Snøhetta: The Architecture Firm That Designs for the People Who Will Never Be Photographed Inside
The Norwegian firm founded in 1989 designed the Alexandria Library, the Oslo Opera House, the 9/11 Memorial Museum Pavilion, and the Times Square redesign. Their practice is built on a single proposition: that public space must serve its public rather than its image. Author on what this means in practice.
“The building that insists it is not the most important thing at the site is the most difficult formal achievement in design. The 9/11 Memorial Pavilion’s restraint is its argument. The Oslo Opera House roof belongs to the people who are in it, not the people who photograph it. These are the same architectural conviction.”
Snøhetta was founded in 1989 by a group of architects and landscape architects who had won the competition to design the Bibliotheca Alexandrina — the new Library of Alexandria, built on the site of the ancient library on the Egyptian Mediterranean coast — and who formed a practice around the conviction that the collaboration between architecture and landscape was not a stylistic preference but a structural condition for the kinds of buildings they wanted to make. The library, which opened in 2002 and which processes the relationship between the Mediterranean, the land, and the building’s interior as a single continuous spatial experience, remains the clearest single statement of what the practice is about.
The Oslo Opera House, which opened in 2008 and for which Snøhetta received the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2009, is the building that produced the specific quality of public recognition that architecture rarely achieves: a building that people who are not interested in architecture go to. The roof of the Oslo Opera House is accessible to the public and is, in the specific sense, used. Not as a viewing platform or a tourist attraction, but as a place where Oslo residents go to sit, walk, run, have lunch, and watch the Oslofjord. The architecture made this possible by treating the relationship between the public exterior and the performance interior not as a problem of separation but as a problem of connection.
The 9/11 Memorial Museum Pavilion at Ground Zero in New York — designed in collaboration with Davis Brody Bond for the interior — is the building in their portfolio that most directly confronts the question of what architecture can do when it is required to serve grief, memory, and the ongoing life of a city simultaneously. The pavilion marks the entry to the underground museum without dominating the memorial pools above ground or the surrounding urban context. Its scale is deliberate and its restraint is the most difficult formal achievement in the design: the building that insists it is not the most important thing at the site.
The Times Square redesign — the transformation of one of the world’s most photographed and least pleasant urban spaces into a pedestrian environment with seating, plantings, and a surface treatment that reduces the visual cacophony of the advertising infrastructure — was completed in phases between 2009 and 2017 and has produced a public space that is used differently from the pre-redesign Times Square in ways that are measurable in foot traffic, dwell time, and the specific quality of what people do when they stop. They sit. Before the redesign, they did not sit.
The current work includes the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art expansion, the Visitors’ Center at the Cern facility in Geneva, and several projects in Norway that continue the practice’s engagement with the specific relationship between the Norwegian landscape and the buildings that occupy it. The Visitor Centre at Svartisen glacier — a project that confronts the specific condition of a landscape that is changing at a rate that architecture must acknowledge rather than ignore — is the most formally consequential piece of their current programme.
The firm operates from offices in Oslo, New York, San Francisco, Innsbruck, Adelaide, and Paris. It is large by the standards of practices with this level of critical recognition: approximately five hundred employees, a scale that raises the same questions for architecture practices that it raises for any creative enterprise. The answer Snøhetta has given to those questions — the maintenance of a flat organisational structure with no named star designer, the insistence on landscape as an equal partner to architecture in every project — is the answer the work has been demonstrating since 1989.
The Oslo Opera House is the most direct available introduction to what the practice is about. Go to Oslo in late October, when the light on the fjord is horizontal and the roof is cold and the building is at its most honest.
It is the most public building in Europe, in the specific sense that matters: it belongs to the people who are in it, not the people who photograph it.
BY OONA CHANEL
Lacaton & Vassal: The Architects Who Believe That Never Demolishing Is the Correct Answer
Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal won the Pritzker Prize in 2021 with a practice built on the proposition that the best building is the one that already exists, improved. Their work on French social housing has produced more genuinely liveable space at less cost than any new-build programme in Europe.
“Never demolish. The best building is the one that already exists, improved. The Tour Bois Le Prêtre transformation added winter gardens and fifteen to twenty square metres per apartment at forty percent less cost than new build. The residents remained in their homes. The Pritzker jury called it a new definition of generosity in architecture.”
Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal were asked, in 1996, to redesign the Place Léon Aucoc in Bordeaux — a public square the city administration had identified as needing improvement. They spent several weeks observing the square in use: the boules players, the market stalls, the residents sitting on the benches in the evenings. Their recommendation to the city administration was that the square should not be redesigned. It was being used well, by the people who used it, in the ways they had adapted it to serve their needs. The cost of redesigning it would be high. The benefit would be indeterminate. The correct intervention was to clean the gravel, trim the trees, and leave it alone.
This story is quoted in almost everything written about Lacaton & Vassal because it distils the practice’s fundamental methodological principle: that the question before any architectural intervention should be whether the intervention is necessary, and that the answer is more often ‘no’ than the architecture profession’s financial structure is set up to acknowledge. The architect who recommends no intervention is the architect who generates no fees. Lacaton & Vassal have built a practice on recommending minimal intervention at every possible opportunity and demonstrating, across thirty years of work, that minimal intervention is not minimal architecture.
The social housing transformation work — specifically the rehabilitation of post-war housing towers across France in collaboration with Frédéric Druot — is the body of work that produced the Pritzker Prize. The problem they were asked to address: the large post-war social housing estates built rapidly across French cities in the 1960s and 1970s are now failing their residents, consuming excessive energy, and producing the social segregation that concentrated poverty in peripheral urban locations.
The standard French government response has been demolition and replacement. Lacaton & Vassal’s response, first proposed in their 2004 co-authored research publication Transformation, is extension and upgrade: wrapping the existing building in a structure that adds a new layer of habitable space — typically winter gardens and extended living areas — while retaining the existing fabric. The residents remain in their homes during construction where possible. The result, in the completed projects, is apartments that are significantly larger than the original, significantly better in energy performance, and have cost substantially less per unit than equivalent new-build replacement.
The Tour Bois Le Prêtre project in Paris, completed in 2011, is the most widely documented realisation of this approach. The hundred-and-sixty-five apartments, originally built in 1962, were transformed without demolition: the existing concrete frame retained, a new glass façade wrapping providing winter gardens extending each apartment by fifteen to twenty square metres, the building’s energy performance substantially improved. The cost was approximately forty percent less than demolition and new build would have cost for equivalent unit provision.
The Pritzker Prize citation in 2021 specifically noted that their practice offers a new definition of generosity in architecture: not the generosity of grand buildings or expressive form, but the generosity of space and light given to people who have been historically denied it.
They are currently working on projects across France, Belgium, and several international commissions. The practice remains small by choice.
The Pritzker Prize has produced a level of international attention that the practice has absorbed without expanding in ways that would change the quality of attention available per project.
BY OONA CHANEL
Milan: Where Luxury Goes to Prove It Is Still Worth the Price
MFW September 22–28. Prada. Gucci under Sabato De Sarno. Bottega Veneta under Louise Trotter. Versace under Dario Vitale. Four houses with new or recent creative directors making the argument for Italian luxury in the most commercially significant week in fashion.
“The houses navigating the commercial challenge best are the ones generating genuine desire rather than brand recognition alone — desire for this specific thing at this specific moment rather than for the logo on the bag. Milan this week is making that argument. The collections are the argument. The business case depends on whether it is convincing.”
Milan Fashion Week is where the argument about luxury is made at its most direct. Paris is about authority and culture. London is about ideas and risk. New York is about the commercial intelligence of the dressed American woman. Milan is about the proposition that a garment made with exceptional materials by exceptional craft should cost what it costs, and the runway is the demonstration of why. The houses that make this argument most convincingly are the ones whose collections justify their price points not through heritage alone but through the specific quality of making.
Bottega Veneta under Louise Trotter, who succeeded Matthieu Blazy when Blazy moved to Chanel in 2024, is the most watched appointment in the Italian system. Blazy built a critical and commercial platform at Bottega through an approach that treated the house’s material intelligence — its mastery of intrecciato leather, its command of texture and surface — as the content of the collection rather than the backdrop. Trotter’s first two seasons have extended this logic with a somewhat different relationship to colour and a different reading of what the Bottega customer wants to wear at the level of function rather than aspiration. The third collection is where the direction either deepens or reveals its limits.
Gucci under Sabato De Sarno is entering a more settled phase after the uncertainty of his debut period. The critical response to his early collections described them as commercially legible but creatively cautious relative to the formal ambition of the Alessandro Michele era. His SS27 collection will be the most commercially significant thing shown in Milan this week.
Versace under Dario Vitale is the appointment with the most to prove in the shortest time. Vitale came from within the house after the departure of Donatella Versace from the creative director role she held for twenty-six years. He is making a collection under scrutiny that no new creative director faces in quite the same way: the house’s aesthetic identity was so completely associated with its founder’s vision that any departure reads as loss and any continuation reads as maintenance rather than creation.
Prada remains the intellectual anchor of the Milan week and the house that most consistently produces work that the fashion critical apparatus cannot quite categorise, which is the clearest available signal that something interesting is happening. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have been co-creative directing since 2020 and the collaboration has produced, across six years, a specific quality of uncertainty about what Prada is going to do that is the rarest quality available in a heritage house with this commercial footprint.
The commercial reality beneath the creative conversation: Italian luxury is in a more complex economic position than it has been in a decade. The Chinese luxury consumer has not returned to the pre-2022 spending levels that the industry had structured itself around. The houses navigating this best are the ones generating genuine desire rather than brand recognition alone — desire for this specific thing at this specific moment rather than for the logo on the bag.
Milan this week is making the argument that Italian luxury can continue to generate that desire at a price point that the current economic environment is questioning.
The collections are the argument. The business case depends on whether it is convincing.
BY OONA CHANEL
JAR: The Jeweller Who Refuses to Sell and Why the Waiting List Is Irrelevant
Joel Arthur Rosenthal has been making jewels in a tiny Paris atelier since 1978. He does not advertise. He does not wholesale. His work sells for between fifty thousand and seven million dollars and there is no straightforward way to simply buy it.
"The value in a JAR piece is not the material value of the stones. It is the intelligence that transforms whatever material is present into something that could not have been made by anyone else. His work is not expensive because the stones are expensive. The stones are expensive because his work is expensive."
Joel Arthur Rosenthal - JAR - operates from a first-floor atelier at 7 Place Vendôme in Paris that has no sign, no retail space visible from the street, and no purchasing process that resembles what the word 'buying' usually means. You do not go to JAR and select a piece. You are introduced, by someone who already has a relationship with the atelier, and over a period of time that may extend to years, a piece may be made for you. The alternative is the auction market, where JAR pieces appear with the frequency of serious private collections being dispersed and with prices that reflect the specific quality of objects made by someone who considers nothing finished until it is perfect.
He was born in New York in 1943 and trained neither as a goldsmith nor as a jeweller but as a painter - at Harvard, where he studied art history and studio art. He moved to Paris in the late 196os and began making jewels almost accidentally, producing pieces for friends that demonstrated a technical facility with gemstones and precious metals that no formal training had produced.
The technical language of JAR is worth establishing before anything else, because the formal intelligence of his work is inseparable from its material intelligence. He uses pave setting at densities that conventional jewellery manufacture considers structurally impossible: stones so closely set that the metal between them is reduced to almost nothing, producing a surface that reads as pure colour rather than as gemstones in a setting. No other jeweller working at any scale has produced pave at this density with this consistency.
The materials he uses are not always the most expensive available. A JAR piece may be centred on a very fine Colombian emerald, or it may be centred on a piece of glass, or a river pebble, or a material whose identity is deliberately ambiguous. The value in a JAR piece is not the material value of the stones. It is the intelligence that transforms whatever material is present into something that could not have been made by anyone else. His work is not expensive because the stones are expensive. The stones are expensive because his work is expensive.
The exhibitions have been rare and institutional: a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in 2013, curated by Harold Koda, which was the most visited Costume Institute show that was not a celebrity retrospective since the Balenciaga show of the 1970s. The institutional response was consistent: people who had never considered jewellery a serious art form came to look and came back to look again, because what they found in the cases was not decorative art. It was, in the specific sense, sculpture.
The Christie's and Sotheby's secondary market for JAR has been consistent and is now one of the most closely watched specialist jewellery categories in the auction world. Pieces sold in the 1990s at five figures now achieve six and seven. The trajectory is not speculation - it reflects the recognition that there is a finite number of JAR pieces in existence and that no new pieces can be made at the rate that demand is growing.
For the reader who will never be introduced to the atelier: the auction previews at Christie's and Sotheby's in London, Geneva, and New York are the available route to encountering the work in person.
Go to the previews. Look at the pieces long enough to understand what the light is doing. That quality - the specific relationship between the setting and the light - is the argument the work has been making since 1978.
BY OONA CHANEL
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Antwerp collector home
“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.
Palermo / long-term viewing
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."
Interiors in Mexican style
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."
Southern Italian painting
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.
antwerp collector home
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.
18th century hall in Norfolk
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