Annachiara Biondi

Bringing friends and members of the community into our holidays has always been a really big part of it. I love to host. I have friends who are great cooks, so that makes it really fun — just that spirit of collaboration and community. The food preparation experience is also a big part of enjoying things together. It’s really about the fragrances in the house. One thing that I do almost constantly during the holidays is boil cinnamon sticks. Heat can make the air a bit dry, so boiling water put…

Silvio Campara likes to wax lyrical about Golden Goose, the Italian label known for its £440 distressed and star-encrusted trainers. Campara has held senior roles at the company since 2013, first as commercial director and then, from 2018, as chief executive. “Golden Goose is not fashion. It’s an icon,” he tells me on Zoom from the company’s head office in Milan, speaking from a conference room with white walls and what looks like a line of washing machines. “We walk together with a Chanel bag,…

In November, Anne Hathaway hosted the CFDA Fashion Awards, an annual ceremony that honours the best of American fashion. The film star stepped on to the red carpet wearing the most American of looks: a double denim corset and skirt designed by Ralph Lauren, worn with Bulgari jewels. The look was a crowning moment of Hathaway’s recent fashion resurgence, and it was orchestrated by celebrity stylist and fashion editor Erin Walsh. Hathaway has been in the limelight for at least two decades, but h…

In early 2019, after seven years of growing her independent London-based label Isa Arfen, designer Serafina Sama felt it was time for a break. The brand, which was bringing in £1.3mn in annual sales, had held its first catwalk show at London Fashion Week only a year earlier, gaining accolades from the press. It counted 65 retailers across the world and had just launched its own ecommerce website. Despite all this, Sama was lost. “From outside, everything looked good, but I didn’t have a clear p…

When Rent the Runway launched in 2009, it hailed its model as disruptive: by allowing users to rent clothing online by subscription, the platform was supposed to revolutionise the way consumers shopped and, in the words of co-founder Jennifer Hyman, “put Zara out of business”. Fifteen years later, the company, which today says it has 132,000 active subscribers, has remained far from profitable, struggling to contain costs and battling flat revenue and subscription numbers. Demand is not the pro…

On the first night of Italian music festival Sanremo, co-host and singer Marco Mengoni walked the stage in six different looks, including a see-through, floral embroidered top by Valentino and a Fendi leather blazer paired up with low leather Bermuda shorts designed to create a skirt effect. On the same night, Tunisian-Italian rapper Ghali appeared in a sparkling baby blue twin-set with matching high-waisted trousers by Loewe, a sliver of midriff appearing every time he moved, and Alessandro de…

Imagine you had a tough day at work, but instead of commuting home in a crowded train, you could just grab your towel and go down the road for a restorative jump in the sea. Or, rather than joining a spin class in a sweaty, windowless room at 6am, you could drink your coffee, still hot from home, overlooking a quiet, sandy beach after a peaceful swim. For these four creatives based in the Philippines, Ghana, Jamaica and Finland, being close to water is all that matters. Here they share their fa…

It’s early May, less than two weeks before the Cannes Film Festival, and yet calm reigns at the Chopard headquarters in Geneva. Artisans in neat white coats work in silence, only interrupted by polite “bonjours” addressed to passers-by. The Swiss brand’s Red Carpet collection, 77 haute joaillerie pieces, which will debut at the French festival — sponsored by Chopard since 1998 — has already been dispatched to the Riviera, but prototypes of the most complex pieces are still displayed on a desk.…

Fetish in fashion is undergoing a revival but there is more to current kink than a nod to previous style eras

The accessible luxury brand’s CEO on how they rode out a plunge into the red — and the biggest problem facing emerging fashion labels