Backstage: Rombaut SS25

July 01, 2024

Last week in Paris, ROMBAUT didn't just tread the runway lightly. Their Spring-Summer 2025 collection celebrated the Belgian brand's 10-year anniversary, highlighting its journey from humble beginnings to avant-garde prominence.

The SS25 collection, aptly named “PATH,” encapsulated ROMBAUT's journey through struggle, growth, and enlightenment. Drawing inspiration from Shaolin Kung Fu, the collection balanced body, mind, and spirit, merging Zen Buddhist and Taoist philosophies with physical resilience. This narrative of self-improvement, kindness, and environmental care showcased the brand's unwavering dedication to environmental responsibility and social consciousness.

After a 4-month hiatus in 2023, founder Mats Rombaut returned to a fashion landscape dominated by A.I., violence, and waning religious influence. Yet, amidst these challenges, ROMBAUT found hope and meaning in creating objects that tell stories. View our backstage photos below.

Photography by Regina Ntahompagze

Fashion

Uptown Classics, Downtown Subversion at Milan Fashion Week

Diesel

Seen through that lens, Diesel ’s Fall 2024 outing was a case in point. Through a lineup of characterful attractions, democratizing the fashion show is an increasingly commonplace phenomenon for Glenn Martens, who had over a thousand aficionados connected through towering screens that projected the behind the scene process from the HQ. Now here’s the thing: You don’t really think of Glenn Martens’ practice as a vehicle of inclusivity, but this was a clever way for an insider to both acknowledge how fashion can both change and take a step forward — a step that, season after season, keeps the levels of curiosity on a high, showing funky results which keep the brand’s DNA moving. All in all, this was a wardrobe that looked mature, mixing retro glamor with contemporary codes.

Fendi

Elsewhere, you could feel a sweet, uptown tension at play at Fendi, who for Fall 2024 looked to its 1984 archives for inspiration, adopting a newfound ease that teamed comfort and ‘strident confidence’. “The sketches reminded me of London during that period: the New Romantics, the adoption of workwear, aristocratic style and more,” noted Kim Jones. Heaving with an interplay of references such as utilitarianism and drama, they acted as a catalyst for the Fendi woman this season, translating into severe tailored offerings, juxtaposing a feminine sensibility that embraces the austerity of sinuous lines with rounded silhouettes. The graphic details of rich, compact wools and layered wool coats were tied and belted, borrowing more from robes. Knitwear looked sleek, with a somewhat layered — and softened — second skin found in silk ribs which employed traditional Britishness such as the Aran and Guernsey.

Marco Rambaldi

And in times of unrest, can references ever be enough? Not for designer Marco Rambaldi, who chose to encompass a medley of emotive underpinnings in its Fall collection, detailing the current state of our times. “This is a collection that epitomizes the turbulence of our era — a time where empathy fades, the order of things tears apart and failsafe approaches become far-flung memories,” notes Rambaldi in a backstage interview with office. Rambaldi continues to have a taste for the archives, too, though this season was an ode to its classics such as the knitwear made in jacquard rainbow hearts, and garments dating back to its beginning such as the sleeveless-meets-short bomber revisited in wool, denim and leather, nodding to the art of conceal and reveal. Additionally, embellished twin sets with Swarovski crystals tinted of a heavenly blue felt pleasing.

N21

Rounding up the day was N21, where Alessandro Dell’Acqua landed on bourgeois territory for its Fall outing: albeit a tasteful set of color-blocked separates which were body-morphing and breezy in equal measure, the collection — which recalled the uptown glamor of the ‘80s — lacked cohesion, and had offbeat proportions that felt somehow redundant here and there. These are clothes that can turn into easily transformable must-haves: A seriously good (and sexy!) relish for a buyer's recipe.

Fashion

Tengkurap

Fashion

At Batsheva, Fashion Never Grays

February 21, 2024

The fashion industry has an age problem. Kaia Gerber was 13 when she signed to IMG. Brooke Shields was 15 when she told the world, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.” A 14-year-old Sofia Mechetener was described as “sultry and sophisticated” in a piece that was, ironically, meant to document her age-related controversy. While we’re about a decade past the era of casting literal preteens, there’s still a severe lack of age representation within fashion. Hegemonic culture has always equated youth with beauty, and the industry has so far proved no exception to this rule. While people like Junya Watanabe have come in with their genius casting of older men on the runway, it feels as if people are still trying to forget that women don’t always look like children. Of course, the stigma surrounding female aging is as culturally proliferating as ever. The skincare industry is built off of manufactured fears of aging, condemning crow's feet, smile lines, and sun spots. Advertisers profit off of our desires to erase all evidence of life, but here's where Batsheva comes in.

With her latest show, designer Batsheva Hay refuses to relegate women over forty to “grandma fashion.” And while grandma fashion seems to be one of the thousands of trending “-cores” (ex: coastal grandma, whatever that means), Batsheva says that fun clothes don’t burst into flames the minute you start going gray. The FW24 collection even plays on the industry’s less-than-affectionate nickname for women over thirty, with "HAG" in giant letters embroidered across knit sweaters. Aging doesn’t have to be regal and poised — it can be juvenile and fun. Oversized voluminous dresses with polka dots and bright colors remind us that we’re all just overgrown children.

By Izzy Capulong
Photos Nikole Naloy

What is it about youth that obsesses us as a culture? What is it that's keeping casting directors and retailers from casting older models? Some say it's a question of attractiveness; sex does sell, after all. But here's the thing — you don't have to want to sleep with someone to acknowledge they exist. And maybe that gets to the politics of desirability and the social capital carried by the state of being wanted. But then, if modeling is about attraction and desire, that opens the fashion industry up to much more insidious critiques. Even with the gradual disappearance of literal children from the runway, what remains (aside from the legal questions surrounding child labor) are the ethical dilemmas, asking what it means to have a child as the face of a supposedly sexy brand. There are entire dissertations to be written about fashion’s obsession with assigning adult sexuality to an ostensibly young body. Nora Turriago writes it best in her 2016 HuffPost piece, explaining, “There is something distinctly unsettling about watching a pubescent girl stalk down the runway, styled to look beyond her years and wearing expensive clothing intended for children.”

With bows, colors, and volume, the post-COVID “dopamine dressing” of the past few seasons has been about healing our inner children. But perhaps there’s a way to do that without completely disregarding the inherent beauty of aging. What is more beautiful than a life well-lived? Working in the fashion industry, I’ve seen some of the most beautiful models get chewed up and spit out by legacy agencies the minute they stop looking like how they did in middle school. My mom always told me the world doesn’t end after high school. She was right. And fashion doesn’t end when you turn forty, or at least, it shouldn’t.