Queridas lectoras, the first week of September always arrives like a held breath. The Lido fills with water taxis, Paris crowns its newest talent, and New York clears its calendar for the shows to come. This morning we write to you from the middle of that breath, where the season has begun but not yet spoken its full sentence.
In Paris on Thursday, the LVMH Prize named its thirteenth laureate: Julie Kegels, a twenty-seven-year-old Belgian who built her Antwerp label only two years ago around the many lives a woman carries in her wardrobe. Her work is sculptural and handmade, stitched from memory and from the quiet geography of domestic rooms, and the jury that chose her included Jonathan Anderson, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Marc Jacobs, and Stella McCartney. The Karl Lagerfeld Prize went to Zane Li of New York, whose label LII marries the vocabulary of sport with the discipline of couture, and the Savoir-Faire Prize was given to Anil Padia of Yoshita 1967, an Indo-Kenyan designer who has turned the crochet practiced by women across Kenya into a language of identity and inheritance. We note, with something like recognition, that every one of this year's winners builds from memory and from the hands of women.
Meanwhile the eighty-third Venice Film Festival is unfolding along the canals, and its red carpet has settled early into a mood of dark, disciplined elegance. Amal Clooney opened the festival in a custom column by Tom Ford by Haider Ackermann and returned days later in Stella McCartney; jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal has moved from The Row to Celine to Balenciaga with the assurance of a woman who understands that restraint is its own kind of drama. Kendall Jenner made her Venice debut in archival Giorgio Armani from 1995, a reminder that the most modern gesture on any carpet is often the oldest dress in the room. Later in the festival, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem will bring Florian Zeller's Bunker to the Lido, and we will be watching what Spain's most luminous couple chooses to wear when the lights find them.
Back home, New York Fashion Week opens next Thursday, September 10, and closes on the fifteenth with Thom Browne. Among the seventy shows are ten debuts, and the one that opens the week belongs to Henry Zankov, presenting his first collection as artistic director of Diane von Furstenberg, a house founded by a woman who understood that a single dress could change how a woman moved through the world.
We could not help but see ourselves in the thread that runs through all of this: a Belgian designer drawing from domestic memory, a Kenyan craft passed between women's hands, an archival gown that carries three decades of history onto a carpet. At House of Yas we have always believed that a garment is a vessel for what we refuse to leave behind, the Havana our grandmothers described to us, the Miami light that raised us, the hours of handwork that turn fabric into inheritance. If this week's news has stirred that same longing in you, we invite you to explore our collections at houseofyas.com, where every piece is made to be remembered.
Con cariño,
La Revista