What’s Happening: The Fall/Winter 2024 season was major for the heavy hitters of the Europe shows, where new creative leadership at Moschino, McQueen, and Chloé revealed their first collections. Also worth noting: sophomore launches from Phoebe Philo and Gucci’s Sabato de Sarno.

The Download: Last fall heralded a changing of the guard across some of luxury fashion’s most recognizable names: within 24 hours of each other, Séan McGirr ascended to the top creative job at McQueen while Chemena Kamali was named creative director of Chloé. Barely one month later, Davide Renne, the former right hand to Alessandro Michele, was named creative director of Moschino after 20 years at Gucci. The fashion world claims to love a fresh perspective, so the industry was atwitter with anticipation for the trio’s debuts, slated for February and March of this year, with their respective Fall/Winter shows. Then tragedy struck. Nine days after his appointment, Renne died. His successor, Adrian Appiolaza, took over the top job just 23 days before Moschino’s runway show on Feb. 22.

From the outside, a designer’s first season steering a storied fashion house is a thankless task—the first collection is the first crêpe, figuratively speaking. A handful of months is hardly enough time to find one’s voice and perspective in the abstract, let alone to also translate it into a full collection that respects the house’s heritage while appealing to the nebulous desires and expectations of the industry’s ecosystem of buyers, media, and consumers. Rising to the occasion under the circumstances Appiolaza faced is unthinkable. Yet, in those three weeks, he crafted a vision of “eccentric realness” rooted in late founder Franco Moschino’s legacy of theatricality and statement-making. His manner pays homage to Franco’s archive and takes the house in a more wearable, less costumed direction than we’ve grown accustomed to seeing from Moschino’s runways and red carpet moments over the past decade.

At Chloé, meanwhile, Kamali put her savoir-faire of house codes—mined from previous stints at the French fashion house, under Phoebe Philo and Clare Waight Keller—to good use. A parade of sheer chiffon, lace, leg-lengthening way-high waistlines, thigh-high boots, lots of leather, and teeny-tiny hotpants offered a vision of the effortless it-girl ease that hadn’t been seen since the tenures of Stella McCartney and Karl Lagerfeld.

McGirr also sought to evoke a return to house codes at McQueen, albeit with a bold move: the show’s opening look and warehouse setting mirrored Lee Alexander’s spring 1995 collection. Before his appointment, McGirr’s was more of an industry name than a household one: his years as a Central Saint Martins wunderkind blossomed into a head-down work ethic at JW Anderson, Dries Van Noten, Burberry, and Uniqlo. Critics had their notes for McGirr, but his finale walk was met with a sound far rarer and more precious than applause: raucous, pretense-shattering laughter to the tune of the show’s closing song: Enya’s “Orinoco Flow.”

Finally, the Fall/Winter 2024 season marked a moment of note for two other recent debuts that landed last season: Sabato de Sarno at Gucci and Phoebe Philo, at long last, presiding over her own namesake. With his second collection, Gucci’s more-is-more power dressing of prior eras seems to be giving way to a quiet, perhaps underwhelming focus on clothes that are simply nice. If anyone feels like that’s a letdown, de Sarno is unbothered: “If my clothes are commercial, I don’t care,” he told Cathy Horyn. Philo, meanwhile, had the last word at Paris Fashion Week while sitting out the runway rigamarole entirely. Scarcely two days after Chanel closed fashion month, her second edit dropped 60 of her latest garments. Fatigue should be setting into the bones of weary designers and editors, but everyone seems energized by what Philo has to offer.

In Their Own Words: “I think there’s this connection where today as a woman you need to be able to follow your intuition and be yourself. It’s very much about an intuitive way of dressing,” Kamali told Vogue ahead of her runway debut, and we couldn’t agree more.

Surface Says: We’ll take a point of view—whether it sticks the landing or not—over “quiet luxury” any day.

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John Portman sparked an atrium hotel craze in the latter half of the 20th century—look no further than his dazzling, slightly neofuturistic Hyatt Regency properties in Atlanta and San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center. Around the corner from the latter, in the heart of the city’s Financial District, a lesser-known Portman building marked by a jagged concrete facade was recently revamped into The Jay, an Autograph Collection hotel whose moody yet restrained interiors by AvroKO subtly reference both the architect and San Francisco lore.

The homage begins in the lobby, where abstract relief-panel screens evoke Portman’s signature brutalism; a grand spiral staircase snaking around a golden pole takes cues from his former Atlanta home. The hotel’s 360 suites skew lighter, thanks in part to sinuous furniture informed by the sculptures of local legend Ruth Asawa and angled floor-to-ceiling windows that wrap the bedrooms. The Omakase Group’s executive chef Michael Magallanes masterminded The Third Floor Terrace, where lushly landscaped seating nooks and a seasonal menu featuring premier Northern California produce offer a breath of fresh air in the frenetic Bay Area.

From enameled copper vessels to handmade wooden boxes adorned with tassels and charms, Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi’s covetable objects temper notions of glamour and femininity with a palpable darker side, thanks in part to the references to historical fashion, fine art, and film she cleverly sprinkles throughout. The Milan-based artisan’s latest experiments, which are currently on view at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery in New York, took her to the Czech Republic to forge freeform glass vessels whose swirling forms and opacity seem to take on a life of their own.

Our weekly roundup of the internet’s most preposterous headlines, from the outrageous to the outright bizarre.

Does the World Really Need an Eggo Pancake Vacation Rental? [Washington Post]

Humpback Sex Photographed for First Time—and Both Whales Were Male [The Guardian]

British Museum Apologizes for Suggesting “Girlies” Find Men by “Looking Confused” at Roman Exhibition [ARTnews]

The Hot New Luxury Good for the Rich: Air [The New Republic]

Art Dealer Stefan Simchowitz Scores 0.24 Percent of Votes in U.S. Senate Bid [Artnet]

Carla Sozzani’s gallery-bookstore-fashion concept shop may have bid arrivederci to New York some four years ago, but Milan’s denizens are rather more fortunate than those of us on this side of the Atlantic. In January, a new gallery and project room designed by 2050+ opened its doors in the Italian fashion capital. The futuristic, whitewashed gallerie opened with “Happy Birthday Louise Parker,” an exhibition of photography by Roe Ethridge curated by writer Alessandro Rabottini.

The show defies easy categorization; Rabottini’s wide-ranging works obliterate genre divides with a mix of fashion photography, still lifes, portraits, and landscapes. Meanwhile, the project room hosts “Pietro Consagra. Ornaments,” a show of the sculptor’s jewelry that is exhibited alongside collectible design objects, art books, vintage photos by Ugo Mulas, and glossy magazines from around the world. Together, they’re exactly the kinds of poignant shows that would motivate New Yorkers to schlep down to 10 Corso Como’s former home in the South Street Seaport—but as Design Week approaches, maybe Milan isn’t so out of the way after all.

When: Until Aug. 18

Where: Kunstmuseum, Basel

What: The late light artist’s comprehensive survey at the renowned Swiss institution spans 58 works, including 35 light installations, that pay special attention his artworks in the context of his habit of dedicating them to people, including Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, and Dia founder Heiner Friedrich, and causes, such as the pursuit of peace during the Vietnam War.

Noho’s bold, colorful, and playful furniture is designed to bring comfort and joy to home and workplace. Its core range of seating, the Move and Lightly chairs, are made from sustainable ingredients like castor beans, discarded carpets, and recycled fishing nets. All Noho products are made in Wellington, New Zealand, to maintain quality, minimize production waste, and ensure only renewable energy is used throughout the process.

Surface Says: Noho pulls off the near-impossible by making ergonomic furniture look good: sunny yellow and teal colorways pop online and IRL, while its sleek silhouettes ditch the corporate feel of traditional ergonomic seating.

Science suggests otherwise, but this comet strike theory is gaining steam.

In Glasgow, activists spray-paint a four-letter-word onto busts of Queen Victoria.

This rare loon somehow made its way into the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas.

Books, vinyls, and fetish all converge in Henri Levy’s new “Anti Public Library.”