MILAN — Matthieu Blazy imagined the set of his latest presentation for Bottega Veneta as a burned landscape, with huge blooming cacti sculpted from Murano glass representing the resilience of life and beauty in a living hell.  

“When there is nothing left, you try to make something out of yourself,” Blazy said after the show. “Dressing brings us dignity, makes us human.” That veiled comment on the current state of the world inspired a huge collection that Blazy intended as an elevation of the everyday. What people do to get by. “There was something beautiful in the idea of making it monumental.”

And yet it wasn’t scale that stood out so much as directness and simplicity. In his three years at Bottega, Blazy has made a name for himself as an alchemist, spurring the brand’s remarkable ateliers on to feats of transformative ingenuity. Here, he insisted the aim was reduction. No flannel shirt made from leather this time. Nothing — or no one — pretending to be something they’re not. Instead, cotton was cotton, leather was leather. There was no embellishment, less technique. “Reduction, but to the maximum,” said Blazy. One gorgeous effect was achieved with nothing more than fabric on a dress or skirt bunched and buttoned. The plissé pleating of a pale yellow top opened into flares of sunset orange. A t-shirt dress burst phoenix-like into a ball of fiery red fringe.  Outerwear was stripped of detail but it was emphatic in its silhouettes, with oversized, rounded sleeves. Blazy dropped a broad-shouldered sweater to mid-calf. That was reductio ad elegantia.

“Elegance is resilience,” he insisted. His equally elegant version of a classic trench had storm flaps which anticipated a hurricane.

One particularly beautiful bias-cut dress featured a dense scribble print which was actually a composite of thousands of passport stamps. Blazy called it a “memory” print. In the show, it was followed by an outfit woven with fine stripes, like the lines in a notebook. The idea of writing suggested hope for the future to the designer, “what can still be written.” I know he intended resilience, but it was also a reminder of what’s been lost to the all-consuming flames. That was the constant subtext — fire, ash, carbon black — that loaned a meditative melancholy to the show. So much we know, so little we can do. And yet people continue, burned to the ground, springing back to beautiful life, stronger than ever. Blazy’s hope.

Bottega Veneta Autumn/Winter 2024

Once, you could have reasonably attached a state of meditative melancholy to Luke and Lucie Meier’s revisioning of Jil Sander, but, as Lucie said on Friday, they’ve grown bolder with the years. “Cleaner and more colourful,” she added when she was asked to describe the new collection. And there was Mariacarla Boscono as proof, opening the show in a vermilion red suit with a raglan shoulder, bold, precise, definitely colourful.

Like any thinking people this season, the Meiers have been attempting to reconcile their work and the world. Luke talked about the feeling of being surrounded, immersed in something, and that was the sense they wanted to get across. Mk.gee, a musician they love, played live during the show, enveloping the audience in sound. Many of the models wore black skullcaps which encased their heads. And then the clothes themselves wrapped bodies in an over-abundance of quilted fabric, like protective blankets.

The show took place in a space described as a capsule. It underscored a sci-fi tinge in the Meiers’ work which was only stronger with their latest collection. The stately volumes, the quilted capes and full-sleeved tunics worked as the wardrobe of an intergalactic aristocracy. The metal fringing which shimmered round necklines and down side seams added a space cowboy flourish. Those odd black skullcaps suggested Vulcans, the shaggy slippers called to our inner Wookie. (The Meiers weren’t the only designers in Milan to propose the Wookie foot for Winter ‘24.) For terrestrials, the new emphasis on sleeker tailoring held much more promise.

Jil Sander Autumn/Winter 2024

If Matthieu Blazy and the Meiers were in their own ways responding to the future, Giorgio Armani headed in the other direction, back to his roots. It wouldn’t be surprising if he’s been brooding on the past. In December, his Silos exhibition space opened an exhibition dedicated to the work of Aldo Fallai, the photographer who was responsible for sealing the Armani aesthetic for posterity in the ad campaigns he shot during the seventies and eighties. Gina de Bernardo, the model who dominated those campaigns, was first on the catwalk on Monday morning.

Roots mean nature, and Armani went back to the garden with a floral-saturated show that opened in the dusky golden hour (even though it was actually morning outside) before shading into twilight and eventually darkest night. A look composed of a cargo pant in washed velvet, with a floral almost-dressing gown, a wide-brimmed embroidered hat and floral slippers had a suggestion of the eccentricity that is Armani’s not so guilty pleasure.  When the soundtrack cooed “anything you can imagine”, you could imagine that there isn’t much that hasn’t crossed Armani’s mind in his half-century in fashion. But the parade of familiar silhouettes, touchable textures and tones took on an edge of magic realism as night fell. Lustrous jewel-toned duchesse, black velvet sparkling with a swarm of dragonflies, flowers turning luminous, like deep sea creatures, can occasionally seem like incongruities in the grand scheme of sensible Armani things. But they’re as much the man as any of the revolutionary looks that are celebrated in Aldo Fallai’s images.

Giorgio Armani Autumn/Winter 2024

Swedish textile recycler Renewcell said Sunday it filed for bankruptcy after failing to secure sufficient long-term funding to continue operations.

The company launched a strategic review in November, after it emerged that demand for its recycled raw material was much weaker than expected. It managed to raise $10 million in short-term funding from investors and lenders (including its biggest shareholder, H&M) in December. But efforts to secure further investment have proved unsuccessful.

The situation marks a blow to efforts to introduce new, more sustainable materials to the market at scale. Renewcell, which developed technology to recycle used cotton textiles into a feedstock for yarns like viscose and lyocell, was an early mover in the space and viewed as a litmus test for others.

“This is a sad day for the environment, our employees, our shareholders, and our other stakeholders, and it is a testament to the lack of leadership and necessary pace of change in the fashion industry” Renewcell board chairman Michael Berg said in a statement.

Learn more:

What’s Blocking the Rise of More Sustainable Materials?

Weaker-than-expected demand for Swedish textile recycler Renewcell’s recycled cellulose pulp has highlighted broader hurdles challenging efforts to lessen fashion’s environmental footprint.

MILAN — The little paper sailor hat on every seat at the Moschino show unfolded into shownotes which immediately announced Adrian Appiolaza’s intention “to build a new language from an existing vocabulary.” But the mere weeks he had to create a collection, succeeding Davide Renne whose death, after only ten days in the job, rocked Milan last November, scarcely left Appiolaza with much time for such an ambitious project. So maybe this was more like him familiarising himself with the old language, becoming fluent in it before he starts speaking his own lingo.

And boy, was he fluent! The thought that Franco Moschino might be somewhere smiling over Appiolaza’s debut didn’t seem so outlandish, especially when so many memorable Franco-isms were paraded in a refresher course for those who might only be aware of the brand through Jeremy Scott’s near-decade in charge. Scott’s brand of irony tended to an overload of campy spectacle. Moschino himself was a much more rigorous proposition, dressing up droll satire and an activist frame of mind in Milanese tailoring (even as he poked fun at it). Appiolaza’s years of experience in the industry, most recently as design director of women’s ready-to-wear at Loewe, make him a dream successor in that respect. He calls himself “an obsessive archivist.” With this debut, it was really the lightness of his touch with the legacy that made the greatest impression.

Of course, it helped that so many of Franco’s details are so durably delightful, but Appiolaza owned them, made them look fresh, rather than 35 years old. I was always a sucker for the exclamation marks, the question marks and the polka dots anyway, along with Moschino’s message tees and the endless trompe l’oeil touches. Appiolaza drew on them all, plus the repurposed men’s wardrobe, the trench, boxer shorts, silk pyjamas, ties turned into waistcoats and turbans. The pearl-draped “Chanel” suit got a revisit in waffle knit. PEACE and LOVE, Happy Face and fluffy white clouds drifting in a clear blue sky: Moschino’s original iconography now has other layers of meaning, but whatever happens next, Appiolaza captured his character — and his characters. I’m already looking forward to the next one.

Moschino Autumn/Winter 2024

Francesco Risso insists Marni’s travels aren’t over but after touching down in New York, Tokyo and Paris, he felt the brand’s 30th birthday should be celebrated in Milan. “We’re becoming adults,” he said gleefully. And then he proceeded to show a collection that was child’s play, an extravaganza of deliberate naïvete, an earnest effort to glorify instinct and intuition as a release from the structured thinking he has acquired over his years in fashion.

Risso was motivated by Charlie Porter’s new book “Bring No Clothes,” the title taken from Virginia Woolf’s instruction to her haute bohemian friends on how to dress for a weekend in the country. Come as you are, forget about traditional niceties of dress. Gripped by the idea of a real blank slate, Risso and his team covered everything in their studio, windows included, in white paper. No moodboards, no perspective, no floodtide of digital imagery. Completely detached from that customary comfort zone, “It was the first place our soul came alive,” Risso marveled. Simple creation by pure instinct. Lots of handwork, scribbling, obsessive finger-painting. No need for details or cuts. Like turning a switch off and back on again, Risso agreed, to illuminate an entirely new landscape.

He resists the idea he’s any kind of shaman, but there was a distinctly shamanic tinge to the enterprise, with the tribe of Marni chasing enlightenment behind their fearless leader. The show venue was originally a dark, dirty tunnel, transformed, cleansed, by another covering into a white paper cave. A choir sang.

Those who have followed Marni for the last three decades probably cherish memories of aesthetically pleasing eccentricity (a contemporary version of the haute bohemian patch that was Woolf and Co.’s playground a century ago). Risso’s blank slate produced rather more of a challenge. Marni was always about colour. He talked about “dematerialising colour.” There was a lot of black, cut into stark, geometric, basic, almost 2D shapes. Very little detail, as promised. Instinct manifested itself in animal prints, and outcrops of fur, which made some of the models look like a new species. When the fur was hand-painted, it matted into whorls or peaks of whipped meringue. To these eyes at least, it was the hand-painting that came closest to Risso’s faith in a structureless new vision. Striations of paint were gloriously splurged by hand all over jackets, capes and frocks. Granted, the paint needed the structure of those items of clothing to achieve its effects, but there was never a shaman who thrived without compromise.

I came away thinking of Emma Stone as Bella Baxter in “Poor Things,” negotiating her way back into the human condition by trial and error. Same with Francesco Risso. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Marni Autumn/Winter 2024

Donatella Versace’s backdrop was a gleaming white stairway to heaven. To reach it, her models had to traverse a massive expanse of thick-piled black carpet which kicked up a snowdrift of fluff while they walked. It’s hard work getting to heaven. That’s something Donatella knows all too well. Her exceptionally good mood also suggested she knows she’ll make it in the end. Or maybe it was due to the collection she’d just showed. Back when the world had clarity, Donatella was responsible for Versus, the second collection her brother gifted her as a way to keep Versace wired into the rock/pop/punk culture she was naturally drawn to. Versus presentations in New York were as much a gig as a fashion show. That’s how Friday night felt, except that now there’s the artisanship of the atelier’s hands to polish the product.

From the first sheetmetal blast of Siouxsie & the Banshees to the last (you will never again hear the lyrics “Be a carcass … be limblessly in love” at a fashion show, promise), the Versace show was an exercise in Versus edge.  Hair was spiked punkily, eyes were shadowed heavily. There were hole-y knits. And the palette of black, white, red and grey was classic, a punk/power pop hybrid, like the five-button Edwardian jackets on the boys. Though it was actually the ones Donatella made for Prince that dictated the silhouette, wide in the shoulder, suppressed in the waist. The dramatic tweed jacket with the jeweled buttons? That hinted at further inspiration from the Purple One.

The Versace show in LA a year ago was a turning point for Donatella. The precise, powerful tailoring generated rave reviews. Understandably, she’s not about to let it go. “We need courage,” she said during a preview. The broad-shouldered power jacket is a crutch. She went on to show more of the same. Graphic cuts, graphic patterns. The show closed with a couple of tuxedo looks — the boy in black leather thigh boots — that will probably keep her stuck to her power-dressing guns. But, earlier, there were a few sculpted looks with ruched skirts and bustier or portrait necklines that I figured were much more likely to have put the smile on Donatella’s face. Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go to Versace. With Gigi Hadid in priestly white-collared black silk to offer absolution.

Versace Autumn/Winter 2024

In 1991, as a riposte to red lipstick, Bobbi Brown, a then 30-something makeup artist, launched her eponymous brand with a handful of nude lipsticks. It marked the world’s introduction to the no-makeup makeup look, the antithesis of the more-is-more aesthetic that reigned in women’s makeup bags long after the 80s had made its exit.

As a jobbing makeup artist, she initially sold it directly to friends and clients and then, fortuitously, met a buyer from Bergdorf Goodman in New York, where it officially launched. Brown expected to sell 100 lipsticks a month. The new brand sold 100 a day. It outperformed all the establishment beauty brands in the store and very quickly other retailers, such as Neiman Marcus, asked to stock the brand across the country.

“I wanted women to look like they weren’t really wearing makeup,” Brown said.

Four years later, Estée Lauder Companies (owner of Estée Lauder, Jo Malone London, MAC Cosmetics, Clinique and more) came calling. Brown sold her company (for a reported $75m), stayed on as the captain of the now global Bobbi Brown ship, steering it towards becoming a billion-dollar company. And then, in 2016, she walked away. No one saw it coming.

“Burnt,” is how she describes how she felt at the time. “I was done. I thought, ‘I’ve done it, I’ve succeeded, I’ve built a billion-dollar brand, I’m done with beauty.’” Fashion and beauty history is filled with designers and founders who have put their names on a label, only for them to then have to give them up when they sell to a conglomerate. Typically, the designer themselves disappears, never to be seen again.

But not Brown. Weeks in, she realised she was not quite done. There were a number of false starts, including a short-lived supplements line (“I thought I was going to be this natural wellness guru. It didn’t happen,” she deadpans) and a futile attempt to go back to being a freelance makeup artist (“No agent wanted to represent me,” she says with a shrug.) But then she hit the jackpot – again. In October 2020, on the day her 25-year noncompete with Estée Lauder Companies ended, Brown launched Jones Road Beauty, a modern line of makeup that champions a clean minimalism.

“My philosophy with beauty,” she explains, “is about confidence and just loving what’s on your face, whether they are lines or whatever. Just go with it, it’s easier.” The brand, like its predecessor, is also fully inclusive, because, Brown says emphatically, “It’s very important to have makeup for everyone’s skin.” The timing of her launch was bold. The world was in the midst of a pandemic and, globally, makeup sales were significantly down.

And yet Jones Road tapped into the zeitgeist of what women – from TikTokers to Boomers – actually wanted. “It’s common sense,” Brown shrugs. She won’t divulge figures: “We’ve been completely profitable since day one,” is all she will say. But if the rumoured global daily sales (seven figures and counting) are anything to go by, Bobbi Brown is well on her way to creating another billion-dollar brand.

Born in 1957 to middle-class parents in the Chicago suburbs, Brown describes her mother as “beautiful and very glamorous”, but credits Ali MacGraw in “Love Story” for helping her see there was “another type of beauty”. She studied theatrical makeup at Emerson College in Boston and, after graduating in 1979, moved to New York. She contacted a makeup-artist agency and began working in the fashion industry. Eventually, she landed covers on American Vogue and Elle and grew a reputation for a minimal, nextdoor-girl aesthetic that would go on to make Brown a very rich woman, which is why the New York Times dubbed her “The Mogul Next Door.”

This no-makeup makeup look (critiqued over the years for, among other things, hiding the labour that goes into meeting Eurocentric beauty standards), involves wearing quite a lot of makeup in order to look as though you have just stepped out of a yoga class – young, fit and wealthy. This oxymoronic fashion evolved alongside Brown’s success, its most recent iteration being “clean” beauty, or the “five-minute face” – a minimalist beauty aesthetic that promises to make users look like themselves but better.

Brown’s self-assurance is light years away from the intense, fraught, blazer-and-heels woman I first met at a Bobbi Brown launch in 2015. Today, she is sitting legs folded yoga style on a banquette in Claridges, she is dressed in a low-key black sweater and jeans – and is wearing no makeup. She is diminutive – “I’m like 5ft nothing” – but on that day, she seemed towering and a little terrifying. “Yeah,” she chuckles, “there was a lot going on back then. I always had PR people staring at me; I always had marketing people around. Yes, I was in charge, but…” she adds pointedly, “I was constantly fighting for what I wanted. When I left the brand, I took off my heels and became myself again.” Leaving and being herself again meant, at 63 and in a business still rife with misogyny and ageism, Brown had to start again. “No,” she says, correcting me, “I didn’t have to start again, I chose to start again.” And rather than being intimidated by the prospect, she considered it an opportunity to do things differently. “I love a clean slate. You get to get rid of everything and think: ‘What would I do now?’”

What she has done is build a new company that is in complete contrast to her last one. No one in her team has a background in beauty. Unlike most corporate company structures, they have no CEO or COO. “We tried it, it didn’t work, we got rid of them.” Her top team is largely a family affair. There’s herself (“I have no title. I don’t need a title”); her husband, Stephen Plofker, a property entrepreneur; her son, Cody Plofker, who is the chief marketing officer; and her daughter-in-law, Payal Patel Plofker, who is the brand and marketing director. (“I actually can’t wait to go home and see my 13-month-old granddaughter,” says Brown, adding with a chuckle, “she is the child of the people who work for me, so I have an extra reason not to piss them off.”)

She and her husband live three minutes from the office and the rest of the family are also in the vicinity.

Mixing family with business seems to work well. Brown was the makeup artist for both her daughters-in-law on their wedding days. She has described it as more terrifying than being asked to do Michelle Obama’s makeup, because “I really wanted to please them.”

A self-confessed anglophile, Brown cites Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire, Grays Antiques Market and Anya Hindmarch’s café in London as some of her favourite haunts, and she recently joined the British Beauty Council as an ambassador. “I love the British aesthetic.” She even chose the name Jones Road, she says, because: “It sounded like a bespoke British brand that they asked me to reinvent and make more modern.”

Brown herself is a mix of modern and old-fashioned pragmatism. “Even early on in my career,” she recalls, “I would tell people how to put on makeup while trying to get their kids to school. I’d tell them to just stick to a couple of things, do them in the car at stop lights…”

Many at her namesake brand, reveals Brown, considered her everyday approach too “mumsy” or parochial. “Once, someone very high up at the old company sat me down and said: ‘I think you should buy a pied-à-terre in New York City. This way you can invite editors round and they can think you are a city girl.’ Someone else said that because I’m so small, I needed something that would make people notice me when I walked in, like a hat with a feather. Then I was told I should dress ‘cool’, so someone took me shopping for leather pants [trousers]”.

Brown can’t help the wry laugh that escapes her at the absurdity of it all. “You know, I tried all these things on, all the things you had to do to be a fancy business person, and none of it made any sense to me. Finally, I was like, ‘I think the editors liked me because we talked about normal stuff – like our kids and how tired we were.’”

While she says she loves New York, she doesn’t see herself as a “New York person” and continues to live in Montclair, New Jersey, where she moved in the late 80s with her husband.

Her authenticity, at a time when social media’s perfection is slowly beginning to lose its gloss, could explain her popularity on TikTok. When, in 2022, Meredith Duxbury, a beauty influencer known for her full-coverage makeup looks, gave Jones Road’s What The Foundation, a poor review, Brown lightheartedly parodied the influencer’s video. It went viral, resulting in a huge spike in sales. She is self-deprecating about being a social-media hit. “The joke is that afterwards I see I’ve got my hair sticking out and I’m covered in dog hair and dust. I’m like, ‘Guys, you have to tell me!’” But her fans still seem to just get it.

Brown has no plans to sell Jones Road in other stores beyond London’s Liberty, despite batting away numerous requests. Her unequivocal stance provides an insight into her success as an entrepreneur. She exudes warmth, but her eye contact is serious and unwavering; her tone direct and her vision clear. “I only launch a product when I see a need,” she says. She jokes that there is “no real strategy”, but clearly there is. Sales, she says, have “tripled” in the past year and while the company growth invariably means increased expenses, she caveats, “We do not waste money.”

And perhaps this is a clue to her success. Even her own sartorial stance has a thrifty approach – albeit a relative one. “I just like really normal things.” To my raised eyebrow she laughs and adds, “OK, yes I do like Celine [fashion designer Phoebe Philo era]. They are the things in my wardrobe I will never give away. But I’ll team it with my Uniqlo jeans.” Her penchant for Philo’s Celine – an effortless, pared-down luxe (“It would be my dream to do the makeup for her next campaign”) set the tone for the Jones Road aesthetic.

In the week we met, Philo’s highly anticipated namesake collection launched, marking her return to the industry after helming a brand that was hugely successful under her direction and walking away from it at the height of its success. Sound familiar? “I was waiting with bated breath to see what she would return with, because,” says Brown, “I love a good comeback story.”

By Funmi Fetto

This week, designer debuts at Chloé and Alexander McQueen will be among the most closely watched shows at Paris Fashion Week.

At Chloé, hopes are high for Chemena Kamali, a charismatic behind-the-scenes figure who was the brand’s design director during its boho-chic boom days under Clare Waight Keller before working with Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent to deliver a spate of knockout collections that scored dozens of major magazine covers and helped the brand revive its ready-to-wear business. But Chloé is a tricky house. It’s a relatively small label with limited marketing budgets that has long struggled to keep pace with rivals and sell enough of the leather goods that once anchored its business, according to sources.

Meanwhile, at Alexander McQueen, Seán McGirr, who worked at Dries Van Noten and Uniqlo before serving as head of ready-to-wear at JW Anderson, has his work cut out for him, too. In taking the reins from longtime creative director Sarah Burton, who steered the label after the death of founder Lee McQueen in 2010, McGirr has big shoes to fill. And while owner Kering does not break out sales for McQueen, sources say the business lost ground in the run up to Burton’s exit last September as sales to aspirational clients slowed and it cut back on wholesale and its bestselling bubble sneakers.

Both Kamali and McGirr have issued teaser campaigns in recent weeks that seemed to signal returns to the glory days of their labels. Kamali’s Chloé campaign featured a slightly retro update to its logo and a renewed focus on core values like free-spirited femininity and links to Paris. Those ideas got lost under predecessors Gabriela Hearst and Natacha Ramsay-Levi. Recalling the romance of Karl Lagerfeld’s 70s-era Chloé could help get the brand back in gear.

Meanwhile McGirr’s McQueen teaser for McQueen, with its references to “The Wicker Man” (and a refashioned logo of its own), harkened back to the more macabre, confrontational, hard-edged mood of founder Lee, a direction that could help re-engage fashion-forward clients whose enthusiasm for Kering stablemate Balenciaga has cooled.

Elsewhere this week, concerns are expected to mount over how a slowing luxury market and the unravelling of e-commerce giant Farfetch will impact emerging brands. On Thursday, Y/Project cancelled its show amid “uncertain times.” To be sure, the hip denim label is facing unique challenges, with its ownership and management in flux, and a designer who splits his time between the brand and Italian denim giant Diesel. But Y/Project is surely not the only label struggling this season.

What Else to Watch for This Week

Sunday

Milan Fashion Week: Giorgio Armani

Monday

Paris Fashion Week: Vaquera

Tuesday

Paris Fashion Week: Christian Dior, Saint Laurent

Puma, Macy’s, Revolve, Urban Outfitters report earnings

Wednesday

Paris Fashion Week: Courrèges, The Row, Undercover, Dries Van Noten

Warby Parker, Moncler, TJX report earnings

Thursday

Paris Fashion Week: Rick Owens, Off-White, Chloé, Givenchy, Paco Rabanne, Schiaparelli

Bath & Body Works, Olaplex, RealReal report earnings

Friday

Paris Fashion Week: Loewe, Giambattista Valli, Yohji Yamamoto, Victoria Beckham

Matter+Shape design salon opens in Paris

Saturday

Paris Fashion Week: Junya Watanabe, Noir Kei Ninomiya, Hermès, Comme des Garçons, Ann Demeulemeester, Alexander McQueen

The Week Ahead wants to hear from you! Send tips, suggestions, complaints and compliments to brian.baskin@businessoffashion.com.

Dior has “postponed indefinitely” its menswear show slated for March 23 in Hong Kong. Production teams, travelling guests and local authorities were informed yesterday of the change, just a month before the event.

The brand did not supply a reason for the change — nor any indication of when the show might be rescheduled — sparking frustration from local officials who had hoped the event would be a major moment spotlighting Hong Kong’s appeal as a destination for international travel and shopping.

Hong Kong’s standing as an international retail hub has declined in recent years as Beijing has ramped up oversight of the territory while protests and pandemic-era travel restrictions curbed demand for travel and shopping, with visitors from Mainland Chinese re-routing to destinations like the duty-free island Hainan. LVMH stablemate Louis Vuitton also sought to spotlight the city as a fashion destination with a show by menswear creative director Pharrell Williams last year.

Dior’s unexplained postponement could raises questions about the health of Hong Kong’s luxury market as well as the future of men’s creative director Kim Jones, who will mark 6 years at the brand April 1. Since Jones joined Dior in 2018, menswear sales have boomed as the designer mixed house codes like nipped-waist tailoring and carnage with streetwear and collaborations with hip artists.

Dior representatives declined to comment on why the show has been shelved.

Learn more:

Kim Jones Drops a New Beat for Dior Men

The multitasking designer talks to Tim Blanks about Virgil Abloh, his new Jack Kerouac-infused collection and why he’s taking a break from collaborations to focus on ‘Dior by Dior.’