Lemaire‘s spring-summer 2025 collection was galore of understated sensuality. Soft tailoring revisited in light, supple fabrics, workwear imagined in refined materials, loose-fitting cuts following fitted lines and slender attitudes that enrich the wardrobe with a new sense of seductiveness. Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran played with sexy straps: they transformed outerwear into nonchalantly gestured shoulder accessory; they were integrated with knitted mini-dresses in form of garters that held up matching thigh-highs. I love to see these cheeky moments the brand surprises its loyal fan-base with (remember the butt bags?). The designers indulged in more quirky, flirty details, like the beaded body jewelry adorning a fluid dress or a guy’s cowboy black shirt pierced with small rings.
Here are couple of great Lemaire pieces you can shop now…
So far, Undercover‘s Jun Takahashi has presented the best collection of this menswear season. I still can’t believe in its beauty, a delightful balance of refinement, fluidness and tactility. The designer was thinking about the concept of “borderlessness“. “There are many categories, many tribes. I wanted to make it borderless. Because to eliminate conflicts, you want borders to be eliminated – that’s the metaphor. And because I work in fashion, this is how I can express that.” Human unity at a moment of fracture – a theme that isn’t easy to capture through the medium of clothes, but Takahashi did just wonderfully. In the opening section the designer seemed to consider the artist’s uniform, showing a series of loose linen jackets and high-hemmed pants in sky-blue, pink, or off-white. Straps were suspended from the jacket skirts, and the elbows, vents, and other points of physical articulation were bordered by zippers or slits. Some of the garments were printed with images of clouds or smoke. The closing section featured prints of Takahashi’s painted art whose subjects included a looming sphere-headed, many-tentacled entity, and which the designer called “my creature.” On their heads, the models wore either wide-brimmed hats with fishnet veils or headpieces of golden nails or leaves above lace masks across their eyes. Most wore ornate beaded collars at their necks and intriguing little details including brightly colored painted buttons. Later on there was a phenomenal ragged-edged skirt in what looked like an old baroque brocade. Full-length robes and trailing, metal-flecked sari-esque trains and skirts came at the end. “He wanted to provide a men’s collection which also has elements that are feminine,” reported Takahashi’s translator: “because he thinks this border is getting less and less.”
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Hey, did you know about my newsletter – Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!
Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen are in their experimentation mode. No longer bound to uncompromising minimalism they’ve established and refined to razor-sharp perfection throughout the years, they are confidently letting not-that-easy-to-digest edginess to The Row‘s world. Or maybe the most stylish twins in the world are taking a look back at their culture-shifting style from the 2000s? @eljosecriales started that discourse by comparing spring-summer 2025’s grey melange sweater worn over a white ivory slip dress worn over washed blue pants to one of Mary-Kate’s red carpet looks from 2004 that similarly played with layers in a cool, spontaneous, boho manner. That’s the definition of “auto-referential“! Most of the new season offering feels like a very instinctual play with clothes and accessories, never matching or fitting “as it should“, but striking an intriguing balance. Phoebe Philo’s late years at Céline had a similar essence, but the Olsens aren’t copying the British designer as they used to back in the day – they’re doing their own, authentic thing. As they should – they are by now very mature designers, as The Row is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary (the twins started with a t-shirt). And their just-opened shop in Amagansett will certainly sell these plaid shirts, breezy dresses, denim shirts and future-vintage evening dresses like hot buns. Oh, to be awfully rich and buy The Row like daily apparel!
There’s an appealing, sensually charged toughness about Magda Butrym’s collection for resort 2025. The Polish designer’s smokey-eyed and red-lipped glamazons are in a dreamworld, but one that isn’t a saccharine wonderland. A sense of enigmatic chic informs the entire line-up, blurring the lines between daywear and eveningwear, feminine and masculine, precious and utilitarian. The collection’s brave, tough chic mood finds inspiration in cinematic depictions of women in West Berlin during the late 1970s, from Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” remake to Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession“. The first, a perplexing story of a witchy dance school and its female-only cadre and students, informs the collection’s color palette. Rusty-tones, overcast-greens and earthy-ecrus meet intoxicating blood-red – the color of lipstick on the pale faces of Madame Blanc’s dancers, and their nail polish, and the unsettling interiors of the Tanz Akademie. In Possession, the high-pitched fever dream directed by the renowned Polish provocateur, Isabelle Adjani’s character Anna – entangled in an illicit, forbidden romance – storms metro stations and soc-realist neighborhoods in utilitarian, yet feminine dress-coats. These two so female-centered films deliver an unobvious outlook on women, their emotions, sensuality, and most importantly, their sacred power. The lookbook, photographed by Vitali Gelwich, was captured inside Warsaw’s iconic Dom Pod Orłami (“House Under Eagles”). This modernist pearl keeps in its thick, marble walls many untold secrets, from pre-war bank affairs to wild raves of the 1990s. Who knows what rituals happened down these long corridors and hidden staircases? The brute, monumental beauty of the building charges the lookbook with certain mysterious, elusive, even esoteric ambience, one that can be perceived in Guadagnino and Żuławski’s cinematic universes.
In all that highly feminine, yet commanding mood the designer is channeling and refining in her latest offerings, an assortment of no-nonsense, investment-worthy garments: a drab olive-brown jacket with a high, chin-grazing collar styled with matching pair of knitted panties;sensational outerwear in broad-shouldered cut; pleated, wool pants refined by the designer to perfection. But there’s also place for unabashed glam: the eternal style of Milanese sciuras unexpectedly dialogues with the unsung chic of Old Warsaw’s starlets like Zula through a retro-imbued overlap that comes evident in faux fur stoles wrapped around the shoulders, worn over seductive, ruched dresses with built-in corsets. Meanwhile, the two finale pieces of the collection are hooded black dresses in either above-the-knee or floor-sweeping length. They intrigue with minimalist sharpness of cut and the seductive depth of plunging necklines, subverting monastic connotations. As usual in case of Butrym’s style vocabulary, there’s a charming nod to her Slavic heritage. For resort, it comes in form of hand-made lace from Koniaków which is very proudly used in a crocheted body with sharp shoulder-pads, an apron-like skirt, shopper bags, and next season’s ultimate it-accessory: bonnets.
Psst… have you seen the designer’s first ever flagship store that she opened last month in Warsaw? Read about it right here!
Need a Magda Butrym wardrobe update? I’ve got you covered.
Mads Mikkelsen closed Zegna‘s spring-summer 2025 show, and also men’s Milan Fashion Week. Alessandro Sartori‘s take on the brand is always a pleasure to see, and a reminder that maybe there’s no need in reinventing the wheel. In the end, the best clothes are the ones that strike with quality and look always great, whatever trend is terrorizing the streets at the moment. Wearing Zegna, a man (or woman – Sartori confidently tips his toes in this field too!) doesn’t have to overthink his appearance, because these garments do all the work for him. The latest collection had a nuance of sensuality that was “quintessentially Italian, a certain idea of Italian elegance in the ’60s,” a feel for lightness and insouciance that seemed to break away from Sartori’s renowned, disciplined minimalism. The designer has translated traditional suiting into a luxe version of sportswear, and has given workwear an elaborate, rich new identity. His work is about hybridization of the highest refined order, with a constant tension in reducing the categories of masculine dressing and finding new solutions to liberate classics from the weight of their codes. He does it brilliantly, and with one of the best color palettes in the industry!
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Hey, did you know about my newsletter – Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!
Design & Culture by Ed 