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Rami Al Ali Becomes First Syrian in Paris Fashion Program

Syrian fashion designer Rami Al Ali acknowledges the audience following the presentation of his creations during the Women's Haute-Couture Fall/Winter 2025-26 collection show in Paris, on July 10, 2025. (AFP)
Syrian fashion designer Rami Al Ali acknowledges the audience following the presentation of his creations during the Women's Haute-Couture Fall/Winter 2025-26 collection show in Paris, on July 10, 2025. (AFP)
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Rami Al Ali Becomes First Syrian in Paris Fashion Program

Syrian fashion designer Rami Al Ali acknowledges the audience following the presentation of his creations during the Women's Haute-Couture Fall/Winter 2025-26 collection show in Paris, on July 10, 2025. (AFP)
Syrian fashion designer Rami Al Ali acknowledges the audience following the presentation of his creations during the Women's Haute-Couture Fall/Winter 2025-26 collection show in Paris, on July 10, 2025. (AFP)

Syrian couturier Rami Al Ali made history Thursday as the first fashion designer from his country to feature in the official Paris Haute Couture Week calendar in a new landmark for Arab representation in the luxury business.

After years of showing his tailored evening dresses on the sidelines of Couture Week, he was invited this year by France's Federation de la Haute Couture et de la Mode to join the program.

He sent out models in long pleated dresses in pastel colors, making elaborate use of silk, rolled crepe fabric, embroidery and beading in a collection that reflected his optimism about the future of his war-ravaged country.

"We called the collection the 'Guardian of Light', and it came at a time that is very hopeful, very promising," the 53-year-old told AFP beforehand.

The fall of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in December led to the rise of opposition-turned-transitional leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, which has brought a fragile end to nearly 14 years of civil war.

Al Ali, who grew up in the eastern Syrian city of Deir Ezzor before moving to Dubai, where he founded his brand more than 20 years ago, was holding back tears as he spoke to reporters afterwards.

He told AFP he had been feeling "nervous, excited, tired, happy" about his breakthrough moment, which follows years of dressing A-listers and royalty including Beyonce and Oscar winner Helen Mirren.

- 'Bolder, braver' -

After decades of Syria being a byword for violence and political oppression, Al Ali hopes that artists will now help highlight the country's rich history and design culture.

"I think now we have much more freedom in expressing ourselves in all different aspects, political, humanitarian, creative. We have a lot to say, and definitely we are bolder, braver in the way we express it," he said.

Haute Couture Week is separate from the ready-to-wear Paris Fashion Week and is dedicated to handcrafted, one-of-a-kind creations made for red carpet events, galas, and other high-profile social occasions.

The program this week included two designers from Lebanon -- Elie Saab and Zuhair Murad - as well as Cameroon's Imane Ayissi, the sole sub-Saharan African label included in the calendar.

Saudi Arabian designer Mohammed Ashi's brand Ashi Studio was also in the program.

Ayissi, who joined the Couture calendar in 2020 at the same time as much-hyped Indian designer Rahul Mishra, paid tribute to the increasing diversity on the Paris fashion circuit.

"It shows that things are changing, that things are moving forward," former model Ayissi told AFP this week after his show, which made elaborate use of traditional African textiles.

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Fashion

Paris Mourns Valentino, the Last Titan of Couture’s Golden Age

An Italian flag hangs at half-mast outside the Valentino Creative Headquarters, following the death of the fashion designer Valentino Garavani at the age of 93 on Monday, in Rome, Italy, January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
An Italian flag hangs at half-mast outside the Valentino Creative Headquarters, following the death of the fashion designer Valentino Garavani at the age of 93 on Monday, in Rome, Italy, January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
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Paris Mourns Valentino, the Last Titan of Couture’s Golden Age

An Italian flag hangs at half-mast outside the Valentino Creative Headquarters, following the death of the fashion designer Valentino Garavani at the age of 93 on Monday, in Rome, Italy, January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
An Italian flag hangs at half-mast outside the Valentino Creative Headquarters, following the death of the fashion designer Valentino Garavani at the age of 93 on Monday, in Rome, Italy, January 20, 2026. (Reuters)

Valentino Garavani’s death cast a long shadow over the opening day of Paris Fashion Week menswear Tuesday, with front-row guests and industry figures mourning the passing of one of the last towering names of 20th-century couture — an Italian designer whose working life was closely entwined with the Paris runways.

Valentino, 93, died at his Rome residence, the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti Foundation said in a statement announcing his death. While he built his house in Rome, he spent decades presenting collections in France.

He “was one of the last big couturiers who really embodied what was fashion in the 20th century,” said Pierre Groppo, fashion editor-in-chief at Vanity Fair France.

On a day meant to sell the future, many guests said they were thinking about what fashion has lost: the couturier as a living institution.

Groppo pointed to the codes that made Valentino instantly legible — “the dots, the ruffles, the knots” — and to a generation of designers who, he said, “in a way, invented what is celebrity culture.”

Valentino’s vision was built on a simple idea: make women look luminous, then make the moment unforgettable.

He dressed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor, among others, fixed his signature “Valentino red” in the public imagination, and — through his decades-long partnership with Giancarlo Giammetti — helped turn the designer himself into part of the spectacle, as recognizable as the clients in his front row.

The end of a fashion era

Prominent fashion writer Luke Leitch framed the loss in similarly outsized terms, calling Valentino “the last of the fashion ‘leviathans of that generation’,” and saying it was “absolutely” the end of a certain class of designer: figures whose names could carry a global house, and whose authority came not from viral speed but from permanence.

Trained in Paris before founding his maison in Rome, Valentino became a rare bridge figure: Italian by origin, but fluent in the rituals that made Paris couture an institution. His career moved between those two capitals of elegance, bringing Roman grandeur into a system that still treats fashion not only as commerce, but as ceremony.

Even as he aged, the house’s founder kept turning up at its couture and ready-to-wear shows, as observed by one Associated Press journalist — until he eventually retreated from public life, all the while radiating quiet grandeur from his front-row seat.

For some in Paris on Tuesday, the loss felt personal precisely because Valentino’s world was never only Italian.

Groppo recalled the designer as “very much more than a fashion brand,” adding: “It was a lifestyle.”

That lifestyle — couture polish, social glamour, and the conviction that elegance could be a form of power — remains a reference point even as fashion accelerates toward louder branding and faster cycles.

“It’s quite sad as he’s so important to the fashion industry, and he contributed a lot and I cannot forget the stunning red he created,” said Lolo Zhang, a Chinese fashion influencer attending Louis Vuitton ’s show in Paris.

“He always celebrated pure beauty, and architecture for the silhouette, and how he used color. The old era just passed by.”

Other guests described a delayed realization — the kind that arrives only when a figure who seemed permanent is suddenly gone.

YSL, Chanel and Valentino

“There are some people who want to be Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel. ... There are also people who are spontaneously Valentino,” said Guy-Claude Agboton, deputy editor of Ideat magazine. “It’s a question of identity.”

For Paris fashion observer Benedict Epinay, the grief was bound up with memory. And with the emotional charge of Valentino’s final bow.

“It was such a great moment. I was lucky enough to attend the last show he gave,” Epinay said. “It was so moving because we knew at that time it was the last show.”

Fashion observer Arfan Ghani pointed to what Valentino represented to younger designers: a “classy” standard of restraint in an era that often rewards noise.

“Because it was very classical materials," Ghani said. "It wasn’t as loud as a lot of other of these brands are with branding.”

Paris-based sculptor Ranti Bam described Valentino in the language of form: less trend than structure, less look than line.

“As a sculptor I saw Valentino as an artist,” Bam said. “He transcended fashion into sculpture.”

“He didn’t follow trends, he pursued form,” she added. “That’s why his work doesn’t date, it endures.”

The fashion house Valentino has for years continued under a new generation of leadership and design — still showcased in Paris.

Fashion

Pharrell Opens Vuitton’s Monogram Anniversary Year With Cinematic Menswear Show

A model presents a creation from the Fall/Winter 2026/2027 collection by US designer Pharrell Williams for Louis Vuitton during the Paris Fashion Week, in Paris, France, 20 January 2026. (EPA)
A model presents a creation from the Fall/Winter 2026/2027 collection by US designer Pharrell Williams for Louis Vuitton during the Paris Fashion Week, in Paris, France, 20 January 2026. (EPA)
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Pharrell Opens Vuitton’s Monogram Anniversary Year With Cinematic Menswear Show

A model presents a creation from the Fall/Winter 2026/2027 collection by US designer Pharrell Williams for Louis Vuitton during the Paris Fashion Week, in Paris, France, 20 January 2026. (EPA)
A model presents a creation from the Fall/Winter 2026/2027 collection by US designer Pharrell Williams for Louis Vuitton during the Paris Fashion Week, in Paris, France, 20 January 2026. (EPA)

Pharrell Williams opened a celebration year for Louis Vuitton's monogram — marking the house’s 130th anniversary of its most recognizable signature — with a Fall-Winter 2026 men’s show that was equal parts brand pageant and movie set.

Inside the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, the guests encircled the grassy runway. At its center sat a glass-walled, minimalist apartment — part bedroom, part display box — where models kept entering and exiting like characters crossing movie scenes.

It was also a celebrity-heavy room, with a front row mixing music, film and online fame — SZA, Usher, Future, Jackson Wang and others, plus a runway debut to seal the crossover: BamBam of Korean boy band GOT7.

The soundtrack did as much scene-setting as the set. A gospel choir and full orchestra performed live from the balconies, lifting what could have been a straightforward runway lap into something closer to a staged sequence: romantic, controlled, faintly grand.

On the clothes, Williams stayed inside his Vuitton DNA: readable from a distance, richer up close, and always tethered to the idea of travel and the house’s heritage goods.

This season’s lens was 1970s ease spiked with utility. The palette sat firmly in autumn-tonal grays, browns, black, denim, cream — then broke into jolts of bubblegum pink, baby blue and emerald green that kept the mood from turning too polite.

It was Vuitton in full brand mode: monogram year messaging, hero outerwear, high-gloss accessories, and a set built for cameras.

Silhouettes ran long and loose, with baggier trousers that swung into an A-line sweep; suits were often topped with parka coats, a high-low collision that has become one of his signatures.

The details — always his style argument — did the work.

Shirts flashed with glimmering surfaces.

Bows and jabot-style collars delivered the 70s note without going costume.

Utility came through in the hardware language: ties, toggles, belts, zippers; faux-fur collars that read both functional and decorative.

Patent Oxford shoes added a hard, glossy punctuation under the softer shapes.

A monogrammed puffer arrived as the obvious anniversary-era hero item.

Williams also pushed a slightly “undone” finish — wrinkled tops that looked intentionally lived-in rather than sloppy — while widening the fit menu beyond the season’s broader swing toward slimness: skin-tight knits, cleanly fitted suits and oversized tailored shorts.

Then came the Vuitton wink at travel as culture-object: an Art Nouveau travel case in stained glass, rolled through on a trolley — absurd, beautiful, and perfectly on-message for a house that still sells the idea of departure as luxury.

Fashion

Burberry Beats Holiday Sales Expectations, Attracts More Shoppers in China

A Burberry Check styled shirt with the Burberry label is displayed at the Burberry flagship store in Regent Street, London, Britain, September 8, 2025. (Reuters)
A Burberry Check styled shirt with the Burberry label is displayed at the Burberry flagship store in Regent Street, London, Britain, September 8, 2025. (Reuters)
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Burberry Beats Holiday Sales Expectations, Attracts More Shoppers in China

A Burberry Check styled shirt with the Burberry label is displayed at the Burberry flagship store in Regent Street, London, Britain, September 8, 2025. (Reuters)
A Burberry Check styled shirt with the Burberry label is displayed at the Burberry flagship store in Regent Street, London, Britain, September 8, 2025. (Reuters)

Burberry beat expectations for sales growth in the key holiday quarter as its marketing push featuring British celebrities resonated ‌with shoppers ‌and helped attract more Gen ‌Z ⁠consumers ​in China.

Joshua ‌Schulman, who became CEO in July 2024 as sales were sliding, is leading a turnaround focused on trench coats, scarves and the brand's British heritage, while cutting costs after reducing the workforce by 20% last year.

"Our customers responded to our immersive Timeless ⁠British Luxury campaigns and experiences, while the continued strength in our core ‌outerwear category is now extending ‍into accessories and ready-to-wear," ‍Schulman said in a statement on Wednesday.

Comparable store sales rose 3% in the three months to December 27, beating analysts' expectation of 2% growth, according to a company-compiled consensus.

Sales ​in China rose 6% on a comparable basis, as the brand continued its recovery ⁠in the crucial luxury market. Burberry said the performance was supported by "double-digit" growth in Gen Z customers.

The company said its markdown period was shorter and "shallower" than last year, an encouraging sign for investors looking for signs that customers are increasingly willing to buy Burberry products at full price.

Burberry said it expects full-year adjusted operating profit to be in line with the consensus forecast of 149 million pounds ($200 ‌million).