Lauren Indvik

The financial pressures on British fashion are mounting, but designers including Daniel Lee, Simone Rocha and Erdem proved their grit

Abrupt exit of Gucci creative director Sabato De Sarno underlines unprecedented talent churn at leading labels

Alessandro Michele made his couture debut at Valentino and Schiaparelli revived the corset

Pietro Beccari is betting that the label’s sole title sponsorship of F1 will help it evolve from a fashion brand into a ‘cultural’ one

In October, I snapped up two matching pairs of Dutch floral striped curtains, with a “bonus” set of almost equally lovely embroidered curtains, at a local auction house for a mere £110 (with fees!). They were lined and in wonderful condition, with little in the way of fading and stains, and of the kind of fabric that would probably be priced at £200 a metre or more new. They were about 30cm too short to be hung up in the rooms I had in mind, but I figured I could have two of the matching pairs j…

Late last year the Hot or Cool Institute, a Berlin-based think-tank researching the intersection of culture and climate, published a study looking at what a “sustainable” wardrobe would look like — a wardrobe that could live comfortably within the 1.5-degree pathway set out by the Paris Agreement and still allow developing nations to increase their consumption to middle-class levels. To achieve that, the study’s authors concluded that people in wealthy countries should be buying no more than fiv…

For the €362bn personal luxury goods sector, 2023 may go down as the year that the post-Covid bubble finally burst. Despite the reopening of China at the start of the year, demand for personal luxury products slowed to 8 per cent at constant currency rates according to Bain, narrowly outpacing global inflation and marking a significant deceleration after three consecutive years of 20 per cent sales growth on average. Investors took note: for the first time in seven years, luxury stocks did not…

At a Christie’s sale in Paris late last year, a painted “Etruscan” armchair that once adorned Marie Antoinette’s apartments at Versailles, still retaining its original blue and grey pigment, hammered down at €906,000 (€1.1mn with fees) — wildly surpassing Christie’s mid-estimate of €150,000. Demand for antique painted furniture is on the rise as interiors evolve from what Alix Melville, junior specialist of decorative arts at Christie’s, describes as the “cream neutral walls and floors of the e…

Chanel is bracing for a “tougher” 2024 as the luxury industry grapples with slowing growth amid a global economic slowdown. President of fashion Bruno Pavlovsky said that the economic situation was difficult “everywhere, in every single country”, echoing warnings made by executives at LVMH and Burberry in recent weeks. “Luxury is not protected from the economy,” he told the Financial Times ahead of Chanel’s Métiers d’Art show in Manchester, where the company welcomed international clients and…

Bally is a brand that just about everyone has heard of but few really know. A survey of my acquaintances yields “men’s shoemaker”, “high street shoe shop” and “shoes, quite good quality”. A colleague is surprised to learn the company is Swiss and not British. Bally chief executive Nicolas Girotto knows this all too well. When the French-born former retail exec was promoted from chief operating officer to chief executive in mid-2019, customers told him “you have a well respected brand, a brand t…