Chopova Lowena Spring/Summer 2027

“Stiletto” is the Italian diminutive of stilo, meaning dagger, from the Latin stilus, a pointed writing tool. In English it meant a “short, slender, narrow dagger” from the 1610s, and the shoe meaning arrived by 1953 (Etymonline). Heels themselves began with men. Bata Shoe Museum curator Elizabeth Semmelhack traces them to 10th-century Persia, where riders wore them in stirrups. Wooden heels could only be carved so thin before they snapped, which is why early 20th-century women mostly wore wedges and platforms. Steel changed that. Around 1951, André Perugia introduced a “needle heel,” and in 1954 Roger Vivier, working for Dior, released his Aiguille stiletto, French for “needle” (Eleanor Cummins, Popular Science). Salvatore Ferragamo had experimented with steel heels back in the 1920s, so who invented the stiletto is still debated. Google Arts & Culture’s museum partners call Vivier the “father of the modern-day stiletto.”

Martine Rose started her own label in London in the late 2000s. Not long after Demna was named creative director of Balenciaga, he reached out to her: “I like what you do. Do you want to come and do it here?” (Francesco Martino, nss magazine). Rose told W Magazine that Balenciaga’s menswear at the time was “beautifully made, but with no real story to it,” and that “Demna wanted it to be a thing” (Caroline Roux, W Magazine). Their first collection together was Spring 2017 menswear, his first menswear for the house. The Fall 2017 show introduced the Bernie Sanders parody logo that became a Balenciaga signature. She consulted on menswear for about three years, until 2018 (nss).

Now she may be heading back. In October 2026, Puck’s Lauren Sherman and Malique Morris reported that Rose signed a deal to become Balenciaga’s next designer, replacing Pierpaolo Piccioli, who took over from Demna in 2025. Kering declined to comment, Rose didn’t respond, and a formal announcement isn’t expected for weeks, so for now it’s still a rumor. Puck also notes that she was in talks to succeed Demna once before, when he was first named at Gucci.

This is one of my favorite lesser-known historical events :)

For generations, tenant farmers in the Hudson Valley and Catskills lived under the patroon system, a holdover from Dutch New Netherland. They paid yearly rent on land they could never own. The landlord kept the timber, mineral and water rights, and if a tenant sold, a quarter of the price went to the landlord (William G. Pomeroy Foundation). When Stephen Van Rensselaer III, “the last patroon,” died in 1839, his heirs demanded overdue rents and the tenants revolted.

Disguised as “Calico Indians,” a tactic the Sand Lake Historical Society says was modeled on the Boston Tea Party, they wore calico gowns with masks of sheepskin or leather (Historical Society of the Town of Middletown; Lissa Harris, Chronogram). Some also used painted muslin (Herb Hallas, New York Almanack). A blast on a tin dinner horn called them out to block sheriffs and disrupt auctions. In January 1845, New York passed a law banning masks in public to stop them, and it stayed on the books until 2020 (New York Almanack; Chronogram). That August, rebels killed Undersheriff Osman Steele in Andes (Alissa Quart, NYR Daily). Harris writes that afterward, most of the leather masks were destroyed, burned or buried because they had become objects of shame. A few survive with descendants’ families. The fight still worked: New York’s 1846 constitution abolished the old feudal tenures and banned farm leases longer than twelve years (NYR Daily; Pomeroy Foundation).