I serve as the European Editor for Palmer, the Palm Beach luxury magazine, which is published four times during “the season.” Since we are in the thick of rosé season, I thought I’d post this feature, which first appeared in Palmer Volume 6. If you’d like to read the complete issue, you can order a copy of the hardbound magazine here.

Also: This will be my last newsletter for the summer, and I’ll be pausing subscriptions through the month of August. See you in September.

By Dana Thomas for Palmer

“A charming, simple daughter of the sea.” That’s how French writer Guy de Maupassant described the Mediterranean fishing village of Saint-Tropez when he first came upon it in the 19th century. “A little nook of paradise,” said Brigitte Bardot, who discovered the Riviera peninsula in the 1950s as a young starlet filming Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, and has lived there ever since.

“The problem with Saint-Tropez is there is only one road t…

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Today, I made my debut as a Guest Essayist on the New York Times Opinions page. Here is a gift link to the piece. Enjoy!

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Thirty-five years ago next month, I went to New York from Washington on assignment for The Washington Post Style section to write about the premiere of a little Irish movie that was generating a lot of buzz: The Commitments. One of the breakout stars of the film was Glen Hansard, a 21-year-old Irish musician who played the band’s guitarist, Outspan Foster. At the time, Hansard was the frontman for the fledgling Irish indie-rock group The Frames, which went on to become one of Ireland’s most acclaimed and enduring bands. In 2006, Hansard starred with his partner, Czech musician Markéta Irglová, in the film Once, a semi-autobiographical love story about an Irish busker and a Czech pianist. Hansard and Irglová shared an Oscar for Falling Slowly, a song they wrote and recorded together for Once. The movie was later adapted into a Broadway musical, which won several Tonys, including Best M…

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• LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault is peeved

To quote former ace Hollywood reporter Nikki Finke: “TOLDJA!”

Last night, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that next year’s Costume Institute exhibition will be John Galliano: Horizons, “the first major museum show to examine the full breadth of his creative output.”

You know, like my book Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano does.

As you all are devoted readers of The Style Files, you know I have reported several times that this was coming:

• In September 2023, when High & Low—John Galliano, a documentary directed by Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and produced in association with Condé Nast Entertainment, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. As I reported back then, Anna Wintour had been shopping that doc for years, and I knew of three directors who, after speaking with her about it, had turned it down. Something I’ve never mentioned: Macdonald came to me early in the development of that film, said he’d read the book, was interested in optioning it, and asked me to consult on the film. We had several discussions, then radio silence. I always wondered who put the kibosh on my involvement, because clearly someone did. At the time of the premiere, I wrote in The Style Files that I saw the doc as the kickoff of a well-planned rehabilitation, or uncancelling, campaign of John Galliano, so he could eventually be the subject of a Met retrospective and gala, likely scheduled for the following spring.

• Then, in May 2024, when New York magazine confirmed that Galliano was indeed supposed to be the subject of Costume Institute’s marquee exhibition and gala, but the project was postponed because of the Israel—Gaza war, and the Pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia University’s campus thirty blocks away. As you may recall, Galliano was fired from Christian Dior in 2011 for a drunken, anti-Semitic outburst at a Paris cafe. More about that below.

• And last March, when Zara announced it had hired Galliano to “re-author” its archival designs. The first items will arrive in Zara stores next month. I saw the partnership as the final installment in Galliano’s rehabilitation campaign, and predicted that the Met show announcement would be coming soon.

• And again in April, when I was told at a conference in Barcelona that Anna Wintour had been spotted on the Zara campus last fall, before the partnership announcement. My source said he’d heard Zara would be underwriting the gala. That subject was not addressed in the Met’s press release.

What the press release did say is that the show will include “sketches, toiles, research books, and archival materials.” That’s interesting, given most of Galliano’s archives from the 1980s and early 1990s—his first decade in business—do not exist anymore.

As I write in the book:

• In 1986, when Galliano’s first and extremely patient backer Johann Brun was forced to shut down the company because it was losing so much money, he sold off “the patterns, the samples, the unused bolts of fabrics, sewing machines—because they were the company’s assets and would be needed to pay off creditors in liquidation.” Galliano’s fourth collection, “Forgotten Innocents,” never went into production.

• In November 1991, his second backer, Peder Bertelsen, also gave up, and stopped financing Galliano: “As with Brun, the relationship ended badly, with Galliano’s archives chucked into bins and assets sold off in liquidation.”

Some former employees, like Gail Downey, who hand-knit Galliano’s knitwear pieces for his first collections in the 1980s, and Amanda Harlech, his devoted original muse/stylist who he brutally abandoned when he took the Dior job, kept original clothing and items from those years. But you know who has the most ephemera, such as press kits, look books, videos, slides, invitations, and newspaper and magazine clippings?

Me.

I spent almost five years working on Gods and Kings, went to see nearly every person who ever worked for Galliano, from his degree show in 1984 to his hiring at Dior in 1996, and came home with all sorts of promotional materials, including sketches. And with the help of my research assistant Chantel Tattoli, I found just about every article ever written about him—most of the 1980s ones were not online—thereby building a John Galliano research archive. I also kept all of the Galliano invitations that I received from 1994 onwards. (I did the same for McQueen.) There are cases and cases of the stuff in my basement.

We’ll see if Andrew Bolton gives me a call. He hasn’t yet.

Most interestingly, the Met release says the show “will address the derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception. In doing so, the exhibition will consider how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.”

To remind those who know and inform those who don’t, this is what went down.

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By Dana Thomas for Air Mail

Walk into Le Grand Véfour, one of Paris’s oldest restaurants—and for much of its history, one of its haughtiest—and you’ll immediately notice something is different. The once stodgy crimson banquettes are now a cheerful royal blue. The plates are more industrial, less faux Versailles. The waitstaff is very young, and very fashionable—as opposed to old-school and serious. The diners are discreet, and Parisian, instead of the loud tourists who, in recent years, had commandeered the place. And there’s music, or rather contemporary “Muzak.” On a summer afternoon, it was Simply Red’s “Holding Back the Years” wafting through the elegant Directoire dining room where Napoleon romanced Joséphine, Victor Hugo held court, and Colette lingered over meals.

“Le Grand Véfour is a jewel, one of the best-known restaurants in the world, ” says Alexandra de La Brosse, chief marketing officer of Paris …

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By Dana Thomas for Air Mail

July 16, 2026

“It’s like wearing a cherry pie!” declared the actress and jewelry collector Jennifer Tilly, as she slipped on the one-of-a-kind Dolce & Gabbana Alta Gioielleria gold statement ring festooned with miniature cherries in enamel, diamonds, pink sapphires, and rubies. She was having an impromptu private fitting on Sunday night’s opening event of Alta Moda, the Italian fashion brand’s annual multi-day luxury extravaganza, this year set in the Sicilian coastal town of Taormina. The price of that mini cherry pie: $145,000—before tax. “I’ll have to think about it,” Tilly told the vendeuse. She then rejoined the party in the cloister-like courtyard of the San Domenico Palace, the Four Seasons hotel set in a former 15th-century monastery perched on a cliff above the Ionian Sea—yes, the same hotel that was in Season Two of The White Lotus.

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By Dana Thomas for Air Mail

Martin Margiela is disrupting fashion—again. The Belgian designer who made deconstruction mainstream and invented the ever popular camel-toed Tabi boot, then abruptly quit the business in 2009, is unloading a private trove of fashion detritus in Paris today. The sale, which includes early sketches, lookbooks, personal items, and clothing from Margiela’s namesake brand as well as from Hermès, where he designed women’s ready-to-wear in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is hosted by the French house Maurice Auction in association with Kerry Taylor Auctions of London.

“After many years of moving archival material from place to place and subsequent loans for exhibitions, I felt it was time to let go of a part of my fashion memorabilia,” Margiela, who is known to be reclusive and media-averse, said in a statement.

The organize…

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• Chanel buys the French heritage haberdasher Charvet

• Inside Madonna’s album release party with Grindr in London.

For years, I have argued that the fashion industry does not have a consumption problem; it has an overproduction problem.

As I argued in my book, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, the fashion has built a system that rewards brands for producing endless amounts of clothing—more than a hundred billion items a year now—as cheaply, and quickly as possible, while shunting the environmental and human damage onto communities (usually in developing nations), garment workers (usually paid half—or less—a living wage, and treated like forced labor), and, ultimately, all of us (we now have polyester’s microfibers in our air, our waterways, and our blood).

This week, France became the first major country to try to do something meaningful about it. After more than two years of debate, the French Senate approved legislation aimed squarely at the new generation of ultra-fast-fashion giants—Shein, Temu and AliExpress. Unlike previous attempts to regulate fashion, this law recognizes something important: ultra-fast fashion is not simply an accelerated version of Zara or H&M. It is an entirely different business model.

The proposed law would impose environmental penalties ranging from €0.25 to €6 per garment initially, rising to as much as €10 by 2030. Even more striking, it would prohibit advertising by ultra-fast-fashion companies and ban influencers from promoting them. The legislation still requires presidential signature before taking effect, but, politically, it is a pivotal moment.

“What is at stake today is not just clothes, but the societal model we want to defend,” Serge Papin, France’s minister for small enterprises, told legislators before the vote. “The industry targeted by this bill is one that floods our markets with disposable fashion, with clothes worn only a few weeks before being thrown away.”

That may be the most important sentence uttered in any parliamentary debate about fashion in years. This debate has never really been about the democratization of fashion: making clothes so cheap that anyone can afford them; it’s about whether democracies should allow algorithms to encourage consumers to buy astonishing amounts of clothes designed to be tossed after only a few wears, if that.

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The Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris ruled earlier this month that Le Bidon Français, a French company that sells decorative objects covered with luxury logos, infringed on Hermès’s trademark, The Fashion Law reported this week. In the case, Le Bidon Français argued that the pieces were satirical artworks, juxtaposing one of the world’s most rarefied luxury brands with mundane—or even absurd—objects. The judges weren’t convinced.

The court’s reasoning is fascinating because it didn’t dismiss the idea that luxury trademarks can appear in works of art. Quite the contrary: It drew a distinction between artistic expression and commercial exploitation. Once identical Hermès trademarks were being used not merely as artistic material but to market, promote, hashtag, and sell products, the court found that consumers could reasonably believe there was a commercial relationship with Hermès.

It’s an important ruling, especially as the market for “luxury art objects,” upcycled designer goods, and logo-based collectibles continues to explode. But it also raises a larger question: Where, exactly, is the line? Because artists have been using luxury logos for decades as both subject matter and social commentary.

No one has understood this better than New York artist Tom Sachs.

In the mid-1990s, Sachs began making sculptures bearing with the logos of luxury houses. Sometimes, he painted the logo on the item, sometimes he upcycled existing luxury detritus, like logo-covered shopping bags and shoeboxes. He presented these pieces in a show called Creativity is the Enemy at Thomas Healy Gallery in New York in 1998, and at the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris in 1999. I attended the opening during Couture Week, and it was amazing to watch all these fashion people like Isabella Blow and André Leon Talley taking in art that skewered their work, and them personally. Sachs’ Prada Value Meal transformed a McDonald’s Happy Meal into an object of luxury obsession. His Hermès Value Meal performed the same sleight of hand.

The Prada Deathcamp was a model of a World War II concentration camp built from Prada shoeboxes and packaging. It provoked outrage—as Sachs intended. His point was not to compare Prada to Nazi Germany. It was to ask why luxury brands exert such extraordinary psychological power over us. As he famously put it, “Fashion, like fascism, is about loss of identity.” It was a deliberately provocative way of arguing that consumer culture can demand conformity every bit as effectively as political ideology.

Most unsettling, however, was Chanel Guillotine, 15-foot-tall replica of the French execution device, painted black—a shade Coco Chanel transformed from funereal to fashionable—and bearing the house logo. Priced at roughly $45,000, Chanel Guillotine tied together one of fashion’s most enduring symbols of elegance with one of history’s most brutal instruments of death. San Franciscan art patron Dodie Rosekrans bought it for her palazzo in Venice. She later donated it to the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou.

In the spring of 2006, I visited Sachs in Milan while he was installing an exhibition at the original Fondazione Prada, next to the company’s headquarters. As we walked through the galleries, I asked if I could use an image of Prada Value Meal for the cover of my forthcoming book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. As I explained to him, the sculpture distilled, in one unforgettable image, the very argument I was making in the book: that luxury had become less about craftsmanship than branding, less about the object than the logo, and, in the age of globalization and corporatization, it had been massified. He said: “Absolutely.”

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• Greening up the World Cup

• Alexander McQueen goes home

Earlier this month, the Global Labor Justice (GLJ), Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA), and the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), published an open letter to Victoria’s Secret shareholders recounting the death last fall of Paramasivam Pushpalatha, a 45-year-old garment worker at a factory operated by Victoria’s Secret supplier Brandix in Sri Lanka. According to worker testimonies, Ms. Pushpalatha fell ill during her shift, was denied leave, and then died on the job.

The story gets worse: When a female labor organizer later distributed information about the case outside the factory, a group of men dressed in Brandix-branded clothing surrounded her and threatened to rape and kill her.

And worse: When members of Ms. Pushpalatha’s family complained about her death, they allegedly were similarly threatened. Worker testimony, police reports, and affidavits regarding the incidents have been submitted to the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission.

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In 1962, Clark won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London, where he met David Hockney, a fellow student. In 1964, Clark moved in with [textile designer Celia] Birtwell, and despite his later homosexual liaisons, they began a love affair that would consume him to the day he died. That year was pivotal for Clark: he acknowledged his homosexual side by seducing Hockney, and together, they traveled to the United States, where Hockney introduced Clark to the glamorous life of Hollywood. Clark returned to London with a cache of Pop Art materials and a head full of ideas.

Six years later, Hockney painted one of his most famous portraits, “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” of Clark, Birtwell and their cat in their flat in Notting Hill Gate. …

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In the rarefied world of high fashion, the ultimate luxury is couture, the made-to-measure clothes that are presented each January and July in Paris to a select clientele. One such client is Palm Beach resident Audrey Gruss, the chair of the Hope for Depression Research Foundation (HDRF), a non-profit that supports research for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of depression, and the wife of Wall Street power broker Martin Gruss.

In January, the Grusses traveled to Paris for Haute Couture Week to shop for new looks for Audrey to wear to their many social and public engagements this year, including the HDRF Luncheon Seminar at The Plaza hotel in November. And what a whirlwind it was: couture shows, fashionable lunches, gala dinners, showroom visits, fittings, and, most importantly, fun. A lot of fun.

Couture is in the midst of a boom, with thousands of new clients of all ages and fro…

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Photography by Ambroise Tézenas

The Los Angeles–based fashion and accessories designer Clare Vivier and her husband, Thierry, had long pined for a place in France. During family visits to his hometown of Saint-Calais, southwest of Paris, she quietly eyed a handsome 19th-century manor set on a lush patch of land along the river Anille. In 2020, they heard that the family who had owned the seemingly abandoned house for the last 50 years had put it on the market. The Viviers swiftly bought it—a dream come true, times two.

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• Can Shein buy sustainability cred?

• What’s Jonathan Anderson's beef with women—and possibly dogs?

• Are luxury brands taking over all of Saint-Tropez?

As most of you know, I was at the Cannes Film Festival for a spell this week for the announcement that Dirty Films, the production company of Cate Blanchett, Andrew Upton and Coco Francini, is co-producing the documentary adaptation of my book, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, directed by noted auteur Reiner Holzemer. We’re now in the financing phase. (If you are interested in funding it, do drop a line!)

While in Cannes, I noticed and heard a few things:

• The Absence of the Hollywood Studios: No major player has a movie in the Cannes competition this year, and you can feel it at every turn. No blockbuster billboards on hotel facades. Empty seats at official screenings. Fewer power meetings at the Hôtel Majestic and beach clubs. Less traffic. No big premiere parties that go on until dawn. No amazing stunts, like when Top Gun: Maverick premiered in 2022, and the Patrouille de France did a fly-by. No juice. No frisson. It’s even easy to get a table at Da Laura. “It’s really boring this year,” I was told more than once. “Dead,” someone else said.

  

• Jury member Demi Moore is not missing a single a Red Carpet Opportunity: One of the things I’ve loved about covering Cannes over the years was spotting or crossing jury members at press screenings—there is a small section of dedicated seats for them, and they can drop in and catch a film at 8:30 or 11 a.m., freeing up their evenings for supper with friends, or official functions like the President’s Dinner, or maybe another press screening. Generally, jury members get dolled up and walk the red carpet for the opening and closing ceremonies; the rest of the 12-day festival, they are in casual clothes, going to the movies like regular Joes.

  The Style Files is reader-supported. To keep quality independent journalism alive and thriving, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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By Chris Gardner for The Hollywood Reporter

Cate Blanchett is diving deeper into the fashion business — on the big screen.

The Oscar-winning actress and her production company Dirty Films with Andrew Upton and Coco Francini have boarded the documentary adaptation of Dana Thomas’ book Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, being directed by noted auteur Reiner Holzemer.

The project, which is moving into the financing phase, investigates the $3 trillion global fashion industry by examining the “environmental and human cost of an industry built on speed and scale while spotlighting the designers and innovators reshaping the system,” per the filmmakers. It is based on Thomas’s book of the same name, which was named The Independent’s best fashion book on sustainability and was hailed by The New Yorker as “a glimpse into how consumerism, slowed to a less ferocious p…

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By Dana Thomas for Palmer.

Twentieth-century American heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post liked to receive at home—at Hillwood, her Georgian house set on 25 acres overlooking Washington D.C.’s Rock Creek Park; Camp Topridge, a rustic, 68-building compound in the Adirondacks; and Mar-a-Lago, her Palm Beach winter retreat, which she built in the 1920s. Her guest lists were a veritable who’s who of the era: captains of industry, politicians, diplomats, intellectuals, royalty. Dinners were as formal and elegant as those at Buckingham Palace or the White House, and followed similar protocol. “After all, I’m old-fashioned,” she told Life magazine in 1965.

When laying the table, her staff used yardsticks to measure the placement of every item. Each plate would sit exactly 16 inches apart. The porcelain was often by royal purveyors, such as the Manufacture de Sèvres in France or the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, as was the flatware, lik…

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• The King’s Music Room is up for a top music award

• Has the Met Gala run out of steam?

• The Devil Wears Prada 2 reviews are in, and zowie, it actually sounds good!

The fashion business has produced its share of visionaries, but few saw the digital future as early—or as clearly—as Federico Marchetti. Long before “e-commerce” became industry shorthand, Marchetti was building Yoox into a global platform that would eventually merge with Net-a-Porter, reshaping how luxury is sold—and consumed.

In his new book, The Geek of Chic: An American Dream Italian Style, published by Post Hill Press, Marchetti charts that journey: from early skepticism and near-misses to IPO euphoria and the complexities of scaling a digital luxury empire. But what makes the story particularly compelling now is what came after. Since stepping away from the company, Marchetti has turned his focus to sustainability, working closely with King Charles III on initiatives like the Fashion Task Force, with projects spanning from regenerative agriculture to craft revival.

I first saw this work up close in 2022, when I was contributing editor for British Vogue, and a team from the magazine, including editor-in-chief Edward Enninful and me, traveled to Ayrshire, Scotland to meet with Marchetti and then-Prince Charles at Dumfries House, the seat for what is now known as the King’s Foundation, His Majesty’s sustainability center, which is open to the public.

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In this issue:

• Did Anna Wintour broker the Zara x John Galliano deal?

• Will Milan Fashion Week go anti-fur?

• Who are the emerging designers to watch from Salone del Mobile?

For much of the month of April, I’ve been on the road, speaking at conferences, attending trade shows, and doing research for my upcoming biography on Giorgio Armani, and along the way, I gleaned all sorts of interesting tidbits.

During the European Designer Fashion Summit in Barcelona, all that anyone could talk about—and ask me about—was the upcoming partnership of John Galliano, whose mother was Spanish, and Zara, the Spanish fast fashion giant. As most of you know, I weighed in on the news a few weeks ago; if you missed it, you can read it here.

But the most interesting thing I heard about it was that Condé Nast Global Chief Content Officer Anna Wintour was apparently spotted on the Zara campus in A Coruña, Spain last fall. Folks wondered if she was the one who brokered the Zara x Galliano deal, and if that deal included Zara underwriting the Met Gala in New York for the John Galliano retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, presumably a year from now.

Yes, this could be idle gossip and daydreaming—the person who told me about Wintour’s alleged Zara visit had the info secondhand. But it would certainly make sense.

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Queen Elizabeth II was known for many things: her calm, her determination, her resilience, her longevity. What does not generally come up in conversation is her fashion sense. Beyond the formless suits and coat dresses in jelly bean hues, with matching hats, that were her day look for the last decades of her 96-year-long life, her rugged country garb, and her enviable collection of headscarves, and her sensible shoes, rarely does one discuss, much less analyze, her clothing choices during her 70-year reign. Indeed, you could easily assume the Queen didn’t give a hoot about fashion.

How wrong you would be, as Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style, a new exhibition in the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace through October 18, proves. Tracing what the Queen wore from her baptism in a Spitalfields silk and Honiton lace christening gown first worn by Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Victoria, in 1841, to the bubblegum-pink pleated dress with a matching coat she wore for her Platinum Jubilee in 2022, three months before her death—more than 200 items in all, half of which are on display for the first time—what is certain is her Majesty spent a great deal of time thinking about, choosing, and wearing a lot of fashion.

The Queen “made her own decisions about her clothing and which designers, couturiers and suppliers she chose to work with,” notably Norman Hartman and Hardy Amies, says exhibition curator Caroline de Guitaut. And she understood fashion was her soft power—what she called “dress diplomacy”—especially during state visits abroad. “Her clothes acknowledged everything from religious, cultural, and social convention, no matter which country or culture was visited,” Guitaut says.

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Ever-wonderful , former fashion director for InStyle magazine, who I wrote about in The Style Files when his most recent book, Dressing the Part: Television’s Most Stylish Shows, was published, had me on his Substack podcast, this week to talk about all things fashion.

What a hilarious time we had!

Tune in here for a listen and join us in the laughter.

To keep up with my work:

• Follow me on Instagram

• Buy my books:

  • Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

  • Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano

  • Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes

  • Fashionopolis: The Young Readers Edition

• Listen to my award-winning podcast, The Green Dream, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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