For those of us who live and breathe art, summer may have been a welcome break, but something is thrilling about watching the art world come back to life. By September, everyone returns with a new exhibition, a revised price list and the firm conviction that last season’s uncertainty was, in retrospect, strategically useful.

This year, the return comes with an additional question: is the art market finally feeling better?

It has spent the past few years in a sort of malaise. The money never disappeared, but the people who had it became particular about parting with it. Collectors still wanted masterpieces. What became harder to sell was anything requiring a little faith, imagination, or an explanation longer than the condition report. But what is art if not experimentation and gamble, I wonder?

After two consecutive years of decline, global art sales grew 4 per cent in 2025 to $59.6 billion. Auctions did even better, rising 9 per cent to $20.7 billion, while dealers managed a more restrained 2 per cent increase to $34.8 billion.

Four per cent is hardly cause to uncork the collector-grade champagne, but it is much better than another year of describing falling sales as resilience. And since then, the first half of 2026 has produced some harder-to-ignore signs of life.

Thus, as the galleries reopen, the fairs begin assembling their booths, and everyone prepares to pretend they are definitely buying for love rather than investment, I thought it was time for a little health check.

Is the art market actually back? Tag along for the report.

Going Once, Going Twice… Recovered?

If one wished to construct the most persuasive possible case for an art-market recovery, the auction houses would be the logical starting point.

Christie’s reported $3.5 billion in public auction sales during the first half of 2026, representing a 71 per cent year-on-year increase, alongside a further $1 billion in private sales. Sotheby’s reported $3.4 billion in public auction sales, up 59 per cent. According to ArtTactic, combined auction sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips increased by approximately 70 per cent year-on-year during the same period.

London was a key player. ArtTactic calculated that first-half sales in the city rose 131 per cent to $1.42 billion, bringing the market close to the levels recorded during the post-Covid rebound of 2022.

On the surface, the patient appears not just recovered but ready to resume competitive sport. There is, however, an important doctor’s note we must not ignore.

Much of the market’s strength has been concentrated in the category to which wealthy collectors tend to retreat when macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty make experimentation less attractive: exceptional works, established names and trophy collections.

Christie’s May sale, for example, included Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A, which sold for $181.2 million. High-end auction activity had already begun to recover during 2025; in the United States, the combined value of works selling above $10 million increased by almost 40 per cent.

I would argue that, while the market is recovering, the recovery remains visibly narrow. If a collector is once again prepared to spend $180 million on a Pollock, confidence has clearly returned somewhere. But it is not telling of their appetite for an emerging artist represented by a mid-sized gallery, or for a work that has yet to be validated by museums, scholarship and three generations of auction results. Art will always be a compelling portfolio diversifier, but who is still buying for the craft?

The art market is not one market. It is a collection of distinct markets, asset classes and behavioural ecosystems that occasionally meet at the same opening.

When in Doubt, Buy a Masterpiece

The United States accounts for 44 per cent of global art sales by value, followed by Britain at 18 per cent and China at 14 per cent. Together, these three markets represent 76 per cent of global sales.

The recovery has not, however, moved evenly through the gallery ecosystem. Dealers collectively grew by only 2 per cent last year, while operating costs increased by an estimated 5 per cent. Among dealers with annual turnover between $1 million and $10 million, average sales declined slightly.

This is not a minor statistical detail. It goes to the question of what we mean when we describe the art market as healthy.

The market cannot be assessed solely by whether a small number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals remain willing to bid against one another for masterpieces. That is an important indicator of liquidity and confidence at the top, but it is not a complete measure of the sector’s condition.

A functioning art ecosystem also requires galleries willing to invest in artists before they become auction guarantees; collectors prepared to buy before consensus has formed; and sufficient confidence in the middle of the market for businesses to survive the years between discovering an artist and selling their work at a materially higher level.

The upper end of the market benefits from a powerful accumulation of institutional advantages. Joan Mitchell is a useful example. Once comparatively undervalued against the male Abstract Expressionists with whom her work was historically discussed, her market now sits beneath decades of institutional scholarship, major retrospectives, blue-chip representation and increasingly formidable auction results. Buying a major Mitchell today may require millions of dollars, but it no longer requires the collector to make any sort of radical aesthetic bet.

The emerging market, however, demands a different kind of conviction. It asks the collector to make a judgement before consensus has formed, and to accept the possibility that it never will.

What if everyone else never comes around to seeing what I see?

This is where the autumn calendar comes into play: over the next three months, the market will be asked that same question repeatedly, across different cities, price points and mechanisms.

Seoul Enters the Experiment

As I write this, Frieze Seoul is in full swing. Its fifth edition brings more than 125 galleries from 30 countries to COEX, but the mood on the floor is rather more interesting than the scale of the fair itself.

Early reporting suggests galleries are making sales, some better than expected, while remaining noticeably reluctant to call it a recovery. Dealers have responded to a volatile Korean economy with more cautious pricing, younger artists and works at comparatively accessible price points. The atmosphere is less euphoric than the early years of Frieze Seoul, when Korea appeared to be the art market’s next great gold rush, and perhaps more revealing because of it.

There are still seven-figure transactions. Thaddaeus Ropac sold an Adrian Ghenie painting for €1.1 million on opening day, while a 1971 work by Korean abstractionist Yoo Youngkuk subsequently sold for around $1.6 million. But some of the more useful evidence sits further down the price ladder: works by younger Korean artists selling in the tens of thousands, local collectors buying locally, and galleries reporting transactions across a considerably broader range of prices.

This is not a market succumbing to FOMO (if you would allow my Gen Z reference); it is one remembering that discernment is useful when the objects in question cost more than a house. Perhaps restraint, rather than exuberance, is the more convincing sign of recovery.

A speculative market rewards urgency: buy now because everybody else is buying. A mature one should, theoretically, reward judgement. Seoul may therefore be giving us the first indication of what this recovery could look like if it travels beyond trophy lots: less spectacular, more selective and considerably harder to summarise in a headline.

It also gives us our first data point. Seoul is testing appetite now. London and Paris will test it again in October. Then the major autumn auctions will tell us whether confidence survives once estimates become public and paddles go up.

Time to Put Your Money Where the Art Is

On 14 October, Frieze London and Frieze Masters return to Regent’s Park, bringing almost 300 galleries from 48 countries and regions with them.

For several days, substantial quantities of art, capital and social anxiety will be concentrated beneath two very large tents. Frieze London will focus predominantly on contemporary art and living artists, while Frieze Masters will extend across historical periods and established art-historical categories.

An auction tells us what a buyer was prepared to pay for an artwork that already occupies a recognisable position within the secondary-market hierarchy. A fair, in contrast, is closer to an argument. Every booth is, in effect, a gallery making a series of claims: this artist is it; this work deserves this price; this is the moment to acquire it; and, ideally, you should do so before somebody else does.

That makes Frieze an ultimate test of the current recovery. If confidence is truly spreading through the market, the evidence should appear not only in the sale of trophy works but in collectors’ willingness to take considered risks again.

London will not be operating in isolation. The art world moves on to Paris almost immediately afterwards, meaning October effectively gives the European gallery market several weeks to make its case. What galleries choose to bring will itself be revealing. In uncertain markets, inventory becomes strategy. Do dealers lead with emerging artists whose markets they are still constructing, or arrive armed with names they already know collectors can defend? Do prices creep upwards? Do works sell quickly, or acquire the increasingly familiar little phrase on reserve?

Fairs tell us what galleries believe collectors should value. They are exercises in market-making as much as selling: artists are positioned, prices established, narratives reinforced and scarcity carefully managed.

On the other hand, the autumn auction season gives the secondary market its chance to respond. Here the theatre changes. Galleries can control primary-market pricing and, to an extent, who receives access to a work. At auction, estimates are published, bidding is visible, and failure has a number attached to it.

A successful fair tells us galleries have persuaded collectors to participate in the construction of value. A successful auction tells us there is sufficient demand to defend value once it has entered a more transparent marketplace. We have proposition and price discovery playing a choreographed duet.

Seoul gives us the opening indication. London and Paris will show what galleries are willing to bet on. The autumn auctions will reveal what buyers are prepared to defend with actual capital. If all three begin pointing in the same direction, then I may be persuaded to use the word recovery without an asterisk.

When Selling Is Beside the Point

Some 4,000 miles away from Frieze Seoul, a different art-world recovery is taking place. Tehran Art Month is currently unfolding across the Iranian capital, bringing together more than 45 galleries alongside studios and cultural spaces in a city still processing two wars, January’s bloody unrest and enormous economic pressure. The Financial Times reports galleries going months without making sales, artists losing studios to inflation, and the rising cost of materials making some practices increasingly difficult to sustain.

And still, they are making art. At Artibition, Mojtaba Amini has turned his experience of the March strikes in Tehran into a blackened and scorched canvas, its surface covered in soot and ash. Elsewhere, artists are processing war, isolation and the strange psychological task of continuing ordinary life after catastrophe. Not everybody is convinced by the initiative: some galleries have declined to participate, questioning its timing and whether the event can meaningfully serve an already fragile art scene.

Tehran Art Month is not presenting the convenient image of an industry triumphantly bouncing back. It is showing people trying to work out what art is for when the market around it barely functions.

One anonymous Tehran gallerist described a reality almost inverse to the one we have been discussing at the top of the international market: top-level works can still find collectors, while second-tier pieces struggle to move at all.

Nevertheless, after reopening following the war, people came to the gallery and stayed for hours simply talking and being together. The gallery had become useful even when it was not selling anything. Is it war what is need it to remind us that art is not a commodity but a source of life itself? Art will always have a place in a diversified portfolio. But who is in it for the craft?

We spend an extraordinary amount of time discussing art through the vocabulary of capital: appreciation, liquidity, investment, provenance, scarcity, returns. All of these things are important because artists need galleries, galleries need collectors and, regrettably, landlords remain unmoved by cultural significance. But Tehran offers a useful correction to the idea that a healthy art world and a healthy art market are interchangeable.

A gallery can be commercially fragile and culturally indispensable. An artwork can be financially illiquid and still matter enormously. Sometimes the most convincing demonstration of confidence in art is not paying $180 million but continuing to make it just because it is a token that reminds us we are human.

The Price of Conviction

Which brings us back to money, although perhaps with a slightly different understanding of what it is measuring.

We ought to remember that confidence in art is not supported by the same analytical infrastructure as confidence in public equities or fixed income. There is no quarterly earnings statement explaining why a painting should appreciate. There are no dividends. There may not even be another comparable work publicly offered for several years.

Two canvases of identical dimensions may contain broadly comparable quantities of paint and differ in price by several million pounds. Fashion has at least attempted to construct a material justification for luxury. Whether those explanations always survive close inspection is another matter, but the narrative prevails. Art is more ephemeral.

Its value emerges from an unruly combination of meaning, reputation, provenance, scarcity, scholarship, institutional validation, gallery representation, cultural relevance and, eventually, enough people agreeing that all of the above should cost a particular amount of money. The funny thing about consensus is how quickly it starts looking like intrinsic value.

The 2026 Art Basel and UBS report captures the market somewhere between the two. Forty-three per cent of dealers surveyed expected sales to improve this year, compared with 33 per cent a year earlier. Only 19 per cent expected sales to decline. Among mid-tier auction houses, the proportion anticipating stronger sales increased from 15 per cent to 48 per cent.

Optimism is real, but we have yet to discover how adventurous it will become. A $100 million painting selling for $120 million demonstrates that extremely wealthy people remain extremely wealthy and that the market for exceptional works remains liquid.

A healthy market will not just showcase the presence of money but how far collectors are prepared to let it wander from safety.

Recovered? Ask Me in November

Global sales returned to growth in 2025. Auction houses have produced materially stronger results in 2026. London auction sales have rebounded. Dealer sentiment has improved.

But I am not yet opening the champagne. At least not before checking whether it is being offered on consignment.

After looking at Tehran, even the question itself feels inadequate. There are really two recoveries taking place. One is financial: the return of transactions, liquidity and collector confidence after several difficult years. The other is cultural: the continued willingness of artists, galleries and audiences to believe that art is worth making, showing and gathering around even when its economic infrastructure is under extraordinary pressure.

The second never disappeared. The first is what remains under examination. Frieze Seoul is already giving us an early indication of a market that appears more selective than speculative. October will move the experiment to London and Paris, where galleries will make their case for the artists and works they believe should define the next phase of the market. Then the autumn auctions will reveal which of those convictions survive once estimates become public and it’s time to bid.

What I want to know is if confidence can travel: from masterpieces to emerging artists, from auction houses to galleries, and from the very top of the market into the ecosystem beneath it.

Either way, I will see you under the tent — where conviction is expensive, and everyone insists they bought for love.

I went to one of the top universities for fashion (if not the absolute best, as clearly stated by my entirely unbiased opinion), and from day one, sustainability was at the core of our curriculum. And for God’s sake, if I see one more “sustainability strategy” document, I might actually never recycle again.

Then Business of Fashion published a piece announcing that “polyester” has become a Gen-Z insult. The word is now being thrown around on TikTok as shorthand for cheap, fake, and low-quality, while people are suddenly checking labels and hunting for natural fibres. BoF points to this as a sign that fibre composition has moved from a niche sustainability concern into the mainstream. I think they are giving us far too much credit.

After years of being told polyester is terrible for the environment, what finally made Gen Z turn against it wasn’t its sustainability credentials. I hate to burst the bubble, but it was the realisation that a £5 H&M top, shockingly, looks cheap after wash number three next to the designer shirt your senior manager is sporting around the office. Thus accidentally proving the point of this entire article. Make the greener option desirable for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with being green.

Now, the following declaration might make me persona non grata among people of my own generation, but I think sustainability is one of the greatest marketing scams fashion has ever tailored to target young consumers.

Personally, as you can probably tell, I have never been particularly green. Not because I intentionally pollute, but because I have never gone out of my way to recycle or calculate the environmental consequences of every purchase I make. Sue me, I know.

The truth is, I have always been suspicious of the idea that if you and I recycle religiously or even suffer through another disintegrating paper straw, we will somehow save the world. I have held onto the unpopular conviction that change does not start with you and me (more on that later).

Before I immerse you in my arguments, I should make something very clear: I am not against sustainability. If a brand is reducing its environmental impact, fantastic. By all means, carry on. My argument is that sustainability can no longer sit at the centre of fashion as though it were an identity, nor should brands be able to build their entire moral proposition around it. To reference Miranda Priestly: Sustainability, as your brand ethos? Groundbreaking.

At the scale at which the fashion industry currently operates, “sustainability” is an illusion. There is no such thing as a completely sustainable piece of clothing. The moment we extract a raw material, process it, dye it, manufacture it, package it, and transport it across the world, we have created an environmental footprint. A garment can certainly pollute less than another, be made better, last longer, travel fewer miles, use fewer resources, and overall cause less damage. However, less harmful is not the same thing as harmless.

Sustainability has become a language through which companies sell products and consumers buy not only clothes, but the comforting idea that our consumption can be morally virtuous. How convenient. The problem is that environmental crises are not solved according to how virtuous our purchases make us feel. They are solved through measurable reductions, infrastructure, regulation, technological innovation and the decidedly less PR-friendly part: economics.

I realise this proposition might come across as cynical (I was raised by lawyers; there was only so much hope for me). Nevertheless, I think it is time for my generation to stop being babied by the idea that we can shop our way out of overconsumption, put on our big-girl/boy pants and confront fashion’s environmental problem as it actually is.

Ask yourself… if sustainability has become something fashion can sell us, who exactly is being sustained: the planet, or the business model?

The weaving of a lie

There is a speech by comedian and political commentator Konstantin Kisin that catapulted this whole idea from a personal conspiratorial belief to a factual argument. Speaking at the Oxford Union in 2023, Kisin made an argument about climate change that was deliberately provocative: wealthy Westerners can lecture themselves about consuming less, but billions of people elsewhere are still trying to consume more.

Essentially, more electricity, better housing, air conditioning, food, indoor plumbing, etc. The things we start describing as excessive consumption after we acquire them. He concluded that we are not going to convince poorer populations to remain poor for the sake of climate targets. The realistic route, he argued, is technological: make cleaner alternatives so effective and so cheap that choosing them no longer requires environmental altruism.

There are problems with Kisin’s argument, which I will get to. But there is one part I find difficult to dismiss: Economics tends to beat morality.

Fashion has spent the past decade behaving as though the opposite were true. We have been told to “shop better”. But when we weren’t looking, the industry performed an impressive sleight of hand. A problem originating in how billions of garments are designed, manufactured, priced, and distributed became something to be solved at checkout.

Would madam like to save the planet with her trousers today?

Morals End at the Checkout

The first problem with sustainability as fashion’s grand consumer proposition is that consumers are very good environmentalists in surveys. However, at the till, we become more complicated. A 2021 study by researchers Theresa Maria Rausch, Daniel Baier and Stefanie Wening involving 4,350 online shoppers found that, when buying clothes, conventional attributes such as fit, comfort, value for money and quality still ranked above sustainability. And this was 2021, when failing to be green was practically grounds for public excommunication. The researchers specifically investigated whether sustainability actually mattered relative to other product characteristics and how much consumers were prepared to pay for it. Thus the false premises revealed themselves: despite widespread positive attitudes towards sustainable consumption, sustainable apparel had failed to become mainstream.

Economists and behavioural researchers call this the intention-behaviour gap. We say sustainability matters, but we need that £29 dress we really like. A 2025 Scientific Reports experiment made the contradiction even more interesting. Researchers presented consumers with three versions of a leather bag, ranging from conventional leather to increasingly circular alternatives. Pro-environmental attitudes did increase purchase intentions and willingness to pay, particularly when shoppers perceived the sustainable product as higher quality and understood why production cost more. But the researchers explicitly situate their findings within the long-established gap between what consumers intend to buy and what they actually purchase.

Turns out that sustainability has commercial value, although it is just not necessarily the value fashion marketing has led us to believe. Consumers may pay more when environmental improvements arrive alongside quality, design and credible production value. That is very different from assuming sustainable is itself a sufficiently desirable product.

Nobody wants an ugly handbag because its carbon footprint has impeccable morals. Fashion remains fashion.

What if I told you virtue is also a product

Researchers Vanessa Apaolaza and colleagues surveyed a representative sample of 600 Australian consumers about sustainable clothing. Turns out environmental concern mattered just as much as conspicuous consumption. In other words, sustainable clothing can have signalling value. Buying it can communicate something about the person buying it: I am environmentally conscious; I am one of the good ones. (Haven’t we heard that before?)

Even more interestingly, the interaction between conspicuous consumption and the belief that individual purchases make an environmental difference was the strongest effect in their model. Perceived greenwashing, meanwhile, reduced purchase intentions. Which brings me back to my original accusation. Sustainability is extremely marketable because it allows consumption to masquerade as restraint.

I mean, what a magic trick! You can now buy the new dress while simultaneously feeling virtuous about buying the new dress. It is capitalism’s way of selling you the sin and the absolution in the same transaction.

To be clear, that does not mean the sustainably produced dress is equivalent to the conventional one. If one requires fewer resources, it is objectively better for the environment. My objection is to the moral theatre around the transaction. Buying something with a lower environmental footprint is still buying something.

Nonetheless, the marketing department has worked overtime to rebrand this transaction as:

Conscious. Responsible. Green. Sustainable. Chic.

Sustainability has been marketed so aggressively that sustainability marketing itself can now make us trust it less. A 2026 study of 300 online fashion consumers in China found that perceived greenwashing significantly reduced green trust, while that trust was an important driver of green purchase intention and corporate image.

Pull down the business model’s pants

Fashion’s environmental problem takes on a different shape when the focus shifts from consumer behaviour to the economics behind it.

Imagine two companies:

• Brand A produces 100 dresses at £100 each and sells 90.

• Brand B produces 150 because manufacturing larger quantities lowers its unit cost. It sells 90 at full price, discounts another 40, and writes off the rest.

From a traditional commercial perspective, Brand B may still have made the rational decision if the additional margin and revenue outweigh the cost of unsold inventory. Environmentally, however, they have produced 50 extra dresses nobody originally demanded.

This is where I think the sustainability discourse loses the plot. If polluting is cheaper than not polluting, what exactly are we expecting businesses to do? The environmental cost of producing that additional garment is not necessarily reflected in its price. Economists call this a negative externality (or so I have been told).

This is why environmental economics tends to focus on changing incentives rather than hoping everybody becomes nicer. We make waste expensive, make pollution expensive, make durability economically valuable, make reuse profitable, make recycling technologically viable, and make companies responsible for the products they put into circulation. Then watch how quickly sustainability departments discover creativity.

Europe Would Like a Word

The European Union is moving towards Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, for textiles. The basic principle is straightforward: if you put clothing onto the market, you retain some financial responsibility for what happens when consumers are finished with it.

EU member states are expected to establish textile EPR schemes by 2028. Europe is simultaneously tightening rules around textile waste, separate collection and unsold inventory. Less than 1 per cent of textiles currently become new textiles, while estimates suggest Europe needs roughly €8bn-€11bn of investment to develop the sorting and recycling infrastructure necessary for a genuinely circular textile system.

That, my friends, is how you are supposed to do sustainability … if you must.

The EU has also begun banning large companies from destroying unsold apparel and footwear under its Ecodesign framework. The policy is not perfect, I admit it. To ban brands from destroying unsold clothes still leaves the prevailing question of why they made so much unwanted inventory in the first place. But if Rome wasn’t built in a day, I suppose sustainable fashion deserves at least a few years. The takeaway is that at least we have switched from the meaningless question of “Can we convince the consumer to make the ethical choice?” to “Can we change the economics that made the unethical choice profitable?”

Circularity only works if somebody can make money from the circle

Fashion talks about circularity like a moral awakening. Unfortunately, businesses still need to pay the bills.

A garment becomes interesting from an economic sustainability perspective when value can be extracted from it repeatedly. From sold to resold, to refurbished (with a few steps in between). Therefore, as a completely unqualified business advisor, I don’t think the opportunity is convincing consumers to stop consuming altogether (good luck getting my shopaholic self to subscribe to that). It is figuring out how to create more economic value from every physical product we produce.

Luxury is my argument’s golden child. The contemporary resale market increasingly treats fashion products as assets with residual value. Recent resale data show consumers searching for extremely specific seasons and designers rather than simply brands, while almost half of shoppers surveyed by The RealReal consider potential resale value before buying something new. Demand for vintage pieces more than 15 years old has risen sharply since 2020.

Which means that sustainability is becoming incidental. You don’t have to persuade someone: Please save this handbag because Mother Earth would appreciate it. You can tell them: Don’t destroy it. It’s worth £2,000.

This brings me back to Kisin, because this is where his economic argument intertwines with the fashion industry. The strongest environmental business models may ultimately be the ones that do not require consumers to care about the environment at all. The greenest decision becomes the economically rational decision… no sainthood required.

Kisin’s Achilles ' heel

Kisin’s argument goes too far when it implies that prosperity and environmental action exist on opposite sides of the equation. As an optimistic (though cynical) Gen Z, I think they don’t have to. The World Bank has explicitly argued that climate policy is not simply a choice between high-growth/high-carbon development and low-growth/low-carbon development. Existing technologies and efficiency improvements can reduce industrial energy consumption while preserving economic growth, and climate investment can produce benefits in health, energy security and productivity.

More importantly, poorer countries do not have the luxury of ignoring environmental damage. They are often more exposed to it. Recent World Bank analysis also argues that climate impacts already disproportionately hurt poorer populations and that delayed action threatens future poverty reduction. Climate change damages infrastructure, agriculture, health, and productivity… so the things economic development requires.

“Get rich first, clean up later” is not much of a development strategy if environmental degradation destroys part of the wealth you are trying to create.

There is also evidence that economic growth and emissions can eventually separate. Britain provides one example of absolute decoupling between economic growth and territorial carbon emissions. But (and this is an enormous but ) the same Office for National Statistics analysis notes that globally, GDP and emissions remained strongly coupled, while rich countries can effectively outsource carbon-intensive manufacturing to poorer economies.

The thing is, London can look wonderfully post-industrial while the shirt I’m wearing was spun, dyed, cut and sewn thousands of miles away. In other words, we cleaned up our backyard by moving the mess into someone else’s.

That is the part of the sustainability conversation I think my generation needs to become more grown-up about.

Before We Blame Capitalism for Everything…

The obvious counterargument to everything I have just written (and it is a good one) is that companies do respond to consumers. If millions of people stop buying something, businesses notice quickly. The willingness-to-pay research I mentioned earlier shows that environmental values can translate into higher valuations of circular products.

So no, individual action is not meaningless… it is just not as meaningful as we like to think. My issue is with confusing influence with responsibility. Consumers operate within markets whose choices have already been constructed for them. I am sorry to break it to you, but we cannot personally redesign the economics of global polyester production while standing in the Zara fitting room.

Consumer demand pushes; industry investment builds, and regulation can change the rules. Those are different forms of power, and pretending they are equivalent conveniently transfers responsibility towards the person with the least of it.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Yes, I know, you have a friend of a friend who runs their own local sustainable brand and “it is actually sustainable”. Well, if that were the case, they prove fashion can be more sustainable.

A brand producing fewer garments from lower-impact materials in renewable-powered factories, paying workers properly, designing for durability, and repairing products is clearly preferable environmentally to a company doing none of those things. I am not arguing otherwise. I am arguing that calling the resulting product sustainable can conceal the fact that it still required resources to exist.

I think that fashion needs to abandon sustainability as an absolute category or creative concept and start talking in measurements. How much carbon? What percentage was resold? What happened to unsold inventory?

For the love of God, not another one

If I have already made myself persona non grata among my generation, I might as well add creative directors and marketers to the list. Sustainability should not be a brand identity. It should be operational hygiene. Nobody launches a fashion company proudly announcing, “We comply with fire-safety regulations.” Congratulations. We would certainly hope so.

What I am saying is, let’s stop performing sustainability. Look, I don’t want to be sold a fantasy about being a “conscious consumer”. Its environmental costs should already be built into how the product was designed, manufactured, priced, and disposed of. And crucially, that transition cannot depend entirely on consumers developing perfect morals.

Yes, we as consumers should reward companies that are trying to be greener. But saving the planet cannot depend on everyone suddenly becoming a saint. This is where I think fashion should steal a page from Kisin’s argument: the environmental option becomes scalable when choosing it no longer feels like a sacrifice.

Tesla did not make electric cars culturally relevant by asking consumers to accept a miserable little vehicle as penance for industrialisation. Technologies scale when economics, regulation and performance begin working in their favour. Fashion should aspire to the same thing.

For years, fashion has told us that changing the world starts with changing what we buy. I think we have it backwards. In this scenario, it is not what you can do for fashion but what fashion can do for you as a consumer.

Stop asking consumers to save the planet one vintage Loro Piana shirt at a time and make sustainability the financially obvious choice instead. I fear we might be waiting a while if our environmental future depends on corporations choosing morality over profit.

So, to fashion schools and the industry at large: it is time to stop teaching businesses to have a conscience and start teaching them how to make sustainability make business sense.

In episode one of Fashion Goss, we use this controversial cover to unpack the mythology of the September Issue, the business that made it fashion’s most powerful publication, and how its influence has changed. From Anna Wintour and advertising millions to celebrity culture and the nepo baby debate, we ask what a Vogue cover actually means today… And, more importantly, who gets to have one.

Last week, I was catching up with a friend of mine at a riverside pub. What was meant to be a quick drink turned into a full-blown, four-hour story-time session.

I hadn’t seen her in about two months, and the last I had heard, she was dating this absolute disgrace of a man whom she was convinced was the crème de la crème.

I grew increasingly horrified as she added layer after layer to the story, repeatedly trying to convince her to run…immediately. Nevertheless, she assured me she was perfectly aware of his player behaviour and remained in full control of the situation. “She could walk away whenever she wanted”. “She was playing him just as much as he was playing her.”

As someone with commitment issues myself (to put it politely ), I knew she was in deep. I could see in her eyes the faintest hope that she was going to be the one to change him. Obviously, she was never going to voice that sentiment to me, a woman who had been campaigning for his removal from day one.

Fast-forward a couple of months and the situation ended exactly as I predicted: her heartbroken, him with a new girl as though nothing had happened. As much as I wanted to, I had the compassion not to say I told you so. She, in turn, had the courage to admit that she had been wrong about him.

To be completely honest, this article was originally going to be titled Why Intelligent Women Fall for Bullsh*t Men. Then I reassessed and made the editorial decision to go deeper. Because it isn’t really about the bullsh*t men. At the end of the day, any person has the right to be an asshole. What baffles me are the women who recognise the performance, and still develop this burning desire to become the exception to it.

Why?

This friend I am telling you about is gorgeous. She has a political science degree from a top UK university, a master’s from one of the best fashion schools in the world, an extensive CV and a blooming career in fashion PR. She comes from a great family, has stellar values, impeccable taste, and an incredible sense of humour (in her second language, might I add). All in all, the dream girl. So why on earth did she fall for this man's lies? Is the dating market really that doomed?

I don’t think this can be blamed entirely on the current state of the dating pool. The reason I consider myself relatively immune to unavailable men (and why, according to some friends, I might have accidentally turned into one myself) is that I grew up with a front-row seat to a version of this dynamic.

Which tells me two things: men have been coaxing women into variations of this situation for decades, and women have been willingly intrigued by the game for just as long.

My parents’ relationship is complicated, and it is not mine to disclose. All I can speak about is what I experienced as collateral damage. I want to make it very clear that my dad is an exemplary man and an outstanding father. But it is my understanding (and, to some extent, my experience) that he has been a lousy husband. Not because he cheated, but because my mother spent years in the position of believing that, eventually, she could change him.

My mother is one of the cleverest women I know. Yet when it comes to him, logic and reason seem to go straight out the window. So I arrived, once again, at the same infuriating question:

Why?!

I will take this opportunity to define what I mean by a bullsh*t man. He is not necessarily a bad person per se: not a cheater, nor an abuser. He is, however, a master at making you believe in your own fantasies. He builds castles out of smoke and gets you so emotionally invested that, every time one collapses, you somehow blame the weather. You forgive the senseless excuse, hand him your heart again, and hope that this time he has developed the emotional competence he has given you absolutely no evidence of possessing. Sound familiar?

I promised myself very young that I would never enter a situation like that, and I have remained faithful to that promise. In fact, I have taken it so far in the opposite direction that I have hurt both myself and other people. But this is not an article about my trauma. My point is that none of this is new.

So forget the men for a second. Why do otherwise rational women believe they can change men who have given them absolutely no indication that they intend to change?

Look, I am no psychologist, but I am a great journalist, which means that when an interest crosses my path, I investigate it relentlessly. Therefore, I present you with my unprofessional explanation.

The Seduction of the Red Flag

My first instinct was that there had to be something intoxicating about a difficult man. The chase, the uncertainty, the occasional crumb of affection delivered at the right moment. You know, all the things your friends tell you are red flags while you insist they are actually signs of a very complicated connection. “You don’t understand him as I do”.

Take my friend, for instance; she had read the terms and conditions and clicked accept anyway. So perhaps my analogy was wrong because intelligence was never the issue.

Knowing the game does not mean you cannot lose it

Psychologists C. Raymond Knee, Amy Canevello, Amber Bush and Astrid Cook have studied something called relationship-contingent self-esteem: essentially, the extent to which a person’s sense of self-worth becomes dependent on what is happening in their romantic relationship.

Across four studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people higher in relationship-contingent self-esteem experienced stronger fluctuations in self-esteem in response to everyday positive and negative relationship events. Interestingly, couples in which both partners scored higher on it reported greater commitment, but not greater satisfaction or closeness.

Which made me wonder whether the appeal of changing a man is not entirely about the man. There seems to be a delicious little ego trip buried inside the proposition. He doesn’t commit, but what if he changes for me?

Now we have a completely different story. If a lovely, emotionally available man chooses you, that is cute. If a man who supposedly chooses nobody chooses you? That feels like winning. Suddenly, his commitment does not simply prove that he loves you. It proves that there is something about you capable of producing a version of him nobody else managed to access.

This whole “I am special enough that he will want to change for me” fantasy leads me to a more uncomfortable question: why on earth are we letting the whims of emotionally immature men become a measure of our own worth?

Unfortunately, relationships actually can change people

Here is where psychology inconveniently ruins my perfectly good argument. There is actual evidence that romantic partners can help one another change. Stephen Drigotas, Caryl Rusbult, and their colleagues gave this the fabulous name the Michelangelo phenomenon. Their 1999 research found that close partners can help one another move towards their ideal selves by affirming the qualities and aspirations the other person already wants to develop.

It is clear to me that whoever came up with the name was a fellow art nerd. Michelangelo supposedly approached sculpture as though the figure already existed inside the marble and his job was to release it. The argument is that good relationships can work similarly.

Your partner sees the person you want to become, behaves towards you in ways that affirm that person and, over time, can help you move closer to it. Later research has continued to find evidence for this process.

Now, before you text your ex to give him one more chance, there is an important detail. The statue has to want to come out of the marble. The Michelangelo phenomenon is not I have personally decided what kind of man you should become and will now spend the rest of my life chiselling away until you comply. Supporting somebody’s own aspirations is very different from falling in love with a hypothetical future version of

And do not dare argue that “he says he is going to change.” Actions always speak louder than words, as my morally contradictory mother would say. More importantly, those actions have to come from him, not as the result of an hour-long nagging conducted by you. Remember, ladies, the goal is to find a partner, not successfully raise somebody else’s son.

Is it love or labour?

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild introduced the concept of emotion work to describe the management of feelings in private life, later developing the related idea of emotional labour in paid work. Subsequent research on intimate relationships has repeatedly found gendered patterns in who performs the work required to maintain emotional intimacy.

A qualitative study of young women in heterosexual relationships, for example, found that women often felt accountable for emotional care and described monitoring both their own feelings and the emotional climate of the relationship (although the researchers also found reciprocity in some couples)

In less academic language: someone has historically had to remember the birthday, ask what is wrong, initiate the difficult conversation, notice the mood, suggest therapy, repair the argument, and explain why replying “k” after a three-paragraph message might not constitute healthy communication.

In case you hadn´t guessed, historically, that someone has disproportionately been a woman. Maybe I can change him is simply the extreme romantic version of something women have been culturally trained to do: relationship maintenance.

Hollywood has some explaining to do

How many romantic narratives depend on a woman discovering that the terrible man is secretly wonderful? Beauty and the Beast barely bothered with metaphor. He is an actual beast.

Then there is Mr Big, Chuck Bass, Mr Darcy, Benjamin Berry, etc. Half the romantic heroes of the 2000s appear to suffer from the same mysterious condition whereby they are incapable of basic emotional communication until the correct woman appears.

He is difficult with everyone else. But soft with her. He was selfish, damaged, promiscuous, emotionally constipated, or some fabulous cocktail of all four. Then he fell in love. These movies raised me, for sure, but I was damn sure not to develop a saviour complex.

We don’t only romanticise the man’s transformation. We romanticise the woman’s role in causing it. Her patience meant something. Her suffering meant something. It is an extremely flattering story to tell women because it transforms tolerating terrible behaviour into evidence of extraordinary emotional depth.

Maybe he isn’t wasting your time; maybe he is just in need of that magical feminine touch.

The truth hiding inside the fantasy

Psychologists do distinguish between different beliefs people hold about how relationships work. Knee’s research on implicit theories of relationships separates what he calls destiny beliefs (the idea that two people are essentially meant to be or they aren’t) from growth beliefs. The belief that relationships can be cultivated and problems overcome through effort.

A recent longitudinal study following 904 couples for two years found that stronger growth beliefs were associated with a slower decline in relationship satisfaction. I know what my mother would say: relationships require work. People are imperfect; I know I am. Loving someone means accommodating change, conflict, and occasionally behaviour that makes you want to throw their phone (and them) into the Thames.

The problem begins when “relationships require work” becomes “this relationship would be wonderful if only this person were fundamentally different.” “We need to learn how to communicate better” needs to stop being code for “He currently doesn’t want a relationship, but I have prepared a five-year strategic plan”.

Even more interestingly, Knee and colleagues found that people with stronger growth beliefs could be more tolerant when their real partner differed from their ideal partner. In their studies, discrepancies between the partner someone had and the partner they ideally wanted were less strongly tied to dissatisfaction among people who believed relationships could be cultivated. I know nobody marries an Excel spreadsheet of their preferred characteristics. But I can also see how a perfectly healthy belief can become dangerous when stretched beyond recognition.

I wonder if we sometimes mistake emotional difficulty for emotional depth?

And then there is the ego

This is the explanation I keep coming back to because it is less YA novel-coded than blaming childhood trauma, attachment styles, or the state of the dating scene.

Ego, my friends.

There is something validating about imagining that somebody changed because you were worth changing for. If what happens in a relationship becomes entangled with how we evaluate ourselves, rejection isn’t merely disappointing. It can start feeling like information about our worth.

Essentially, if he chooses you, you win twice. You get the man, and you get proof that you were different from every woman who came before you. However, if he doesn’t choose you, your self-esteem is at risk. Was I not special enough? Was she prettier? Why did he commit to the next girl after telling me he wasn’t ready? You end up with his emotional development as your performance review.

Absolutely not, thank you.

Stronger than intelligence

So, why do intelligent women fall for Bullsh*t Men? I don’t think they fall for them because intelligence temporarily leaves the body. My friend knew exactly what she was dealing with. I would go as far as to argue that intelligence can even provide a sophisticated set of tools with which to explain away what we don’t want to accept.

Maybe intelligent women don’t fall for this performance because they fail to see through it. Sometimes we see through it so clearly that we become convinced we couldn’t possibly be fooled by it. My friend knew he was playing a game. She just thought knowing the rules meant she couldn’t lose.

I do admire women who fall in love carelessly, rather than approaching it with the calculation I do. Yes, they suffer, but my God, do they live. More importantly, I have come to realise that what I like to disguise as restraint is often just cowardice dressed up as good judgement. I might get my heart broken one day, but I hope I am brave enough to love as fearlessly as these women do. And to those who recognise themselves in me, perhaps we could do with remembering something too: no one dies of a broken heart.

Maybe, when love is at stake, we always end up losing one way or another.

So, can you change him?

Well, I hate to be that person who says it is complicated, but it is. Relationships change people. Psychology gives us plenty of evidence that partners can support one another’s growth and that believing in relationships is a definite sign of maturity.

Having said this, I think we have to stop asking the question men have told us to negotiate with our sense of self-preservation:

Can I change him?

And change it for one that not only ensures he becomes a better person, but that we become the women we ought to become:

Does he want to change himself?

There is something poetic about writing about the death of an artist who spent most of her career concerned with infinity. Yayoi Kusama died in Tokyo on August 14, aged 97. Her death was announced by her studio and museum on Thursday, with the Kusama-esque detail that she continued painting until her final days. A restlessness for creation that defines artists of her generation.

An artist’s death inevitably raises questions about what happens to the value of their work. It would be common sense that after death, the artist’s pieces increase in value due to scarcity. But at 97, after more than seven decades of working, Kusama leaves behind an enormous body of work and an equally large secondary market.

There are the early Infinity Nets, which already command millions. There are paintings, sculptures, and installations held by major institutions. Then there are thousands of prints, editions and pumpkins circulating at much lower price points, not to mention a commercial presence that has put her dots on everything from Louis Vuitton bags to keyrings.

Therefore, the interesting question is not whether Kusama’s market will rise after her death. That would treat an incredibly varied body of work as though it were one asset class. What interests me is how collectors will reassess that body of work now that it is complete. Her death may not make every Kusama more desirable, but it could make the distinctions between them much more important.

Before Kusama Became Kusama

The commercial machine can make it easy to forget just how unique Kusama’s career was. As someone who grew up wanting to become an artist myself, however, it was the improbability of her story that made me keep dreaming.

She was born in Matsumoto in 1929 and began experiencing hallucinations as a child: patterns, flowers and dots proliferating across her field of vision. Those experiences became the basis of the obsessive repetition that would eventually make her work instantly recognisable.

Then, in 1957, she left Japan for the United States. I think this part of the Kusama story deserves more attention than it gets. We are talking about a Japanese woman in her twenties leaving postwar Japan, entering an American art world overwhelmingly dominated by men and deciding she belonged in its avant-garde.

By 1958 she was in New York, producing the Infinity Net paintings and, soon after, soft sculptures, performances, happenings and mirrored environments. She developed what she called “self-obliteration”: the dissolution of the individual into endlessly repeated forms.

Her first Infinity Mirror Room appeared in 1965. Phalli’s Field used mirrors to multiply a room of red-spotted stuffed phallic forms into apparent infinity. The technology was relatively simple, which allowed her idea to shine through.

Kusama was working alongside the generation that would come to define postwar American art, yet her career never acquired the same institutional momentum as many of her male peers. She returned to Japan in 1973 and, from 1977, voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital while continuing to work from a nearby studio.

Then came one of the great second acts in modern art. In 1993, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale. It was not technically her first appearance in Venice (ina very Kuma style, she had staged an unauthorised intervention there in 1966). But the official Japanese pavilion consummated her as an institution in her own right. The Japan Foundation itself describes the exhibition as helping drive the international re-evaluation of her practice.

An artist who had been building mirrored environments since 1965 all of a sudden found herself with what looked like the perfect artwork for Instagram. Very convenient… and, as it turned out, very commercial.

Death Is Not a Business Plan

So, should collectors buy Kusama today? When it comes to art, I would be suspicious of anyone answering that question simply with: the artist is dead; therefore prices rise. Death only creates meaningful scarcity when scarcity did not already exist in the parts of the market collectors care about.

Kusama was prolific, extremely so. Her market contains paintings, drawings, prints, editions, sculptures, pumpkins, installations, multiples and commercial collaborations. At the lower end, ownership of something recognisably Kusama has been unusually accessible for an artist of her stature.

That accessibility has been enormously useful to her market. In 2021, for example, 750 Kusama lots sold at auction, generating $183.5mn, according to Artnet market data. The average sale price was about $245,000, but the range was extraordinary: the same market stretched from inexpensive multiples to an $8mn painting.

More recently, her market remained formidable. Kusama overtook David Hockney as the top-selling contemporary artist by auction turnover in 2023, generating $80.9mn from 51 works made after 2000.

Even in June this year, Phillips sold the 2013 painting INFINITY-NETS (MAE) for £1.548mn against an estimate of £800,000-£1.2mn. Another 2016 Infinity Net offered by Phillips sold for £990,500 against a £1mn-£1.5mn estimate.

“Kusama”, I would argue, cannot be treated as one market. There is Kusama the global brand, and there is Kusama the art-historical asset. Her death could widen the gap between them.

Not All Dots Are Created Equal

If I were buying Kusama with investment in mind, I would not be rushing towards whichever pumpkin happens to appear at auction next week. I would be looking backwards. The early Infinity Nets are the obvious candidates for increased collector attention because their scarcity is paired with historical significance. They document Kusama’s arrival in New York and the development of the obsessive visual language from which the rest of the empire emerged.

We must remember that scarcity alone does not make art valuable. My childhood drawings are extremely scarce, but Sotheby’s has yet to call my mom. My point is that serious collectors pay for scarcity attached to significance. The same argument applies to important 1960s sculptures, works with major exhibition histories, historically significant pumpkins, and exceptional works that connect directly to turning points in Kusama’s practice.

In contrast, the more mass-produced end of the market is different. Her prints, editions and multiples benefit enormously from the recognisability of the Kusama brand, and I would expect today’s news to generate speculative interest. But an artist dying does not magically make a large edition rare. I would go on to argue that this is the point where provenance becomes most important.

Pricing the Unpriceable

This, in my opinion, is the oddest piece in Kusama’s market. Her most famous works are arguably not her most expensive. Artnet noted in 2022 that no Infinity Room appeared among Kusama’s 100 highest auction prices in its database, despite the installations being among her most culturally recognisable works.

A unique 1993 Infinity Mirror Room, for instance, came to Sotheby’s in 2018 carrying an estimate of just $300,000-$400,000. That sounds bizarre until you remember what an Infinity Room requires: space, installation, conservation, operational management, etc.

The potential buyer pool is therefore narrower than it is for a painting. Nevertheless, in this scenario, auction price may be a poor way of measuring the economic value of these works. An Infinity Room can do something an Infinity Net cannot. It can sell tickets.

The Value of an Audience

When the Hirshhorn staged Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors in 2017, the exhibition helped push annual attendance past one million visitors for the first time in almost 30 years. The show subsequently travelled across North America to sell-out crowds.

The museum later acquired a reconfiguration of Kusama’s original Phalli’s Field. It already owned other Kusama works, but director Melissa Chiu explicitly pointed to the exhibition's impact when discussing the decision to acquire the room.

Then, in 2022, the Hirshhorn and Buffalo’s Albright-Knox jointly acquired Infinity Mirrored Room—My Heart Is Dancing into the Universe. Two major American museums sharing ownership of a single Kusama room tells you something about both the desirability and awkward economics of these installations.

A painting offers a relatively straightforward answer: take it to auction and see what someone is willing to pay. An Infinity Room refuses to play by the financial standards imposed by the market. A museum can hold one for decades without selling it once, while the work continues to attract visitors, sell tickets, drive memberships, and even become a destination in its own right.

Its economic value, then, cannot be measured solely by what it might fetch on the secondary market. Part of its value lies in the audience it can repeatedly create. An Infinity Room is better understood not as a trophy artwork, but as cultural infrastructure: an asset whose value grows through being experienced rather than exchanged.

Who Owns the Infinity?

Kusama’s death also raises a more technical question about installation art: what survives when the artist does not? A painting is, within reason, materially self-contained. An Infinity Room is not so 2 dimensional (pun intended). There is a certain irony in it: a work conceived to evoke infinity is made of materials with very definite lifespans.

Lights fail. Mirrors break. Electronics become obsolete. Rooms are dismantled and reconstructed. Components can require fabrication decades after the artist conceived the work. Phalli’s Field, for example, exists through authorised reconfigurations. The Hirshhorn’s version is one of three editions, with others at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and Fondation Louis Vuitton.

Therefore, the valuable object is not simply the pile of mirrors, timber, lights and fabric sitting in storage. It is the authorised artwork: the concept, physical components, certificate, installation specifications, provenance, edition status and institutional recognition that allow those materials to continue existing as a Kusama.

That makes stewardship after her death very important. Her studio, foundation, museum and galleries are now supporting more than a living artist’s practice. They are custodians of the rules governing a finite oeuvre. For installations, those rules can directly affect value.

That leaves a number of questions around what preserving a Kusama means. How faithfully must an Infinity Room be reconstructed, which components can be replaced, and who ultimately gets to authorise those decisions? Technology will inevitably become obsolete, materials will deteriorate, and some degree of replacement will become unavoidable. The line between conservation and recreation therefore becomes difficult to draw; and, for now, these are only some of the questions I am left with.

How Much Kusama Is Too Much Kusama?

She is almost too famous. Her visual cues are a language of their own beyond the art world: dots are Kusama, pumpkins are Kusama, mirrors are Kusama.

Louis Vuitton was one of the first brands that hopped in the Kusama vanwagon. But ubiquity creates an unusual challenge for the estate. The public-facing Kusama machine thrives on accessibility. Exhibitions, installations, merchandise, collaborations and editions have allowed people who will never spend £1mn on a painting to participate in the Kusama universe. That participation helps maintain demand at the top.

At the same time, trophy markets depend on hierarchy. If everything feels special, eventually nothing does. Thus, one of the most consequential financial decisions made after Kusama’s death may have nothing to do with auction houses. It will be how aggressively her image is commercialised from here. The estate will have to protect scarcity without destroying ubiquity.

An enviable problem, but still a problem.

Canonised in Her Own Lifetime

Female artists are often subjected to a patronising posthumous narrative. She was overlooked, but now we finally recognise her. Prices rise, and justice, conveniently measurable in dollars, has been served.

That is not Kusama’s story. She was overlooked. She was marginalised. Her international re-evaluation came decades after some of the men with whom she shared the New York avant-garde had already achieved canonical status. But Kusama had the unusual privilege of living long enough to see the correction.

By the final years of her life, she was not simply one of the most successful women artists in the market; she sat at its very top. Sotheby’s analysis of auction sales between 2018 and May 2025 places Kusama first among women artists by value, with more than $657mn in sales. Louise Bourgeois, whose market now commands extraordinary prices, never got to witness the same thing: her auction record of $32.8mn was set in 2023, more than a decade after her death.

That complicates the usual story of the overlooked female artist. What does it mean when recognition arrives late, but not too late?

The Market After Kusama

We must keep in mind that one auction result proves nothing in the big picture. The real test will come from patterns across the next several auction cycles.

Do early Infinity Nets begin attracting materially stronger bidding? Does the premium between historically significant works and later decorative examples widen? Do major paintings begin consistently clearing estimates? And, most interestingly, does Kusama’s market become more selective now that production has stopped?

Yesterday, a collector buying a Kusama existed in a market in which the artist was still producing. Today, every Kusama competes for attention inside a closed catalogue. Collectors can begin ranking the oeuvre with a finality that was impossible while she was alive… and markets love hierarchy. Slowly but surely the market will begin to decide which works represent Kusama the phenomenon and which represent Kusama the artist.

The great irony of Yayoi Kusama’s death is not simply that an artist obsessed with infinity has left behind a finite body of work. It is that the market must now put boundaries around it. For decades, Kusama multiplied herself: dots, nets, pumpkins, mirrors, rooms, products, exhibitions, images. Repetition was both her artistic language and, eventually, part of her commercial power.

Perhaps that was her greatest act of self-obliteration: she made herself so ubiquitous that the art world which once overlooked her could no longer imagine itself without her.

I got the idea from Keiko Fujimori’s smile.

Keiko Fujimori is the eldest daughter of the late former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, who governed the country from 1990 to 2000. Infamous for resigning from the presidency via fax from Japan, his government remains associated with corruption and alleged grave human-rights abuses. Safe to say that even before Keiko was judged for her own political mistakes, she was condemned for her father’s.

Even though she has been a fixture in Peruvian media for as long as I can remember, Fujimori has only recently assumed the presidency, taking office in the midst of a deeply divided nation. I have a distant memory of her as a confident, strong but pleasant-looking woman. However, in one of her recent appearances, particularly the one alongside Argentine president Javier Milei, something looked different to me.

Why was she smiling so much? I wondered. It looked almost painful.

As the thought crossed my mind, another followed: had I ever wondered the same about a male politician? Never. Politics is filled with men staring solemnly into the middle distance as though the weight of civilisation rests between their eyebrows. Nobody seems concerned that they aren’t smiling. I even remember once telling my dad (who is a public figure) to smile more because he came across as cold during interviews. He curtly answered that he was not a clown. He made me laugh; I hope we women can achieve that level of self-assertion one day.

Fujimori has operated for years under deeply tainted public opinion, which made me conclude that there must be some poor PR person screaming into her ear: Smile more. It will make you seem warm. Maternal.

I could almost hear their voices, and I was annoyed.

In a 2020 study, pertinently titled Leading or Cheer-Leading? The Gender Gap in Political Smiles, political scientist Sejin Koo analysed campaign posters from South Korea’s 2014 local elections. Using facial-recognition software to measure candidates’ smiles, Koo found that smiling had a powerful positive association with electoral performance among women running in multicandidate races. The same effect did not consistently appear for men.

Koo’s argument is interesting because the study suggests that, when voters have limited information with which to distinguish candidates, facial expressions can become shortcuts. A smile turns into a symbol of warmth, harmlessness, and approachability; qualities that carry all the more value when the person asking you for power is a woman.

Psychology argues that we tend to evaluate other people along two particularly stubborn dimensions: warmth and competence. In crude terms, we want to know whether somebody knows what they are doing and whether they are likely to use that ability against us.

The problem is that these characteristics have never been culturally gender-neutral. Women have traditionally been associated with warmth, kindness and cooperation. Leadership, meanwhile, has historically been associated with agency, assertiveness and dominance; your masculine energy, as pop culture would qualify it.

Psychologists Alice Eagly and Steven Karau formalised this tension through role congruity theory in 2002. They argued that prejudice towards female leaders can emerge from the perceived mismatch between what society expects from a woman and what it expects from a leader.

A woman can therefore be penalised for failing to appear sufficiently leader-like, only to encounter resistance when she behaves exactly as a traditional leader is supposed to behave.

How lovely, as if being an ambitious woman was not hard enough.

A woman must be authoritative, but not aggressive. Ambitious, but not ruthless. Warm, but not unserious. Feminine, but never frivolous. Attractive enough for her appearance to be deemed acceptable, but ideally not so attractive that we start discussing it instead of her policies.

And don’t forget to smile, darling!

Hillary Clinton is the poster-child case study for what happens when a woman lands on the wrong side of that equation. By the time she ran for president in 2016, proving competence should theoretically have been the easy part. She had been a US senator, secretary of state, first lady, and lawyer. Yet the criticism that followed Clinton for decades was not that she lacked ambition or knowledge. It was that she was cold. Calculating. Robotic. Unlikable. The word likability became comically (and denigratingly) attached to her candidacy.

Psychologists Sarah Gervais and Amy Hillard tested this contrast through perceptions of Clinton and Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee whose political persona leaned much more visibly into conventional femininity. Their research found Clinton was perceived as less traditionally feminine and less warm than Palin, while Palin was perceived as less competent than Clinton.

There it is.

Clinton: competent, but insufficiently warm.

Palin: warmer and more conventionally feminine, but insufficiently competent.

Somewhere between the two exists the perfect female politician, but nobody has yet provided coordinates. Except there is no universal formula. Take Taiwan’s former president Tsai Ing-wen. Tsai became Taiwan’s first female president in 2016, operating in a political environment that, like much of East Asia, had historically been heavily male-dominated. Instead of building her image around conventional maternal femininity, Tsai became known for an unusually restrained political persona.

Her relationship with femininity was not static either. Research published in the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies examined the creation of Tsai’s unlikely social-media persona as 辣台妹 — roughly, “hot Taiwanese girl” — which reframed a politician known for restraint as defiant and distinctly Taiwanese.

By her 2020 re-election campaign, the image had shifted again. Amid worsening tensions with China, analysis of Tsai’s political imagery found her increasingly photographed in suits, military settings and alongside soldiers. More conventionally feminine garments and colours became less prominent as her campaign presented a commander-in-chief capable of standing up to Beijing.

This complicates the idea that women simply need to appear warmer. What if the political environment demands the opposite? A woman may need to smile to make authority more palatable, but she may also need to strip warmth from her image to prove she can exercise authority at all.

What these examples reveal is not the absence of a successful formula, but the expectation that women must find one at all. Female authority still seems to require a careful calibration between femininity and power. A negotiation their male counterparts don’t need to perform.

Margaret Thatcher played the image game beautifully. Her political image became extraordinarily controlled: structured suits, pearls, immaculate hair and the handbag that eventually became so synonymous with her political force that “handbagging” entered British political vocabulary. She did not erase femininity to acquire authority, but constructed a version of femininity that could accommodate it.

Even her voice was subject to modification. Before becoming prime minister, Thatcher underwent vocal coaching that helped lower her pitch and slow her delivery. The transformation fascinates me because it demonstrates that when it comes to political gender performance, fashion might fall short. When it comes to women, authority had an appropriate tone of voice too.

Angela Merkel, in contrast, pursued the inverse strategy. During her 16 years as German chancellor, her wardrobe became so consistent that it stopped making news: trousers, sensible shoes and essentially the same blazer reproduced in every Pantone colour available to the German government.

A different approach, but a clever one. If you wear approximately the same thing every day for 16 years, eventually people become bored of talking about it. It does make me wonder whether this strategy suited her personality better, or whether political authority demanded it at the expense of some of her femininity.

Male politicians, of course, have enjoyed the luxury of a uniform for as long as suits have been around. Barack Obama once caused an actual political controversy by wearing a tan one, which goes to tell just how little room for sartorial scandal menswear normally provides. But otherwise, a man can spend an entire political career alternating between navy and charcoal suits without anyone asking what his wardrobe evolution tells us about his emotional state.

The male suit is politically invisible, so to speak.

We women have not been so lucky as to inherit such a neutral uniform. We have to manufacture one, which can be liberating but also the target of endless debate.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez flips the debate entirely: why should femininity have to disappear for authority to appear?. The US congresswoman belongs to a completely different political-media generation from Thatcher or Merkel. Rather than attempting to make femininity disappear, she has at times done the opposite. Red lipstick, hoop earrings, fashion and beauty are acknowledged instead of treated as embarrassing distractions from serious political life.

Social media makes that strategy easier. A politician no longer has to wait for a newspaper columnist to explain what her lipstick means. She can open her phone and tell several million people herself. As a matter of fact, if I were a politician, I would see which makeup brands aligned with my political views and land sponsorships with them. Campaign financing solved.

Jokes aside, it represents a meaningful transfer of power. The question no longer has to be: How do I stop the voters from discussing my femininity? It should become: If the public is going to discuss it anyway, why should we let them decide what my femininity is allowed to look like?

And the timing is perfect to ask this question. We are entering an internet increasingly populated by synthetic faces, AI-generated copy, PR-approved personalities and people who seem to have been media-trained before they learnt to walk. What if personality becomes the winning card in an increasingly cookie-cutter political world? If anything, it begs the question: why should powerful women continue turning themselves into Stepford-wife versions of political acceptability?

This is where Kamala Harris becomes the most interesting exhibit of all. Harris’s laugh became a recurring political object during her national campaigns: clipped from speeches, circulated online, mocked by opponents and treated as evidence of character. The irony of the former examples becomes almost comical. Clinton’s insufficient warmth could be evidence that she was cold, and now Harris’s visible enjoyment could be evidence that she was unserious.

Fujimori smiles uncomfortably, and I wonder whether it is manufactured. Harris laughs, and the public decides there is too much of her personality. If all politicians are performing, why are women still working from a different script?

Fujimori, Clinton, Palin, Tsai, Thatcher, Merkel, Ocasio-Cortez and Harris have not failed to discover some magical formula for female political likability. They have each been negotiating the same absurd premise: that a woman’s authority must be accompanied by a second performance explaining what kind of woman she is while exercising it.

That second performance has a cost. Feminist sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called the management of emotional expressions required by certain jobs emotional labour. She was not writing about politicians, but the concept is difficult not to think about here.

Appearing warm is work. Smiling is work. Softening disagreement is work. Projecting authority while ensuring that authority does not read as hostility is work. It becomes a round-the-clock performance, especially when it does not come naturally to you.

Which brings us back to Koo’s South Korean study. Her research suggested that, under particular electoral conditions, this emotional performance can produce measurable benefits for female candidates.

I have started thinking of it as the smile tax.

Men pay their own political taxes, of course. Politics, as I have insinuated, is one enormous theatre of gender performance. Having grown up close to it, I can attest to the rituals: men roll up their sleeves to demonstrate that they have just discovered manual labour, loosen their ties to become men of the people, and wear hard hats in factories where nobody has asked them to operate machinery.

The thing is, the qualities traditionally expected of men already resemble the qualities traditionally expected of leaders.

A stern man can look serious. A stern woman can look cold.

An assertive man can look decisive. An assertive woman can look calculating.

This does not mean voters automatically punish women for displaying authority. Of course, there is no single rule for how voters respond to women in power. What reads as authoritative in one political context might read as cold in another, and the same femininity that benefits one candidate might undermine another. The root problem predates any single election. Our template was constructed during centuries in which political authority overwhelmingly looked male.

Women inherited power, but we have yet to inherit its visual language.

This is why I keep returning to Keiko Fujimori’s smile. I still think it looks performative, if I am being honest. But I am no longer particularly interested in deciding whether it is. I am interested in why I expected her facial expressions to tell me something about her suitability for power in the first place.

A dark suit on a male politician does not usually strike us as costume. A deep voice does not register as styling. A serious expression is simply what power looks like. Perhaps that is the ultimate privilege women have yet to be afforded: to perform power so conventionally that nobody recognises it as a performance.

Clinton tried competence. Thatcher engineered authority. Merkel neutralised the wardrobe. Tsai adapted femininity to circumstance. Ocasio-Cortez claimed it on her own terms. Harris discovered that even laughter can become a political disadvantage.

Different countries. Different generations. Different ideologies. But women are still calibrating.

Thus, after spending an unreasonable amount of time thinking about Keiko Fujimori’s enthusiastic smile, I no longer think the relevant question is why powerful women need to smile so much. I want to know what would happen if they stopped trying to make us comfortable with their power at all.

Trigger warning: This article contains talk of EDs

My first love has always been art, although throughout my life it has worn many faces. The earliest was ballet.

It was also, by far, my most toxic relationship.

Unlike painting, which has been equally all-consuming but considerably kinder, ballet and I fought. It gave me the bare minimum and somehow convinced me I was never enough. I spent years desperately trying to please it and, like any truly toxic first love, the more I gave, the more it seemed to demand.

In hindsight, I know it was not entirely ballet’s fault. I was an obsessive, impressionable teenager operating under unrealistic expectations, and ballet provided an exceptionally fertile environment for all of that to flourish. By 18, I had had enough. I broke up with it for good. It had taxed my body and my mind in more ways than I cared to admit, and cutting it out of my life felt like the only sensible thing left to do.

So why, in the name of God, would I ever go back?

Excellent question. I don’t have a rational answer beyond "it was calling my name."

I have always been very active. After ballet, I took up running and other forms of exercise that kept my body moving, but something remained missing. It felt as though I had locked away an entire part of my personality and thrown away the key. Seeing ballet was strangely painful. It was like running into an ex you swore you were over and discovering that your stomach still drops when you smell his perfume.

Except worse. Ballet was the one that got away.

There is something bizarre about sports in general, but ballet in particular. You can dedicate fifteen years of your life to mastering something: your afternoons, weekends, body, vocabulary, friendships, ambitions; and then, unless you pursue it professionally, one day you simply... stop.

Apparently this is called growing up.

We spend childhood being encouraged to become obsessed with things and adulthood being told to become realistic about them. Passions become hobbies, hobbies become things we “used to do”, and we lose little pieces of ourselves in the name of becoming sensible.

Four years after quitting, my mind might have moved on, but my body apparently had not. If it could talk, it would have been screaming for the movement. Yes, I am fit. I had kept some of my flexibility. But I missed the very specific freedom ballet gives you: throwing yourself into the air and trusting that your body knows what to do; twisting it into shapes that look almost unnatural; demanding more from it than the average person ever will. Ballet gives you an extraordinary contradiction: control in pursuit of complete freedom. I missed seeing a movement and having the confidence that my body could reproduce it.

Then, because I am a firm believer that anything you think about incessantly eventually manifests itself into your life, ballet found me.

I was at a Megaformer class (all the rage among London’s It girls, by the way) with a new instructor. At the end, she asked whether I had danced. I told her that, in another lifetime, I had trained almost professionally. She told me I should start again and offered to sign me up for a free class at a dance studio she was affiliated with.

I signed up.

Back to the barre

The week before the class, I was terrified.

I started stretching incessantly, which was probably my first indication that the old relationship dynamics had not disappeared entirely. My fitness was good, but nothing is quite like actually dancing. I knew I had lost flexibility. I wondered whether I would still pick up choreography quickly. My flatmate assured me it would be “like riding a bike: you never forget.”

I thought she was delusional.

More importantly, there was another question I wasn’t ready to answer: what if the reason I walked away from ballet in the first place came back?

Until now, I have kept that reason deliberately vague.

Ballet became the catalyst for one of the hardest periods of my adolescence: my eating disorder. For years, I blamed the art form itself. I resented it enough that cutting all ties felt necessary. Distance has made that relationship more complicated.

Ballet was not solely to blame. It absolutely pulled a trigger, but I also know myself better now. I am obsessive. I am a perfectionist. When I feel out of control, my instinct is to search for something I can control and pursue it relentlessly. Had ballet not provided the outlet, something else might have.

I don’t particularly enjoy talking about that period of my life unless there is a reason to. I have no interest in turning the worst thing that happened to me into the most interesting thing about me. It isn’t. My life since has been far more interesting.

But it matters here because disordered eating remains painfully intertwined with ballet and other aesthetic sports.

The complicated reality is that the pressure does not always need to come from somebody standing in the corner telling you to lose weight. Ballet gives you mirrors. Lots of them. You spend hours studying your own body while surrounded by other bodies, all attempting to create the same illusion of effortlessness. It becomes easy for a perfectionist mind to turn technique into aesthetics and aesthetics into an endless list of if-onlys.

This time, however, I was returning at 22, not 15. I trusted that I had grown enough to recognise those thoughts without allowing them to run the show.

Then I arrived at the studio (Danceworks on Bond Street). I felt immediately at home. Classical music floated through the building. Dancers wandered around in that strange assortment of clothes that makes sense only inside a studio. Even the slightly rustic infrastructure reminded me of Danza Viva, the studio in which I grew up dancing.

For all the damage associated with those years, ballet shaped an enormous part of the woman I became. There are few places where I feel more instinctively at home than somewhere between hairspray, tights and tutus (a painting studio might be the only exception).

I had booked an intermediate class from two until four: barre, centre, adagio, the whole ordeal. I put on a leotard I had owned since I was 14 and felt an embarrassing wave of reassurance when it fit. See? You still belong here. It took a second for the adult part of my brain to interrupt: what business does a 22-year-old woman have deriving validation from fitting into her teenage ballet clothes?

Ah. There she was. Ballet had wasted absolutely no time.

Still, I looked the part. I had fifteen years of classical training somewhere inside me. It was my first class in four years. I promised myself I would give my body some grace.

Then I walked into the studio.

Everyone looked incredibly fit, not only young women, but dancers of all ages. Their bodies carried the subtle evidence of years of training: rotated hips, extraordinary posture, effortlessly toned arms.

Retired dancers, I decided.

Then I noticed a couple of girls whose bodies immediately brought me back to a place I knew too well. It felt like cold water. I cannot know what somebody else is going through simply by looking at them, and I no longer want to view every thin body through the lens of my own history. But the moment still confronted me with the fear I had carried into the room: that returning to something I loved might also mean returning to the environment in which I had once learnt to hurt myself.

For a moment, I felt sad. Not only for the girl I had been, but for how easily an art form capable of creating so much beauty can become tangled with ideas about what a body ought to look like.

Then the music started, and I stopped thinking.

The strange freedom of absolute control

That is the thing about ballet: it demands everything.

Not in the passive, clear-your-mind way meditation does. Ballet clears your mind because there is simply no room left in it.

Long neck. Shoulders down. Lengthen the arm. Relax the hands. Breathe. Ribs in. Engage the core. Pelvis in. Breath. Rotate the legs. Straight knees. Point the feet. Don’t roll the supporting foot. Breathe. And smile, for God’s sake!

Repeat the mental checklist above.

It sounds exhausting. To an overthinker, it is heaven. For two hours, my brain had only one job: inhabit my body completely. My very wise flatmate was right; it was like riding a bike.

The vocabulary returned first. Then the coordination. Then the second-nature instinct that tells you where your arm should be without needing to look at it. I was rusty, obviously. Some combinations humbled me considerably. But underneath four years of dust, the dancer was still there.

I had spent years thinking I had abandoned her. Apparently, she had just been waiting.

The second affair

So I went back the following week, and then again.

For the past two weeks, I have been taking two ballet classes a week, stretching every day and continuing my normal training. I have given myself four months to regain as much of my former technique as possible and, eventually, return to pointe.

I realise this sounds exhausting. But when you grow up training every day, this does not feel extreme. It feels familiar.

I am under no illusion that this story ends with me becoming a prima ballerina. That isn’t the point. I simply missed dancing.

My life is already deeply creative, but dancing accesses something different. Your body becomes the instrument, the material, and the storyteller all at once. And ballet itself contains everything I love about art: music, costume, history, language, performance, storytelling. It is culture expressed through flesh and movement.

This time, though, I get to play with it.

I get to dress for class because it is fun. I get to read about ballet because I am keen. I get to obsess over improving a movement because executing it correctly feels incredible; not because I need a solo, a competition result, or somebody else’s approval.

I am still disciplined. I still want to improve. I would be lying if I claimed I had suddenly become wonderfully whimsical about the whole thing.

The difference is that the ambition belongs to me now. I dance because I love how it feels to dance.

Somewhere in all of this, I have met the girl who first fell in love with ballet again. I am glad she is still there. She is probably the reason I missed it so desperately. She still wants to push too hard sometimes, still confuses perfection with success, still has the occasional irrational thought.

Only now she doesn’t get to make all the decisions. There is an adult in the room. Growing older can be deceptive. Because we inhabit ourselves every day, change rarely feels dramatic. You look in the mirror and feel essentially like the same person you were yesterday. Then, every once in a while, you return to a place you haven’t visited in years and meet an earlier version of yourself there.

Ballet reminded me how far I have come.

I wish my 15-year-old self could have watched that first class. Not because my extensions were impressive, but because she would have seen that eventually the things consuming her would stop feeling quite so enormous. That she would grow up. That she would build the life she dreamed about. And, most importantly, that one day she could return to the thing she loved without needing to destroy herself for it.

There is something deeply romantic about returning to what you loved as a child and discovering that it still belongs to you. I encourage you to revisit something you once abandoned. Not because you need to become who you once were. Do it so you can see everything it took to become who you are now.

As for ballet and me? We are officially seeing each other again.

I shall report back.

I am no financial adviser, and certainly no finance bro, yet I find myself following Shein’s IPO as if it were the hottest reality show of the moment. Then again, maybe it is.

We have money, politics, questionable relationships, several failed attempts at commitment and, after being rejected by New York and London, what appears to be a third-choice suitor in Hong Kong. All that is missing is a “pull-aside for a chat” and someone throwing a drink.

Beyond the drama, though, I find Shein’s predicament fascinating. This is a company that was valued at $98.2bn in 2022, seemed practically engineered to dominate the way my generation shops, and made traditional fast fashion look, well, slow. Now, as it prepares to convince public investors of its worth, the cracks in that seemingly indestructible model are becoming considerably easier to see.

And the irony is almost too good.

Shein built its empire by understanding that the modern consumer is fickle. We want more, faster, cheaper, and newer. We fall in love with an aesthetic on Monday and declare it embarrassing by Friday. Shein did not fight that behaviour; it industrialised it.

Now the company has to ask investors for something it spent years training its own customers not to give: long-term commitment. Suddenly, I was invested. Financially? No comment. Emotionally? Embarrassingly so. Because underneath the IPO numbers sits a much more interesting question: has Shein become a victim of the consumer it helped create?

The financial gossip

Shein is expected to make its Hong Kong stock-market debut on August 28, according to Reuters. The company has been marketed to investors at a valuation of roughly $30bn–$40bn, although the Financial Times has reported investor interest at valuations below $30bn. An obscene amount of money, until you remember investors valued it at $98.2bn in 2022.

The numbers explain some of the comedown. Net profit peaked at $3.4bn in 2024 before falling to roughly $2bn in 2025, while its net profit margin dropped from 8.7 per cent to 4.9 per cent. Earlier this year, Shein slipped into a $99mn quarterly loss, although a $328mn accounting charge played a significant role in that figure.

More concerning for investors is growth. Shein’s revenue rose 41.1 per cent in 2023 and 20.7 per cent in 2024; Coresight Research expects growth of only around 2 per cent in 2025. Annual active customers increased from 230mn to 273mn, but those customers continued ordering only around four times a year. Therefore, as far as I understand, while Shein is still getting people through the door, it is not necessarily persuading them to stay for another drink.

Acquiring those people is becoming expensive. Shein spent $1.43bn on marketing in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up from $1.09bn a year earlier. For a company whose growth once appeared almost supernatural, investors are discovering that the magic trick has a media budget.

Hong Kong was not exactly the dream suitor

Hong Kong, incidentally, was not Shein’s first choice. It was more like the third guy on the roster. The company originally pursued New York, before political scrutiny of its Chinese supply chain made an American listing increasingly difficult. It then turned to London, but that effort also stalled. Chinese regulators finally approved a Hong Kong listing last month.

The geographical tour is revealing. Shein was founded in China, moved its headquarters to Singapore and sells to customers in roughly 160 countries, but its extraordinary supply chain remains deeply dependent on southern China. Attempts to diversify have demonstrated exactly how difficult that machinery is to replicate. Shein tried to establish Vietnam as a major export base, leasing warehouse space equivalent to about 21 football pitches near Ho Chi Minh City. By mid-2026, it had drastically scaled the operation back as suppliers struggled to reproduce the speed, flexibility, and economics of its Chinese manufacturing network.

For years, Shein made geography feel almost irrelevant to the shopper. Somewhere, someone could manufacture the top currently appearing on your For You page and have it heading towards your bedroom before the trend died.

Then geopolitics rudely reminded everyone that clothes do, in fact, come from somewhere. The US ended the de minimis exemption that had allowed low-value parcels to enter duty-free, while Europe has also tightened its treatment of cheap e-commerce imports. The direct-from-factory model that helped make a £5 top economically possible is suddenly encountering governments that would quite like their borders back.

That makes the Hong Kong listing more than a change of venue. It exposes the identity Shein has spent years trying to manage: global-facing, Singapore-headquartered, but still fundamentally reliant on a Chinese industrial ecosystem. Turns out you can move headquarters more easily than you can move an entire supply chain.

Shein never sold fashion

This is where I think the financial story becomes a fashion story (my type of story). Shein’s great innovation was not the £5 top. Cheap clothes existed long before it. It was turning fashion into a feed.

Traditional fashion worked through prediction. Designers and buyers made large bets months before consumers entered stores. Zara famously accelerated that system. Shein pushed it towards something closer to real-time experimentation: launch enormous numbers of styles in small initial quantities, collect behavioural data, rapidly reorder what works and discard what does not.

A garment effectively becomes an A/B test. Instead of waiting for brands to tell us what the season looked like, we were offered an effectively endless stream of options responding to whatever aesthetic happened to be circulating online.

Fashion behaved like content, and content has one fundamental problem: yesterday’s is practically prehistoric.

The consumer Shein created

Shein did not invent short attention spans, but it built an extraordinarily successful business around them. Its model rewards experimentation without attachment. A cowboy phase? £7. Mermaidcore? £9. Office siren lasted three weeks? Financial damage minimal.

The customer does not need to decide who she is. She can simply order whoever she feels like being on Tuesday.

There is something liberating about that, particularly for young consumers without luxury budgets. Fashion has always been a tool for identity experimentation; Shein dramatically lowered the entry price.

Nevertheless, the same system also lowers the cost of abandonment. That becomes a fascinating problem when applied to the platform itself. Temu understood the same psychology. TikTok Shop increasingly collapses discovery and purchase into the same interface. Amazon has been pushing further into low-cost e-commerce. Shein no longer has exclusive ownership of the dopamine loop it helped perfect.

The consumer has been trained exceptionally well, but as any fashion girl knows, she has kept her options open.

From disruptor to incumbent

This is the part I suspect matters most to investors. Shein spent years benefiting from being the thing disrupting everybody else. Now it has become large enough to experience the much less glamorous side of success: being the incumbent.

At nearly 300mn annual active customers, finding another hundred million people is harder than finding the first hundred million. Regulations designed around the consequences of ultra-fast e-commerce begin catching up. Competitors copy your innovations. Marketing becomes more expensive. Growth percentages become less exciting simply because the denominator has become enormous.

I think this is not necessarily evidence that Shein is dying. Far from it. I think it is evidence that Shein may be becoming mature.

Unfortunately, “mature” is not the sexiest word to put into an IPO deck when your previous valuation was built partly on the assumption that you would continue growing like a teenager with access to somebody else’s credit card.

One investor who reviewed Shein’s recent financials told Reuters that the company was, at its core, still “a supply chain company”. Others questioned whether expanding Shein’s portfolio of in-house brands offered enough of a new growth engine. Morgan Stanley, one of the banks sponsoring the IPO, reportedly estimated a fair value range of $39bn–$52bn based partly on projected earnings and comparisons with Inditex and H&M.

It seems the great disruptor is increasingly being valued against the companies it was supposed to make look obsolete. Maybe karma is also a thing when it comes to finance.

Can Shein become a brand?

As someone who works building brands, I perceive another problem hidden inside all this. I know what Zara looks like. I know what Miu Miu looks like. I know what Jacquemus looks like. Even H&M, for all its breadth, has spent decades constructing a recognisable retail identity.

What does Shein look like?

That question is almost beside the point within its original model. Shein did not need one aesthetic because its competitive advantage was offering all of them. It became extraordinarily good at responding to desire without necessarily creating desire itself.

Brands create attachment. Platforms create convenience. A strong brand can convince someone to buy something they did not know they wanted because they want access to the world surrounding it. A platform wins because it makes finding something she already wants easier, cheaper, or faster.

The second relationship is powerful but considerably easier to replace.

This may explain why Shein is now highlighting the potential of its own brand portfolio to investors. The next phase of growth cannot depend indefinitely on being the fastest machine responding to everybody else’s ideas.

At some point, Shein may need consumers to want Shein, not simply something from Shein.

The fast-fashion paradox

Unfortunately, for the sustainability lovers, none of this means Shein’s model has failed. In fact, it succeeded so spectacularly that much of fashion now operates more like Shein than it did before Shein.

Trend cycles have accelerated. Brands monitor social data relentlessly. Drops arrive faster. Product testing has become more responsive. E-commerce increasingly resembles entertainment. Even luxury houses now think about how quickly a runway moment can become a purchasable object.

Shein won part of the argument, but at what cost, I wonder.

The company optimised fashion for immediacy at exactly the moment public markets are asking it to demonstrate durability. Now it needs to convince investors that those same consumers will remain loyal while competitors offer the same dopamine elsewhere.

That is why I find the IPO much more interesting than its eventual share price. It is testing whether a company built around permanent newness can itself become a lasting institution.

The next chapter of Shein cannot simply be faster Shein. It needs either deeper loyalty, stronger brands, greater margins, or another growth engine altogether.

In other words, Shein has reached the stage every commitment-phobe eventually dreads. The situationship worked brilliantly. Now someone wants to know where this is going.

I Want You to Be Happy came to me via a TikTok recommendation, which might sound like a pathetic way to discover literature, but is remarkably on-brand with the book itself. I am not entirely sure I would call it a love story, but if it is one, it is a love story set very much in the real world. I am rarely drawn to realism unless it is exceptionally done and has something slightly disruptive to say; and this book manages both.

There is something guiltily delicious about reading two people fall for each other. It makes you giddy, sends you rummaging through the archives of your own romantic history, and then, very rudely, holds up a mirror. The messages, the overthinking, the choreographed indifference when you care far too much; it is all uncomfortably familiar. I Want You to Be Happy is warm-hearted while exposing just how ridiculous otherwise intelligent adults can become when romance is involved, and how often we manage to become our own worst enemy.

So, naturally, I had thoughts. Here are five of them ( with some spoilers)

1. Is love the key ingredient to creativity?

Both characters are writers, and although we are never actually shown their work, I must confess I spent the first half of the book assuming neither was particularly good at it. They write sporadically, almost on a whim, without ever seeming truly consumed by their craft. I have always believed that creativity requires a certain degree of obsession. Inspiration may come and go, but if you love what you do, you keep returning to it anyway.

Curiously, after the two meet, they both begin writing again. Separately, they describe finding in the other a renewed sense of peace and inspiration that allows them to create. And this made me wonder: how important is love to the creative process?

Perhaps love does not inspire so much as create the emotional space in which inspiration can exist. There is something creatively liberating about feeling understood by another person. I assume it might be that the energy previously spent searching for connection can be redirected towards making something.

But then, does it have to be romantic love? Could friendship, family, or simply feeling deeply connected to another person produce the same effect? And how profound must that connection be? Do we actually need love to create, or merely the emotional intensity of desire? Perhaps creativity does not require love at all, but rather to feel something strongly enough that keeping it inside becomes more difficult than turning it into something else.

2. The fear of a mediocre life

Joey is in her twenties, working as a barista and carrying the enormous professional expectations that make an ordinary life feel threatening. Beneath her dreams sits an impending sense of doom: what if nothing great actually happens? What if she wakes up at 30 and has nothing remarkable to show for herself?

Chuck, at 35, almost feels like the personification of that fear. He earns decent money and has built a functional life, but works a job he finds mediocre and has largely abandoned his dreams because pursuing them became too inconvenient. And yet, compared with Joey, he is considerably more stable. He has money, security and the infrastructure of adulthood that she is still struggling to build.

It made me think about how frighteningly close comfort and complacency can sit beside each other.

The fear of mediocrity seems so acute in your twenties, when life still feels full of theoretical possibilities. You could become anything, live anywhere, build something extraordinary. But possibility comes with an implication: eventually, you have to find out which of those imagined lives will never happen.

So why do people settle? I think very few actually decide to. I think it happens incrementally. A dream becomes impractical, then postponed, then something you used to want. Meanwhile, stability begins to look increasingly attractive. We become very good at renaming the compromises we make: giving up becomes “being realistic”; fear becomes “security”; a life we never imagined for ourselves becomes “comfortable.”

Who gets to decide what constitutes a mediocre life? Is Chuck’s life mediocre because it fails to satisfy him, or because it fails to resemble the culturally prescribed version of success? Maybe the more frightening possibility isn’t waking up at 30 having achieved nothing remarkable. Maybe it’s achieving everything you were told should make you happy and discovering that somewhere along the way you stopped wanting it.

3. Social norms are stupid

How many times have we all thought, I’ll text him later; I don’t want to seem too keen? God forbid the person you like discovers that you do, in fact, like them.

The book portrays these little rituals with painful bluntness, and it made me wonder how much actual, tangible time we waste performing indifference. We wait an hour to reply because they waited two. It’s as if romantic interest were a balance sheet and showing too much affection might send us into insolvency.

It is ridiculous. Worse, we all seem to know it is ridiculous and continue doing it anyway. What we call modern dating etiquette is really just collective self-preservation. If I never appear to care too much, then rejection can never humiliate me too much. Nonchalance has become emotional insurance. The problem is that protecting ourselves from rejection also requires protecting ourselves from sincerity.

Is this part of why we romanticise the “great loves” of previous generations? Perhaps people did not necessarily love more deeply then. We simply inherited the letters, grand gestures, and stories of those who were reckless enough to admit that they cared; and we were left with the receipts. It is such a pathetic contradiction for modern romance: people want intimacy while doing everything possible to conceal how desperately they want it.

4. So, older men are not the solution?

Are older men really the solution? Asking for a friend, obviously.

Even one of my favourite business gurus recently argued that women are unlikely to become seriously wealthy unless they are in an age-gap relationship. In my own life, I have seen enough anecdotal evidence to understand the appeal. My concern has always been different: why is this older man looking for someone significantly younger in the first place? And, perhaps more ominously, why aren’t women his own age interested?

Chuck beautifully destroys the “older-guy” fantasy. He is 35 and, to Joey, that age initially reads as a credential in itself. Older means established. Older means experienced. Older means he surely knows what he wants. Except he doesn’t. He is 35 years old and still managing to find himself in a situationship. At some point, surely, ambiguity stops being mysterious and starts becoming an administrative failure.

An older man has had more time to become emotionally intelligent, financially secure, and certain of himself. He has also had more time to become exceptionally good at being exactly who he already is. Experience cuts both ways. If a 35-year-old understands relationships better than a 25-year-old, presumably he also understands their games better. The romantic older man and the more seasoned manipulator may occasionally arrive wearing the same mask.

5. Is dating a British man a universal experience?

There were several moments while reading Chuck that made me stop and think: Have I dated this man? Not because of his commitment issues, his age, or even his personality, but because the writing captures something so specific about the mannerisms of a British man.

The awkwardness. The body language. The dad jokes. It is all captured so beautifully in the writing because none of it is exaggerated enough to become a caricature. Chuck is not written as The British Man™. It is subtler than that. It is in the pauses, the phrasing, the tiny social misfires.

There is something uniquely British about being perfectly charming while simultaneously appearing deeply uncomfortable with the fact that a human interaction is taking place. Of course, I realise I am generalising an entire nation of men based on literature and personal experience, which is hardly rigorous social science. However, the recognition was immediate enough to make me suspicious.

This is the greatest compliment I can give the book’s writing: Chuck did not remind me of a fictional character; he reminded me of London.

I finished the book feeling deeply sentimental about all of it. There is a romance to the ridiculousness of ordinary life: falling for the wrong person, panicking that you are wasting your twenties, pretending not to care when you very much do, and discovering that growing older does not necessarily mean becoming any better at understanding what you want.

Most love stories offer us something to fantasise about while this one offers recognition. I Want You to Be Happy did not make me long for somebody else’s great love story. It made me look at the absurd little dramas of my own life with slightly more affection.

John Galliano portrait (2026)

Fashion loves a comeback almost as much as it loves a rebrand.

Therefore, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced John Galliano: Horizons as the Costume Institute’s spring 2027 exhibition, the reaction was predictably divided. For some, the retrospective was long overdue: Galliano is one of the few designers whose absence would leave a genuine hole in any serious account of modern fashion. For others, staging a monographic exhibition devoted to him felt uncomfortably close to converting accountability into applause.

Both interpretations are plausible, and that might be the root of the problem.

Galliano’s influence is not what is in question. Across his own label, Givenchy, Dior and Maison Margiela, he transformed the runway into narrative theatre and helped define the modern creative director as designer, historian, performer and brand mythologist rolled into one beautifully overworked package. However, it all came crumbling down in 2011. He was dismissed from Dior following the circulation of videos in which he made antisemitic and racist remarks; he was subsequently convicted in France for public insults. The Met has said that Horizons will address this conduct, its consequences and Galliano’s later attempts at repair rather than tucking the entire episode behind a particularly voluminous couture skirt.

The exhibition, scheduled to run from May 2027 to January 2028, will make Galliano only the third living designer to receive a solo Costume Institute show, after Yves Saint Laurent and Rei Kawakubo. It will be divided into three sections: “Bearings”, addressing his public rupture and its aftermath; “Horizons”, examining his sources of inspiration; and “Atlas of Transformation”, focusing on craft, experimentation and technique.

The Met, therefore, insists this will not be a coronation. The Costume Institute is not a passive archive but an active arbiter of cultural value; and in fashion, cultural value has a remarkable talent for becoming financial value.

The museum as market-maker

A major fashion retrospective does not merely organise old clothes into elegant rooms. It converts a designer into heritage.

Pierre Bourdieu called this symbolic capital: the authority conferred by institutions that decide what deserves to be taken seriously. A Galliano dress can be beautiful, rare and historically important before entering the Met. Once exhibited, catalogued and placed within an official narrative, however, it acquires institutional legitimacy. It stops being merely vintage and begins its ascent towards patrimony.

The timing could hardly be more commercially convenient. In June 2026, two lots of limited-edition Dior Saddle bags created to mark Galliano’s tenth anniversary at the house sold at Christie’s for €76,200 and €50,800 (respectively), 38 and more than 25 times their high estimates. Christie’s described both as world auction records for Dior handbags. 43% of buyers in the sale were Millennials or Gen Z.

DIOR BY JOHN GALLIANO, 2002 & 2006 (Christie´s)

This was before the Met had opened a single vitrine.

The broader resale economy is moving in the same direction. ThredUp projects that the global second-hand apparel market will reach $393bn by 2030, growing twice as quickly as the overall apparel sector, with Millennials and Gen Z expected to drive more than 70 per cent of that expansion.

Put those signals together, and the likely consequences are not difficult to forecast. Early Galliano becomes scarcer. Dior newspaper prints and Saddle bags gain another layer of collector mythology. Margiela Artisanal pieces migrate further from wardrobe to asset class. Auction houses create tightly edited sales around “important periods”, while brands rediscover Galliano references with the remarkable confidence of people hoping nobody remembers where they came from.

Walter Benjamin argued that an original artwork possesses an aura produced by its singular history and presence. Fashion complicates that theory because clothes were designed to circulate: to be worn, photographed, copied and eventually rediscovered in someone’s mother’s wardrobe. Nonetheless, museums can create a second aura. Provenance, exhibition history and institutional validation become part of the object itself.

A dress once worn to dinner becomes “a museum-exhibited Galliano”. Same silk, but different tax bracket. The Met is not merely looking back at Galliano. It is creating the conditions through which the market will look at him differently. A rebrand and a repricing, if you will.

The strongest argument in favour

The historical case for the retrospective is formidable.

Galliano changed how fashion communicates. His collections transformed research into spectacle, producing characters and worlds rather than rows of seasonal product. At Dior, he understood that couture could function as the emotional centre of a global luxury business even when almost none of the audience would ever buy it. Fantasy at the top sold accessories beneath it.

That model now feels entirely ordinary, but it was not ordinary then.

The Met’s own collection reflects the breadth of his contribution, from the religious provocation of the 1992 “Vicar” dress to the bias-cut gowns of the 1990s and the historically layered narratives that defined his early practice. The museum describes one 1995 gown inspired by Dolores del Río as combining technical virtuosity with a fully imagined romantic biography. Precisely the fusion of construction and character that made Galliano distinctive.

John Galliano British-spring/summer 1992 (MET)

To omit him from fashion history because parts of his biography are morally intolerable would not produce a more ethical account. It would produce a less accurate one. Museums, after all, do not exist solely to reward admirable people. If they did, their galleries might suddenly become very peaceful and spacious.

The intellectually sound defence is simple: documentation is not endorsement. Nevertheless, that sentence becomes less convincing when the documentation is launched by the Met Gala, framed by celebrity, funded through prestige and experienced through rooms designed to make visitors gasp.

When documentation begins to look like admiration

The truth is fashion exhibitions do not communicate like books. A scholarly text can place achievement beside misconduct and sustain tension between them. An exhibition works through atmosphere: lighting, music, scale, choreography and proximity to extraordinary objects. Visitors may read every wall label or remember only the dress.

This is where the Met’s challenge becomes less curatorial than psychological. Can a section on antisemitic abuse retain its moral weight once visitors enter a succession of breathtaking galleries devoted to technical brilliance? Can text compete with couture?

It can try… but couture has excellent public relations.

Michel Foucault’s concept of the author function helps explain the greater difficulty. A creator’s name does more than establish authorship; it governs how bodies of work are grouped, interpreted and valued. “Galliano” has become a totalising category: fantasy, excess, craft, collapse, exile and return.

A monographic exhibition strengthens that structure. It encourages us to interpret decades of collective labour: by pattern cutters, researchers, assistants, embroiderers, stylists, craftspeople and ateliers; through the story of one exceptional man.

Fashion has always found the lone-genius myth irresistible. In Galliano’s case, however, the mythology carries another risk: the exhibition itself may be interpreted as the final stage of his rehabilitation. Not merely evidence that his work matters, but evidence that the most influential fashion institution in America has decided he is ready to be admired again.

That is where restorative justice must be distinguished from reputational restoration. Restorative justice centres harm, accountability, those affected and sustained attempts at repair. Reputational restoration centres the return of the disgraced individual. The two can overlap, but they are not identical. Galliano has apologised, undergone treatment and engaged with Jewish organisations. The Anti-Defamation League has publicly acknowledged his efforts and supported the exhibition’s intention to confront his conduct.

The Met’s task is not to decide whether he has become a better person. A museum is not a parole board. The challenge is not to tell a more complicated story and capture the nuances. It is to ensure that complexity does not become absolution.

Why Galliano, and why now?

The decision is a diagnosis of the industry. Luxury has spent much of the past decade refining itself into commercial efficiency: increasing prices, expanding margins, perfecting recognisable products and producing collections calibrated for global legibility. The outcome has been competent, expensive and emotionally anaemic.

Then came Maison Margiela Artisanal 2024. Galliano produced a nocturnal cast of lacquered, damaged characters who appeared to have escaped a Brassaï photograph after making several poor decisions in excellent corsetry.

Maison Margiela Artisanal 2024

Its significance lay not in persuading the mass market to buy waist-training corsets or porcelain complexions. It reminded the industry that fashion’s defensible advantage over ordinary clothing is not quality alone, but fantasy.

Luxury faces consumer fatigue and growing resistance to price increases unsupported by corresponding emotional value. A beautifully made bag can justify part of its cost. A mythology justifies the rest. Galliano is therefore useful not only as history, but as strategy.

His retrospective signals a wider pivot from quiet luxury towards narrative luxury: character-led collections, theatrical beauty, dense historical references, visible craft and shows constructed as cultural events rather than seasonal catalogues.

Brands with deep archives and strong creative authorship stand to benefit. Brands whose identity rests on the belief that a very expensive grey jumper qualifies as a worldview may find the next few seasons very uncomfortable.

Redemption as spectacle

The most difficult cultural question is not whether art can be separated from the artist. Museums separate very little. Their function is to bring objects, people, contexts and histories into proximity.

This retrospective inevitably revives one of culture's oldest and most unresolved questions: can we ever separate the art from the artist? More importantly, it raises another: can context alone bear the weight of accountability?

Guy Debord argued that modern societies convert lived experience into spectacle: events become images, and images become commodities that can be consumed at a safe distance. Galliano’s biography presents an almost satisfying and cinematic narrative arc.

Prodigy, emperor, disgrace, exile, rehabilitation, masterpiece, museum.

The danger is that accountability becomes valuable because it completes the story. The scandal no longer interrupts the mythology; it improves the third act. From a communications perspective, that narrative is formidable. It generates debate, editorial coverage, attendance and emotional investment. Controversy does not always diminish cultural capital. Properly framed, it can intensify it.

The Met must therefore avoid becoming merely the most prestigious producer of Galliano’s redemption.

The precedent problem

The Costume Institute has demonstrated both the power and the limitations of spectacle before. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty drew more than 661,000 visitors and helped transform McQueen from an influential designer into an almost mythic cultural figure. The exhibition’s achievement was enormous, but so was its simplification: industrial pressure, collaboration and corporate machinery became secondary to the compelling image of the tortured genius.

Galliano’s history cannot be placed inside the same romantic template. McQueen’s tragedy was directed primarily inward; Galliano’s misconduct harmed others. To aestheticise both through the language of suffering and brilliance would be intellectually lazy.

China: Through the Looking Glass, which attracted more than 815,000 visitors, offers another warning. The exhibition openly examined Western fantasies of China, but its visual beauty prompted debate over whether spectacle had overwhelmed its critique of Orientalism. Visitors encountered the argument, certainly. Many also encountered a very beautiful version of the fantasy being questioned.

That is the Costume Institute’s recurring gift and hazard: it makes theory irresistible, but beauty can blur the theory. “Complicated” is sometimes the cultural sector’s preferred term for “we would still quite like to show the dresses”.

What does a good scenario look like?

The most ambitious version of Horizons would make the institution and the industry visible alongside Galliano. It would examine not only his creative process, but the system that produced his authority: the vast annual workload, the ateliers, the executives, the editors, the commercial expansion of Dior, the machinery of image-making and the industry’s role in first building, then discarding, then rehabilitating him.

It should distinguish explanation from excuse. Galliano has spoken about addiction, exhaustion and extreme professional pressure. Those facts can help explain the conditions surrounding his collapse; they do not excuse antisemitism. A serious exhibition should be capable of holding both ideas at once without allowing either to erase the other.

It should also resist presenting Galliano as an isolated moral drama. Fashion built a culture that worshipped creative excess, profited from impossible output and treated self-destruction as evidence of genius…right up until it became a public-relations problem.

The more interesting exhibition is therefore not “the life of a difficult genius”. It is how fashion manufactures, exploits, disciplines and rehabilitates genius. That would move Horizons beyond biography and towards institutional critique.

Is the exhibition a good idea?

Commercially, it is an exceptional one. Historically, it is justified. Creatively, it may arrive at the exact moment fashion needs reminding that clothing can still create awe. Culturally, it is a minefield dressed in exquisite embroidery.

Its success will depend on whether visitors leave saying, “I understand Galliano more fully,” or simply, “God, he was brilliant.”

The difference between those two responses is the entire exhibition.

The Met may insist that Horizons is neither a pardon nor a coronation. The market, less troubled by semantic distinctions, is likely to treat it as both.

A museum can claim to preserve history without endorsing it. But when that museum possesses enough authority to turn dresses into monuments, scandal into narrative and archives into assets, preservation is never entirely passive.

Museums do not simply remember history; they teach future generations how to remember it.

Projection

Every generation of women seems convinced it has finally discovered the correct way to be a woman. One decade celebrates domesticity, the next independence. We replace aprons with briefcases, then briefcases with sourdough starters, each movement promising that fulfilment lies just beyond the previous generation’s mistakes. The language changes, the aesthetics evolve, but the certainty remains consistent.

Perhaps that is why Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear feels so timely. Although set between the digital age and the American frontier, it is not really a novel about history. It is a novel about certainty, about the extraordinary confidence with which women prescribe lives for one another.

There is a peculiar irony at the heart of Yesteryear. Natalie Heller Mills, a wealthy Christian influencer whose online empire is built on idealising traditional femininity, wakes up in 1855 and is finally granted the life she has spent years persuading millions of followers to envy. Except the version she arrives in bears little resemblance to the softly lit aesthetic she has curated online. There are no linen dresses that remain effortlessly white, no perfectly risen sourdough filmed from above, no carefully concealed nanny just outside the frame. There is physical exhaustion. There is hunger. There is childbirth without modern medicine. There is the horrifying realisation that women possess no agency over the direction of their own lives.

It is a deliciously cruel literary trick.

For the first half of the novel, I found myself reading with the same guilty satisfaction a career-oriented woman has when it appears she has triumphed over the ones who chose motherhood. Natalie has built a career transforming domesticity into aspiration, and all of a sudden is forced to perform it without the 5 million dollars her father-in-law gave them.

The satire lands because it exposes something we instinctively recognise: social media has become extraordinarily good at aestheticising labour while removing the labour itself. Motherhood is marketed as matching linen pyjamas and homemade jam, but not the sleep deprivation or post-partum depression. Domesticity, once an economic necessity, becomes another luxury lifestyle available primarily to those wealthy enough to outsource the least photogenic parts of it.

The internet has not reinvented nineteenth-century womanhood; it has curated it.

However, somewhere around the middle of the novel, my relationship with Yesteryear began to shift. The punishment remained entertaining, but I found myself wondering whether its target had changed. Was Burke still satirising the performance of traditional femininity? Or had she begun satirising the desire for it altogether?

One of the novel’s most revealing moments does not take place in 1855 at all, but inside Natalie’s imagination. Long before she finds herself trapped in the past, Natalie imagines the future awaiting Reena, her former Harvard roommate. Where Natalie chose marriage, Christianity, and motherhood, Reena chose her career. In Natalie’s mind, that decision unfolds with almost mathematical certainty. Reena will fight for internships, compete for promotions, answer emails at midnight, survive on takeaway coffee, date unsuccessfully, postpone children, struggle to maintain friendships, and eventually wake up one morning to discover professional success had ruined her life.

The passage is intended to reveal Natalie’s prejudices. What surprised me was how much of it sounded familiar. Not because Natalie is right, but because almost every ambitious woman I know is aware and fearful of that realisation herself.

One of the reasons Yesteryear feels so contemporary is that it understands something second-wave feminism could never anticipate. When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she famously described “the problem that has no name”: the silent dissatisfaction experienced by suburban American housewives who had been told that marriage and motherhood alone should constitute a fulfilling life. Friedan challenged a society that confined women almost exclusively to the private sphere.

Sixty years later, the geography of that dissatisfaction has changed. Many women no longer feel imprisoned by the home. They feel divided between two worlds that each demand total commitment.

The remarkable success of the feminist movement transformed women’s relationship to work. Across much of the Western world, women entered universities, professions and political institutions in unprecedented numbers. They became surgeons, judges, journalists, architects and prime ministers. Nevertheless, while employment expanded dramatically, domestic expectations stayed the same. Liberation did not eliminate labour; it multiplied it.

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild described this phenomenon in The Second Shift almost four decades ago. After completing a full day of paid work, many women returned home to begin a second, unpaid shift of childcare, emotional management and domestic organisation. Claudia Goldin, whose work earned her the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, later demonstrated that one of the most persistent drivers of the gender pay gap emerges not when women enter the labour market, but after they become mothers. The problem was never access to work. It was the assumption that women could enter one sphere without leaving the other.

Natalie instinctively recognises this contradiction when she imagines Reena’s future. She sees the exhaustion before she sees the achievement. Where she fails (and where I think the novel occasionally fails alongside her) is in assuming that exhaustion necessarily invalidates the choice.

Natalie never actually asks Reena what she wants. She simply projects onto Reena the same certainty with which she projects nineteenth-century fantasies onto history itself. Perhaps that is the first great irony of Yesteryear. Natalie spends the novel longing for a century she has never inhabited. At the very same time, she invents a future for Reena that she has never lived. I think this is a call for reflection on how we have become remarkably adept at imagining other women’s lives.

There is something almost universal about believing fulfilment exists one decision away. If only you pursued the career. If only you married younger. If you had remained single. If only you had children. If only you did not. Even though I am young, I have come to understand that as a woman, the fantasy always belongs to somebody else.

This, more than the time travel, is what makes Yesteryear feel unsettling and premonitory. It is not really a novel about 1855. Nor is it even a novel about tradwives. It is a novel about projection. About the extraordinary confidence with which we narrate lives that are not our own. If Natalie spends the novel learning that history is far less romantic than she imagined, the reader is left confronting a more uncomfortable possibility: are we all guilty of romanticising someone else’s version of womanhood?

From Projection to Prescription

Perhaps projection would not matter quite so much if it remained a private habit. The danger begins when our fantasies about other people’s lives harden into prescriptions about how they ought to live them.

Natalie does not simply imagine that Reena will be unhappy. She needs Reena to be unhappy. Her own identity depends upon it. If Reena can build a fulfilling life outside marriage and motherhood, then Natalie’s certainty begins to crack. Likewise, if Natalie were genuinely content, she would have little reason to convince millions of strangers that her way of living is the only one capable of producing happiness.

The irony is that neither woman is afforded the complexity of existing outside the other’s imagination. Maybe this has always been the hidden weakness of ideological movements. They rarely settle for explaining one possible way of living. They almost always begin explaining why alternative lives must necessarily fail.

Victorian society treated marriage as a woman’s natural destiny. The second half of the twentieth century often framed economic independence as her liberation. Today’s internet, meanwhile, oscillates between hyper-productivity and hyper-domesticity, offering women an endless carousel of identities: the girlboss, the clean girl, the tradwife, the stay-at-home girlfriend, the “high-value woman”. Each presented with remarkable confidence as though centuries of female experience had finally culminated in a single aesthetic.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin warned against precisely this temptation. In distinguishing between negative and positive liberty, he argued that freedom is not simply about possessing choices, but about resisting the belief that there exists one objectively correct way to live. The moment a society convinces itself that it has discovered the ideal human life, those who choose differently begin to appear not merely different, but mistaken.

It seems that modern womanhood has become trapped in precisely this paradox. For all our talk of choice, we remain surprisingly uncomfortable with women making choices we ourselves would never make.

John Stuart Mill understood this more than 160 years ago. In On Liberty, he argued that individuality is not simply a personal preference but a social necessity. Progress depends upon allowing people to conduct what he called “experiments in living”: different ways of organising a life, none of which should be suppressed merely because they depart from convention. Society benefits not from conformity, but from plurality.

Mill’s argument feels almost radical today. We often speak about supporting women’s choices, provided those choices resemble our own. The ambitious woman celebrates female founders but dismisses the woman who leaves medicine to raise children. The traditionalist praises motherhood while treating career ambition as evidence of moral decline.

Neither position is especially interested in freedom. Both are interested in validation.

My own life makes this uncomfortable to admit. My biggest dream is to build companies, write books, travel constantly, and create work that outlives me. I suspect that motherhood may never become the defining ambition of my life. Perhaps it will. Perhaps it will not. However, my inability to imagine fulfilment within one kind of life tells me remarkably little about another woman’s ability to find fulfilment there.

Our desires are autobiographies; they are not political theories.

This distinction becomes particularly important when private values begin making claims upon public rights. Over the past year, a growing number of conservative female commentators in the United States have argued for a return to more traditional gender roles. Some have gone considerably further. At Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit, discussions around marriage, motherhood and female submission were accompanied by remarks from attendees suggesting that women would willingly relinquish the right to vote if it restored what they understood to be a more stable social order.

The contradiction is almost too perfect. Women were exercising freedoms won through generations of political struggle: the freedom to assemble, to organise, to speak publicly and to participate in democratic debate; to question whether women should continue possessing those freedoms at all.

Hannah Arendt repeatedly argued that rights survive only because they are exercised. Freedom, for Arendt, was never merely an internal conviction; it existed through public participation. To voluntarily abandon political agency is therefore not simply a personal lifestyle choice. It alters the conditions under which everybody else must live.

There is an important distinction here that I think contemporary feminism sometimes struggles to articulate. A woman is entitled to reject corporate ambition. She is entitled to devote herself entirely to motherhood. She is entitled to organise her marriage according to whatever religious or personal convictions she finds meaningful. She is even entitled never to vote.

What she is not entitled to do is transform those personal convictions into obligations for women who never consented to them. Rights end precisely where another person’s begin. This is why I have always found the language of “choice feminism” simultaneously persuasive and insufficient. Not every decision made by a woman is automatically feminist simply because a woman made it.

Women are perfectly capable of reproducing misogyny. We can defend institutions that limit us. We can mistake our own comfort for universal truth. We can, like Natalie, become so invested in the life we have chosen that we begin needing every other woman to choose it too.

The measure of feminism, then, cannot simply be whether women are making choices. It must also be whether they are protecting everyone else’s ability to make different ones.

The Woman Who Bakes Bread for a Living

This is why I find influencer Nara Smith such a fascinating cultural figure. For years, the internet has insisted on making her the poster child of the tradwife movement. The evidence, at first glance, appears overwhelming. She cooks every meal from scratch. She dresses in impeccably feminine silhouettes. She speaks softly. She has children. Her videos are drenched in an aesthetic nostalgia that feels uncannily similar to the world Natalie spends Yesteryear trying to recreate.

Nonetheless, Smith herself has repeatedly rejected the label.

She has explained, on numerous occasions, that she is a working model, a business owner and the principal creative force behind one of the most successful personal brands on social media. Cooking, in her case, is not evidence that she has withdrawn from economic life. It is economic life.

This distinction reveals how profoundly our understanding of women’s labour has changed. For centuries, domestic work was invisible precisely because it belonged to the private sphere. Cooking, cleaning and childcare generated enormous economic value while remaining largely excluded from conventional definitions of work. Feminist economists have spent decades demonstrating that capitalism has historically depended upon this unpaid labour while refusing to count it.

Nara Smith has taken one of the oldest forms of unpaid female labour and transformed it into intellectual property.

The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard argued that contemporary society increasingly consumes representations rather than reality itself. Eventually, he suggested, the copy becomes more meaningful than the original. He called this hyperreality: a world in which simulations begin replacing the thing they supposedly represent.

Smith’s internet persona feels almost designed to illustrate the idea. Her videos are frequently criticised for being unrealistic (after all, who is cooking gum from scratch?), but realism has never been the point. They are not documentaries about domestic labour any more than Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is a documentary about eighteenth-century France.

They are performances. Highly stylised, beautifully lit performances. The homemade cereal, the scratch-made Takis, the designer dresses worn while stirring soup. None of these are attempts to document ordinary domestic life. They create an atmosphere, a fantasy, a visual language.

The irony, of course, is that millions of viewers interpret that fantasy literally. Much like Natalie mistakes nineteenth-century America for an aesthetic, audiences mistake Nara’s content for an instruction manual.

This is where Yesteryear becomes unexpectedly complicated. Natalie insists she has rejected the modern working woman. Objectively, like Nara Smith, she has become one. She negotiates sponsorships, manages an audience of millions, builds a recognisable personal brand and generates substantial income through digital entrepreneurship. She has not escaped capitalism; she has found a more feminine way of participating in it.

Natalie criticises women like Reena for making work central to their identity, while she builds a career more successful than most corporate executives could ever hope to achieve. Perhaps this reveals something larger about our current moment.

We continue speaking as though women must choose between family and ambition. Nevertheless, the reality has become considerably messier. Women launch businesses from maternity leave. Lawyers become food influencers. Fashion editors raise children while writing books. Mothers become Members of Parliament. Founders breastfeed between investor meetings. The categories that once seemed mutually exclusive increasingly overlap.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described modern life as “liquid”: identities no longer remain fixed but continually adapt to changing circumstances. Careers, relationships and even personal identities become less permanent than they once appeared.

It appears femininity has become liquid too. The modern woman rarely inhabits a single role. Each identity expands or contracts according to circumstance rather than replacing the others entirely. This complexity is what makes contemporary debates around womanhood feel increasingly inadequate.

We remain obsessed with absolute answers. Career woman or housewife. Traditional or feminist. Ambitious or nurturing. Public or private. Most women occupy several categories before lunchtime.

This is perhaps where Yesteryear feels simultaneously most perceptive and most limited. The novel brilliantly dismantles the fantasy that the past offered women a simpler, more authentic existence. History was never as beautiful as nostalgia makes it appear.

Natalie’s romanticisation of domesticity deserves interrogation, but domesticity itself does not deserve ridicule. The novel sometimes leaves little room for the possibility that a woman might genuinely long for marriage, motherhood or a quieter life without being politically reactionary, intellectually naïve or secretly oppressed.

In trying to dismantle one stereotype, it occasionally constructs another. Virginia Woolf famously argued that a woman needed “a room of one’s own” to write fiction. The phrase has become one of feminism’s most enduring slogans, but it is often remembered only partially. The room is more than a space; it is economic independence, privacy, and the material conditions necessary to imagine a life for oneself.

Nearly a century later, the room itself has certainly changed. For one woman, it might be an office overlooking Canary Wharf. For another, a kitchen filled with children. For someone else, an artist’s studio or a laboratory or a courtroom. The architecture is less important than the principle. What feminism ultimately secured was never one particular destination but the possibility of choosing the room in which one’s life would unfold.

Reading Yesteryear, I found myself thinking that Natalie spends the entire novel searching for the correct version of womanhood, yet she never considers the possibility that no such version exists.

I believe that the greatest achievement of modern feminism was never that it allowed women to become CEOs instead of wives, or wives instead of CEOs. It was that, for the first time in history, it made both lives equally imaginable. The challenge now is ensuring we do not lose that freedom by becoming as prescriptive about liberation as previous generations were about domesticity.

Joyce Kozloff, Uncivil Wars: Battle of Appomattox Court House, 2021, acrylic on canvas,

Last week, American artist Joyce Kozloff dismantled one of contemporary art’s longest-running mysteries.

In an interview published by Ocula, the 82-year-old artist, best known as a founder of the Pattern and Decoration movement, revealed that she had also been one of the original Guerrilla Girls. The anonymous feminist collective emerged in New York in 1985 after protesting the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture. Of the 169 artists included in the exhibition, only 13 were women, a statistic that became the catalyst for one of the most influential activist movements in contemporary art. Kozloff left the collective in 1991, but for more than three decades her identity remained deliberately concealed.

The headlines were inevitable. Founding Guerrilla Girl Unmasked. Another of the art world’s best-kept secrets finally revealed. However, the revelation feels strangely beside the point. Not because Kozloff’s role is unimportant (it is) but because the urge to identify the woman behind the gorilla mask is precisely the instinct the Guerrilla Girls spent forty years trying to resist.

Their anonymity was never a gimmick. Nor was it simply a disguise. It was an ideological rejection of the art world’s favourite fiction: that history is made by exceptional individuals rather than by systems.

The Guerrilla Girls understood something that still makes the market uncomfortable. If the artist disappears, the institution can no longer hide behind biography. There is no charismatic protagonist to celebrate, only uncomfortable statistics to confront. Nevertheless, it seems that nowadays statistics are notoriously difficult to sell. Personalities, on the other hand, have never been more valuable.

The contemporary art market increasingly trades in artists as brands as much as it does artworks. Galleries sell practices through personal narratives. Museums market exhibitions through intimate documentaries, podcasts and studio visits. Instagram has completely collapsed the distinction between artist and public figure. Somewhere between the artist statement and the behind-the-scenes Reel, visibility became another artistic medium.

Thus the Guerrilla Girls suddenly look almost radical again. Not because anonymous activism disappeared, but because anonymity itself has become economically inefficient.

Ironically, the collective became globally recognised by refusing recognition. Their gorilla masks became one of contemporary art’s most recognisable visual identities while simultaneously rejecting the very mechanics of branding. Today’s marketing consultants would probably describe that as exceptional brand positioning.

The Guerrilla Girls would have called it refusing the point.

It seems that despite decades of institutional progress, the market continues to tell a remarkably familiar story. Museums have undoubtedly changed. Female artists are represented more frequently than they were in 1985, and major institutions now routinely publish diversity targets and acquisition strategies. According to the 2026 Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report, women now represent roughly 45% of artists exhibited by primary-market galleries. A figure that would have been almost unimaginable when the Guerrilla Girls first began wheat-pasting posters across SoHo.

Money, however, remains considerably less progressive than museum labels. The same report found that works by women accounted for only 37% of gallery sales by value, despite approaching parity in representation. The imbalance becomes even more pronounced on the secondary market, where women represented only 11% of the top 200 artists sold at auction, generating just 8% of total auction value. Progress, it appears, has travelled far more quickly through curatorial departments than collectors’ cheque books.

The Guerrilla Girls famously asked whether women had to be naked to get into the Met Museum. Forty years later, one might ask a different question. Do women still have to become exceptional to be valued equally?

This is where Kozloff’s revelation becomes interesting. Not because another name has emerged from behind a gorilla mask, but because it arrives at a moment when protest itself is undergoing an identity crisis.

What happens when institutional critique becomes institutional history?

The Guerrilla Girls were once considered agitators. Today their posters hang inside the very museums they criticised. They are taught in art schools, collected by major institutions and reproduced in exhibition catalogues. Nothing announces the canonisation of protest quite like finding it framed in a museum gift shop.

This is not necessarily failure. In many respects it is victory, but victory has a peculiar habit of softening its own edges. Punk ends up behind glass at the V&A. Graffiti becomes blue-chip. Institutional critique acquires wall text. It could be interpreted that the Guerrilla Girls have become part of the canon they once fought to rewrite.

Nonetheless, their work refuses to feel historical because the conditions that produced it have not disappeared with the same enthusiasm as the posters have been archived.

Perhaps this is why anonymous activism suddenly feels less like an artefact of the 1980s than a preview of the future. We are living through another moment in which anonymity is being rediscovered. Not only through whistleblowers and decentralised activist networks, but through collective online identities, open-source communities and forms of digital organising that deliberately resist becoming personal brands.

In a culture where every opinion demands an author and every movement eventually acquires a spokesperson, refusing attribution begins to feel almost luxurious. The Guerrilla Girls built an entire movement by insisting the face was irrelevant. Which is why Joyce Kozloff’s revelation feels culturally revealing. Not because we finally know who one of the Guerrilla Girls was, but because our first instinct was to ask who she was at all.

Perhaps the Guerrilla Girls' greatest prediction was not about museums. It was about attention. In an economy where everything demands a face, anonymity has become the last luxury no one can commodify.

Yesterday I was shopping at Las Rozas Village outside Madrid before inevitably ending up in El Corte Inglés. Somewhere between the luxury outlets and the sportswear floor, I realised I had seen the same garment at least a dozen times.

An Argentina shirt.

An England shirt.

Juventus.

Manchester United.

Sometimes they were the originals. Sometimes they weren’t. Instead, a familiar football jersey had simply acquired a different logo across the chest: Scuffers, Nude Project or whichever streetwear label had decided this season that football was its personality.

The more shops I walked into, the more they blurred into one another. Different brands. Different price points, the same shirt.

And it made me wonder: when did fashion stop designing football jerseys and start straight up robbing them? Or perhaps the more uncomfortable question is this: has fashion become increasingly dependent on objects that already possess cultural meaning?

Fashion has always borrowed. Yves Saint Laurent borrowed from Le Smoking. Jean Paul Gaultier borrowed from sailors. Vivienne Westwood borrowed from punk. Designers have spent decades translating uniforms, subcultures and everyday dress into luxury.

Nonetheless, something feels different this time.

Increasingly, fashion isn’t transforming these garments beyond recognition. It is preserving them almost exactly as they are, merely changing the context. A different logo. Better styling. A campaign. A runway. Suddenly an object designed for ninety minutes on a pitch becomes a desirable fashion item.

In many cases, the football shirt itself hasn’t changed. We have. Or rather, fashion has decided we should look at it differently.

I couldn’t help thinking about Marcel Duchamp. In 1917, he placed a urinal inside an art gallery and called it Fountain. The object itself remained unchanged. What changed was the context. The institution instructed us to see an everyday object as art.

Fashion seems to be performing a remarkably similar exercise.

The football jersey leaves the stadium and enters a campaign. It appears beneath a beautifully tailored coat, paired with vintage denim and photographed by someone whose Instagram feed resembles a Juergen Teller contact sheet. The garment hasn’t become more luxurious. It has become more culturally legible to a different audience.

The uncomfortable truth is that football shirts already contain everything fashion spends millions trying to manufacture.

Identity.

Belonging.

History.

Memory.

Community.

No luxury brand, regardless of its marketing budget, can invent decades of collective nostalgia overnight. Football already has it all. Which is why I find the growing obsession with archival jerseys so fascinating. People aren’t simply looking for a shirt. They’re looking for the shirt.

The Lamine Yamal one.

The Beckham-era England shirt.

The Zidane France shirt.

The sponsor matters. The badge placement matters. The year matters. The imperfections matter. At some point during this World Cup, the football jersey stopped functioning as merchandise and became an archival object. Almost like early Helmut Lang or Margiela.

Which leads me to another thought. Perhaps fashion’s greatest luxury today isn’t craftsmanship. It is borrowed authenticity. A football shirt carries emotional weight long before a fashion brand touches it. It arrives with stories already stitched into the fabric. Entire childhoods, family traditions, rivalries, victories and heartbreaks are embedded within a garment that was never designed to be fashionable in the first place.

Fashion simply inherits that emotional capital.

That isn’t necessarily a criticism. Some of the most intelligent designers of the last twenty years have built careers around recontextualisation rather than invention. Virgil Abloh understood that. Demna understands it. Miuccia Prada has been doing it for decades.

Originality no longer always means creating something from nothing. Sometimes it means recognising that culture has already created something powerful and asking the right questions about it. As Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.

However, there is a fine line between cultural observation and creative dependency. Walking through those stores yesterday, I couldn’t shake the feeling that many brands had arrived at the same conclusion. Football was trending, so they reached for the nearest jersey. No reinterpretation, just replication.

At what point does borrowing become outsourcing? At what point does fashion stop creating symbols and simply rent them from other cultures?

I’m not entirely sure I have the answer. Perhaps the clue lies in that a copy carries the aesthetic of belonging, while the original carries belonging itself.

Not too long ago you could either be a fashion girl or a football fan, but after the latest World Cup it seems you can’t be one without being the other.

Football shirts belonged in stadiums, pubs and Sunday league pitches. Certainly not on Pinterest mood boards or luxury runways. The football fan was marketed as overwhelmingly male, and the industry responded accordingly. Campaigns were loud, hyper-masculine and almost exclusively centred around performance. Footballers who pushed back the hyper-masculine gender norms were gossiped about.

Fast forward to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and the picture looks remarkably different. This wasn’t simply the biggest World Cup in history. It became one of the largest cultural events fashion has ever had the opportunity to engage with. The tournament broke attendance records almost immediately, drawing more than 4.6 million spectators during the group stage alone, while FIFA Fan Festivals attracted over 5.5 million visitors. Safe to say, the highest attendance figures since the concept was introduced in 2006.

Nevertheless, perhaps the most significant shift wasn’t taking place on the pitch. It was happening in the audience.

For years, women have represented one of football’s fastest-growing demographics, yet they have rarely been treated as its primary consumer. The stereotype of football as an exclusively male pastime has persisted despite the reality that women increasingly shape how the sport is consumed, discussed and, crucially, commercialised.

Fashion, never one to miss a cultural shift, understood this long before football did.

The rise of blokecore was never really about football. It was about reinterpreting football culture and carving out a space for the long-neglected fans.

Vintage jerseys became wardrobe staples. Adidas collaborations with Wales Bonner transformed sportswear into luxury. Miu Miu sent football boots down the runway. Martine Rose built entire collections around football aesthetics. Suddenly, the shirt was no longer merely merchandise; it had become a fashion object.

Then came the World Cup. Rather than simply producing tournament-themed capsules, fashion brands recognised something much larger: football had become a cultural platform.

Celebrity stylists Avigail and Damian Collins opened a World Cup vintage pop-up in Los Angeles, curating archival jerseys alongside Jean Paul Gaultier scarves, Claude Montana jackets and even a Fendi football. Their premise was simple: football shirts deserved to be collected, styled and appreciated in the same way as any other fashion archive.

Evidence of this shift no longer lives exclusively on runways or in marketing campaigns. It is visible in everyday wardrobes. I have friends who wouldn't ordinarily be caught dead in denim and are now happily sporting vintage football shirts. Archival jerseys have become the latest grail on fashion wish lists. I, too, have found myself casually browsing resale platforms in search of Kaká's 2002 Brazil shirt.

Footballers themselves have also undergone a remarkable sartorial transformation. Long before tunnel fits became content in their own right, David Beckham and a young Cristiano Ronaldo had already begun dismantling the stereotype of the footballer as stylistically one-dimensional. Beckham’s willingness to embrace fashion campaigns, luxury tailoring and, at times, unapologetically experimental looks made him one of the first athletes to be viewed as a genuine style icon rather than simply a celebrity with good clothes. Ronaldo, meanwhile, helped usher in a more polished, aspirational image of masculinity, one that increasingly blurred the boundaries between athlete, model and luxury ambassador.

Today’s generation has inherited that legacy. Players now arrive at stadiums dressed as though they are walking into a Fashion Week venue. What was once an exception has become an expectation. The footballer has evolved from athlete to style reference, and his wardrobe from personal expression to algorithmic inspiration shaping both men and women’s style.

That shift says a great deal about how football itself is changing.

Historically, women’s visibility within football culture has often been reduced to the “WAG” narrative. Fashion coverage surrounding tournaments focused less on female supporters than on the wives and girlfriends sitting in hospitality boxes.

Today, that narrative feels increasingly outdated. Women are no longer merely adjacent to football culture. We are actively shaping it. We buy the shirts, we create the TikTok trends; we dictate which vintage kits suddenly become desirable.

In many ways, women have transformed football merchandise into fashion. This matters because fashion has always functioned as a remarkably accurate predictor of consumer behaviour. When luxury brands invest in an aesthetic, they rarely do so by accident. They invest because they recognise where culture is moving. The real question now is how fashion will continue to embrace football aesthetics without tipping into costume. At what point does cultural appreciation become performance?

Sponsors have noticed the same shift. Alongside traditional sporting partners, the 2026 FIFA World Cup attracted lifestyle and beauty companies eager to reach broader audiences, reflecting football’s growing appeal beyond its traditional fan base.

The commercial implications are enormous. For decades, brands approached football as a male market. Today, they are beginning to understand that its cultural influence extends far beyond ninety minutes on the pitch. The modern football consumer buys beauty, fashion, travel and luxury experiences alongside tickets and jerseys. She follows transfer news and runway shows with equal enthusiasm. She understands both offside rules and archival Prada.

Perhaps the biggest misconception was never that women didn’t watch football. It was that brands assumed they weren’t worth speaking to.

When I was fifteen, I found myself torn between pursuing fashion and choosing what everyone around me considered a more “stable” career. I had loved art for as long as I could remember, but I was terrified of committing to a path I wasn’t even sure I was talented enough to follow.

Amid that uncertainty, I remember watching Daniel Roseberry’s first Haute Couture collection for Schiaparelli. In a single runway show, he revived the artistry of fashion that I had admired throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. More importantly, he reminded me that while fashion may not be the kindest of industries, it has always rewarded dreamers. Not even a year ago, he had been crashing in friends’ couches, and now he was the mastermind behind the most artistic of all maisons.

That show led me down a rabbit hole.

I became fascinated with the heritage house Roseberry had inherited. To my surprise, I found myself admiring Elsa Schiaparelli even more than her current successor. I discovered the Lobster Dress, the Shoe Hat, her friendship with Salvador Dalí, and the endless creativity that defined both her work and her life. She became not only the designer I aspired to be, but the woman I hoped to become: strong, independent, and unapologetically free.

So, when the V&A announced Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, I was beyond excited. Apparently, so was everyone else, because tickets sold out months in advance. After what felt like an endless wait, I finally visited the exhibition.

Here are my five most honest thoughts.

1. The exhibition design slightly undermined the curation.

The first thing I noticed upon entering was the paper-like treatment of the walls. I am sure there was an underlying design rationale, but unfortunately, it escaped me.

Rather than elevating the exhibition, I found the installation surprisingly distracting. Instead of framing Elsa Schiaparelli’s story, it competed with it. Considering how rich her narrative is, I could not help but feel that the exhibition design diminished, rather than reinforced, the context being presented.

Schiaparelli by Elsa Schiaparelli

2. I love Elsa Schiaparelli as an entrepreneur even more than I love her as a designer.

Before visiting the exhibition, I had only encountered Schiaparelli’s most iconic creations: the surrealist masterpieces that have become synonymous with her name. Seeing the breadth of her work in person was unexpectedly revealing. If I am being completely honest, I found parts of it underwhelming.

That thought surprised even me. Perhaps, I wondered, the true brilliance of Elsa Schiaparelli lies less in every individual garment and more in the woman herself. Yes, her designs were revolutionary, but perhaps even more revolutionary was her attitude. Her willingness to challenge convention. Her fearlessness. Her entrepreneurial instinct.

Maybe, after all, it wasn’t just her clothes that inspired me. It was her rebellion.

3. Was her creativity constrained by the commercial reality of running a fashion house?

This was probably the question I kept returning to throughout the exhibition. Some garments felt astonishingly imaginative: pure manifestations of her artistic vision.

Others felt... ordinary. That inconsistency puzzled me.

I remembered reading that within her first year in business, she already employed around fifty people. Suddenly, I began wondering whether Schiaparelli faced the same tension that every successful designer eventually encounters.

In an ideal world, designers create solely for the love of the craft. In reality, they create to sell. Even Schiaparelli today produces ready-to-wear alongside Haute Couture. Commercial viability has always been part of fashion’s equation.

Could this explain the inconsistency I perceived?

Perhaps.

After all, a Jackson Pollock may be celebrated in a museum, but it isn’t necessarily what someone shopping for wall art at IKEA is looking for.

Schiaparelli by Daniel Roseberry

4. Her understanding of art was decades ahead of its time.

Today, the relationship between fashion and art feels almost inevitable, almost obvious.

Prada has Fondazione Prada. Louis Vuitton has collaborated with Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama. Designers like Matières Fécales continue to push fashion into the realm of performance art. However, Schiaparelli was operating in a very different cultural landscape.

At the time, fashion was still largely viewed as functional. Beautiful, certainly, but rarely considered art by those outside the industry. Elsa Schiaparelli challenged that perception head-on. Not by talking about art, but by embedding it into fashion so completely that the distinction became impossible to ignore.

Imagine presenting a hat shaped like a shoe in the 1930s. Even more remarkable was the way her work entered into conversation with the artists of her time. Seeing Picasso incorporate one of her garments into one of his portraits illustrates just how porous the boundary between fashion and fine art had become.

She wasn’t simply dressing artists. She was creating alongside them.

Portrait of Nusch Éluard wearing Schiaparelli by Pablo Picasso (1937, Paris)

5. Does hindsight affect how revolutionary I perceive Elsa’s work to have been?

This became the question that lingered with me after leaving the exhibition. Am I being unfair? Or am I simply failing to place her work within its historical context?

I am twenty-two years old. I live in London, studied at Central Saint Martins and the London College of Fashion, and work within the fashion industry. Safe to say, I have become accustomed to performative fashion.

Designers constantly compete to surprise us. Perhaps that’s why displaying Daniel Roseberry’s theatrical creations alongside some of Elsa’s more restrained pieces felt like a slightly problematic curatorial decision. It inevitably creates the impression that her work was somehow less avant-garde.

But was it? Or have I simply become desensitised?

It occurred to me that looking at Elsa Schiaparelli’s work today may be similar to looking at a Renaissance painting. Without context, the subject matter may seem familiar, even predictable. Yet without the Renaissance, Impressionism could never have happened. Without Impressionism, Modernism would never have existed.

Perhaps Elsa Schiaparelli walked so that KidSuper, Daniel Del Valle, and certainly Daniel Roseberry could run.

“The Shoe Hat” by Elsa Schiaparelli

6. The exhibition could have trusted its audience to go deeper.

For someone whose career has been profoundly inspired by Schiaparelli, I found the curatorial texts surprisingly limited. Someone unfamiliar with the house would undoubtedly leave knowing that Elsa Schiaparelli was an imaginative designer. Nevertheless, I would think they might not have truly understood why she mattered.

Where was her rivalry with Coco Chanel? Where was a deeper discussion of Surrealism beyond her friendships? What about her upbringing, her ambitions, or the experiences that shaped her worldview?

Artists aren’t defined solely by what they create. They’re defined by why they create it.

If I had curated the exhibition, I would have invited Daniel Roseberry to contribute his own reflections. I would have loved to read his notes on deciphering Elsa’s creative mind, understanding her visual language, and navigating the delicate balance between preserving and evolving her legacy.

Likewise, I found it a missed opportunity not to hear more from the ateliers themselves. Throughout the exhibition, the extraordinary craftsmanship behind both Elsa’s work and Roseberry’s contemporary creations often felt like an afterthought. Considering the level of technical excellence on display, I would have loved to see sketches, toiles, embroidery samples, or handwritten atelier notes explaining how these extraordinary garments came to life.

Schiaparelli by Daniel Roseberry

Is it worth seeing?

The exhibition assembled some of the most extraordinary garments ever produced by the House of Schiaparelli, yet it never fully captured the extraordinary woman behind them. The pieces were magnificent, the craftsmanship undeniable, and the legacy unmistakable. Nonetheless, exhibitions are not remembered solely for what they display but for the stories they tell. While Schiaparelli's creations dazzled, the narrative that connected them never quite rose to the same level. The garments deserved a stronger spine, because Elsa Schiaparelli's story deserves nothing less.

“Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.”

The Devil Wears Prada 2006

Few cinematic lines have aged as well as Miranda Priestly’s famous dismissal in The Devil Wears Prada. It became shorthand for everything fashion supposedly despised: predictability, commerciality and the endless recycling of seasonal clichés.

For almost two decades, she was right. Flowers had become meaningless decoration: commercial and easy to sell.

However, Paris Couture Week has reminded us that no matter how overused a motif, it can always be rebranded through a change of connotation. During couture week, florals have abandoned their predictable association with summer to adopt a more mature symbol of entire brand universes. This season, Chanel and Dior, arguably the two maisons most intrinsically linked to flowers throughout fashion history, presented new interpretations of botanical collections. They used flowers to tell stories. Through entirely different creative vocabularies, Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson demonstrated that perhaps the most familiar motif in fashion has become one of its richest narrative devices.

Ironically, Miranda’s sarcastic remark may finally have become... groundbreaking.

The timing is almost inevitable. Luxury is emerging from years dominated by “quiet luxury”: immaculate cashmere, anonymous tailoring and wardrobes stripped of obvious decoration. Nevertheless, I would argue that while minimalism succeeded commercially, it has always been void of emotion. Consumers began purchasing what they were told were “investment pieces”, yet failed to achieve the look being portrayed in the media. It was never a lack of styling skill, but rather a lack of personal style that made minimalism look like a uniform instead of an aesthetic.

Thus, florals first crept in as a subtle antidote to the restraint of quiet luxury before blossoming into a full-scale rebellion against its pared-back aesthetic.

Unlike logos, flowers communicate culture. Unlike trends, they carry centuries of symbolism. They evoke memory, geography, craftsmanship, femininity, and mythology simultaneously. A flower can belong to a grandmother’s garden as easily as it can to a couture salon.

That duality has always fascinated fashion. Christian Dior himself famously described women as flowers. His revolutionary New Look of 1947, with rounded shoulders, cinched waists and generous skirts, was conceived to resemble blossoms opening after the austerity of war. The silhouette wasn’t simply inspired by flowers; it embodied optimism itself. At Chanel, Gabrielle Chanel found her lifelong muse in the camellia. Unlike the rose, the camellia was scentless. It became an emblem of restrained elegance, appearing everywhere from jewellery to embroidery and eventually becoming inseparable from the House itself.

Christian Dior’s “New Look” 1947, Vogue Archives

CHANEL F/W 1998 (By Karl Lagerfeld)

Flowers, therefore, are hardly new territory for either maison. What feels different today is the intention behind them.

Matthieu Blazy’s second Haute Couture collection for Chanel approached couture almost as a children’s storybook. His invitation arrived as a miniature book inscribed “Once Upon a Time”, opening onto a sprouting bean. A clear reference to Jack and the Beanstalk. The collection unfolded like a modern fairy tale, populated by embroidered vines climbing sheer mousseline, towering flowers, swans, woodland creatures and fantastical accessories that transformed the Grand Palais into an enchanted landscape.

It is no longer simply about the flowers themselves, but about the worlds being built around them—the distinct chapters each maison is using them to write.

Blazy used floral embroideries as pathways through imaginary forests. Feathers dissolved into petals. Beadwork recreated stems climbing the body rather than merely embellishing it. Nature became architecture. The spine for a new fairy tale world in the Chanel universe. Fairy tales have always used plants as symbols of transformation, growth, and desire. Jack’s beanstalk, in my opinion, is a metaphor for ambition made visible, a bridge between ordinary life and impossible worlds. By anchoring couture within this narrative, Blazy restores flowers to something they had gradually lost: symbolic power and whimsical originality.

Chanel Spring 2026 Couture Collection

Jonathan Anderson arrived at Dior from an entirely different direction. If Blazy looked towards folklore, Anderson looked towards contemporary art. His collection drew heavily from the sculptural work of American artist Lynda Benglis, whose practice is defined by molten forms, organic movement and the rejection of rigid structure. Benglis’ sculptures appear almost alive: neither fully controlled nor entirely accidental. That same tension ran throughout Anderson’s couture debut.

Rather than treating flowers as recognisable botanical motifs, Anderson abstracted nature itself. Petals dissolved into sculptural pleats. Metallic surfaces rippled like unfolding leaves. Embroidery became relief rather than ornament. The body appeared less dressed than sculpted. In a faithful imitation of nature, the garments appeared to have grown around it rather than been constructed.

Dior Spring 2026 Couture Collection

The result felt less “floral spring” and more “botanical art”. Nature ceased being imagery and instead became a process. This distinction is perhaps the defining characteristic separating today’s couture florals from those Miranda Priestly once dismissed. Fast fashion transformed flowers into print. Haute couture is transforming flowers back into objects.

That difference carries significant commercial implications.

Luxury fashion increasingly operates within what economists call an experience economy. Consumers are no longer purchasing products alone; they are purchasing narratives. The justification for a couture price tag lies not solely in exclusivity but in visible labour, artistic intention and emotional resonance. Three-dimensional embroidery, hand-sculpted petals and botanical beadwork communicate value in ways that flat digital prints simply cannot. Flowers have become evidence of craftsmanship.

They photograph beautifully, but more importantly, they reward close inspection. The further one descends the commercial fashion ladder, however, the more interesting this evolution becomes. Historically, couture functions as fashion’s research laboratory. Ideas rarely travel downward unchanged.

Instead, they translate. If I were to guess, I would expect fewer flat ditsy florals next spring and considerably more texture. Appliqué flowers will replace printed bouquets. Laser-cut petals, sculptural rosettes, botanical jacquards and dimensional embroidery are likely to appear first in luxury ready-to-wear before filtering through premium contemporary brands and eventually the high street.

What begins as couture fantasy often ends as commercial reality. However, another intrinsic force may also be influencing this renewed botanical obsession.

For decades, luxury fashion largely exported European visual culture. Think Dolce & Gabbana’s Sicilian Lemons, Versace’s Roman Medusa, Burberry’s English prints. Today, inspiration increasingly travels in the opposite direction. Across Latin America, flowers have never occupied the purely decorative role they often assumed within European fashion. They exist within everyday rituals. Markets are overflowing with tropical blooms, religious festivals carpeted with petals, domestic courtyards, public squares, architecture, and family celebrations. Flora is not seasonal decoration; it is cultural infrastructure.

As luxury increasingly looks beyond Europe for creative references (whether through destination shows, artisanal collaborations or broader conversations around craftsmanship), unsurprisingly, botanical abundance has re-entered fashion’s visual vocabulary. The social events and the Latin American artists who are ambassadors of the culture have granted Europe a newfound interest in everything Caribbean.

Perhaps that is couture’s greatest achievement. Not creating something entirely new, but restoring meaning to something we had stopped noticing. Fashion history rarely moves in straight lines. Ideas fall out of favour, become clichés, and eventually return carrying entirely different cultural significance.

Couture reminds us that innovation isn’t always about inventing something new. Sometimes, it’s about looking at something ridiculous and asking a better question. It turns out flowers still have a few stories left to tell. And if anyone was destined to prove Miranda Priestly wrong, it was always going to be two of the most compelling designers of their generation.

David Hockney’s “Self-Portrait With Red Braces” (2003)

The death of David Hockney at the age of 88 marks the end of one of the most influential artistic careers of the past century. A must-know name for those of us who went to art school. Tributes have understandably focused on his contribution to painting, his reinvention of landscape and portraiture, and his relentless curiosity across mediums. However, alongside the memorials, exhibitions, and inevitable flood of social media posts featuring A Bigger Splash, another conversation has already begun: what happens when one of the art world’s most bankable living artists is no longer living? Is this a Picasso-like situation for the art market?

I have always thought the art market has a peculiar relationship with mortality. It treats death as both a cultural event and a data point, often within the same conversation. While curators reflect on legacy, auction specialists update spreadsheets. Neither response is necessarily cynical; both are part of the ecosystem.

Historically, the death of a major artist tends to trigger a familiar sequence of events: tributes, retrospectives, renewed scholarship and, almost immediately, a sudden outbreak of collectors insisting they never intended to sell.

In Hockney’s case, however, I believe that the market will prove less reactive than many expect.

For decades, Hockney occupied a rare position. Unlike many contemporary artists whose markets are driven by novelty, scarcity or speculation, his was built on a foundation of institutional recognition. His works sit in major museum collections around the world, his exhibitions consistently drew large audiences, and his best-known images (from Californian swimming pools to Yorkshire landscapes) have long since entered the visual canon. Undeniably, his recognition is due to his unique technique and use of media. However, it was his remarkably instinctive grasp of public relations that propelled him into mass media visibility (painting Harry Styles certainly did nothing to diminish his appeal beyond the art world).

This matters because not all artist deaths affect markets in the same way. The most dramatic repricing tends to occur when an artist’s future potential remains a significant part of their value. Hockney’s market, by contrast, had already reached a remarkable degree of maturity during his lifetime.

A more useful comparison may be Gerhard Richter than a younger contemporary artist. In both cases, values were increasingly determined by historical significance, exhibition history and provenance rather than anticipation. The artist’s place within the canon had already been established.

In other words, much of Hockney’s market was already behaving as though art history had made up its mind. He was crowned an “artist” by the market during his lifetime.

This distinction is important. Scarcity alone does not create value. If it did, every storage unit would contain a masterpiece. What death often does create is clarity. It reinforces existing hierarchies within an artist’s oeuvre and accelerates conversations that were already underway.

For Hockney, that is likely to mean renewed attention on works that already occupy a central position within his career: the pool paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, landmark portraits and the most significant Yorkshire landscapes. These works were difficult to acquire before last week. Their owners have generally displayed all the urgency of medieval landowners contemplating property transactions.

As a result, the most important works may become even less visible on the market.

A similar pattern can be observed in the market for Jean-Michel Basquiat. While values rose dramatically following his death, the supply of museum-quality works available for purchase diminished. The result was not simply higher prices but fiercer competition for a shrinking pool of exceptional material.

The insight is straightforward: price appreciation and market activity are not always the same thing.

The first posthumous auction season will inevitably be scrutinised for signs of a “Hockney effect”. Auction houses, after all, rarely object to a compelling narrative when one arrives fully formed. Nevertheless, history suggests that the most significant shifts may occur more gradually.

Major collectors often hold. Museums reassess acquisition priorities. Foundations and estates begin shaping scholarly narratives. The market does not transform overnight; it reorganises itself around a newly fixed reality.

Hockney’s later works, particularly those produced digitally, may offer a different test. Unlike the paintings that define his public image, these works occupy a more complex position within both the market and art history. Their long-term performance will depend less on scarcity and more on how successfully they are integrated into the broader story of his career.

This is where institutions become particularly influential. The years immediately following an artist’s death often become a period of collective editing, during which curators, scholars, collectors and dealers hushly negotiate which works will define the legacy for future generations.

The market likes to imagine that prices determine importance. More often than not, the relationship works the other way around.

If there is a lesson from Picasso, Warhol and other blue-chip markets, it is that death rarely transforms an artist’s position. Instead, it crystallises it. Values become more concentrated around key works, availability decreases and distinctions between historically significant pieces and secondary material become increasingly pronounced.

For Hockney, whose place within post-war art was already secure, the most significant shift may not be a sudden increase in prices but the closure of a market that had, until now, remained open to future production.

Evidently, the question is no longer what David Hockney will make next. The question now is what happens when a market that spent decades pricing his future is forced to confront the fact that there isn’t one.

The art world likes to imagine it is in the business of history. The market, meanwhile, has spent the past week being reminded that history eventually arrives for everyone.

Nevertheless, what do I know? I’m just an art enthusiast. The auction houses will let us know soon enough...

One of the books I read this month was The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I picked up almost on a whim and a rush of shopaholism. However, it ended up being the slap in the face I needed, delivered in the most beautiful text.

The novel follows Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert: young, beautiful, socially positioned to succeed, and entirely incapable of doing anything with it. They fall in love, get married, and then spend most of their lives waiting. Waiting for money, for something to happen, for life to begin. It never quite does.

These are five thoughts I kept coming back to while reading it.

1. Fitzgerald was certainly not an only child

Anthony moves through the novel with panic of being alone. His life is structured around avoiding emptiness. Even before Gloria becomes his permanent companion, he fills his time relentlessly—dinners with friends every single night, a butler waking him up, pointless meetings with his broker, women he entertains despite finding them uninteresting.

I find this a very poor portrayal of an only child, yet Fitzgerald seems to excuse Anthony’s behaviour through his lack of siblings. As someone who grew up as an only child, I found the opposite to be true. If it were not for my parents’ sake, I could easily disappear from my flat without anyone knowing where I’ve gone or when I’ll be back.

Only children are forced to learn how to sit with their own thoughts from a very early age. They become relentlessly independent. This is something Anthony completely lacks.

Of course, to be alone and to be lonely are not the same thing. Nevertheless, an only child learns to be comfortable with both—because we know that, inevitably, there will come a day when we are left alone.

2. “I am glad” is the most honest response to “I love you.”

The real question is: what is love?

Can a selfish person love someone else? Gloria certainly cannot.

Nowadays, everyone “loves” everyone, yet very rarely does the word reflect the level of commitment it is supposed to carry. Love is often confused with admiration.

Men love your beauty, but not necessarily you.

I burst out laughing when Gloria said she was glad Anthony loved her. Because, despite all her shortcomings, she understood something essential—how to implant obsession in a man without ever fully giving herself away.

3. Is beauty only beautiful because it is fleeting?

Gloria is acutely aware of her beauty, but even more aware of its expiration date. Almost immediately after marriage, she begins to speak about ageing, with an underlying anxiety that never quite leaves her.

I feel for her more than I would like to admit. I often wonder what will happen when I am no longer young—and I would even go as far as to say, no longer beautiful.

Perhaps that is the point. Beauty is compelling because it is fleeting. It appears almost by chance, in a specific place, at a specific moment.

What are the odds that it materialises at all?

How lucky are we to admire it—or even better, to possess it, even if only briefly. And how naturally we begin to reminisce about past beauty, as though it belonged to another life.

4. What happens when a life is built on expectation rather than purpose

Anthony’s life is not empty because he fails; it is empty because he never attempts anything at all. He is sustained by the idea that something will eventually happen to him: inheritance, success, arrival.

It never does.

How many times have we been told we are too young to start, too inexperienced, too unprepared?

At some point, everyone has to decide whether they are more afraid of failure or of regret. I am utterly terrified of regret. Because the biggest waste is not failing, it is letting life pass you by without ever really beginning.

5. They live as if they are already a memory

There is something strange about the way Anthony and Gloria move through the world. It often feels as though they are not living in the present, but performing a version of themselves that will be remembered later. As if they are already aware of how their lives will look from the outside.

Why do we all do that?

Where does this obsession with being perceived come from?

And more importantly, what does it matter if it limits us?

Maybe the problem is not that we are too aware. Maybe it’s that we are aware—and still choose to do nothing.

One of the underrated perks of living with someone who also works in fashion is that almost any conversation can spiral into a sociological debate. Late last Sunday, hiding from the rain inside Tottenham Court Road’s Salad Project, my flatmate and I somehow ended up philosophising about the anatomy of the perfect “photo dump.” We know the formula too well: the casual mirror photo, the coffee cup, the blurry street shot, the outfit picture that pretends not to be an outfit picture. Somewhere in that conversation, we arrived at a conclusion that felt slightly uncomfortable…

The problem with social media is not that everyone wants to create content. The problem is that not everyone is interested enough to.

That might sound harsh, but it touches on something deeper about the cultural moment we are living in. Creation used to imply perspective. If you were making something—whether it was a garment, an image, a film, or even a post—you were contributing something to the cultural conversation. What we now call “photo dumps,” we used to call mood boards at Central Saint Martins.

Sketch page from my time at CSM*

Everyone wants to be creative, and everyone wants a piece of the cake we call ‘the fashion industry’. As a result, a kind of copy-paste culture has taken over. The desire to create is no longer necessarily linked to the desire to contribute something meaningful. Much of what circulates online today simply reproduces what already exists: the same poses, the same outfits, the same references recycled endlessly.

The paradox is striking. We are producing more images, more content, more fashion than ever before—and yet genuinely new ideas seem increasingly rare.

Fashion, perhaps more than any other industry, is feeling the consequences of this exhaustion. Fashion creators are not only expected to be creative, but they are expected to be creative constantly.

The modern fashion calendar borders on the absurd. Designers move from one collection to the next with barely enough time to finish the previous one. Ready-to-wear, couture, cruise, pre-collections, capsules, collaborations, campaigns. The machine requires a constant stream of novelty.

Take Chanel as a case study. Today, the label produces roughly six major runway collections each year: two ready-to-wear seasons, two haute couture shows, a cruise collection, and the Métiers d’Art presentation. Multiply that rhythm across decades, and the numbers become staggering. Since the early twentieth century, Chanel has produced well over a thousand runway collections.

A thousand shows.

Chanel 1995*

At a certain point, one begins to wonder whether creativity can survive that pace. When designers are required to generate ideas continuously, repetition becomes inevitable. When the industry moves at the speed of production rather than reflection, the safest option is to recycle what has already worked.

Which brings us back to that Sunday conversation about photo dumps. Fashion now operates on the same logic as social media: produce more, produce faster, produce constantly. Visibility is rewarded, and depth, less so.

True creative work, however, rarely functions under those conditions. It requires pauses and moments where observation replaces output.

The structure of the Venice Biennale offers an interesting contrast. The exhibition takes place every two years—frequent enough to remain culturally relevant, but spaced far enough apart that artists can disappear in between. They experiment. They research. They pursue side projects. They fail privately. When they return, the work feels developed rather than rushed.

Image from Venice Biennale*

Fashion rarely grants its designers that luxury. Imagine what might happen if a major house took a season off. Not because of a crisis, but deliberately. A year to observe the market. To understand what people actually want to wear. To study culture before responding to it.

The result might be something fashion desperately needs right now: collections that feel considered rather than merely produced.

Creativity is nothing but perspective, and perspective takes time to develop. As George Orwell once wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Screenshot from @ly.as Instagram

Fashion is a ruthless dictator — deeming designers or trends “out of fashion”— except when it comes to its media. After all, it is the media that preaches fashion’s whims. They are treated as permanent fixtures of the industry’s architecture, interpreting change rather than experiencing it themselves. Yet the recent dispute surrounding the LA Watch Party suggests that even fashion’s most powerful publication may not be immune to the cultural shifts it once helped orchestrate.

The original watch parties gained traction for a simple reason: they felt authentic to how fashion is actually discussed today. A group gathered around a livestreamed runway show, reacting in real time. The format stripped away the ceremony that has traditionally surrounded fashion criticism. It replaced editorial snobbery with collective interpretation.

When Vogue entered this territory with its own version—reportedly more curated, more exclusive—it revealed a deeper tension between two models of fashion media. One relies on access and authority; the other on participation and immediacy. For most of the twentieth century, Vogue operated as fashion’s central interpreter. Editors shaped the narrative, and readers absorbed the conclusions. Digital culture has since fractured that hierarchy. Commentary now unfolds simultaneously across creators, critics, and audiences.

For Gen Z, the issue is not that we want to be invited into the conversation. We already are the conversation. What we respond to is disruption. Fashion becomes interesting when it feels strange, bold, even slightly uncomfortable. The creators and commentators who resonate most with younger audiences do not simply admire fashion; they interrogate it. They challenge designers, dissect references, and treat runway shows as cultural objects rather than sacred ceremonies.

Against that backdrop, much of Vogue’s current editorial voice feels oddly cautious.

One can see this in the magazine’s increasing reliance on the “thoughts” listicle: 21 Thoughts I Had While Watching…, 27 Thoughts I Had While Watching…, and so on. There is nothing inherently wrong with a recurring format. A recognisable series can create rhythm for readers. The problem is not the structure but the substance. Too often, the “thoughts” remain precisely that: fleeting reactions rather than developed ideas. Observations appear as fragments where analysis should begin. A thought I had while reading those articles was, “This could have been a TikTok.”Comments such as “I love her blue blouse” or “this moment was chaotic” are not good enough comments for a legend such as Vogue. A legend that once distinguished itself by transforming observation into argument. Writers such as Suzy Menkes and Cathy Horyn approached collections with intellectual seriousness. They examined proportion, historical references, cultural mood, and the success—or failure—of a designer’s proposition. The reader finished the article with a clearer understanding of the show itself. Fashion deserves ideas, not merely impressions.

A similar caution appears in the magazine’s imagery. Consider the recent cover featuring Bhavitha Mandava, the Indian model discovered by Matthieu Blazy and one of the most striking new faces to emerge in recent seasons. Mandava possesses exactly the kind of presence fashion magazines once built entire visual narratives around. Yet the cover presented her against a plain blue background—elegant, certainly, but strangely restrained.

February’s British Vogue Cover

A model with that level of magnetism invites something more imaginative. Her story is intertwined with New York, a city whose visual language offers endless cinematic possibilities. One could easily imagine the cover unfolding on a deserted Underground platform late at night: the metallic walls reflecting fluorescent light, the tunnel receding into darkness behind her, a train approaching in blurred motion while she stands perfectly still in a sculptural coat. Fashion photography works best when it constructs a world around the subject rather than isolating them from it.

Ironically, Vogue itself once revolutionised the modern cover. When Anna Wintour took over American Vogue in 1988, she famously broke with decades of rigid studio portraiture. Her first cover—featuring a model wearing a couture jacket paired with jeans—felt relaxed, modern, and slightly irreverent compared to the tightly controlled glamour that preceded it. The image altered the visual grammar of fashion magazines for a generation.

Anna Wintour’s first Vogue Cover as Editor in Chief

But revolutions in fashion eventually harden into conventions. The mid-length portrait, the clean background, the carefully controlled lighting, devices that once signalled modernity now risk signalling caution. Caution rarely drives fashion forward.

Taken together, the watch-party controversy, the listicle writing, and the conservative visual language point toward the same underlying issue. Vogue remains an institution of enormous cultural weight. Its archives alone constitute one of fashion’s most important visual histories. Yet influence today depends less on prestige than on imagination. The most energetic conversations in fashion now occur outside the institutions that once controlled them. They emerge from creators, critics, and audiences who treat fashion not as a spectacle to admire but as a cultural object to debate.

This does not mean Vogue has lost relevance. But it does suggest that relevance can no longer be assumed. Fashion has always advanced through provocation: through images that challenge expectation, through criticism that sharpens rather than softens its judgments. When the culture surrounding fashion begins to feel more adventurous than the institutions documenting it, the balance has shifted.

Which leaves one unsettling possibility: has Vogue misplaced its nerve?