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Thai silk and royal diplomacy
Queen Sirikit’s wardrobe brought Thai silk, historic forms and Paris couture into the visual language of twentieth-century diplomacy. La Mode en Majesté looks beyond royal style to a period in which clothing became closely involved in how modern Thailand represented itself. In 1960, Queen Sirikit of Thailand embarked on an international tour that would take…
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Images made to last
Campaigns still launch, September issues still arrive and magazine covers can still ignite a conversation. But fashion photography now enters a visual culture with fewer hierarchies, more images and almost no guarantee that the one intended to matter most will be the one we remember. Fashion has not lost its need for powerful images. If…
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Hunting past seasons
Runway seasons, creative directors, provenance and forgotten collections are becoming part of the way people shop. As access to fashion history expands, the archive is no longer reserved for museums, houses and specialists. A vintage designer label once told a shopper most of what they needed to know. Today, it may only be the beginning.…
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Alaïa, African influences
At the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris, a new exhibition traces the presence of Africa across decades of the couturier’s work, revealing an influence carried through childhood memories, materials, colour and some of his most recognisable experiments with the body. Azzedine Alaïa made his career in Paris, but part of his visual language had been…
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Fashion’s summer intermission
Between the final couture show and September’s crowded fashion calendar, the industry appears to slow down. But fashion’s summer pause has become less an absence of activity than a change in where that activity takes place. By mid-July, fashion begins to look unusually quiet. The sequence that started with resort collections and continued through Pitti…
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Sustainability, past the buzzword
Fashion talks about sustainability differently than it did five years ago. The promises have become quieter, the vocabulary more cautious and the easy solutions harder to defend. Behind that change in tone, however, the industry’s environmental reckoning is becoming more concrete. There was a period when sustainability seemed capable of becoming a fashion trend in…