For much of the month of April, I’ve been on the road, speaking at conferences, attending trade shows, and doing research for my upcoming biography on Giorgio Armani, and along the way, I gleaned all sorts of interesting tidbits.

During the European Designer Fashion Summit in Barcelona, all that anyone could talk about—and ask me about—was the upcoming partnership of John Galliano, whose mother was Spanish, and Zara, the Spanish fast fashion giant. As most of you know, I weighed in on the news a few weeks ago; if you missed it, you can read it here.

But the most interesting thing I heard about it was that Condé Nast Global Chief Content Officer Anna Wintour was apparently spotted on the Zara campus in A Coruña, Spain last fall. Folks wondered if she was the one who brokered the Zara x Galliano deal, and if that deal included Zara underwriting the Met Gala in New York for the John Galliano retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute,…

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Queen Elizabeth II was known for many things: her calm, her determination, her resilience, her longevity. What does not generally come up in conversation is her fashion sense. Beyond the formless suits and coat dresses in jelly bean hues, with matching hats, that were her day look for the last decades of her 96-year-long life, her rugged country garb, and her enviable collection of headscarves, and her sensible shoes, rarely does one discuss, much less analyze, her clothing choices during her 70-year reign. Indeed, you could easily assume the Queen didn’t give a hoot about fashion.

How wrong you would be, as Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style, a new exhibition in the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace through October 18, proves. Tracing what the Queen wore from her baptism in a Spitalfields silk and Honiton lace christening gown first worn by Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Victoria, in 1841, to the bubblegum-pink pleated dress with a matching coat she wore for her Platinum Jubilee in 2022, three months before her death—more than 200 items in all, half of which are on display for the first time—what is certain is her Majesty spent a great deal of time thinking about, choosing, and wearing a lot of fashion.

The Queen “made her own decisions about her clothing and which designers, couturiers and suppliers she chose to work with,” notably Norman Hartman and Hardy Amies, says exhibition curator Caroline de Guitaut. And she understood fashion was her soft power—what she called “dress diplomacy”—especially during state visits abroad. “Her clothes acknowledged everything from religious, cultural, and social convention, no matter which country or culture was visited,” Guitaut says.

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Ever-wonderful , former fashion director for InStyle magazine, who I wrote about in The Style Files when his most recent book, Dressing the Part: Television’s Most Stylish Shows, was published, had me on his Substack podcast, this week to talk about all things fashion.

What a hilarious time we had!

Tune in here for a listen and join us in the laughter.

To keep up with my work:

• Follow me on Instagram

• Buy my books:

  • Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

  • Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano

  • Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes

  • Fashionopolis: The Young Readers Edition

• Listen to my award-winning podcast, The Green Dream, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Style Files may earn a small commission if you shop via affiliate links in this newsletter.

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Elsa Schiaparelli changed the way we buy, wear, look at, and think about clothes. The Italian-born designer, who ran her Paris couture house from the 1920s to the mid-1950s, collaborated with Surrealism’s leaders, including Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí and Man Ray, who were also her friends, to create what she called “wearable art,” and erased the boundary between fine art and fashion. She was the first to offer mass-produced designer ready-to-wear in standardized sizes, such as knitwear with tromp l’oeil effects, and designer sportswear, like saucy tennis dresses, which she sold in her Place Vendôme boutique. And she was the first to bring Surrealism to London, introducing her witty, sensual, and, at times, kooky designs in her Mayfair store during the 1930s Depression, and, in turn, lifting the mood, as well as the style, of the city.

These three points are the core argument of Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, a monumental exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London through November 8. This is not the first big Schiaparelli retrospective—there was Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli in 2003 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has one of the largest collections of her work, Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ten years later, and Shocking! The Surrealist Worlds of Elsa Schiaparelli at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2022.

But the V&A show, curated by Sonnet Stanfill, Lydia Caston, and Rosalind McKever, “in close collaboration with the House of Schiaparelli,” is a worthy addition to the conversation. More than 400 objects, including fashion, artworks, accessories, jewelry, furniture, perfumes and ephemera, from the 1920s to the present day, are on show, linking the Schiaparelli’s original work with that of the house’s current designer, Daniel Roseberry of Plano, Texas, who has led the studio since 2019. The exhibition confirms the weighty social and cultural contributions Schiaparelli made then, as shows how the luxury fashion business today has co-opted such genuine creativity for global commercial dominance and immense financial gain.

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Ed note: I serve as the European Editor for Palmer, the Palm Beach luxury magazine that is published four times during “the season.” On occasion, I will post an excerpt from one of my Palmer features. With the Saut Hermès happening this weekend at the Grand Palais in Paris, I thought it was a perfect time to run this one, which appeared in Volume 9, published earlier this year. If you’d like to read the complete story, and everything else in the issue, you can order a copy of the hardbound magazine here.

By Dana Thomas for Palmer

Fashion has long turned to equestrian sports for inspiration. It is said that Ralph Lauren got the idea for his Polo line from a Slim Aarons photo in 1955 of player Laddie Sanford at the Gulfstream Polo Club in Delray, Florida. When Jean Cassegrain founded the French luxury brand Longchamp in 1948—originally as a pipe and smoking accessories company—he took the name from the famous racecourse in Paris, and, to go with it, created a…

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Well, I didn’t see this coming: Fast Fashion colossus Zara announced this week that it has tapped long-disgraced British fashion designer John Galliano to design seasonal collections for the Spanish brand—a partnership that is essentially a mash-up of two of my three books: Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano and Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes.

The deal is for two years, and Galliano’s remit is to “re-author” Zara archival designs, “deconstructing and reconfiguring them into new seasonal expressions and creations,” according to a joint statement. The first drop will be in September.

Of course, the high-low collaboration makes immense strategic sense for both parties.

Zara wants to raise its position from the bottom of the fashion pyramid with Shein and Temu, i.e. cheap throwaway clothes, to the mid-market sector of decently-made, stylish offerings at higher, yet affordable, prices. With luxury fashion brands now pricing their offerings at ludicrous heights—I clocked Chanel’s red silk flamenco skirt in its rue du fbg. Saint-Honoré window this week at 12,000 Euros, what?—the middle market is the fashion industry’s new sweet spot. Galliano’s obsession with beauty, glamour, and his experience in high fashion, will give Zara the credibility, and maybe even the quality, bump it needs to get there.

Galliano, meanwhile, gets to connect with a whole new consumer segment—shoppers who dream of owning Dior, where he used to work, but can only afford the lipstick or the eau de toilette. As Vogue’s former editor-in-chief Anna Wintour told me about H&M’s collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld—the first luxury-fast-fashion team-ups—in 2004, “It means more people are going to get better fashion. And the more people who can have fashion, the better.”

That’s not all.

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French shoe designer Christian Louboutin loves houses. And he has a fair number. “There’s Portugal, Brittany, Vendée, Egypt, and Damascus,” he notes, sitting in his Paris kitchen on a sunny summer afternoon. He also has a place in Los Angeles. And there’s Vermelho Melides, the boutique hotel in Portugal, that he designed and opened in 2023, and its new beachside mate, scheduled to be ready this summer.

The thing is, Louboutin doesn’t just love owning houses. He loves redoing houses. “I’m an immo-sexual,” he says, throwing out a play on the word immobilier, which is French for property. He took a sip of an espresso in a colorful thimble-shaped cup. “I have a carnal relationship with construction. For 28 years, I have had something under construction. And I’m afraid it’s going to continue, because of the second …

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Last summer, French fashion journalist and influencer Elias Medini, aka Lyas, had an idea: Why not have watch parties for fashion shows like sports fans do for games? The first was in a café in Paris during the menswear shows last June, and was such a big success, La Watch Party has blown up into a huge event for 2,000 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, with drinks, food, live fashion shows, Q&As, and deejays. The whole thing is free, without tickets. Just show up and have fun. This season’s run of La Watch Party concludes tonight with Chanel. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

But wouldn’t you know it: La Watch Party was such a good idea, Vogue decided to stage its own at the very-short-lived Vogue Café pop-up, for the Balmain show. Miffed, Lyas took to social media to blast the fashion glossy for stealing his idea. Difference was: Vogue’s was invitation only, i.e. exclusive. Lyas’s is open to the public, i.e. inclusive. Not really the same thing.

Nevertheless, Lyras is onto something. For all fashion executives’ talk about democratizing the luxury business—the subject of my first book, Deluxe, and actually, my third one, Fashionopolis, too—in the end, Fashion Week, be it in New York, London, Milan, or Paris, is wholly, and proudly, exclusionary. Sure, smaller, local fashion weeks in third-tier cities, like Minneapolis and Atlanta, are often open to the public.

But the only major one I know that welcomes the hoi polloi is the Melbourne Fashion Festival in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve been a couple of times, and it has such a joyous vibe—local fashion fans are genuinely thrilled to be able to buy tickets to see the shows, attend cocktails and parties, and mix the designers and retailers. It is truly festive.

Inviting the public to fashion shows certainly makes sense, since these are the people who actually go shopping and spend money on fashion—unlike glossy magazine editors and influencers who acquire much of their wardrobes through brand “gifting.”

To know more about La Watch Party and how it came about, I rang up Lyas. Excerpts:

First, tell me about you.

Well, I’m 27. I’m from Normandy, from Rouen. I’m half French, half Algerian.

And you’ve always loved fashion?

Actually, I first had a love for cinema, and it transformed into a love for fashion. That’s why I came to Paris: to study film direction at ESRA – École supérieure de réalisation audiovisuelle, a French private film school.

Have you directed anything yet? Besides the Watch Parties?

Not yet. After La Watch Party can stand on its own, then I’ll move into cinema.

How did you come up the idea to do fashion show watch parties?

It came from the fact that I was not invited to Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior show—the menswear show—last summer. I was the fashion correspondent for Interview magazine, and I was doing content creation on Instagram and TikTok, and I’d been to Dior’s three previous shows, so I thought I’d get an invitation. I really wanted to witness what I thought was going to be fashion history and I was mad that I couldn’t see it in real life. I thought: ‘I don’t want to stay at home and watch it on my phone. Let’s just go to the bar I always go to—Le Saint Denis—bring the TV from my place, screen the show and invite everyone to come and watch it like they would watch a football match.’ And about 250, 300 people showed up.

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In 1990, I was covering the opening of Dick Tracy at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., when I clocked in the movie that Madonna was wearing a black sequin backless gown, by award-winning costume designer Milena Canonero, that was almost identical to the one that costumer Anthea Sylbert had made for Julie Christie in Shampoo. I wrote about the duplication in the paper’s Sunday fashion column.

And, thanks to Demna, here I am, 36 years later, writing about it again.

Back in 1990, the design repetition made sense: Warren Beatty co-wrote, co-produced and starred in Shampoo, and directed and starred in Dick Tracy, and in each, his leading lady was his then-girlfriend. He clearly liked that dress.

So did Kate Moss. In the late 1990s, she had the Julie Christie Dress copied, and wore it to the 1998 CFDA Awards. She looked fantastic.

And Nicole Kidman showed up in a version of it in 2009.

* Since publication of this newsletter, a reader has pointed out that the first iteration of the gown—without sequins or crystals—was by French couturier Guy Laroche for French actress Mireille Darc for Yves Robert’s 1972 film, Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire (The Tall Blond with a Black Shoe). Across her mid-back is a delicate gold chain. According to French Vogue, the dress was given to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre in 2005.

Now comes Demna. To close his first Gucci show, he had Moss slink her way down the runway in yet another nearly-identical version of the Julie Christie Dress. Only difference was this one was cut a little lower in the back, revealing a Gucci G-string—a very sexy undergarment originally designed by Tom Ford 30 years ago. (The long, white-lit runway in the black room was a Ford repeat, too.)

This all you need to know to understand Demna’s Gucci—and fashion in general right now. As I find myself commenting regularly on social media these days:

Does anyone in fashion today have an original idea?

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By Dana Thomas for The Hollywood Reporter

Elizabeth Snead, a former contributor and style and fashion writer for The Hollywood Reporter, died Monday in Delray Beach, Florida, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. She was 74.

Snead joined THR in 2011 as a contributing style editor, and she interviewed costume designers, established stars like Kristen Stewart and emerging talents while covering industry trends through 2015.

During THR’s Costume Designers Roundtable in 2012, Lincoln’s Joanna Johnston told Snead and executive features editor Stephen Galloway that designing wardrobes for film was “somewhere between a war and a circus.”

And for a 2012 story on the retirement of Uggie, the Jack Russell who starred in the best picture Oscar winner The Artist, his trainer Sarah Clifford told Snead, “He’s at the stage where he just says, ‘I think I want to go and lay in the sun by the pool.’” Wrote Snead: “Uggie’s protégé, his brother Dash, is tr…

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• Alexander McQueen’s personal wardrobe is up for sale.

• King Charles III does London Fashion Week

• LVMH helps Paris celebrate the 4th of July

When I started writing my first book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, I knew that I wanted to dedicate a chapter to the importance of red-carpet dressing in luxury marketing. What I didn’t know at the time was the immense power, prestige, jealousy, and corruption of celebrity stylists. I quickly learned during Oscar Week 2005, when I followed Rachel Zoe as she selected items for her clients to wear to the Academy Awards and its satellite events and parties.

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an interview of Rachel Zoe, pegged to her joining the cast of the reality TV series Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and in that story, Zoe claimed she never wanted to be famous. I don’t buy it. And you won’t either, once you read the below Deluxe excerpt about my time with her in Los Angeles. With the Oscars just around the corner, I thought it would be fun to revisit this section of Deluxe. Enjoy!

Rachel Zoe blew into the Jimmy Choo Oscar Suite on the fifth floor of the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel on a rainy February morning in 2005 like she owned the joint. Dressed in a black fitted Roberto Cavalli jacket with fur cuffs, tight skinny jeans, a Chloé belt, and five-inch-high stiletto boots with buckles, she air-kissed Sandra Choi, niece of the London-based luxury shoe company’s namesake, and clocked the crowd in a swift 360-degree glance.

Choi, the company’s creative director, and Tamara Mellon, the glam jet-set founder and president, booked the suite to receive socialites, starlets, and A-list stylists looking for shoes to borrow for the myriad dinners and parties later in the week, culminating with the seventy-seventh Academy Awards on Sunday night. Swishing her long Botticelli ringlets out of the way, and with notebook-wielding Choi by her side, Zoe cut through the sea of tea- and champagne-sipping faux blondes and headed straight into the bedroom of the buttercup yellow suite. The bed, dresser, desk, and armoire had been replaced with long banquet tables, each covered with white linen tablecloths, huge bouquets of white roses and tulips, and scores of dangerously tall and wildly expensive women’s shoes.

“For Salma”—as in Hayek—“I need size-wise 6,” Zoe instructed Choi in her acute northern New Jersey accent. “She called me this morning. ‘Rachel, I need five inches!’” Choi nodded and jotted it down. Zoe picked up a strappy gold leather stiletto, handed it to Choi to note, and pointed out others in silver and bronze. They were for Julie Delpy, who was nominated for best original screenplay for Before Sunset. “I’m not sure what her jewelry is going to be,” Zoe explained, “so I’d like to keep it open.”

She scanned the table again. “These are fabulous,” she declared of a bronze pair that tied around the ankle. She picked out a pair of black platforms, too. “Can we do a jewel on the platform?” she asked pointedly. Choi nodded and scribbled. “Great,” Zoe concluded. She turned to leave but spied another table in the back corner. “Holy crap! Holy crap!” she wailed as she cradled a pair of purple satin pumps with big jeweled buckles. “This is incredible! And look at this,” pawing a pair of five-inch silver-strap stilettos. “I could cry!”

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• Astounding Auction Results

• Lauren Sanchez Bezos, Fashion Editor?

When I first started covering Paris couture—the made-to-measure high fashion for the .1 percent—in the early 1990s, it was a small and intimate affair. Most of the shows were staged in the opulent Belle Epoque ballroom of the Grand Hôtel—only Yves Saint Laurent and Versace showed elsewhere, Saint Laurent in the equally rococo ballroom of what was then the Hôtel InterContinental and is now the Westin, and Versace on a catwalk built over the swimming pool of the Hôtel Ritz.

Only 200 to 300 hundred people attended—clients, a great many from the United States, like Nan Kempner and Deeda Blair; editors, such as WWD's John Fairchild, Vogue’s Anna Wintour, and Harper’s Bazaar’s Liz Tilberis; retailers from luxury department stores such as Bergdorf Goodman and Harrod’s; a few celebrity ambassadors, like French actresses Catherine Deneuve and Carole Bouquet; and daily reporters, like me. There were no “influencers.” No paparazzi lining the sidewalks out front, photographing stars as they arrived and models as they exited. None of the circus you have now.

And the presentation was straightforward, following a strict set of rules set by French fashion’s governing body: 60-plus looks, starting with daywear, moving through cocktail to evening wear, and a wedding dress. Shows were long—at least 45 minutes, usually more. Each model came out alone, on a raised catwalk, walked slowly and purposefully, stopped in the middle and twirled, continued to the end, presented the outfit, twirled again, maybe took off the jacket, so you could see the blouse, then slowly made her way back. The clients were there to shop for next season’s wardrobe, maybe a wedding trousseau. They wanted to see the clothes. Coutures shows were not about noise, or advertising, or hype. They were was about selling beautifully-made Fashion.

Those days are long gone, as I saw during this week’s couture shows for the Spring-Summer 2026 season.

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Haute Couture Week, which unfurls each January and July in Paris, used to be a handful of shows for a handful of rich women who could afford to spend six figures or more on made-to-measure clothes. Now the shows are primarily for social media influencers, who use the runways to as backdrops for Instagram posts to hawk lipstick and skin care products. Luxury jewelry houses have joined in the fun, presenting their high jewelry collections to VICs—Very Important Clients—and the media in between the coutures shows. And auction houses now schedule their best fashion-driven sales during Haute Couture Week, also in hopes to lure some of those VICs to buy glorious vintage pieces. This week alone—the spring-summer 2026 haute couture season—there are three major luxury fashion auctions.

On January 29, Kerry Taylor Auctions x Maurice Auctions is hosting Dior Masterpieces: The Mouna Ayoub Collection at the Hôtel Bristol. There are 126 pieces in all, spanning from the mid-1980s, when Marc Bohan was head couturier, all the way through the Maria Grazia Chiuri era, which came to an end last year. The best are from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when John Galliano was creative director—including the remarkable painted silk evening dress from his Clochards [Homeless] collection for spring/summer 2000. I remember when that look came down the runway—I thought it was one of the most beautiful gowns I’d ever seen. It has an estimate of €80,000 to €120,000 Euros. I predict it will break €500,000.

This isn’t the first Ayoub auction—I interviewed her in 2024 for The Styles Files about the sale of 41 of her Jean Paul Gaultier pieces. Among them was “L’Ecume des Jours,” a never-worn denim-and-ostrich-plume gown from Spring/Summer 1999, which sold for an astounding €377,000—a world record for the designer. I also wrote about Maurice Auctions’ sale of the Alaïa-heavy wardrobe of French model and actress Farida Khelfa for the New York Times last fall.

Christie’s is hosting Mathilde and Friends in Paris, an online auction of French socialite and PR whiz Mathilde Favier’s belongings, as well as items from the fashion designer Julie de Libran, interior decorator Jacques Grange, and beauty titan Terry de Gunzburg, through February 4. The 121 lots of “cherished objects, iconic outfits, poetic talismans and unexpected treasures,” as the pitch reads—so Favier, that—include a couple of looks by Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, and John Galliano for Dior, a pair of sculpted aluminum violet earrings by JAR (estimated at €3,000 to €5,000—yeah, right), and a 25-year-old chintz sofa. Bidding starts on Monday, January 26.

But the grandest sale of all this week is “From Doris, With Love,” a Sotheby’s auction in Paris of jewelry, fashion, artworks, and decorative objects from the estate of the Chilean-Swiss style arbiter Doris Brynner, who died last year at 93. There is a live auction at the new Sotheby’s Paris headquarters on Tuesday, January 27 and Wednesday, January 28, and an online sale that runs through Wednesday, January 28. As the preview, open to the public through tomorrow (Monday), proves, Brynner had exceptional taste. Among the more than 250 items on the block are beautiful pieces of Cristóbal Balenciaga couture, Jean Schlumberger jewelry, and Dior Maison tableware. You will want it all.

Last week, shortly before the opening of the exhibition, I chatted with Victoria about her mother’s life and style. Excerpts:

Tell me about your mother.

She was born in Zagreb in 1931—her name was Doris Kleiner—and during the World War II, the family moved to Santiago, in Chile. That’s where she was raised. When she and her sister were teenagers, their parents sent both on a trip to Paris. And my mother said, ‘I’m coming back here.’

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Since I have been covering fashion for almost 40 years, I have had many occasions to spend time with Italian couturier Valentino Garavani, or “Mr. Valentino” as he was known in the fashion business. I attended his shows in Paris, and would be invited to join him at his post-show brunches at the Hôtel Regina. He gave me a tour of his chateau near Versailles for a cover story I wrote for Architectural Digest. I went to see him at his chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, to interview him for Newsweek for his 40th anniversary in business, and he graciously invited me to stay for dinner. (My dinner partner was William F. Buckley Jr. and we had truffle risotto.) I wrote about his retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, also for Newsweek. (I was the magazine’s European Arts and Entertainment correspondent for about 15 years.)

And for Valentino’s 45t…

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Before she was sent to the guillotine in 1793, 37-year-old Marie Antoinette couldn’t have imagined that more than two centuries later, she’d still be one of the most famous women in the world. The French queen’s jewels and furniture command record-breaking prices at auction; her porcelain and palace fabrics are reproduced and hawked by homeware brands; and her likeness is used on everything from expensive candles to throw blankets. She’s been the inspiration for a plethora of bestselling books, feature films, jazz and rap songs and fashion shows.

If you need proof that the Biden-era embrace of quiet luxury has given way to something decidedly more ostentatious and maximal, look no further than Marie Antoinette’s renewed visibility. In the age of influencers, the Queen is a case study in spectacle and optics…

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Brigitte Bardot bathed in the bright Mediterranean sunlight one last time today as a white Mercedes hearse ferried her through the narrow streets of Saint-Tropez to Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption church for a private funeral attended by family and several French luminaries, including far-right political leader Marine Le Pen, who Bardot once called “the Joan of Arc of the 21st century.”

As the police-escorted cortege drove along the port in the frigid morning air, hundreds of fans and locals, many of them with their dogs, applauded. Bardot, who died on Dec. 28 from cancer at 91, shot to stardom in French director Roger Vadim’s 1956 erotic drama, Et Dieu créa la femme [And God Created Woman], set in Saint-Tropez. (If you don’t known the movie, you can rent it here and here.) In the early 1970s, she quit show business to become a leading animal rights activist.

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In early 2000, I was assigned by New York Times Magazine Style Editor Amy Spindler to write a story about Yves Saint Laurent’s muses. Every one of them—Betty Catroux, Loulou de la Falaise, Jane Birkin, Charlotte Rampling, Andrée Putman, Gunilla Lindblad, Paloma Picasso, Colombe Pringle—showed up at the studio that cold January day for the photo session and interview. Everyone except Jacqueline de Ribes. She wanted to do her picture separately.

And then, after many faxes and phone calls from me and Amy, she finally agreed—three months after the original shoot, and days before the deadline—to have me over to her apartment on the Place du Palais-Bourbon for tea and a chat. I was ushered into her perfectly appointed salon by a butler, and when she swanned in, dressed in a couture pantsuit by Jean Paul Gaultier—her new chou-chou, now that Saint Laurent was heading toward retirement—she gave me an up-and-down, pinched her face with disapproval, sat down, and quickly let i…

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By Vanessa Friedman

The New York Times

Dec. 8, 2025

Frenchwomen seem to have a secret way with a silk scarf. I love the way they look, but when I try to tie my own scarves, the result resembles a kid’s bandanna or feels lumpy and voluminous. How do they do it? — Suzanne, New York

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• Fashion Adventures on the Queen Mary 2

• Ralph Lauren goes postal

• Some rather large news from me

“Who’s John Galliano?”

That’s what the British airline desk agent said when I handed her a copy of my book, Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano as I checked in for at the Southampton, England airport for my flight to Paris.

No, I don’t usually bribe airline personnel with signed books for better treatment—though that is a good idea. I was flying home from the Fashion Week Transatlantic Crossing on the Queen Mary 2—more about that below—and my suitcase was overweight. Pulling out, and handing over, two books made the difference.

The point of this tale is that while she and her colleague were excited to read about McQueen, who died 15 years ago, she had never heard of John Galliano.

It’s understandable. Though throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Galliano was Britain’s m…

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