Burberry’s Festive Claridge’s Takeover

He wasn’t the first elaborately costumed star to tear through Claridge’s at an indecent hour – Kate Moss famously spent her The Beautiful And Damned-themed 30th here – but he may have been the most inconspicuous. Picture it: not yet 9am, and into the hotel’s expansive lobby clanks a man in full medeival knight regalia, while a brass band plays carols and a Golden Retriever hoovers errant fries from burger carts during the grand unveiling of this year’s Christmas tree by Burberry’s Daniel Lee.

“Being invited to design the Claridge’s Christmas tree is a huge honour,” says the Bradford-born designer, who could be found overseeing the production well into the early hours the (k)night before. “Claridge’s is my favourite hotel in London, a symbol of elegance and charm.” And charm really is the word: Lee’s 16-foot fir, drenched in 600 purple, flaxen and aquamarine bows made from surplus Burberry fabrics, stuffed with thistles, glass baubles, brass bells, and surrounded by throws, cushions and chess pieces, feels like a happy deviation from the conceptual contortions that have previously taken up space. John Galliano created a porcelain-white menagerie in 2009, Karl Lagerfeld an upside-down spruce in 2017, and Burberry’s Christopher Bailey a triangular structure of metallic umbrellas in 2015. Lee’s vision, by contrast, seems transported from the grand country piles that inspired his autumn/winter 2025 collection, where the retrievers are indeed well-fed and the walls lined with suits of armour.

“The whole idea behind the show came, initially, from London’s ‘weekend escapees’,” Lee said back then, less than an hour before sending Lesley Manville, swathed in velvet brocade, down a Tate Britain runway. “Those who live and work in the capital and escape to the beautiful English countryside to breathe the fresh air, take long walks and disengage.” But it was tonight’s party where that scene came most to life, with a grab bag of national treasures – Jennifer Saunders, Richard E Grant, Karen Elson, Alexa Chung – drifting about the place like eccentric aunts and uncles sprung from the family attic, while some editors turned up in pyjama shorts and slippers, as though they’d just padded down from whichever turret bedroom Lee had allocated them for the night. And then there were the requisite branded touch points: a pop-up shop, doormen, old-school train trolleys groaning with penny sweets, key cards, lifts – and every other available surface – decked in Burberry check.

And, of course, no charmingly dysfunctional Christmas is complete without its, in this case, Negroni-stoked, speeches. Olivia Colman, for one, gathered more than 500 guests in Claridge’s foyer and reading room for an ode to the season. “I know this isn’t going to be a popular opinion, but would you mind putting your phones down?” she said, launching into a self-authored riff on ‘Twas the Night After Christmas. “Now we’ll feel Christmassy together.” If that sounds at all kitsch, the holidays are a time for fashionably unfashionable quantities of schmaltz.

Costume Art Is the First Exhibition In The Costume Institute’s New Permanent Galleries At The Met

Fashion is coming out of the basement at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Announced today, Costume Art, the spring 2026 exhibition at the Costume Institute, will mark the inauguration of the nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M Nast Galleries, adjacent to The Met’s Great Hall. “It’s a huge moment for the Costume Institute,” says curator in charge Andrew Bolton. “It will be transformative for our department, but I also think it’s going to be transformative to fashion more generally – the fact that an art museum like The Met is actually giving a central location to fashion.”

To mark the momentous occasion, Bolton has conceived an exhibition that addresses “the centrality of the dressed body in the museum’s vast collection,” by pairing paintings, sculptures and other objects spanning the 5,000 years of art represented in The Met, alongside historical and contemporary garments from the Costume Institute.

“What connects every curatorial department and what connects every single gallery in the museum is fashion, or the dressed body,” Bolton says. “It’s the common thread throughout the whole museum, which is really what the initial idea for the exhibition was, this epiphany: I know that we’ve often been seen as the stepchild, but, in fact, the dressed body is front and centre in every gallery you come across. Even the nude is never naked,” he continues. “It’s always inscribed with cultural values and ideas.”

The art and fashion divide stubbornly persists despite Costume Institute exhibitions like “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”, which was the most-visited exhibition in The Met’s history with 1.66 million visitors. Bolton figures that the hierarchy endures precisely because of clothing’s connection to the body. “Fashion’s acceptance as an art form has really occurred on art’s terms,” he explains. “It’s premised on the negation, on the renunciation, of the body, and on the [fact that] aesthetics are about disembodied and disinterested contemplation.”

Traditionally, Bolton admits, Costume Institute shows have emphasised clothing’s visual appeal, with the mannequins disappearing behind or underneath garments. His bold idea for Costume Art is to insist on the significance of the body, or “the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear.” Fashion, he insists, actually “has an edge on art because it is about one’s lived, embodied experience.”

He’s organised the exhibition around a series of thematic body types loosely divided into three categories. These include bodies omnipresent in art, like the classical body and the nude body; other kinds of bodies that are more often overlooked, like aging bodies and pregnant bodies; and still more that are universal, like the anatomical body. Bolton’s is a much more expansive view of the corporeal than the fashion industry itself often promotes, with its rail-thin models and narrow size ranges. “The idea was to put the body back into discussions about art and fashion, and to embrace the body, not to take it away as a way of elevating fashion to an art form,” he explains.

Indeed, the exhibition has been designed, by Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of the Brooklyn firm Peterson Rich Office, to privilege fashion. In the high ceiling room of the Condé M Nast Galleries (there is also a low ceilinged room), clothing will be displayed on mannequins perched on 6-foot pedestals, onto which the artwork will be embedded. “When you walk in, your eye immediately goes up, you look at the fashions first,” Bolton says.

Even more powerfully, the artist Samar Hejazi has been commissioned to create mirrored heads for the show’s mannequins. “I’ve always wanted to try to bridge the gap between the viewer and the mannequin,” Bolton begins. With a “mannequin where the face is a mirror, you’re looking at yourself. Part of that is to reflect on the lived experience of the bodies you’re looking at, and also to reflect your own lived experience – to facilitate empathy and compassion.” Going a step further, the museum will also be casting real bodies to embody the clothes. “As you go through, [the exhibition] will challenge normative conventions and, in turn, offer more diverse displays of beauty.”

Costume Art is the first of Bolton’s exhibitions to be subtitle-less. The simplicity of the show’s name bolsters its objective: that fashion should most certainly be considered on the same plane as art. “I thought very, very carefully about that,” Bolton says. In fact, as recently as two weeks ago, the show did have a colon and a subtitle. “But then we took it out and it was like taking off a corset,” he laughs. “I thought, this is exactly what it should be. It’s bold, it’s strong, it’s a statement of intent.” The goal, he goes on, “is not to create a new hierarchy. It’s just to disband that hierarchy and to focus on equivalency – equivalency of artworks and equivalency of bodies.”

Made possible by Jeff and Lauren Bezos, with other funding from Saint Laurent and Condé Nast, Costume Art will run from 10 May 2026 – 10 January 2027, following the Met Gala on 4 May, 2026, which provides the Costume Institute with its primary source of funding for all activities.

Apple And Issey Miyake Unite For The iPhone Pocket

It’s no secret that Steve Jobs’s favourite fashion designer was Issey Miyake. The former Apple CEO adopted the Japanese designer’s minimal black turtlenecks as part of the iconic uniform he wore on Keynote stages around the world, though apart from a mutual respect – and the facts that Miyake once appeared in Apple’s Think Different campaign and almost designed an Apple uniform – the duo never officially collaborated.

Until now. This month, Apple releases a collaboration with Issey Miyake, marking the tech brand’s first union with a fashion house since the Apple Watch Hermès in 2015. The product? A curious-looking rectangle of 3D-knitted fabric known as the iPhone Pocket. Robust and cushioned, with stretchy pleats true to Issey Miyake’s iconic Pleats Please design, the accessory is designed to snugly hold any model of iPhone (as well as small essentials like AirPods or a chapstick).

The iPhone Pocket comes in two lengths – one short enough to carry on the wrist and another that can be worn cross-body – as well as a spectrum of colours: three for the long design and eight for the short, that spans punchy brights like mandarin orange and peacock blue to subtler neutrals. The shorter version can also be tied up and used as a bag charm. Labubu who?

Like Issey Miyake and Apple’s greatest designs before it, the Pocket is deceptively simple. “At first glance, you probably wouldn’t recognise what it is,” says Yoshiyuki Miyamae, design director of the Miyake Design Studio (Issey Miayke’s parent company). A longtime staffer who joined the company in 2001 and worked closely alongside Miyake himself, Miyamae is in charge of A-POC ABLE, the label based on the late designer’s A Piece of Cloth concept, which examines the minutiae of clothes making. That fastidiousness and technical knowledge made him the perfect man for the job.

To bring the collaboration to fruition, Miyamae handpicked a talented trio of designers from across Issey Miyake to form a team, and they set about making prototypes. Some were crafted from paper, origami-style. They took their ideas to Apple’s HQ in Cupertino where they met with the industrial design team, and from there sparked a creative process that Miyamae likens to making music. “It was like a jazz session. Everyone brainstormed and asked, ‘how can we develop it further?’, ‘should we take it in this direction or that?’,” he says. “There was a mutual respect and understanding that made the process really efficient and productive.”

Happily for both sides, and perhaps because of the shared legacy of innovation, everything came together naturally. “We didn’t start with the idea of a collaboration, and in fact it really wasn’t the intention,” says Molly Anderson, Apple’s vice president of industrial design, on a video call from Cupertino. “We were interested in how they [at Issey Miyake] work, to see what we could learn from them, and the other way around.” A stylish Brit with blunt bangs and wireframe aviators, Anderson found an easy synergy with the Miyake team. “It has felt like a very organic relationship in terms of the personalities working together, without hierarchy, or without feeling like there was a pressure of expertise or scale or knowledge, but really a meeting of minds,” she says.

Colour choices for the iPhone Pocket were a key part of the two teams’ synergy. The aforementioned shade of mandarin, which Miyamae’s team proposed, was by total coincidence close to the new iPhone 17’s ‘Cosmic Orange’, at the time still unreleased. “We realised that the things that resonate with us are really very similar to things that resonate with them, so that was a lovely moment for us,” says Anderson.

Faithful to Apple’s history of paper engineering, the packaging comes with ceremony – and a Japanese twist. The long, frosted paper that contains the iPhone Pocket was inspired by the rice paper candy bags used for a Japanese children’s festival where long sweets are given to symbolise prayers for a healthy life ahead. For Miyamae, it evokes a childlike sense of excitement and anticipation: “The idea is that you’re opening a gift that’s full of candy.”

The accessory also signals how our phones are increasingly becoming part of our outfits; a natural extension of a phone case. “The way that people carry and style their products has changed and is becoming even more of an expression of yourself,” says Anderson. Working with a fashion house like Issey Miyake helps Apple adapt to the shift. “It allows us to be a bit more playful in terms of colour, branding, and material…and to flex a little bit into other spaces. We’ve certainly learned things in the process, which perhaps influences our next round of packaging or next round of product,” she says.

Though Miyake and Jobs are not around to see it, there is a significance to the collaboration that transcends the product. “Both these great masterminds are now gone, but what we have in common is how we continue to challenge ourselves to be innovative, and to create new and original things,” says Miyamae. “It’s a moment of connecting the dots.” The iPhone Pocket short strap will retail for £139.95 and the long strap for £219.95, from Friday 14 November at select Apple Store locations worldwide and from Apple.com.

Olivier Rousteing Exits Balmain

Olivier Rousteing has stepped down as creative director of Balmain after 14 years, the house announced today. The news closes one of the longest, most disruptive and most publicly visible designer tenures in 21st-century fashion.

“I am deeply proud of all that I’ve accomplished, and profoundly grateful to my exceptional team at Balmain, my chosen family, in a place that has been my home for the past 14 years. My thanks go to Mr Rachid Mohamed Rachid and Matteo Sgarbossa for their unwavering belief in me and for entrusting me with this extraordinary opportunity. As I look ahead to the future and the next chapter of my creative journey, I will always hold this treasured time close to my heart,” said Rousteing in a statement.

“I would like to express my deep gratitude to Olivier for writing such an important chapter in the history of Balmain House. Olivier’s contribution and passion over the past years will leave an indelible mark on the history of fashion,” added Balmain CEO Matteo Sgarbossa.

When Rousteing was handed the Balmain job in April 2011, aged 25, he became the youngest non-founding designer to lead a major Paris house since Yves Saint Laurent was appointed at Dior. He was also the first Black person ever appointed creative leader of a heritage French house across all its design categories. During 2012, his first full year in charge, Balmain recorded revenues of €30.4 million and profit of €3.1 million: last year its revenues were estimated at €300 million.

Despite that tenfold fiscal uptick over his tenure, Balmain’s recently appointed leadership is committed to imposing different creative directions in order to drive future growth. The question is whether it will choose to appoint an established designer lead in Rousteing’s stead, or alternatively opt for the high-risk but also high-reward strategy of giving the Balmain platform to a creative as untested as Rousteing was when his story at the house began.

Then unknown outside the industry – and largely unknown within it – he had been working in the Balmain studio under his predecessor Christophe Decarnin since 2009. His appointment was backed by Balmain’s then-owner Alain Hivelin, who had rescued the house from near-bankruptcy: when Decarnin unexpectedly left, Hivelin took a gamble. “I will be forever grateful to Alain Hivelin for his vision, his support and friendship,” Rousteing said after Hivelin’s death in 2014.

Despite being “terrified” at his spring/summer 2012 debut, Rousteing steadily built in confidence. From his earliest seasons, Rousteing characterised himself as both custodian to Pierre Balmain’s heritage and disruptor to fashion’s wider conservatism. Alongside high-impact, heavily embellished and, often, critically divisive collections, he developed what he termed the Balmain Army: a collective social-media driven community built around diversity, visibility and direct connection with the public. “When I started to have a lot of diversity in the casting, and when I started to play hip-hop music, some people started to question what I was doing,” he later recalled. “And then Rihanna came backstage and said, ‘You’re changing the rules of this fashion world.’”

This was not his only gleeful name drop. His friendships with figures such as Kim Kardashian, Gigi Hadid and Rihanna created a period of pop-culture influence for Balmain. “My first meeting with Kim was surprising, electric and love,” he said of their encounter at the 2013 Met Gala. The first piece he designed for her was a pearl-covered dress for her bachelorette party. Those relationships helped shift Balmain from Decarnin’s elite, IYKYK Paris label to a globally recognised symbol of contemporary and unabashedly flashy glamour. When, in 2015, H&M offered a collaboration collection based on hits from Rousteing’s first eight seasons of design, over 500 people slept overnight (in November) outside the London Regent Street flagship where they were on sale. In Paris, the collection sold out in three hours. The hashtag #Balmainia seemed entirely justified.

The following year, 2016, revenues were around €120 million: Qatar-based Mayhoola purchased 100 per cent of Balmain for €500 million that same year. Following the acquisition, Rousteing worked to expand the reach of both Balmain and Paris fashion more broadly. Beginning with his large-scale festival shows, among them the 2019 men’s presentation during Paris’s Fête de la Musique, which drew more than 2,000 guests to the Jardin des Plantes, he made public access a core part of the Balmain experience. “Our belief,” he said then, “is in the possibility of a more inclusive, joyful future for fashion.” The Balmain Festival events blended live music with runway presentations: some editors kvetched, but the audience loved it.

“Olivier’s visionary leadership has not only redefined the boundaries of fashion but also inspired a generation with bold creativity, unwavering authenticity, and commitment to inclusivity. We are immensely proud of all that has been achieved under his direction and look forward to seeing the next chapter of his journey unfold with the same brilliance and passion,” said Mayhoola CEO and Balmain chairman Rachid Mohamed Rachid.

For much of Rousteing’s tenure, he was closely supported by Txampi Diz, who worked first as Balmain’s KCD-employed external publicist and later as house chief marketing officer. Just as it had for him under Decarnin, Balmain under Rousteing also proved an early training ground for several young designers, including Ludovic de Saint Sernin, who passed through the atelier before founding his own label.

Rousteing’s work consistently returned to the founder, Pierre Balmain. He cited the post-war couturier’s bravery and precision as the brand’s source code and used the 1950s archive to re-anchor Balmain’s identity after years of faded relevance. “My strength has been to build Balmain’s pop-culture relevance,” he said, “but also to build Balmain into a heritage house.” His admiration for Karl Lagerfeld was equally powerful; in return, Lagerfeld, who began his own career as Pierre Balmain’s assistant, once floated Rousteing as his possible successor at Chanel.

In 2019, Rousteing, who was adopted and raised by white French parents in Bordeaux, revealed another side of his story in Wonder Boy, a documentary that followed his search for his birth parents. Two years later, he endured a domestic accident that left him with severe burns. These experiences were duly reflected in Balmain collections that followed. He was also the guest couturier for Jean Paul Gaultier’s autumn/winter 2022 haute couture collection.

Following Hivelin’s sale to Mayhoola, Rousteing worked under CEOs Massimo Piombini from 2017 to 2019, and then Jean-Jacques Guével through 2024. That year, Guével was succeeded by Matteo Sgarbossa, who is an alum of Mango, Gucci and Givenchy. Alongside these executives, Rousteing’s 14-year tenure saw him drive a major diversification of the house. He reintroduced couture to the schedule in 2019 as a guest designer, launched beauty and fragrance under license with Estée Lauder in 2023, and expanded accessories into a significant business line. Rousteing and Sgarbossa partnered during Balmain’s 80th-anniversary year in 2025 to consolidate those achievements and, it turns out, position the brand for its next phase under the successor-to-come.

Speaking after what would be his final show in the ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel on 1 October 2025, Rousteing reflected on being back in the venue of his first-ever show as creative director of Balmain. “I was so scared and so shy,” he said of his debut there in 2011. He also seemed to suggest that he hoped to remain at the house, saying: “This season everybody’s talking about a new era and new beginnings, but I believe that you can build your new era, and make your new beginning, by being yourself in the same house and challenging yourself.” Today’s announcement leaves Rousteing, who celebrated his 40th birthday in September, looking to build that “new era” somewhere apart from Balmain.

The Biggest Ever Exhibition Of Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Will Go On Show At Buckingham Palace

In April 1929, Princess Elizabeth appeared on the cover of Time, published in honour of her third birthday. The portrait, taken by the society photographer Marcus Adams, who had shot her formal Vogue debut two years earlier, captures the future Queen in a pastel play dress, a string of pearls and a fugue state of boredom. The headline reads, “P’incess Lilbet, she has set the babe fashion for yellow,” while inside the magazine, a clerk at H Gordon Selfridge’s is quoted as saying, “every mother wants to buy a little yellow frock, or primrose bonnet like Princess Elizabeth’s.”

It is sort of amusing that the heir apparent had established a uniform before she could even spell her own name. Over the next ten decades, Elizabeth II would rely on court dressers Norman Hartnell, Sir Hardy Amies, Sir Ian Thomas, Stewart Parvin and Angela Kelly to create ensembles in all sorts of striking colours – from a sequined, multi-coloured harlequin blouse for the 1999 Royal Variety Performance to a neon green skirt suit on the Buckingham Palace balcony for Trooping the Colour in 2016. Every look, hat to hem, was designed so that, at 5ft 4, she would always stand out in a crowd; her early raincoats were made from see-through plastic, precipitating the umbrellas of her later reign.

This is, of course, just one aspect of the late monarch’s wardrobe set to be explored in a forthcoming retrospective at The King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace in April 2026. Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style – the largest exhibition of the Queen’s fashion ever staged – will showcase around 200 items, roughly half of which have never been displayed before. The selection spans couture gowns, including an apple-green dress worn to a 1957 state banquet at the British Embassy in Washington, and the blue crinoline-skirted number worn for Princess Margaret’s wedding in 1960, to the headscarves, tweed jackets and tartan skirts of her Balmoral wardrobe. Many pieces will be shown alongside original sketches and fabric swatches, annotated by court dressers and the Queen herself.

And then there are the added works by Christopher Kane, Erdem Moralıoğlu and Richard Quinn – the first recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design – each shown alongside a corresponding garment from the Queen’s archive, as evidence of her influence on contemporary style. All three designers have, in different ways, weighed in on that legacy. Kane’s spring/summer 2011 collection, for example, evoked her image through argyle sweaters draped over shoulders and a drop-waist, laser-cut leather dress that mimicked lace; and Moralıoğlu’s spring/summer 2018 proposal drew on a young Elizabeth’s love of Harlem Renaissance jazz; while Quinn’s autumn/winter 2024 offering reimagined the crystal-embroidered gown she wore to the 1962 premiere of Lawrence of Arabia, as well as the black velvet dress she chose for her 1956 meeting with Marilyn Monroe.

Each designer will expand on their connection to the Queen’s clothing in an accompanying tome, which includes a tribute from Vogue’s Anna Wintour and an essay from Amy de la Haye, the professor of dress history and curatorship at the London College of Fashion. Together, they present an exploration of Elizabeth II as both a private individual and imperial sovereign and, well, the velvet gloves that concealed the iron fist. Speaking on his own relationship to her style, Kane says: “Queen Elizabeth II’s wardrobe is one of the most significant living archives in modern fashion history. From the decline of the court dressmaker to the rise of couturiers like Hartnell and Hardy Amies, her garments tell the story of Britain and its evolving identity through fashion. For designers and students, it offers a masterclass in silhouette, construction, repetition, symbolism and perhaps most importantly, restraint.” Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style opens at The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, on 10 April 2026.