Fendi Fall/Winter 2000

In May 2023, Peter Do was named creative director of Helmut Lang, tasked with reviving a brand that had gone without a permanent creative lead since 2014, nearly a decade of drift for a house once considered the defining force of 1990s minimalism. Do's debut Spring 2024 collection, staged at Skylight at Essex Crossing on New York's Lower East Side, leaned directly into his own Vietnamese heritage: he commissioned poet Ocean Vuong to contribute text that appeared printed on the concrete floor, on tank tops, and on high-necked white shirts, along with an opening letter played as audio, deliberately echoing Helmut Lang's own 1990s collaborations with artist Jenny Holzer. Despite the anticipation, Do's tenure was short-lived. He departed less than two years later, in November 2024, after his Spring 2025 collection was pulled from the New York Fashion Week schedule entirely. He's since refocused on his own eponymous label, founded in 2018, and its newer offshoot PD-168.

Before launching her own label, Marine Serre built an unusually stacked résumé across three major houses. At Dior, she worked under Raf Simons during his tenure as creative director. At Alexander McQueen, she worked under Sarah Burton. And at Maison Margiela, she worked under Matthieu Blazy, long before he became known for his later, high-profile stints at Bottega Veneta and Chanel. Chanel itself, though, was never one of her stops. Serre then went on to work at Balenciaga under Demna Gvasalia while simultaneously building her own label, which she launched after winning the 2017 LVMH Prize, before she'd even staged a single standalone runway show.

Emily Bode Aujla built Bode's entire design language around sourcing genuinely antique textiles, quilts dating back to the 1840s, grain sacks, vintage tablecloths, and bed linens, and reworking them into modern workwear-inspired garments. Rather than treating these materials as decoration, she applies traditional hand techniques to them: quilting, mending, appliqué, and Japanese methods like sashiko and boro. Because so much of the source material is genuinely one-of-a-kind, many early Bode pieces were literally unrepeatable, a single antique quilt could only ever become one jacket. The result is a brand built less around trend cycles and more around personal and historical storytelling: each Bode collection is grounded in a specific narrative, often drawn from Bode Aujla's own family history or American cultural memory.