Remembering Dolly Parton’s Singular Style

You could recognize Dolly Parton by her silhouette from the last row of a concert venue — buxom, big-haired, tiny-bodied and teetering on heels. And that was by design.

Like Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson, she wasn’t owned by any brand; she was the brand: a self-aware blonde bimbo who, of course, was anything but.

Parton understood the power of image and built hers out of the visual vocabulary of working-class Southern femininity, with bleached hair, acrylic nails, rhinestones, fringe, tight waists, short skirts and décolletage. Then she turned it way up. The oft-told origin story is that her childhood ideal of glamour was “the town tramp,” a woman other people may have regarded as cheap but the young Parton saw as beautiful.

That tension was essential to her style, which she often called “backwoods Barbie.” Parton was always in on the joke, and her famous quip that “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap” perfectly captured just how much calculation was behind the artifice. Her clothes exaggerated things women historically have been encouraged to minimize, including breasts, blonde ambition, sexuality, sparkle and age-defying vanity. Rather than apologize for any of it, she made excess her uniform.

Fashion, in the conventional sense, wasn’t the point, though she did make a memorable appearance at the 1994 Calvin Klein fall runway show. Yes, really. Dolly in Calvin. Still, she rarely appeared in fashion magazines, becoming a style icon on her own, outside of the industry.

Her longtime costume designers Lucy Adams and Steve Summers did not work on reinventing her look, which is the name of the game for so many of today’s pop stars. They refined it, creating ever more sparkly Nudie-inspired jumpsuits and second-skin waist-snatching gowns with Western fringe and butterfly motifs. Her nails were also a style signature. Long and red, she famously used them as percussion on her hit song “9 to 5.”

Dolly’s appeal outgrew the confines of country music, and yet she stayed true to her image. She became a denim icon, a camp icon and a gay icon, embraced for her self-invention, showiness, humor, kindness and refusal to conform to conventional ideas of good taste. She didn’t dress to be taken seriously, she dressed so no one could ever mistake her for anyone else.

Along the way, she meant so much to so many people, including Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Sabrina Carpenter, who sometimes imitated her style. “Oh Dolly, the only thing I could say after we met was ‘she really is an angel walking the earth,’ and ‘we look like we could be sisters,’” Carpenter wrote on Instagram.

The social media tributes have been fascinating to see, from Jeff Bezos (”Dolly spent her whole life showing us what it means to lead with love ...”) to the Royal Family (”Remembering the late, great Dolly, who brought joy, comfort and inspiration to so many — including the millions of children given free books through her Imagination Library”).

Carol Burnett recalled taping the 1979 TV special Dolly and Carol in Nashville over Thanksgiving week, when Parton cooked individual turkey dinners for every person involved in the production, while Reese Witherspoon posted about how Parton took her out to dinner to share her memories of June Carter Cash when she was prepping for the 2005 film Walk the Line.

The fashion community has also chimed in, with L.A. designers Emily Current and Meritt Elliott of The Great calling her their “denim queen,” and Emma Grede, co-founder of Good American, remembering their 2025 collaboration on a denim capsule collection and the joy of shooting with Parton.

“After a crazy long day on set, Dolly took photos with every single person working. Never have I see anyone do that and never have I been on a set where everyone wanted a photo,” said Grede. “But Dolly was different.”

And she looked different, always. As Parton said herself, “Who wants to dress classy? I’m in a class of my own.” Amen.

U.S. Open of Fashion Brings Stars and Sparkle to Queens

Welcome to the opening acts of what can only be described as the U.S. Open of Fashion.

While the official Grand Slam action begins Sunday, Flushing Meadows is already a runway for looks on the court and in the seats.

Tuesday’s Roger Federer exhibition event at Arthur Ashe Stadium set the tone, with U.S. Open and Federer superfan Anna Wintour attending alongside designers Tory Burch and Wes Gordon, beauty scion Aerin Lauder, The Shards‘ Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere, Lin-Manuel Miranda and more.

On the court, the tournament promises to deliver a masterclass in style from icon Venus Williams, whose avant-garde looks changed the game; Naomi Osaka, who has turned the court walk into something akin to a Met Gala red carpet; Coco Gauff, the face of New Balance x Miu Miu; and Aryana Sabalenka, who locked in a powerhouse partnership with Gucci earlier this year.

Sabalenka got ahead of the action on Tuesday, turning heads during a mixed doubles match alongside Novak Djokovic, when she sported a daring Nike New York Court Slam black mesh tennis dress over an electric orange sports top and bottom. She completed the look with over 83 carats of colorful diamond jewelry created in collaboration with New York brand Material Good, which she will be wearing throughout the tournament.

While Jannik Sinner has given new meaning to tennis-core as an ambassador for Gucci, debuting a series of custom luxury duffels on the court, he had to withdraw from the competition because of a knee injury. But there are other luxury brand ambassadors worth keeping score of, including Carlos Alcatraz (Louis Vuitton) and Lorenzo Musetti (Bottega Veneta).

L’Agence Gets Into the Game

Who knew that while scaling a wildly successful L.A. fashion business over the past 12 years, Tara Rudes Dann was also perfecting her tennis game? Which is to say, the L’Agence fashion director launched the brand’s new tennis collection last week from an authentic place, as a lifelong lover of the sport.

She gathered friends courtside at the Beverly Hills estate of her uncle, L’Agence creative director and chairman Jeff Rudes, to celebrate over a delightful tennis-themed dinner that included honeydew Deuce cocktails, a L’Agence branded Roe caviar service and optic yellow, tennis-ball shaped “Gateau Princesse” desserts.

Naturally, the dress code was tennis whites, and she enlisted her fashionable guests, including makeup artist Monika Blunder, stylists Abby Arad and Andrea Lubin, furniture designer Nina Takesh, beauty podcaster Melissa Magsaysay, Anablue founder Lauren Perez Waltzer and others to model the collection of cute tennis dresses, pleated skirts and fitted tanks, designed to perform with four-way stretch, UV protection and moisture-wicking materials. Everyone looked great.

The evening’s guest of honor was former pro tennis player and fashion maverick Anne White, who famously created a frenzy by sporting a unitard while playing at Wimbledon in 1985, where a referee actually told her to wear more appropriate clothing. Apparently, she had no idea the look would stoke so much controversy.

“I’m sitting next to an incredible human,” Dann said during her toast. “A badass tennis player.”

After her professional career, White spent 16 years in fashion as director of wholesale at Cartier and Jaeger-LeCoultre watches, before becoming director of The Beverly Hills Tennis Club.

Cut to the pandemic, when Dann met and got the chance to play with White on the very court where dinner was served and the collection was launched, alas without a unitard.

“It was so special during that time of so much uncertainty to be with someone so powerful,” said Dann, who is getting ready to up her game in another way next month, showing L’Agence for the first time at Paris Fashion Week. Bonne chance.

L’Agence Tennis Collection, $135 to $450, at L’Agence.com, L’Agence stores and select retail partners.

Hollywood-Loved Jeweler Puts Down West Coast Roots

It may be the dog days of summer, but that hasn’t slowed the fashion action.

Hollywood-loved jeweler Jessica McCormack, who designed Zendaya’s engagement ring and Zoë Kravitz’s everyday diamond earrings and ring stacks, has opened her first West Coast store at South Coast Plaza.

The antiques-filled boutique has brought the British designer’s residential retail sensibility to Costa Mesa, Calif., in a remarkable way, so that you can hardly tell it’s inside a shopping center. And the opening adds to an impressive list of recent first-to-market store exclusives for South Coast Plaza that also includes Manolo Blahnik, Schiaparelli and Alaia.

The 1,600 square-foot space showcases McCormack’s signature Day Diamonds, as well as exclusive pieces and new collections.

“Wearability has always been at the heart of how I design, with pieces meant to be worn every day, not saved for occasions,” McCormack said. “California already knows how to do that instinctively; there’s an effortless quality to how people dress here that I’ve always admired, and it’s exactly the world I want Day Diamonds to live in.”

In the corporate-dominated landscape of high jewelry, where heritage brands have centuries of archives to draw on, and aggressively pay for celebrity placements, McCormack has built a modern, independent empire.

The New Zealand-born designer may be a pioneer in the concept of casual diamonds, but she is just as serious as the big guys are about her craft, nurtured during a childhood spent combing through estate auctions with her art-dealer father.

A formative internship in the jewelry department at Sotheby’s London deepened her obsession, giving her hands-on experience with 1920s Cartier and imperial Russian treasures. But rather than copying the past, McCormack has translated the tradition of Georgian and Victorian gold smithing into sleek, ultra-modern pieces. Her signature “button-back” technique cases the reverse side of a diamond in gold to soften the light, while hand-cut, blackened white gold borders give classical settings a rock n’ roll edge.

This balance of high-end luxe and effortless wearability has captured the attention of Hollywood tastemakers who are wearing her jewelry on the red carpet and on the street.

When Kravitz, who is the ultimate arbiter of effortless, downtown cool, signed on as the first brand ambassador in 2024, it cemented the brand’s position at the intersection of high fashion and street style.

Following a successful American debut with a townhouse on New York’s Madison Avenue, McCormack is doubling down on Southern California with a standalone Rodeo Drive flagship planned by 2027. So expect lots more Hollywood hits to keep coming.

Jessica McCormack, 3333 Bristol Street, Costa Mesa, Calif.

Palisades Village Tenants Offer a Who’s Who of Contemporary L.A. Fashion Brands

Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village reopened with much fanfare last weekend following $100 million in environmental remediation and renovations, reintroducing itself as a gathering place for a community still rebuilding and healing from last year’s fires.

The refreshed retail tenant list is a concentration of some of the most successful homegrown labels of the past two decades, making the shopping center a compelling destination for L.A. fashion and different visions of its trademark ease, as conceived by founders who are denim industry veterans, Hollywood stylists, digital influencers and more.

One of the must-sees is the first West Coast store for Leset, the L.A. brand founded by Lili Chemla in 2019 that moves beyond athleisure to marry the ease of loungewear with the polish of ready-to-wear.

Its popular Margo boxy tees, pointelle knits, Kyoto carpenter pants, cropped cardigans and oversized merino sweaters, available in classic colors and punchy brights, can be worn as part of matching sets for an everyday tonal uniform or pulled apart to wear with other things. In addition to its basics, the brand now also has slip skirts, shorts, outerwear, shoes and even some patterns in the mix, like fall’s cheery marigold jacquard.

The brand’s effortless essentials have a devoted following that includes Hailey Bieber, Dakota Johnson, Sofia Richie Grainge and other tastemakers who have turned Leset’s deceptively simple staples into cult pieces.

Designed by Phoebe Little, the store feels like a closet in a luxe coastal California home, with washed-out hues, warm woods, stone floors, custom millwork, vintage light fixtures and gorgeous, minimal floral arrangements, all of which add to the experience.

Next door, you’ll find the first-ever store from Xirena, Dierdre Roffoni and Tony Graham’s stalwart L.A. brand, built on relaxed washed cotton poplin shirts and shirt dresses, crinkly gauze dresses and drawstring pants.

The L.A. fashion veterans founded Xírena (pronounced “sirena”) in 2011, and it has been on an upward trajectory since, transitioning from its beginnings in cotton lingerie to delightfully lived-in shirting and eventually a full lifestyle offering with boho floral dresses and skirts, corduroy jackets, denim and more.

All of it is on display in the boutique, which has a lovely organic feel with an artificial skylight made from fabric, hand carved travertine flooring, and curved textured walls. There’s also a fun selection of accessories from third-party brands in the mix, including shell necklaces from Gachon Pothier, metallic socks and embroidered raffia bags by Maria La Rosa.

Hollywood stylist-turned-designer Andrea Lieberman’s sophisticated California contemporary label ALC has reopened across the way, as has L.A. model-influencer Anine Bing‘s store, which stocks denim, tailoring and shoes with a rock ‘n’ roll edge, plus her popular “Los Angeles” University sweatshirts showing hometown pride.

In a huge storefront on the main drag of Swarthmore Avenue is Reformation, the L.A.-born label Yael Aflalo launched in 2009 with reworked vintage and grew into a powerhouse that helped redefine sustainable fashion — culminating in an IPO last month at an eye-popping $886 million valuation.

And coming in January: Staud, founded by L.A. native Sarah Staudinger after she was fashion director of Reformation. She has built an impressive business with her cheerful, vintage-inspired resort wear, beaded bags and covetable shoes, not to mention collabs with Birkenstock, New Balance, American Express and more.

Just across the way, Cult Gaia opens next month. That’s Jasmin Larian Hekmat’s label, born in L.A. in 2012, which has turned accessories and clothing into sometimes-surrealist objets d’art, beginning with the bamboo Ark bag that became an emblem of Instagram-era style.

On the denim front is Paige, former fit model Paige Adams-Geller’s brand that grew out of L.A.’s early-aughts premium denim boom. And soon-to-open Mother, founded by denim veterans Lela Becker and Tim Kaeding, channels mischievous irreverence and 1970s nostalgia into vintage-inspired jeans and ready-to-wear. The brand lost its original Palisades location in the fire days before it was due to open, and this store follows on the heels of a Beverly Hills boutique that opened last month.

Like several of the brands with stores in Palisades Village, Mother makes much of its clothing in L.A., as does Buck Mason, which has a men’s store and will soon have a women’s store here as well. Sasha Koehn and Erik Allen Ford founded Buck Mason in Venice in 2013, focusing on American classics, including perfect white tees, chinos, button-downs and chore jackets. (Leanne Ford, who is married to Erik, designs their chic stores and is a formidable creative force herself, having done interior collaborations with Crate & Barrel and other brands.)

On the luxury side, Jacques Marie Mage, Jérôme Mage’s wildly successful 10-year-old L.A. eyewear label, is opening an outpost for its collectible eyeglasses and design objects that pair iconoclastic swagger with Japanese craft.

And anchoring a particularly visible corner, L.A. native Jennifer Meyer is back. After founding her fine-jewelry line in 2005, her breakthrough came when Jennifer Aniston wore her leaf necklace in the 2006 film The Break-Up.

If L.A. style is defined by polished ease, Meyer has translated that idea into jewelry. Her nameplate, palm tree, initial and charm pendant necklaces have been part of the off-duty, everyday wardrobes of Hollywood celebrities for two decades. When it came time to open her first flagship store, Meyer chose Palisades Village, and she lent her support through the devastating fires, even designing an “L.A.” pendant with proceeds benefiting the Los Angeles Fire Department. In store now, she’s continuing her neighborhood cheer with a new “Palisades” pendant necklace.

These local brands tell a feel-good story of creativity and entrepreneurship, reflecting distinct facets of the city’s style and different generations of brand building. Together, they offer a fitting reminder of what good can happen when the city comes together.

Palisades Village, 15225 Palisades Village Lane, Pacific Palisades.

Palisades Fashion Icon Back in Business

Elyse Walker brought high-end designer clothing to the Pacific Palisades in 1999, opening her namesake store on Antioch Street and giving the Westside neighborhood the fashion clubhouse it needed.

She set the standard for personal service, shopping the collections in Europe with specific clients in mind, delivering clothes to their homes for them to try on and launching an in-house styling program. All of it helped her grow Elyse Walker to a fleet of eight stores from New York to the Napa Valley, including her more casual Towne stores. All the while, she nurtured a core community of women in the Palisades who shopped for shoes, showed off new babies and cried over relationships in her midst.

Last year, when Walker lost the mothership in the Palisades Fire, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to reopen. Then Rick Caruso came calling, offering her the prime space fronting Sunset Boulevard at the entrance to Palisades Village.

Now located at 1000 Swarthmore with nearly 8,000 square feet of retail space, the store has a sophisticated salon feel and was designed by architecture firm Janson Scuro, which was also responsible for the Madison Avenue flagship in New York and Walker’s store in St. Helena, Calif.

Spanning three rooms, Walker’s curation of luxury brands is as sharp as ever, dictated by clients rather than trends. The selection includes tailoring from Celine, Gucci and Saint Laurent; knitwear from Walker’s own namesake line; mixed-print skirts and gold-embroidered shirts from Dries Van Noten; and sexy, silky evening dresses from Silvia Tcherassi. She also stocks up-and-coming brands such as High Sport, Jacquemus and Jude, alongside fine jewelry from Gucci, Jenna Blake, Spinelli Kilcollin and Sophie Bille Brahe, among others.

Walker got her start in shoes and still has the best selection in town, from Phoebe Philo ballet flats to Alaïa’s latest suede cutout slippers and Khaite’s whipstitched moccasin kitten heels.

The heart of the store is a central living room with a large, welcoming couch designed to spark conversation, just as the space always has. Etched in stone on the floor at the entrance to the store is “Palisades Forever.”

“I want to thank every client, friend and retail partner who stood by us and supported us through the challenges post fire,” Walker told guests gathered for the opening hosted by Rick Caruso on Saturday. “It all led to this point where we celebrate this momentous occasion not just for the store, but for the entire Palisades community that now has a place to gather and call home.”

Elyse Walker, 1000 Swarthmore Street, Pacific Palisades, CA.

Elevator Boys Make Their Film Debut

Addison Rae, Noah Beck and ... the Elevator Boys?

When the German boy band, which surged to popularity on TikTok, signed with CAA last spring, it was clear they had Hollywood ambitions.

With more than 48 million social media followers, the five members — Bene Schulz, Jacob Rott, Julien Brown, Luis Freitag and Tim Schaecker — have gone from being content creators just starting out to firmly establishing themselves in the pop music world with singles such as Runaway, I Like It and Love Me Better — all in just five years.

They have also become fashion-world fixtures, partnering with Gucci, Prada, Armani, Ralph Lauren, Hublot, L’Oréal Paris and Rabanne Beauty, among other brands, and have become regulars in the front row at fashion weeks. Rott in particular has emerged as a red carpet risk-taker and style setter and even walked the Versace runway as a model in 2024.

Now, the Elevator Boys have turned their attention to acting, with their first film, “Back to the ‘90s,” debuting Friday on Prime Video in German with English subtitles.

The time-travel film is of the Back to the Future genre, only the time machine isn’t a DeLorean, it’s ... you guessed it, an elevator.

Art imitates life in that the film follows five friends who dream of making it as a boy band. When one member threatens to walk away just as their big break is in play, the group unexpectedly finds itself transported back to 1995.

Cue the gags about life pre-tech (a telephone book is mistaken for an instruction manual, cassette tapes abound, navigation to a party must be done without Google) and the throwback fashion, including space buns, choker necklaces and Veruca Salt T-shirts, all of which look au courant thanks to today’s ‘90s nostalgia craze.

The story is light, blending music (alt and pop), friendship and romance. The film, which was directed by Facundo Scalerandi, also introduces a new Elevator Boys track, 1995, cleverly written and produced by Gary Barlow of Take That, the 1990s British boy band that also featured Robbie Williams.

Will Back to the ‘90s be enough to lift the Elevator Boys’ acting prospects in Hollywood? Let’s put it this way: It’s a start.

Reserve Lunch (and Dinner) at the Lucas Now

Following the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA opening, L.A.’s next hotly anticipated museum opening is the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and it’s just around the corner on Sept. 22.

While I love museums, I love museum shops and restaurants almost as much. And the Lucas’ newly announced Skywalker Grill looks incredible.

The restaurant opening atop the futuristic-looking 300,000-square-foot building is giving serious Mos Eisley Cantina vibes — as in, the “wretched hive of scum and villainy” that first appeared in the 1977 original film, Star Wars.

Maybe it’s the way the cherry wood paneling curves to resemble the walls of Tatooine’s no-droids-allowed watering hole. Or it could be the gleaming white, futuristic slabs of Corian stone that accent some surfaces. But it’s probably the sculptural bar that anchors the room, reminiscent of the horseshoe-shaped one that welcomes a who’s who of the galactic underworld.

The space was designed by Rockwell Group (of the Las Vegas Cosmopolitan and Nobu Hotels, Warner Music Group headquarters and many more dazzling spaces). And it will also serve up a neat sci-fi-worthy trick: a private dining room with walls that switch from clear to frosted for added privacy. Skywalker Grill will also boast an outdoor terrace described in press materials as “nestled among lush landscaping that offer panoramic views of Los Angeles” (more Forest Moon of Endor vibes, really).

The menu, by comparison, is much more down to earth and skews toward classic American cuisine, with an emphasis on California-grown ingredients. Shareable plates include Dungeness crab cakes, pigs in a blanket and lobster corn dogs, and among the signature entrées on the menu are crispy chicken Milanese, honey-miso-glazed salmon and the Skywalker Ranch Wagyu Burger. Here’s hoping there will be a fun-themed cocktail menu, at least.

The restaurant will welcome guests for lunch, dinner and weekend brunch, and it’s worth noting that Skywalker Grill will be accessible to the general public as well as museumgoers — and after regular museum hours.

Although the restaurant isn’t scheduled to open until the museum officially does, it’s currently accepting reservations online through Resy. As of this writing, though, the first available table for two doesn’t appear to be until early November. So you might just need to use a Jedi mind trick to score the table you’re looking for.

Skywalker Grill at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, 1 Lucas Plaza, Los Angeles, open starting Sept. 22, 2026.

The Shards Brings Back the Dark Glam of Early ‘80s L.A.

When I first saw Less Than Zero, the glamorous 1987 neo-noir film based on Bret Easton Ellis’ novel of the same name, it made quite an impression.

Gorgeous Jami Gertz in her sharp black tailoring and tight short skirts. Andrew McCarthy in his red Corvette driving through the neon night. The swimming pools, cigarettes and so, so much cocaine. It was incredibly seductive, if deeply tragic in its portrayal of addiction. Still, for a teenager in New York City who liked trouble, it made L.A. look like the place I wanted to find it.

So, naturally, I was excited to see The Shards, the new thriller streaming on FX and Hulu from executive producer Ryan Murphy, based on Ellis’ 2023 horror novel of the same name. It’s set in the same privileged, cocaine- and cigarette-fueled early-1980s L.A. scene.

It takes place in 1981, centering on five seniors at a prep school (inspired by Buckley School, Ellis’ alma mater) whose lives unravel when a serial killer terrorizes L.A., and it becomes evident that the culprit could be someone in their own friend circle.

Ellis himself figures into the story, with Igby Rigney playing a fictionalized version of the author who becomes suspicious of new student Robert Mallory, played by Homer Gere. And Kaia Gerber is Susan Reynolds, the class president, miss perfect, and the hottest girl in school.

The show is a bit uneven, but like most everything Murphy touches, it looks great and could very well be fashion-influential, à la Euphoria. (Gerber and Gere are covering the September issue of Vogue, cleverly harking back to a 1992 cover featuring their parents, Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere, who were married at the time.)

There’s a lot of disco, Studio 54 and Flippers Roller Boogie Palace in the women’s clothes, with a killer soundtrack to match. And watching the characters drive their gorgeous cars from Westwood Village to Mulholland Drive, stopping at retro L.A. locations like Sherman Oaks Galleria, Hamburger Hamlet and Trumps, is a treat.

American Gigolo, the 1980 film starring Homer’s father, Richard, was a stylistic reference for the film’s fashion, costume designer and co-executive producer Lou Eyrich told the L.A. Times.

You can certainly see it in the coiffed men’s hair and neutral-toned drape suits, which are already seeing a revival on men’s fashion runways. To that end, style star-in-the-making Rigney wore a baggy Valentino look for The Shards’ Berlin premiere that felt like a touch of red-carpet method dressing.

Gerber’s looks are quite different than the 1980s shoulder pads and neon colors more commonly associated with the MTV decade. “That was the late ‘80s,” she told Vogue magazine. “What’s so fun about our show is that it’s set during a transitional time for fashion. My character has a lot of amazing looks that I personally love, like the jeans I wear. It’s very Lauren Hutton and Brooke Shields; classic all-American looks.” Very Calvin Klein and Perry Ellis, too.

All-American prep is another major reference, with plenty of Ralph Lauren polo ponies (so many, I’m convinced it must be a brand integration), crisp khakis, deck sneakers and Ray-Ban Clubmaster sunglasses. It’s a look that’s always in fashion but is currently seeing a revival at Celine and the reenergized Polo Ralph Lauren.

Banking on interest in the show’s fashion, the marketing team at FX pulled together an 82-page, downloadable The Shards Guide to Being Hot & Rich, with features such as “How to Dress the Part,” “The Art of Effortless Beauty” and “A Valley It Girl’s Friday Night.”

It appears to be a riff on Lisa Birnbach’s seminal 1980 work The Preppy Handbook, which would be brilliant if it were funnier. It also doesn’t mention a single brand name, not even Ralph Lauren, which is a head-scratcher. Why do an 82-page style guide if you’re not going to guide?

Makeup Archive Dedicated to The Historic Legacy of Beauty Products

Celebrity makeup artist and social media famous beauty historian Erin Parsons has launched a new project called The Makeup Archive.

The 501 (k) non-profit organization and online (for now) museum is dedicated to the historic legacy of makeup from the 1700s to today, featuring everything from 1940s era Mavis Liquid Hose leg makeup and a Souvenir Marine Officer hat compact, to 1960s Mary Quant Every Day Lashes false eyelashes and Revlon Couturine lipstick dolls, to a 1990s-era Robert Lee Morris for Elizabeth Arden lipstick case and Chanel Vamp lipstick.

The items are displayed like beautiful objets d’art, with informational labels about their provenance, and are a lot of fun to look through, even if the website is a little clunky. Related ephemera, such as vintage beauty advertisements and books, are also catalogued.

Parsons, whose career has spanned working with Pat McGrath and Gigi Hadid as well as serving as Maybelline’s global makeup artist, traces her love of beauty back to Marilyn Monroe. There are several items that belonged to the fashion icon, including a Rouge Pot by French brand Dorin and a Max Factor Hollywood lipstick.

I chatted with Parsons about the origins of the archive, its mission and what we should all be collecting at Sephora now that will stand the test of time later.

WrapStyle: How did you come up with the idea for the Makeup Archive and how long did it take to get it launched?

EP: Honestly I was collecting without a cause, I was truly obsessed with beauty history, finding objects worn by celebs of the past or figuring out how ancient makeup was created. I had collected so much that it was bordering on hoarding so my husband said why don’t we archive this so you know exactly what you have.

Once we started we realized there really was no dedication to beauty history in this way. We decided to create a non-profit organization to further the education, preservation and research into everything beauty history, mainly for now makeup related.

Why is it needed in our culture, and do you think it will ever take physical form as a museum?

EP: The beauty industry is something like a $700 billion industry which is insane and yet we don’t know what came before. Most products are recycled (for instance the eyelash curler has not really changed since its launch in I believe 1924). I personally think it’s important to look at the past in order to create something unique for the future. In the world of beauty there is no real technological change. I hope that this archive inspires but also helps to create something completely new. Our goal is to create an actual public space, whether it’s the archive where one can research or a museum where one can look upon the objects and learn from the past. We are hoping and trying to create the makeup museum in New York City.

When did you start collecting and what was your very first piece?

EP: My first piece ever was a Maybelline cake mascara. I believe it was 10 years ago as I was Maybelline’s global makeup artist at the time. I thought hmm ... Maybelline came out in 1916 so what did the product look like? I went on eBay and couldn’t believe I found a piece of their history fully intact. Well that started a firestorm. I have so much Maybelline in my collection. But then I wanted to know what lipstick did Marilyn Monroe use? This really has become a never ending quest. Years later, I have thousands of objects from beauty history’s past.

I read that the Marilyn Monroe lipstick is your most valuable piece. Why did you want to own it and what is your continuing fascination with Marilyn from a makeup point of view?

EP: Marilyn is such a makeup icon! Through artifice she created this legendary look that we can all associate with her. I wanted to know what was the red lip she wore? In the end because of Technicolor and the way certain tones and hues translated on screen I found out her red was orange! This piece is so valuable to me because it was Marilyn who got me interested in makeup from my childhood. She is the reason I understood that makeup can create a character. From this I became a makeup artist which helped me afford all of these incredible objects.

Tell me about some other rare pieces.

EP: The boîte à mouches. These are truly rare and an obsession. (Editor note: In French, boîte à mouches translates to “fly box,” and historically, refers to a small, decorative cosmetic case used in the 17th and 18th centuries to hold artificial beauty marks made of silk or velvet worn on the face). They were makeup compacts holding a tiny brush known as a vergette plus two compartments that held rouge and I believe loose powder. They are called this because historians believe they held beauty marks but I’m not so sure. You can barely fit your finger in to grab a “fly” or mouche so I truly question this. In portraits of Madame de Pompadour she is using one of these to apply her rouge. In my opinion it was the world’s first compact yet it was not called such.

I love complete boxes of color harmony like the Richard Hudnut pieces. They have items for your hair and skin and eyes to match. I also love figural compacts like the Schuco monkey, turtle and dog and these are quite rare as they are from the 1920s.

What guides your acquisition strategy?

EP: In the beginning I collected almost anything I could find but then I looked for mint condition in the box, especially with ephemera attached. Sometimes I’ll buy something used just so I can swatch the color. This often ends up in my videos.

What is one makeup item on the market today that you think is so influential that it will be collectible in 30 years?

EP: Specialty lipstick packaging. I think of the Dior Rouge Premier line. The case is incredibly crafted and special. I bought one and then they kindly gifted me one so I plan to do a giveaway online. It’s just as beautiful as the vintage pieces. I hope to see more special containers with refills available like it in the future.

Devil Wears Prada 2 Clothes, Accessories Go Under the Gavel

The most anticipated fashion movie of the year might turn out to be the most anticipated auction of the year.

Auction house Christie’s New York is putting clothing and accessories featured in The Devil Wears Prada 2 up for bid in an online auction running Sept. 1-15. The sale includes screen-worn pieces such as the colorful Gabriela Hearst dress worn by Anne Hathaway (spoiler alert: stain and all), a Dries Van Noten tassel jacket worn by Meryl Streep and a Dior suit worn by Emily Blunt.

The auction is the brainchild of the movie’s titular devil, Meryl Streep, who spearheaded a similar charity auction after the first film. Proceeds from this sale will benefit two organizations: the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the latter of which is a nod to the endangered-media plot line of the film.

The online auction can be accessed for bidding at Christies.com starting Sept. 1. If you’d prefer to browse before you bid, you can do that, too — provided you’re in New York from Sept. 8-13, when the pieces will be featured in a free, public exhibition at Christie’s New York at 20 Rockefeller Plaza.

Other film-related items that could become part of your own fashion closet, if the auction gods find favor with you, include a pair of red Valentino Rockstud pumps worn by Streep in a trailer for the movie and signed by the actor; a three-piece Dolce & Gabbana suit with cheetah neck scarf worn onscreen by Stanley Tucci during the designers’ Spring/Summer 2026 fashion show in Milan; and the black velvet-and-feathered Bad Binch TongTong by Terrence Zhou maxi dress worn by Lady Gaga in the Runway music video with artist Doechii.

‘The Devil Wears Prada 2: The Auction” opening Sept. 1 at 10 a.m. EDT at christies.com

Sézane Finds Its Forever L.A. Home

Following successful pop-ups in the area over the last couple of years that were extended due to their popularity, beloved contemporary French brand Sézane has opened a permanent store at Brentwood Country Mart.

The compact boutique, with glossy lacquer, striped upholstery and antique mirrors, has a tight edit of pieces from the brand’s just-dropped fall collection, including a cool khaki-green bomber jacket that looks far more expensive than its $670 price tag; a romantic embroidered blouse with a ruffled neckline; suede wedges; the ever-popular Sézane bucket bags; and limited-edition Paris-L.A. T-shirts.

Sézane Brentwood joins the brand’s growing list of U.S. locations, including boutiques in San Francisco, New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C., as well as long-term pop-ups in Austin, Atlanta, Boston, Nashville, Charleston, Dallas and Williamsburg.

To celebrate the opening, Sézane’s traveling retail concept, En Route, will also arrive in Los Angeles with a custom Airstream-turned-mobile boutique that will stop at the Brentwood Farmers Market on Sunday, Aug. 16, and the Hollywood Farmers Market on Sunday, Aug. 23.

Sézane Brentwood, 225 26th Street, Santa Monica, CA. Sezane.com.

John Galliano in the Hot Seat Again

Anna Wintour has done it again with her annual fashion fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute.

Following on the heels of this year’s Met Gala, aka Tech Gala, which became a flashpoint for conversation about the unscrupulous tech titans who footed the bill for the night celebrating the Costume Art exhibition, the subject of next year’s fashion extravaganza and fundraiser is generating fresh controversy.

The 2027 exhibition, John Galliano: Horizons, will be the first major museum show dedicated to the work of the designer, who was fired by Dior in 2011 after being caught on video hurling antisemitic and anti-Asian insults at patrons during a drunken tirade at a Paris bar.

The news broke during Paris Fashion Week, and I remember the repercussions immediately hitting Hollywood. Natalie Portman, the celebrity face of Miss Dior Chérie perfume, issued a strongly worded statement disassociating herself from the designer. After initially denying the allegations, Galliano later apologized and entered a treatment facility, where he shared his struggles with addiction. He was also convicted by a French court of antisemitic insults based on religion, race or ethnicity.

In the 15 years since, he has continued to maintain his sobriety and regularly meet with Jewish leaders and rabbis, with the Anti-Defamation League publicly recognizing his sustained efforts. He has also orchestrated a Hollywood-worthy career comeback, guided in part by Wintour, going from guest-designing for Oscar de la Renta in 2013 to being hired by Renzo Rosso as the creative director of Maison Margiela in 2014.

The drumbeat of support for Galliano has gotten louder in recent years. He presented one of the most critically lauded collections of his career for Maison Margiela in January 2024. Staged beneath the Pont Alexandre III bridge, the show recreated a foggy, bohemian 1930s tavern inspired by Brassaï’s photographs of gritty Parisian nightlife, featuring exaggerated feminine silhouettes, Gwendoline Christie walking the runway and makeup artist Pat McGrath’s wet-look porcelain-doll skin, which became a viral sensation.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Kylie Jenner were among those who wore looks from the collection on the red carpet. More recently, Zendaya, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, Jenner and others have worn archival Galliano pieces, bringing his historical work back into the conversation, and the marketplace.

After leaving Margiela in 2024, Galliano launched a two-year partnership with Zara in 2026. He’ll be reimagining garments from Zara’s archives using couture techniques, with the first collection dropping next month. He and Zara primed the pump for the collaboration by dressing Stevie Nicks for this year’s Met Gala. It seems likely Zara will sponsor the next one, which would be a feather in the fast-fashion retailer’s cap as it pursues its own goal of reputational recovery.

Galliano’s technical skill and talent for creating staggering beauty are undeniable and certainly worthy of a solo museum exhibition. His runway shows are among the most memorable I ever attended during my career covering fashion, and his red carpet creations over the years for Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Celine Dion and others rank among Hollywood’s most iconic.

Galliano’s career was storied from the beginning. In 1994, he pulled off one of the most masterful low-budget creative coups in fashion history, turning a single bolt of black fabric into a runway collection that was so inventive it landed him the top job at Givenchy a year later. Wintour has often said it was her favorite runway show of all time.

His rise mirrored that of the modern global luxury industry, with Galliano serving as the creative engine for LVMH founder Bernard Arnault. By hiring Galliano for Givenchy and then, in 1996, for crown jewel Christian Dior, Arnault and LVMH pioneered the era of the fashion designer as rock star. One only has to look at Galliano’s flamboyant, costumed runway bows to know he thoroughly embraced the role.

His theatrical runway shows and collections generated the massive attention necessary to fuel a global business built on fragrance, cosmetics and accessories, including the popular Saddle Bag, introduced in 1999, driving Dior’s sales to around $27 billion the year he was fired.

As a technician, Galliano modernized the bias cut, merged English tailoring with French romance and drew heavily on historical research, mashing up eras to interesting effect. But he also mined cultural references and traditional dress from China, Japan, Africa and Indigenous America that would be considered cultural appropriation today and are quite shocking in retrospect. This, too, must be addressed.

The museum promises the exhibition will not gloss over the conduct that nearly ended his career and reputation, or the content of his work that has not aged well.

“Rather than presenting a conventional narrative of disgrace and redemption, the gallery will examine how memory, experience, cultural values and historical circumstances continually reshape the reception of a designer’s work,” according to the Costume Institute press release. “It will invite visitors to consider how aesthetic achievement, ethical accountability and institutional recognition intersect.”

In recent years, museums including the Met have been working to investigate and reframe the provenance of their collections, and this exhibition seems to be another example of that. (Much of what will be on display is from the Costume Institute’s private collection.) And Galliano is not the only famous designer to have a problematic personal history that should be examined. Coco Chanel was a Nazi sympathizer or worse, depending on the version of history you believe.

I look forward to seeing how the Met handles this, and I hope it will open up a long-overdue dialogue about antisemitism and cultural appropriation in fashion, issues that are far more far-reaching than Galliano.

In Other Vogue News....

Vogue confirmed Thursday that the next stop for the Vogue World fashion extravaganza will be San Francisco, which I rallied for in this newsletter just a few weeks ago after Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and global editorial director of Vogue, was spotted touring the city. Her visit included a meeting with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and a stop at Gap’s corporate offices.

“Vogue believes in celebrating cities, and San Francisco is a city like none other,” Wintour said of the event. “It’s a place of diverse communities living side by side, a place that loves the arts, loves creativity and isn’t afraid of change.”

She continued: “There’s a history of rebelliousness here, as well as incredible innovation. I love that San Francisco has always stood up for its values, and the things it believes in.”

In 2025, Vogue World: Hollywood brought a constellation of stars, including Nicole Kidman, Dakota Johnson, Doja Cat, Baz Luhrmann and Miley Cyrus, together for a celebration of fashion and costume design at the historic Paramount lot in L.A. Vogue World: Milan is next, scheduled for Sept. 22.

It’s Curtains for WME’s New York Fashion Week

WME Group has sold the intellectual property behind New York Fashion Week, including the trademarks for New York Fashion Week, NYFW and NYFW: The Shows, along with its digital assets, to Signet Fashion, marking the end of an era for the Hollywood juggernaut’s involvement in American fashion’s marquee event.

Signet is “a media and entertainment company focused on building and monetizing intellectual property across film, television, live experiences, gaming and digital media,” according to a representative. The company said it plans to expand the New York Fashion Week brand through year-round programming, digital content, media production, brand partnerships and new audience engagement initiatives. WME declined to comment.

After IMG acquired the commercial rights to New York Fashion Week in 2001, the company later became part of WME when the agency acquired it in 2014. The ambition extended beyond producing runway shows. “When we look at the world, we see fashion, sports, movies, TV, books: They are all just different aspects of global entertainment consumption,” Ari Emanuel, then CEO of WME/IMG, told The New York Times in 2015.

The idea was to leverage WME’s relationships with actors, musicians, athletes and brands to transform New York Fashion Week into a broader cultural and commercial entertainment event, while generating revenue through sponsorships, media rights, experiential marketing and branded content.

It was a compelling idea at the moment celebrity was increasingly driving fashion, red carpets were rivaling runways in influence, and luxury brands were beginning to invest heavily in Hollywood.

But the vision never fully came together. While IMG (and later WME-IMG) did create centralized locations for New York Fashion Week, many designers preferred showing independently in their own venues, and managing their own celebrity relationships and content.

By 2024, IMG had abandoned a NYFW: The Shows hub in favor of producing one-off brand experiences, before largely stepping away from fashion week programming altogether.

The sale also reflects WME Fashion’s own evolution. Once heavily invested in fashion week production around the world, the company has increasingly focused on its IMG Models, The Wall Group and Art + Commerce divisions, representing models, stylists, photographers, makeup artists and hair stylists. WME also represents its celebrity talent in lucrative fashion deals, of course, as well as a handful of designers pursuing Hollywood ambitions.

Throughout it all, the Council of Fashion Designers of America has overseen the official New York Fashion Week schedule and Fashion Calendar, somewhat confusingly, and will continue to do so.

It’s all very industry insider, but the sale does mark the end of a structure that had defined New York Fashion Week for much of the past 25 years. After acquiring the 7th on Sixth business from the CFDA in 2001, IMG oversaw the evolution of the shows from Bryant Park to Lincoln Center to Skylight and Spring Studios, managing Fashion Week as a commercial enterprise. Until it wasn’t — at least not for WME. We’ll see what Signet can do.

Meet Mother – in Beverly Hills

Los Angeles-based Mother, which has built curve-flattering denim into a juggernaut brand over the last 16 years, has taken that curvaceousness to new heights – and to Beverly Hills – with its first flagship retail store.

The 3,850-square-foot space on North Canon Drive is full of quirky, discoverable twists and turns, including a glass-case “Cabinet of Curiosities” near the entrance and a ’70s-era conversation pit that, like the rug in “The Big Lebowski,” ties the whole room together.

When I first toured the space with co-founders Tim Kaeding and Lela Becker for a Vogue story, Kaeding explained how the pit was both anchor and seed.

“It started with the idea of a 1970s house with a conversation pit and everything curved around it,” he told me. “We wanted the store to feel like an adventure. The best stores are the ones where you wander a little. You turn a corner and find something you weren’t expecting, then another corner and there’s something else. The layout follows one continuous path inspired by a sublime spiral.”

Adjacent to the conversation pit is another enticement to linger longer: a café inspired by roadside stops the Mother team has visited in Europe, serving coffee, matcha, tea loaves and other snacks.

In addition to the brand’s complete assortment of denim, ready-to-wear, outerwear, knits and accessories (the store debuts with Mother’s Fall “Wild Track” leopard- and flame-emblazoned collection), the store will offer custom embroidery services and merchandise exclusive to the flagship.

The debut of the flagship space is a rebirth following the loss of the brand’s first retail project two years ago in the Palisades Fire, just two days before its opening.

An unintended bonus? Next time you head to Beverly Hills for a little retail therapy, you can easily justify it as a trip to visit Mother.

Mother, open daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., 351 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills

A Timely Take on Textiles

Textiles seem to be having a moment on the SoCal museum circuit. A few months ago, when the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA opened, not only did the museum’s textile holdings move front and center as a result of a new curatorial approach, but they also enveloped the space in the form of floor-to-ceiling sputtered-chrome protective curtains designed by textile artist Reiko Sudo, whose work will be the focus of a LACMA retrospective opening next month.

Now, a major exhibition at the Fowler Museum at UCLA opening Sunday, Textiles as Monument, swaps the permanence of chiseled stone and cast bronze for embroidery, weaving and textile-based sculpture challenging traditional notions of what gets memorialized and how.

Featuring newly commissioned works and large-scale immersive installations by contemporary artists Suchitra Mattai, Jagdeep Raina and Swapnaa Tamhane, the exhibition was curated by Syona Puliady, the museum’s curator of Textiles of the Eastern Hemisphere.

“Monuments often communicate permanence and authority, but they can also exclude, simplify, or erase,” Puliady said. “This exhibition explores how textiles offer another way of remembering, one rooted in intimacy, movement, labor and care. Through their work, these artists remind us that histories are not only preserved in stone and bronze, but also in materials touched, carried, repaired and passed between generations.”

Some of the pieces are large enough to feel monumental in the literal sense of the word, such as Suchitra Mattai’s An Offering (2023), a 17-foot-long, 7-foot-high, wall-mounted, wing-shaped piece crafted from vintage saris and fabric.

Other pieces do their monumentalizing on a smaller — but equally impactful — scale. Among these are Jagdeep Raina’s embroidery pieces, California 2025 and Beverly Hills 2025, commissioned for the exhibition, which depict the lives of SoCal’s migrant and domestic labor workforce in tapestries that cover less than 2 square feet of wall space.

If you leave questioning what a monument actually is and who gets to determine what is and isn’t one, then this exhibition has done what it set out to do. But to do that, you just need to get there first.

“Textiles as Monument,” Fowler Museum at UCLA, 308 Charles E. Young Dr. N., Los Angeles.

Venice Film (+Fashion) Festival Primer

The Hollywood-fashion machine is beginning to go quiet for the summer, with the season’s blockbuster films already promoted and premiered and European design houses on August holiday.

The next big red carpet extravaganza will be the Venice Film Festival, Sept. 2–12. Last year’s event was a particularly competitive arena for fashion’s new crop of creative directors, with Jonathan Anderson teasing his first Dior couture on Three Goodbyes actress Alba Rohrwacher, while dressing several others, and Julia Roberts and Amanda Seyfried debuting the first daytime look by Versace’s short-lived but much-loved designer Dario Vitale, not to mention parties hosted by Armani, Tom Ford and more.

This year’s festival won’t see the same level of newness, but it will be style-packed.

A Family Affair

Star sisters Kate and Rooney Mara will be ones to watch, appearing together for the first time onscreen as co-dependent twin sisters in Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard. The global face of Givenchy’s L’Interdit fragrance, Rooney will surely be repping the house while she’s in Venice. Meanwhile, Kate attended the Saint Laurent men’s show in January, which could be a hint of red carpet looks to come.

Spain’s beloved film couple Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz are starring in Florian Zeller’s Bunker, which has this delightful log line: An architect’s marriage is tested after he accepts a project to build a bunker for a billionaire. Cruz has been a Chanel ambassador since 2018 so is sure to wear something by Matthieu Blazy, while Bardem likes to wear his politics on his sleeve. He stepped out at the Oscars in a “No a la guerra” (no war) pin, and wore a traditional Palestinian keffiyeh scarf to the Emmys in 2025. Prada regular and Zegna Malibu show guest Paul Dano and Tommy Hilfiger spring campaign face Patrick Schwarzenegger are also in the cast.

A Dude Fest

Controversy is already in the air over gender disparity in the competition. Danish director May el-Toukhy’s film Woman Unknown is the sole female-directed title in the running for the Golden Lion, a setback after several years in which Venice and other major festivals had made progress toward equal representation.

Several of the big films are also leading men showcases.

Danny Boyle’s Ink, about Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sun newspaper, opens the festival. Guy Pearce stars with Claire Foy and menswear darling Jack O’Connell, who attended the Armani and Dior shows in January.

Dior ambassador Robert Pattinson returns to Venice for the first time since 2019 in Lance Oppenheim’s film Primetime, playing To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in what’s sure to be a buzzy performance.

Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, a dark CIA comedy thriller with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, is another strong festival contender. Let’s not forget Malkovich has modeled for Prada, Comme des Garçons, and most recently for JW Anderson. He has his own clothing label as well. Cue the year’s fashion eccentric!

The Jury

At least there’s a woman in a leadership role. Actor-director Maggie Gyllenhaal is the president of the main competition jury.

Gyllenhaal is in deep with Miu Miu, which as a brand has long supported female filmmakers. She sits on the board of its Women’s Tales program started in 2011, which releases two female-directed short films every year exploring modern womanhood, and often hosts panels and events around the Venice Film Festival. I’d expect Miu Miu to be back supporting her, and for her to be supporting Miu Miu.

Gyllenhaal will be doing double duty at the fest; she’ll also be premiering an alternate reality short film called Flesh Impact, starring Valentino fashion and beauty ambassador Dakota Johnson as Marilyn Monroe at the height of her fame and Ellen Burstyn as the veteran performer Marilyn never got to become. We can’t wait.

The Fashion Doc

Last year’s fest saw the premiere of Marc by Sofia, Sofia Coppola’s sweet ode to her friend, Marc Jacobs. The 2026 fashion doc to watch in Venice is Be Brave, chronicling the personal and entrepreneurial journey of Renzo Rosso, founder and chairman of the Italian fashion juggernaut OTB Group, which owns luxury brands including Diesel, Maison Margiela, Marni and Jil Sander, as well as having a minority investment in L.A.-based Amiri.

The film is directed by Francesco Carrozzini, son of the late Franca Sozzani, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, and is sure to generate plenty of conversation because of its use of artificial intelligence. The film is produced by the Rome-based Our Films and Our Ai.

During a June press conference announcing the film, Rosso said: “I am a big fan of technology and we are doing a lot on this front, thanks to AI, from consumption control to placements and design. Artificial intelligence must be seen as something that stimulates. It is something you have to dialogue with and insert who you are into. The beauty is when you manage to establish a human relationship within technology; then something true emerges that has the brand’s DNA.”

Let’s see.

Screen Time at LACMA

Congress’ recent passage of the Sunshine Protection Act, which aims to make Daylight Savings Time permanent, recently put the notion of time — and the fictive nature of it — front and center. How do we mark it? Who controls it? And what shapes our perception of it?

There are as many answers to those questions as there are minutes in the day, but one undeniable answer to the last of them is Hollywood movies. Cutaway shots of ticking wall clocks telegraph death-row urgency, close-ups of wristwatches signal synchronized heists, digital displays blinking by the bedside or looming overhead in train stations help characters — and viewers — chart the passage of time in a way that’s important, compressing or stretching it to serve the story arc. This makes the arrival of Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), on display at the L.A. County Museum of Art for the first time since 2015, timely indeed.

A 24-hour looping video montage that depicts the passage of time — minute by minute throughout the day and synced to the local time — via film and television snippets of clocks, watches and the occasional spoken-word reference, The Clock decouples the time depictions from their original meanings and, by stringing them together, either creates meaning of its own, underscores the meaningless of time or does a little bit of both.

Of course, what you see and what you take away will be wholly dependent on when you step into the looping river of time on the first floor of the BCAM building to view it. If you part the black curtains and plop into a roomy upholstered chair shortly after the museum’s opening, you’ll catch Robert Redford being robbed of his wristwatch at precisely 11:06 a.m. (in 1972’s The Hot Rock), followed five minutes (and more than a dozen clips later) by Clive Owen and a cutaway shot of a focus-pulling clock (time: 11:11 a.m.) in 2009’s Duplicity. Stick around for another 15 minutes and you’ll find yourself spending time with the likes of Albert Finney and Tatum O’Neal (11:23 a.m), Johnny Cash, Stan Laurel and Cameron Diaz (11:25 a.m.) and marking time with The Breakfast Club (11:31 a.m.), Animal House (11:32 a.m.) and Falling Down (11:33 a.m.).

It’s an addictive time sink and, by its nature, one that will be different every minute of every day. The only drawback? Unless you were lucky enough to score tickets to last weekend’s special 24-hour screening (or already have them in hand for the sold out Aug. 22-23 one) you’ll be limited to catching the on-screen minutes fly by during regular museum hours.

Regardless, you’ll be glad you made time to see it.

Christian Marclay’s The Clock, July 26–Aug. 23, 2026, BCAM, Level 1, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

Let the Fashion Flags Fly

The confluence of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the current partisan political climate have made good, old-fashioned flag-waving a dicey — and potentially polarizing — proposition. Until now, anyway. Thanks to the United Flags of Fashion — a four-way initiative between the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), Vogue, Rockefeller Center and America250 — there’s finally a flag (a whole lot of flags, actually) I feel like flying.

Unveiled Monday night in New York City, the United Flags of Fashion program gave leading American designers a simple if intriguing challenge: reimagine the flags of all 50 states, five U.S. territories and Washington, D.C., creating original works that celebrate the creativity, diversity and cultural richness of the United States.

More than two dozen designers and brands ultimately stepped up to the vexillological challenge resulting in more than 120 flags. While that is far too many to show or discuss in depth here (but, in case you were wondering – because I was – Thom Browne’s take on the Pennsylvania flag was suiting gray but thankfully it was not served up as a shrunken pennant), three in particular caught my eye.

California-raised, New York-based designer Willy Chavarria served up a version of the California Bear Flag (one of five designers to rep the Golden State), bearing the name “Califaztlan,” a portmanteau word combining California and Aztlán, the mythical legendary homeland of the Aztec people, as a way of “recognizing the Indigenous and Mexican histories that predate U.S. control by thousands of years,” Chavarria noted in his explanatory text. He added that the serape-style striped blanket draped over the back of the lumbering bear symbolized “unity, inclusion and the embrace of all people.”

L.A.-based designer Clare Vivier, who grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, took a run at that state’s flag (as did three other designers), taking inspiration, she explained on social media, by the French phrase that is the official state motto.

“We created an undulating purple backdrop with green shadows, inspired by the natural beauty of Minnesota and the spectacular occurrence of the Aurora Borealis in the northern sky,” she wrote. “’L’Etoile Du Nord,’ the North Star, is the official state motto, which honors the French explorers who mapped the state when it was the Northernmost state in the union. To recognize the native Ojibwe culture, we included the word ‘Wawatay’ — meaning Northern Lights — in shadow text.”

She added that the flag’s 19 stars were a nod to Minnesota being the 19th state admitted to the Union and the purple color was a tribute to Minnesota native and “national cultural treasure” Prince. Cool!

Rachel Scott, the creative director of Diotima (as well as Proenza Schouler) purposefully eschewed traditional heraldic-style flag design for her reimagined U.S. Virgin Islands flag, for an elegant, uncluttered and powerful standard with a bold diagonal center line. The colors carry what the Jamaican-born designer describes as “a distinctly Caribbean visual language. A red diagonal band layered over black cuts across a field of green and deep sea blue, evoking the islands’ land, sea, energy and resilience.”

Now that’s a trooping of the colors we can all rally around.

The 120+ United Flags of Fashion will be on the flagpoles surrounding the Rockefeller Center rink through Sept. 4.

A Celebration of Filipino Food and Fashion

Last week, the Gerry Building became a celebration of Filipino creativity, as fashion, food and community came together for an intimate evening for designer Puey Quinoñes hosted by DJ Samantha Duenas, journalists Melissa Magsaysay and Sara Tan, all looking gorgeous in his designs.

Editors, influencers and clients gathered for a dinner cooked by Kuya Lord chef and James Beard Award winner Lord Maynard Llera before a runway presentation from Quinoñes.

Sculptural evening wear with a whimsical touch, the looks showcased the designer’s signature innovative draping and vibrant colors with nods to traditional Filipino craft. Piña pineapple fiber fringe, mother-of-pearl embellishments and silhouettes resembling the iconic Maria Clara dress of the Philippines were all filtered through his modern lens.

“Puey’s work is so indicative of the swell of soft power coming out of the Philippines diaspora, in media, music, film and fashion,” Magsaysay said in her introductory remarks.

For Quinoñes, the presentation marked the formal introduction of his namesake brand to L.A. after years of building an international career. He apprenticed for a designer in Manila before launching his own label in 2005. His designs soon attracted politicians, celebrities, and beauty queens before expanding internationally. His work has since appeared everywhere from Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” music video to America’s Next Top Model, while the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired one of his designs for its permanent collection in 2020.

The designer said the collection represented “a journey back to my roots.” It was inspired by celebrations of the Agta Festival honoring Santo Niño in his humble hometown of Bobon, where he grew up living with his grandmother, a seamstress. “During this joyful event, we adorn ourselves in costumes made from locally sourced materials and I felt a strong urge to revisit the tradition and honor it in my work,” he explained.

Quinones sent guests home with gift baskets filled with his favorite snacks from the Philippines—banana brittle, dried mangoes, prawn crackers, and bottles of soy sauce and vinegar for the national dish adobo—proof that the strongest expression of culture often begins with the comforts of home.

The Rise of the Celebrity Bridal Fashion Ambassador

Paris couture sensation Matières Fécales, which just last week dressed Zendaya in a winged goddess gown at The Odyssey premiere in New York City, has joined a growing number of luxury brands that are turning the wedding aisle into the new Hollywood red carpet.

The fashion house created three wedding looks for singer/model Gabbriette Bechtel, who married English musician and 1975 frontman Matty Healy last weekend in L.A., in front of a crowd that included Charli XCX, George Daniel, Emily Ratajkowski, Alex Consani and more.

Following the nuptials, the brand issued a press release touting the event as the official launch of Matières Fécale bridalwear. The announcement arrived in my inbox on the heels of one from Saint Laurent with photos and dressing credits for Logan Lerman’s Saint Laurent wedding tuxedo, and just weeks after Taylor Swift tied the knot at Madison Square Garden in a still unseen custom Jonathan Anderson Dior gown. (I predict the big reveal will be the September Vogue cover.)

Celebrity weddings have become global showcases for luxury brands with every entrance dissected as closely as an Oscars arrival. Dressing a Hollywood bride has emerged as a coveted designer commission and opportunity for a brand to demonstrate its artistry in a single, unforgettable look while generating months of cultural conversation.

It wasn’t always this way. During Hollywood’s Golden Age, stars were more likely to entrust their wedding dresses to the studio costume designers who dressed them on screen than to Paris couture houses. Grace Kelly’s influential 1956 gown was designed by MGM costume designer Helen Rose, not Dior or Balenciaga. Natalie Wood also married in a Helen Rose creation.

That changed as luxury fashion became a global business locked in a intimate relationship with Hollywood, and celebrity culture became a 24/7 obsession.

It’s hard to say who was the first modern Hollywood designer bride. Kim Kardashian’s custom Givenchy Haute Couture bridal gown by Riccardo Tisci cemented her role as his friend and muse and made her nuptials to Kanye West a global fashion event, while Sofia Richie Grainge’s Chanel wedding in the South of France introduced a younger, social media savvy generation to the house’s couture.

Dua Lipa brought the brand deal to the altar in perhaps the most visible way. She was already a longtime Chanel ambassador when creative director Matthieu Blazy designed the couture gown she wore to her wedding celebration in Sicily last month, casting her at the center of a fairytale that resonated far beyond the usual high fashion audience.

And that’s the point. Because the wedding aisle is everyone’s runway.

Little House on the Prairie Celebrates Native American and Americana Style

I never thought I would be writing about Netflix’s new adaptation of Little House on the Prairie as must-see fashion TV. But its costumes are far more rich and resonant today than one might expect from a period piece, weaving together enduring threads of American style: Native American craft and the workwear and homespun dress that continue to shape everything from heritage menswear to today’s romantic, prairie-inspired dresses.

The series doesn’t just recreate the open frontier of 1860s century Independence, Kansas—it shows how its visual language still informs the way we dress today.

Creator Rebecca Sonnenshine’s approach is a welcome departure from both Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books and the 1970s television series. While those centered almost entirely on the Ingalls family’s experience, the Netflix series broadens the frontier narrative by including the Osage people whose homeland the settlers occupied.

To create the series’ gorgeous Indigenous wardrobe, costume designer Mitchell Travers tapped 35 Osage artists, who made nearly 3,200 handcrafted pieces over the course of the production, including ribbon work, finger woven sashes, intricate beadwork, silver conchos, moccasins, feather work and more.

“What I found so inspiring about creating the Osage characters was the combination of so many techniques,” Travers told WrapStyle of working with makers whose techniques have been preserved through generations and remain vibrant today.

“Some have come to their particular craft to better understand their heritage, others have been honing a craft since childhood with techniques passed down through elders, and others run businesses producing goods for their community,” he said.

As Travers immersed himself in traditional Osage dress, working with Osage cultural consultant Julie O’Keefe, The Osage Nation Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, he discovered that every detail carried meaning.

“Certain blanket styles or the way they are worn communicate age and rank. Color combinations or symbols connect to family lineage, and certain garments are only appropriate in very specific contexts,” he added. Preserving those nuances while working within the demands of a television production, he said, was one of the project’s most rewarding challenges.

The same dedication to authenticity extended to the Ingalls family, although their clothes resonate in an entirely different way. Watching Charles Ingalls cross the prairie in his weathered field jacket, faded work shirt and sturdy boots made me think about the continued obsession with heritage brands and American workwear, in labels like Filson, RRL and Buck Mason.

“It’s so interesting to find the through lines of men’s workwear still very relevant in today’s style,” Travers said. “I wanted to create a silhouette and palette for Pa that felt very grounded, masculine and paternal. In an ever-changing world, Pa needed to remain our constant.” His clothes become more worn over the course of the series, reflecting the harsh realities of frontier life.

The women of Little House felt contemporary in some ways, too. Long before “prairie dressing” and “cottage-core” became shorthand for the romantic collections of brands like Dôen and Christy Dawn—and before social media embraced the so-called tradwife aesthetic—these were clothes designed for hard work, modesty and longevity.

Travers designed into that reality after exhaustive research, studying original garments and photographs in museums across the country, including the Minnesota Historical Society, Genesee Country Village & Museum and Old Sturbridge Village.

“I think it’s impossible not to take artistic license when creating entertainment,” Travers said of the pieces. “I work hard to understand the period to the fullest extent, but filter that through the lens of how a contemporary audience will interact with it. I want people to find a connection with these characters, those with a background in historical accuracy and those without.”

Betye Saar’s Formative Wearable Art

Before Betye Saar began transforming found objects into her famous assemblages, she was finding her creative voice by designing what people wore.

Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar examines the L.A. artist’s early career in theatrical costume and fashion, exploring how they were the foundations of her art practice.

I’m not sure how I missed the opening at Roberts Projects earlier this summer, but am glad I didn’t miss the exhibition book release and signing coming up Saturday, July 25 from noon to 2 p.m.. which Saar is expected to attend.

Part of the celebrations surrounding Saar’s 100th birthday, which is July 30, the delightful exhibition gathers more than 200 works including costume sketches, garments, jewelry, greeting cards, photographs and archival materials, much of it produced in the colorful 1960s and early ‘70s.

It begins with Saar’s costume designs for the Inner City Cultural Center, the groundbreaking multicultural performing arts institution established after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, where she became part of a vibrant network of Black artists, actors, writers and activists.

Newly discovered production photographs are displayed alongside her original sketches for plays including West Side Story and Antigone, showing how theater expanded her visual language. The drama of sets, lighting and performance clearly also find their way into her immersive, symbolic assemblages.

Long before the fine art world embraced her, she supported herself as a designer, creating greeting cards, enamel objects and jewelry while also producing album covers, book jackets and commissioned work. She also made elaborate costumes for her daughters and others to wear for Southern California’s Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

Let’s Get It On makes the case that Saar’s later work, including Black Girl’s Window (1969) and The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), grew directly out of years spent thinking about color, composition and the transformative power of objects.

It also reveals she had a designer’s eye from the very beginning, one still evident today in the way Saar dresses herself at age 93, in richly layered colors, textiles and flea market jewelry.

“Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” through Aug. 22, Roberts Projects, 442 South La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, robertsprojectsla.com. Book signing July 25, noon to 2 p.m.

Etai’s Trippy Collaboration

Los Angeles menswear designer Etai Drori got his start handcrafting bespoke pieces from deconstructed luxury leather goods that earned him a celebrity following including Billie Eilish, Rosalia, Travis Scott and J Balvin. Now, he has found a new material source: the trippy op-art of Spanish artist Felipe Pantone.

Parallel Practices: Tailored Structures & Kinetic Surfaces brings Pantone, who got his start as a graffiti artist, and Etai together at Albertz Benda’s L.A. gallery.

The exhibition pairs Pantone’s kinetic artworks inspired by the digital world, with furniture and design objects created with Drori.

The designer digitally mapped out each piece before taking it apart and rebuilding it using custom textiles designed by Pantone and produced by the Italian textile company Limonta.

Pantone’s paintings and kinetic sculptures complement the furniture in Benza’s residential-style gallery in a midcentury home on Marmont Lane.

I remember Drori from when he was a child. He grew up in a fashion family, the son of L.A. ready-to-wear designer Nony Tochterman, whose Petro Zillia collection was a 2000s favorite at Los Angeles Fashion Week, where she was known for her colorful collections, her pink hair, and riding her pink bicycle down the runway.

For those looking for a more accessible piece of the Pantone collaboration, Drori has lighters for sale on his website for $150.

“Etai x Felipe Pantone Parallel Practices: Tailored Structures of Kinetic Surfaces,” through Aug. 8 at Albertz Benda, 8260 Marmont Ln., Los Angeles, albertzbenda.com.

Brunello Cucinelli Film Hits Theaters

Seven months after its star-studded premiere at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios with Jeff Goldblum, Jessica Chastain and Chris Pine, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary opens in U.S. theaters on July 24.

Cucinelli, who has spent the last 48 years growing a small collection of colorful cashmere sweaters into a publicly traded, multibillion-dollar luxury brand, commissioned the film about his life and philosophy of humanistic capitalism, tapping Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore and Oscar-winning composer Nicola Piovani.

The film follows Cucinelli’s journey from his humble childhood in the Italian countryside to the height of fashion, always grounded in his company home and heart in the village of Solomeo, with archival footage, personal memories and interviews with Oprah, Patrick Dempsey and more.

“Brunello: The Gracious Visionary“ is showing at the Town Center 5 in Encino and the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles.

Olivier Rousteing Revs Up Rabanne

Get ready to start seeing a lot more chain mail on the red carpet.

Olivier Rousteing has been appointed the new creative director of Rabanne. The luxury fashion brand was founded in 1966 by Paco Rabanne, one of the definitive designers of the Space Age, who used unconventional materials like metal, plastic, paper and chain mail, and designed costumes for film, including Jane Fonda’s in the 1968 sci-fi fantasy Barbarella.

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The designer arrives after spending the last 14 years at French luxury brand Balmain, where he gave the brand a distinct body-con identity and his embrace of celebrity and social media shook up the industry. Can he do it again?

Rousteing recognized before much of the fashion establishment that Hollywood’s new power brokers were not just movie stars but reality TV and social media personalities. Ultimately, he became one himself as an early adopter of Instagram, which made him one of the most recognizable creative directors of his generation, with 9.4 million followers.

Like Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy, Rousteing gave Kim Kardashian the high fashion stamp of approval as a muse and a friend, beginning in 2013 after they met at the Met Gala. And she became central to the rise of the Balmain Army. The Kardashian-West family fronted Balmain campaigns, dominated the front rows of runway shows, and Rousteing appeared on Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

Kim hasn’t been to a Balmain show since 2023 (her last high-profile Paris Fashion Week appearance in 2025 had her walking the Balenciaga runway for Demna’s final couture show). But she did wear a custom Balmain gown by Rousteing, one of fashion’s too few Black creative directors, to last year’s Fifteen Percent Pledge Gala, which raises money to support Black-owned businesses.

Rousteing also counts Beyoncé as a muse, having designed her 2018 Coachella stage costumes, inspired by historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), military uniforms, ancient Egypt and Black empowerment. He then tapped her to collaborate on 17 Balmain couture looks inspired by her 2023 “Renaissance” album.

One of Rousteing’s other big achievements at Balmain was bringing back haute couture after a 16-year lull, and he could do the same at Rabanne, which hasn’t shown a couture collection since 2000, when the brand’s namesake retired.

It’s also notable that Rousteing was early to fashion’s foray into film with his César Award-nominated 2019 documentary Wonder Boy, directed by Anissa Bonnefont, widening his popularity beyond fashion.

The film offered a tender portrait of his life, chronicling his rise at Balmain, his recovery from a devastating accident, and his emotional search for his biological parents. Perhaps a follow-up could document his rise at Rabanne, air on Amazon, and coincide with the release of a fragrance created under Rousteing’s direction, in a high-low marketing move that capitalizes on his fame and Rabanne’s powerful beauty business?

Overseen by Julien Dossena for the last 13 years, Rabanne has seen its share of new celebrity fans, including Sabrina Carpenter and Dua Lipa. It also became the first Puig-owned brand to surpass $1 billion in sales, lifted mostly by fragrance. Dossena’s ready-to-wear collections were consistently innovative, but he was relatively unknown outside of fashion circles.

It will be interesting to see how Rousteing will envision the future of the brand, and what part Hollywood and technology might play in it. He’s stepping into a crowded field of buzzy new creative directors, and the money to compete in the celebrity dressing game is considerable, with Chanel and Dior spending millions on Hollywood ambassadors and campaigns.

But Rabanne parent company Puig is no financial slouch, and Rousteing still has a high profile and powerful friends. What he could do with the brand in film, TV and costume is particularly exciting, and could help sell the beauty products that power the bottom line.

“For me, fashion is about emotion, identity and the confidence to express who we truly are,” Rousteing wrote on Instagram. “That belief feels deeply connected to Paco Rabanne and his enduring legacy while shaping a future that is bold, inspiring and open to new possibilities.”

His first ready-to-wear runway collection will debut in March 2027.

Zendaya’s Epic Goddess Style

Christopher Nolan’s historical fantasy epic The Odyssey opens to global anticipation on Friday, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, Elliot Page as Sinon, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as the goddess Athena and many more.

Even before the overwhelmingly positive reviews started rolling out, Zendaya was already giving us reason to ponder the visual style of the film and its potential impact.

With the help of her stylist and “method” red carpet dressing auteur Law Roach, Zendaya has dazzled in one all-white goddess look after another during the press tour, mixing archival pieces with custom and couture, and topping it off at Tuesday’s New York premiere with a white-hot winged gown by buzzy Paris brand Matières Fécales.

For a Paris photo call, she wore an archival spring 1997 Givenchy dress with dramatic sleeves and a mythology all its own. The dress was designed by the late Alexander McQueen, whose debut collection for the French fashion house was inspired by another epic story, The Search for the Golden Fleece, in which Athena also plays a role. Zendaya accessorized it with the incredible gold headdress created for the runway by Philip Treacy.

For the Paris premiere later that night, Zendaya’s custom white lace Louis Vuitton gown with keyhole cutout was one of the prettiest designs to come out of the house in years.

Zendaya has also turned heads in more casual moments, styling a short, pleated spring 2008 Alberta Ferretti mini dress with cascading metallic gold chain detailing with one of the early 2000s’ trendiest boho goddess styles, gladiator sandals. If Zendaya can’t bring them back, no one can.

Let’s hope Odyssey designer Ellen Mirojnick’s onscreen costumes for the goddess Athena are equally captivating.

LACMA 2026 Art+Film Gala Honorees

Dune director Denis Villeneuve and artist Vija Celmins, who share a passion for finding the sublime in vast, sometimes inhospitable landscapes, will be the 2026 honorees at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 15th Art+Film Gala on Nov. 7.

LACMA trustee Eva Chow and actor Leonardo DiCaprio are returning as gala co-chairs, and Gucci as presenting sponsor, which it has been from the beginning.

“This year, we are honoring two icons of visual creativity. Whether in painting, drawing, printmaking, or other media, Vija Celmins’ exacting renderings of the natural world blend realism and imagination, resulting in sublimely beautiful works,” LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan said. “Likewise, Denis Villeneuve’s meticulously crafted worlds give his films an unforgettable visual impact, from contemplative and cerebral stories to global blockbusters.”

Villeneuve is the Oscar-nominated director, screenwriter, and producer of Sicario, Blade Runner 2049 and the Dune trilogy. The November LACMA event will be followed by the release of Dune: Part Three in December, so Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya could well make an appearance at the gala. Villeneuve is also set to direct the next James Bond film for Amazon MGM Studios.

Celmins is known for her renderings of ocean waves, desert floors, and night skies. She began working in the 1960s, painting the objects in her Los Angeles studio before turning her attention to photographs found in magazines and history books for inspiration. By the end of the 1960s, she moved to working in graphite on paper. When she began painting again in the 1980s, drawing and printmaking remained central to her work, which has been featured in solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and many more.

Proceeds from the annual Art+Film Gala help fund LACMA exhibitions, acquisitions and educational programming exploring the intersection of art and film. The 2025 gala raised $6.5 million.

The $12 “Sacred Water” That’s Selling Out at Erewhon

Erewhon, the beloved L.A. grocery store where you never have paid so much to eat so little, has collaborated on beverages with a number of wellness brands in recent years, including Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, Marianna Hewitt’s Summer Fridays and Vacation, maker of my favorite throwback sunscreen Orange Gelée.

For its latest trick, Erewhon has partnered with water-filtering showerhead purveyor Jolie on a $12 “Sacred Water,” made using a clarifying method usually reserved for high-end cocktails, according to press materials. Drawing inspiration from holy water, the tonic celebrates it as something to cherish, honor and share. Of course, I had to try it.

I stopped by the Tonic Bar at the Beverly Hills Erewhon before 8 a.m. and was told by the tonic tender that the water had been selling out so fast, she’d need to check in the back to see if any more had come in. A few minutes later, she appeared with a large plastic pouch reminiscent of an IV bag, full of Sacred Water.

My small cup filled, I pressed a straw inside and took a sip. If you have ever dreamt of mixing coconut water and white grape juice, this is indeed your holy grail. The 8-ounce drink also contains anise hyssop, holy basil, jasmine tea, coconut milk, raw honey and green cardamom.

It was refreshing, if a bit tart, and not nearly as botanical tasting as I’d hoped. I had to wonder if the ice cubes, presumably not made of Sacred Water, ruined the effect. The water also had some serious competition, however.

Just the day before I drank from the famed water fountain at the Visitors Center at Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park. Coming from the same Sierra snow melt that feeds the grove’s giant sequoias, that delicious sacred water had devotees of its own lined up to fill their bottles. For free.

If you can’t make it to Yosemite, Jolie’s Sacred Water is available at Erewhon stores through Sept. 30. Either way, your cup runneth over.

Why Vogue World Should Come to San Francisco

Vogue global editorial director Anna Wintour is eyeing California for another edition of Vogue World after the pop culture runway extravaganza was held at Paramount Studios in Hollywood in 2025.

As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle and confirmed by Vogue, the fashion maven recently visited the Bay Area to scout locations for the annual event, which combines runway shows and performances, attracts celebrity attendees, and raises money for a different local charity each time. Vogue World debuted in 2022 in New York and has since been hosted in London, Paris and L.A., and will head to Milan in September.

If it comes to San Francisco next year, it would be a coda of sorts to this year’s Met Gala, which was not so affectionately dubbed the “Tech Gala” because of the deep-pocketed tech moguls and firms that underwrote the evening, including Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Snap and Shopify.

Certainly, the Bay Area is the cradle of today’s Gilded Age, but following the money is only part of why Vogue World: San Francisco is a genius idea.

Sticking with tech, Cupertino-based Apple may be the most influential design brand of our time, having created the iPhone, which is in the hands and pockets of more than 1 billion people worldwide. Apple first intersected with fashion in a meaningful way with the debut of the Hermès Apple Watch in 2015. And tech’s love affair with fashion has only continued.

Just this week, Meta introduced photo- and video-capturing Meta Starfire Kylie Jenner Edition AI glasses, priced at $399, in an effort to leverage the beauty mogul’s influence over her 382 million social media followers and make smart glasses fashionable.

But San Francisco also deserves to host Vogue World on its analog laurels. Historically, it has been a hotbed of innovation and social change that has had an outsized influence on the democracy of fashion and what people wear every day.

Number one, it is the birthplace of Levi Strauss denim and the 501 jean, arguably the most recognizable and widely worn piece of branded clothing ever made.

The origin story goes like this: In 1853, Strauss, a Bavarian immigrant, opened a dry goods company in San Francisco. Recognizing the need for durable workwear during the height of the Gold Rush, he and tailor Jacob Davis combined copper rivet reinforcements with denim, leading to the first manufactured waist overalls in 1873. They were the precursor to what we now call blue jeans, an icon that has come to symbolize America around the world. It does not hurt Vogue World’s San Francisco prospects that the popular Mayor Daniel Lurie, whom Wintour met with, is a Levi Strauss heir.

The event could be a celebration of denim alone and still be a roaring success, with designers interpreting denim workwear from mass to luxury. (Perhaps this is why we have already seen so much denim on the spring 2027 runways … could Jonathan Anderson and Dolce & Gabbana know something we do not?)

Levi’s is not the only San Francisco American fashion success story, of course. There is also Gap, founded in 1969 by Donald and Doris Fisher. What started as a denim and vinyl records store evolved into a brand that transformed the way people dress for work, driving a generational shift to more casual attire that began in the 1990s, when Gap khakis and advertising campaigns became part of pop culture.

Gap also created the blueprint for modern lifestyle marketing with its peppy collaborations with entertainers, which have been rebooted under CEO Richard Dickson and Gap Studio designer Zac Posen, who have tapped Katseye, Young Miko, Gwyneth Paltrow and Apple Martin, among others. Gap is experiencing a renaissance, and Wintour was also spotted in San Francisco at Gap headquarters and with Posen.

Also founded in San Francisco: The North Face in 1964. What began as a climbing gear store (the Grateful Dead played at the opening) became a global juggernaut thanks in no small part to the 1990s hip-hop community, which made outdoor apparel into streetwear, establishing it as a key foundation of the modern casual wardrobe.

Esprit was founded in San Francisco in 1969 by Doug and Susie Tompkins (who previously founded The North Face) and Jane Tise. The brand’s colorful, cheap-and-cheerful, California-aspirational clothing, John Casado–designed stencil-effect logo, and Oliviero Toscani–lensed campaigns starring real people — a novel idea at the time — helped define 1980s fashion for young people and remain a touchpoint for designers today.

Beyond influential brands are the region’s influential social movements which have been inspiring trends and designer mood boards for decades.

Just as Hollywood’s larger-than-life blonde bombshells and teenage rebels shaped the imaginations and wardrobes of countless people across the globe, so too did counterculture and activist leaders in the Bay Area in the 1950s and ’60s, from the bookish workwear of the Beats in North Beach to the tie-dye and fringe-loving hippies of Haight-Ashbury, the Black Panthers in Oakland whose leather jackets, berets and sunglasses became a uniform of resistance, and the “Castro clone” look of the LGBTQ rights movement.

All of it and more would be a rich tapestry for a Vogue World runway. As the song goes: “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

New Clothes, Old Tricks

During the hottest days on record in Paris, designers still managed to show some cool Spring 2027 clothes, with slim, if not skinny, jeans, lots of sheer suiting, styling wizardry and footwear brand collaborations galore, drawing an impressive celebrity turnout, for better or worse.

Another fashion week, another nepo baby on the runway. Or two. Jayden and Sean Preston Federline walked the Vetements runway show. What’s Vetements? Now you know, which is why luxury brands continue to turn to children of celebrities, even those whose stardom has dimmed.

The brothers’ parents are pop star Britney Spears and her ex-husband Kevin Federline. “K-Fed,” for those who remember, is now living in Hawaii with a new wife and family. He works as a DJ and published a memoir last year, You Thought You Knew.

While some family connections bestow a brand halo of exclusivity, glamour and cultural relevance, this one left me rolling my eyes. I’m sure the Federline brothers are very nice, but fashion, is this all you’ve got? And to have them parading underwhelming clothes we’ve all seen before? It felt cheap.

The Federlines weren’t the only “famous” ones on the Vetements runway. Sharon Stone also walked the show, which I would argue was beneath her, given the company.

Dior’s Elevated Everyday

Dior’s Jonathan Anderson dialed down experimentation to focus on the elevated everyday, including artfully distressed denim, what you might call pajama suits, and a Dior-ified version of fashion’s ubiquitous quarter-zip sweater among the highlights. Not one to resist jaunty neckwear, he also introduced a sparkly sailor tie.

Free-Styling

American designer Michael Rider continues to kill it at Celine, where he’s selling the idea of having fun styling your clothes.

This season’s mix had even more ease, including what I am sure will be a hotly anticipated Reebok sneaker collaboration. I loved the Flashdance sweatshirts with a customized feel, the perfectly proportioned jackets, and the offbeat hats, boots and beads. And I loved the show notes even more, which read like a manifesto for personal style: “Making do with a few great things. Customizing … panache. And being very unaware of having it.” More of that, please.

Hollywood Dreams

It may have been Men’s Fashion Week, but there was plenty of womenswear on the runway, too. Willy Chavarria has been working on expanding his women’s business for a while, and this collection really nailed it, with draped silk cocktail gowns, whimsical floral dresses, sexy slit skirts and sheer tops that should put him in the Hollywood dressing conversation in an even more meaningful way than before. Also coming soon: an Ugg collaboration.

Timmy, Is That You?

Sarah Burton held her first full Givenchy men’s presentation during the week, and the collection was a beautiful extension of what she has done on the women’s side, with exquisite tailoring and eveningwear, rich floral embroideries and refined streetwear, including a pink leather tracksuit like the red one sported by Timothée Chalamet last year when he was promoting Marty Supreme.

Chalamet wore Givenchy several times during awards season, when he made Burton’s double-breasted tailoring his own. Perhaps he even had an influence on the designer. “I wanted this to feel very personal and intimate, and to reflect the conversations that I have with the friends of the house,” she wrote in the collection notes. Could an official partnership be next?

Paris Fashion Week From Another Angle

While Men’s Fashion Week was unspooling in Paris, Angelina Jolie’s new film Couture, which uses Paris Fashion Week as a backdrop, opened in theaters in the U.S.

I went to see the film, which tells personal stories of those behind the scenes who do not usually have a voice, and chips away at some of the glamour of the shows in a way that was familiar to me.

Maxine (Jolie) is at the center of the story, an American director hired to create a short film for a runway presentation. After landing in Paris, she becomes immersed in the pre-show prep at a fashion house, only to receive a phone call delivering the devastating news that she has breast cancer and needs surgery right away, a medical diagnosis that mirrors Jolie’s own personal story.

As someone who spent years going to runway shows, the plot point brings home the disconnect between fantasy and reality that happens during fashion week, particularly when it comes to one’s personal life. It’s easy to feel like you are living in runway la-la land where nothing can touch you during the month of traveling to these fabulous shows twice a year.

The film also follows model Ada (played by real-life model Anyier Anei), a South Sudanese fresh face navigating her first fashion week in Paris, working to make money to send home to her family in Kenya to help lift them out of poverty.

Her journey (partly inspired by Anei’s own) has her palling around with other models too young to know better, staying up late drinking champagne, and disastrously twisting her ankle while practicing her walk ahead of her big runway debut. It is an illuminating look into the lives of the pretty faces who are so often expressionless and dehumanized on the runway.

A third character, makeup artist Angèle (Ella Rumpf), is the least developed. She is an aspiring writer (honestly, her job prospects would be better sticking with makeup design), lugging her kit from gig to gig around Paris, crossing paths with Maxine and Ada in scenes that are somewhat hollow. But somehow, this rings true, too. Brief, surface encounters are the way one experiences fashion week.

There is a lot of pain as Ada walks the runway with a swollen ankle, and Jolie struggles to put on a brave face as she goes between hospital appointments and the film shoot. But in the end, there is beauty under pressure, which is what fashion week is all about.

Tiffany & Co. Store Brings the California Coast Indoors

Tiffany & Co. is shining again on the SoCal retail scene at South Coast Plaza with the opening of a new 15,000-square-foot store designed by architect Peter Marino.

The new location reintroduces the LVMH-owned jeweler to Southern California, where it has invested heavily in celebrity ambassadors including Zendaya, Anya Taylor-Joy, Greta Lee and Chase Sui Wonders, and will open a new Rodeo Drive flagship in 2028 on the site of the former Luxe Hotel.

The South Coast Plaza space showcases the design concept first introduced at the Landmark store on New York’s Fifth Avenue, which opened with much fanfare in 2023. It will also feature an upcoming Tiffany Blue Box Café helmed by chef Daniel Boulud.

Marino’s concept brings the coast inside, with digital screens by artist Oyoram projecting sweeping views inspired by Newport and Laguna Beach.

Tiffany archival pieces with ties to the region are on display, including a specimen of morganite from Mesa Grande, Calif., on loan from a private collection, and others featuring kunzite, a gemstone first identified in California.

The space is also filled with contemporary art, including Tiffany Miraculous, Tiffany Smashing, Tiffany Adorable and Tiffany Dish by Damien Hirst near the entrance, as well as works by Urs Fischer, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Vik Muniz.

In addition to high jewelry and megadiamonds, the store showcases the HardWear, Bird on a Rock, Knot, Sixteen Stone and T by Tiffany collections.

Tiffany & Co., 3333 Bristol St., Suite 1509, Costa Mesa, Calif.

Michelle Obama’s Fashion Diplomacy Shines in Chicago

The star-packed opening of the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago was a nostalgia trip in the best way. The museum celebrates the impact of both Barack and Michelle Obama, including the former first lady’s use of fashion diplomacy during her years in the White House and afterward. Working with her longtime stylist Meredith Koop, who may be the best in the business, Michelle Obama has embraced a wide range of diverse designers and used clothing as a sophisticated tool for communication and symbolism.

That skill was on full display during the Obama Center’s opening weekend, when she brought her late mother, Marian Robinson, along for the journey, sartorially speaking. Michelle Obama wore a custom Acne Studios pencil skirt featuring a portrait of Robinson, who was a fixture of the first family’s home life during the presidency, living at the White House for all eight years and helping raise Sasha and Malia Obama.

“Everybody in our lives was touched by mom. It broke Barack down because he hadn’t seen the skirt,” Michelle Obama told Michele Norris on MS NOW, explaining that it took a while for the former president to compose himself onstage after seeing it. “I had gotten emotionally accustomed to the beauty of it … I should have prepped him...”

Later in the weekend, Michelle Obama nodded to the Thom Browne coat dress she wore for the second inauguration in 2013, opening the new museum in a Thom Browne navy-and-white seersucker cropped sack jacket with a matching skirt, white cotton piqué corset and white wingtip pumps. At other events, her choices were equally thoughtful and distinctly American in spirit; she wore a black dress by French brand Celine, currently designed by American Michael Rider, and a black peplum top with a white silk skirt by buzzy New York label Fforme, designed by Frances Howie.

The museum’s exhibitions stretch from the Declaration of Independence through the fight for women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement and other milestones in the ongoing pursuit of equality.

The narrative also focuses on Barack Obama’s presidency and life in the White House, including a full-scale replica of the Oval Office as it appeared during the Obama administration and a showcase featuring 12 of Michelle Obama’s most iconic dresses.

Included is the dress from election night in 2008, by Cuban-American designer Narciso Rodriguez, which I wrote at the time was “a major statement, the patriotic red bursting out of black like a firecracker out of the night sky.” It was a taste of what was to come from the first lady, who consistently supported young American fashion designers.

Together with Koop, she often chose symbolic looks in which the color or designer was intended to make a statement, such as the Tom Ford white halter gown on display, which she wore to a state dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in 2011 — a nod to the American designer living and working in London at the time.

For her final White House State Dinner in October 2016, Michelle Obama chose a custom rose-gold chain-mail gown designed by Atelier Versace. Honoring the guests of honor — Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and his wife, Agnese Landini — the goddess-like look celebrated Italian craftsmanship.

The museum also displays the colorful geometric-print halter dress Michelle Obama wore for her official portrait painted by artist Amy Sherald.

It was designed by Michelle Smith of Milly, an American contemporary brand that FLOTUS turned to often. “It is a people’s fabric. The dress has pockets. It is easy and comfortable,” Smith said at the time. “The dress speaks to the confidence, warmth and realness of Michelle Obama.”

Jones Road Opens in Santa Monica

Bobbi Brown needs no introduction. She revolutionized the beauty world in the 1990s by creating the “no-makeup” makeup look and building an empire around it. Now she has landed on the West Coast, opening her first Jones Road store on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.

Brown founded the brand five and a half years ago, in the midst of the pandemic and on the exact day her 25-year noncompete agreement with Estée Lauder, the owner of her namesake brand, expired. I am a huge fan of the brand and am elated that I can now shop it in person closer to home. I recently had the chance to chat with the beauty legend about her vision, her retail rollout and her summer beauty tips.

“I’d left one company not thinking I would ever go back and do what I did before, because there couldn’t possibly be another chapter,” Brown told WrapStyle. But she was swept up in what was happening in beauty in the early 2020s, when brands began circumventing the department store model, and launching direct to consumer.

“Plus, I really started wearing different kinds of makeup and really caring about ingredients,” she added. “I was dipping my toe into a lot of the new clean brands but being a little bit disappointed at the efficacy. So, I saw that there was something that I could create that didn’t exist, and I started Jones Road with a simple philosophy that you don’t need a lot, you just need the right things.”

From the beginning, her hero product has been the Miracle Balm because “no one had ever seen anything like it,” she said. “And it was this product that was a happy accident. Instantly when I put it on, I said, this is a miracle. It came without color in it at first, and I saw what it did to my skin, but then I said, ‘Well, what if we tinted it,’ and so we did. People still weren’t wearing a lot of foundation during the pandemic, so this was unbelievable. And you could put it on your lips, you could put it on your eyes, and your hair, on your body.”

Another must-have is What the Foundation. “I couldn’t have named it that at my old company,” she laughed, referring to parent brand Estée Lauder.

Next up is a full-coverage concealer, coming on the heels of the new Bright Skin Illuminating Drops, which Brown likens to “vacation skin in a bottle.”

“If you’re in a place that is high humidity, and California is not high humidity, you should not be putting What the Foundation or Miracle Balm on, even if you’re super dry, because it’s just going to be sticky,” she said.

“You could mix Bright Skin Drops with your moisturizer and put it on your cheeks for a bit of brightening,” she suggested. “Something else that’s great for the summer is the gel liner, which is a long wear lining product for the eyes. It’s not going to smear and stays put. Even our mascara gets eight-hour wear. I’d recommend things that just stay on and you don’t have to think about.”

With more than 40 years in the industry, it’s remarkable that Brown is still enjoying it.

What’s different now is, “I am very in touch with my customer, which I certainly wasn’t before,” she said of her digital community and de facto focus group. “We have a Jones Road Facebook group called the Roadies. Last I looked, there was 90,000 members.”

When the brand exploded digitally, Brown wasn’t thinking about brick-and-mortar stores — until her husband, a real estate developer, found a cool building in her hometown of Montclair, N.J. It became her first store, which opened during the pandemic. “People were lined up around the block to get in, because you know, four people at a time, everyone had masks on, people were coming from all over the globe and all over the Tri-State area,” she said.

In addition to the Santa Monica store, Brown is opening three other California stores this year in Palo Alto, Newport Beach and San Diego, which will bring the total store count to 20 by the end of the year.

“I’m in my late 60s, and I had dinner with friends of mine who asked if I was playing golf yet. No mahjong, no pickleball, no. What do I do? I have a Jones Road truck sitting outside my house, and I hop in it with a bunch of kids that I hired, college kids, and we give samples out, and talk to people, and we shoot content. I am having so much fun doing what I’m doing.”

She needs to get that truck out to L.A., maybe when she comes in September for a personal appearance at the store.

Jones Road, 1406 Montana Ave., Santa Monica.

Dataland Brings AI to the Museum

Dataland, the first AI art museum, has opened in L.A., and it’s getting rave reviews from The New York Times and elsewhere, while flooding my feed with fantastical selfies the likes of which I haven’t seen since Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms opened at The Broad in 2015.

The museum is located in the Frank Gehry-designed L.A. Grand building in downtown L.A. and is a nod to the DTLA future depicted in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, which co-founder Refik Anadol fell in love with at the age of 8.

The space is also across the street from Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, where, in 2018, Refik Anadol Studio presented one of its defining projects, WDCH Dreams, with machine-generated dreams of 100 years of L.A. Philharmonic performances mapped onto the silvery sides of the building.

With its inaugural exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, Dataland offers a multi-sensory experience, including chocolates from local confectioner Valerie and fragrance from L’Oréal, that continually evolves through human data collected from visitors.

The exhibition is powered by Refik Anadol Studio’s Large Nature Model, an AI system trained on one of the world’s largest ethically sourced collections of ecological data. Visitors can connect to the museum through two wearable devices — a medical-grade biosensor worn on the wrist that captures physiological responses in real time, including heart rate and skin temperature, among others — or a device worn around the neck that delivers a scent journey by L’Oréal.

Established in 2014 by Refik Anadol, a pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence whose work has been exhibited in museums globally, and artist and entrepreneur Efsun Erkılıç, the Los Angeles-based Refik Anadol Studio produces immersive media art using data as its primary material and AI as a collaborator.

Across five galleries spanning 25,000 square feet, the museum takes you through machine-generated environments inspired by real-world rain forests. Highlights include an infinity room of a different sort, where Anadol’s dream of a glass hummingbird takes flight in an LED cube; an architectural canvas called the Data Pavilion; and the Latent Gallery, where visitors can paint with a “thinking brush,” sample an edible sculpture, experience the sacred healing song of the Yawanawá people and encounter the scent of a flower that blooms only one night each year in the Amazon rainforest.

Walt Disney himself couldn’t have imagined anything so trippy. Then again, if you’ve seen Fantasia, maybe he did.

Dataland, 100 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles (424) 443-3502.

The Boys Are Back

Pretty, preppy, beachy and skinny-mini the boys are back on the runways in Milan and Paris for the Spring 2027 menswear shows.

Temperatures have been soaring in Europe, and the A-lister contingent has been relatively sparse, save for Ralph Lauren’s stacked Milan front row, where David Lauren was flanked by Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton and Tom Hiddleston.

Saint Laurent followed that up in Paris with a Madonna moment, and Rami Malek, Austin Butler and Kate Moss managing to look cool in the historic heat.

On the runway, some design ideas seemed to carry over from the influential Dior and Chanel women’s collections, notably tricked-out jeans and piled-on costume jewelry.

For better or worse, the newsiest collection so far has been Prada’s, which brought back the early Aughts slimline look with skinny pants on even skinnier models that even in the age of Ozempic begged the question of responsible body representation on the runway. That said, I did like the Matrix-cool sunglasses.

Vacanze Siciliane, Dolce & Gabbana’s beach escape of a show with Adonis-like models, also had plenty of personality pants if you can call them that, but much more forgiving. I loved this collection, which was steeped in coral and shell details.

Dolce & Gabbana also set the bar for the new brooch, which has migrated from the red carpet to the everyday, also seen at Armani and Saint Laurent.

I loved all the novelty knitwear, especially the Ralph Lauren sweater sampling every design motif of the designer’s oeuvre, from Southwestern to equestrian, plaid to cottagecore.

And at Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams had the coolest set so far, bringing SoCal surf and skate culture to Cité Internationale Universitaire, complete with a giant artificial wave and models toting surfboards and pushing LV trunks resembling ice cream pushcarts at the beach.

The clothes were more restrained than in some of Williams’ past outings, which was a good thing. His version of the season’s embellished jeans featured shells arranged in the house’s Damier pattern (cute). And who wouldn’t smile at an LV rash guard?

Hang ten (thousand) dollars.

Hermès Goes Hollywood Glam

Julia Louis-Dreyfus cozied up to Melinda French Gates in the front row, Natasha Lyonne slid in at the very last minute and Miley Cyrus shimmied in her seat to the finale song Bette Davis Eyes.

There was star power aplenty at the Hermès Fall 2026 Chapter Two show in Bel Air last week. Both off the runway and on it too, with women’s artistic director Nadège Vanhée showing her most glamorous collection to date, and one that felt very L.A.

The hilltop location just above the Hotel Bel-Air made for some logistical headaches. But the cinematic golden-hour vantage point made up for the long wait for golf carts and shuttles.

The event had been in the works for a year, and the show’s pavilion structure was built over the course of a month. Bathed in golden-hour yellow paint, or jaune flave, the set ushered in a softer vision of Hermès ready-to-wear.

Since 2024, the brand has been taking its women’s RTW collection on the road, stopping in New York, Shanghai and now L.A., with each destination informing the designer’s work.

For this chapter, Vanhée zeroed in on the dress, specifically a gorgeous strapless duchesse satin design that seemed destined for the red carpet. Signaling a new direction for the leather-centric house, the dress came in several colors, including rouge tango, modeled by Karen Elson. All were styled with super-chic matching satin evening boots, which feel like a trend in the making.

The propositions for glam nights continued with fluid gowns in velvet or scattered with starry embroidery, jewel-tone silk coats and suiting.

Meanwhile, the elements of practice and performance inherent to Hollywood came through as Vanhée drew inspiration from the world of dance, touching on rehearsal wear with side-tie silhouettes and groovy sparkly-knit jumpsuits with flared legs. (Groovy and Hermès are two words I never thought would meet.)

The house’s signature leather was reimagined with a lighter touch, as buttery blousons layered over sensual velvet dresses, for example, while Western-detailed, boxy zip-front jackets with matching shorts felt very L.A. rock ’n’ roll.

The event underscored the reality that the U.S., even with all its troubles, is a key market for luxury brands navigating the industry slowdown, though it should be said that Hermès is already doing much better than most. The show followed L.A. destination presentations from Dior at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Gucci and Louis Vuitton in New York in the last few weeks.

The U.S., specifically L.A., is also the celebrity-fashion power center, of course, and the night’s lineup of dressier looks made it clear that Hermès is getting more serious about Hollywood dressing.

Several celebrities have been priming the pump, with director Chloé Zhao wearing a Spring 2026 Hermès bodycon dress at Cannes last month, actor Toheeb Jimoh choosing a sleek pinstriped Spring 2026 Hermès men’s suit for a screening of Sheep in the Box at Cannes, and Cyrus donning a glossy black Hermès coat at the iHeartRadio Music Awards back in March.

Adding to the celebrity dressing potential, there’s already a lot of anticipation for what’s next in Hermès menswear with British designer Grace Wales Bonner taking the reins--and making history as the first Black woman to lead a major European fashion house. Her first show will be in January 2027.

Zegna Does Malibu Without the Clichés

Ermenegildo Zegna turned the Malibu Pier into a runway on Friday night, bringing a taste of the Med to the Pacific with its Spring 2027 show.

Silver-haired style setter Stellan Skarsgård, Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson, Rami Malek, Mahershala Ali, Paul Dano and many more from the Hollywood set took their seats in beach chairs for the parade of luxe leisurewear from Italian designer Alessandro Sartori.

The Italian art of villeggiatura, or escaping—truly escaping—to the seaside for the summer season, was Sartori’s starting point for what he does best: a relaxed but refined lineup, one that would be right at home at Nobu just down the PCH.

Soft tailoring and stripes were the foundations of the collection. Shirt jackets, safari jackets, duster coats and beachy cardigans were casually layered over shorts, while terry-cloth pullovers and color-blocked windbreakers offered more overt nautical references. Blazers with adjustable belts and shirts with interchangeable collars underscored the functional aspect of the clothes.

The palette was surf-and-sand, and ease was the prevailing mood, but never at the expense of elegance. Instead, the designer explored how summer dressing can look spontaneous and polished at the same time, taking on coastal L.A. without falling into palm-tree and surfboard clichés.

“I wanted to express a Zegna take on summer,” Sartori said. “Our vision of leisure dressing is rooted in a cultivated attitude and a discerning gaze that is profoundly Italian, yet open to the world.”

H. Lorenzo’s New Guard Flagship

Fashion’s new guard is alive and well at the new H. Lorenzo flagship on Beverly Boulevard. The 9,000-square-foot, gallery-like space is a garden of edgy delights from hard-to-find and up-and-coming global and L.A. brands. There’s Paris-based enfants terribles Matières Fécales, who created Sarah Paulson’s memorable “One Percent” Met Gala gown; London-based goth designer Dilara Findikoglu, who recently collaborated with Khy after Kylie Jenner’s stylist discovered the designer here; and Paly Hollywood, whose art-to-wear pieces are co-designed by James Franco.

One of L.A.’s formative fashion boutiques, H. Lorenzo was a Sunset Boulevard institution for 42 years. It was founded by Lorenzo Hadar, who helped bring cutting-edge European and Japanese clothing to L.A. in the 1980s — literally — beginning with a “cash-and-carry” model that saw him bringing Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and Comme des Garçons pieces back in his suitcase to sell to customers.

The store’s reputation grew, attracting a who’s who of celebrities over the decades, from James Brown and Michael Jackson to Tupac Shakur, Drake, Cardi B and Justin Bieber. It also became a go-to destination for stylists and costume designers looking for the newest looks, including Ruth E. Carter and Euphoria costume designer Natasha Newman-Thomas.

Now, Lorenzo’s son Mac Hadar is heading the business day to day, and the store has relocated to Beverly and Robertson boulevards. “We wanted to inject new energy into the company and just evolve,” Mac said on a busy Wednesday afternoon at the store, as shoppers rolled in for Paly hoodies and Sekrit Saints leather jackets, trying things on and pronouncing them “fire” and “cool as f--k.”

“We try to add at least a 15 to 20 percent new brand mix to our roster every season ... and be one step ahead of the curve,” said Mac, who also merchandises H. Lorenzo’s archive store on Santa Fe Avenue in downtown L.A., curating 40 years of vintage so it feels relevant to the moment.

The flagship was designed in collaboration with Italian architect Oliviero Arch Baldini, who has created all the H. Lorenzo stores. It’s minimal, but packs a punch.

“We love the racking system in this space. It feels like there is a lot of metal, but with the clothing on it, it almost floats,” said Mac, explaining that the front of the store is intended to be a rotating design installation, starting with a Japanese curation of custom tatami tables, hand-painted fans, pottery and other objets d’art, all of which are for sale.

On the racks and shelves, shoppers can find Elena Velez’s wasteland-cool sweats, Chopova Lowena’s punky princess skirts, Kapitol’s cult-favorite Japanese-Americana workwear jackets, Doublet’s moss-embroidered jeans, Stephen Jones’ haute hats, Maison Margiela’s tabi shoes and Ashley Williams’ surreal paper roll bracelets.

Mac is also envisioning the new, larger space as a community space—and it already has been, hosting the kickoff for an exclusive collaboration with Ann Demeulemeester last month. “We wanted to introduce the space before it was open,” Mac said. “And we’re planning on doing things like movie screenings and activations that bring people together in ways beyond just a clothing drop with a DJ.”

H. Lorenzo, 8801 Beverly Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA 90048

Rare Exhibition of Chinese Fashion Opening at LACMA

Opening June 14 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity is a rare showcase of Chinese fashion in the U.S., dazzling with textiles and embroidery so exquisite they have to be seen IRL, as well as stories of cross-cultural influence and trailblazing 3D-printed mannequins created by designer Jason Wu to represent Chinese physiques, hairstyles and skin tones.

The exhibition is also rare in that it is largely based on a single collection donated to the museum by Berkeley-based Chinese American artist Chere Lai Mah, who spent more than four decades preserving garments belonging to her mother, mother-in-law and other relatives who traveled regularly between Fresno, Calif., and Hong Kong to buy their clothing.

Augmented with pieces from the museum’s permanent collection, Fashioning Chinese Women includes 70 garments tracing the evolution of Chinese dress within China, from the loose, densely embroidered and decorated robes of the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) to the sleek qipaos of Republican Shanghai (1912–1949) and the globally influential cheongsams of postwar Hong Kong.

The show touches on how political reforms brought narrower silhouettes, while global trade and imported materials led to textile innovations, including Art Deco-inspired machine lace and devoré velvets.

The exhibition explores the rise of the qipao as a symbol of modern Chinese fashion during the mid-20th century, when tailors refined the silhouette using Western dressmaking techniques. Among the highlights are two 1949 versions sewn by Susan Mah herself, made from whimsical mid-century California rayon fabrics that reflect her dual Chinese American identity, and three bold, colorful, 1960s-era graphic knee-length cheongsam shift dresses from the fashionable wardrobe of socialite Aileen Chiang Pei, stepmother of architect I. M. Pei.

The show also touches on historical figures who shaped how Chinese dress was perceived and copied abroad, including Anna May Wong, the Hollywood actress who brought Chinese glamour to the silver screen and into the public consciousness in the 1920s, and the stylish First Lady of the Republic of China, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who wore a modernized qipao on her 1943 goodwill tour to America and helped raise the visibility of Chinese Americans, including speaking to a capacity crowd at the Hollywood Bowl.

“Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity,” June 14–Oct. 12, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036.

Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon is Really a Fashion Exhibition, a Good One

It’s the summer of Marilyn, with events around the world celebrating the centennial of Marilyn Monroe’s birth on June 1, 2026, from the Palm Springs lookalike contest featuring 1,037 Marilyns, to Julien’s Auctions’ 100 Years of Marilyn featuring her Elizabeth Arden “Pink Spark” lip pomade and pink patterned Emilio Pucci blouse among other ephemera.

The Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon exhibition, now on view, is part of the broader celebration, with a curatorial focus on how the glamorous but tragic figure shaped and controlled her own image. How much control she actually had remains a matter of debate. But the exhibition offers an impressive array of fashion, from on-screen gowns and jeans to a proto-Skims waist trainer and elegant everyday looks from midcentury Los Angeles brand Jax.

The exhibition is sponsored by Chanel, which supplied a rare 1950s-era bottle of Chanel No. 5 displayed alongside Marilyn Monroe’s famous quote: “What do I wear to bed? Why, Chanel No. 5 of course.”

Monroe certainly knew what she was doing giving that provocative quote to Life magazine in a 1952 interview, adding, “I don’t want to say nude, but it’s the truth.”

The endorsement was not paid, a fact that may surprise modern audiences. Monroe later became a celebrity ambassador for Westmore Hollywood Cosmetics. More recently, in 2013, Chanel collaborated with her estate to use archival recordings of Monroe’s voice in a fragrance campaign.

While Marlene Dietrich and Audrey Hepburn traveled to Paris to collaborate with couturiers on their on- and offscreen looks, Hollywood’s studio costume designers shaped Marilyn Monroe’s bombshell persona, with William Travilla collaborating with Monroe on eight films. Their craftsmanship rivaled anything being done in Europe at the time, as this work demonstrates.

The star of the show is Travilla’s strapless hot pink silk satin gown and gloves, which Monroe wore to perform “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). The dress, which has its own gallery, retains its vivid color in person as it appears onscreen. Travilla incorporated felt, boning, ostrich feathers and horsehair to help the garment maintain its shape, and it has held up impressively over time.

Interestingly, it was not the first choice for the scene; Travilla designed a more risqué, Taylor Swift showgirl era-like costume consisting of a bejeweled two piece and bodysuit, which is also on display.

But during the film’s production, Monroe’s nude photos from 1949 surfaced in the press, and the studio thought it best for her to wear something more conservative. She showed them, delivering one of the most seductive performances in Hollywood history even in a more modest outfit.

The Travilla from The Seven Year Itch (1955) is also on display—more precisely, a Travilla-made replica of the pleated halter gown famously lifted by a breeze from a subway grate. The look became synonymous with Monroe’s iconic status, later immortalized in a larger-than-life cutout above Times Square.

I was fascinated to learn that early in her career, before achieving financial success, Monroe often borrowed costumes from studio wardrobe departments for her red carpet appearances.

A gold lamé halter dress made by Travilla for Gentleman Prefer Blondes was deemed too revealing and only shown briefly from behind in the film. Monroe had the designer modify it for her to wear off-screen for photos and appearances including the 1953 Photoplay Awards.

Monroe is often remembered as a pioneer of the “naked dress.” Most famously in audio recordings of her 1962 performance of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” when she wore a shimmering sheer Jean-Louis gown, gasps can be heard from the audience. She also helped cement the halter dress as a symbol of glamour and played a role in popularizing denim for women in the 1950s through her on-screen looks in The Misfits and other films.

But her style didn’t always find favor with the press. In 1951, a prominent female newspaper columnist publicly called Monroe “cheap and vulgar” for wearing a low-cut red dress to a Beverly Hills Hotel party, writing that she would look better in a potato sack. Monroe took it in stride, asking Travilla to design a potato sack dress for her, and wearing it for a 1952 studio-staged photo shoot.

Amidst all the sequins and glamour in the show, her personal attire is particularly revelatory, including her waist, jaw and chin trainers, which are among several underpinnings on display that feel a bit exploitative to look at even all these years later.

Her everyday wardrobe reflected what might be described as quiet luxury: curvy but unadorned little black dresses, a green silk jersey Pucci top paired with black pants, and black Ferragamo heels. One look that stood out in particular was a ballet-pink silk jersey dress with a full chiffon skirt that felt remarkably modern-looking and brought to mind Alaïa.

It was by Jax of Beverly Hills, which dressed much of Hollywood at the time in second-skin slacks, knitwear and jersey dresses defined by a casual elegance. Jax was one of Monroe’s favorite stores and among the first to showcase Rudi Gernreich’s designs.

Monroe also turned to Jax for the silk pajamas she wore in The Seven Year Itch (1955), which are also on display and remain strikingly chic today.

In her last interview, in July 1962 with Life magazine writer Richard Meryman, published in full in the new book Marilyn: The Lost Photographs: The Last Interview (Weldon Owen), Monroe spoke thoughtfully about her approach to style and fame.

“Normally I just wear whatever, but when I’m in a crowd and I’m going to be recognized, I’m more careful the way I dress,” she said at the time. “I mean, more carefully dressed for the occasion. There are certain times I feel that the public should see me at my best. I’m not going to go running around like a dog. I feel I wouldn’t want to let anybody down and I wouldn’t want to disappoint them. Fantasy is important for people, and so I think in that way.

“Sometimes wearing a scarf and a polo coat and no makeup and with a certain attitude of walking, I go shopping or just look at people living. But then, you know, there will be a few teenagers who are kind of sharp, and they’ll say, ‘Hey, just a minute. You know who I think that is?’ And they’ll start tailing me. And I don’t mind. I realize some people want to see if you’re real.”

“Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon” through Feb. 28, 2027 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 6067 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036.

Marilyn’s Beauty Regimen Inspires New Skincare Brand

Marilyn Monroe continues to influence fashion and beauty, as seen in the launch of Icon Skincare, a new brand inspired by a piece of memorabilia acquired by Hollywood collector and beauty executive Bryan Johns, founder and president of iS Clinical, a brand popular among A-list clients.

Johns and his business partner, Alec Call, launched the venture with a Marilyn Monroe 100th birthday celebration at the Academy Museum on Monday night.

The direct-to-consumer brand was born after Johns discovered Hollywood’s Golden Era esthetician Madam Renna, who treated the faces of Monroe, Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor, among others.

Renna was known for her custom formulas, her husband Dr. Campbell’s “bloodless facelift” technique, and her signature use of royal jelly, all of which have been incorporated into Icon Skincare’s formulations.

The nine-piece collection features cleansing, resurfacing, hydration and brightening products with signature blends of sustainably sourced botanicals, antioxidants and acids, with royal jelly playing a prominent role to nourish the skin and offer a radiant glow.

Johns began exploring Renna’s legacy after noticing the beauty pioneer’s name on a signed Monroe photograph he acquired at auction, on which Monroe wrote, “To Madam Renna, thank you for what you’ve given me, your work and your interest.”

He later learned that it was Renna who helped refine Monroe’s chin enough to satisfy director John Huston, leading to her casting in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), her breakout film. Renna reportedly treated Monroe from the late 1940s until Renna’s death.

Among the same box of ephemera Johns acquired was a notebook containing Renna’s formulas. “That’s what started it,” he said of the journey to develop Icon Skincare, which does not use Monroe in its marketing beyond the origin story.

As he told the Marilyn-dressed crowd gathered for cocktails on the Dolby Family Terrace—including Dita Von Teese, January Jones, Sharon Lawrence, celebrity facialist Shani Darden and makeup artist Gregory Arlt—the brand is “about how an icon like Marilyn Monroe can inspire us to discover and reveal icon energy inside.”

Icon Skincare, $32 to $68, is available exclusively at iconskincare.com.

East Coast Prep Meets West Coast Skate at Noah

Design power couple Brendon Babenzien and Estelle Bailey-Babenzien have opened an L.A. clubhouse for their brand Noah.

Located in the Sycamore District, a retail hotspot already home to Nili Lotan, Jacques Marie Mage and Just One Eye, the 5,000-square-foot space marks the New York-based brand’s fourth store and its first on the West Coast. Accessible via an alley off Sycamore Street and tucked into a courtyard shared with the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, the new location reflects Noah’s blend of seaside style, Ivy League prep, skate culture and surf influence, with an emphasis on community.

“To a young kid dealing with cold weather, rain and snow for chunks of the year, it looked like the streets were paved with gold,” Babenzien, who grew up in Long Island, N.Y., said of his early perception of California. “Every magazine was featuring skaters and surfers in California. All of what California was offering us got absorbed, compounded and layered on top of a basically preppy, and sometimes punk, sometimes hip-hop style, defining a new Northeast attitude.”

That collision of influences has long defined Noah, the label Babenzien launched with his wife, Estelle, in 2015 after spending more than 15 years as design director at Supreme. (He also spent five years as creative director of J.Crew menswear before departing the brand in February.) Estelle brings plenty of design experience of her own, from working with Donna Karan on her Madison Avenue flagship to designing Adrian Grenier’s brownstone.

She was responsible for the interiors, with architectural direction from Studio Murnane, translating Noah’s easygoing style into a chic space that invites visitors to linger. The design features a custom Blue Island piece by Shin Okuda of Waka Waka; lighting by Estudio Persona; wallpaper created by Graham & Brown and artist Kate Berry; rugs by Salam Hello; and fitting room curtains made from UK Sailmakers sails.

There is a full kitchen, a Sony-sponsored screening area and soundstage, and an in-store skate bowl designed by Machine Histories.

I stopped by on Saturday, and while no one was shredding, plenty of people were shopping Noah’s collection (priced from $22 to $1,598), which includes colorful Oxford button-downs, seersucker tailoring, rugby shirts, Japanese-crafted denim, chinos, madras windbreakers, board shorts and soft tees. Among the highlights were a limited-edition chain-stitched “Los Angeles” T-shirt created for the opening and another featuring a graphic of the California quail, the state’s official bird. Also on offer were maritime-themed knickknacks, Noah sneaker collaborations with Converse and Catch Ball, and sharp-looking Noah x Timex Moon Phase watches.

Noah, 911 N Orange Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90038.

Catherine Opie’s Cool Blue Period

As the summer weather heats up in L.A., gallery-goers will find a cool respite at Regen Projects in Catherine Opie’s new exhibition of photographs, Holding Blue.

The show features the L.A. artist’s recent works capturing Norway’s dramatic landscape bathed in the deep blue light that envelops the Arctic Circle during the polar winter.

Opie road-tripped through the region in early 2024 in search of the phenomenon known as “blue hour,” which she depicts in a series of large-scale photographs titled Norway Mountains.

The images capture unfiltered light in countless shades of blue, contrasted with craggy earth and glassy ice in what Opie describes as “a meditation on environmental fragility.” Her experience of Norway’s fjords, structures and everyday scenes is also documented in other works on view.

Catherine Opie Circle of Ice 2024 Source: Catherine Opie, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects

Opie describes her photographs of Norway’s mountains as portraits, developed through extended observation, with the artist spending days with each peak before making an image. The resulting works capture the many shifting moods of the landscape.

The majesty at the edge of the world is humbling, as are the scenes of life amid the frozen isolation. Circle of Ice, which features tiny huts lit from within and perched on a precarious swirl of ice, calls to mind the transient Minnesota communities depicted in Opie’s 2001 Icehouses series.

There are variations on color, including Munch Sky, which features a dramatic red sunset reminiscent of the skies in works by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, including The Scream.

This is one of five exhibitions focused on Opie this year. Her work is appearing simultaneously across Europe, with a career-spanning survey at London’s National Portrait Gallery set to travel to Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy, alongside exhibitions opening in Kassel, Germany and Trondheim, Norway.

“Holding Blue,” until July 3 at Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles.

Sir Paul Smith and Gabriela Hearst Launch Dreamy Collab in L.A.

Fashion designers Sir Paul Smith and Gabriela Hearst have a similar always-on energy, infectious enthusiasm and commitment to doing the right thing, not to mention their common love of tailoring and color.

So it made perfect sense when the two announced they were collaborating on a limited-edition collection, which they launched last week with a dinner soirée in L.A.

After being introduced by mutual friend Wesley Schultz, lead singer of the folk band The Lumineers, the designers first became pen pals. “He has the joyfulness of a kid and the humbleness of a great,” Hearst said of Smith. “I’ll text him and he’s at the shop on a Saturday. Once a shopkeeper, always a shopkeeper.”

When she suggested they work on something together, Smith’s first thought went to his father Harold’s photographs, which he credits with giving him a lifelong appreciation for detail that has served him well since launching his brand in 1970. Hearst was keen on the idea and eager to tap into Smith’s process of photo-printing on fabric, which he pioneered in the early 1990s.

She visited him in London at his famed studio and personal cabinet of curiosities, chock full of toys and oddities in every square inch. “People send him things from all over the world because he’s just so cool,” she said.

There, the designers settled on two landscape photographs of the British countryside from the 1950s and ’60s — a mountain and a waterfall — translated in brilliant ombré color onto tailoring, slip dresses, Nina bags and hand-knit sweaters by Manos del Uruguay, the nonprofit cooperative supporting economic independence for women in rural communities that Hearst frequently works with.

It was Smith’s idea to launch the collab in L.A., where the Instagram-famous pink wall outside his Melrose Avenue boutique is a bona fide local landmark and his fanbase of Hollywood celebrities and stylists runs deep.

“You’ve got to sit down now, it’s the law,” he joked, helping guests to their seats on the terrace of Penthouse 64 at the Chateau Marmont.

A starry group of creatives came out for the dinner, including John Boyega, Diplo, Mamie Gummer, Jessica Alba, Quinta Brunson, Edward Norton, Quannah Chasinghorse, Tom Parker Bowles, Sean Baker, Michael Stipe, Warren Alfie Baker, Jeanne Yang, Paul Smith executive chairman Ewan Venters and Gabriela Hearst president Michelle Cohen. And the lucky ones were wearing pieces from the collab.

“Cheers to this lady! And to me!” Smith said, toasting the group. “Steal the napkins!” he added, referring to the keepsakes with similar ombré patterns to the collection.

Over dinner, the conversation touched on the Greater Together L.A. summit earlier in the day, which brought together British leaders representing 230 companies in an effort to grow trade between the U.K. and U.S. (Paul Smith was one of the speakers). There was also chatter about Cannes, where juror Chloé Zhao wore several looks by Hearst. The director has become something of a muse to the designer, who said, “Things that move her are the same things that move me.”

Fashion Hits the Hollywood Walk of Fame

It’s not often that a fashion designer hits the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which is why I did a double-take when I saw Donatella Versace introducing Miley Cyrus at her star induction ceremony last week.

“A fighter, a rebel and a force for good,” Versace said of Cyrus, her friend, who has often worn her designs on the red carpet. “You champion kindness and equality and you are one of the hardest working people I know ... Just remember if any of you step over Miley’s star, do it with attitude and of course major heels.”

Anya Taylor-Joy also spoke about Cyrus, adding, “She challenged the rules, rewrote them and, every once in a while, set them on fire in a teddy bear costume.” (She was referencing her infamous 2013 VMAs performance.)

“My name is laid in gold and pink terrazzo, and it’s fierce, and it’s fun, and it’s fabulous,” Cyrus said. “And I’m in Versace hand-picked from the atelier archives by Donatella herself, which makes it even more fun, and even more fierce and even more fabulous.”

The ladies brought the glam for the afternoon event — and two major archival fashion moments, as it turns out. Cyrus wore a spiderweb lace gown from Versace’s Fall 2015 collection, which had previously been worn by Heidi Klum at the amfAR Gala in Milan that year.

And Taylor-Joy wore a crystal-and-white satin bugle-beaded fringe halter gown from Bob Mackie’s 1990 resort collection.

The confluence of Versace and Mackie got me thinking about why Edith Head and Ruth E. Carter are the only designers with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Undoubtedly, Mackie has earned his spot, with more than 60 TV and film credits as a costume designer for Cher, Carol Burnett, Elton John and many others, as well as his eveningwear collections. I’d argue that fashion designers such as Versace and the late Giorgio Armani deserve recognition, too. Time to get those nominations going.

Louis Vuitton Cruises Into The Frick

After Gucci took over Times Square, Louis Vuitton chose an equally impressive, if much more gilded locale to show its Cruise 2027 runway collection: New York’s Frick Museum.

Reopened last year after a $220 million renovation, the museum has a stunning collection of Old Master paintings, which provided the rich backdrop for creative director Nicolas Ghesquière’s tale of two cities: Paris and New York.

Icons of American style were on parade, including jeans, jerseys, leather and sneakers, alongside groovy pieces made in collaboration with the late New York pop artist Keith Haring. (The collection’s key inspiration was a vintage Louis Vuitton suitcase graffitied by Haring in the 1980s.)

Travel is in the DNA of Louis Vuitton, and Ghesquière is known for time-traveling through different eras and sensibilities in his runway collections. Here, it was downtown-meets-uptown in both setting and substance, with graffiti-style lace, tweed lady suits reworked into shorts suits with a skater vibe, and tooled leather jackets paired with tulle skirts. Accessories were standouts, including LV monogram boxing gloves, Chinese takeout box bags and ruff collars reimagined as capes.

The next U.S. runway stop? Back to L.A. again on June 4, for the second chapter of the Hermès Fall 2026 women’s collection.

Yoko Ono Gets Her Due

For decades, Yoko Ono’s identity was too often overshadowed by her proximity to John Lennon, and she was often cast more as a muse than as the pioneering conceptual artist she has always been. Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, open through Oct. 11 at The Broad, is a long-overdue correction.

The show restores Ono, 93, to the center of her story, tracing her work in shaping avant-garde, performance and participatory art over the past seven decades.

Her experience as a young girl in the World War II–ravaged Japanese countryside, hungry and seeking mental escape, was formative, curator Sarah Loyer asserts. Yoko Ono created a game with her brother, Keisuke, in which they lay on their backs, looked up at the sky and “exchanged menus in the air.” That experience inspired her belief that making art should not be limited to trained artists in studios but can be created in the minds of everyone.

What makes the exhibition so incredible is how contemporary Ono’s themes are and how her works continue to resonate. Across decades, her art has confronted war, displacement and human vulnerability in ways that feel strikingly relevant amid current global conflicts, refugee crises and the politicization of women’s bodies.

Ono’s Instruction Paintings transform viewers into participants through printed instructions that become communal rituals and acts of reflection—including, according to the exhibition text, Isamu Noguchi, whom she amusingly recalls stepping on her Painting to Be Stepped On while wearing a pair of elegant zori slippers. (In New York in the 1950s, Yoko Ono was part of an avant-garde circle that included the artist and others such as Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg and Peggy Guggenheim, who gathered to share and take part in each other’s works.)

These calls to action—to imagine, to mend, to shake hands—were experiential long before they became a buzzword and are particularly powerful today as invitations to slow down, dream and engage. Other works similarly ask visitors to draw, hammer, collect and write recollections.

The exhibition also explores Ono’s role as an early feminist artist. Watching the 1965 film of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece at Carnegie Hall, filmed by David and Albert Maysles, was emotionally charged in a communal setting. On stage, she wears her best suit while audience members take turns cutting away pieces of her clothing, casting us, the viewers, as voyeurs and witnesses to her vulnerability and exposure.

Throughout, Music of the Mind demonstrates how Ono’s art was about activating people, which she is still doing with digital billboards featuring her messages of peace that are appearing across Los Angeles. Her invitation to participate emotionally, politically and in community feels more necessary now than ever.

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, through Oct. 11, The Broad, 221 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles.

Boots Riley’s Brilliant Fashion Film Has Killer Costumes and a Rebel Heart

I Love Boosters is the indie style antidote to The Devil Wears Prada 2’s luxury brand bonanza – and with better costumes, thanks to the brilliance of director Boots Riley and costume designer Shirley Kurata, who was Oscar-nominated for Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Opening Friday, May 22, from Neon, Riley’s bonkers sci-fi meets social justice film is about a group of boosters (definition: people stealing goods from a store and selling them at a discount price) who conspire to take on a devilish fashion mogul.

To create the film’s color-pop maximalist world, Kurata drew inspiration from iconic Japanese street style book Fruits, the Oakland arts scene and the Instagram account UpNextDesigner, and platformed loads of up-and-coming fashion designers on the big screen in the process.

Highlights? A jumpsuit with Stegosaurus spikes specially made by L.A. casual wear brand Big Bud Press; a coat and dress with lenticular blinking eye balls by surrealist L.A. designer/artist Leeann Huang; an on-theme jacket covered in coin purses by London designer Alina Ispas; and a red water spout neckerchief by emerging London designer Selina Kwong.

“I’m a champion for any aspiring designer,” Kurata told WrapStyle. “Their work is so fun. You can’t always use them, but this movie I was able to.”

The stylishly surreal film follows aspiring designer Corvette (Keke Palmer) and her fellow boosters, Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Maria (Taylour Paige) as they steal their way from the storefronts of Oakland to the unethical clothing factories in China.

The story exposes fashion’s greed and hidden truths, and resonates particularly now in light of the real world news this week that sustainable fashion brand Everlane is being acquired by ultra fast-fashion giant Shein, a move that’s being perceived as a slap in the face by its idealistic Millennial customer base,

In the film, Corvette’s hero is Christie Smith, played to perfection by Demi Moore. She is fashion’s gatekeeper as the founder of trendy Metro Designer, which has its headquarters in a wacky slanted building, and dresses its shops (and beleaguered shopkeepers) according to a single monochromatic color scheme.

But as it turns out, Christie is more of a villain, a taker not a creator, and many of her ideas are cribbed from people on the street like Corvette, including one turquoise dress specifically, which when it is discovered touches off the boosters’ revenge plot to right the imbalance of power.

The boosters hatch a plan to empty out all Metro Designer stores, joined by Jianhu (Poppy Lu), who has arrived from a factory in China where Metro Designer clothes are made by exploited laborers, suffering from health problems because of the harmful effects of sand-blasting.

“Fashion that happens in our neighborhood is absorbed by the fashion industry, then sold back to us at very high prices – so people figure out how to get the stuff they want with much less money,” Riley said in the production notes. “I was thinking about the economy of that and how fashion and art manifests; how people make and consume art while they’re struggling and how communities work together.”

Indeed, the boosters revel in their personal style, which has a wholly creative DIY charm. To achieve that, Kurata sourced looks from well-known brands like Anna Sui, Rodarte, Thom Browne and Adidas, alongside up-and-comers, including fashion students from Savannah College of Art & Design. She also scoured thrift shops from L.A. to Atlanta for clothes to match the colors of the store sets.

“I had to do two closets, one for the character, and another that was all their disguises,” Kurata said of her approach. “It was important to separate that, and also to distinguish the styles of the boosters. For Corvette, because she’s an aspiring designer, I tried to find pieces that felt like she made them or had a creative twist. Maria is more edgy, more punk in vibe. And Sade being a single mom, I had her more streetwear infused.”

The group disguises, with all four boosters in coordinated outfits, are a joy.

“I had the most fun with those looks,” the designer said. “There were florals and animal prints and anime raver looks. We wanted to do an all polka-dotted theme but we ran out of time.”

Christie, the fashion mogul, is a contrast.

“Since she’s living in this slanted apartment, I wanted to reflect that world with things being asymmetrical and a bit off,” said Kurata of her deconstructed tailoring. “But I also thought it was fitting to have her devoid of color, when all of her designs were full of color. It’s a very fashion thing to do, to dress in black.”

Of course, there’s a runway show scene where hijinks ensue. I only wish it had gone on longer and featured more looks by the SCAD students. Still, there is so much eye candy throughout the film, I wanted to freeze every frame.

“In a time where they are trying to push AI on us, I hope this showcases human creativity and using real objects and just making it work. Boots even said it’s OK if it’s a little janky,” said Kurata, adding that the director gave her total freedom.

It helps that the filmmaker is a style aficionado.

“We even had a dress-like-Boots day,” Kurata said. “But you can’t compete with the legend himself.”

Cannes’ Best-Dressed

Cannes juror Ruth Negga and her stylist Karla Welch won Cannes this year, bringing awards season’s black-and-white color story into the now, surprising us with offbeat designer choices (Sacai at a Chopard gala!), retro and modern looks, and incredible hair styles every time.

I loved Negga’s range, from a playful, romantic black lace Saint Laurent peplum gown to the perfect Ami Paris tuxedo with a Gobstopper of Chopard statement ring.

(Ami Paris, the accessible luxury brand founded by French designer Alexandre Mattiussi in 2011, was a sponsor of Cannes’ Critics Week. It’s been in growth mode, priming the pump for U.S. expansion with lots of Hollywood red carpet dressing in recent months.)

Negga was also a great representative for Michael Rider’s Celine, choosing a chic all-white look at the jury photo call, and a white tank gown with retro round sunglasses for the Paper Tiger screening.

She dipped into vintage, too, with an Ossie Clark white dress and cape jacket from online vintage emporium Shrimpton Couture, whose founder Cherie Balch wrote on Instagram that Welch snatches up pieces here and there as they land in her shop. (Yes, she buys them.)

“I never know where or who they will land on, or when. Sometimes, it’s on herself and sometimes it’s months and months later on one of her fabulous clients,” Balch said. “Like this moment with Ruth. I have learned to just watch and wait for the magic that she creates.”

Hear, hear.

Chanel Finds Its Edge

Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel hit the Croisette for the first time, and not only did the brand have an edge, with several of its longtime ambassadors in competing films, it found its edge with younger, cooler looks.

To be fair, longtime Chanel ambassador Kristen Stewart has always worn the brand’s clothes with a certain eff-you insouciance. And that continued here when she paired a sheer whisper tweed two piece look fresh off the couture runway with Nike sneakers for the Full Phil photo call, and chose a wild-at-heart black-and-red sequin Chanel gown for the premiere.

Riley Keough put her own stamp on one of Blazy’s sheer takes on the iconic Chanel suit, while Sandra Hüller showcased his love of texture in a marvelously spiky feather bolero jacket. I also loved the sweet toughness to the black leather Chanel gown worn by Marion Cotillard, another longtime ambassador. Vive la difference.

John Travolta’s Dad Style

American treasure John Travolta served up what may have been the most talked-about style statement of the fest, debuting new headgear that agitated internet trolls who accused him of stealing Samuel L. Jackson’s look, among other inane things.

To me, it was dad cute to make the beret his red carpet signature, appearing alongside his daughter, Ella Bleu Travolta. When in France.

Gucci Takes Times Square

Saturday night in New York. An audacious runway set that turned all of Times Square into a giant Gucci ad. A star-packed cast including Tom Brady, Paris Hilton and Cindy Crawford. Demna pulled out all the stops for his Cruise 2027 Gucci show.

Anyone who has seen the film House of Gucci knows that New York played a key role in the rise of the fashion house in the 1980s, when private clients could use a special golden key to enter Gucci Galleria, the space hidden above the Fifth Avenue flagship.

A video montage on Times Square’s screens celebrated that legacy with a wink, combining found footage with advertisements for real and fake products including Gucci Underwear, Gucci Automobili, Gucci Businesswear, Gucci Gym, Gucci Pets and Gucci Life, reinforcing the idea of Gucci as an identity and a lifestyle.

On the asphalt runway, for his fourth collection, Demna continued to design into his cast of characters, re-envisioning them for the Big Apple. Gucci is an attitude and there was plenty of it here, with the leather daddy, the Upper East Side maven, the downtown It girl, the Wall Street banker and others coming to mind.

Low-slung and baggy denim, sharp tailoring, leather, fantasy furs and fur stoles, Flora patterns and flashes of skin continued to be key motifs, with the iconic Gucci Web stripe showing up as a bandeau top, and the horsebit as a stirrup on boots.

It was provocative, not to mention a spectacle – in Times Square – that doesn’t get much bigger. But clothes-wise, there wasn’t a lot that looked new to surprise and delight. Then again, maybe that’s Demna’s strategy ... a steady drumbeat of similar to get customers used to it, loving it, buying it – hopefully?

Luxury Fashion on Steroids

Shopping has never been more competitive. To score the latest runway stunner, more and more, you have to know somebody. Enter Catherine Bloom, L.A. VIP shopper extraordinaire, who jumped ship from Neiman Marcus to Nordstrom last year, taking on the newly created position of Director of Luxury Styling.

Now, she has her own appointment-only studio on Melrose Place, designed by the famed L.A. interior designer Brigette Romanek, no less, with multiple rooms featuring the most fabulous, straight-from-the-runway Dior shoes and bags; boho-chic color-saturated Chloé, Missoni, Gabriela Hearst and Etro; party-ready, sculptural, feather-flocked and beaded looks from Givenchy, The Attico, Dries Van Noten and Alaia; the hottest accessories by Schiaparelli, Bottega Veneta, Roger Vivier and more.

Bloom does her own shopping, stocking merchandise that’s separate from what Nordstrom buys more widely, and takes requests if you’re trying to find something.

“I go with my gut, something that fits my client’s lifestyle, something that they don’t have or something that they do have but it’s a little different. Something that I’m still thinking about the next morning,” Bloom said of her philosophy for shopping for Hollywood execs, stylists and celebrities.

The L.A. fashion community came out to inaugurate the new space and lend their support last week.

“It’s the perfect L.A. boudoir,” said designer Brian Wolk of Wolk Morais, noting that Bloom’s power is such that she regularly sells through their coat deliveries in just a day or two – in L.A.

Designers Bibhu Mohapatra, Ace Harper and Sarah Weinstock were browsing the racks across the four, style-packed Bloom rooms, as was Decades founder Cameron Silver, Carolina Herrera president Emilie Rubinfeld and Air Mail editor Rickie De Sole.

The consensus was that Bloom’s sense of color and curation sets a new bar for L.A. retail, not to mention her love of a diva piece, like the cult favorite Olivier Theyskens feather sweater she was wearing herself.

“She just knows everyone,” said Wolk. “It’s full of the best of the best but feels like a hometown store.”

Catherine Bloom for Nordstrom is open by appointment only Monday-Saturday from 10am-6pm. Clients can make appointments via email at CatherineBloomforNordstrom@nordstrom.com or at (323) 602-2201.

Dior’s New Golden Age

“No Dior, no Dietrich!” Marlene Dietrich famously told Alfred Hitchcock and her Warner Bros. bosses while negotiating for the couturier to design her costumes for the 1950 film Stage Fright.

She was one in a long line of Hollywood legends the fashion house has glamorized throughout its storied history with cinema, a legacy brought to life in creative director Jonathan Anderson’s resort collection runway show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Geffen Galleries on Wednesday night.

The W.M. Keck Plaza was transformed into a studio-worthy set with vintage cars, streetlights, rolling fog and a constellation of stars in the seats. Fresh off wearing custom Dior while headlining Coachella and a Dior dress made from Sabrina film strips to last week’s Met Gala, Sabrina Carpenter arrived wearing Look One from the runway show.

From Hollywood bombshells to rebels, Miley Cyrus kept it cool in Dior denim, a recurring theme in the collection and among guests, from fashion editors in jeans to LaKeith Stanfield in distressed denim cargo shorts and jacket.

Mikey Madison, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ejae, Miles Teller, Jeff Goldblum, Jisoo, Tracee Ellis Ross, Lauren Hutton and Greta Lee (with her cute parents in tow) were also dressed in Dior, helping sell the brand’s image to the world in the same way Hollywood stars have since the Golden Age.

Macaulay Culkin and Paul W. Downs were among those representing Anderson’s new New Look jacket, which has proven to be a style statement for men as well as women.

Al Pacino arrived with his earbuds still in, acting his usual curmudgeonly self. He was one of several memorable sightings in the industry insider-heavy crowd, which included Brian Grazer, Sue Kroll, Sean Baker, Danny Elfman and Ruth E. Carter, alongside multigenerational duos such as Leslie Mann and Maude Apatow; Kimora Lee Simmons and Aoki Lee Simmons; and stylist Elizabeth Saltzman and her son, Charlie Walker, who modeled in the show.

Anderson has his own love affair with Hollywood, having designed costumes for Luca Guadagnino’s films Challengers and Queer. He built anticipation for the resort collection by sending vintage-style Dior keychains with invitations and releasing a teaser video starring Irish actress Alison Oliver behind the wheel of a car in a scene reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Oliver’s breakout performance as Isabella Linton in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights earlier this year has her star on the rise, and, like generations before her, Dior is right there alongside her.

Dior Resort 2027: Hollywood Glam Slam

Presented at magic hour, with the sun setting behind the palm trees and moody shadows cast across the walls of the museum plaza, Jonathan Anderson’s first resort collection for Dior was a love letter to Hollywood that managed to avoid the usual clichés even as it paid homage to cinematic history.

Anderson used Christian Dior’s costumes for Marlene Dietrich in the 1950 film Stage Fright as a starting point. Her nipped-waist suiting, flower-bedecked garden-party dresses, feathers and furs were present in spirit, but translated into something more modern.

Similarly, many of the more exaggerated shapes Anderson has explored in recent collections, including his first haute couture, were distilled with wearability in mind while still retaining a stylish tactility.

The collection opened with a trio of gorgeous chiffon drop-waist dresses decorated with rosettes, introducing florals as a theme that threaded through everything from a gown blanketed in California poppies to whimsical scarves that resembled veritable bouquets.

Bias cut dresses and long satin sarong skirts were sumptuously draped, sprouting petals, vines, fringe and embroidery, while faux fur robe coats and feathered slipper shoes conjured a starlet’s boudoir.

Dior’s signature sharp suiting was given a new California ease, so that soft tweed blazers featured fraying edges, Bar jackets were more louche and a houndstooth chiffon duster was offered as a covetable new topper.

Building on his Fall 2026 collection shown in March, Anderson offered plenty of denim, ranging from fuzzy textured styles to ripped and crystal-embroidered versions. Fun extras included single dangling crystal mesh earrings and whimsical bird- and bug-shaped minaudières.

Women have been buying and borrowing from Anderson’s Dior men’s collections, and vice versa, making it feel natural to have them co-mingling on the runway. Knit capes evoked Sombr’s glam rock style, flannel coats featured shadows echoing film noir-style Venetian blinds and casual shirting with typography created in collaboration with L.A. artist Edward Ruscha added to the collection’s sense of place.

After Anderson took his bow, guests filed upstairs to enjoy the Geffen Galleries, taking in views over traffic-buzzing Wilshire Boulevard and a brand-new Dior billboard featuring Alison Oliver. It was a scene Ruscha could have created himself.

Cannes for Fashion Watchers

There may not be any major Hollywood blockbusters premiering at Cannes this year, but the kickoff of international awards season still has plenty of stars and major red-carpet moments in store.

Some of what will be worn is dictated by brand ambassador relationships, and in that area, Chanel is poised to score big during the festival. But there are still plenty of opportunities for style surprises, which began Tuesday at the opening-day jury photocall, with Demi Moore in a delightfully dotty custom Jacquemus sculptural bustier dress embroidered with feather confetti, individually dyed, bent and curved by hand. Let the fashion wonder begin.

Here’s what fashion watchers should look out for.

The Jury

As much as I would love to see jury members embrace fashions by designers from their respective countries when selecting the Palme d’Or — with Demi Moore in U.S. designer Thom Browne, Chloé Zhao in Chinese designer Huishan Zhang, and Ruth Negga in Irish designer Róisín Pierce in a dream scenario — that was not the case, at least in the early hours of the festival.

Moore did come out strong, following her daytime Jacquemus photocall look with a custom Jacquemus sequin peplum gown for the opening ceremony, and then a buoyant Gucci draped lilac chiffon gown for the premiere of La Vie D’une Femme. (Gucci was a given for at least one, if not more, Cannes carpets, since Moore has a high-profile partnership with the brand, having appeared in Demna’s 2025 Gucci short film and attended the Fall 2026 show in Milan.)

Zhao shook things up at the jury photocall in a sexy Hermès Spring 2026 navy blue slit-front top and skirt before continuing her Gabriela Hearst 2025–26 awards-season streak, wearing a charming black pointelle lace gown from the American designer’s Fall 2026 collection for the opening ceremony.

Meanwhile, Negga looked casually cool in an elegant all-white Fall 2026 look by Michael Rider for Celine during the photocall, then nodded to her Irish roots at the opening ceremony in a custom green fringed Dior gown by Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson. Extra points for the killer sunglasses seen so far on the Croisette.

The International Darlings

Both leads in buzzy competition films, Sandra Hüller (Fatherland) and Renate Reinsve (Fjord), are fashion insider favorites because of their intellectual approach to style. Hüller was the face of a Phoebe Philo campaign in 2024, opened the Spring 2026 Miu Miu show last year in a workwear apron and wore a black Schiaparelli hourglass gown with an exaggerated off-the-shoulder neckline to the Oscars. More recently, she wore Prada to the Project Hail Mary premiere in New York, suggesting a possible Cannes red carpet moment for her as well.

Reinsve is a Louis Vuitton ambassador and was among the Oscars’ best-dressed in a striking, minimalist, asymmetrically draped red gown, showcasing her modern approach to fashion.

Let the games begin.

The Brand Ambassadors

Already riding high on critical acclaim for creative director Matthieu Blazy’s first three collections, Chanel is poised to make an outsize impact at Cannes, with three of its ambassadors — Riley Keough (Butterfly Jam), Marion Cotillard (Karma) and Kristen Stewart (Full Phil) — expected to wear the brand for red carpet appearances.

Louis Vuitton is also set for major moments, with ambassadors Reinsve, Alicia Vikander (Hope) and Léa Seydoux (Gentle Monster) expected to feature prominently on the red carpet.

Prada ambassador Scarlett Johansson (Paper Tiger) and Saint Laurent ambassador Rami Malek (The Man I Love) are also ones to watch.

The Newbie

I Love LA star Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut Club Kid follows a washed-up party promoter who is forced to turn his life around when an unexpected visitor arrives. It is one of the festival’s most hotly anticipated films. Like his character on the Rachel Sennott-led show, Firstman has a quirky personal style rooted in indie fashion labels, including Ludovic de Saint Sernin and Advisry, which he wore to the recent Fashion Trust U.S. Awards in L.A. Naturally, anticipation is high for what he will wear next. His Club Kid co-star Cara Delevingne is also expected to dazzle on the Cannes carpet.

The Brand Activations

L.A. wellness leader Alo Yoga is hosting a sanctuary-style retail space and multi-day takeover of the Hotel Martinez pier, in keeping with the brand’s new business strategy of pushing further into the luxury market.

Star stylist Law Roach is partnering with longtime Cannes sponsor Magnum Ice Cream, acting as “Taste Architect” to bring the new Magnum La Pistache and Magnum La Pêche to the beachfront activation.

Chopard continues its run of crafting the Palme d’Or and bedazzling guests as an official Cannes partner, while the festival wraps with the premier fashion-focused charity event, the amfAR gala on May 21 at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc.

The Must-See Fashion Film

Fashion’s fixation on archival glamour should find a compelling reflection in Ron Howard’s documentary on Richard Avedon. The director—whose previous subjects have ranged from the Beatles to Luciano Pavarotti—now turns his attention to the legendary photographer whose vision helped define modern fashion imagery across six decades at Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and The New Yorker.

For fashion audiences descending on the Croisette, Avedon will contextualize the photographer’s enduring influence, drawing on his personal archives, behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with collaborators. Known for bringing movement, emotion and psychological intensity to his work, Avedon transformed static portraiture into something cinematic and alive, producing such memorable images as Dovima With Elephants (1955) and Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent (1981).

Gehry at Gagosian

Fish were a recurring motif in Frank Gehry’s work, influencing not only his sculptures but his architecture, including the silvery, undulating shape of Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown L.A.

On May 14, Gagosian Beverly Hills will open the first exhibition of Gehry’s works since his death in 2025, focusing on the animal forms that animated his art.

Organized in collaboration with Gehry’s family and designed by his studio, the show demonstrates how he achieved fluidity of movement even while using industrial materials.

Among the highlights are Bear with Us (2014), a life-size sculpture rendered in gleaming faceted steel that looks impossibly soft, evoking crumpled foil despite its monumental weight. The work later inspired a Louis Vuitton clutch designed by Gehry in 2023, underscoring his fluidity between art and commercial design throughout his career.

Untitled (Black Crocodile New York) (2023), made from Formica, silicone and LED lights, transforms industrial materials into something tactile and whimsical, while A Pair of Snake Lamps (1989) combines gouache-painted papier-mâché with illumination, blurring the line between sculpture and functional object.

Central are Gehry’s celebrated fish sculptures, including Fish on Fire (2023), the final fish he created before his death. For Gehry, the fish was a “perfect form,” a motif that continues to be echoed in the sweeping curves and metallic surfaces of the soon-to-open Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

The exhibition also includes ten works on paper in ink, watercolor and acrylic, where fish emerge through energetic black lines and bursts of color. Altogether, the show reveals a creative language rooted in movement, material experimentation and an enduring fascination with organic form.

Frank Gehry, May 24-June 27, Gagosian, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills. Opening reception May 14, 6 to 8 p.m.

The Met Gala’s Biggest Trend Was Money

The arts have always been about money. In fact, it’s doubtful we’d have museums at all if it weren’t for tycoons — oil (J. Paul Getty Museum); railroad (Metropolitan Museum of Art); luxury retail (Fondation Louis Vuitton); entertainment (Geffen Galleries at LACMA) — and on and on. And sad as it is, I sincerely doubt any of these patrons of the arts made their money while always upholding fair labor practices and social progressiveness.

And yet, this year’s Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art became a flashpoint for a heated conversation about our current-day tycoons, the very unfashionable tech titans who footed the bill for the night.

With Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who skipped the red carpet) and Lauren Sánchez Bezos serving as honorary chairs and lead sponsors, donating $10 million, the “Tech Gala,” as it has been dubbed, became a symbol of wealth inequality. The association of fashion’s biggest night with Amazon’s sketchy labor practices and Bezos’ Trumpy political donations became a hot-button issue in recent weeks, prompting comparisons of the gala to The Hunger Games, counterprogramming by labor activists and Zohran Mamdani, and the arrest of an Amazon protester who briefly broke through the barricades on Monday night.

The most, and perhaps only, political fashion statement on the Met Gala red carpet, however, was Sarah Paulson’s fraying smoke-gray debutante gown, which she wore with a dollar-bill mask over her eyes, a literal comment on being blinded by money, designed by Matières Fécales, the avant-garde Paris fashion label that took aim at the One Percent in its Fall 2026 collection.

Now that dress, mind you, was from a haute couture collection, so it’s really an inside joke. Because who’s going to wear couture other than the One Percent?

The night also brought an astounding display of wealth, from Lauren Sánchez Bezos’ 30-carat diamond engagement ring to the Queen of Kalahari, a $50 million Chopard diamond necklace worn by co-chair Beyoncé, who is herself a billionaire. The biggest mystery was how these women, and others, could have so much money and still look so mediocre.

But back to the controversy. Let’s not forget that the tension between art and the economic resources required from patrons and corporate sponsors for it to be made and seen has always existed, from the Renaissance-funding Medicis to the Gilded Age robber barons to the oligarchs of today. And corporate sponsors, which for the Met Gala included the Bezoses, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, Spotify, Instagram and Saint Laurent, are a necessary evil for the survival of media — and fashion — in 2026. One only has to watch The Devil Wears Prada 2 to know that.

What was the Met supposed to do? Turn down their money? Not create a better gallery space for the country’s finest historical fashion collection? At least the tech titans finally stepped up and spent money on something enriching to humanity rather than tearing it apart.

Although some stars stayed away, the event opening the new exhibition Costume Art raised a record $42 million for the museum’s Costume Institute. It attracted celebrities from every corner of culture interpreting the “Fashion Is Art” dress code, from Madonna in a Philip Treacy shipwreck headdress and ghostly Saint Laurent gown, with a retinue of helpers carrying her train referencing Leonora Carrington’s 1945 painting The Temptation of St. Anthony, to Olympic skier Eileen Gu in an Iris van Herpen dress performing performance art by blowing its own bubbles, to artist Amy Sherald in a striking polka-dot Thom Browne look inspired by the one in her own 2014 painting, Miss Everything.

It’s too bad the Vogue livestream and E! Entertainment television coverage were both so abysmal. (If the Met Gala is meant to be taken seriously, its live coverage should really be better.) Very few of the talking heads or celebrities seemed to have done enough homework to speak intelligently about their looks and inspirations.

When it came to the dress code, interpretations were mixed. Most looks veered more fashion than costume, with a few exceptions. Heidi Klum’s kooky foam-and-fiberglass look, mimicking the Met’s marble statue The Veiled Vestal (1847) by Italian artist Raffaelle Monti, could just as easily have been worn at her annual Halloween party. However, kudos to her not only for doing her homework and being able to explain the look on the livestream, but also for actually wandering the Met itself looking for inspiration.

The dressed body in all shapes and sizes as the foundation of much of art history is one of the exhibition’s overriding themes. But on the red carpet, other than Bad Bunny sporting prosthetics to transform himself into “Old Bunny,” the dressed body was mostly surgically enhanced, smoothed, and lifted to ageless perfection. No wonder Mounjaro-maker Eli Lilly bought in as a Vogue livestream sponsor.

Designers, Artists and Body Mods

In addition to tech titans, fashion houses bought tables and dressed their famous guests, often with fine art and artists in mind. Here are some of my highlights.

The Insider Edge

Of all the designers, Thom Browne may have won the night. He is particularly well positioned to excel with Met Gala looks because he has an in: his partner is Costume Institute head curator Andrew Bolton. But his dramatic silhouettes, lavish embellishments, and sense of play worked especially well this year, including on Chase Infiniti’s spectacular embroidered trompe-l’œil dress inspired by the Greek statue Venus de Milo.

Fully embroidered using over 1.5 million stacked sequins, it had tiered silk fringes in more than 600 different colors, layered to mimic brushstrokes. Fashion as art, for sure. Thom Browne managed to dress his guests, Dwayne Johnson, Olivia Wilde, Finn Wolfhard, Marcello Hernández, Bill Skarsgård, Lindsey Vonn, Adut Akech, Skepta and KUN, with just as much thoughtfulness and attention to detail.

Self-Referential

Anthony Vaccarello, creative director of Saint Laurent, was a co-chair of the gala, and the brand’s decades-long history of collections paying homage to artists — Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Claude Lalanne, Henri Matisse and others — made it a natural choice for dressing guests.

One of the best was Hailey Bieber, who also did her homework, citing metalworker Lalanne, who inspired her 24-karat gold corset, and Saint Laurent’s affinity for blue as references in her strong look.

Classic Studies

Dior leaned into the classics to gorgeous effect, with Naomi Watts a veritable still life in a black satin dress with an outward-projecting skirt embroidered with fabric flowers, and Sabrina Carpenter wrapped in Sabrina film strips in a delightful nod to her name and the movie.

For his first Met carpet, Matthieu Blazy’s natural artistry and love of craft made Chanel shine, from Nicole Kidman’s glossy red, feathery gown to Gracie Abrams’ gilded, collage-inspired look based on Gustav Klimt’s work.

Multidisciplinary Art Deco-era artist Erté and his flair for theatricality were apropos inspirations for Alessandro Michele at Valentino, who dressed Tyla like an exquisite peacock, drawing on one of his favorite motifs.

Goddess Pose

Using one of the most enduring motifs in art history as his spark, Zac Posen transformed Kendall Jenner into the goddess Nike, inspired by the famed Hellenistic sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace, wearing a twisted jersey gown by Gap Studio.

Ciara was rock ’n’ roll regal as a modern-day Queen Nefertiti in a gold gown by Greek designer Celia Kritharioti, with a dramatic neckpiece and crown. The Egyptian queen is depicted in several artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Body as canvas

Emma Chamberlain collaborated with Miguel Castro Freitas, creative director of Mugler, and artist Anna Deller-Yee to hand-paint her dress, one of the best of the night, which deserves a place in a museum exhibition itself.

I also loved Rachel Sennott in a custom Marc Jacobs look inspired by the geometric, color-blocked and dot-covered artworks of conceptual artist John Baldessari. The comedian added a bit of performance to her red carpet turn, blowing a bubble with her gum to add another dot to the red carpet canvas.

Kim Kardashian tapped British pop artist Allen Jones for her orange fiberglass body plate. Jones and Kardashian seem like a good match; he is known for his fetishistic representations of the female form, including a 1969 furniture series that sparked debate about female objectification. Enough said.

The Male Form

Although the men’s looks weren’t the strongest, Connor Storrie was Adonis-like in a Saint Laurent halter top with a train and a stunner of a Tiffany & Co. brooch, while Colman Domingo’s harlequin look was equal parts Valentino and Picasso.

Breakout Performance

London-based couturier Robert Wun may not have been a household name before, but after this Met Gala, he should be on his way. The independent designer created eight jaw-dropping avant-garde looks, including Naomi Osaka’s dramatic coat dress sliced open with red feathers evoking exsanguination. The piece featured 659,000 stitches of embroidery and thousands of faceted Swarovski crystals in four shades of red, totaling over 3,280 hours of handwork, “illustrating the human anatomy, needle by needle, crystal by crystal.”

Jewels Unboxed

At the 2026 Met Gala, jewelry was as theatrical as everything else, with stars using it to amplify their looks, sometimes as part of their clothing.

Emily Blunt accented her black Ashi Studio gown with ropes of Mikimoto pearls, while Sabrina Carpenter attached Chopard diamonds to her Dior dress, worn with a glittering headpiece with “Sabrina” written on its center stone.

Following the awards season trend, statement necklaces continued to dominate, with Rosé’s winged Tiffany & Co. choker echoing the bird motif on her Saint Laurent dress, and Jisoo accessorizing her garden-inspired Dior look with a Cartier choker from 1905 sewn onto pink velvet.

Others made avant-garde statements. Accenting her whirling metal Margiela couture gown with copious diamonds from Briony Raymond, Dyne and Fred Leighton, Rihanna and hairstylist Yusef Williams also tasked jeweler Jennifer Behr with creating silver hair coils for a crown. Puerto Rican singer Rauw Alejandro embraced the face jewelry trend with a silver ear cover and nose clip by Yaaqee Studio.

A Fragrance With Musical Notes

Argentinian luxury fragrance house Fueguia 1833 marked the opening of its new South Coast Plaza boutique this week with a performance by Oscar-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla and the launch of Ronroco, a fragrance inspired by the traditional 10-string Andean instrument that is a signature element of his music.

Santaolalla, an Andean folk music preservationist, Hollywood composer and pivotal figure in L.A.’s Latin rock music scene, approached Fueguia founder Julian Bedel about collaborating, and the resulting scent translates the ronroco’s warm woods and resonant character into an olfactory composition built around copal, Oud Chaco and Salvia del Monte.

“The cedar and spruce embody the warmth of its wooden body, while the resins connect the earthly and divine, echoing the sacred vibrations of each note,” said Gustavo Santaolalla, who won Academy Awards for Best Original Score for Brokeback Mountain and Babel and composed the score for HBO’s The Last of Us.

After studying art and music, Bedel launched his fragrance brand in Buenos Aires in 2010, developing small-batch scents with rare botanicals and rooting the fragrances in South American culture. (He worked with Uruguayan-American fashion designer Gabriela Hearst to develop her fragrances.)

When Santaolalla approached him, Bedel was already working on a project analyzing and replicating the scent of famed Stradivarius violins, which will culminate in a $30,000 fragrance launching later this year. “There’s a scientific element to the smell of instruments. Besides being beautifully built, they carry a certain mojo. The smell triggers something in your brain that makes you play better. That’s why there’s this passion for vintage instruments,” explained Bedel, who plays guitar himself.

He applied the same science to distill the essence of the ronroco, creating a creamy, resinous wood perfume with aromatic herbs.

Fueguia releases about four to five fragrances a year and has 16 stores worldwide, with another Southern California location in the works on Melrose Place in L.A.

Fueguia 1833, 3333 Bristol St Suite 1603, Costa Mesa.

The Devil Has Heart

In 2026, the devil no longer wears Prada. The devil wears Allbirds, or some other fashion-techy brand. Because in The Devil Wears Prada 2, opening Friday, it’s not Miranda Priestly but the masters of the online universe who are the villains.

The long-awaited sequel starring Meryl Streep as the all-powerful Runway editor and Anne Hathaway as her former assistant, has a lot of heart. A lot. But it’s not exactly a comedy, at least not for those living through the current media apocalypse and tech world domination.

Twenty years later, the new film reflects a generational change. Fashion is no longer the bitchy, entitled clique it once was. Internet culture is. And it is the online backlash to a Runway story about a Shein-like fast-fashion company, and the failure of that story to acknowledge labor abuses, that lands the magazine in hot water. Just hours after being laid off from her newspaper job, Andy Sachs (Hathaway), now a respected journalist, is called to the rescue as the new features editor.

The plot revolves around her effort to restore Runway’s journalistic integrity while at the same time driving almighty web traffic with content people want to read while they go to the bathroom (welcome to it), and Miranda’s effort to save Runway from being sold to Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), a Jeff Bezos-like character.

What Andy encounters when she returns to the top of the glossy media kingdom is very different than before: Fashion is now self-aware and inclusive, and office bullying is out of style. Which, it has to be said, makes for fewer funny tirades and zingers than the first film, though it is hilarious watching Miranda struggle to hang up her coat and stumble over the words “body positivity.”

In the new world, it’s no longer creatives who call the shots, not in media or Hollywood. It’s budgets and advertisers. To that end, I was worried the film was going to have so many brand integrations it would feel like a giant ad buy. (For that, you can check out the clever print edition of Runway magazine published as a promo for the film, if you can get your hands on one.)

Dior, Dolce & Gabbana and Tiffany & Co., all make sizable appearances in the film and play a part in the story. Valentino and Coach are name-checked. There are cameos by Marc Jacobs and Donatella Versace. But overall, names and logos don’t hit you over the head the way you might expect from a much-anticipated fashion film follow-up.

Molly Rogers’ stellar costumes reflect fashion’s great casualization, with Andy embodying a stylish bohemian writer in chic denim and menswear vests, carrying a beat-up Coach briefcase for office attire, and wearing a colorful Gabriela Hearst dress and Toteme pajama set for a Hamptons jaunt. Miranda herself can even be seen wearing, gasp, sneakers in one scene.

Don’t fear, though, she also rocks plenty of diva looks, including a scene-stealing tasseled Dries Van Noten jacket, a red Balenciaga ball gown and an Armani Privé crystal-studded coat from Giorgio Armani’s final collection. Emily Blunt also has some fun fashion moments in Dior.

There’s a nod to Gen Z’s love (and reality) of resale, with a thrifted Margiela look mentioned prominently by Miranda’s current first assistant. The cerulean blue sweater is also back (kind of), and this time Andy is owning it.

Milan, not Paris Fashion Week, takes center stage. And in a case of life imitating art, after it was in L.A. at Paramount Studios last year, the next Vogue World fashion show extravaganza will take place in Milan in September and will likely look somewhat similar to the Milan gala scene from the film.

The lead-up to the release has featured several cross-promotional moments, with Anna Wintour and Anne Hathaway taking the stage at the Oscars together and Wintour posing with Meryl Streep for the May cover of Vogue. That, too, is telling of the state of media: that the powerful editor now needs the film that skewered her more than ever for cultural relevancy and survival—and that she is willing to make fun of herself to an extent.

Big tech may be the enemy of fashion in the film, but it is also the benefactor, as in real life. With the Bezos comparison to the Benji Barnes character, people will be paying even closer attention at the Met Gala Monday as Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos co-host alongside Wintour, doing nothing to dispel the persistent rumors that they could be looking to buy Vogue parent company Condé Nast.

The event marks the opening of an enormous new fashion gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with pride of place near the grand entrance instead of in the basement where it has long languished, a huge achievement for Wintour. Millions of dollars will be raised, and the unparalleled celebrity-fashion parade will mean page views shoot up not only for Vogue but for nearly every other fashion publication on the planet covering the event. The Devil Wears Prada 2 may just help keep them there for a little longer.

Chanel Resort Collection Dazzles

The Chanel Cruise 2026–27 collection set sail in Biarritz on Tuesday, with Nicole Kidman and Marion Cotillard wearing little black dresses to mark the 100th anniversary of Coco Chanel’s trailblazing style, and A$AP Rocky accessorizing his pink quilted bag with matching pink Chanel baby shoes made for his newest child, Rocki Irish Mayers.

Creative director Matthieu Blazy delivered another dynamite runway show, this one in a location paying homage to the roots of the couture house, which Chanel established in the seaside hotspot of Biarritz in 1915 following her success as a milliner in Paris, Deauville and Monte Carlo.

Traditional (and adorable) 1920s-era bathing caps, Basque stripes, novelty beach scene knits and bags, scarfy silk separates, and jackets galore — from workwear to fishing net-covered to ladylike with starfish embroideries — were standout looks, in addition to the classic LBDs (little black dresses) and black-and-white swim and sportswear that were revolutionary for women in Coco Chanel’s time.

Blazy continued his love affair with texture, showing full skirts exploding with raffia fringe and otherworldly surface embellishments, like orange paillettes covering a dress that resembled a coral reef.

There were accessories upon accessories, bags upon bags, spectator heels and punch-colored sandals and then the most minimalist of shoes—heel caps—designed to go (almost) barefoot in the sand. Overall, the continuation of the coral and seashell motifs already hitting for spring guarantees that trend will have a long runway.

Let’s hope more Chanel actually lands in stores and stays there going forward. I was in Paris last week and the boutiques are cleaned out of Blazy accessories. The frenzy is real, but so is the frustration for shoppers.

Beverly Hills’ New Boutique for the Best Dressed

Former Saks VIC personal shopper Tony Ferreira, whose clients include Paris Hilton, Mariah Carey, Jennifer Tilly and many more best-dressed guests, has struck out on his own, opening The Swan House on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills.

Ferreira has spent 30 years as a personal shopper crisscrossing the globe to buy the best of the biggest luxury brands for his 500 regular clients and making millions of dollars for Saks, which is currently winding its way through bankruptcy. But at Swan House, he is approaching retail differently, offering exclusive, hard-to-find and up-and-coming fashion labels with a special focus on gowns for those who buy and don’t borrow in a town that runs on red carpets.

“A lot of department stores are afraid of anything too expensive or exclusive,” he said during a tour of the store. “But if someone walks in and sees a beautiful dress and there’s only one, they buy it because they are afraid it’s going to get sold. So that’s what I’m trying to do—elevated, curated pieces.”

The 2,000-square-foot salon-like space named after Truman Capote’s novel The Swans of Fifth Avenue is a fashion fantasyland under a giant chandelier, with eveningwear and garden party dresses with bold color and embellishment by familiar (but not so familiar) names like Elie Saab, Erdem, George Hobeika, Tony Ward, Pamella Rolland, Naeem Khan, Huishan Zhang, Roberto Cavalli, Viktor & Rolf, Pierre Cardin and more.

There are also Ferreira’s new discoveries, including a lavishly beaded cape by London up-and-coming designer Nicholas Oakwell, gravity-defying sculptural dresses by young Vietnamese couturier Phan Huy, unexpected feminine tailored looks by Paris-based bridal wear designer Celestina Agostino and breezy sundresses by L.A.-based designer Aliona Kononova.

To complete the look, The Swan House features fine jewelry by Martin Katz, David Webb, Loree Rodkin and more, bags by Moreau Paris, hats by Gladys Tamez and evening shoes by Gedebe. Prices range from about $1,100 to $201,000.

Upstairs, in the VIP area, Ferreira will continue his independent personal shopping business, bringing in pieces from Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda couture collection, for example. He also plans to use the store for brand events for his loyal clientele. The courtyard, where Italian restaurant Oltremare will soon open, may soon host a fashion show, he hinted.

Luxury slowdown? “I’m not seeing it,” Ferreira said, reiterating his approach. “I’m not letting anyone borrow clothes—the stylists have to buy it—and I’m only buying a couple of each style so no one sees themselves.”

The Swan House, 350 N Canon Dr, Beverly Hills, 310-795-1997.

Fashion Trust U.S. and Mother Denim Celebrate L.A. Creativity and Craft

Fresh off its star-studded awards ceremony awarding $600,000 in grant money to emerging designers, Fashion Trust U.S. co-hosted a rooftop cocktail party Tuesday night at Petit Ermitage with one of L.A.’s fashion vanguards, everyone’s favorite denim-and-more brand, Mother.

With denim the dress code du jour (Mother co-founder Lela Becker wore hers with a ginormous Celine chubby fur jacket, natch), a stylish crowd including Ava Phillippe, Abigail Spencer, Langley Fox and Monet Mazur mingled over spicy margs with designers and brand founders.

Spotted under the twinkle lights? Chriselle Lim, Charles Harbison, Loree Rodkin, Kadi Lee, Christy Cham, Peter Dundas, Jacquie Aiche, Camilla Gabrieli and other members of the L.A. fashion community for which Fashion Trust U.S. has become a power center.

“We at Mother have been manufacturing here in L.A. for the last 16 years with the same artisans and craftsmen we’ve known for 25 years,” Mother co-founder Tim Kaeding said in a toast to the city’s emerging designers and artisans. “As other brands move out of the country...we’ve decided to stay, and we bought a manufacturing spot here so we can continue to invest in the talent and infrastructure that make this city so special.”

Joining him, Fashion Trust U.S. founder Tania Fares added, “The brand has something really special. As Tim says, everything is rooted locally. That commitment to craft and community is really inspiring.”

LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries Are Made for Meandering

Finally! LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries have opened their doors, and as someone who lives in the neighborhood, I’m elated.

The stunning Peter Zumthor-designed building, which extends across Wilshire Boulevard, took nearly six years and $724 million to complete. Construction workers were still finishing up during last week’s media preview, even pausing to take souvenir photos for themselves, which was cute.

The new W.M. Keck Plaza on the north side of the building is an incredible public space, with views of the Japanese Pavilion and Alexander Calder’s Three Quintains (Hello Girls) mobile. It’s also where an Erewhon will soon open. For those complaining about the perceived inaccessibility of the bougie L.A. café—have you ever been to a museum? The food is never cheap. Bringing in Erewhon was a smart move for LACMA because it’s a tourist magnet that will draw attention on its own. And now there are even collectible LACMA–Erewhon juice bottles.

Walking up the staircase and into the 100,000-square-foot building, where the galleries are organized to challenge longstanding hierarchies of art, I was a bit disoriented at first. Where to start? What order to go in? There are no right answers, which is the point. It’s a museum experience for shorter attention spans, perhaps, but also one that encourages connectivity and meandering.

The sight lines and light create some incredible vistas, which are an L.A. art form of their own.

Plus, where else but L.A. would you see a gallery devoted to “Car Culture,” with a 1961 Studebaker alongside Ed Ruscha’s Parking Lots, Dennis Hopper’s Double Standard and Mexican artist Carlos Almaraz’s Crash in Phthalo Green, a painting depicting a high-speed car crash? Or a 1960 Greg Noll surfboard sharing space with Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen chairs, a Craig Kauffman wall relief and an Issey Miyake molded bodice, all in the service of celebrating plastic in art post–World War II?

In the Earth and Water section, I loved the table of ceramic water vessels from diverse cultures and time periods, from ancient to contemporary. The display spoke to a shared human experience across time and place, but on a more basic level, it also appealed to me aesthetically. It reminded me of how people collect and arrange pieces in their homes, without regard for where or when something came from.

Textiles play a more prominent role in the gallery due to the new curatorial direction’s thematic approach, which is loosely organized around the world’s oceans and how they have fostered the exchange of ideas, materials and aesthetics across time and place.

“There were times when cloth was way more important than painting … and I want to remind people that the hierarchies of value are always changing,” LACMA director Michael Govan told me when I was reporting a Vogue Business story about the museum last year. “Part of that was to elevate the fashion and costume collections from their tiny little corner and to make commitments to exhibitions, but more importantly, to collection building in a diverse way.”

The curation invites viewers to draw their own connections and be surprised, perhaps, by the provenance of objects. One of the most vibrant galleries is Textile Conversations: Africa and Black America, bringing together barkcloths painted by Mbuti women and geometrically designed textiles by Kuba women, both from Congo, juxtaposed with bold 20th-century quilts from the African American diaspora.

The curators do not shy away from themes of conquest, empire, colonization and the economy of slavery. One particularly poignant pairing appears in the Transatlantic Exchange and Its Legacies gallery: an 1840 Lady of the Lake pieced cotton quilt from Virginia—then the largest market for selling enslaved people—displayed alongside L.A. artist Betye Saar’s I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break, a sculptural tableau featuring a vintage ironing board, bedsheet, wooden clothespins and rope, referencing the painful legacy of forced labor.

There is so much to see and digest. I roamed around for two hours, and my phone died because I took so many photos. I can’t wait to go back.

LACMA David Geffen Galleries, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, lacma.org. Member previews through May 3, then open to the public.

Dior Debuts Cerulean Blue Lipgloss Just in Time for The Devil Wears Prada 2

It’s kind of an open secret that Dior plays a role in The Devil Wears Prada 2. How big that role is remains to be seen, and how many other brands are embedded in the film is unclear—but by all accounts, it’s a lot. Judging from what we saw at fashion week during filming and what’s emerging now as the red carpet campaign ramps up, Dolce & Gabbana and Valentino appear to be part of the mix as well.

The new Dioriviera Summer beauty collection that just dropped is not an official collaboration (though plenty are in the pipeline—with Re/Done, Walmart, Grey Goose, L’Oréal and others lining up). But it is well timed to the film’s May 1 release, with its new Dior Lip Addict Maximizer gloss in “Cerulean” blue.

Cerulean blue, for those who have been living under a rock and haven’t seen the original film, is at the heart of Miranda Priestly’s coolly eviscerating explanation to Andrea “Andy” Sachs about the gravity of the fashion industry.

The gloss doesn’t go on blue, alas, but clear. It could still start a trend, however. There’s also an azur blue nail polish and an indigo blue shade in the new Diorshow eyeshadow set, all of which can be used to create “summer fresh blue” and “sunkissed coral” looks alongside the array of new bronzing products.

In addition to coming to movie screens, Dior is coming to Los Angeles on May 13 for its Cruise 2027 runway show, which will be held at ... LACMA. Full circle.

Tiffany’s Garden of Delights

Teyana Taylor, Connor Storrie, Naomi Watts, Amanda Seyfried, Gabrielle Union, Dwyane Wade, Rosé, Camille Cottin, Diane Kruger and many more brought the bling to the Park Avenue Armory in New York City last week to celebrate the launch of Tiffany & Co.’s Blue Book 2026: Hidden Garden collection.

Conceived by Nathalie Verdeille alongside the Tiffany Design Studio, this year’s lineup of priceless gems draws on the legacy of Jean Schlumberger, turning flora and fauna into fantastical statements, including statement necklaces that were a standout look on the 2025–26 awards season red carpets and are expected to continue through Cannes next month.

Worn by Greta Lee at the event, Tiffany & Co.’s Bird on a Rock necklace—reimagining Schlumberger’s iconic motif—features two avian creatures perched atop aquamarines, encircled by custom-cut chrysoprase beads. Equally arresting is the Monarch necklace, featuring a hidden butterfly, where twisting vines and sculpted foliage are reimagined in handcrafted platinum, 18k yellow gold and pavé diamond elements.

It could be the perfect piece for Vicky Krieps to wear to the Cannes premiere of Andy Garcia’s contemporary film noir Diamond.

Armani Archivio Chapter Two

With Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Isabel Marant, Chloé, Bottega Veneta, Moncler, Kelly Wearstler for H&M and many more descending on Milan Design Week, the furniture fair has become a mini fashion week, with brands using the opportunity to launch collections in both the home and apparel spaces.

One of those is the second chapter of Armani/Archivio, the archival project that made its debut on the red carpet at the 2025 Academy Museum Gala in L.A. This iteration debuted at the Milan Giorgio Armani boutique, featuring 13 men’s and women’s looks from collections spanning 1979 to 1994, reproduced and made available for purchase. The pieces are anchored by the jacket—Armani’s most enduring icon.

The accompanying campaign, shot and styled by L.A.-based photographer, filmmaker and ERL designer Eli Russell Linnetz, presents the 13 archival looks with the sartorial ease that the late fashion maestro intended, translated for the present.

“Mr. Armani is one of the greatest artists of our time. He changed the way we live our lives every day and what we aspire to become, and his legacy is something the rest of us are still learning from,” Linnetz said. “These Archivio pieces feel as alive today as the day they were made because he designed his work to be eternally impactful—deceivingly simple on the hanger, the clothes transform on the body, like magic. As a designer, to handle these garments and understand how they were made has been both a great education and a gift, and to photograph them, as part of the long lineage of photographers who have been part of the Armani universe, was a privilege I will carry with me for a very long time.”

The looks are available at Armani.com, in select Giorgio Armani boutiques and at Apropos Berlin, Just One Eye in Los Angeles and Mytheresa. The story behind each look can be discovered at archivio.armani.com, where collections from the past 50 years are being documented and organized for inspiration—and posterity.

LVMH Joins Coachella Brand Bonanza

It’s festival—and festival fashion—season, which brings influential looks onstage and off.

At Coachella weekend one, Sabrina Carpenter turned the main stage into Sabrinawood with a performance that was both cinematic—and chock-full of brand placements.

I knew we were in for a new level of onstage branding when the camera panned to Carpenter’s stack of Louis Vuitton logo luggage in the backseat during her encounter with Sam Elliott as a creepy police officer.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned fashion house Dior also played a role, creating all four looks for the pop star’s performance, including a red silk mini dress, a gold embroidered dress with sequins and chiffon sleeves, a white embroidered bra top and fringe skirt and a black lace-and-satin bodysuit and cape.

I can’t recall another luxury brand placement as high-profile since Balmain designed Beyoncé’s costumes in 2018.

Watching the performance (on livestream, yes), I guessed Carpenter’s costumes might have been Chanel, since the 1920s-inspired drop-waist silhouette has been mined by creative director Matthieu Blazy in his runway collections and has started to take off in the real world as a trend among fashion insiders.

Surprise! The belted drop-waist mini and the rest were Dior by Jonathan Anderson. They didn’t look much like his vision for the house so far, but that’s often the case with custom clothing made for celebrities, with the brand functioning more as a dressmaker for a specific artistic vision.

Carpenter, who is styled by Jared Ellner, is not an official ambassador for Dior or Louis Vuitton, at least not yet, but she does have a special relationship with the brands. She wore a pantless Louis Vuitton look to last year’s Met Gala and attended both the Dior and Louis Vuitton menswear shows in 2025.

The Sabrinawood fashion partnership paid off, garnering $3.6 million in total earned media impact for Dior, according to Launchmetrics, but it was a drop in the bucket compared with the $90 million in media impact value Dior earned at its Fall 2026 women’s runway show, as a comparison.

Elsewhere onstage at the festival, lingerie looks reigned, from Addison Rae’s Agent Provocateur red latex bra top and micro shorts to Bini’s tropical siren-inspired looks by emerging Filipino designer Raf Villas; FKA Twigs’ destroyed fetish wear by New York-based Guvanch, to Katseye’s candy-colored confections by Vietnamese label La Lune.

On the men’s designer front, Sombr continued his run of custom Valentino, while Giveon and Labrinth stepped out in custom Balenciaga.

Justin Bieber went more casual in a hoodie and shorts, repping his brand SKYLRK, which sold an astonishing $5 million in merch from its installation at the festival, according to Vogue. And speaking of hoodies, Gap was the festival’s first exclusive apparel sponsor, erecting a Gap Hoodie House on the grounds.

Celebs flocked to branded parties hosted by Guess, Airbnb, Rhode, Barbie and more. And Teyana Taylor brought her inimitable red carpet style to the Coachella-adjacent Revolve Festival, wearing one of the retailer-turned-design house’s latest Revolve Los Angeles creations. Per usual, it left little to the imagination. But isn’t that what Coachella is all about?

Anna Sui on the Enduring Fascination with the Nineties

Anna Sui brought out fashionistas Joe Zee, TJ Walker, Linda Ramone, Paul Cavaco and more for a walk down memory lane in downtown L.A. last week.

The legendary designer had a book signing at ASU FIDM in conjunction with the fashion school museum’s current exhibition, Obsessed: Fashion and Nostalgia in the ‘90s.

In conversation with school director Dennita Sewell, Sui shared memories of her Spring 1993 grunge collection, which hit the runway the same season as Marc Jacobs’ grunge collection but never seems to get as much credit as a fashion earthquake. That’s despite the fact that hers was actually produced. His, for Perry Ellis, was not, because he famously got fired after it was shown, which you can learn more about in the A24 documentary out now, Marc by Sofia, out now.

“It turned fashion on its head. You know, they didn’t know where to put us or what to do with it,” Sui said of the grunge style. “But it really resonated with that generation and the models really liked it because suddenly they had clothes for their generation, not mommy’s. And they were so used to wearing these power suits, feeling like they were dressing like an older person.”

At the time, when supermodels were the influencers, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell started calling Sui for her lace babydoll dresses, which they wore all around Paris Couture Week. The off-duty styles became so popular with models, the designer said she was shipping them to Paris in bulk, “to the point where I heard that Karl [Lagerfeld] was complaining that’s all everyone was wearing.”

Including Madonna, who showed up front row at a Jean Paul Gaultier show wearing an Anna Sui babydoll dress.

What makes the ’90s so enduringly fascinating? “This was pre-digital ... The way we found out information was going out, hanging out, word of mouth ... Everything was very organic and very genuine,” she said. “And then a model would be dating one of the new actors and bringing him backstage and nothing was ... paid for.”

For more on those times, check out the fab Rizzoli book The Nineties x Anna Sui — and ASU FIDM’s great little exhibition, including pieces from her grunge collection, open through June 27, 2026.

Bruce Weber’s Visual Memoir at Fahey/Klein Gallery

Water polo player Jeff Aquilon was the surprise guest at photographer Bruce Weber’s standing-room-only book signing and talk Saturday at Fahey/Klein Gallery, in conjunction with the exhibition Bruce Weber: Try a Little Tenderness, on view through June 6.

Weber, who created some of the most iconic fashion photographs of the 1980s and 1990s for Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Versace, Abercrombie & Fitch and others, photographed Aquilon for the Soho News in 1978 after their chance meeting at Pepperdine University in Malibu, where Aquilon was captain of the water polo team.

The images defined a new kind of masculinity in fashion and sparked Klein’s interest in working with Weber, he recalled during the talk. Eventually, Aquilon would come to be known as the first male supermodel (he’s now retired and living in Santa Barbara with his family). Weber’s Calvin Klein campaigns would go on to transform fashion imagery forever.

The raw intimacy and tender emotion Weber brought to those iconic campaign photos runs through the exhibition, which is a visual memoir of sorts, reflecting how his eye developed through family, friendship, mentorship, love, collaboration and lived experience. Celebrity portraits of Muhammad Ali, Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix, Sam Shepard, Kate Moss and others showcase Weber’s affinity for youth culture and his casual approach to depicting glamour, including an image of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy he shot in Glen Cove, New York, in 1997, which was eventually published in Vanity Fair after her death.

The exhibition coincides with the publication of Bruce Weber: My Education, a 565-page hardcover monograph published by Taschen.

Bruce Weber: Try a Little Tenderness is on view through June 6 at Fahey/Klein, 148 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles.

Pamela Anderson Brings Her Natural Beauty to Celeb-Loved Olive Ateliers

It was fortuitous when Pamela Anderson mentioned gardening during her introduction to Designer of the Year winner Tory Burch at the Fashion Trust U.S. Awards last week, saying, “Tory makes you want to be the best, unapologetic version of yourself and keep discovering who that person is on the runway or in the garden.”

That moment resonated because the actress, whose Provençal-style home garden on Vancouver Island was featured in Architectural Digest last year, was also in town to debut a design collaboration close to nature.

The Sentimentalist is her new spring furniture and décor collection with Olive Ateliers, the L.A. Arts District–based retail and furniture design studio loved by Jennifer Lopez, Sofia Richie Grainge, Benny Blanco, Kendall Jenner and more.

“I grew up by the sea,” Anderson said. “I remember our tiny cabin on the dock, the wood turned silver from years of salt and weather.” That sense of gentle aging runs throughout the collection, which is made of natural materials like rattan and solid teak, alongside durable performance fabrics.

Spanning more than 40 pieces, it includes loungers, reading chairs with matching ottomans, dining tables, woven coffee tables, baskets and even a dog bed with mixed blue and ivory stripes.

“Pamela and I are both innately nostalgic,” said Olive Ateliers co-founder and chief brand officer Kendall Knox of creating the unfussy and romantic range. “We’ve connected over the rituals that shape our days—jazz, time in the garden and a deep appreciation for objects with history.”

The Sentimentalist collection, $75 to $3,499, is available online or at Olive Ateliers’ Los Angeles flagship, 1210 Mateo St., Los Angeles.

See you next week!

Hollywood Synergy Has Never Been More In Style

The Euphoria tie-up with Balenciaga that debuted at Paris Fashion Week last month was apparently a package deal that included dressing some of the cast members for the Season 3 premiere in Hollywood on Wednesday.

You may remember that Balenciaga designer Pierpaolo Piccioli brought Euphoria to his Fall 2026 runway, collaborating with the HBO show’s creator, Sam Levinson, on moody video sets and incorporating imagery from the upcoming season into streetwear looks that were clearly designed to capture a younger generation.

At the premiere, Sam and Ashley Levinson, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Priscilla Delgado, Danielle Deadwyler and Anna Van Patten all wore Balenciaga — a mix of custom pieces and looks from the Euphoria-themed fall runway show. (Not so the bigger stars: Zendaya was in Ashi Studio couture, Maude Apatow in Celine, Hunter Schafer in Roberto Cavalli and Sydney Sweeney in vintage Pierre Cardin.)

The new season starts Sunday, jumping five years into the future to follow the cast as twentysomethings. The costumes, by Natasha Newman-Thomas, will be a mix of contemporary, vintage and up-and-coming designers, with Jacob Elordi, a celebrity ambassador for Bottega Veneta, wearing some luxe workwear from the brand in character on the show, which has already caused a frenzy of discussion online.

No word on whether any Balenciaga runway pieces will appear on-screen, but the brand did rush some into production for a see-now, buy-now collection, including a $625 T-shirt with an HBO tag at the hem.

Although it was reportedly born out of a mutual creative admiration between director and designer, the full-360 collaboration is yet another example of how luxury brands continue to invest in Hollywood and blur the lines between fashion, costume and merch. (Hello, Marty Supreme jacket.) I imagine we will see many more partnerships like these, going from runway to red carpet to cash register and back again.

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The Vogue magazine May cover shoot and story out this week promoting The Devil Wears Prada 2, featuring Meryl Streep and her character Miranda Priestly’s alter ego Anna Wintour, was similarly self-aware and synergistic.

Streep’s comment in the story about her costumes from the first film was telling: “Well, everybody was afraid of Anna on the first one, so we couldn’t find any clothes. Nobody would give us any clothes.”

How the power has shifted. Vogue needs this film, of course. In a meta moment, the challenged media landscape is a major plot point. And brands have lined up to dress the cast on the red carpet and integrate into the storyline with a bonanza of placements that started last year — where else? — on the Dolce & Gabbana runway. The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens May 1.

Tory for the Win!

At last, Tory Burch has gotten her long-overdue Designer of the Year award — not in New York, but at the Fashion Trust U.S. gala in Los Angeles.

It was well-deserved. Burch, who has reinvented herself numerous times, including, elevating her brand on the path to the current “Toryaissance,” is at the top of her game creatively and commercially.

Her friend Pamela Anderson (the two were introduced by their sons, who knew?) presented the honor, saying, “She’s a devoted mother, a visionary designer and a fearless advocate for women. Through her Foundation, she leads with compassion and is the first to say, yes, I can help advise and support.”

Burch delivered wise words to the young creatives in the room: “Fashion is an industry that constantly asks you to explain yourself. It takes conviction, resilience and trust in your instincts. And if I can offer one piece of advice, I would say nurture your point of view, respect it and let it grow and evolve. And build the thing that only you can build.”

The awards elevated the next generation of ready-to-wear and accessories designers with $600,000 in financial aid and mentorship for the winners, who were selected from more than 600 applications.

Now a marquee event on the spring social calendar, the fourth annual gala hosted by the non-profit organization pulled in a stylish, starry crowd, including Sharon Stone, Mindy Kaling, Julia Fox, Paris Hilton, Lana Condor, Chrissy Teigen, Hunter Doohan, Jordan Firstman, Emma Chamberlain, Fergie, Kumail Nanjiani, Paris Jackson, Skye Hankey and more.

Designers and creatives were in attendance from L.A., New York and beyond, including Gap’s Zac Posen, Diotima and Proenza Schouler’s Rachel Scott, J. Crew’s Olympia Gayot, Disney’s Bobby Kim, James Perse, Jonathan Simkhai, Sergio Hudson, Dani Nahmias, Gaia Repossi, Leonardo Lawson, Loree Rodkin, Mugler’s Miguel Castro Freitas, David Koma, Jamie Haller, ALC’s Andrea Liebermann, Daniella Villegas, B. Ackermann and many more.

Hosted by actress and comedian Ego Nwodim, the evening featured awards in multiple categories.

Carrying the torch for the avant-garde, Michèle Lamy, the influential proprietress of 1990s-era Hollywood hotspot Les Deux Cafes just up the street from the gala venue, and later a key part of designer Rick Owens’ creative rise and a cultural force herself, was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Design & Culture, presented by Travis Scott and Erykah Badu.

Accepting it wearing a sharp shouldered leather jacket and platform shoes, she urged the crowd to face the geopolitical moment, raising a fist and saying with her French inflected accent, “Resistance!”

“Michèle is the poster child for exceptional freedom, for resistance, for non-conformity and creativity,” Badu said. “It takes a lot to be creative ... First they laugh. Then they copy.”

Finalists were selected by Founding Board Member Tania Fares and additional board members All the Cool Girls Get Fired co-author Laura Brown, UTA’s Dan Constable, CAA’s Maha Dakhil, stylists Jamie Mizrahi, Karla Welch and Carlos Nazario, beauty guru Anastasia Soare, fashion consultant Anne Crawford, Lady Emma Thynn, Marchioness of Bath and FTUS partner Google.

The ready-to-wear award went to Zane Li of LII. In just two years, the Chinese-born designer has made his name in the industry with soft, sculptural, sport-couture pieces, which have been worn by Greta Lee and Ayo Edebiri, among others.

Known for her playful yet structured pieces, New York-based Mexican American designer Josefina Baillères took home the jewelry award, presented by Olivia Wilde, who was wearing a striking bra top and pants look by ready-to-wear finalist Ashlyn. (More on her later.)

Miami-based Andrea Marron, who makes sculptural leather bags as design objects, won the accessories award.

Melissa McCarthy took the stage to give the Graduate Award to Marcelle Barbosa of Amaramara, who is fresh out of Parsons and already garnering Instagram likes from Lauren Sánchez Bezos for her experimental designs, such as a water-soluble garment.

Deborah Won of Pisces Rising won the inaugural Type One Ventures award honoring an emerging designer exploring outer space as inspiration.

Maxwell Osborne and Kristy Chen of anOnlyChild accepted the sustainability award from Jodie Turner-Smith, and Lykke Lii serenaded the Whispering Angel-fueled crowd before everyone headed across the street to the afterparty.

A Moment With a Rising Fashion Star

Ashlynn Park may not have taken home the FTUS ready-to-wear award for her brand Ashlyn, but her first trip to L.A. was fruitful nonetheless. (Plus, the rising star already won back-to-back awards last year from the CFDA and the Vogue Fashion Fund, and is getting mentorship from Thom Browne and others.)

A veteran pattern maker of Yohji Yamamoto and Alexander Wang, Park started her brand in 2020. And she has a growing fan club who gathered Wednesday at the Des Kohan boutique on Fairfax Avenue to shop her soft yet architectural spring 2026 collection with rounded silhouettes evoking Korean buncheong jars, peplum hem fine knit tank tops and crisp organic cotton shirts, Italian viscose sculpted skirts, ruffled cocoon coats and Ashlyn’s cult favorite pants.

“I wanted to create a fit addiction,” Park said of her focus on construction and a simple elegance that have made her among the most promising new American designers, with early celebrity supporters Gwyneth Paltrow, Anna Sawai and Katie Holmes.

“I remember looking at it and I lost my mind,” store owner Desiree Kohan said about the appeal of the modern feminine pieces, which are designed to be layered.

As woman after woman tried on looks, Park reflected on her short time in L.A. before heading to the airport. “Last night’s gala was fantastic, and then being here ... I’m very inspired by boutiques, and being able to talk with the customers.”

Tracee Ellis Ross Throws Shade in the Best Way

Tracee Ellis Ross is no slouch when it comes to style. She was wearing Azzedine Alaia back in college for goodness sake, and her Instagram shows her genuine passion for clothing and accessories is not limited to any brand ambassadorship.

Which is why it makes sense that the Pattern Beauty entrepreneur is launching a cool-as-hell eyewear collaboration with a relatively obscure, 1960s French avant-garde design house, Emmanuelle Khanh.

Sometimes called the French Mary Quant, Khanh was a pioneer of a liberated, expressive femininity who designed bold, architectural eyewear to match her silhouettes.

Ross is a collector who has worn Emmanuelle Khanh frames over the years, including “La Fleur” and “1997” styles in early 2023 while attending the 54th NAACP Image Awards, according to the brand.

The collab started like so many do, with a simple exchange of DMs on Instagram. “Looking at Tracee’s style, from early 2000s red carpets to her everyday looks, I was struck by her fearless yet balanced use of color and oversized, graphic silhouettes. That became our starting point,” said the brand’s creative director Eva Gaumé.

“French style is an anchoring inspiration for my style; quiet maximalism, unapologetically personal and functional with great accessories,” said Ross.

Drawing from Emmanuelle Khanh’s archives and Ross’ love for oversized frames, their collaboration led to the creation of two exclusive frames with names that seem particularly apropos for the moment: Truth and Freedom.

Freedom is a dramatic acetate mask silhouette and Truth is a pilot-shaped optical frame. Each piece is handcrafted in Italy and France and prices are $510 to $700. The glasses are available exclusively at The Webster stores in L.A., Montecito, Palm Springs, Soho, South Beach and at the brand’s website. Just in time for styling that fearless Coachella look.

The Devil is Back

Gird your loins, the Devil Wears Prada 2 red carpet fashion frenzy has officially begun with this week’s kickoff of the film’s press tour in Mexico City.

For a daytime press conference, Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway posed outside Casa Azul, the strikingly blue (though not cerulean) home of Frida Kahlo.

Anne Hathaway wore a fab black Schiaparelli fringed dress with a surrealist-looking golden eye embellishment that seemed to pay homage to Kahlo.

Streep wore a devilish red suit and pussy-bow blouse by Dolce & Gabbana, one of the many fashion brands we’ve already seen integrated into the movie. (You’ll remember scenes were filmed during the Spring-Summer 2026 show during Milan Fashion Week last September, which saw Streep, in character as Miranda Priestly, mingling with her alter ego Anna Wintour.)

For a fan screening at Museo Anahuacalli, 20 minutes of the film were teased, and there was a runway show featuring looks by prominent Mexican fashion designers, including Alfredo Martinez, Benito Santos and Carla Fernández. The event was a kickoff of sorts for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Mexico, which is scheduled for April 16 to 20 in Guadalajara.

Hathaway walked the runway in a Stella McCartney sequin flared minidress and over-the-knee boots, while Streep wore a navy blue belted Schiaparelli coat dress.

Some commented on social media that it would have been a nice gesture for Streep or Hathaway, or both, to have worn a look by a Mexican designer for the runway event. Agreed. Even a Mexican American designer. Willy Chavarria could have whipped up an amazing red pantsuit.

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The duo has reunited for The Devil Wears Prada 2 alongside Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci. The film will follow Priestly “as she navigates her career amid the decline of traditional magazine publishing and as she faces off against Blunt’s character, now a high-powered executive for a luxury group with advertising dollars that Priestly desperately needs.” Hathaway, meanwhile, returns as the new features editor at Runway.

The film opens May 1, but the press tour will hit Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, New York and London before that, so they’ll be plenty more opportunity for looks--and opinions!

Byredo and Lauren Halsey Bottle an L.A. Vibe

It’s the lead up to Mother’s Day, aka high season for fragrance launches. In recent days, Dior’s J’adore Intense was feted with Club J’adore at a Beverly Hills mansion, and LoveShackFancy celebrated its latest scent, Sweetheart, with a very pink, very flowery party at Kathy Hilton’s house in Bel Air.

But Byredo, the Stockholm-born fragrance house that has made a practice of distilling memory into scent, touched down last week with a more unconventional launch: a collaboration with Lauren Halsey, staged inside her newly opened Sister Dreamer sculpture park.

Halsey — whose installations fuse Egyptian iconography with street culture and community archives — has spent nearly two decades imagining Sister Dreamer, a public art park at Western Avenue and 76th Street. The courtyard of carved concrete panels, sphinxes and columns is both tribute and offering to the South Central neighborhood she calls home, designed as a space for belonging, programming and everyday life.

Sister Dreamer the fragrance is a limited-edition eau de parfum conceived as “a vessel for memory, community and imagined futures.” Opening with pink pepper and juniper, it softens into freesia and Turkish rose before settling into a warm base of sandalwood, amber and what the brand calls “healingwood.” It’s fresh and floral but not cloying, capturing a distinct L.A. moment.

“The park itself sits on a city block saturated with incense-scented air from my park’s neighbors: a mom and pop incense distributor, hyperlocal makers selling Coco Egypt and Oprah’s money sticks from their backpacks, and even a corporate gas station with a modest selection of Black Love Extra Strong and mango-peach oils,” Halsey said of the inspirations. The fragrance pulls from all of them, as well as from the aromatic native plants, wildflowers, fruit trees, herbs and grasses growing in the park.

The crowd was a cool mix of well-dressed fashion, art and entertainment people, where I spotted LaKeith Stanfield, Jeremy Pope, Tia Mowry, Zerina Akers, Delfin Finley and Kohshin Finley, Aleali May, Reese Cooper and more.