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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BY OONA CHANEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BY OONA CHANEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Oona chanel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question is whether they can do it here.

By Oona chanel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Oona Chanel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades Bulbo by the Campana Brothers

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

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

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

Salviati x Draga & Aurel, Salone Raritas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Oona Chanel

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

Schiaparelli at the V&A: When Discomfort Becomes Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can surrealism still unsettle once it becomes a luxury language?

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

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

Elsa answered those questions one way.

The contemporary house answers them another.

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

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

By Oona Chanel

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

Pierre Yovanovitch’s Exacting Interiors

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

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

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

That distinction matters.

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

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

This is why his interiors hold.

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

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

Yovanovitch is strongest when he resists prettiness.

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

That is one of their strengths.

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

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

That rigor is what gives the work durability.

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

This is a more serious proposition than lifestyle luxury.

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

By Oona Chanel

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

Why Pedro Pascal Matters to Chanel Now

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

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

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

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

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

That alone makes the appointment noteworthy.

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

That is a more strategic move.

And it comes at an important moment for Blazy.

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

Pascal fits that logic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is intelligent luxury business.

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

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

By Oona Chanel

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

Inside Dolce & Gabbana’s Transfer of Power

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

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

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

Dolce & Gabbana appears to be entering the latter.

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

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

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

But markets change faster than mythology.

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

That is what makes this leadership shift important.

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

The problem is conversion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That does not mean softening the brand.

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

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

That is precisely what makes institutional restructuring so delicate.

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

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

Beauty is likely to be central to the answer.

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

Fashion creates the halo. Beauty monetizes it.

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

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

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

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

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

In fashion, that is rarely just a leadership story.

It is the beginning of a different era.

By Oona Chanel

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

The Desert Rose: A Diamond’s Cultural Afterlife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Desert Rose - Vivid Orangy Pink diamond.

From Commodity to Cosmology

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

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

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

Patek Philippe luce watch. Patek Philippe 498G-010

“Everything you see here belongs to one consigner,”

Andrés explains.

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

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

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

Charged Objects

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

“I believe stones get charged with things.

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

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

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

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

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

Andrés notes.

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

The Desert Rose as Metaphor

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

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

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

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

RM Sotheby’s Abu Dhabi

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

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

Words by Oona Chanel for Author Magazine

Pictures courtesy Ron John

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

Khadija Al Bastaki: Building Dubai’s Design Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview by Oona Chanel

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

Jacob Abrian on Why Dubai Fashion Week Is Redefining the Global Map

Dubai is no longer content to be seen as merely a consumer of fashion. With Dubai Fashion Week — co-founded by the Arab Fashion Council (AFC) and Dubai Design District (d3) — the region is asserting itself as a producer of ideas, talent, and new industry standards. At the center of this shift is Jacob Abrian, CEO and Founder of the Arab Fashion Council, whose mission is to transform how the world views the Middle East’s creative landscape.

In this conversation with Author Magazine, Abrian speaks about infrastructure, sustainability, luxury, and the identity of Dubai as an emerging fashion capital.

Oona Chanel: The Middle East is often seen as a consumer market more than a creative exporter. What is the one structural shift that could finally change this perception?

Jacob Abrian: The Middle East has long been seen as a powerful consumer market, but what will truly change the narrative is investing in our own creative infrastructure. We have extraordinary talent here, and the shift comes when we stop exporting ideas elsewhere and instead build the ecosystem that allows designers to thrive at home — from mentorship and accessible manufacturing to global visibility. That’s why platforms like Dubai Fashion Week are so vital: they don’t just showcase collections, they cultivate an entire value chain. When that ecosystem is fully in place, the Middle East will no longer just consume fashion — it will set the agenda for it.

Oona: Fashion is often accused of being spectacle without sustainability. How can Dubai Fashion Week prove that spectacle and responsibility can coexist in a way that shifts industry standards?

Jacob: Dubai Fashion Week proves this by embedding sustainability into every aspect of the event. Recognising fashion’s environmental impact, the Arab Fashion Council launched the AFC Green Label to promote responsible practices. The initiative supports designers worldwide who use ethical materials and sustainable methods, providing them with a platform during Dubai Fashion Week. By highlighting creativity alongside conscious choices, the AFC Green Label shows the industry that spectacle and responsibility are not opposites — they can elevate each other.

Oona: The word “luxury” is constantly being redefined. From your vantage point, what does luxury mean today in the Middle East — and how will that definition shape the global market?

acob: Luxury today is no longer just about price or exclusivity — it’s about meaning, authenticity, and connection. In the Middle East, luxury resonates when it tells a story, reflects culture, and creates an emotional bond with the wearer. It’s about craftsmanship and quality, of course, but also about celebrating identity and heritage in a modern, relevant way. As our region increasingly influences global trends, this narrative-driven definition of luxury will shape the global market — where value comes as much from a piece’s story and impact as from its material worth.

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

Jacob: To me, Dubai is boldness, diversity, and a forward-looking vision. We sit at the intersection of tradition and modernity, where heritage meets innovation and technology. Dubai Fashion Week is about more than clothes — it’s about celebrating ideas, giving new voices a platform, and showing that fashion here can be daring, inclusive, and globally relevant. Our identity will be defined by pushing boundaries, embracing the future, and staying true to our culture and community.

Oona: Looking ahead, if Dubai Fashion Week is to shape not just a regional but a global future, what will its greatest contribution to the fashion world be?

Jacob: Unlike other fashion weeks, we offer 360° support — not just exposure on the runway. Its greatest contribution will be seen in three ways. First, by championing emerging designers alongside established names, giving them both visibility and commercial pathways through initiatives like our dedicated buyers programme. Second, by creating platforms like Threads Talks by Meta, where panel discussions connect thought leaders, creatives, and industry pioneers. And third, by embedding sustainability through the AFC Green Label, proving that spectacular runway shows can coexist with responsibility.

“Dubai is boldness, diversity, and forward vision — a fashion capital defined by both heritage and innovation.”

Interview by Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 9/2/25 Author Magazine 9/2/25

Theatre, Textiles, and Fearlessness: Tara Babylon on Fashion Without Borders

British-Iraqi designer Tara Babylon has carved out a rare space where performance art, hand-crafted textiles, and fashion meet in explosive color. Based in New York, and an alumna of Central Saint Martins and Parsons, she refuses to separate craft from theatre, or fun from sophistication. Gender-fluid, artisanal, and exuberantly bold, her work is a reminder that fashion is not just about clothes — it is about how we experience identity, joy, and presence.

Author: Your work sits at the intersection of art, craft, and fashion. When you begin a collection, do you think like a designer, a performance artist, or a storyteller first?

Tara Babylon: I begin each collection by tuning into my mood — what I’m feeling and how I want to express that creatively. From there, I gather research: fabrics, dancers, costumes, vintage clothing, music. Everything merges through experimentation on and off my own body until it becomes a single vision.

Author: Gender-fluidity is central to your label. What possibilities open up when clothing is freed from categories — and what challenges remain?

Tara Babylon: The possibilities lie in freedom — anyone can wear the pieces, which makes them playful and inclusive. The challenge is logistics: most stores don’t have a “unisex” floor. Buyers still think in men’s or women’s categories, which makes pitching gender-fluid collections harder.

Author: You champion artisanal techniques at a time when speed dominates. What does the human hand bring that machines never can?

Tara Babylon: The human hand infuses textiles with tangibility, character, and care. It creates subtle imperfections that add depth and texture. Machines can’t replicate that emotion. You literally feel the difference when something has been touched and shaped by a human hand.

Author: Your runway shows often feel like theatre. What role does performance play in your process?

Tara Babylon: For me, a fashion show is theatre — and theatre is a fashion show. I love to blur those lines, because that’s where things become truly interesting. Creating an entire world is central to my process: accessories, fabrics, shoes, music, models — it all has to merge. I’m wired as a showman; extravagance and the challenge of elevating every detail drive me to make each presentation unforgettable.

Author: You’ve studied at Central Saint Martins and Parsons. What lasting lessons did each give you?

Tara Babylon: CSM taught me resourcefulness: if you think you can’t make something because of budget, then you’re not being creative enough. Parsons taught me to embrace the unknown. Being alone in a new country stripped me back, but it forced me to trust the process and rebuild from scratch. That’s when my textiles and brand truly came to life.

Author: Sustainability can feel restrictive. How do you keep it playful and full of energy?

Tara Babylon: Some sustainable fabrics limit color, and as a color lover I won’t compromise on palette. Instead, I embed sustainability elsewhere: through linings, threads, fair labor, and conscious decision-making. It’s about balance — responsibility without losing joy.

Author: Your work blurs showpiece and ready-to-wear. How do you decide what becomes everyday clothing?

Tara Babylon: First comes the fantasy, then comes the process of simplifying it. That’s the hard part. Some ideas take years to refine from performance textile to ready-to-wear piece. I’m still revisiting techniques I began experimenting with five years ago.

Author: You describe your work as fun yet sophisticated. What does “fun” mean in the context of luxury?

Tara Babylon: Fun is about playfulness, the freedom to be lighthearted. I can’t stand overly serious fashion. Creativity should have joy at its center. Even when a garment carries deep meaning, the experience of it can still be playful.

Author: How does your multicultural background shape your perspective on beauty and identity?

Tara Babylon: Each cultural layer has shaped me. British structure, Iraqi heritage, New York energy — they all add dimension to my identity. Tara Babylon is about celebrating individuality and confidence. When someone wears a piece, I want them to feel fabulous, free, and entirely themselves in the most elevated way possible.

Author: Looking to the future, what do you hope the phrase “a Tara Babylon piece” will mean?

Tara Babylon: That it stands for empowerment, joy, and individuality. Each garment is meant to make the wearer feel like they are stepping into something unforgettable.

Interview by Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 9/2/25 Author Magazine 9/2/25

Rasha El Hallak: Fasila Collective and the Poetry of Fashion

Fashion often claims to be about storytelling, but rarely does it begin with words themselves. Fasila Collective, founded by Rasha El Hallak, does exactly that. Built on the idea that Arabic poetry — centuries old, charged with philosophy, pride, and tenderness — can be translated into garments, Fasila turns verse into clothing that is lived in, embodied, and remembered. Each collection begins not with images or mood boards, but with a line of poetry: Al-Mutanabbi’s defiant self-love, Wallada bint al-Mustakfi’s fierce independence. These voices are not ornament; they are architecture.

This week, Fasila is debuting its global campaign — featuring Daria Strokous photographed against the brutalist backdrop of Habitat 67 in Canada. The imagery sets poetry against concrete, history against modernity, underscoring the brand’s mission: to prove that Arabic verse is not relic, but resonance — timeless, universal, and alive in the now.

Fasila is not only a fashion label but a cultural statement. It repositions the Middle East from consumer to creator, offering a vision where heritage is not nostalgia but source code — a foundation for building a globally relevant, intellectually rigorous, and emotionally resonant form of luxury.

In this conversation with Author Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, Oona Chanel, Rasha El Hallak reflects on how she translates verse into form, why silence is as powerful as sound, and why Fasila’s mission is ultimately about cultural bridges as much as clothes.

Oona: Fasila is described as “reviving Arabic poetry into clothes.” How do you translate something as ephemeral as a verse into a physical garment a woman can wear?

Rasha El Hallak: Translating a verse into a garment is an act of translating culture and history, not just text. It begins with the soul of the poem. The rhythm of a line might inspire the drape and flow of a fabric, while a metaphor might define a palette. For Al-Mutanabbi’s work, full of strength, we used structured shoulders and assertive lines. The embroidery is placed thoughtfully to interact with the body, so the verse isn’t just on the wearer, but with the wearer — turning the ephemeral into a tangible, wearable experience.

Oona: Many brands lean on heritage as decoration. Fasila treats heritage as narrative. How do you protect that depth in an industry that often prefers surface?

Rasha: We protect that depth by making the text the origin of the design process, not an afterthought. A collection begins with a deep reading of a poem, and that narrative informs every decision — the cut, the fabric, the technique. This makes us less vulnerable to fleeting trends because our foundation isn’t fashion’s cycle, it’s centuries of literature and emotion. For me, fashion is not surface level; it’s a powerful way of self-expression. Fasila allows me to share Arab heritage with authenticity and pride.

Oona: Your campaign with Daria Strokous at Habitat 67 in Canada placed poetry against brutalist architecture. What did that contrast reveal?

Rasha: That campaign was a statement of modern strength. Al-Mutanabbi’s verses celebrate unapologetic self-love, so the woman who wears them embodies a warrior. Our silhouettes are architectural, and placing them against Habitat 67’s concrete geometry created harmony between garment and building. More importantly, the shoot in Canada consciously took an ancient poem into a starkly modern context — proving its timeless relevance and global resonance.

Oona: Quiet luxury is often tied to European minimalism. How do you define it through Arabic poetry?

Rasha: Quiet luxury, for us, is intellectual and spiritual richness. The “quiet” lies not in absence, but in meaning. The luxury of a Fasila piece is not in a logo, but in the verse embroidered on a sleeve — words that carry weight, history, and philosophy. It’s an inward-facing luxury, understood by those who recognize the depth of the words. A quiet declaration of identity rooted in eloquence and heritage.

Oona: Fasila is both global and rooted. Do you see yourself as exporting Arabic culture outward, or inviting the world inward?

Rasha: Inviting inward. “Exporting” feels one-directional, like performance. What we want is dialogue. The themes in the poetry we choose — pride, love, independence — are universal. By placing these verses on modern silhouettes, we create an access point that allows people everywhere to connect with Arabic identity as something intellectual, artistic, and contemporary.

Oona: In classical Arabic poetry, the unsaid is often as powerful as the spoken. Do you design with absence as a tool?

Rasha: Absolutely. Fasila itself means a pause, a space for breath. That philosophy defines our approach: clean silhouettes, uncluttered forms, and strategic use of negative space. The garment becomes a frame of silence around the words, ensuring the poetry has space to resonate.

Oona: The Middle East is still often described as a consumer market for fashion. How does Fasila rewrite that narrative?

Rasha: Fasila is shifting the region from interpreter to author. We are not borrowing heritage as decoration; we are building from it. Our literary history is the source code of a new luxury aesthetic. By doing this, we assert that our culture is not only a market but a wellspring of original ideas, capable of producing fashion that is globally compelling.

Oona: You’ve placed women like Wallada bint al-Mustakfi at the center of your storytelling. How does this reshape Arab identity?

Rasha: It reclaims the complexity of Arab womanhood. Wallada was a poet and a figure of independence in the 11th century — a feminist before the word existed. By re-centering her, we prove that empowerment and intellectual freedom are not imported concepts but part of our own legacy. It complicates stereotypes and offers women today authentic role models from their own history.

Oona: If Fasila were itself a poem — one line to capture its soul — what would it be?

Rasha: They clothed themselves in poetry, and the world paused to read.

Oona: Looking ahead twenty years, do you want Fasila’s legacy to be the clothes or the cultural bridges?

Rasha: The cultural bridges. The clothes are the medium, but the mission is larger: sparking curiosity, pride, and dialogue around Arabic literature. If Fasila is remembered for shifting perspectives and building bridges, then we have succeeded.

“They clothed themselves in poetry, and the world paused to read.”

Interview by Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 9/2/25 Author Magazine 9/2/25

Dressing the Woman, Not the Ideal: Dima Ayad on Fashion, Truth, and Belonging

Few designers have challenged the fashion system from within quite like Dima Ayad. Her eponymous label was founded not to chase a trend, but to fill a void — to give women of all sizes a place in fashion without compromise. More than a decade later, Ayad has become one of the region’s most distinctive voices, a designer who insists that clothes should serve the woman, not the other way around. From her base in Dubai, she has built a brand that is both local and global, both celebratory and pragmatic, proving that inclusivity is not a niche but a philosophy of design.

Author: Your brand began as a response to exclusion. Looking at today’s fashion industry, where do you think inclusivity is still most absent — and how do you plan to address it?

Dima: I think the concept of inclusion has, in many ways, become another form of exclusion. It’s still treated as a niche or a trend, rather than a standard. One brand alone can’t shift the industry, but we are doing everything we can to keep the conversation alive and push it forward. For me, it’s not just about a movement — it’s about the reality that women need clothes they can actually wear. That necessity should never be optional.

“Inclusion should never be a movement. It should be the standard.”

Author: Many labels treat extended sizing as an afterthought. For you, it is the foundation. How does designing for a spectrum of bodies change the creative process itself?

Dima: For me, designing for all shapes and sizes isn’t a burden — it’s the enjoyment of the process. I begin with all kinds of women in mind. My philosophy is that if a piece works beautifully on the larger size, it will almost always work on the smaller one too. That’s how I build collections. Practically, I always create two sample sizes — one in XXL and one in S — and then we refine from there. It ensures the clothes are not only inclusive, but also flattering across the spectrum.

Author: You’ve built a brand rooted in Dubai but visible globally. What do you believe the Middle East can teach the fashion capitals about redefining beauty?

Dima: I’m proud that everything we do is made in Dubai. What the Middle East can really teach the global consumer is that change is not only necessary, it’s exciting. There is so much more than the standard orientation we’ve all grown used to from global brands. Here, we bring a different edge and a unique twist. Growing up in Dubai — a truly multicultural city — means you naturally tap into many markets at once. That perspective, that blend, is something only this region can offer.

Author: In partnering with Malone Souliers, you placed a regional vision alongside a global luxury house. What did that collaboration teach you about the power — and the limits — of cross-cultural design

JDima: Cross-cultural design is something truly special. It proves that products can be both local and global at the same time. That balance is what makes collaborations like this so rewarding. For me, creating it was pure joy — bringing two perspectives together and seeing them merge into something new.

Author: Some designers design for the runway; you design for the woman herself. When you imagine her stepping into your clothes, what is the first feeling you want her to have?

Dima: I design for the woman, always. I think of her in every moment she lives — whether she’s in the office, going to a party, on her first date, attending a wedding, or even walking down the aisle at her own. I design with those moments in mind, because those are her real runways. Her life is the runway, and I want my clothes to celebrate every step she takes on it.

“Her life is the runway. My clothes should celebrate every step she takes.”

Author: Fashion weeks often emphasize spectacle. How do you ensure that your collections remain grounded in real women’s lives while still commanding the stage?

Dima: I make sure the collection feels like a spectacle, but a grounded one. Whatever you see on that stage, you should be able to imagine yourself wearing. For me, that’s the essence of being a designer — creating a moment that excites, but also translates.

Author: As a businesswoman as well as a designer, what has been the hardest structural barrier you’ve faced in scaling an inclusive brand — and how did you overcome it?

Dima: The hardest barrier is maintaining what people call a work–life balance, while also figuring out how far you leap for growth. For me, inclusivity has never been the reason I feel stuck — it’s the reason I keep going. Women all over the world are part of that story, and they’re the reason I do this. The real challenge is scaling safely: how to grow without the sharp hikes, spikes, or declines that can destabilize a brand. That’s what I think about every day.

Author: Awards and recognition validate a career, but they don’t define it. What personal milestone meant the most to you — a moment that may never appear in press headlines?

Dima: For me, milestones aren’t defined by awards — they’re defined by the number of women wearing the clothes. One of my proudest moments was when we sold a thousand dresses, and another was when a single design sold over 500 pieces. Those are the kinds of milestones I celebrate. Expansion into new retailers and segments has also been incredibly meaningful. My form of validation has always been seeing more women around the world wearing Dima Ayad — that’s what defines success for me.

Author: You once filled a gap in the market. Today, you’ve helped to change it. What gap do you see now — in fashion, business, or culture — that you feel compelled to address next?

Dima: Today, the real gap is the pressure to follow trends. I feel strongly that women shouldn’t have wardrobes built only around what’s fashionable in the moment, but around timeless elements that last. Sustaining that kind of fashion is what I want to push forward. The other gap is beyond clothes — it’s about self-image. I want women to know that it’s okay to be yourself, without filters or FaceTune. You are enough as you are, and that should be celebrated just as much as what you wear.

“You are enough as you are — that is as important as what you wear.”

Author: Looking ahead twenty years, what would you like “Dima Ayad” to stand for — not just as a label, but as a philosophy in the global fashion conversation?

Dima: In twenty years, I want “Dima Ayad” to be remembered as a brand that started in Dubai and went on to make a global impact. I want it to stand for the idea that real change can come from here — from the Middle East — and that authenticity has the power to shift an entire industry. For me, the philosophy is simple: you can create from a place of truth, celebrate women as they are, and still redefine what fashion looks like on the world stage.

Interview by Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 9/2/25 Author Magazine 9/2/25

Building Presence: Jozeph Diarbakerli on Power, Heritage, and Fearless Design

For Jozeph and Cintia Diarbakerli, fashion was never background noise. As children in a Syrian Armenian family who emigrated to Canada, they studied magazines as if they were sacred objects, dissecting every silhouette, every aura. Today, that obsession has crystallized into a brand launched in 2024 that is unapologetic in form, sculptural in attitude, and global in its ambitions.

Theirs is a design language rooted in contrasts: heritage and modernity, intimacy and spectacle, vulnerability and strength. Together, the siblings have built a creative partnership that thrives on trust and tension — and a brand that refuses to whisper when it can command.

Author: Your Syrian Armenian heritage and Canadian upbringing sit in tension and harmony. How do you decide when to let tradition lead and when to let modernity cut through?

Jozeph Diarbakerli: Heritage is in our DNA, it’s impossible to ignore. But living in Canada taught us not to be afraid of risk. So when we design, we let both sides live together — one makes the work soulful, the other keeps it sharp.

Author: Your pieces are often described as bold, sculptural, unapologetic. What is the emotion you most want a woman to feel when she enters a room in your design?

Jozeph Diarbakerli: The emotion is intensity. Nothing soft, nothing casual. Everything amplified.

Author: Launching a brand in 2024 is not just about artistry but about infrastructure. What has been the hardest business decision so far — and how did it shape your direction?

Jozeph Diarbakerli: We had to accept that saying no is a business strategy. That decision has shaped our identity as much as any silhouette.

Author: You speak about presence as a philosophy. Do you believe clothes can actually change the way a woman commands space, or do they reveal something already there?

Jozeph Diarbakerli: Clothes don’t invent power, they frame it. The presence is already inside her — we just give it silhouette, sharpness, a stage.

Author: As siblings in business, your creative partnership is rare. What is the greatest strength — and the greatest challenge — of building a brand together?

Jozeph Diarbakerli: Our strength is trust. We don’t second-guess each other’s vision. The challenge is intensity — we’re siblings, so nothing is polite. But that honesty keeps the brand sharp.

Author: If you could rewrite the global narrative of Arab and Armenian fashion in one sentence, what would it say, and how does your work embody that?

Jozeph Diarbakerli: The sentence would be: we are not defined by where we come from, but by the power we project. Our work embodies that projection on every runway.

Author: The industry is full of young brands that burn bright and fade quickly. What must you build now to ensure Jozeph Diarbakerli is not a moment, but a house that endures?

Jozeph Diarbakerli: Wait and see.

Author: When you design, do you begin with architecture of form, or with the emotion you want the garment to carry?

Jozeph Diarbakerli: Our process is emotional before it’s structural. We create the aura first, then we build the body to hold it.

Author: Looking ten years ahead, what do you hope people will say when they hear the name Jozeph Diarbakerli?

Jozeph Diarbakerli: Still unapologetic. Fearless. Pushing boundaries.

Interview by Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 9/2/25 Author Magazine 9/2/25

The Power of Restraint: OTTÉ on Precision, Quiet Confidence, and Redefining Wardrobes

For more than 15 years, Tara, the founder of OTTÉ, built her career as a stylist — curating wardrobes, sourcing unique pieces, and translating personality into clothing. But styling revealed a truth: women often reached for the same timeless silhouettes season after season. What they wanted wasn’t endless novelty, but pieces that could move with them through different moments of their lives. OTTÉ was born from this realization — to create clothing not only for the present, but for the long arc of a woman’s story.

At its heart, OTTÉ is not about minimalism as a trend. It is about clarity, precision, and intention. Every seam, proportion, and finish is designed to endure, to live with the wearer, and to carry meaning beyond a single season.

Author: What made you move from curating wardrobes to creating pieces with OTTÉ?

OTTÉ: Styling taught me that women often wanted fewer, better pieces — clothes that didn’t just fit their lifestyle, but elevated it. I wanted to design garments that endure, travel with them, and still feel modern years later. That’s when OTTÉ was born.

Author: Minimalism is often marketed as a trend. How does OTTÉ approach intentional design differently?

OTTÉ: For us, intentional design means creating pieces that transcend cycles. Our silhouettes are designed to be as relevant five years from now as they are today. We think about how a blazer carries you from a meeting to dinner, or how a dress holds its shape after repeated wear. It’s not about less decoration — it’s about more meaning.

Author: Construction is often invisible to the eye. How do you approach it?

OTTÉ: A garment only lasts as long as its construction allows. We use French seams in silks, reinforced hems, and hand-finished details so the inside of the garment is as considered as the outside. These invisible choices are what turn a seasonal piece into a wardrobe staple.

Author: As a stylist, you saw women searching for “fixes.” How does OTTÉ address that differently?

OTTÉ: Women don’t actually need endless newness. They need fewer, better options. With OTTÉ, I design clothing that works seamlessly into a life already in motion — pieces that remove the question of what to wear, because they simply work again and again.

Author: You often use the phrase “quiet confidence.” What does that look like?

OTTÉ: It looks like ease — shoulders relaxed, movement fluid, a natural steadiness. It’s the opposite of overcompensation. You see it in a woman who never adjusts her clothes because they already serve her. Our silks, for example, are cut to move with the body so she never has to think about them.

Author: Why is the blazer essential in your collections?
OTTÉ: A precisely cut blazer is transformative. It frames the shoulders, straightens posture, and signals authority without a word. At OTTÉ, our blazers sharpen a silhouette but remain fluid enough to move with a woman’s life. They can elevate denim or ground a silk dress — one piece that speaks volumes without shouting.

Author: Who do you design for?

OTTÉ: I think of a friend who’s a creative director. Her wardrobe is pared back — silks, tailoring, tonal layers — but every choice is intentional. She doesn’t chase trends, yet she leads conversations. That duality is who we design for: women who let their intelligence and presence do the speaking, while their clothing quietly supports the message.

Author: What compromise will you never make?

OTTÉ: Precision. Fashion often rewards speed, but speed erodes integrity. It once took 14 samples to perfect a single item. That process wasn’t excessive, it was essential. Restraint only has power when it’s executed with clarity.

Author: What do you hope OTTÉ encourages women to think about when they dress?

OTTÉ: That dressing is a long-term relationship, not a revolving door of trends. A wardrobe should be an edited collection of pieces that serve you season after season. If OTTÉ can redefine dressing as an act of curation — choosing fewer, better, more intentional garments — then we’ve done more than design clothes. We’ve reshaped a mindset.

Interview by Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 9/2/25 Author Magazine 9/2/25

Forty Years Avant-Garde: Ksenija Vrbanić on the Architecture of Fashion

Few designers embody the word “avant-garde” with as much longevity as Ksenija Vrbanić, the founder of XD Xenia Design. Since 1986, she has steered her Croatian label into global relevance while refusing the trap of repetition. Her brand has become a study in contrasts: rooted in traditional craftsmanship yet embracing technological tools, unapologetically architectural but deeply human, global in vision yet proudly anchored in Croatia.

As XD approaches its fourth decade, Vrbanić reflects not with nostalgia but with an architect’s clarity: every garment is a structure, every collection a dialogue between past and future.

Author: You’ve led XD for nearly four decades. What does it take for a brand to stay avant-garde without repeating itself?

Ksenija Vrbanić: To stay avant-garde, one must constantly question and explore, pushing beyond comfort zones. It’s important never to fall into complacency. I avoid recycling my own ideas — instead, I look for new ways to challenge conventions.

Author: The “XD dimension” is described as personality-driven design. How do you translate someone’s presence into a cut or a line?

Ksenija Vrbanić: The XD dimension is architecture for the body. My codes are bold and closely linked to personality. Shapes are designed to empower, to endure, to move with strength. When clothes carry my personal signature, people sense it — and sometimes discover a reflection of themselves in it.

Author: You’ve balanced craftsmanship with technology. Where do you see technology pushing fashion next, and what risks do you refuse to take?

Ksenija Vrbanić: Technology will continue to accelerate processes and sustainability. But fashion must remain a human experience. I’ll never abandon craftsmanship, artistry, and touch. Without them, fashion loses its soul.

Author: Sustainability was in your DNA long before it became a trend. Do you believe fashion can ever be truly sustainable?

Ksenija Vrbanić: Fashion is a living organism, in constant change. But the cycle of producing and discarding every six months is destructive. True sustainability means reducing volumes, enhancing quality, designing with intention, and respecting the human relationships in making clothes.

Author: Croatia isn’t usually listed alongside Paris or Milan. How has being rooted there shaped your vision?

Ksenija Vrbanić: Being in Croatia gave me perspective. I built the XD Design Centre to reflect values: harmony with nature, a workspace where people feel free to create. We even grow our own vegetables on-site. At the same time, Zagreb is an hour from an international airport. The world is within reach. Croatia may not offer the same support as other countries, but a unique vision can be realized anywhere. That’s our advantage.

Author: When you revisit a past design, do you feel nostalgia or the urge to reinvent?

Ksenija Vrbanić: I see opportunities for improvement. Each piece captures its moment, but I don’t dwell on the past. We’re building the XD Museum, where archives will be placed beside new ideas — a dialogue across time.

Author: If XD were a building, what would it be?

Ksenija Vrbanić: The XD Design Centre itself. It was once a stable for brickyard horses. We preserved the old bricks and beams, then layered them with concrete, steel, glass. A horse-shaped lamp recalls the building’s history. The space follows Vastu principles, ensuring energy and clarity. For me, the building embodies the brand.

Author: You’ve mentored many Croatian designers. What advice do you give most often?

Ksenija Vrbanić: Stay optimistic. Don’t fear failure. I wasted time fearing it myself, but failure is often progress in disguise. The toughest moments shaped me most. Everything is possible — even when it seems impossible.

Author: Fashion weeks demand spectacle. How do you balance theatre with your own aesthetic?

Ksenija Vrbanić: Spectacle can be engaging without being loud. For me, it’s about crafting narrative — music, makeup, design — each detail must innovate without losing truth.

Author: Looking 40 years ahead, what do you hope people will remember more: the clothes or the philosophy?

Ksenija Vrbanić: The philosophy. Clothes are vehicles for values. What matters is the story: a commitment to innovation, responsibility, and the belief that fashion can be both human and visionary.

⸻

Closing Reflection

In a fashion world obsessed with speed and noise, XD stands as an enduring contradiction: fiercely avant-garde yet rooted in discipline, radical in form yet human in practice. If the next 40 years mirror the last, then the legacy of XD Xenia Design will not be garments alone, but a philosophy of resilience, precision, and fearless experimentation.

Interview by Oona Chanel

Author Magazine 9/2/25 Author Magazine 9/2/25

From Tenderness to Defiance: The Stories Arabic Letters Carry

With Bil Arabi, Nadine Kanso transformed Arabic letters into luminous declarations — jewels that carry memory, identity, and defiance. In this exclusive conversation with Author Magazine, Editor-in-Chief Oona Chanel explores the hidden corners of Kanso’s design process, the mystic weight of language, and the uncharted future of Arabic design.

Some artists design objects; Nadine Kanso designs belonging. With Bil Arabi, she turned Arabic letters into forms that speak — rings that spell tenderness, pendants that hold defiance, earrings that shimmer with memory. For nearly two decades, her work has been less about ornament and more about identity: a way of making the unseen visible and the unspoken unforgettable.

From Beirut’s charged streets to Dubai’s restless skyline, Kanso has always moved between memory and reinvention, building a language of design that is both fiercely regional and undeniably global. Her pieces are not accessories; they are declarations. They remind the wearer that Arabic is not only a script but a living pulse — one that continues to define, question, and evolve with every generation.

Design as Memory & Language

Oona: When you sculpt Arabic letters into gold, do you ever feel you are giving voice to something unsaid — a silence from your own life that finds form in metal?

Nadine: When I started Bil Arabi in 2006, it was to create something from our language for people to carry meaning and emotion with them. The letters are more than symbols; they are memory and voice all at once. Turning them into jewelry is my way of making the unsaid visible and preserving meaning in a form that lasts.

“The letters are more than symbols; they are memory and voice all at once.”

Oona: Which Arabic letter has never appeared in your work yet but quietly calls to you, waiting for the right moment?

Nadine: The letter ث, which is uncommon in names, has always called me. There is a delicate elegance in it that I look forward to exploring when the moment feels right.

Oona: How do you know when a design is finished? Do you stop because it is perfect, or because it still carries the mystery of what remains unsaid?

Nadine: Design is always evolving. As an artist and designer, I never feel something is completely finished. Each creation carries a sense of mystery, leaving space for the wearer to complete the story themselves.

Culture, Identity & the Region

Oona: In today’s Gulf and Levant, where culture is moving so fast, what do you feel is being preserved, and what is being lost, in the visual language of the region?

Nadine: What remains is our pride in language and our instinct for beauty. What risks being lost is the time we once gave to craft and storytelling. Bil Arabi was born to protect that essence and to show that calligraphy and design can be both timeless and modern.

““Bil Arabi was born to protect the essence of language, showing that calligraphy can be both timeless and modern.”

Oona: Do you believe that Arabic design is still seen by the world as “heritage,” or has it finally become “contemporary”?

Nadine: When I launched the brand, Arabic design was often seen as heritage, something to be admired in the past. Bil Arabi has always aimed to shift that perception, showing the world that our letters and identity belong fully to the present. I believe the world is beginning to see it as contemporary, though there is still more work to do.

Oona: If someone from outside the region wears Bil Arabi, what do you hope they carry with them beyond beauty?

Nadine: I hope they carry meaning. Every piece of Bil Arabi is not just jewelry, it is a message. Even if they don’t speak Arabic, they wear identity, culture, and artistry. They carry something that is alive with history yet modern in form.

Personal Reflections & Creative Rituals

Oona: What does your creative ritual look like on a day when inspiration feels absent? Do you wait, force, or surrender?

Nadine: Creativity cannot be forced. On those days, I surrender to the quiet. The beauty of Bil Arabi is that the alphabet always has more to give and can guide me back to inspiration.

Oona: What is the most personal piece you have ever created, not for the market but for yourself?

Nadine: My engagement ring. It reads “Enta wa Ana” — “you and I” — in gold and diamonds. It is a piece that will forever preserve love and memory.

“My engagement ring reads ‘Enta wa Ana.’ It will forever preserve love and memory.”

Oona: When you look back at your first collections, do you feel pride, distance, or a kind of tenderness toward that younger version of yourself?

Nadine: I feel pride. Bil Arabi was the first brand in the region to create Arabic letters as art pieces. Looking back, I admire that courage and vision.

The Hidden Mystique of Design

Oona: Is there a material, a stone, or a symbol you’ve long wanted to work with but haven’t dared to yet, and why?

Nadine: I have always been fascinated by raw wood combined with gold. Jewelry is about permanence, while wood carries fragility. That tension is intriguing, and one day I hope to explore it.

Oona: Do you believe that jewelry can carry protection, like an amulet, even if it’s born out of design rather than ritual?

Nadine: Yes, absolutely. Jewelry carries intention. At Bil Arabi, the letters themselves are powerful and hold energy. When someone wears them, they carry that protection. For example, our Ya Ein collection is designed to protect the wearer from negative energy.

“Jewelry carries intention. The letters themselves are powerful and hold energy.”

Oona: When someone buys a piece, do you feel they are buying an object, or are they stepping into a hidden story you wrote for them

Nadine: They are stepping into a story. Jewelry is not only about design, it is about expression, about voice — and every wearer completes that story.

Time, Change & Evolution

Oona: Has your idea of beauty changed with time?

Nadine: My idea of beauty has remained rooted in authenticity. What I find most beautiful now is honesty in design and materials, pieces that feel alive and purposeful.

Oona: How has motherhood shaped the way you design? Do you find yourself leaving letters and messages for your children in your work?

Nadine: Bil Arabi has always been about identity and voice, and my children are part of that language.

Oona: If you imagine Bil Arabi fifty years from now, what story should it still be telling about the Arab world?

Nadine: Fifty years from now, I want Bil Arabi to still tell the story of Arab identity as dynamic, unapologetic, and alive. The brand should continue to reinvent itself while holding true to its core: our words matter and deserve to be seen.

Home, Place & Belonging

Oona: Between Beirut and Dubai, where do you feel your creativity belongs — in the chaos of memory, or in the calm of reinvention?

Nadine: Both. Beirut is memory, scars, and chaos; it fuels my soul. Dubai is reinvention, growth, and limitless horizons; it pushes me forward. Bil Arabi is born of both.

“Beirut fuels my soul; Dubai pushes me forward. Bil Arabi is born of both.”

Oona: What detail in your home says more about you as a designer than any of your collections ever could?

Nadine: The art pieces around my home. Each one carries a story and a source of inspiration, reflecting how I see design and creativity.

Oona: When you design, do you feel more like you are building a home for language, or setting language free to wander the world?

Nadine: Both. Bil Arabi gives letters a home in gold and diamonds, but once worn, they are free. They wander with whoever carries them.

The Unexplored & the Future

Oona: Is there a part of yourself that you feel you have not yet allowed into your work — something hidden, waiting, that you might one day reveal?

Nadine: Jewelry evolves with life, and I am still evolving. Each collection unveils something new, exploring sides of creativity that were once hidden.

Oona: If Bil Arabi were not jewelry but another art form, what unexplored shape would it take?

Nadine: As a photographer, I best express myself through images. Bil Arabi would likely take the form of a body of photographic work, capturing the stories, energy, and messages that the jewelry carries in a new medium.

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Interview by Oona Chanel