Querida lectora,
There is a particular stillness to the last days of August — the long exhale before the season begins, when the ateliers are lit past midnight and the city holds its breath. This morning the calendar finally arrived. The CFDA released its preliminary schedule for New York Fashion Week, seventy runway shows and presentations spread across five days in September, opening on the tenth with Henry Zankov's debut as artistic director of Diane von Furstenberg and closing on the fifteenth with Thom Browne. Carolina Herrera, Michael Kors, Khaite, Prabal Gurung, Ulla Johnson and LaQuan Smith return, but what moves me most is the roster of names showing on the official calendar for the very first time — Conner Ives, Magda Butrym, Sabyasachi, Zaldy. A calendar is a kind of promise. Every season it makes room for someone who was not there before.
In Paris, Loewe continues its new chapter under Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez, whose second collection arrived in neon and fuzzy texture — worn, in the campaign imagery, by Julia Garner. It is a joyful, slightly unruly kind of luxury, and it suggests that the house is willing to be young in public. At Dior, Jonathan Anderson has taken the opposite route, reaching backward to reach forward: the new Cigale bag draws its sculptural curve and its single bow from a Christian Dior couture dress of Autumn 1952, translated into supple calfskin. Seventy-four years, folded into an object you can carry on your shoulder. This is what an archive is for. Not nostalgia for its own sake, but proof that a shape can outlive the hands that first made it.
Elsewhere, the season of national costume is upon us. Miss Universe Thailand staged its competition earlier this month around a theme of fruits and food — sculpted mangosteen, towering durian headdresses, capes rendered as platters — while in San José del Cabo, thirty-two delegates of Miss Universe México walked in garments drawn from folklore, history and popular art. We should be careful not to dismiss these as spectacle. In much of the world, the national costume is the only runway where a country gets to dress itself, in its own language, without translation.
And a quieter note from the business of fashion: SKIMS named Erin Magee its first Chief Design Officer this week, while Under Armour introduced a lifestyle line with the rapper Gunna installed as creative director. Two very different companies, both deciding that design leadership deserves a name and a seat. For those of us building independently, that is worth watching — it means the industry is once again willing to say out loud that someone is responsible for the beauty.
All of it circles back to the same truth we work from here in Miami: that clothing is memory made wearable. A bow from 1952. A costume that carries a coastline. A designer's name spoken aloud at last. At House of Yas, we cut from the same conviction — that exile can be embroidered, that heritage can be tailored, that a woman deserves to wear where she came from and where she is going in the same silhouette. Come see what we have been making at houseofyas.com.
Con cariño,
La Revista