Chic

Rive Gauche. Saint Laurent Pre-Fall 2025

| Design & Culture by Ed

Anthony Vaccarello‘s pre-fall 2025 collection for Saint Laurent serves as a subtle prelude to the winter fashion show we’ve seen back in March. While the ultra-boxy, exaggerated outerwear silhouettes are absent here, we instead get the first hints of bold, saturated colors (Vaccarello really knows how to use orange) and maxi-length skirts that echoed the show’s finale with their gargantuan volumes. The main theme for this lookbook line-up is the year of 1966, a pivotal moment in Yves Saint Laurent history: the launch of the Rive Gauche ready-to-wear label. The collection couldn’t get more ready-to-wear: Prince of Wales plaid blazers and skirts (Yves’ signature), leather jackets you want to wear (and wear out), boudoir lace slips and fluffy furs. The Left Bank allure is far from dead.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Icecream-hued Chic. Maryam Nassir Zadeh SS25

| Design & Culture by Ed

For spring-summer 2025, Maryam Nassir Zadeh delivers her trademark (es)sense of cool. It’s one you just can’t fake; authenticity and realness have always been Maryam’s key codes, whether we’re talking about her label, her boutiques in New York and Paris, or her personal style that’s on so many brands’ moodboards. The experiments with clothes, textures and colors she conducts in her wardrobe are reflected and refined in her ready-to-wear collections. You can tell the designer is really into silky transparency this spring season, and she made it extra-intriguing (and extra-sensual) thanks to an idiosyncratic color palette pulled from “ice cream” hues like mango, guava, pistachio, and cherry (she posted a lot sorbets throughout the summer on her IG!). All that delight got brilliantly balanced with mannish, earthy brown tones. The juxtaposition of ultra-feminine slip-dresses and ruffled sheer skirts with more masculine elements like vintage-y leathers and flannel shirts (a mix & match delightfully orchestrated with the help of stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington) makes this collection feel even more appealing.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Femme-hood. Saint Laurent Pre-Fall 2024

| Design & Culture by Ed

It sometimes seems Anthony Vaccarello is more YSL than Yves Saint Laurent ever was. The Belgian designer has formed an immensely razor-sharp image of the contemporary maison, smartly constructed out of Saint Laurent archives and refreshed with modern-day approach to glamour. For pre-fall 2024 – that is now hitting stores – there are plenty of great weathered leather coats, blousons, and belted utility jackets. There are also two absolutely to die for le smokings, particularly the one suit whose tux jacket was faced with lace. But there was also the body-revealing part, one that caused a stir in Vaccarello’s winter 2024 collection we’ve seen in early spring. It was built on sheer stocking dressing, with fake furs casually thrown over it all. The story is here too, emphasized by lingerie-esque pieces and styled with black lace hose with just about everything – such a classically, somewhat naughtily playful Parisian gesture. The boudoir vibe was played up with a slew of gorgeous screen siren satiny long dresses, sinuous little slip dresses, and a new iteration of the jumpsuit, conjured out of a skinny-strapped lace-edged camisole, all of which were variously worn with stacks of chunky bangles and pointy satin-y sculpted shoes. You better don’t mess up with that femme.

Shop my favorite pieces from the collection…

ED’s SELECTION:


SAINT LAURENT Satin-jersey Midi Skirt



SAINT LAURENT Lace-trimmed Ribbed Silk-jersey Mini Dress



SAINT LAURENT Faux Fur Scarf



SAINT LAURENT Lace-trimmed Ribbed Silk-jersey Tank Top



SAINT LAURENT Hall Satin Mules

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Bourgeois Chic. Chloé Resort 2025

| Design & Culture by Ed

Resort 2025 is the third collection we see from Chemena Kamali at Chloé, and so far we know for a fact that she really has a knack for revisiting and refreshing the maison‘s codes, from Gaby Aghion’s liberating femininity to Stella McCartney and Phoebe Philo’s early 2000s frivolity. For spring, Kamali is taking a closer look at bourgeois chic from Karl Lagerfeld’s era. “There are all these stories to explore that haven’t really been told yet that are part of our history,” she said. This time her mood-board was covered with images of “the Art Deco years of Karl in the 1970s. He furnished the entire apartment he lived in, in Saint Germain, as this Deco masterpiece – everything was in black and gold, and white, cream and gold, and he used to lend it to Vogue and others for shoots. Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton, David Bailey, and Deborah Turbeville all shot there.” The billowing, floating volumes, off-the shoulder dresses, balloon-sleeved blouses, and square-necked smocks in diaphanous coin-dot lamé and swirling, pleated metallic florals swiftly teleport you to these days. But there’s also a breath of contemporary air. The boxer-ballet shoe hybrid wedged sneakers Chloé is launching this season (similar walked in a couple of Hannah McGibbon’s runways). “I wanted something that was soft, feminine, comfortable,” Kamali summed up. “And they had to be real. All the women in the office have been test-wearing them.” Collaged from a myriad soft pastel colors in hi-top and low versions, they look like a Chloé hit in the making. Also worth noting: the reissuing of Square Camera handbag with chain handle from Philo’s winter 2003 collection. Whoever still has it in their wardrobe, lucky you!

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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The Girl is Back. Chloé Pre-Fall 2024.

| Design & Culture by Ed

The Chloé girl is so back, baby. Chemena Kamali‘s pre-fall 2024 collection – a prelude to the runway line-up we’ve seen in the end of February – proves that the designer is confident about her vision of the Parisian maison. Kamali knows the history of the brand inside out, and worked there as a Chloé-obsessed junior designer in the noughties under Phoebe Philo’s creative direction, and then again under Clare Waight Keller. Nobody comprehends better than Kamali the spontaneous feeling of it-ness that belongs to the female-centric Chloé philosophy; a power recharged through so many generations since the house was founded in the 1950s by the Jewish-Egyptian emigré Gaby Aghion as a free-spirited ready-to-wear antidote to Parisian haute couture. “I really was thinking a lot about the Chloé wardrobe, what it should consist of, just, quite frankly, why do I want to wear it? What do I think is important to have in terms of essential pieces, things that go well with other silhouettes that you have at home already?” It’s the balance of carefree romance and pragmatism that’s run through the house since Karl Lagerfeld’s tenures in the ’70s, ’80s, and late ’90s; what Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, and Hannah McGibbon ignited in the aughts; and Kamali’s consciousness of what contemporary women need (she herself is a working mother). Customers will soon come across hot wardrobe staples at Chloé boutiues: a navy gabardine jacket with an elongated “Karl collar“, hanging next to a pair of white jeans with scalloped edges, and a soft navy blouse. Then, there’s an array of perfectly-cut trousers hang with slim cognac leather maxi coats, blazers, and caped “highwaywoman” gabardine trenches. Silk slip dresses elude with hyper-feminine energy, contrasting with utilitarian button-on capes on the raincoats. As for accessories, Kamali offers some of the chicest pieces in the brand’s recent history, instant best-sellers: the spacious “Camera” bag, classic wedges and timeless, suede over-the-knee boots.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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