Todd Oldham Spring/Summer 1995

During Alber Elbaz's years as creative director of Lanvin, from 2001 to 2015, the house's flagship at 22 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris became famous for its window displays. The scenes changed roughly every month and were staged dramaturgically, with mannequins writhing on divans, hanging from hula hoops or sprawled between hay bales. They were surrounded by props like artworks, vintage trucks, paint splashes, gilt mirrors and musical instruments made from crushed tin cans. One week a pair of mother-and-daughter mannequins with bubblegum-pink skin stood in matching big-shouldered dresses. Another time, a cloud of butterflies filled the glass to echo a butterfly-print collection. "When I do windows, I don't start with a red dress or a white coat," Elbaz wrote. "I begin with a dream, with a story, and with a sketch." He even put miniature mannequins in his own designs in the windows, which inspired a line of collectible hand-painted "Miss Lanvin" dolls. The windows were so loved that in 2014 Rizzoli published Lanvin: I Love You, a book of nearly 200 of these scenes alongside Elbaz's hand-drawn concept sketches. The address itself carries history: Jeanne Lanvin, a milliner who started her business in the 1880s, moved her house to 22 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1893. Its famous logo of a mother and daughter came from a 1907 photo of Jeanne and her daughter Marguerite at a costume ball. Elbaz left Lanvin in 2015, launched his own label, AZ Factory, in 2021, and unfortunately died of Covid-19 that April at age 59.

On February 9, 1991, at NBA All-Star Weekend in Charlotte, Boston Celtics rookie Dee Brown won the Slam Dunk Contest with a moment that turned into one of sneaker marketing's biggest accidental wins. He was a late addition to an eight-man field that also included Shawn Kemp, hometown Hornets Rex Chapman and Kendall Gill, Kenny Smith, Blue Edwards, Otis Smith and Kenny Williams. Before his first dunk, Brown knelt down and pumped air into his black Reebok Pumps, sneakers built around inflatable air bladders that Reebok had launched in November 1989. Then he threw down a backward two-handed jam. The crowd loved it. In the finals against Kemp, who was dunking with raw power, Brown improvised a no-look slam, covering his eyes with his forearm as he went up. It sealed the title so convincingly that he didn't need his final dunk. The pumping gesture was Brown's own spontaneous idea, not a planned ad, but a TNT broadcaster estimated it was worth about a million dollars in free advertising for Reebok, which quickly built national campaigns around him and gave him his own Pump model. A 6-foot-1 guard out of Jacksonville University who'd been overshadowed by Larry Bird and the Celtics' veterans, Brown became a household name overnight, made the NBA's All-Rookie team that season and went on to play 12 seasons in the league.

His daughter Lexi Brown is also really pretty.

Before FRUiTS, Shoichi Aoki founded STREET in 1985, a magazine of candid street-style photos from Paris, London, New York, Antwerp, Berlin, and beyond. In 1997 he turned his lens on one neighborhood: Harajuku, Tokyo. FRUiTS documented the area's teenagers as they mixed labels like Comme des Garçons, Vivienne Westwood and Hysteric Glamour with tie-dye, crochet, kimonos and wooden geta sandals, and it became the defining record of subcultures like decora, gyaru-adjacent ganguro and Harajuku punk. Aoki saw style as a kind of skill, and for two decades his magazine was a bible for designers and fashion fans around the world. The final issue came out at the end of 2016, and when Aoki announced the closure in early 2017, his reason became famous: "there are no more cool kids to photograph." He blamed the spread of Western fast fashion and the shift to social media, which had changed how young people dressed and where style got seen. The story didn't fully end there: the STREET and FRUiTS archives were later digitized for fans to download, and Aoki has since talked about reviving FRUiTS, inspired by a new wave of designers drawing on Harajuku's legacy.