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Arabelle Sicardi’s new book, The House of Beauty , reminds us that care is resistance. I began reading Arabelle Sicardi ’s debut essay collection   while I waited to get called back for a mani-pedi at the nail salon. I spent the next hour trying to keep the pages on my lap, stealing glances as I placed my painted fingers under the fluorescence of portable UV lamps. I  read it in between getting my legs waxed and my eyebrows threaded. Their book followed me around on errands, crammed between makeup and skincare purchases from Sephora and Ulta, restocks from my favorite K-beauty store in Chinatown, and samples from the niche perfume stores in SoHo. I reached for it when I grew impatient waiting for my dyed hair to process and when I procrastinated on putting on a full face for a night out. Equal parts historical epic, investigative journalism, and memoir, reading The House of Beauty: Lessons From The Image Industry   means you’ll never see your hauls, your daily routines, or local salon services the same way again.  From the beginning, Sicardi is determined to show the very real blood, sweat, and tears that underpin the beauty industry. In a chapter titled “Choose Your Own Disaster,” readers begin their dangerous journey at the source of two popular cosmetic ingredients found in 70% of the world’s beauty products — mica mined in India and palm kernel oil harvested in the peatland forests of Malaysia and Indonesia. Sicardi guides us across oceans and continents through the perspectives of these exploited laborers and the journalists and NGOs risking their lives to document these dangerous, often illegal operations. We become a child dying in a mining cave collapse, a cargo ship deckhand held hostage by pirates, a migrant plantation worker with their passport locked away in an administrative office, desperate to return home. We eavesdrop on a Malaysian government lawyer bragging about convincing Indigenous villagers to sign over the rights to their land. We sit in boardrooms where bribes are exchanged, and the destruction of communities and ecosystems is negotiated through corporate meetings. We even become the purchased product in the shower, on the counter, shown off in review videos, and restocked on a shelf by an underpaid retail employee. By following the money from these places to people like Estée Lauder heir Ronald Lauder, noted for his Republican mega-donations , and the under-resourced innovations in foundation shades by Black cosmetic chemist Balanda Atis  (of L’Oreal’s Women of Color Lab ), Sicardi puts a face to the workers whose suffering is overlooked in the name of globalized commercial efficiency — and a name to those in the industry both perpetuating its violence and trying to solve its thorny problems.    In sharp contrast to the previous chapter filled with the accounts of unnamed workers, Sicardi turns their attention to one of beauty’s most recognizable names: Coco Chanel. Despite the House of Chanel’s best efforts at suppression, the designer’s collaboration with the Nazis  has become well known in recent years, complicating her legacy in fashion and beauty. Still, Chanel No. 5 remains one of the most popular perfumes in the world . Despite what little I already knew of Chanel’s biography, I didn’t expect to learn about the Wertheimers , the Jewish family who became responsible for producing and manufacturing the fragrance, inadvertently helping to sustain Chanel’s lavish Parisian lifestyle during World War II. Nor about how quickly Chanel began to associate herself with the Nazis to maintain her wealth and prestige. Sicardi confronts how her selfishness and hatred helped her not only survive, but thrive, in Nazi-occupied France. Behind the iconic fragrance, Sicardi locates a monstrous history of greed. “And it makes sense, really,” they write, “because power appears beautiful, and beauty makes time feel conquerable. Beauty makes cruel choices so easy. Beauty makes empathy a political tool.”  Of course, beauty is more than just the products we use or the ideas of how our bodies should look. It’s a history and culture shaped over generations by economies, geopolitics, conflict, and the movement of commodities and people. Sicardi chooses to explore beauty’s connective tissue first through hair, then through the nail industry. Through hair, Sicardi wrestles with how styles and textures have signified resistance, forced assimilation, opportunities for entrepreneurship, and materials for self-empowerment. Biographies of Haitian-American barber Pierre Toussaint  and activist business mogul Madam C.J. Walker  intersect with the violent cutting of Chinese men’s queue  braids in San Francisco jails as part of the Pigtail Ordinance of 1878 ; the rise of South Korea’s wig industry in the 20th century, fueled by U.S. embargoes after the Vietnam War; and the emergence of synthetic extensions and hairpieces. By following each strand of this braid, Sicardi untangles the politics that underpin our beauty supply stores and hair salons. Through manicures, Sicardi wrestles with the complicated legacy of actress Tippi Hedren , credited with building America’s nail industry by offering training to Vietnamese refugees. Billed as an opportunity for the disenfranchised, Sicardi unpacks the racism, classism, and exploitation these manicurists experienced: “The reality of a miracle is that it is also a story of devastation.” Yet there are also opportunities for solidarity, such as the founding of Mantrap , a Black- and Vietnamese-owned salon, in the 1980s, or collective organizing by cooperatives like the New York Nail Salon Workers Association  and the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative . Sicardi describes learning how to care for their hair and do their own nails as part of this journey, carrying on these living histories through the work of their own hands rather than merely being a passive consumer.          Only Sicardi could write a book about beauty as incisive and thoughtful as this one. They are, after all, a veteran of the very industry they set out to critique. Perhaps their name rings a bell from their Rookie Mag  days. You’ve probably clicked on one of their articles for publications like Allure , Teen Vogue , The Cut , Harper’s Bazaar , or The Verge . In 2015, Sicardi made headlines when they resigned from their role as Buzzfeed ’s beauty editor   following the censorship of an article criticizing a misogynistic ad by one of the site’s advertisers, Dove. In the introduction, Sicardi recounts how that moment shaped their perspective as a critic: “It is hard to live under the specter of what bodies are supposed to be. It gets even more complicated when you are getting paid to articulate those rules — when your job is to give voice to the rules at the same time that you have to make it seem like you’re pushing against them.” Today, Sicardi continues to carve out their own space in beauty, offering their services as a brand consultant and as a judge for the Art and Olfaction Awards . In 2022, they founded the nail art culture nonprofit, the Museum of Nails Foundation  — a fitting evolution of their activism, given how they write in the book about the empowerment and precarity of the nail industry. As a tastemaker, critic, journalist, consumer, and self-described “beauty world builder,” Sicardi has built their career on negotiating beauty’s complex networks of power. The House of Beauty isn’t just a call to expose the industry’s harms to themselves and others; it’s a call for readers to learn, resist, and advance positive change.  The House of Beauty begs the question, “What’s the state of beauty criticism today?” It’s a thought I kept pondering as I made my way through the book. Like many twenty-somethings today, my formative understanding of beauty was shaped first by magazines, then the meteoric rise of beauty YouTubers, Instagram influencers, and TikTokers. It’s hard not to drown in a sea of whitewashed sponsored content, shady brand deals, and profit-motivated recommendations. Sicardi is one of the few beauty creatives who continues to challenge the status quo, drawing attention to companies’ bad behavior while also providing much-needed education on how our culture of beauty and wellness today is shaped by political histories of race, class, immigration, disability, gender, and sexual identity. The House of Beauty ’s hybrid intervention situates Sicardi among fellow critics like Fariha Róisín , Sable Yong , Tanaïs , Mimi Thi Nguyen , Moshtari Hilal , Chloe Cooper Jones , and Ellen Atlanta , who coalesce their lived experiences into the industry’s systemic injustices.  As much as Sicardi’s book is concerned with the past and present of the beauty industry, The House of Beauty also looks to its future. Sicardi wrestles with how beauty’s production actively contributes to the climate crisis : through the harvesting of natural resources, the waste produced by packaging, and polluting emissions; its use of fossil-fuel by-products; and companies’ push to displace Indigenous peoples from their homelands . They unpack how greenwashing buzzwords like “clean,” “organic,” and “sustainable” aren’t enough to address the industry’s systemic issues with extraction and over-consumption. When they visit a conference for bodyhackers and transhumanities, Sicardi identifies body modification technology as the beauty industry’s sinister new frontier. Obsessions with self-enhancement and optimized perfection find institutional support from tech companies , the military , and universities . Yet these futures of beauty hardly acknowledge the cost, feeding into the capitalist drive for continuous growth while overlooking the harms that such technologies and ideas have on the disabled, working class, and communities of color. In a chapter about activists mobilizing to distribute hygiene kits in places like Los Angeles’s Skid Row during COVID lockdown, community hygiene during police brutality protests, and the precarity of beauty store and salon closures, Sicardi finds a way to turn these daily anxieties into a roadmap of new possibilities. “Beauty as an ethical act means understanding you have the duty to use it responsibly,” they write, “We are given imperfect choices. We must force better ones.”  Through The House of Beauty, Arabelle Sicardi holds up a mirror to the beauty industry, inviting us to look, listen, and learn about this world that has shaped how we perceive ourselves — even if we don’t like the ugliness we see. Beauty becomes a method, a tool, a weapon, a bridge, a form of survival, a guide through which we can understand the world, an archive of deeply personal and expansively global histories. Sicardi confronts beauty’s behemoths, from individuals like Coco Chanel to the multinational corporations monopolizing the industry, but also makes sure to recognize the life and legacy of industry heroes whose stories are overlooked and whose contributions remain underappreciated.  A project that was years in the making, I found myself craving more and reflecting on what I felt to be missing: further teasing out of the linkages between the beauty industry and the military industrial complex, deeper explorations of beauty’s historical intersections with disability, how beauty has functioned in queer communities as forms of self-affirmation and political resistance. The House of Beauty  is a comprehensive guide, yes, but it also reads as an invitation for others in the industry take Sicardi’s kit off the vanity counter and learn more for themselves. “When the world tells you beauty is not your bounty, not your legacy, not your place, not your home, when the world tells you that you are not deserving of care,” they instruct us: “Don’t believe it. Write yourself in.” The work of understanding beauty—its mechanisms, its materialities, its evolutions, its trend cycles, its capacities for world making, knowing, and undoing—is never finished. In 2026, the stakes of Sicardi’s project feel more urgent than ever. The House of Beauty  ends with a section titled “Heart Chest,” a collection of resources highlighting organizations that provide services like hygiene for unhoused communities, gender-affirming care, financially-accessible bodywork, wellness support for chronically ill and disabled people, beauty industry worker advocacy, and climate justice activism. For all of the ways beauty hurts us, Sicardi shows how its rituals, skills, and products can help us care for each other and ourselves in times of crisis. As they put it, “I am crawling my way out of the rubble with very manicured hands.” 🌀 Eleonor Botoman is an art historian and culture critic based in Brooklyn. They are currently a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center studying environmental art, material culture, and design. When they’re not experimenting with perfumery, you can find them curating multimedia wonders for their Substack newsletter, Screenshot Reliquary .

Who wouldn’t want a Victorian-era edge to their look? In a world so painfully minimalist, populated by mantras like ‘‘less is more,’’ few pieces of jewelry really catch one's eye. Having mastered the art of ‘‘more is more’’ beautifully, designer Mia Vesper — whose mother was an antique collector and textile designer — stands at the vanguard of challenging this. Founded in 2017, Vesper Obscura is the type of brand that tries to defy industry norms.  Although the founder started with clothing, her defiant and timeless jewelry is its true star. But whether they’re garments or ornaments, Vesper is dedicated to making relics that flirt with the past, the present, and ultimately the future as well.  Ahead, we sit down with Mia to discuss Vesper’s newest collection, her creative process and influences, and how she continues to build a company that stays unapologetically true to its values in an era ruled by fleeting trends and relentless speed.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity. ANA BEATRIZ REITZ: I’m very curious about how all of this began for you. Could you walk me through the founding of the brand?  MIA VESPER: Vesper Obscura was founded the way a lot of honest things are founded: out of necessity; mild terror, really. The clothing line was burying me financially, and I needed an escape hatch that didn’t feel like surrender. Jewelry offered salvation. The margins are real, the object is permanent, and the ethical math is different. I started making jewelry in 2024, during one of the most difficult periods of my life. But it was followed, almost immediately, by a far better one. Jewelry didn’t just change the business; it changed my nervous system. For the first time in years, the work felt viable. ABR: Now, Vesper Obscura feels like a breath of fresh air amidst the same staleness that rules fashion. Did you set out in the very beginning to position the brand with that slowness, sustainable charm so different from the current speed, or did that ethos reveal itself naturally over time? MV: Made-to-order began as a financial constraint. I didn’t have the luxury of making inventory and praying for conversion. But it also turned into a kind of discipline, because it forced me to treat each piece like it had to earn the right to exist. And yes, the rejection of sameness is intentional. I’m not interested in half-hearted design integrity, especially not in a world already overflowing with objects. In a capitalist society, making something is a moral act. If I’m going to produce, it should be good, it should be considered, and it should feel scarce for a reason, not for marketing theater. ABR: How would you describe your creative process, from the first spark of inspiration to a finished piece ready to be sold? MV: I start with a sketch. Sometimes I’ll prototype, but usually my job is to draw the idea clearly enough that it can be translated into a real, wearable object. Then I work with production partners to engineer it into something that has weight, structure, and presence. I’m not precious about the mythology of suffering –  my part in the assembly line is fairly low lift to be honest – I’m precious about the object. ABR: What guides your choice of materials when developing a new collection?  MV: Materials are chosen for integrity and endurance. I’m drawn to metal and stone because they’re stubborn materials, old materials. They refuse to be disposable. ABR: Your work feels both ancient and futuristic at the same time. How do you manage to create and equilibrate this tension, and why is it relevant for you? MV: Because I’ve spent so much time looking at what already exists, I’m interested in the gaps, the missing artifacts. I’m trying to design things that feel like they should be found in a velvet-lined drawer in 1890, or unearthed in 2090. Ancient and futuristic aren’t opposites to me; they’re the same impulse, just aimed at different directions in time. ABR: For so long, jewelry has been connected to power. Do you see your designs as a form of armor of their own ? MV: Yes. Everyday armor. Not costume, not occasionwear. The kind that changes your posture. ABR: Vesper Obscura’s latest collection has a distinctly Victorian style with a modern twist. Which aspects of the Victorian era interested you most in reinterpreting them through a contemporary lens? MV: I’m obsessed with body jewelry because it’s still strangely underexplored, and when it is  explored, it often gets trapped in a bohemian vocabulary that I personally cannot tolerate on my own body. I wanted to take something that’s usually coded as “earthy” and make it feel architectural, sharp, and intentionally styled. The Victorian influence shows up in restraint, intimacy, and a kind of ornamental severity. But I wanted the end result to feel now: clean, sporty, slightly confrontational. I always want a jarring juxtaposition, and then I edit it down until it becomes wearable instead of theatrical. ABR: Many of the pieces feel truly like talismans, with a life of their own. When creating, do you imagine histories or characters or this is something that comes later? MV: The character is me, which sounds unbearable, but it’s simply honest. I design what I want to wear. I’m a purveyor and obsessive appreciator first, and a designer second. I like objects to a slightly dangerous degree. The histories come later, or sometimes they arrive automatically. If something is built like an artifact, it starts generating its own mythology whether you write one or not. ABR: What do you hope someone feels when wearing one piece from this collection? MV:  Cool. So so so cool.  ABR: In an industry obsessed with speed, slowness can be a radical act. How intentional is that pace for you, and what does working slowly allow you to protect? MV: If I’m honest, the slowness has mostly been structural rather than ideological. It’s what happens when you don’t have unlimited cash. In clothing, sustainability felt like a constant ethical negotiation. With jewelry, the moral math is cleaner for me. I avoid questionable stones, I work in materials meant to last, and I’m making objects that can actually be kept. Working slowly protects quality control, cash flow, and my sanity. Creatively, though? I’m not attached to scarcity as a personality trait. If I had unlimited resources, I would design constantly. I don’t worship slowness.  ABR: As the brand continues to grow, how do you protect its integrity and values while allowing it to evolve? MV: The integrity is the design rigor. As long as I’m still making things that feel necessary, I know the brand is alive. The moment I start repeating myself, I’d rather stop. I never want to make the white t-shirt of jewelry. Growth is exciting if it supports the work instead of sanding down its edges. I’m very at peace with the vision. ABR: Why do you think there’s a deep appetite for ornament, nostalgia, and symbolism right now? MV: Because reality has become aggressively unromantic. Life feels a little hellscape-adjacent, and people are hungry for atmosphere. We don’t write letters beside a babbling brook. We have Slack. We have doomscrolling. We have the bright fluorescent lighting of modern existence. Ornamentation is a way of taking your life back aesthetically. It’s cinema you can wear. I also think we’re watching individualism get morally complicated. We’re watching a shift in how people relate to status and identity. There’s a growing desire to flatten hierarchies and question what matters, but we still want beauty, theater, and self-mythology. Jewelry is one of the places where it’s socially permissible to be the main character. ABR: What advice would you give to emerging designers who feel caught between honoring their vision and keeping pace with the algorithm? MV: It’s a terrible predicament. Not everyone is built to be a content machine, and treating that as mandatory is a great way to kill art. If you’re naturally suited to posting constantly, leverage it. If you aren’t, don’t force it. Build alternative engines: trunk shows, email, collaborations, a collector base, real community. There are ways to sell that don’t require turning your life into a feed. And my biggest advice: don’t build your business around a daily practice you hate. Entrepreneurship has endless work baked into it. Take the easiest, most enjoyable avenue whenever morally plausible.  ABR: Finally, when you think about the legacy of Vesper Obscura, what do you want it to leave behind in the jewelry world? MV: Objects that feel immediately understood, but not predictable. That’s the line I care about: clarity with surprise. I want to leave behind future heirlooms, pieces that can be passed down with pride. Consumable surprises, built to outlast the era that created them. 🌀 Ana Beatriz Reitz Gameiro is a Brazilian freelance journalist covering fashion, entertainment, beauty, and culture. Her work has appeared in publications such as FASHIONISTA, V Magazine, Polyester, Remezcla, and NSS. She is also the voice behind The Devil Writes Fashion (previously For Fashion’s Sake), a weekly newsletter where fashion is dissected, celebrated, and occasionally roasted with humor, heart, and just a little bite.

The collaboration, over 25 years in the making, proves that nostalgia itself isn’t the problem — it’s how we choose to handle it. Three pieces from the Vivienne Westwood x Nana collaboration, shot by Alex Soroka. The long-awaited official collaboration between fashion house Vivienne Westwood and Ai Yazawa’s cult shōjo manga Nana (stylized as NANA) has finally arrived — but not without controversy. From confusing rollout logistics to limited stock and simplified designs, die-hard fans criticized the capsule collection as “nostalgia bait”. Is this collection really a cash grab or something more culturally complex? THE GOOD As part of the anniversary campaign, Vivienne Westwood sat down with Nana creator Ai Yazawa for a rare interview , offering insight into Yazawa's creative process, influences, and motivations. Yazawa is historically private and has seldom spoken publicly since an unspecified illness delayed the completion of Nana in 2009. Nana is a popular Japanese manga and anime series, first serialized in the early 2000s by manga magazine Cookie. It gained a cult following thanks to its unique illustration style, compelling plot, memorable characters, and iconic fashion pieces. In addition to the manga, the series inspired an anime adaptation, two live-action films, video games, and several tribute albums.  The plot centers on two women, both named Nana, who meet by chance on a train to Tokyo. They quickly find their lives and ambitions intertwined. Nana Osaki, an aspiring punk rocker, is the heartbeat of the story — and she is often adorned in stylish Vivienne Westwood pieces that symbolize her musicality and confidence. She is determined to bring her punk band, the Black Stones (aka BLAST), to the top of the music industry and chart her own path as a musician. Alternatively, Nana Komatsu (affectionately known as Hachi) struggles with self-discovery and undergoes aesthetic changes throughout the series. She seeks her purpose, often feeling lost or unfocused, and ultimately seeks validation in relationships that don’t always put her first. Hachi becomes the support system for Nana O.'s band, that is, until an unexpected romance threatens to break everything they have built.   Their style journeys reflect not only their ambitions but also their uncertainties and hesitations — an element Yazawa mentions in her interview. “For me, fashion has always been central to storytelling,” Yazawa explained. “Since manga can’t produce sound, fashion becomes an important tool to express it visually.” Before creating Nana, Yazawa studied fashion at Osaka Mode Gakuen and eventually left school to pursue her true passion: becoming a mangaka. Her reflections during the interview with Westwood revealed just how integral fashion was to Nana's story and reinforced what fans have always known: Nana’s use of style was transcendent. Yazawa used fashion not just for aesthetics, but as a metaphor for each character’s personal transformation. “I’ve loved Vivienne’s clothes even before drawing Nana, and I had been collecting them, so almost all of the items that appear in the manga are from my own collection,” Yazawa added. “For me, drawing a punk band and drawing Vivienne’s clothes could not be separated. I believe that music and fashion have always been deeply connected, no matter the era.” Her punk-inspired aesthetics, rooted in the Japanese subcultures of the 90s and early 2000s, influenced an entire generation of readers. This collaboration with Westwood, at least conceptually, felt both emotionally and artistically aligned. The collection featured thoughtful details, such as reinterpretations of the Armour Ring  with Yazawa-inspired illustrations etched on the inside panels. The Armour Ring is featured extensively in Nana and is a signature piece worn by Nana O. The collection also featured red pieces, such as the Stormy Jacket  and Puppy Corset , which can be seen as a subtle nod to Nana O., given her strong association with red clothing throughout the series.  Abandoned by her mother at four, Nana O. was raised by her grandmother, who discouraged her from wearing red and pink clothing, as they were seen as tempting to men. Her grandmother used this restriction in a warped form of protection — keeping Nana from following the path of her mother and having a child out of wedlock or otherwise making life choices her grandmother deemed as dishonorable.  After her grandmother dies, Nana wears a red dress — also known as the Happy Berry dress — in an act of defiance (and freedom). For this reason alone, pairing red clothing pieces with Nana O. grounded the collection in the manga's original visual language.  Personally, I would have liked to have seen Westwood’s interpretation of the Happy Berry dress in the collection. It is a significant outfit in the series, not only for the plot points mentioned earlier, but also for its role in sparking Nana’s relationship with Ren—her love interest and rival throughout the series. The capsule also featured familiar favorites like the Rocking Horse Ballerina  shoes and gave popular pieces — like Nana O.’s pendant orb necklace  — official recognition by virtue of the collab, satisfying a need that unofficial cosplay versions had been filling for years, often for thousands of dollars. But most importantly, the collaboration introduced Nana to a broader global audience, solidifying its fashion status and extending its cultural legacy into wider circles of fashion and pop culture. But that expansion wasn’t without its costs. Two Nana comic covers from 2000 and 2006, respectively. THE BAD Where the collaboration excelled in concept, it fumbled logistically. The rollout was undoubtedly messy.  Though positioned as a 25th-anniversary celebration, the collection launched nearly six months after Nana’s official publication anniversary on May 15. On October 6, Vivienne Westwood posted a reel on their Instagram  teasing the collaboration with no mention of individual pieces or styles. Two weeks later, Yazawa posted on Instagram , announcing the 25th anniversary edition of the manga set for release on October 31—with no clear connection or mention of the capsule collection.  On November 12, Vivienne Westwood continued teasing the release with an Instagram Reels post  featuring the updated manga set and the caption “Almost time…”. There were no teaser posts on Facebook, and their X account has been largely silent since 2024.  The next day, November 13, the house announced on Instagram  that items would be available at 10 a.m. “local time” at their boutiques . Yet, many fans discovered the pieces had already gone live online on November 12, with several items selling out within a few hours. “I'm in the U.S., and for some reason I can see it all uploaded and even shop, though I was under the impression it was dropping tomorrow. Sadly, multiple pieces are already sold out,” one Reddit user wrote. “I signed up for the newsletter and didn’t even get notified when it dropped. They really messed up the release; literally no one had a chance with how bad the organization was for the drop,” another Reddit user wrote . Beyond logistics, some fans criticized the design choices, like (presumably) Hachi’s Mini Sunday Dress and Nana’s Cigarette Trousers, for feeling oversimplified and geared toward mass appeal.  In the manga, Nana O. continually layers her outfits, sometimes mixing patterns and silhouettes, and maximizes her creative expression through distressed layered tees, belts, pyramid-studded bands, and other punk accessories. By contrast, the Cigarette Trousers felt plain.  On the other hand, Hachi is always changing her look to fit a new job or to reflect a new stage of her life. As a high school student, Hachi’s look was reminiscent of the early gyaru/kogal style, with loose socks, loafers, cellphone charms, and other accessories to individualize strict school uniforms.  As the series progresses, Hachi’s looks change. She sometimes mixes vintage pieces from the ‘50s and '60s (think Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s), and at other times, Hachi dips into coquette or Y2K styles. It is understandably difficult to adapt to such a varied style profile, but some fans felt that more options should be available that better evoke Hachi’s range of taste. There was also artificial-scarcity-fueled frustration, particularly for high-demand items like the Giant Orb Lighter — modeled after Shin’s signature piece (but not in the iconic silver finish popularized in the manga) — that were limited to just 250 units worldwide. Price was another sticking point. The Giant Orb Lighter, for example, retailed for nearly $1,800, and many fans criticized the use of brass instead of gold in the jewelry items. And yet, despite these missteps, the collection largely sold out. THE ENDEARING When asked her thoughts about Nana’s enduring legacy, Yazawa said during her interview with Vivienne Westwood: “I’ve always believed that even as times change, human emotions themselves don’t change much. Being able to have my work continue to be read is one of the greatest joys an author can have.” Her answer, in part, illuminates the reasons behind the collab selling out despite its downsides: emotional resonance. Nana shines because of its ability to communicate the exciting yet fleeting years of early adulthood. The playful mixing of styles. The rush of firsts while setting out on your own. It taps into that expansive feeling of possibility while also delivering the cold clarity of consequence. Each character in the series has an opportunity to grow from their past or choose to repeat it. This emotional resonance, paired with the stylish visual branding behind Nana, is a key factor in the collection’s success despite its criticisms. There’s also another element at play — the recent resurgence of early-2000s nostalgia.  According to Archrival, 59% of surveyed Zoomers  say they’d most like to live in the early 2000s because of its culture and entertainment. Brands recognize this selling point and are capitalizing on it: Hollister launched a dedicated Y2K capsule , Aéropostale now highlights an entire Y2K section online , and Coach’s resurgence  has been fueled in part by revivals of its classic leather and Soho-styled bags. But just because nostalgia sells doesn’t mean it feels authentic. Two pieces from the Vivienne Westwood x Nana collaboration, shot by Alex Soroka. THE MEANINGFUL For nostalgia to feel authentic, brands must do more than replicate past designs — they need to reinterpret what made them desirable, tap into current cultural moments, and innovate. Some brands are doing this well. Gap’s collaboration with designer Sandy Liang  reimagined ’90s and early-2000s essentials through her personal lens and Cantonese heritage. The result? A fun, unique, and refreshing collection that actually felt like a personal tribute to the 2000s. Similarly, ONE OF , an atelier specializing in deadstock and historical garments, transforms archival pieces into bespoke designs that honor their history while giving them new life. Both of these examples demonstrate that thoughtful, intentional reinterpretation — not mere replication — is what makes dipping into the past meaningful rather than exploitative. And perhaps that’s the real lesson behind the Vivienne Westwood x Nana collaboration: nostalgia itself isn’t the problem. It’s how we choose to handle it. FINAL THOUGHTS Despite drawing criticism for price point, a messy rollout, and certain design choices, the Vivienne Westwood x Nana collaboration helped solidify the series' fashion status, expose it to new audiences, and create buzz around its anniversary, which is invaluable. It will be interesting to see how future capsule collections from this collab (now with the benefit of fan feedback) perform and which key pieces from the series come to light. One takeaway brands can have from this collab is the importance of integrating culture, context, and history when working with artists or legacy IPs. It can’t just be about aesthetics or hype — it needs to be personal. After all, works like Nana create more than nostalgia. They define generations. They create moments that unite people across time.  As Nana once said, “People can't be just tied together. They have to connect.” 🌀 Amara Johnson  is a writer based in Philadelphia, PA. When she’s not writing, she’s reading or scrolling through Pinterest for style inspo. She loves finding the story in everything.

From Comme des Garçons to Hollywood Gifts , and everything in between. L-R: Universal Flowering, Étude in Black; Serviette, Byronic Hero; Hollywood Gifts, Centerfold It is one of the more uniquely human impulses to catalog. One of my favorite books of theory, Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals , defines a new type of media consumption predicated on Otaku , or obsessive fans of various types of new millennium Japanese media. Azuma’s view of Otaku is highly critical, describing this new mode of consumption as inherently “animalistic” — trading the primacy of authored works for mere categorization of derivative types. The modern mode of consumption, therein, is never able to consider anything on its own, and is in a constant compulsive state of referential comparison, holding the self-authored work on par with countless fanmade derivatives: a wholly postmodern and degenerative way of turning reading or watching or listening into the automatic construction of Relational Databases. Other scholars, both in and outside Japan, following Azuma’s theories, have grown to soften their attitudes towards this type of consumption. Like it or not, however, I think in 2025, nearly 25 years after Azuma wrote about the fandoms behind media like Neon Genesis Evangelion  and Cardcaptor Sakura , Japanese media has taken over the world, and in a broader sense, people have become Otaku, or hyper-obsessive fans about so much more than just Idols and anime.  I am an Otaku for lots of things, some more embarrassing and traditional than others , but if nothing else, I am not as much of a perfume collector or ideally a perfume critic as I am a perfume Otaku. I would still buy it in secret if it stopped being cool, and my love for perfume has overshadowed and defined a number of IRL relationships with friends, family, and lovers. It’s been more of a problem in the past, but my urge to catalog is still as sharp as ever. That’s why, during my favorite time of year, I still find time to break away from Lessons and Carols church services and eating English toffee to rank my favorite and least favorite perfume releases of the last year. Like last year, the   obvious niche perfume boom  has given me a lot to celebrate.  I won’t waste any more time. Ladies and either gay gentlemen or a few uncharacteristically idiosyncratic heterosexual gentlemen probably on the spectrum, these are my favorite perfume releases of 2025. The Year’s Biggest Triumphs Clue Perfumery, Dandelion Butter This was a clear standout, and really a release that defined a good portion of my personal year in terms of just how often I wore it. Like a few other fragrances here, I wrote an entire review and a broader interview with the team behind Clue Perfumery about this scent, so please refer to that for my more elaborate thoughts on it . Suffice to say, here, that as nearly half a year has gone by since its summertime release, I still feel this perfume is one of the most inventive and delightful things I’ve smelled in a long time. I think the broader category of what I could call “weird gourmands” —   rice ,  milk ,  nuts , etc. — is incredibly in vogue.  Dandelion Butter feels wholly divorced from the trend cycle and moreso connected to a nostalgic, gritty sense of childhood play. Its inspiration, a nonsensical childhood game involving real dandelion stems, taps into a sort of underground information economy of old wives' tales and 20th-century children’s games, and thus feels decisively before the internet age — in which kids were forced into authoring their own kinds of fun instead of defaulting to the adult developers of Roblox or Fortnite. The smell itself reflects the same warped childhood perspective that inspired   my favorite Clue scent, With the Candlestick . Refrigerated, high-salt butter in slab form, grassy pollen stems, and dainty yellow blooms abound, and the drydown yields to a sweet sap that recalls tonguing honeysuckle in the outer bounds of the park your elementary school went for recess. A true pleasure to wear, and something absolutely worthy of cult status in the niche fragrance community. Get your hands and nose on it whenever it’s in stock. Serviette, Byronic Hero Another fragrance I’ve written about , and that’s also   received press writeups  from people far more influential than me. To suffice, this is the peak of Trey Taylor’s unique perfume style: accessible, rounded edges, marketable eccentricity, and deeper-than-it-seems class-conscious mingling of the profane with the sacred. The defining feature here is a pretty realistic diesel exhaust note, capturing that addictive gas-station smell and mixing it with a saffron-rose-oud combo that evokes   some of the more popular designer niche oud fragrances . It’s not wholly dirty and has the same sort of alt-sheen as something like   Black Saffron  (a sweet leather styrax take on saffron I count as one of Byredo’s best). Wear Byronic Hero to the club, and let its distinct and unflinching sillage start conversations as easily as it frightens asthmatics. Marlou, Heliodose I do think   Doliphor , the second fragrance release this year from enigmatic provocateurs Marlou, is the more unique and lauded of the two, but somehow Heliodose ended up being my secret favorite. The second collaboration with perfumer Stéphanie Bakouche, this attempts to translate the characteristic ferality (and fecality) of Marlou’s DNA into a floral fragrance. Needless to say, this is not at all what I was expecting. I imagined an animalic floral in the vein of their classy and very lovely   Poudrextase , or even Eris Parfums’ stinky, sultry   Night Flower . Heliodose, in contrast, focuses on the oft-maligned hedione molecule and elevates it to a hyper-sweet tropical zenith. Maybe the most accessible Marlou, this evokes the almond-tiare summertime sheen of Serge Lutens’   La Dompteuse Encagee . I get milky, fleshy, obscene white florals that shine with an almost plastic-toy perfection. It’s pretty simple, but laden with pissy indoles. Not even to the extreme that my beloved   Olene  turns heads — this indole heart resounds with a shallow femininity. If all the other Marlou perfumes smelled like 85-year-old women and   were virally worn by beautiful 20-something girls , this actually smells like a 20-something girl, but probably won’t be worn by them. Sensual, but in an entirely new way for Marlou. If these are the fruits of expanding the palate of a very tightly controlled fragrance series, count me in. Bogue, Come I hadn’t tried any of the infamous Bogue fragrances before this, but Antonio Gardoni’s radical animalic work has come highly recommended. In a similar vein to Marlou, he is known for hyper-stinky perfumers’ perfumes, and this time has made something comparatively quite sweet. Suggestively titled, this is a sticky tropical floral enshrined in honeyed civet and medicinal helichrysum. The civet here is instantly recognizable, dated and regal in the same vein as Michael Jackson’s signature   Bal A Versailles . What distinguishes it is a thick, sweet honey note that warms the nose in harmony with the helichrysum, and renders the animalics here much more approachable to the uninduced masses. Undertones include vanilla, ylang ylang, and grassy immortelle. Staggeringly layered, this unfolds over many hours on skin, revealing green nuances of wild patchouli, tea, and musk. Wear Come to a free love commune in rural Virginia in the 1960s and find new and inventive ways to have awful unprotected sex on psychedelics. L-R: Marlou, Heliodose; Zoologist Perfumes, Olm; Agar Olfactory, Cereale DI SER, Zuko DI SER is perhaps the peak of modern Japanese perfumery in terms of the sheer quality of its releases, but often sticks faithfully to a   citrus-forward palate , occasionally dipping its toes into dark oud with success . Zuko marks a departure into the world of incense and presents the accord in a novel manner wholly divorced from Western culture. This is the farthest thing in the world from   Incense Avignon  or any other requisite churchy smell, and highlights the ultra-camphoric smell of Zuko, a fine incense powder used by monks that also served as the inspiration for my all-time favorite discontinued Diptyque fragrance,   Kimonanthe . DI SER’s take is equally medicinal as Kimonathe, but offers up a more faithful rendering of apothecary ingredients like turmeric, cinnamon leaf, and clove. What comes through most prominently, however, is eucalyptus-borne camphor. Like a hefty scoop of Tiger Balm, this wears less like a perfume and more like a remedy. As a professed fan of perfumes people   often tout as unbearably medicinal , I was hooked. There is no ash here, but rather a grated spice that purifies the mind and body. Bring this with you to practice aikido , and rub it on your pulse points whenever you start to feel a cold coming on. Zoologist Perfumes, Olm This is a curious artifact. Composed by Spyros Drosopoulos, the Greek surgeon turned perfumer behind Baruti Perfumes, this slippery little fragrance is a far cry from the   bold gourmand powerhouses   that built up his original brand. As much as the packaging can sometimes be a little Reddit, I like the Zoologist series because it often involves commissioning perfumers with their own brands or established practices to make something a bit more weird and animalic. This takes a slightly different avenue with a similar spirit, being much more of an earthy-vegetal fragrance in the vein of Early Modern’s Celadon , a cult hit for the Scottish perfume house. I get a distinct umami impression of algae, but also a very damp, watery sediment-clay accord, like the   highly underrated fragrance Lake Bottom  from Folie a Plusieurs. The website itself lists a '“Water Cave Accord,” which I think does a good job of summing it up. There is a bit more traditional ISO E Super base that gives it some oomph , and does a good job of adding to the slightly unsettling alien sheen created by wearing this fragrance on skin. I don’t get the other stated notes of amber and sandalwood, but describing the base as “oily musks” is a delightful little turn of phrase that I think is followed up into the drydown of this fragrance’s wear. I would wear Olm from Zoologist Perfumes to hibernate in my bed for a few days at least, emerging slowly but surely from my covers like a wriggly prehistoric creature climbing onto dry land. Agar Olfactory, Cereale Speaking of prehistoric and weird creatures, this release from Chicago-based Agar Olfactory was launched right at the end of 2024, but had such a meaningful impact on my scent rotation this year that I feel it is wholly worth including. agustine zegers (styled in lowercase) has had a big year this year, to say the least. What went from a very precious Chicago insider’s secret has blown up on the weird girl niche fragrance Internet scene. I now see screenshots of their provocative notes lists on random corners of the internet, and find them stocked at a number of premier scent retailers in NYC, North Carolina, and beyond. Moreover, zegers has publicized a parent venture to Agar Olfactory, dubbed   the speculative scent lab . Very much made in the collaborative, artistic vein as Agar, this project eschews optimizing retail profitability in favor of hosting   a number of fascinating workshops  at the intersection of ecology and olfaction, and   custom smellscaping  in the service of collaborating with artists on scented installation work. In a sales environment where an ounce of virality often triggers an outpouring of big-business capital, it’s truly meaningful to see zegers double down on the countercultural spirit that made Agar Olfactory stand out.  Their most recent release, Cereale , does just that. Inspired, as all their fragrances are, by a potential iteration of ecological apocalypse, the imaginative copy describes rye and bran monocultures threatened by a novel infection. This perfume, they write, is what food scientists develop to appease the taste for bread still prominent in popular culture. One of the most viscerally shocking fragrances I’ve smelled in recent memory, this is nothing like the delicate rose-water sourdough found in similar   Chicago-based bread perfume  purveyors. This smells, to me, exactly like a bowl full of warm water and active dry yeast. It isn’t even a baked bread perfume; it is a baking perfume itself. I get creamy lactone butter notes, atop a walloping from fermented yeasty dough. What adds to this perfume’s unique aggression is its insane strength. A few sprays instantly turn any room into the back of house at a Panera Bread, and on clothes, it lasts so long I smell it on them after  running them through the laundry. Somewhat of an impish little sister to   Selperniku , which is another oddball butter scent with an uncharacteristically powerful performance, wear Cereale to terrorize stay-at-home moms on the subway, or to carboload at 6 AM before running a half-marathon. Jorum Studio, Vernus I really didn’t hear much chatter about this perfume online, which is a shame. Released as a limited springtime exclusive for Scottish genius Euan McCall’s Jorum Studios, this is the polar opposite of   a fresh, dewy tulip scent . Rough, dirty, and edgy, this is primarily a narcissus scent, which is among the more challenging floral notes in perfume. It used to be one I regarded with a bit of fear. At its worst, it is incredibly screechy and hay-like. Thanks to a wonderful ultra-dusty floral-loving close friend of mine, however, I’ve given narcissus a new lease on life. Vernus is undoubtedly a narcissus and daffodil soliflore with incredible dimension, getting to the essence of two very adorable but unexpectedly musty floral notes. Like lazily digging your fingers into dirt, it opens very tart and faintly sour. A visceral bright yellow and brown, you smell the entire flower from root to stem to bloom. I swear there’s almost a charred meat dimension to this floral perfume, it’s that fleshy. An extremely high dose of Jonquil absolute is what really defines Vernus’ profile. A subtle peppery-honey mixture, it speaks to the sweet arrival of spring with uncharacteristically warm tones. Wear this fragrance in April, or whenever you want to remember that one unfortunate time you got so happy about the end of the cold season you skipped through a flower field so fast you fell flat on your face. January Scent Project, Sorabji I was excited about a new release from Providence auteur John Biebel for a very long time. He’s been in a long process of rehauling his bottle and storefront designs, and I’ve certainly missed smelling things through his hyper-unique point of view. There isn’t a single JSP scent I don’t find technically interesting, but his newest, Sorabji , is uniquely approachable compared to some of the more heady concepts like the sharp herbal lilac/tumeric/apple experiment   Vaporocindro . Inspired by the works of English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, this fragrance softly hums with warmth and spice, wearing like an amber perfume tinged with those candy lollipops spiked with scorpions . Based around the interplay between osmanthus, black tea, and apricot, I was perhaps projecting my experience of more Asiatic-oriented osmanthus-apricot fragrances like   Kimonanthe   onto my expectations for this release. The resulting smell, however, is closer to the warm library suede of   Kafka on the Shore . Bolstered with a red Morocco book leather accord, my nose picks up chili pepper, tickling cooking spices like tarragon, and a hearty dose of osmanthus. Where there is apricot, it moreso adds a hazy sweetness, wearing into the drydown like a vanilla-amber on my skin. I truly feel this is a great scent to gift someone to introduce them to the world of experimental perfume, as it’s made from exclusively strange ingredients you won’t find on designer shelves, yet it has an addictive, sweet tinge that makes it a beguiling and wearable signature. Buy this for the person in your friend group who loves an NPR subscription and a good cup of spicy instant ramen, and watch the compliments from its extrait-level sillage roll in. L-R: Sylhouette Parfums, L’Etoile Mourante; Commes des Garçons, Max Richter 01; d'Annam, Spring Festival Commes des Garçons, Max Richter 01 You’ll learn this later, but beloved alt-fashion house Comme des Garçons’ fragrance release schedule has been very hit-or-miss this year. Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting to like this one, but it’s a hit. Another experimental musician collab, this fragrance draws from smells familiar to a musician’s studio: graphite, piano wood, magnetic tape. What I smell is somewhere in between the mellow coffee musk of   Odeur Du Theatre Du Chatelet Acte 1   and the more marketable varnish-accord   skin scent Zero . In a sense, it does something both of these fragrances try to do in their own ways: evoke the intimacy and atmosphere of artists at work, including the more unseemly smells of their materials. Max Richter 01 does this with a very realistic metallic pencil lead smell, mixed with a sleek black pepper wood base that feels marketable to Rick Owens bros who are willing to drop money blindly on something like this. I don’t get a ton of other notes, here, but the art-class-wood effect feels approachable and not horribly indebted to the current trend cycle, so I think it works. There’s enough here to differentiate it from other releases from the house, and if anything, I think it does a better job fitting into the Odeur series, of which its bottle seems reminiscent. Hollywood Gifts, Centerfold The debut from   Nose Candy podcasteuse Maddie Phinney , I’ve   previously written a lot on my blog about this perfume . Needless to say, I think it's really good at doing the kitschy poptimist gourmand thing lots of more established perfumers (see the final entry on this write-up) are trying to do right now. Centerfold , a photorealistic Cherry ChapStick accord meets amaretto and boxed chocolates, wearing on skin for an entire day and evoking memories of cool older girls in high school who smoked stolen cigs behind their parents’ backs and had trashed cars full of tabloids. Frankly, Woah This is a hard one to find, but really fun. Born from design studio I Know You Know, Whoa ’s bottle is an art object in and of itself. Inspired by the delirious tones of California in the summertime, this is a pineapple fragrance with a unique nail polish accord. It’s not necessarily the front-and-center of the composition, which is very wearable. I think of this as a sticky, juicy grapefruit-tropical hybrid, with an acetone artificial base that wears similarly to a mainstream CDG fragrance. Of all the fragrances on this list, I do think I’ve worn this one the least, but it has its time and place from June through August. Extra points should be awarded for having a gorgeously designed bottle, though I get the sense from the other fragrances in this line that the aesthetics of their release may have even been too prominent a concern. As far as design studio perfumes go, though, this one will do just fine. Sylhouette Parfums , L’Etoile Mourante Of everything I’ve put in this list, I was most wowed by this weird little perfume from Vietnam-based provocateurs Sylhouette. I haven’t smelled as much as I’d like from them, but it’s safe to say pretty much everything I’ve encountered has been cutting-edge and hyper-experimental. Explicitly dedicated to the victims of the Genocide in Gaza,   Molotov Cocktail   was a truly breathtaking metallic fragrance, with accents of blood, burned leather, sweat, pepper spray, and vodka that would make fragrance bros who hype up the utterly mediocre   Inexcusable Evil   turn up their patchy pubescent mustachioed noses. L’Etoile Mourante is something entirely different, a quiet, aching fairy that wiggles quietly into the grey matter in your brain. I see loose comparisons only to two very hard-to-find gems:   Serge Lutens’ Bas de Soie , a fleshy hyacinth in the noble tradition of   No 19 , and the ultimate discontinued unicorn from   Byredo, Seven Veils . Like Seven Veils, L’Etoile turns the spotlight on carrot seed: a suede-like, vegetal, peppery smell that cuts deeply into the nostalgia glands, evoking simmering stews and old world glimmer. Fantasy accords like “star dust” and “cosmic smoke” read to me as sultry orris and black pepper. The principal floral accord here is Blue Wisteria, a highly delicate hanging floral with dewy green budding accents not unlike   Jo Malone’s grandma’s favorite hand soap .  There’s something elegiac about this perfume; Palo Santo and smoky incense undertones lend a severity to the pretty floral-spice opening. There are no real similarities between the notes, but the quiet register in which this perfume speaks reminds me of my prized signature scent,   Passage d’Enfer . Astoundingly delicate, this wears on skin with a subtlety that can truly be thrown off by something as commonplace as the ambient smell of a room. This perfume is best experienced outside, perhaps right after it’s rained the kind of long-awaited summer rain that turns cracked soil into feed for earthworms. Long, wriggly, and nothing other than that which they are, and an unapologetic and tiny natural beauty the entire food chain has grown to depend on. Pearfat Parfum , Sister Hildegard This one also surprised me, because Alie Kiral’s work for Pearfat is always extremely inventive, but it often features a quirky warmth and wearability. This perfume, on the other hand, seems quite difficult to wear, with an inherent strangeness that really caught me off guard but has endeared it to me all the more over time. The scent is inspired by one of my favorite saints, the polymath and abbess Sister Hildegard of Bingen, whose musical and theological work has managed to break free from the exclusive confines of Christian worship into the cultural mainstream. Celebrated as an esoteric feminist icon, her work transcends gender, class, and often even religious piety, speaking to the strange dignity of the soul and calling listeners into mystic realms of union with the divine.  Kiral’s tribute eschews the too-obvious choice of making a capital-C Church Incense Perfume, focusing rather on Bingen’s love for the   Viriditas   of the natural world. The first and most prominent note to me is cyclamen, a watery, crisp vegetal note I associate with an odd little gem from my benefactors at Diptyque called   Eau de Lierre . It prevails into the drydown, wearing as if you’d romped through the small overgrown cemetery behind the cathedral walls. This is also a lactonic scent, however, and a prevalent tepid milk quality evokes   The Nursing Madonna  and the strange maternal visions of Saint Bernard  partaking of the Virgin Mother’s breastmilk. Underlying accords submit themselves to the union of green and milky overtones, but I do detect a vague smokiness as well as the punch of juicy orange. A fantasy accord Kiral describes as “flecks of dust against stained glass,” I don’t entirely smell the full vision here, but there is something really strange and evocative about this perfume.  I honestly see another potential comparison to the very misunderstood   Secretions Magnifiques  from mainstream provocateurs Etat Libre d’Orange. It garnered viral fame for supposedly being unwearable, for smelling like blood and cum mixed together in a tribute to the most disgusting viscera of what makes people people. I don’t entirely think it lives up to this claim, however — and, to me, it wears on skin as an almost-tropical seaweed iris and milk fragrance. There’s a similar fleshy, salty quality here, though that would probably be enough to make someone not already entrenched in the world of weird perfume pretty put off. Luckily, this is a limited-edition scent from an indie retailer that exclusively appeals to weird girls looking to smell like memories or twee concepts, so it’s found a tidy little audience of freaks to nestle into. Wear this perfume to 12 PM Thursday Mass with only three or four people in the church, and wander aimlessly around the campus afterwards until you start to hear voices. d’Annam , Spring Festival There’s been a lot of hype this year about perfumes from Vietnam-based d’Annam, all inspired by different aspects of Asian culture and released in small series dedicated to specific countries. I do really enjoy their   coffee scent , and I was partial to the more   premium offering from their Japan line . That said, I do sometimes feel they miss the mark   with some of their concepts , and not everything they release wowed me. That said, I was interested in the Chinese-themed collection released this year, and while I was only able to sample one option, I liked it a lot. Spring Festival , or Chinese New Year, is the annual center of the Chinese celebratory calendar. The fragrance created to commemorate this occasion is quite unique and evocative, centered around a Candied Hawthorne note inspired by   Tanghulu , a skewer of fresh fruit covered in sugar often served at New Year’s festivals. Citrus notes of mandarin take a backseat to a smoky, medicinal sugar and plum blossom mixture that maybe doesn’t feel uniquely Chinese, but certainly evokes various East Asian sundries and tonics at large. The drydown is powdery and sweet, perhaps from the stated notes of Red Dates and “Red Lanterns” (Something paper-adjacent? What a bold fantasy note to include). I think of all the scents included, here, this is the least effective at living up to its very specific concept, but I will always love any fragrance that bolsters up medicinal, powdery, and fruity smells into a lovely salve. Wear this in Chinatown to smell like you know where to find the best Tang Yuan glutinous rice balls in town. Neela Vermeire Creations, Eshal This scent is truly gorgeous. Contributing a fresh take on the tuberose soliflore, an extremely crowded market already, this scent is defined by a bold injection of turmeric. Tepid, spiced, and herbal, the tuberose in Eshal is far from milky or opulent in a classical way. I see a similarity   to Dominique Ropion’s “brutalist tuberose” scent for Regime des Fleurs . In an effort to distance himself from having created perhaps the most iconic niche tuberose perfume of all time, defined by its headiness and plush sensuality, Ropion has gone on   to make fragrances that push tuberose  in a dry, verdant, or spiced resin cast. To be honest, I’ve found this approach to have mixed results, but here, another master perfumer, Bertrand Duchaufour, seems to have taken this playbook and excelled with it. Another man,   somewhat burdened by his most iconic scent compositions , this fragrance smells like the (honestly better) younger sister to his own private-label tuberose,   Jodhpur 6AM . Zesty, exotic, and dry, this fragrance opens with a similar lime to   Moonmilk . The center is indeed tuberose; however, it reads less like   White Diamonds  and more like green, waxy tubers and stems. Vibrant and fresh, this is a tuberose that eschews Eurocentric ideals of ballroom white florals and smells like Indian tuberose in its holistic environment. Universal Flowering , Étude in Black Courtney Rafuse has been moving pretty under the radar for the last year or so, releasing only collaborations with other creatives or businesses, all while navigating the various pitfalls of being a Canadian brand shipping frequently to the tariff-laden isolationist USA. Needless to say, it came as a welcome surprise to see two new bombshells saunter their way into the Universal Flowering core collection. Released quietly alongside a broader streamlining of her bottle and website design, Étude in Black and her brother Big Night certainly prove that Rafuse still has the touch.  Big Night is a bold pineapple mélange in the vein of the criminally underrated   Music for a While , or DS&Durga’s clubbing fragrance   Black Magenta . The centerpiece here is a gritty, sweet vetiver, not unlike the ingredient used in the ginger-forward   Poems One Through Twelve . Where Poems leans sweet, Big Night is tart and sour. Like a man cozying up in Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville resort after calling over several hookers, this is sleazy, charming, and masculine in a weird, off-kilter dad way. That said, Étude in Black was my favorite of the two, and immediately garnered an impulse bottle buy on the basis of its sheer uniqueness. Rafuse always couples her scent creations with evocative associative poetry, and Étude is no exception. I found her description here so meaningful, I feel it’s worth repeating in its entirety below: The roses arrived at noon. I don’t recall the impact, only the machinery of its reception. Chrome shears dulled by tap water, the too-tall vase, a note of brutalist prose. This is how it always starts. With a feeling, yes, but more so the things I decorate the feeling with in order to engage in the ceremony. This is not just a story I tell myself. It’s simply an excavated surface I have to tend to. Pruning a bush with the focus of a surgeon, making the essential cuts that angle at growth. Hours arranging a room like a calculation of chance. This is not just a ritual! So I left the roses in the vase. I didn’t trim the stems. I didn’t change the water. I watched them mainline their own filth to a familiar, clouded end. How perverse, witnessing a thing so alive delight in its own consummation. Is letting them just be the most violent instruction? The now black petals, dutifully dropping onto the polished wood, are the only appropriate response. This is a rose perfume, I suppose — but one completely turned on its head. Rose is quite a hard note to convince me of, as I often feel rose perfumes rest too heavily upon their own laurels, so to speak, doing very little to expound upon the same few recipes for popular success invented in the 20th century   or even the 21st .  That said, this fragrance is clearly conceptually interested in the aesthetics of decay and of delirium, which I find it evokes quite handily. I barely get rose as a flower, here; it's listed in the notes as “rose liqueur,” and the opening of this perfume has all the sparkling boozy effervescence of a good   Poinsettia   or even a   Rose Cocktail . Plasticine juicy strawberry adds a playful femme veneer, like   Fraaagola Saalaaata’s  older sister, who during the long winter of ‘77 was involuntarily committed to a mental institution.  Even beyond its booziness, this scent evokes soirees and juicy red fruits at wintertime gatherings. Into the drydown, however, two notable accords emerge. One is candle wax, a dramatic smoky-waxy sheen not unlike the accents of one of my own most worn scents of all time,   With the Candlestick . Hinoki and rosewood combine into a nondescript industrial-woody veneer, like the sheen of a wooden bar counter or a well-worn antique chair with long, unkempt fingernail scratches along the sides. Candle smoke, incense, and powdery cocktail glitter turn this rose into a Plato’s Cave reflection of the flower. This is rose-flavored , not a floral or fruity scent. This evokes all the finer trappings of a princess dissatisfied with the insanity-inducing confines of her station. Wear Étude in Black to unnerve people at your office’s holiday party, or to whittle down the days while shut in your room on a 19th-century rest cure. The Year’s Biggest Disappointments As perfume giveth, perfume often taketh away. With the explosion of niche perfume comes the marketing of $200+ bottles of snake oil — Eaux de Parfums you quite literally do not need, bolstered by high-budget ad campaigns that try to convince you others will like you better for wearing them. Some of these perfumes were things I was really excited to smell, but was really let down by. I generally try to stay away from independent perfumers who are trying their best, but maybe just didn’t connect with my audience niche. Big box niche retailers, however, are always fair game. Let’s begin. DS&Durga, Brown Flowers I feel, based on its advertising campaign, this perfume was supposed to be Wes Anderson, Annie Hall  drab-chic core as a smell. Leave it to the (often lovable) hipsters at DS&Durga to try to make a perfume that smells, ironically, boring on purpose. I wish it even did that, to be honest. David Moltz is usually pretty deft with floral notes, and I’ve enjoyed a lot of his past   stabs at white floral perfumes , including some great ones   they felt the need to discontinue . That said, Brown Flowers was basically just a dusty coffee-jasmine hybrid, and didn’t really feel vintage to me, much less something that speaks to current niche scent interests.  Maybe my biggest problem with this perfume is that it’s not brown, and not even grey. This is much more of an orange, springy white floral, which would maybe be better marketed as an April exclusive or as one of the elusive and often very unpredictable Studio Juices. I don’t even hate this scent; I was just so hyped by the marketing that I found the scent itself didn't really relate to its inspiration at all. Maybe throw in some powdery animalic base, make it actually reminiscent of the 1970s. Whatever, a shot and a miss is something Moltz is certainly capable of brushing off, and I’m still excited to keep up with their packed future release schedule under the auspices of my own generous employer, Manzanita Capital. Commes des Garçons, Odeur 10 This one actually made me mad. The Odeur series represents some of the most experimental attempts at designer niche perfumery, and I consider scents like   Odeur 53 masterpieces . This perfume is simply   Byredo Blanche  for people who think they’re too good for Byredo Blanche. Barely even off-putting, it’s a fresh laundry, modern aldehyde skin scent, not buttery, not spiced, just clean. I never thought I would see the day that Comme des Garçons caters to the clean girl market. Sad! L-R: DS&Durga, Brown Flowers; Maison Francis Kurkdjian, Kurky; Byredo, Alto Astral Francesca Bianchi, The Essence This one is a bit of a weird artifact because I don’t think it was necessarily meant to stand on its own as a perfume. This was the great Italian perfumer Francesca Bianchi’s attempt at capturing the general base notes common to most of her existing fragrances, to wear as a sort of “enhancer” for other fragrances. I suppose she does a good job at capturing this, but to be honest, I don’t find The Essence terribly compelling. When Bianchi is at her best, it’s often what she can add to this basic violet-civet structure that makes her perfumes great. Maybe this was an attempt to compete with Molecule 01 -type basic skin scents, and in that case, I don’t really think it works. Moreso, I think this bit is kind of played out in 2025, and I’d like to see Bianchi working to give her audience more , not less. In the wake of Glossier You terrorizing girls and gays across the world, I think perfume that distinctly smells like you are wearing perfume  is the new vogue. If I wanted to seem like I wasn’t wearing perfume, I would just not wear perfume. Which, of course, I would never do. Byredo, Alto Astral These days, I’m mostly done being reflexively mean to the enfant terrible  luxury niche perfumers at Byredo, only because, by my own suspicions, they’re likely on the brink of bankruptcy. That said, this new perfume is just objectively a bad attempt to capitalize on the success of their aldehydic laundry scent,   Blanche . I was somewhat hopeful to see aldehydes on the menu again, because while I don’t think it’s terribly inventive, I do have to hand it to Blanche for making young women crave aldehydic scents again, and to break past their knee-jerk reaction to call anything aldehydic “old lady-like” because of its connections with   Chanel No. 5 and the usual suspects .  It’s funny to me that “clean, fresh, laundry scents” are very in with the masses right now, but only if you market them without mentioning the very same ingredients that made classic perfumes of the 1920s-50s really pop. There’s a recursive beauty to knowing that women are deathly afraid of aging and, by extension, don’t want to smell like their grandmothers, but also have noses that respond to the same core ingredients their grandmothers did, making them more alike than either would probably assume. Needless to say, Alto Astral has none of the historic connotations of aldehydes, and instead sublimates the note to a suntan-lotion style vanilla coconut note that reminds me of sugary ambers like   Baccarat Rouge  and   its countless imitators . It’s actually quite the opposite of a grandma scent; this perfume was designed to please a teenage girl and all those whose olfactory tastes haven’t evolved from that stage of life onward. If I wanted a tropical scent,   I would get a tropical scent . If I wanted a clean soapy scent,   I would get a clean soapy scent . This perfume tries to do both and ends up accomplishing neither. Maison Francis Kurkdjian, Kurky I honestly feel sorry, because I do think that Maison Francis Kurkdjian has made it onto my biggest disappointments list every single year I’ve made them. I don’t hate MFK, despite my indications, and the Grand Soir  series is lovely. I’m so glad they brought back   Absolu Pour le Soir , even if it is updated to modern guidelines. That said, this new release, Kurky , is literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen hit the Neiman Marcus shelves. Even when Frederic Malle did   the whole playful childhood nostalgia thing , he did it with an ounce of class. This not only looks like a perfume for seven-year-olds, but it smells like one, too. I understand the whole getting in touch with your inner child thing, but my inner child isn’t spending $265 on a fruity musk fragrance that smells like off-brand children’s shampoo. I know Quest International Flavors and Fragrances wasn’t paying that much to commission brainless fruity gourmand scents back when you used to push perfumes for them. Please learn from this, Francis, for all our sakes. 🌀  This piece was concurrently published in Robinovitz's perfume newsletter, Eat Your Lipstick . Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

Unlike most fashion trends, leopard style never really goes out of fashion. From royals to old Hollywood, to now, these spots have remained fierce as a sartorial statement and a cultural touchpoint – here’s why. L-R: Alexa Chung, Carrie Donovan, Meryl Streep Is there any arena more fickle than fashion? Somehow, within this most volatile of jungles, leopard looks and motifs continue to prowl and reign.   While our jeans may ride high or low and we may quietly tuck away last year’s fad (please! No more naked dresses), our possibly primal love of leopard never seems to fail. It happens like clockwork every year and across the seasons:  fashion-y insiders declare – yet again – that leopard is back. The thing is, it never really  goes away.   As I write, I’ve spotted no fewer than seven social posts, two   Vogue  articles, and several leopard-clad celeb sightings that have resulted in instantly coveted looks. I can also spot several such looks in my own closet, and I’m not opposed to adding more if some cute new leopard garment catches my eye.   Cat power is real, and leopard looks go back a long way with fashion history intersecting with real history. The ancient Greeks were the first to make the leopard look chic by associating it with Dionysus, the god of wine. A favored animal of the god, Dionysus is often depicted riding a leopard or in a chariot drawn by the animal. These gorgeous creatures could also be found by his side as this good-time god travelled the earth teaching the art of winemaking to mere (and eager) mortals. Leopards, in that sense, were the first party animals. Fashion trends being contagious (not much has changed there), Dionysus’ priests soon adopted the look for themselves  by draping their bodies in leopard skins to symbolize the merits of wild times and good wine.    This mythological connection also pops up in ancient Egypt, where leopards were a popular motif. Seshat, the goddess of writing and wisdom, was often depicted wearing a leopard skin dress or mantle as a symbol of authority, giving leopard print a nice splash of cerebral chic. Leopard later scored points with real-life royals, too. Henry VIII, never one for subtlety, boasted a pretty out-there fashion sense with a variety of animal furs making up the king’s wardrobe – leopard skins among them. Interestingly, exotic animal gifts were all the rage during the medieval and Tudor ages and also inspired what would become the royal menagerie at the Tower of London, a collection of exotic animals from far-flung places as varied as Norway, Africa, and India. In 1516, Sir John Wiltshire wrote to the king, warning him of the arrival of some rather unusual gifts from Italy’s Duke of Ferrara – among them, a live leopard.   Henry decreed that commoners were forbidden to wear leopard in any form, thus crowning the leopard look with that all-important driver of fashion trends – exclusivity. Of course, exclusivity has a way of triggering something else: instant desire. Fast forward to now(ish) and exotic animals as both a look and a power pet would become all the rage in 1920s and ‘30s Paris, albeit among a rarified set of high rollers and stylers. Josephine Baker, an international sensation at the time and later an honorary French citizen, was often seen strolling the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah Chiquita in tow. Note that cheetahs are considered relatively harmless to humans as opposed to leopards. However, to the untrained eye, the shock and awe upon seeing such a creature is the same. Baker was known to cause a major stir among café society as she glided past gasping onlookers, clutching a long and bejeweled leash attached to Chiquita.   Diana Vreeland, fashion legend and editor-in-chief at Vogue  from 1963 to 1971, recounts in her memoirs one of those infamous Josephine Baker sightings . A discerning style spotter, she was surprised – and thrilled – to discover Chiquita and Baker sitting just a few seats away in the same Paris theater in Montmartre one summer day. All in attendance were there to escape the heat while taking in a screening of L’Atlantide , a Jacques Feyder film which featured a bevy of cheetahs. Surprised to see the glamorous film-goer, Vreeland was duly impressed by both Chiquita’s good behavior and the exquisite style of her mistress as she watched the pair speed off into an awaiting white and silver Rolls-Royce. A lways one for sweeping pronouncements, Vreeland described the scene thus: “What a gesture! I've never seen anything like it. It was speed at its best, and style.” Vreeland has also been quoted as saying she never met a leopard print she didn’t like .   Leopard sightings in fashion became more common during the 1920s, as the motif became increasingly accessible in fabric, popping up on everything from couture gowns to hats and scarves. In 1938, leopard looks took a starring role in the Hollywood classic, Bringing Up Baby , starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. The screwball plot effectively heightened the fascination with leopard adventures.   Come the 1950s, leopard styles would convey a different kind of danger via the bombshell look. Pin-up stars like Betty Page and Jayne Mansfield soon adopted leopard styles to seal their own naughty girl-next-door vibes. Too shy to wear leopard in public? No problem, thanks to Fredericks of Hollywood, a brand that launched a racy leopard-inspired line of lingerie in 1947. Technically, Vanity Fair, a competing lingerie brand, was the first to market leopard lingerie  with the introduction of its signature print bras and slips, alongside a campaign that straddled the elegant with the risqué, but it was Fredericks that pulled out all the stops for bombshell looks. Soon, a new national audience could unleash cat-powered sex appeal in the privacy of their home. Josephine Baker and her pet leopard, 1930s. Leopard looks, with all their flash, are not for the timid or those who want to blend in. In an ironic fashion twist, this is the opposite function of leopard prints in their natural habitat, according to fashion aficionado Jo Weldon, who wrote Fierce: The History of Leopard Print, a tell-all history of leopard fashions. “A leopard’s coat serves as a supreme camouflaging device in the wild, making it difficult for their prey to observe them,” says Weldon. “But this is quite the opposite in an urban jungle where wearing leopard makes a powerful statement and commands attention.”   Over time, not-so-subtle leopard styles would take on an even more sexualized vibe, straying into new territory – namely, gentlemen’s clubs and as a go-to look in striptease. But fashion, always mercurial, meant that leopard looks would eventually assume a loftier spot. In 1962, Jacqueline Kennedy, the epitome of high style and elegance, appeared in a stunning leopard-skin coat  for an official engagement, effectively setting off a whole new wave of leopard obsession. Designed by Oleg Cassini, the look instantly ignited a frenzy for leopard coats that reportedly resulted in the capture of nearly 250,000 leopards. Cassini, who never quite recovered from the guilt of setting off such a cruel trend, vowed never again to work with fur, becoming one of the first and most notable anti-fur crusaders and an advocate for animal preservation. An early adopter of then-new synthetic fabrics like polyester and acrylic in his ready-to-wear collections, Cassini paved the way  for innovations that led to realistic-feeling faux fur, ultimately helping to offset the desire for the real thing. Leopard fur was officially banned in the United States in 1973 by the Endangered Species Act, which prohibited the importation and sale of leopard skin – thankfully marking the end of the leopard fur coat.   There’s always been an evolutionary aspect to fashion’s trend cycle. The leopard look has been particularly adept at transforming and seizing some peak pop culture moments. There’s Anne Bancroft’s iconic leopard fashions in the 1967 Mike Nichols film, The Graduate,  with Bancroft playing the classic cougar in pursuit of her daughter’s fiancé, a young Dustin Hoffman (who was only six years younger than Bancroft at the time of filming). More cultural breakthroughs came by way of ‘70s punk and glam rock, with some of the most notable leopard-print wearers — among them, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, and Rob Stewart —  whose leopard suits and skintight pants would become sartorial staples, both on stage and off. During the pandemic, Stewart was even spotted  wearing a leopard print mask, proving yet again the generational prowess of leopard style.  Apart from its punk glam appeal, leopard has turned up at style moments as varied as burlesque; on our favorite superhero films and media (hello, Catwoman); midcentury muses like Edie Sedgwick; and, later, entire style movements like big ‘80s boldness, and even drag. When you think of John Waters’ films, you automatically think of Divine, and when you think of Divine, you think of drag and leopard. Divine’s presence was accessorized by many a leopard look, both on stage and in those cult movies by Waters. So, what is it about leopard styles that holds such enduring fascination and undisputed fashion cred?   “It speaks to us on every level,” according to Weldon, who points out its unique cultural appeal. “Over the years, it has accumulated many meanings while adapting to various styles and situations – from luxe to lazy and from the divine to the debauched.”   Once the dominion of gods, goddesses, and kings and queens, leopard style has gone from the royal to a full-on rebellion, proving its wildly democratic power. But perhaps the most significant power lies in having crossed every imaginable boundary, including gender, affluence, and celebrity, while flirting with plenty of taboos along the way. And that might be the ultimate attraction: a lack of rules and the freedom (AKA joy) of making a statement, however small or neon sign-like. Leopard print, after all, has an instinct for attention and always makes an impression as it prowls across the seasons, turning up on everything from winter coats to summery slip dresses.  Recently, leopard styles roared onto Chanel runways for its celebrated show in New York City. An instant sensation thanks in part to an unlikely NYC subway setting, Matthieu Blazy’s designs included, you guessed it, a leopard look or two . Madame Chanel was known to carry off her own leopard looks back in her day, so the influence and reference were  fitting as the dots continue to connect. Leopard style continues to prove to be that rare and coveted thing in fashion: timeless. When it comes to communicating confidence, sexuality, and unabashed style, it’s the biggest game in town. 🌀 Beatriz Zimmermann is an award-nominated fragrance writer based in NYC. An incurable Francophile (and romantic), she loves to connect some of her favorite things in her writing whenever possible, like art, fashion, history, and literature. You can find more of her musings @luxemlove .

Ripe are the fruits that hang low on the tree of romantic desire. Do you feel that? I’m sure you feel it all around you, online, offline, spiritually. Everyone is morphing into a court jester. Symptoms include yearning for an autistic girlfriend to the point that it gets creepy, casting judgment on people for having a boyfriend , and declaring “I need someone who can match my freak” in your Hinge profile, when your “freak” is just enjoying leaving the house. It is thrilling and addictive once you start, but going back seems like a Sisyphean task. I am referring to our collective inability to be sincere, earnest, and honest with ourselves and potential romantic partners.  DAZED’s Angel Martinez recently penned this compelling article , investigating an alleged influx of men fetishising autistic women on dating apps — they say men, but let's be real, this issue supersedes the gender spectrum. The presumption that DAZED seems to offer is   as integral to a viral article in 2025 as baking soda is to a cake rising: it's all men’s fault! They desire autistic women because they are vulnerable and easy to manipulate.  It couldn’t possibly be because autistic women can be wonderful partners, or that maybe this is a sign of netizens’ well-meaning but misguided attempts to normalize neurodivergent romance. The piece  paints autistic women as lacking agency and emotional depth, likening them to “people with youthful interests and colorful outfits.” What is most fascinating about this whole issue is not what is being said, but rather what is not  being said. I’m not sure if it's AI, chronic irony poisoning, plummeting self-esteem rates, or a combination of all of the above, but our collective phobia of sincerity is only getting worse. Fetishizing autism is one piece of the puzzle, but this points to a larger problem, a communication breakdown that leaves us disjointed and maladjusted. Perhaps autistic people are being sought after because there is an illusion, to no fault of their own, that they are the last remaining sincere people on earth. To have faith in this myth is to do a misdeed to yourself and others. Stating that you’d like a partner with a specific neurodevelopmental condition needs to be taboo again. It’s not even about having “standards”; it’s that the premeditated inner scheming that goes into choosing partners is increasingly  based on repairing complex shame systems that no one except oneself can fix. I’d love to travel back in time to 1970 and tell people that in 2025, youngsters are wearing T-shirts that say “girls love my autistic swag” with an image of the Grim Reaper on a motorbike. It didn’t originate with evil intent, but has snowballed into something monstrous after rolling down the long, debris-ridden slope of cyberspace. “Situationships” are another sign (though this is often rooted in insecure attachment) that people have a romantic drill sergeant inside them, whacking them with a wooden stick to stand up straight whenever they have thoughts of beginning a serious, devoted relationship.  Art across space and time shows us this drill sergeant has always lived in us. Countless films, music, and other media depict women “playing hard to get,” not wanting to be tied down, and mediating their desires.   As art and communication have migrated to digital spaces most accessible to young people, those ideas are amplified and much harder to ignore. Short-form content on TikTok prompts women not to settle for less ( if he wanted to, he would ), and gives us access to a host of advice on the pseudo-psychology of love. The perpetual nagging on social media for girls to stop chasing men and instead use the power of their mind to make one appear is a crude example of the psychological warfare we are encouraged to engage in for love. Videos like this  instruct women to take a laissez-faire approach to dating, insisting on the part of men, “If they don’t want to work for it, they don’t want it.” Lying down and basking in the sun like a lizard waiting for a cricket to crawl by, brushing off all attempts at vulnerability or sincerity,  might have worked wonders in the 1950s; nowadays, if you ignore men's assertions of romance, they will simply stop contacting you. Nobody has the time and energy to play the dating chess game anymore. Young couples are just trying to make rent and put food on the table for their cats.  Even simple features, such as a push notification lighting up your phone and hailing your attention to somebody “liking” you on Hinge, have effectively rewired our reward systems. We’re conditioned into believing that, when navigating dating, you’re home free as long as you avoid stepping on broken glass or making too much noise. But romantic desire is programmed to be ritualistic, and quite frankly, irritating. The heterosexual dating gap is exacerbated by women’s ability to be financially independent and pursue post-secondary education; while this may not feel new, across millennia of societal adaptation and evolution, women’s lib is still fairly adolescent. Social scripts that have existed for thousands of years tell us that men should pursue, so it's no surprise that women are confused by the apparent lack of assertiveness. Could it be, perhaps, that social norms are finally changing? I thought we wanted men to embrace their emotional side, their inner tenderness, and that it’s OK not to be OK . We neglected to consider that, with these positive leaps in mental health care, we cannot cherry-pick the emotions we are encouraging people to connect with. When their machismo is unmasked, men likely feel a newfound discomfort. Pouting and using passive aggression online as a tool in hopes of inspiring women to leave their partners instead of communicating their needs is a lost cause. Needs boil down to the individual. Not everyone wants the same things from their partner, regardless of gender. And not everyone wants sincerity anymore. The addition of technology to mediate our relationships also changes the way we think about the distinction between childhood and adulthood — nonchalance signals maturity. A generation whose youth is intimately immortalized on Tumblr and the like tends to reject classic markers of childhood, including joy, naivete, risk, and play. They want to grow up fast and leave their potentially embarrassing home videos collecting dust in the attic (I guess they wouldn’t be on VHS at this point — iPod Touch videos, perhaps?). And yet they have the gumption to exclaim, “I’m a minor, you know!” when a man breathes too close to them. I don’t say this to disparage young women; the urge to run as far away as possible from your past self is real. Even just thinking back to your childhood can feel scary — we cannot imagine existing in a world where irony flies over our heads.  Admittedly, my peers and I have uttered similar yearnings for an “autistic” partner more times than I can count. Sometimes, we’d even say “a little bit” autistic — this was years ago, however, I still see it online from time to time. We knew that it was utterly bizarre to think like this, yet it was everywhere, so it didn’t mean nothing. It’s helpful to reflect on earnestness as intrinsically linked to childhood. To remove the term “inner child” from its obsolete, pop-therapy context of today, and just leave the bones of the words stripped clean to their origin: what do you see when you envision her? Maybe you see innocence. Is it truly innocence, per se, or is it just the absence of shame? She might be sporting a Hannah Montana tee, whom she adores. It’s not a “guilty pleasure” to her; in fact, the very notion that deriving pleasure from something might spark guilt or shame is absolutely mind-boggling to her. In her book Cook, Eat, Repeat, celebrity chef Nigella Lawson stresses that guilt should play no part in pleasures.  Of course, she was referring to food, but the same goes for desire. Digging deep, I realized that what I wanted when throwing around the term “autistic boyfriend” was to love someone who I could learn endlessly from, and have them love me so much that they would want to learn from me, too. I wanted devotion, an intellectual fortress, substance that fueled my rich inner world, and the ability to give back to theirs.  “There are few greater pleasures than sharing your enthusiasms.”  — Nigella Lawson via CBC Radio Desire begins at a cellular level. We are all wired to seek out mates that have healthy immune systems, reproductive fitness, all that sexy stuff. Someone with no hobbies or passions, especially as an adult, is not very likely to fit the bill for that kind of health. The undesirable basement-dwelling neckbeard gamer archetype has taught us this for decades. Depression takes an unspeakable toll on our bodies, and loneliness automatically increases our risk of death . These neuroses are often temporary and come in phases, though our primitive ape minds suck at remembering that. Having clear-cut interests serves as an indicator for cognitive focus, stability, and sociability, all of which are paramount in child-rearing — sorry to be that guy, but at the end of the day, we are all driven to seek partners because our biology wants us to have babies. I don’t condone fetishizing neurodivergence, but to put all our eggs in the basket of misogyny is not productive in this case. The aforementioned DAZED piece includes this statement by Milly Evans, an autistic sex educator, referring to the burst of “I’m looking for an autistic partner” in online dating profiles: “I’d like to have a conversation with these people to understand what they’re hoping to achieve.” Asking this question with the intention of waving a finger, like the article seems to do, is useless. Posing it as a rhetorical question, however, might yield fruitful revelations. When swiping between Hinge, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and your inbox full of millennial marketing quips, the lack of linguistic code-shifting becomes increasingly palpable. Most people prefer to wade in the dialect of the masses; the warm, familiar waters of memetics, which is the smartest way to attract a mate, at the end of the day. Why wouldn't one make their dating app prompts as funny as possible? This language is universal. Women love a silly, goofy guy, right? Our species’ mating ritual is performed on iPhones, so it’s important to evoke a visceral emotional response in potential mates. Igniting laughter in someone is the most streamlined option — it creates an intimate physiological reaction, your face blushes, and you might even vocalize laughter. Have you ever laughed out loud at a flirty text and felt somewhat violated? I mean, what can I say — if food is the way to a man’s heart, laughter is the way to a woman’s heart (and bed). These intricate patterns are what make insincerity an easy fallback. When fishing for love on the apps, post-ironic humour is placed like sticky fly traps. It allows users to be easy to respond to, to be entertained, and then be kicked to the curb. Hinge bios that say “I need a woman with a touch of the ‘tism” are now as ubiquitous as live laugh love  signs in TJ Maxxes. Historically, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is a classic example of a widely desired partner who puts aside her own desires to fix the male protagonist’s life. She’s full of whimsy and is not afraid of sharing her eccentricities with the world. Contenders in the dating marketplace that express a similar passion to MPDGs and people on the spectrum are very attractive, no doubt. I tried to illustrate this in a MS Paint project, shown below.   Ripe, juicy, red fruits of sincerity hang from the tree of romantic desires’ weary branches (they taste like Swedish Berries gummies). Most notably, these fruits are low-hanging . These are three distinct examples of cultural byproducts produced by skirting around sincerity in any way we can. I’m sure they won’t be the last. The obsessive focus on maintaining nonchalance can also be seen as a nihilistic response to our capitalism fatigue. It’s a penetrating, bleak reality, and no wonder it’s so easy to roll our eyes at everything. A member* of a group chat I’m in recently unleashed their feelings at another user, stating: “idk how u dont see the actual active harm nonchalantism, brainrot, and insincerity does to you and the world at large. Anti-intellectualism is why tf this stupid ass country is bland, corrupt, (...)  Especially for artists and creatives like me who care and will not conform to a hateful and disenfranchised world.”  The palpable frustration shown by this individual is something I think many people feel, and the medium of this message, Discord, is a perfect snippet of irony.  Being ambiguous is a useful skill, especially as women, in that we are often asked to be absolutely obsessed with something or, inversely, hate it (see this stellar Substack post  by Liv Jarrell). It gets dangerous when ambiguity becomes a self-defense mechanism. Don’t get me wrong — I love ironic humor just as much as the next person born in 1999. Wearing a cloak of irony as armour prevents us from developing meaningful, complex relationships with one another. We’re constantly doing this balancing act of channeling our sense of childhood whimsy and our “adult” demeanor. I fear the muscles that allow us to do this meaningfully have atrophied, all at the hands of the fear of appearing naive. Harnessing the power of irony takes vigorous practice, akin to climbing the tree of romantic desire. The branches may look intimidating, but you do have the strength; your muscles have memory, too.  Being a jokester can help us grow closer to those we love by offering a simple touch of vulnerability. Verbal irony can also help us regulate our emotions. But have you ever had a friend ironically enjoy   another person ? Forget about the ironic enjoyment of art, that of which we typically analyze through the lenses of camp and kitsch — this is human to human; sort of like bullying, but permissible, for some reason. It’s that one friend who leaves you bewildered when they say things like, “He’s so hot, I really like him, we had an amazing date, but I’m going to ignore his texts and maybe just hook up with him with a paper bag over his head.” Lying to yourself about your desires isn’t a new phenomenon, but the reckless ways we deploy irony and sarcasm (especially online) have waterboarded our last few breaths of conviction. This sort of rhetoric drives a wedge in all directions — towards our own needs, and towards our friends and family who are grasping at straws to give us the benefit of the doubt while we stumble through the outrageous, carnivalesque exhibition of modern romance. Biz Sherbert recently gave this golden advice   in a Substack post : “Do not undercut your work, do not be self-deprecating. You did not 'write a thing.’ You wrote something.” I say: Say it with your chest. Write it on a cue card and tape it to your bathroom mirror. Throw your arms into a self-embrace, and say, It’s okay to want somebody who I find interesting. It’s OK that I don’t have the right tools to convey that on Tinder right now. I am scared, and I am willing to get better at this.  The line between irony and cruelty is thin. The leaves on the tree of romantic desire carry toxic dewdrops leftover by an ironic storm. It’s truly poisoned the whole tree — once we accept nonchalance as a learned behavior, and stop denigrating autistic people (or anyone) in the process, a veil will be pulled back, revealing full individuals that deserve love and inquiry. Let’s leave having a crush on someone as a joke in elementary school. As bell hooks reminds us in All About Love, “ If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.” This book is a must-read, assigned to you by us. There will be no quiz, but please take notes. We are living in a mental health crisis; debilitating anxiety and depression make it even harder to say what you mean, and in some places, you’ll even go to prison for it . Sincerity is vulnerability. You don’t have to have it all figured out, but take a stab at it. Post that cute picture of you and your boyfriend. Write a long, enthusiastic blog post about your vintage clothing haul; people will love it. Commit to treating post-ironic humour like it’s nuclear, and practice discipline to wield it with clarity and consequence. We need to spread the fruits of sincerity and share them with the less fortunate. People are starving, and the fruit is inches from the ground, about to drop and rot into nothing at all. This is an excellent opportunity to practice uplifting each other as citizens of the web, and, dare I say, set an example for the next generation. In a world where it seems like your only communication tools are the skull emoji and fire emoji, practice dipping your feather into the inkwell of earnestness — hey, it might feel like an old friend. 🌀 Lauren Lexa Brown is a Canadian writer, cyber-anthropologist, hardcore perfume enjoyer, and admirer of any and all vintage ephemera. She can be found adding things to her cart and singing to her pet guinea pigs. You can find more of her work on her Substack .

Treatment Menu , a collaborative exhibition helmed by Display Fever’s Naz Balkaya and Teaspoon Projects’ Gigi Surel, understands love not just as a feeling to be experienced, but as a practice. L-R: Works by Natalia Januła, Naz Balkaya, Paula Parole, and Ella Fleck. Photos by Ksenia Burnasheva. How do we love now? There seems to be an endless stream of descriptors that aim to diagnose the current landscape of love and relationships. Love in the age of digital machinery is a continuous search for the next best thing, the shiniest new person; it seems to dissolve the fabric of what it means to love.  Love is an electric flash amidst the cold, dark milieu of the present. Love bursts from the seams of the unexpected, the communion of souls and bodies that arrives in our lives from a seemingly mystical frontier.  But love is not just a yielding entity, a cliche, nor a passing figure of speech. Love has the capacity for radicalism. Love can function as a disruptive force capable of breaking the greedy, omnivorous chains of capitalism that absorb much of our personal lives and inner sanctums. But for love to have such capabilities, we must understand it not as an intangible feeling, but as a sustained practice, a discipline, and a process.  Treatment Menu , a collaborative exhibition helmed by Display Fever’s Naz Balkaya and Teaspoon Projects’ Gigi Surel, understands love not just as a feeling to be experienced, but as a practice . Configuring love as an art form requires an understanding that love is not a passive-consumptive experience, but a state of labour and risk. To be loved and to love in an age where eros is flattened by the iron-clad fists of globalised capitalism that seeks to pulverise difference, transcendence, and transgression, centering the complex matrices of love, beauty, and labour allows those sticky elements of desire and difference to shine through the darkened edges of our contemporary culture.  Inspired by thinkers such as Byung-Chul Han, Erich Fromm, and bell hooks, the exhibition is structured as a simulated beauty salon. This context draws attention to how love requires ritualistic processes, repetition, labour, and discipline to blossom. Love is not something that arrives at your doorstep; it is not something that is conjured out of thin air. It is something to be worked at, something to be worked for .   With seven artists showcasing their work across a plethora of interdisciplinary artistic mediums, Treatment Menu’s  focus straddles the line between razor-sharp and nebulous. The artists — Eva Dixon , Ella Fleck , Hoa Dung Clerget , Natalia Janula , Paula Parole , Julia Thompson , and Harry Whitelock  — work through a variety of methods to explore the rituals and objects of love. The exhibition, showcasing scent installations, found objects, sculptures made from nails and hair gel, LED light installations, and more, highlights how we can understand the processes of love as antidotes to a modern condition that commodifies the sanctity of intimacy. The exhibition began with the development of co-curator Naz Balkaya’s found-object installation Breakup Kit . The piece, fit with a clay-ceramic tray, imagines the dissolution of love through the complex assemblage of objects - such as cigarettes, lighters, and makeup - that we contextualise as part of our identities in the name of self-soothing. In the wake of love-lost, when personal identity feels unmoored and shaken, Breakup Kit  objectifies the vectors of care, heartbreak, grief, and longing in the contemporary moment of the ready-made and endlessly accessible. Through these conversations, Treatment Menu  was born. What exactly is  love, and how does it manifest as emblems in our complex lives? How do we reach for the other in moments of intimacy, when the politics of control demands our focus with an iron-clad grip?   Teaspoon Projects’ Gigi Surel (L) and Display Fever’s Naz Balkaya (R). Photo by Ksenia Burnasheva. Treatment Menu  licks the wounds of love. Love, as a verb, an action, a practice, requires an intensity of intent, a willing plunge into the unseen recesses of the other. In a culture that  eats away at difference and drives us towards endless similitude, exploring the complexities of love and its aftermath offers a way to perceive love as multifaceted — sticky, greedy, confusing, affirming, devastating, rich, and tinged with vulnerability. Love necessitates reaching outwards. Love cannot exist singularly: it must always be in search of the other. But the other is an unknown land, upon which, in our narcissism, we project our own inner landscapes. Conceptualising love as a practice, Treatment Menu  offers a path for understanding how we, as creatures of comfort, as individuals woven into the wider fabric of community, commandeer rituals and exalt possessions as methods of creating our own languages of love and desire, care and heartbreak, grief and longing.  To finalise the exhibition, Treatment Menu, curated by Sayori Radda,   held a reading series to fundraise for the Gaza UNFPA fund. Ed Luker , Jane Dabate , Kate Ebitt , Noor-e-Sehar Ali , Caitlin Hall,   Jessica Key , Alison Rumfitt , Vamika Sinha , Christiana Spens , Ozziline Mercedes , and Susanna Davies-Crook  all spoke towards Treatment Menu ’s theme. Spanning poetry, essay excerpts, prose, and experimental literature, the event materialised - through the diversity, vulnerability, and depth of expression - the necessity of exploring love as a condition through art and literature.  Whilst the print of love marked its shape in the soft snow of the exhibition’s thematic landscape, each writer’s contribution to the evening highlighted that body and soul can possess an amorphous, shifting edge. Love is not experienced in solitude, and yet, our experiences of it can differ so exponentially that having one word for it feels inadequate. We prostrate ourselves at the altar of such universality when it feels that “love” saturates the market of popular culture. But, as Treatment Menu ’s exhibition and reading event demonstrates, undertaking such an endeavor requires a sensitivity to the elements of love that pull us into the orbit of potential and devastating loss. Love and loss are dialectically bound, and yet, the latter does not deter us from the former. We risk ourselves, we risk others. We convert self-shame and self-consciousness into beauty. We give things up, and we take things on. We forever reach outwards, in the hope that the other will find us back. 🌀 M.P.S is a writer, zine-maker, part-time urban researcher, full-time perfume over-thinker, maximalist fashion enjoyer,   and creature from East London. You can find her looking gorgeous on Instagram as @_femmedetta  or giving unsolicited opinions as  @cyberyamauba  on X.

It’s a Gwyneth Paltrow versus Joe Rogan showdown this week. You could say that I’m a bit of a health and wellness freak. I’ve tried just about every single wellness fad out there. Vampire facials?  I’ve had one. My vagus nerve?  It’s been activated. Yoni eggs?  Yeah… I’ve shoved one up there (even though they honestly don’t really do anything). In the past, it seemed that the wellness space was primarily dominated by women and queer people. Doing yoga, drinking green smoothies, and caring about your overall health and appearance were considered feminine traits. We used to call straight men who participated in any kind of wellness/beauty routine “metrosexual”. But these days, the Manosphere has developed their own version of capital “W”-Wellness, featuring players like Joe Rogan, who advocates for the sauna/cold plunge combo and dubiously researched brain pills ; The Liver King, a major proponent of the “Carnivore Diet” (and anabolic steroids); and David Goggins, a fitness/motivational speaker known for competing in over 60 ultramarathons and yelling at insecure dudes on Instagram Reels . The Manosphere routine focuses on high-impact training, protein-maxxing, and increasing testosterone production in the body. Whereas the classic Los Angelino-approved, Gwyneth Paltrow-inspired wellness routine focuses on gentle anti-inflammatory exercise, nutrient-dense foods, and rigorous skin care. This month, I decided to pit two queens against each other, comparing and contrasting the two routines to determine which one is better. There are a lot of silly fads involved in the men’s routine, like “ jelqing ” and GORILLA MIND supplements  that I unfortunately will not be able to try, as I lack some very necessary equipment, but I do hope to still capture the Dawg House, sweaty, grindset spirit of the method.  Here are the bare bones of the experiment: WEEK ONE, AKA Gwyn’s Method: MORNING Wake up early and listen to a guided meditation while using a red light therapy panel 2 tablespoons of Spoiled Child’s liquid collagen supplement Gua sha and lymphatic drainage massage with acupuncture ear seeds AFTERNOON Break intermittent fast with a pescatarian lunch featuring heavy veg EVENING Take a gentle walk followed by a Pilates/barre fitness class Dry brushing session followed by a hot bath  WEEK TWO, AKA Joe’s Method: MORNING Wake up at 5 AM and lift weights AFTERNOON Steak lunch EVENING A session of high-impact cardio and more weight lifting Sauna followed by a cold plunge Steak dinner For this experiment, I did one week of Gwyn’s Method followed by one week of Joe’s Method. Gwyn’s Method was surprisingly very easy (mostly because it was a routine that I have been incorporating, in one form or another, into my daily life since high school).  As far as results: a balanced diet paired with regular low-impact exercise makes you feel incredible (who knew). I also really loved starting my day with guided meditation. It made me feel much more relaxed and in less of a rush in the mornings, which led to having gentler and happier days. Starting my days calm and relaxed, then ending them with a hot bath, made for a very serene and anxiety-free week. I didn’t really notice many effects from the collagen supplements or intermittent fasting, but I do love red light therapy (even though I am convinced it might be snake oil). However, ear seeds are one of the greatest inventions of all time. If you take one thing away from this article, let it be ear seeds . If you’ve never heard of them before, they are these little balls on medical tape that you stick to certain pressure points in your ear. The pamphlet that came with the kit promotes a whole host of restorative benefits that I cannot claim any truth to — however, if you’re looking to have a snatched face, ear seeds will get you there. When you massage those pressure points, it helps to drain any fluid trapped in your face and head, leading to a slimmer appearance. Now… for the Joe’s Method results…. let me say this: I will never eat that much red meat again in my life.  [CONTENT WARNING IF YOU’RE SQUEAMISH]  I was constipated for four days and then… it was like a cork popped and I had insane diarrhea for the rest of the experiment. My gut still hasn’t recovered. Lifting heavy weights over your head when you constantly feel like you are moments away from pooping your pants does NOT a relaxing week make…. I didn’t really mind the exercise routine. Yes, running sucks — but getting your heart rate up is important. So I can’t knock the high-impact training too hard. Really, the only part of this routine that I fully enjoyed was the sauna. Saunas are wonderful! They are a Finnish gift to the world and have so many amazing health benefits. Cold plunges, on the other hand? Cruel and unusual punishment. They are a sick and twisted invention from a clearly deranged mind. To plunge into icy water regularly is a cry for help and should be treated like a severe mental health episode. If you or someone you love is cold plunging, please reach out for help. There is more to life than Wim Hof breathing. Overall, I think Gwyn’s method is much easier to incorporate into your daily life. The exercises are low-impact, and the diet has much more variety. I felt a genuine mind-body connection and a general sense of ease during the week — the complete opposite of what I experienced during Week Two. The end goal of Joe’s Method is to make you feel hulked out and masculine, which it does, but I am dubious about the actual long-term health effects of doing high-impact training and only eating meat. To me, I sense the rumblings of a heart attack in my future if I keep on that path. Additionally, the Manosphere routine has very little emphasis on skin quality and appearance, which, to me, is one of the most important parts of a wellness routine. If I don’t LOOK “healthy,” then what’s the point of all this effort? All I’m saying is, I would much rather find the balance between cigarettes and tofu than crap my pants in a cold plunge. 🌀 Kaitlin Owens is the Archival Editor at Haloscope Magazine and the Editor in Chief of DILETTANTE. For a closer look at her work, please visit her website .

Through chaps, fringe, and a great pair of Texan boots. Cocodrilo Botas Texanas is a Western-style boot boutique  in El Restrepo, a neighborhood in the south of the Colombian capital, Bogotá. Up a narrow staircase surrounded by intricate cowboy-themed decor — belt buckles, hats, old pistols —  Texan-style boots line up the walls top to bottom, in rooms carpeted with cowhide rugs, separated by men’s and women’s sections. For anyone looking for high-quality, intricate cowboy boots that won’t break the bank, Cocodrilo is like a diamond in the rough. You can find any color, height, and shape. And if you see a design that you like but would prefer a shorter boot or lower heel, just ask: they can customize it for you. How do I know all of this? I have three pairs. I discovered Cocodrilo thanks to my very stylish uncle, who possesses a flair for the dramatic. And in an aggressively urban city, where cowboy dreams seem so far away, it’s rather surprising to find a place so deeply-seated in this foreign aesthetic.  The telenovela Pasión de Gavilanes  (2003-2004) captured the hearts of viewers in Colombia, and, during the first decade of private broadcasting in the Latin American country, it achieved the highest ratings  on Telemundo. People all over the world, from Venezuela to Bolivia, all the way to Bulgaria and China, tuned in to watch the Reyes brothers avenge the death of their little sister, Libia (Ana Lucía Domínguez), after a tormentous affair with Don Bernardo Elizondo (Germán Rojas) ends in her murder.  While Pasión de Gavilanes  was filmed in El Pórtico, a hacienda in Colombia that is now an iconic restaurant, the production design and wardrobe create a parallel world where Colombian and Mexican culture blend into a cowboy fever dream. In episode one, the magnetic Rosario Montes performed “Fiera Inquieta”  at the town bar and changed Latin American night culture forever. It’s one of those ubiquitous songs that transcended the screen: everyone knows the lyrics, whether you’ve seen the telenovela or not. Angela Chadid, who sings “Fiera Inquieta,” became one of the most popular voices in Colombian radio, even if she was not the most popular face: actress Zharick León portrayed Rosario Montes and lip-synced to Angela’s voice.  The wardrobe of Pasión de Gavilanes  is an essential part of the show. Juan Reyes and his brothers, Óscar and Franco, wear cowboy hats and boots, while the mythic Rosario Montes performs on the bar in halter bras, side-studded rodeo pants, and coin-encrusted, belly dance-style hip scarves. Costume designer Manuel Guerrero brought the characters to life by giving each one a distinct look while remaining within the boundaries of westernwear.  The show was produced to appeal to a broad range of Latin American and telenovela-loving audiences, created for the United States’ Telemundo and Colombia’s Caracol Televisión. The success of “Fiera Inquieta” and the idealization of the wealthy Elizondo family’s ranch is built within the common foundation that Latin American cultures share, while solidifying an aesthetic that feels authentic to the show’s universe. A large cast  with stars from all over the continent contributes to the illusion. The show was so successful that, in 2022, almost two decades after the initial release, it was  brought back  for a second season of 71 episodes.  But even before “Fiera Inquieta” stole the 4 AM drunk scream-singing spot in Colombians’ party routine, Pedro el Escamoso  broke new ground for cowboy boots. This 2001-2003 Caracol Televisión telenovela follows disgraced Pedro, who leaves his small town to escape a “skirts scandal,” and arrives in Bogotá with no money, and more importantly, no style. He is known for his funky, atypical dancing,  which he can do thanks to his dancing boots, a pair of well-loved, brown, Texan-style ones. Unlike in Pasión de Gavilanes , Pedro’s boots are part of what makes him an outcast. His story is one of an outsider who manages to win the hearts of a family — and of the country. While in the early 2000s, cowboy boots in Colombia were mainly confined to telenovelas (and telenovela-inspired Halloween costumes), in 2018, shoe designer Patricia Mejía collaborated with gallerist and fashionista Gloria Saldarriaga  to launch  a wildly popular line of cowboy boots, which were featured in Vogue  Mexico  and coveted by trend-chasers and collectors. But westernwear didn’t always have positive or fashion-forward associations in Colombian culture. In the ‘90s, westernwear in Colombia was mainly associated with narco-esthetics : the ostentatious display of wealth that became common as drug lords made millions and became part of the ruling class. Owning land and having horses were part of that aesthetic, and so participating in that culture was, in some sentiments, seen as trashy. Due to the proliferation of pop culture, a big portion of what was frowned upon then has now been absorbed as mainstream, or, at least, as a modish fashion statement.  A decade ago, I wouldn’t have gleefully strutted down to Cocodrilo and given them my hard-earned money for a pair of Texan boots; I also wouldn’t have appreciated the high-quality craftsmanship for such an unbelievable price. Many things had to fall into place to get me to the land of three-pair ownership, including a growing appreciation for my uncle’s collection, the freedom of wearing what I want that comes from living in New York, and an urge to embrace my dramatic tendencies. Wearing my Colombian boots in New York is similar to when I pick one of my Wayuu mochilas  as my bag for the day: I’m carrying craftsmanship with me, choosing items made with patience and care and bought from artisans who strive daily to keep traditions alive. I feel fashionable, strutting the streets alongside women in Tecovas, and I feel at home. 🌀 Laura Rocha-Rueda  is a Colombian fashion and fiction writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in HALOSCOPE, Vestoj, The Inquisitive Eater, and The Territorie. She covers runway, trends, and pop culture, and will gladly chat about why dismissing these themes as frivolous is misguided and sad. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School.

At the historic Parisian edifice on the Place de la Concorde, a new exhibit does something radical — it treats perfume as an art in itself. On a gloriously sunny September afternoon, I went to the Hôtel de la Marine  — a large, recently renovated, neoclassical building in the center of Paris, overlooking Place de la Concorde and its gold-capped obelisk (also known as the site where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were guillotined). The Hôtel de la Marine displays the Al Thani collection  in regular thematic exhibits — a collection which boasts thousands of artworks, artifacts, and jewelry pieces. The latest, entitled “Seven Heavenly Senses,” is an exhibit curated by art historian Olivier Berggruen. I was drawn by its premise: it was the first time an Al Thani exhibit juxtaposed contemporary and ancient artworks, and it focused on the seven  senses. Besides the five senses we all know about, the exhibit also puts forward two others: the vestibular sense (balance and movement) and proprioception (the ability of the body to perceive its own position in space).  Headphones on, accompanied by music composed by artist Zsela  for the exhibit, I entered a room filled with garlands of golden flowers hanging vertically from the ceiling and surrounding the artworks like butterflies. Shining over a black background, those minuscule flowers created an agreeable feeling of suspension. This room seemed to function as an antechamber, meant to destabilize our sense of scale — indeed, the works of art were minuscule too: small scenes and portraits (in watercolor or enamel on copper), melancholic gazes and porcelain skin. A basket offered chocolates to enhance the experience and awaken the senses.  A perfume diffuser was placed at the entrance of the second room — or, rather, a corridor leading to the largest room, thus marking our passage into another space. This configuration turned perfume into an experience of transition; the etymology of perfume alludes to such a passage, through the smoke . A reminder, too, that scent always informs our sense of place and time, and compartmentalizes our memories. The perfume chosen to highlight this passage was Jean-Claude Ellena’s 2023 perfume Heaven Can Wait  for the brand Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle.  If, like me, you associate the phrase “heaven can wait” with the film by Lubitsch  — whimsical, colorful (Gene Tierney’s hypnotizing eyes!), nostalgic — you might be surprised: Ellena’s perfume is powdery, soothing, impressionistic, airy. The iris infuses the perfume with melancholia, but it is also a comfortable, timeless scent in its powderiness, as the intensity of cloves finds itself suspended by musks and the harmonious blend of ambrette and carrot seeds. I later got a sample from the Frédéric Malle store, and tried it directly on my skin: at first whiff, a burst of iris, almost plasticky; then, cloves and vetiver quickly overtook the iris and gave it an ethereal quality. The drydown on my skin was very much centered on cloves and a hint of nutmeg, as if I had just crushed spices for my daily cup of masala chai, but it never turned Christmas-y. It was cold, rather, and sharp, elegant, meditative, and made me think of being on a plane, breathing its dry recycled air, suspended in a sea of white-gray clouds. In the corridor, my eyes fell on Monocarp  by Eli Ping , a white, lanky, aerial structure made of canvas and resin; next to Monocarp ’s delicate silhouette, Salman Toor’s 2019 oil painting entitled After Party  showed three characters in a drunken embrace, and one man sitting on the floor next to them, scrolling on his phone. Toor’s characteristic greens filled the scene with melancholia — his work focuses on queer South Asian characters and their experiences of collective spaces, solitude, and new or renewed forms of community.  The corridor was still imbued with a sense of suspension and opened on the largest room of the exhibit, a space of juxtapositional aesthetics in its seemingly haphazard arrangement of objects, contemporary paintings, and ancient, intricate statuettes and glassware. The sense of taste also reappeared in a striking painting of a family eating together — a non-estheticized meal, focused on the material, primal act of feeding oneself and others.  The works of American contemporary artist Naudline Pierre — a triptych and a large painting — left a lasting impression. Those two paintings managed to capture the eeriness of dreams, the wonder and horror of their unpredictable composition. The triptych, entitled In the After  (2025) , was an altar piece commissioned by the exhibit and showed reddish-orange winged beings in movement, inspired by medieval iconography, both angelic and demonic.  Close by, round sandstone accretions (called “gogottes,” often found in the Fontainebleau forest) were also a reminder of the formal beauty of natural structures, and their eerie resemblance to abstract, manmade sculptures. The last piece in the exhibit was the picture of a multicolored curtain, at the end of a corridor, bringing us back to the first room, parallel to the entrance through the invisible curtain of perfume.  Other exhibits have fruitfully showcased perfumes and collaborated with olfactive studios to diffuse scents (without turning the space into a migraine-inducing cloud of smells). My favorite one is “Parfums d’Orient” at the Institut du monde arabe  in 2023-2024, which gave an overview of different scent categories and their geographical and cultural origins in the Arabic world, but also featured original creations by Christopher Sheldrake (the perfumer behind many Serge Lutens fragrances). By comparison, the one Ellena perfume in this exhibit was a bit of a disappointment. And yet, perfume was omnipresent in the Hôtel de la Marine; our exploration of the apartments was accompanied by the cozy scent of Carine Roitfeld candles, which were juxtaposed with contemporary interior design pieces. Those pieces were part of Jérémy Pradier-Jeauneau’s installation entitled “Labyrinth,”  in collaboration with several artists and brands. The Hôtel de la Marine also boasts another olfactive experience created by Chantal Sanier , in which seemingly innocuous scented artworks associate specific scents to different spaces within the Hôtel.  On the balcony overlooking the Place de la Concorde, part of the “Labyrinth” installation, featured “C & Cx”: large stone seats mounted on a square wooden base, created by Antoine Bouillot and Marc-Antoine Barrois, inspired by the beaches of Belle-Île-en-mer. This particular collaboration between Barrois and Bouillot, entitled “Mission Aldebaran,” was first presented in April 2025  at Milan Design Week and functioned as a journey through darkness towards the luminous aura of Aldebaran , a tuberose perfume whose namesake is one of the brightest stars we can see. Next to the stones, a QR code link told us to head out of the Hôtel de la Marine and claim a 10ml bottle of Aldebaran , the latest perfume by Marc-Antoine Barrois. His store was only five minutes away, in a neighborhood where one can find the highest concentration of niche perfumery brands in Paris (new stores are set to open this fall on rue Saint-Honoré, including Maison Crivelli ).  Aldebaran , created by Quentin Bisch in 2025 for designer Marc-Antoine Barrois, is an original (and polarizing) take on an elegant, creamy tuberose, with a bit of an edge, i.e. paprika and mate, which both spice up and soften the fragrance; its floral and slightly medicinal exuberance is toned down, and the scent becomes less sensual, slightly earthy and leathery. I had already smelled paprika in a floral fragrance, Paprika Brasil (incidentally, a Jean-Claude Ellena creation, a little reminiscent of Heaven Can Wait  in its focus on iris and cloves, but much more powdery, rounder and softer), and the spice seemed to have the same role: it made the scent less fluffy, and gave it substance — a hint of gravitas. If tuberose can feel sunny, sexy, and a little bubble-gummy, Aldebaran ’s tuberose is like dappled sunlight in the woods, as summer ends and the air starts to cool. Bisch had already created beautiful tuberose and white flower fragrances ( Tubéreuse Astrale  by Maison Crivelli, or Fleur Narcotique   by Ex Nihilo), but also often ventures into spicy and woody territory — my favorite of his is the cistus-centered Attaquer le Soleil  by Etat Libre d’Orange, which came out in 2016, the same year as B683 , his first of seven creations for Marc-Antoine Barrois.  The market of niche perfumery may seem simultaneously oversaturated and constantly renewing itself with unexpected combinations of notes and accords — but even if I’m always on the hunt for new exciting olfactory creations, I gained a different appreciation for the peaceful and introspective atmosphere of the Hôtel de la Marine, its golden galleries scented with candles, hinting that perfume can be  architecture.  The sense of smell is primal, uniquely able to bring us back to a forgotten past, to reorient our bodies, displace us, and make us experience transitory states. The exhibit left me eager to discover new transdisciplinary explorations of scents and visual or musical art forms — for now, I’ll keep exploring more niche perfumery stores, where mass appeal meets the weird and the conceptual, and where a few droplets can conjure up unexpected memories or reconfigure perception itself. 🌀 Neela Cathelain is a writer, critic, and translator based in Paris.

My five favorite episodes of HBO's Girls , reviewed. Lena Dunham’s serialized millennial magnum opus Girls  entered into my life suddenly, like an awkward two-month fling filled with messy mutual obsession, slow eye-contact sex, and one person ghosting the other at the end of the summer. I didn’t really know what I was getting into when my roommate and I watched the pilot, only that Marnie’s character had given rise to a number of really funny   internet memes , and that most people either loved it or hated it. As someone well-versed in loving  twee media that catches ire for being too navel-gazing and unrealistic , it didn’t take me long to be won over.  As a creative, Dunham’s career was irrevocably marked by her extremely intimate, often cringe-worthy commitment to exhibitionism, and the national smear campaign by what would become the nascent Pizzagate conservative young male Internet mafia, whose knee-jerk disgust reaction to a fat white woman talking about her sex life candidly was to throw death threats as liberally as a drunk guy in Appleton, Wisconsin throws darts trying to impress his Hinge date at TGI Fridays. I don’t always feel as connected to Dunham’s later work, and I completely understand why, as a public figure, she is just as divisive and controversial as her on-screen counterpart Hannah — but, if nothing else, it is undeniable that galvanized by the success of Tiny Furniture   (2010) , Girls  was her closest and most triumphant attempt at capturing the cultural zeitgeist of young American women in the nascent 2012 Obama era. It’s a time that’s definitely too easy to romanticize: the end of the nation’s brutal terrorization of Iraq was bleeding into a general spirit of innocent, sheltered progressivism that grew into the peak prevalence of hipster electroswing mania. I think of lighting-in-a-bottle, early-career  MGMT playing “Time to Pretend"  to a tiny audience on a grainy digital camera. If you put on a dangly owl necklace and distressed skinny jeans in Brooklyn, in the rosy visage of nostalgia, they practically handed you the keys to the city. Needless to say, I blew through the show and was left extremely touched, and often ashamedly infuriated, at the immature, awful behavior of the characters, coupled with how I secretly saw my worst impulses in response to the challenges of young adulthood reflected in them. If   my beloved Sex and the City  is about positively identifying your journey to maturity in a gang of four hilarious thirty-somethings, Girls  is very consciously about negatively identifying your regression into impulsiveness in four emotionally stunted twenty-somethings. Some things are exaggerated, yes, but Girls  sees Dunham’s shocking and characteristic candor turned onto the rites of passage of American, decisively upper-middle-class white girls navigating life in NYC on their own. I could write an entirely different thinkpiece on whether Girls  should be called a “post-feminist” work of television, and more so, what that descriptor means for art made in the 21st century. This problem exists with S ex and the City,  too, but I do think Girls  is more intentionally engaging with the social reality won for young women by the tooth-and-nail advances of the Second Wave, and neither rejects nor confirms any of those progressive tenets wholesale. At its best, however, the show is unflinchingly bleak and merits value by connecting to embarrassing, awkward, and shameful snippets of how women use a relatively newfound generational independence. There are many episodes I love that didn’t make the cut, but in short, I think the set of these five episodes embodies how hilarious, upsetting, and tender Girls  can be. 005: "Welcome to Bushwick A.K.A The Crackcident" (S1E7) This was the exact moment I began to understand the cosmic forces that hold this show together. Sex and the City ’s action is predicated on routine. There is a standing brunch date the girls can use to expound on the current monster-of-the-week guy that’s entered one of their lives, Carrie will always be overspending at Barney’s, they all have relatively stable jobs, etc. It is exactly the opposite in Girls . The only thing these four have in common is that their lives are all a complete mess. The first time we see them together in one place is here, at a grimy warehouse party in Bushwick — where Shoshanna accidentally does crack, Marnie pines over the boy she dumped a few weeks ago, Adam adorably dances with his lesbian friends, and Jessa is loosely involved with a lonely older man for the first of many times. This episode is also notable as the inception of arguably the best relationship in the series, where Ray takes Shoshanna’s virginity after wrangling her home safely. I could say a lot about their trajectory throughout the show as a “the one who got away” couple, but it’s safe to say that in Season One, they’re still very sweet together, and it makes me happy.  The wider storyline comes to a head at the end of the episode, with the revelation of a key piece of Adam’s character: Hannah had no idea he was a teenage alcoholic, and has been working hard in AA for years. In many ways, early to mid-season Adam is the moral center of the show, because he is consistently the only person who makes an active effort to get better, and is the only person who can recognize the thinly veiled cries for help in a mutual bucket of crabs environment in which everyone is content to let everyone else around themselves flounder in dysfunction. I think a tiny but meaningful glimpse of Adam’s character at his best is when he drives Shosh and Hannah to pick up Jessa prematurely from rehab, and is the only one to matter-of-factly remark that it is absolutely a bad idea to enable your close friend to jump ship on treatment and fall back into life as an addict. Adam is absolutely messed up in his own special ways — he’s violent, he’s troubled — but he has a history . Much like Jessa, these points don’t necessarily excuse his behavior, but they ring a far cry away from the very privileged and supportive household environment that bred neuroses like Hannah’s. The episode ends with maybe the best jump cut of the series. During an explosive fight in which Adam gets hit by a car, he shouts, “What do you want? Me to be your fucking boyfriend?” — cut to Hannah and an injured Adam in the cab home, Adam covered in bruises, and Hannah with a childish smile. Thus begins one of the most storied relationships in the show. Adam and Hannah are officially a couple. 004: "Japan" (S5E3) I don’t think you could make this episode today. Not because there isn’t an easily lampooned market for American-oriented “cool Japan travel,”, but because Japan in the American imagination was such a different kind of Orientalism in 2015 than it is today. Both are rooted in a similar infantilization and techno-futurist idealization, but now everyone is obsessed with pretending they’re somehow getting the inside scoop on what’s “really traditional” — as if to seemingly all dunk on each other for their lack of cultural literacy. This episode, which mostly devotes itself to Shoshanna’s chaotic life after moving for a marketing job in Tokyo, has all the explosive superflat-meets-Funko-Pop design stylings of the early Internet. Shoshanna is patient zero for   the Tokidoki Girl renaissance , which was maybe the first thing to loop cooler American girls who turned their nose up at the actually nerdy Vocaloid-tuning fujoshi into the realm of global Japanese culture.  I’m not shy about the fact that Shoshanna is my favorite character in Girls , and her characteristic peppy but wry social Machiavellianism is on full display in a city very accustomed to office ladies working long hours and dishing out bright pink, overly insincere greetings. The main point of note here: the flowering romance with Yoshi, her protective and innocent coworker, who rescues her from a seedy sex bar in the Ginza district. They all but share their first kiss with Shoshanna in programmer socks and a maid outfit, and wrapped up in the fantasy of living abroad, she virtually abandons her upwardly mobile and utterly boring long-distance boyfriend back home. What makes the Japan episode fun is not that it showcases a complete departure from the show’s routine, but rather that, immersed in a culture she only seems to engage with at a surface level, Shoshanna seems most like herself  here. Like many Americans, she went to Japan in search of fantasy, and in doing so, only pushed herself closer to the parts of her life she was trying to avoid. Like   Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Lovers  perfume line, the glimpse we get at Shoshanna’s life in Japan is bright, mass-produced, and extremely disorienting to look back at in hindsight. Bonus points for watching her Japanese slowly get better over the course of the episode. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu!! 003: " Video Games" (S2E7) Jessa is a difficult problem for this show to solve. At times, she’s been on the brink of dangerously manic overactivity that holds lasting consequences for the entire show, and sometimes she’s completely absent from the narrative with very little explanation. Jemima Kirke’s character acting (and sublimation of her own personality into her character) is second to none, save for perhaps Adam Driver. Season Two, Episode Seven, “Video Games” ( Lana reference? ) is among the most vulnerable moments for Jessa on screen. Prompted by an unexpected invitation from Jessa’s estranged father, she brings Hannah on a train upstate to meet his present-day dysfunctional family. It is immediately clear that Jessa’s hyper-independence was a forced consequence of just how immature her father is. He frequently leaves them to walk back from various locations with no indication of when he will return. He is emotional, vengeful, and tied to the whims of his new, completely insane, but well-meaning New Age-devotee wife. Strangely, this is kind of an episode about Hannah, in which her sheltered and very much coddled sensibilities conflict with a home environment that is not built to revolve around her upper-middle-class, only-child whims. I think about her, in a moment of clarity, reaching out to her parents to express an awkward appreciation, only for her mom to blow her off, presuming she’s leading up to asking for money again.  The crux of this episode is Jessa and her father’s conversation on the swingsets, where, after turning back her accusation of not being someone she can rely on, Jessa snaps back: “You shouldn’t have to. I’m the child. I’m the child!” It relies on one of the central theses of the show: everyone is just a scared little kid doing their best to cope with uncertainty, and yet the people these people haphazardly choose to bring into the world deserve so much better than what they get. While Hannah is busy kind-of-having sex with an off-putting high schooler, because that’s just the kind of person she is, we’re left stuck with the weight of Jessa’s knee-jerk avoidance. Just like her father, she chooses to leave the people she loves without a trace. Only later on do we learn she had brought herself to rehab. It’s a bittersweet choice. She assumes the role of the people who hurt her in order to make a genuine attempt at healing. It was a show decision no doubt informed by Jemima Kirke’s IRL pregnancy, but one that really does make sense. The episode itself is as funny as any other, but has this very specific grown-up ennui that makes it one of the defining moments in Jessa’s character arc — one that, ultimately, I do think gets one of the more conclusive and satisfying endings, especially with regard to her relationship with Hannah. 002: "American Bitch" (S6E3) I do think this is probably the most important episode of Girls , and the one that is best regarded as a standalone work of television. My own personal reaction aside, it’s insane that this was released mere months before the infamous exposé of Harvey Weinstein in 2017. “American Bitch,” another one-character focus, this time on Hannah, begins in media res,  with Hannah having written a disparaging op-ed about a very important writer named Chuck Palmer for what is implied to have been a pretty unimportant Internet magazine. Having invited her to his ritzy city condo personally — under the air of transparency to settle her misgivings about his character — the entire episode is essentially an exchange of dialogue between the two.  What is so brilliant about the episode’s structure is how the audience’s own prevailing feelings are manipulated via Hannah’s subtly shifting opinions on this well-read, manipulative, and pathetically charming man. We begin in explicit tension: Hannah sees him as a creep and a sellout, and Palmer acts as if he sees Hannah as a spunky but naive younger writer, blissfully unaware of the familial strife Hannah has brought into his charmed life by spotlighting multiple allegations of grooming from younger fans of his work. In the present-day political climate, we go into this dynamic already expecting a conclusion. He’s an asshole, Hannah won’t budge on her condemnation of him, and we are just here to watch the comedy produced from rubbing these two diametrically and equally narcissistic characters against each other. But 15 minutes in, that isn’t what happens. Hannah, rarely at her most astute and empathetic, wanders around hypothetical corners with him and falls into a broken camaraderie built on two neurotic writers with abysmal self-esteem and an awkward sexual interest. Palmer makes his case (seemingly) clear. These women all threw themselves at him, and perhaps only a little bit knowing better, he briefly indulged their whims as intellectual equals — taking them at their word and not digging deeper into any underlying power dynamic. It’s a defense that seems scarily familiar to anyone who runs in any close-knit, contemporary subculture. And all of Hannah’s initial doubts about this narrative are gently eased by cheeky exchanges of first-edition, signed Philip Roth books ( get it? ) and pejoratively negging praise.  What’s scary about this episode is how good this gambit gets you. You really do begin to think about this episode as a redemption arc for the flawed-older-man writer archetype. You think that Dunham might indeed be arguing for a rehabilitative inclusion of so-called “cancellations” into public life, following lofty leftist standards like restorative justice. And then, so smoothly you barely even notice it, his penis is poking out of his jeans. Hannah is shocked back to reality and immediately disgusted with how subtly she had allowed herself to be manipulated. Like a cartoon villain, Chuck Palmer smiles. Having now tentatively touched him, lying in bed together, she has allowed him to place her into this strange gray area he’s unwittingly used against young women for years. Any future recounting of this incident would immediately make this story about her. She would be the clout-chaser, the wide-eyed ingenue, only ever loosely credible and only capable of wielding any real power against this man at the cost of driving her own cultural reputation completely into the dirt.  Just like that, his daughter is home for music practice, and Hannah sits frigidly next to his ex-wife. Awkwardly defeated in the mental game of chess and present now as simply one of many women in such a scenario, Hannah’s character feels utterly flattened; collapsing, even, the longstanding gray area between Hannah as a fictitious character and Lena Dunham’s own history as a woman. It’s a hollow and eerie ending to an episode drenched in subtlety. It’s crazy to watch this episode in the wake of how violently a similar modern-day Gen Z intellectual counterculture seems to have turned against this era’s #MeToo movement. I think what many of these women who derail the so-called cultural consequences of mass market cancellations seem to gloss over is just how much damage this very specific gray area is capable of doing to the minds of young women. It’s a list of priorities that, to me, feels profoundly selfish, as would befit a scene that attempted to make the “scary uncle at the family reunion”-type of alt-right beliefs chic and for hot girls. Needless to say, as a woman, you can only watch so many Woody Allen reruns until the penis is pointed at you. And like Sleeping Beauty’s cursed spinning wheel, it’s going to be harder than you think to stand firmly with your common sense, and not prick your finger on something that will lock you in a deep, dreary, prince-charming-dependent sleep forever. 001: " Flo" (S3E9) This is definitely not the best episode of Girls , but I do think it’s my favorite. Its main plot point concerns a very common scenario in the emotional lives of twenty-something women: Hannah’s grandmother is dying, and the women of her family have to pick up the pieces of a woman they only knew to varying degrees of familiarity, all while navigating the difficulty of their own distant relationships with each other. Fun cameos are Hannah’s cousin, who aspires to med school greatness and clearly sees Hannah as a black sheep fuckup, and her religious aunt, who never married, taking on much of Flo’s care and advocating contentiously for her belongings. We get great one-liners from Hannah, darkly wishing her cousins could have been the kind of close relationship that stems from all being molested by the same person. She and her cousin Rebecca don’t ever really come to understand each other, but rather are simply able to acknowledge the shared necessity of working alongside each other in a moment of acute crisis. The scenes of Hannah’s mom, Lorraine, arguing with her two sisters function in a similar manner. The episode is ultimately brought to a head with Rebecca crashing her car while texting and driving, and Adam heroically rushing into the hospital when a fine-but-bruised Hannah hilariously texts him only “CAR CRASH.”  Lorraine, a profoundly underrated character, then gives Hannah one of the most infamous lectures of the entire show. After Adam selflessly lies about an engagement to Hannah on her grandmother’s deathbed, Lorraine takes Hannah aside and muses, “I don’t know him very well. But I see certain things. He’s odd. He’s angry. He’s uncomfortable in his own skin. He bounces around from thing to thing… I don’t want you to spend your whole life socializing him like he’s a stray dog. Making the world a friendlier place for him. It’s not easy being married to an odd man. It isn’t.” It’s a dour moment in what seems like a pretty good stretch for Hannah and Adam’s relationship. As someone who really did think they were going to be endgame for most of the first three seasons, this was the exact moment I began to see the grand arc of their ill-fated dynamic. After all is said and done, and the family reaches something close to closure with the end of Flo’s life, Hannah gets a call on her way back to New York. Her condition has miraculously improved, and she’s going to be discharged the next day. It’s a jarring comedic ending that speaks to just how confusing real life can be. Hannah gives a half-smile and walks into the city crowd as a bare-bones twee girl cover of Warren Zevon’s  “ Don’t Let Us Get Sick ” plays us out. As emotionally intense as this show can be, it’s only made me cry once — and weirdly, for reasons I don’t completely understand, it was right here.  At its best, HBO’s Girls  reflected a very messy truth about my own life back to me — that growing older was a far cry from the linear progression I assumed it would be, and that ultimately, we’re all just fragile, sniffly, blubbering, hurt little creatures trying and frequently failing to love and be loved in return. It would feel deeply embarrassing to end with a reference to AJJ, a crust punk band with a now-retired racially insensitive name, if it weren’t so on theme for the characters in the show. Both as this band fits their novel hipster taste, and   this specific song , “American Garbage,” describes the way in which their young female and female-adjacent audiences have used these characters to identify the gross, ugly human parts of themselves at their worst. If there is going to be   a long-foretold indie sleaze revival , it must come at the cost of completely eliminating the novel concept of cringe from our cultural and interpersonal vocabulary. “If I were one of the girls,”   the song goes,   “ I would be Shoshanna. Confused and rude, such a special kind of way to be cruel. Confused and rude, confused and rude .” 🌀 Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and media studies. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

Time to smother your toes in plastic. L-R: Kim Kardashian via Instagram; Chloé SS26; Maison Margiela SS26 A well-shod (or barely -there) foot is all the rage. Just a few months ago, the slapping of thick thong flip-flops  echoed the streets of every major fashion capital. This was partly thanks to the Brazilian brand Havaianas (pioneers of rubber thongs since 1966), who partnered with Gigi Hadid in a delightful move to boost their MIV. Despite the urge to wrap up in fur coats and cozy into hibernation, the phalangeal freak show is far from over. In Spring/Summer 2026, we are going utterly nude .  Unlike the hoist of a flip-flop strap, a PVC heel clings to the metatarsals and emboldens the piggies. An open-toed plastic monster can be wriggled into with bunions galore — forget the sartorial panic of an ill-fitting kitten heel. But this raunchy shoe requires taming. There is the oppressive clack in the Underground to be reckoned with (HALOSCOPE recommends you lacquer up to hide the below-the-nail city grime). Sliding around in foggy, sweat-soaked insoles tempts a kind of voyeuristic humiliation. Once on foot, all go-getting gumption must be channeled into slicked-back confidence. Smothering your trotters in vinylite would be disgusting if only it weren’t so good. Scantily clad feet have teased the conventions of popular culture for almost a century. Following its utility in World War II, PVC soon covered women’s feet worldwide. In a 1955 style dispatch for the New York Times , editor Dorothy Hawkins termed the rise of “a barefoot chic,” picking the nastiest pair of peekaboo vinylite vamps for the cut. During this time, vanguard shoe designer Beth Levine propelled the Herbert Levine repertoire into the nudes. Her most provocative creation was the No Shoe   in the late ‘50s, an elongated, heeled sole fixed by two strips of adhesive that welded to the feet. Sex workers and dancers of the ‘90s spotlighted Pleaser heels — strappy, transparent platforms — for their utilitarianism, which were later commercialised by lingerie giant Frederick’s of Hollywood. For a 1995 Vanity Fair  double spread , Nicole Kidman was shot by Herb Ritts, curls piled high and smouldering in a pink bubble bath — lest we forget the Pleasers draped over the side.  Resurgences of see-through shoes have been peppered across the media sphere for the last 20 years. A slew of A-listers like Ashley Olsen, Hailey Bieber, and Kim K have sported pairs, including those from cult brands Amina Muaddi  and Gianvito Rossi . Former Senior Fashion Writer at Vogue  and NEVERWORNS Newscaster Liana Satenstein reported on the dangers afflicting plastic-covered feet in 2018, namely the repulsive “ petri dish pedicure .” Despite the threat of infectious disease, this genre of shoe is an enduring charmer. Its perennial sheen made a timely and indefinite return in a slam-dunk September showing. The harbinger of perverse fashion, Simone Rocha, showed the gratifying vulgarity that comes with subverting a traditional shoe in her SS26 collection . Brogues were sliced with lapping plastic tongues, evoking that naughty, childish glint Rocha seeks to capture with her gaudy drop-waists and crinkled organza. Similarly, TOGA Archives  warped the classic ballet flat, often worn by a clutch of The Row acolytes, with phalangeal windows across the vamp. Dilara Findikoglu’s strappy heels nipped at the Achilles of medieval goddesses. From afar, cubes of resin became a whisper of a heel.  Although the Chloé SS26 collection  was rooted in springtime pragmatism (think bunching saccharine floral dresses and taffeta coats), it was still anchored in fantasy by the gelatinous peeptoes and boat-neck vamps. Maison Margiela , too, took the PVC trend a step further. In addition to the knee-high split-sole boots fitted with lucite blocks to contort the feet into a glassy hoof, a process of “plasticisation” was used to vacuum-pack garments. Jewellery lay sequestered in bodices and silk jackets shellacked into makeshift raincoats. Loewe’s kooky design lexicon  saw translucent ankle boots attached to the tiniest nub of a heel and lined with colorful knit socks. The most daring iteration was courtesy of Valentino . Stilettos were cut in a salacious “V,” exposing a glimpse of toe cleavage restrained by a sliver of PVC. The heels were paired with knee-length satin skirts, a cinched purple embossed coat, and a ruched fuchsia mini-dress. The industry-wide valley between ludicrous footwear styles (Tabis, Vibram FiveFingers, and flip-flops, to name a few) has spliced, animalised, and exposed the feet. Only the PVC heel offers a cheeky, barely-there shield. The plastic wicks away at naivety and douses the wearer in non-conformity. Better yet if you dig the hunt for a sleazy pair of second-handers.  The foray of topless shoes on the September runways is sure to beckon the sartorially inclined. After all, the fashion moguls have decided: maybe it is  time to let the dogs out. 🌀 Flora Ivins  is a writer and armchair critic based in London. You can often find her plumbing the depths of eBay or online @flosivie .