& other stories aw26 | city rhythms

Miu Miu.

Elevating the ordinary is an ambition that has always defined Miuccia Prada’s secondary line, but the latest Miu Miu presentation in Paris indicates that everyday dress gains a whole new perspective when classicism meets the running track. For Spring/Summer 2027, Miuccia turns its focus entirely towards a recontextualisation of the quotidian wardrobe, building a collection where sportswear, knitwear and leather collide.

Titled ‘Here and Now’, the collection approaches ordinary dressing with a lighter touch than Prada, opening with almost preppy combinations of menswear-inspired blazers, loafers and tailored separates before letting the eccentricities accumulate. Miu Miu describes the collection as “an ambition to do better”, with familiar garments heightened, transformed and placed into new combinations. Staged as the physical base for ‘Geste de Consolation’, a major interdisciplinary project by filmmaker Alice Diop for Art Basel Paris, the runway became a setting for these clothes to interact in a series of nonconformist dialogues full of friction and contrast.

Miu Miu.

Miu Miu.

Sport became one of the collection’s main languages, but Miuccia refused to keep it in its own category. Performance jersey appeared as abbreviated tops, with sports bras and bralets worn over or beneath dresses and other pieces, while tiny sports shorts and track trousers collided with tailoring. The mix gives the collection its distinctly Miu Miu tension: one part country-club wardrobe, another part changing-room scramble. Olivia Colman was among the models walking the show alongside Gigi Hadid, Emma Corrin, Jamie Bell and Liu Wen. 

Skirts naturally had another starring role, following their more conceptual treatment at Prada but arriving here in a considerably more utilitarian mood. Some came in tartan, others in plain leather, while low-slung styles were paired with cropped tops and sneakers. Dresses moved through multiple shapes, from neat mini silhouettes to deliberately crumpled forms, with strings and crossed lacing becoming the collection’s recurring detail. The latter functioned as fastenings, allowing denim, pleated skirts, cocktail dresses and even shoes to be altered. 

The show also debuted the new Wrangler x Miu Miu Upcycled collection, which deconstructs vintage late-twentieth-century denim sourced by specialists before reconstructing it with Miu Miu’s signature crossed lacing. Among the pieces is Wrangler’s cowboy-cut jean, given a new front through hand-customised crisscross stitching.

Leather, knitwear, suede, satin, gauze and metal mixed throughout, with suede laminated in wax to encourage a cracked, aged appearance and evening fabrics crushed against metal hardware. The prints were every bit as memorable, bringing back geometric motifs in wonderfully kitsch combinations that nodded to Miu Miu’s own history and wider popular culture. 

Miu Miu.

The footwear introduced the fifth chapter of the New Balance x Miu Miu collaboration, reworking New Balance’s late-Nineties RC150 racing shoe in technical mesh, with loose customisable laces threaded through external loops. Alongside it came worn-looking loafers, buckled thong sandals and snakeskin-effect pumps finished with sneaker-style laces. Bug-eye sunglasses appeared in a parade of colours, while reptilian finishes also surfaced across the accessories.

The bags deserve their own attention, with new shapes spanning snakeskin-effect clutches and messenger bags to oversized leather bowling styles, giving the collection some particularly covetable counterpoints to all the sportswear.

Discover the Spring/Summer 2027 collection here.

photography. courtesy of Miu Miu
words. Gennaro Costanzo

Valentino.

Fashion has never been particularly good at following the old advice about not judging a book by its cover. Alessandro Michele seems to agree, which may explain why Valentino’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection came with its own library, its own reading list and, eventually, an entire wardrobe of very attention-grabbing “covers”. Titled ‘Antibiblioteca’, the collection was presented at Paris’ Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, where guests were asked to bring a new or unread book to donate to public libraries through Bibliothèques Sans Frontières and Fauvettes City Club.

The idea comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s description of Umberto Eco’s vast personal library, where the unread books matter precisely because of everything they might still teach us. Michele transfers that logic to clothing, treating the runway as a collection of possible lives: garments that may be worn repeatedly, photographed once, cherished forever or never leave the wardrobe at all. “For this reason, a show can be seen as a sort of visual antilibrary,” he writes.

Valentino.

Valentino.

The clothes certainly looked ready to be remembered. Michele’s familiar maximalism arrived in full colour, with hot pink, magenta, lilac, cobalt, vivid green and lemon yellow competing for attention. Satin bustiers were paired with contrasting skirts, while sequins, lace, feathers and elaborate embroidery kept the surface busy. Plissé appeared throughout, alongside dramatic ruffles and fluid, fishtail-like shapes, producing a wardrobe that seemed determined to make its presence known from across the room. 

The accessories were equally committed to the assignment. Chunky jewel-encrusted chokers, oversized pearl earrings and long opera gloves turned even relatively simple looks into full compositions, while bows appeared everywhere — at the waist, across garments and as oversized finishing details. Some of the more playful pieces came topped with baseball caps emblazoned ‘VILLAIN TEEN’, a phrase Michele had already introduced for Resort 2027, where it appeared across caps, knitwear and accessories.

Menswear slipped comfortably into the same world, with tailoring mixed with sheer knitwear, scarves, jewellery and slouchier trousers, while shearling appeared as trims on shirts and other pieces. The intention was not about separating day from night, or masculine from feminine, but actually about collecting as many different personalities as possible under one roof.

Valentino.

Valentino.

The bags offered another particularly tempting chapter, with the Rockstud Spike returning in medium shoulder styles spanning kidskin, suede and embroidered nappa leather, adding yet another layer of texture to Michele’s already crowded visual vocabulary.

The final page ended the story with a saturated magenta gown with a long, pleated train and an enormous bow cascading from the back. It was unmistakably Valentino, unmistakably Michele and the sort of dress that makes you wonder whether the point of a wardrobe is always to be practical. As Michele writes, “Even the garments that we will never wear… still speak to us of the lives we could have lived.”

Discover the Spring/Summer 2027 collection here.

photography. courtesy of Valentino
words. Gennaro Costanzo

Jennifer Lawrence, Greta Lee and Taylor Russell by Sam Rock for Dior.

What do Jennifer Lawrence, Greta Lee, Taylor Russell and Drew Starkey have in common? Aside from a collective lack of bad angles, the answer is a stunningly fresh new Dior Cruise 2027 campaign that turns a trip to the museum into a cinematic exercise in people-watching. If you happen to catch ‘JLaw’ updating her IG feed with art-filled gallery backdrops over the next few days, you can blame the French house. 

Shot by Sam Rock inside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) — the same setting where Jonathan Anderson presented the collection back in May — the four actors wander through the museum’s galleries, laughing, looking at artworks and occasionally appearing lost in thought. Dior describes them as “playing” themselves, since each actor also has an interest in art, adding a little more credibility to all that gallery gazing.

Jennifer Lawrence and Drew Starkey by Sam Rock for Dior.

Jennifer Lawrence, Greta Lee and Taylor Russell by Sam Rock for Dior.

The clothes bring Anderson’s Californian colour story into the museum, drawing on the sun-drenched shades of Los Angeles, Hollywood’s Technicolor era and the visual punch of Pop Art. Lawrence, who was photographed in a pale blue Dior look at the house’s Spring/Summer 2027 show in Paris last week, returns to the Cruise collection here, while the wider campaign gives the collection’s American references a more leisurely setting.

The new accessories are particularly hard to miss. Lee carries the Dior Double, a two-handled satchel, while Russell wears the triangular Dior Initials Hobo, finished with stitched Cannage. Starkey, meanwhile, gets the generously proportioned Dior Double-Up Messenger, with its double buckles and flaps, alongside the Dior Granville Shopper in black leather and Dior Granville Duffle in suede with contrasting Cannage stitching. 

Starkey also wears shirts from Anderson’s Dior collaboration with artist Ed Ruscha, printed with text drawn from Ruscha’s work, adding another layer of Los Angeles culture to the images. The campaign plays with how art and contemporary culture intersect, even weaving in Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (circa 1908) from the museum’s permanent collection to establish a visual link back to the water lilies that bloomed in the Maison’s previous runway collection.

Jennifer Lawrence, Greta Lee and Taylor Russell by Sam Rock for Dior.

The full Dior Cruise 2027 campaign arrives on 22 October, coinciding with the collection’s arrival in stores. Find out more here.

photography. courtesy of Sam Rock for Dior
words. Gennaro Costanzo