Author Magazine 8/3/26 Author Magazine 8/3/26

The Marchetti Studio and the Return of Terrazzo: How One Material Became the Defining Aesthetic Conversation of 2026

Terrazzo — the composite flooring material of Venetian origin, made from chips of marble, granite, quartz, and glass set in cement or resin — has returned to serious design conversation after decades in which it was associated with 1970s public sector interiors. Here is what is happening to it and why it matters.

“Cement-based terrazzo continues to reveal itself over years as it is polished by use. Resin-based systems are faster and lower-cost but will not achieve the same depth. The difference in cost is 30-40%. The difference in what happens to the floor over twenty years is the more interesting question.”

Terrazzo is having a moment that is not a moment. The material has been in continuous production since the fifteenth century, when Venetian craftspeople developed the technique of using marble offcuts — chips too small for standalone use — set in clay-and-goat-milk binders as a cheap and durable flooring solution. It became the defining surface material of mid-twentieth-century modernism, covering the floors of airports, schools, hospitals, and civic buildings across the developed world, before falling out of favour in the 1980s and 1990s when the materials associated with public sector efficiency became aesthetically suspect.

The return is not the retro rehabilitation of a dated style. It is the rediscovery of a material with properties that the synthetic alternatives of the past forty years cannot replicate: durability that improves with age (the aggregate and binder density increasing over decades as the material cures), the specific quality of a floor surface that has been polished to a mirror finish and then worn to a slight warmth, and the most compelling property for the contemporary interior context — infinite design flexibility, since the pattern is embedded in the material rather than printed on a substrate and will therefore outlast the surface without fading or peeling.

The designers working most seriously with terrazzo in 2026 are approaching it as a surface design medium rather than as a flooring specification. Patricia Urquiola's interiors for various Cassina and B&B Italia showrooms have used custom terrazzo patterns coordinated with upholstery to produce spatial unity from the floor up. The Milan-based Marchetti Studio has been developing what they describe as 'narrative terrazzo' — surfaces in which the aggregate pattern is designed to read differently at different scales, producing a micro-pattern at close inspection and a macro-composition at room scale. Studio Mumbai in India, under Bijoy Jain, uses locally sourced aggregate mixed in the ancient lime-based traditional binder as an explicit argument about material continuity and regional identity.

The technical dimension that the current revival is engaging with most seriously: the resin-based terrazzo that replaced cement-based formulations in most commercial applications is faster to lay and cheaper to produce but has a different surface quality and a different environmental profile. Cement-based terrazzo, finished and polished over several days, produces the depth and warmth that the material's historical reputation is based on. It also sequesters carbon in the curing process in ways that resin-based formulations do not. The sustainable architecture conversation is beginning to engage with this distinction.

For the residential client specifying interiors: the key decision is binder and aggregate. Cement-based with locally sourced aggregate (where available) produces the best long-term surface quality and the most interesting visual result — the material continues to reveal itself over years as it is polished by use. Resin-based systems are faster and lower-cost but will not achieve the same depth. The difference in cost is approximately 30-40% for the finished floor; the difference in longevity and aesthetic development is significant.

The current design conversation about terrazzo is one of the more honest debates in the interior design world: about the value of materials that take time to make and improve with age, versus the materials that are deployed quickly, look initially equivalent, and do not have a relationship to time. The choice between them is a choice about what you believe the interior is for.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 7/26/26 Author Magazine 7/26/26

Peter Zumthor: The Architect Who Builds Silence

He has designed fewer buildings in fifty years than most architects complete in five. Every one of them has been in the permanent collection of architectural consciousness since the day it opened. What Zumthor is actually doing — and why his method is the most urgent argument in architecture right now.

“Buildings that appear to have grown from their locations naturally and self-evidently, as if they could not be any other way. This is not a poetic metaphor. It is a design criterion — and the most urgent argument in architecture right now.”

Peter Zumthor works slowly. This is the most important fact about him, and it is the fact that the architecture industry, built around the commission-to-completion cycle that requires continuous production, has found the most difficult to accommodate. He has been in practice since the 1970s. He has completed, across fifty years, approximately thirty buildings. Many architects produce more than that in five years. The buildings Zumthor has completed are studied in every serious architecture school in the world. The buildings produced at greater velocity are, by the same measure, largely unstudied.

The pace is not a personal eccentricity. It is a methodology. Zumthor, who was born in Basel in 1943 and trained first as a cabinetmaker before studying design and architecture, approaches each building as a problem that requires the development of a specific material and spatial knowledge before any design work can begin. This means time on site. Time understanding the climate, the light at different hours, the specific way sound travels in the landscape. Time with the materials — not as specified items on a sheet, but as physical things with specific weight and temperature and the way they age in specific conditions.

The Vals Therme, built between 1994 and 1996 in the Swiss mountain village of Vals, is the building that established Zumthor's international reputation and that remains, thirty years after its completion, one of the most discussed architectural works in the world. It is a bathing complex built into the hillside above the village, constructed from locally quarried Valser quartzite laid in 32-centimetre strata. The material is specific to the place — quartzite from the same mountain that the building inhabits — and this specificity is not decorative but structural: the material determines the thermal mass of the walls, the acoustic quality of the water chambers, and the specific quality of light that penetrates through the narrow slots between the stone layers.

What the Vals Therme does that almost no other building manages: it produces, in the person who enters it, a specific quality of presence that is simultaneous with a specific quality of quiet. You are in the building and you know it and you are, simultaneously, less aware of yourself than you usually are. This is the architectural quality that Zumthor has described as atmosphere — the sense that a building has gathered itself around a specific human experience and that the experience is the point. The materials are in service of this. The proportions are in service of this. The light is in service of this.

His Bruder Klaus Chapel in Mechernich, Germany — completed in 2007 — was built by local farmers over a period of three years, using a technique in which a wooden formwork of 112 tree trunks was erected and then the concrete poured around it. The formwork was subsequently burned from the inside, leaving the charred surface of the trunks as the interior wall and the concrete as the outer shell. The chapel is twelve meters tall, has one aperture at the top, and is open to the weather. It is not a demonstration of technical complexity. It is the most minimal possible architectural statement about shelter, fire, and the sacred. It works because every decision was made in service of that statement.

The Pritzker Prize, which Zumthor received in 2009, is the most prestigious recognition in architecture. His acceptance speech included a description of what he considers beautiful: 'Buildings that appear to have grown from their locations naturally and self-evidently, as if they could not be any other way.' This is not a poetic metaphor. It is a design criterion. The building that could not be anywhere else is the building that Zumthor is trying to make.

He is currently working on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — a building that, if completed, will be his first major public commission in North America and his most scrutinised project. The LACMA project has been revised, debated, delayed, and debated again over more than a decade. The process is characteristic. The building, when it arrives, will have been made from the specific knowledge of a specific place accumulated over years. Whether Los Angeles will be patient enough to receive it on those terms is the interesting institutional question.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 7/23/26 Author Magazine 7/23/26

Kengo Kuma: The Architect Who Dissolves Buildings Into Their Materials

He built the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Stadium from wood. His philosophy — erasing architecture, allowing the material to speak — is producing some of the most quietly significant buildings in the world right now. Here is what he is making and why it matters.

“The material should be the presence rather than the formal gesture. The building made of stone should produce the experience of stone — its weight, its temperature, the way light behaves on its surface — rather than the experience of a designer having made choices about stone.”

Kengo Kuma opens his 2010 book Anti-Object with a provocation that is also a design philosophy: the problem with modern architecture is that it insists on asserting itself. The building declares its presence. It announces its designer. It occupies the landscape as a statement rather than as an inhabitation. Kuma has spent thirty years making the opposite argument in concrete, stone, wood, and paper — that the best buildings are the ones that you forget are there.

This sounds like a formula for invisibility, which would make for uninteresting buildings. What Kuma means is something more specific: that the material should be the presence rather than the formal gesture. A building made of stone, in his understanding, should produce the experience of stone — its weight, its temperature, its specific acoustic quality, the way light behaves on its surface at different times of day — rather than the experience of a designer having made choices about stone. The material should exceed the designer's intervention.

The Japan National Stadium — the primary venue for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games — is the most public application of this philosophy. After the original stadium design by Zaha Hadid Architects was cancelled following public controversy about its scale and cost, a revised competition was held. Kuma's winning design uses 47 species of Japanese cedar and larch wood in the exterior eaves, chosen specifically to reflect the regional timber traditions of each Japanese prefecture. The wood is not decorative — it provides natural ventilation, reducing the stadium's energy load and producing the specific quality of airflow through the stands that enclosed concrete structures cannot achieve.

His current work spans from the V&A Dundee — Scotland's first design museum, completed in 2018, where the building appears to grow from the waterfront as a series of faceted concrete panels that read as geological strata — to the forthcoming Kuma-designed Atelier Shiseido creative hub in Tokyo, to a series of smaller residential and cultural projects that demonstrate, more clearly than the large commissions, the specific quality of his spatial intelligence.

The Nakamura Keith Haring Collection in Kobuchizawa, Japan — a museum housing one of the most significant Keith Haring collections outside the US, completed in 2013 — is one of the least-publicised and most rewarding of his smaller projects. The building uses locally sourced Yatsugatake stone in a pattern that reads as pixelated at close range and as texture at distance, a formal response to Haring's own use of pattern and scale that is compositional rather than illustrative.

For the architect or designer who wants to engage with his practice beyond the completed buildings: Kuma's writing is accessible and specific. Anti-Object (2010) lays out the philosophy clearly. Studies in Organic (2009) is more technical but equally readable. He is currently a Professor at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Engineering — his lectures are occasionally available through the university's open academic channels.

He remains actively taking new commissions through his Tokyo-based practice Kengo Kuma and Associates, which has offices in Paris for European projects.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 7/16/26 Author Magazine 7/16/26

The Return of Sensory Design: Why Touch, Scent, and Sound Are the New Luxury Materials

At Salone, the most talked-about installations asked you to smell, hear, and feel rather than simply look. The shift toward multisensory design is not a trend. It is a response to a world that has organised itself almost entirely around vision.

“The most influential interiors of the next decade will be the ones that the people who inhabit them cannot quite explain. They will be comfortable in ways that are not immediately legible as comfort. They will smell like themselves.”

The most discussed installation at Salone del Mobile 2026 was not the most beautiful. It was the one that made you close your eyes. The USM and Snohetta Renaissance of the Real exhibition — which combined the Swiss manufacturer's iconic steel modular system with a textile cocoon designed by artist Annabelle Schneider — was built around scent, sound frequencies, and diffuse light rather than around the visual spectacle Salone usually rewards. Visitors who entered the cocoon described standing inside it as an experience of physical recalibration: the world of the fair, which is relentlessly visual and relentlessly loud, simply stopped.

This is what the most interesting design thinking in 2026 is doing: recovering the senses that the visual economy of the past two decades — the Instagram image, the architecture photography, the product rendering, the screen — has systematically underinvested in. Touch, which reveals qualities in materials that photography cannot. Scent, which accesses the limbic system directly and produces an emotional response before the rational brain has organised a position. Sound, which shapes spatial experience at a level below conscious awareness.

The theoretical framework for this has been available for years — the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose work on perception and the body in space is now regularly cited by architects and designers; the research on embodied cognition that has produced, in the design world, an interest in what physical sensation does to thought rather than simply to comfort. What is new is the commercial appetite for work that applies this framework rather than merely referencing it.

The practical dimension for interiors: a room that has been designed with sensory intelligence as a primary criterion is a different room from one designed with visual intelligence as the primary criterion. The acoustic properties — whether surfaces absorb or reflect sound, whether there is an ambient level below which the room falls into genuine quiet — are as important as the visual proportions. The material temperature — whether the floor is warm or cold underfoot, whether the furniture invites touch or repels it — is as important as the material colour.

The scent question is one that residential design is only now beginning to take seriously. A room with a specific smell — however subtle, however native to its materials and its light and its particular combination of objects — is a room that has an identity that persists in memory in a way that a visually beautiful but scent-neutral room does not. The specific smell of a well-kept library, of a stone-floored kitchen with a garden window, of a bedroom that has been lived in by people who care about their sheets: these are not incidental. They are the room's signature.

The brands that are building sensory intelligence into their products at scale — Aesop, whose retail environments are arguably the most consistently successful multisensory design projects in commercial space; the hotel groups that have developed scent programmes not as branding but as spatial experience; the residential designers who are now specifying acoustic materials with the same precision they once reserved for visual finishes — are doing so in response to a growing appetite for environments that feel as good as they look.

The most influential interiors of the next decade will be the ones that the people who inhabit them cannot quite explain. They will be comfortable in ways that are not immediately legible as comfort. They will smell like themselves.

This is not mysticism. It is the application of the full range of sensory intelligence to design — and it is, in 2026, finally being taken seriously at the scale it deserves.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 7/14/26 Author Magazine 7/14/26

The Christopher Kane Era at Mulberry: Why This Appointment Is More Interesting Than It Appears

The British designer who redefined what intellectual fashion could look like from London has been named creative director of one of Britain's most heritage-laden houses. The combination has a specific kind of promise — and a specific kind of challenge.

“Kane is one of the few British designers who has maintained a relationship to materiality that is neither nostalgic nor trend-driven — finding the formal intelligence inside a cultural material rather than using cultural material as decoration. This is exactly the skill Mulberry needs.”

Christopher Kane has been named the new creative director of Mulberry, with his first collection set to debut at London Fashion Week in September 2026. The announcement was received with the cautious optimism the British fashion world extends to appointments at British heritage houses — cautious because the recent history of such appointments is mixed, and optimistic because Kane is, whatever else he is, genuinely surprising.

The case for Kane at Mulberry is specific and worth making explicitly. He is one of the few British designers of his generation who has maintained, across twenty years of practice, a relationship to the body and to materiality that is neither nostalgic nor trend-driven. His work at his own label — the lace, the pleating, the specific references to Scottish industrial heritage and the biology of the body that recur throughout his archive — was always about finding the formal intelligence inside a cultural material rather than using cultural material as decoration.

Mulberry's situation is one that several mid-market British heritage brands have shared in recent years: a brand identity so thoroughly associated with a specific aesthetic moment — the Alexa bag, the Cara Delevingne era, the early 2010s British cool girl moment — that the subsequent decade has felt like a negotiation between the identity and the changed culture it sits within. The brand is not damaged. It is paused. It is a house with genuine craft credentials, a British manufacturing commitment that is one of the most sincere in the industry, and a customer relationship built over decades.

Kane's relationship to British manufacturing is biographical rather than rhetorical: he grew up in Glasgow, trained at Central Saint Martins, built his label on collaborations with British factories and British textile traditions. He understands what British making is at the level of material knowledge rather than brand communication. This understanding is, at a house like Mulberry, the prerequisite for everything else.

The challenge is real and worth naming. Kane's formal vocabulary — which has always been slightly strange, slightly bodily, slightly preoccupied with what happens at the edges of things — does not immediately translate to the wardrobe of the Mulberry customer, whose relationship to the brand is warmer and more accessible than Kane's work has typically been.

The opportunity is equally real: Kane's strangeness, applied with care to a house with genuine heritage, might produce exactly the combination of the familiar and the surprising that heritage houses are always trying and rarely managing to achieve.

The bags will be the early commercial test. The Bayswater, the Lily, the Postman's Lock — Mulberry's bag archive is one of the best in British fashion, and what Kane does with it will tell us more about his vision for the house than any runway look.

The September show is the most interesting single fashion week appointment on the London calendar. Watch for it.

BY OONA CHANEL

Author Magazine 7/2/26 Author Magazine 7/2/26

The Polka Dot Is Back and It Has Never Been More Serious

From Demi Moore on the Cannes jury to the SS26 and AW26 runways, the dot has returned — not as nostalgia but as a formal argument about pattern, scale, and the specific joy of wearing something that knows exactly what it is.

“The dot's ability to shift register entirely based on scale, colour, and material is unique among pattern types. A large dot does not disappear into the fabric. It establishes a relationship with the body's proportions that requires the designer to have made a specific decision.”

Demi Moore served on the Cannes 2026 jury. She was photographed at multiple screenings in polka-dotted pieces — choosing, in the most photographed context in cinema, a pattern that is simultaneously classic and confrontational, that makes no apologies for its presence and requires none. The dot has been returning across the SS26 and AW26 runways with a consistency that suggests the fashion system has decided something.

Not a trend in the anxious sense — not the scramble to incorporate a visual motif before it passes — but a genuine formal interest in what pattern does to a garment and specifically what the dot does that other patterns cannot. The dot is not directional. It does not impose a vertical or horizontal emphasis. It does not dominate or recede the way stripe or check does. It is, in the language of pattern, the most democratic form: every point is equivalent to every other point, no hierarchy, no narrative direction, complete formal parity.

This formal neutrality is what makes the dot available for so many different emotional registers. The small navy dot on white in crisp cotton is conservative authority. The large black dot on white silk charmeuse in the hands of a couture atelier is theatrical elegance. The oversized multicoloured dot on jersey is exuberant and slightly anarchic. The dot's ability to shift register entirely based on scale, colour, and material is unique among pattern types, which is why it is among the most durable.

The specific quality that AW26 and SS26 collections are exploring is scale. The large-scale dot — appearing at Valentino in couture-weight silk, at Erdem in wool crepe, at Simone Rocha in tulle overlays — proposes a different relationship between the body and the pattern than the traditional small-scale iteration. A large dot does not disappear into the fabric. It establishes a relationship with the body's proportions that requires the designer to have made a specific decision about how many dots should be visible in a single glance.

The historical reference that keeps appearing in discussions of the current dot moment is Yayoi Kusama, whose obsessive and cosmologically significant use of the polka dot across six decades of art practice was translated most visibly into the Louis Vuitton collaboration of 2023 that covered storefronts globally in dots. The collaboration reminded a generation of consumers that the dot has an art history, a theoretical dimension, an engagement with infinity and repetition and the boundary between self and pattern that goes considerably deeper than pattern.

For the person assembling a wardrobe: the dot is worth taking seriously this season. Not because it is trending but because the current moment in dot design, at the level of the best houses working with it, is producing garments of formal intelligence that will not date in the way the fashion cycle usually demands.

A well-made large-scale dot dress in good silk is not a 2026 dress. It is a dress that could have been made in 1956 or 2006 and will be worth wearing in any of those years.

This is what pattern does, when it is used with conviction rather than with trend consciousness. It removes the garment from time.

BY OONA CHANEL

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