. A sunset. A thesis about rarity.

“It’s probably one of the most beautiful — and the biggest — GIA-certified orangey-pink stones in the world,”

says Andres White Correal, Chairman of Jewellery for Europe & the Middle East at Sotheby’s.

“A stone like this doesn’t sit in the market. It defines it.”

The Desert Rose - Vivid Orangy Pink diamond.

From Commodity to Cosmology

Technically, The Desert Rose is a pear-shaped diamond of exceptional saturation, a sunset-gradient of pink and orange so intense that even seasoned specialists struggle to describe it without resorting to metaphor.

But what makes it culturally potent is the way it sits in the room.

It is not shown alone in a vitrine, elevated beyond context. Instead, it is part of a single-owner constellation: Kashmir sapphires, Colombian Muzo emeralds, Boucheron rings, vintage Tiffany, and one of the rarest assemblages of pocket watches brought to market in decades — all from the same collector.

Patek Philippe luce watch. Patek Philippe 498G-010

“Everything you see here belongs to one consigner,”

Andrés explains.

“We wanted to bring the best of the best at every price bracket — from a €1,000 pearl pendant to this stone.

It’s incredibly rare to see someone collect in such a cohesive, intelligent way.”

The Desert Rose becomes, in that context, not just a hero lot but a keystone: the gravitational centre of a life’s eye.

Charged Objects

What Andrés says next is where the stone moves beyond appraisal and into afterlife.

“I believe stones get charged with things.

When you hold a jewel, it becomes warm with your warmth and your energy.”

This is where The Desert Rose leaves the narrow world of luxury reporting and steps into something else: it becomes a vessel for human memory.

A future wearer — unknown yet already imagined — will bring their own story, their own pulse, their own warmth to it. The stone will leave Abu Dhabi different than it arrived: re-coded by another set of hands.

In a region where collectors are increasingly drawn not only to value but to meaning, that idea lands with particular force.

“Abu Dhabi has one of the most selective audiences in the world,”

Andrés notes.

“They understand what’s best and what’s unique. You want to bring them objects that are worthy of that attention.”

The Desert Rose as Metaphor

The Desert Rose is being auctioned in a city that has built its own cultural landscape almost from sand: Louvre Abu Dhabi, new museums, sovereign collections, a blossoming of galleries and foundations. In that sense, the stone’s name feels almost prophetic.

It is a mineral fact — 31.86 carats, Fancy Vivid Orangy Pink — and at the same time a metaphor for what’s unfolding here: something rare, saturated, and quietly world-redefining.

One day, this diamond will leave the vitrines of Collectors’ Week and disappear into a private life. It will sit on a hand, attend dinners, cross borders, outlive its owner.

But its afterlife will always circle back to this moment in Abu Dhabi — to the week when a desert city and a desert-named stone met and recognised each other as peers.

RM Sotheby’s Abu Dhabi

At 8 pm GST, a fleet of 32 exceptional automobiles—including a visionary “Triple Crown” of future McLaren race cars—brings the language of collecting into the realm of speed and engineering.

Beyond the auctions, over $100 million in diamonds, colored stones, high jewelry, handbags, and watches is being offered for private sale: from the largest flawless diamond in the world to a deep green diamond of staggering rarity, and covetable Birkin and Kelly bags displayed like small, controlled miracles.

Words by Oona Chanel for Author Magazine

Pictures courtesy Ron John

Author Magazine 9/3/25 Author Magazine 9/3/25

Khadija Al Bastaki: Building Dubai’s Design Future

Dubai is no longer a city defined only by its skyline and luxury shopping. It is fast emerging as one of the world’s most dynamic creative capitals. At the heart of this transformation is Khadija Al Bastaki, Senior Vice President of Dubai Design District (d3), part of TECOM Group PJSC. With a mandate to nurture design talent, attract global players, and build a sustainable creative ecosystem, Al Bastaki has been instrumental in positioning Dubai as both a cultural hub and a global business force.

Her vision is one of balance: heritage and innovation, luxury and independence, local roots and global reach. In this conversation with Author Magazine, Al Bastaki discusses the shifts required to move the Middle East from consumer to creator, the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration, and why “Made in Dubai” must soon become a global marker of excellence.

Oona Chanel: The GCC is home to extraordinary consumer power. How can that spending influence be translated into nurturing regional talent rather than only importing global names?

Khadija Al Bastaki: For a long time, the narrative around the Middle East has been that we consume fashion at a high level but don’t produce it. That is changing, and consumer demand is part of the reason. Buyers now want more than imported names—they are looking for local creatives who blend international polish with regional identity.

At d3, we’re building the infrastructure to meet that demand. Platforms like Dubai Fashion Week and Dubai Design Week give regional designers equal visibility alongside global names. Beyond that, our in5 Design incubator and institutions like Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (DIDI), FAD Dubai, and L’ÉCOLE School of Jewelry Arts are shaping the next generation. Government support—through creative visas, streamlined business setup, and expanded production capacity—is also critical. Guided by Dubai’s D33 Agenda and the Design Sector Strategy, we are creating an ecosystem where designers can imagine, produce, and sell right here in Dubai. That is the structural shift that will change the narrative.

Oona Chanel: In a market where luxury dominates, how do you ensure space for independent designers whose work may be culturally vital but commercially fragile?

Khadija: What makes d3 unique is its diversity. Under one address, you’ll find international maisons, regional names, independent concept stores, students, and start-ups. That coexistence creates visibility for independents where global buyers and media are already present.

We also provide tangible platforms: multi-brand spaces, curated pop-ups, and flagship events such as Dubai Design Week, DesignNext, and Sole DXB. These connect designers with audiences they might not otherwise reach. Collaboration is another key: when a young designer works alongside an established house, both voices gain visibility and strength. This ensures culturally vital work not only survives, but thrives.

Oona Chanel: Dubai is a crossroads for art, design, and fashion. How do you encourage these disciplines to collaborate rather than compete?

Khadija: Collaboration is one of our guiding principles. At d3, architects, designers, artists, and entrepreneurs share the same neighbourhood, sparking organic crossovers. Our events are designed to merge disciplines: Dubai Design Week encourages dialogue across art, architecture, and fashion, while collaborations like Cartier’s Al Manama exhibition bring together jewelry, culture, and architecture. Because Dubai is globally connected, these collaborations pull from many influences, creating something unique to the city and its people.

Oona Chanel: What is the single greatest misconception international fashion leaders still hold about Dubai’s creative landscape?

Khadija: The biggest misconception is underestimating our diversity. Dubai is home to over 200 nationalities, producing a consumer base that is far more dynamic and sophisticated than many realize. This mix also nurtures designers with hybrid perspectives.

Another misconception is that everything here is imported. In reality, more and more is produced locally. Through initiatives like “Make it in the Emirates”, Dubai is becoming a production hub as well as a design incubator. We are no longer only a destination for shopping—we are a place where fashion is imagined, made, and exported globally.

Oona: Every fashion capital has its identity: Paris is heritage, Milan is craft, London is risk. If Dubai is still being defined, what identity will set it apart?

Khadija: Dubai’s identity is boldness, diversity, and vision. We aren’t trying to replicate Paris or Milan. Our strength lies in being a crossroads: a place where tradition and technology, heritage and modernity can exist together.

Dubai Fashion Week embodies that. It’s not just about presenting collections—it’s about celebrating ideas, amplifying new voices, and embracing inclusivity. Our identity will be defined by daring to look forward while remaining true to our culture and community.

Oona: Looking forward, what do you want “Made in Dubai” to signify in global fashion conversations ten years from now?

Khadija: For me, “Made in Dubai” must mean creativity with substance. It should reflect our cultural richness—Emirati heritage alongside global influences—and stand for sustainability, innovation, and craftsmanship at the highest level.

In ten years, when someone sees “Made in Dubai” on a label, I want it to signal quality, authenticity, and a story worth telling. That is the legacy we are building.

“Dubai is not only consuming fashion—it is creating it, exporting it, and shaping the global narrative.”

Interview by Oona Chanel