Paris fashion week delivered its share of spectacle this season, but few moments carried the quiet defiance of Pierpaolo Piccioli’s latest outing at Balenciaga. Calling it “the most personal show I have done here,” the Italian designer used Thursday’s presentation to answer, in his own language of fabric and form, a question swirling around the house for months: whose Balenciaga is this, really?

The answer arrived dramatically, literally, at the centre of the runway, where Piccioli placed a towering sculpture of undersea coral built entirely from fabric. It was a nod to the coral necklace he wears every day, a personal talisman turned into a statement piece for the whole room to see. If there was any doubt about the designer inserting himself into the DNA of a storied house, that sculpture erased it.

The clothes that circled it told a consistent story. Piccioli has always operated at two extremes, maximalist instinct paired with minimalist discipline, and this collection leaned hard into that duality. A floor-length ivory cape closed with nothing more than a simple gold clasp. A black suit interrupted by a single slash of tangerine at the jacket hem. A gown rendered from neck to ankle in soft bubbles of organza, excess and restraint occupying the same silhouette. “I like surfaces to be either entirely embellished or super clean,” Piccioli explained, a philosophy that has become something of a signature since he arrived at the label a year ago.

Colour, too, remained central to his thinking, not as decoration but as emotional cue. “How you feel in your clothes is much more important than how you look in them,” he said, a line that could serve as a mission statement for a designer whose reputation was built on making women feel beautiful rather than making headlines.

That distinction matters enormously at Balenciaga right now. Piccioli inherited the house from Demna, whose tenure was defined by shock tactics, internet-baiting stunts and an apocalyptic streetwear aesthetic that was polarising but impossible to ignore, and commercially potent, particularly in menswear. Piccioli represents something close to the opposite instinct: an atelier-trained couturier whose show notes are signed with kisses and speak of “joy and light,” whose ambitions sit closer to Cristóbal Balenciaga’s own founding ideals of craft and silhouette than to viral moments and branding exercises.

It is a bold wager, but not one being made from a position of total security. Sales at the house have reportedly softened, especially in menswear, which had become one of the brand’s most reliable revenue streams under Demna. In a luxury market that has grown jittery and impatient amid broader economic headwinds, a year is not a long runway to prove a new vision works commercially as well as creatively. There have already been murmurs about how long Piccioli’s chapter might last, murmurs he would have been well aware of walking into Thursday’s show.

Some of the house’s recent moves hint at the tension between creative conviction and commercial pressure. Back in March, Balenciaga partnered with the teen drama Euphoria, an unexpected pairing that read as an attempt to keep hold of the streetwear-obsessed customers who had flocked to the brand under Demna and who might otherwise drift away under a couturier more interested in peplums than provocation.

Piccioli’s response, at least artistically, was not to chase that audience directly but to meet it halfway, applying couture techniques to the most ordinary of wardrobe staples. A simple white shirt was given a dramatic peplum hem. A pair of ripped jeans was reshaped with a moulded, hourglass waist. “I like shirts, I like jeans – I like the dignity of them,” he said. “This job is about creating desirability in something familiar, by presenting it in a different way.”

That sentence may be the clearest articulation yet of Piccioli’s strategy at Balenciaga: not a rejection of accessibility, but an argument that true luxury lies in transformation rather than spectacle, in craft applied to the everyday rather than fantasy divorced from it. Whether that philosophy can translate into the sales figures a nervous luxury conglomerate wants to see remains an open question. But as a statement of creative identity, placing a sculpture of his own signature coral at the heart of the Balenciaga runway, Piccioli could hardly have been more direct about where he intends to take the house, and about whose vision is now steering it.

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• Boden – Up to 50% off sale + extra 15% off (I’m trying to figure out which color(s) of this sweater I should order…)
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• Anthropologie – Extra 50% off sale!
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• CVS – Epic beauty sale
• J.Crew – Fall styles start at $39
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• Nordstrom – over 9800 new markdowns
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• Talbots – 40% off one item, 30% off everything else
• Theory – End of season sale is on!

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Every fashion week produces a familiar ritual: photographers camp outside show venues, lenses trained not on the celebrities filing into their front-row seats but on the ordinary people walking past. Nowhere is that ritual more revealing than in Paris, where the latest edition of Paris Fashion Week has once again confirmed what stylists and editors have long suspected — the street is often more interesting than the show itself.

As the spring/summer 2027 collections unfolded this week, veteran street-style photographer Phil Oh captured hundreds of attendees, passersby and self-styled “civilians” who turned the sidewalks surrounding the shows into an impromptu runway of their own. The resulting images, compiled in a sprawling gallery for British Vogue, offer a sharper snapshot of where fashion is actually heading than any single designer’s collection could.

What makes Paris different, according to those who cover it season after season, isn’t simply money or access to luxury labels. It’s a cultural attitude — a sense that getting dressed well is a form of literacy, as essential as being well-read. That ethos shows up in small, telling details: a teenager cradling her first Gérard Darel bag in the crook of her elbow, her mother a few steps away in a tweed cardigan jacket that looks built to be handed down a generation. These aren’t flashy statement pieces chasing trend cycles; they’re rites of passage, bought once and worn for decades.

Of course, Paris is not immune to fast fashion. Zara and Shein haunt wardrobes there just as they do in London, New York or Tokyo. But observers argue there’s a higher concentration of genuine style enthusiasts on Parisian streets than almost anywhere else — a density of people who seem to have thought carefully about proportion, texture and silhouette before stepping out the door. Some credit the influx of British creatives who relocated to the city after Brexit for sharpening that edge further, cross-pollinating London’s irreverence with Parisian restraint.

That tension between mass-market convenience and old-world craftsmanship is, in many ways, the real story of fashion week street style. It’s less about what’s on the runway and more about how real people interpret, remix and resist those trends in daily life. A show might debut an avant-garde silhouette; by the time it reaches the pavement outside, it’s been filtered through personal taste, budget and a healthy amount of French nonchalance.

For brands and designers watching from inside the tents, this unofficial parade carries real weight. Street style has become its own marketing engine, often amplified faster and farther online than the collections themselves. A well-dressed stranger photographed outside a Chanel or Dior show can generate as much engagement as the clothes walking the runway minutes later — proof that in the attention economy, authenticity photographed in natural light sometimes beats polished editorial staging.

It also underscores something fashion insiders have said for years: Paris doesn’t just host fashion week, it performs it. The city itself — its cafés, cobblestones and commuters — becomes part of the set design, lending every outfit a backdrop that feels inseparable from the clothes.

As the spring/summer 2027 shows wind down, the real takeaway may not be found on any runway at all, but in the accumulated evidence from the sidewalks: that good style, at its core, isn’t about keeping up with a season’s trends. It’s about dressing with intention — whether that’s a decades-old family cardigan or a bag passed down with its own quiet history. In Paris, at least, that philosophy still reigns.

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Fashion’s color wheel keeps spinning, and if Jennifer Lopez has anything to say about it, the industry’s next obsession has already arrived wrapped in a decadent shade of brown. During Paris Fashion Week, the singer and actress stepped out in a head-to-toe “chocolate mousse” ensemble that fashion watchers are already calling a style statement for the season ahead.

Lopez made the case while attending the Stella McCartney Spring/Summer 2027 ready-to-wear show on September 30, arriving in a sharp-shouldered, suit-inspired midi dress layered beneath a dramatic fur stole. The look leaned fully into the richness of its namesake dessert, pairing caramel croc-skin slingbacks with espresso-toned accessories, including a leather belt and a furry pouch that echoed the texture of her stole. The overall effect was less “little brown dress” and more old-money heiress on her way to a very chic lunch.

It’s a notable pivot after a year dominated by an entirely different palette. When the Fall 2025 runways debuted, purple was inescapable, with designers from Marc Jacobs to Michael Kors to Prabal Gurung sending out models in every imaginable shade of the color, from deep aubergine to soft lilac. That momentum carried purple through the actual fall season, where it shared the spotlight with amber, mint green and currant red. Now, a year on, Lopez appears to be nominating brown’s moment in the sun — or rather, brown’s moment under the gray Parisian sky.

The outfit arrived on the heels of a string of show-stopping looks Lopez wore at Milan Fashion Week just days earlier, reinforcing her status as one of this fashion month’s most closely watched front-row and street-style fixtures. Her ability to generate headlines simply by showing up in a well-considered outfit is nothing new, but the chocolate mousse look stood out for how deliberately monochromatic and texturally rich it was, suggesting a level of styling intention that goes beyond simply picking a trendy color.

Perhaps the boldest element of the ensemble wasn’t the color at all, but the accessory perched atop Lopez’s head: a birdcage veil dotted with small polka-dot netting. It’s a piece of headwear more commonly associated with weddings, funerals, or a day at Royal Ascot than a ready-to-wear show, which made its appearance at a runway event all the more striking. Pulling off vintage millinery in a casual fashion-week context is no small feat, but it’s precisely the kind of unexpected flourish that has long defined Lopez’s approach to red-carpet and street-style dressing — equal parts polish and theater.

Whether chocolate mousse will actually dethrone purple as the color of the season remains to be seen, and trend forecasting is as much about collective momentum as it is about any single look, however striking. But if recent fashion cycles are any indication, celebrity-driven color moments like this one have a way of trickling from the front row into the wider wardrobe conversation. Designers take note of what gets photographed, photographers chase what gets reposted, and before long, a single outfit worn outside a runway show in Paris starts showing up in store windows months later.

For now, Lopez’s rich, velvety take on brown offers a warm counterpoint to the cooler jewel tones that dominated last fall, and a reminder that sometimes the most powerful fashion statements are also the simplest: commit fully to one color, add a touch of the unexpected, and let the outfit do the talking.

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The clothes may be the point of Paris Fashion Week, but this season, as ever, the audience gave the runway a run for its money. As the Spring/Summer 2027 shows swept through the French capital this week, the city’s biggest ateliers didn’t just unveil new collections — they staged a parade of celebrity spectacle so dense that critics could be forgiven for watching the seats as closely as the catwalk.

Paris marks the final stop on fashion’s quarterly world tour, following New York, London and Milan, and by the time the Sprinter vans start shuttling A-listers from the Hôtel Costes to their next fitting, exhaustion has set in for even the most seasoned observers. British Vogue critic Luke Leitch put it bluntly in his review of Fendi’s mirrored-box presentation, admitting he “looked rough, as usual by this point in the season” next to his “soignée” colleagues. Celebrities, by contrast, arrive with glam squads, custom fittings and a level of polish built for exactly this kind of scrutiny.

The week opened with Julie Kegels, last year’s LVMH Prize winner, and closed its first act with the theatrical, tinsel-loving house Matières Fécales — where Rihanna made a characteristically late entrance in a gold tinsel two-piece that instantly became one of the week’s most talked-about arrivals. Jennifer Lawrence, Tate McRae, Kendall Jenner (with Jacob Elordi in tow), Katie Holmes, Alexa Chung and Gabbriette rounded out an opening night that felt more like a red carpet than a trade show.

But it was Jonathan Anderson’s Christian Dior presentation on Tuesday that assembled perhaps the season’s most star-studded front row: Rosalía, Jennifer Lawrence, Anya Taylor-Joy, Cynthia Erivo, Greta Lee, Eileen Gu, Mia Goth, Ejae and Karlie Kloss all turned out to watch. For a designer still settling into one of fashion’s most scrutinized creative director roles, the turnout doubled as a vote of confidence from Hollywood and the music industry alike.

If Dior brought star wattage, Saint Laurent brought sheer volume. The house’s show turned into something closer to a family reunion of fashion’s most photographed faces, with Zoë Kravitz, Hailey Bieber and Adèle Exarchopoulos seated together, while Kate Moss, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Saldaña, Post Malone, Rami Malek, Eddie Redmayne and a run of supermodel veterans — Amber Valletta, Georgia May Jagger, Jerry Hall — filled out the rows around them. Even cinema royalty showed up: Catherine Deneuve and Francis Ford Coppola were both spotted taking in the collection, a reminder that Saint Laurent’s pull extends well beyond the usual influencer circuit.

Stella McCartney, meanwhile, leaned into legacy and lineage. Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Debicki, Miranda Kerr, Lauryn Hill, Kelsea Ballerini and Natalia Bryant — daughter of Kobe and Vanessa Bryant — sat together, alongside a run of era-spanning supermodels including Toni Garrn and Taylor Hill, suggesting a house intent on bridging generations of famous fans rather than chasing the newest name in the group chat.

Elsewhere, the week’s smaller and more subversive labels drew their own devoted crowds. Acne Studios pulled in King Princess, Amelia Dimoldenberg and Peggy Gou, while Balmain’s front row leaned into internet-native stardom with Chloe Cherry and stylist-turned-tastemaker Law Roach. Courrèges, never short on downtown cool, seated Ziwe alongside actors Julia Davis and Ellis Howard.

What’s striking about this season’s front rows isn’t just who showed up, but what their presence signals about where fashion’s cultural gravity now sits. Musicians like Rosalía and Post Malone rubbing shoulders with New Wave film stars, k-pop and Mandopop crossover figures such as Ejae and Rosé, and legacy supermodels like Kate Moss and Carla Bruni all in the same room underscores how porous the boundaries between music, film, sport and fashion have become. Olympic skier Eileen Gu at Dior, tennis-adjacent style icons, and a growing contingent of internet personalities like Dimoldenberg all point to a front row that has expanded well past the traditional editor-and-actress formula of decades past.

There’s also a generational handoff on display. Alongside icons like Donatella Versace, Catherine Deneuve and Jerry Hall are their spiritual heirs — Lila Moss carrying her mother Kate’s legacy, Iris Law following her father Jude into the fashion spotlight, and Rocco Ritchie representing another famous lineage entirely. Fashion houses appear increasingly deliberate about seating these pairings together, turning the front row itself into a kind of casting statement about continuity and cultural inheritance.

The season isn’t over yet. Chloé, Balenciaga, Schiaparelli, Loewe, Givenchy, Victoria Beckham, Vivienne Westwood, Miu Miu, Valentino, Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier and Chanel all have shows still to come before Paris Fashion Week closes with Louis Vuitton on October 6 — a finale expected to draw its own wave of star power, with LVMH ambassador Lisa among those rumored to attend. If the week’s first half is any indication, the closing stretch promises just as much spectacle off the runway as on it.

Fashion week call times do not leave room for a bloated midsection under a fitted silhouette, and that discomfort is exactly what a small women’s wellness brand called ellēkay built its entire business around. The brand makes one product, sells it directly to customers online, and has become the kind of under the radar recommendation that circulates in group chats before it ever hits a beauty editor’s desk.

ellēkay is a direct to consumer women’s wellness brand that operates online nationally, and its formula is built around a two capsule daily dose taken with water after the largest meal of the day. The capsule itself, Morning Skinny, is not a powder or a shaker bottle situation. It is a straightforward, take it and move on part of a morning routine, which is precisely why it has found an audience among women who already have too many steps in their skincare regimen and no patience for a supplement that adds more.

ellēkay was not built as a sprawling wellness catalog. It is a single product company, and everything the brand does, from formulation to customer service, is in service of that one capsule. That kind of focus is rare in a supplement aisle crowded with brands trying to be everything to everyone, launching a new powder or gummy every season and diluting attention across a dozen products instead of perfecting one.

For anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about what goes on the body, whether that is a foundation formula or a fabric blend, it is worth applying the same scrutiny to what goes into it. Bloating is one of those quiet, unglamorous problems that rarely comes up in a styling conversation but shapes how clothes actually sit, how a woman feels standing in front of a mirror before an event, and how confident she is in a bodycon dress or a tailored trouser by the end of a long day of meetings, fittings, or travel.

What Is Actually Inside the Capsule?

The formula combines a probiotic strain called Akkermansia with a blend of nine digestive enzymes and four herbal extracts, all packed into a single capsule rather than split across separate products. The idea is to address bloating and general digestive comfort from a few angles at once instead of relying on one ingredient to do all the work. For a reader used to scanning ingredient lists on serums and knowing what retinol or niacinamide are supposed to do, this is a similar exercise, just applied to the inside of the body instead of the outside.

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Here is how the three ingredient categories break down:

Ingredient Category	What It Is	Role in the Formula
Probiotic strain	Akkermansia	Supports gut microbiome balance
Digestive enzyme blend	Nine enzymes	Helps break down food after eating
Herbal extract blend	Four botanicals	Supports overall digestive wellness

When Is the Best Time to Take It?

The instructions are simple: two capsules with water, after the largest meal of the day, not before. That timing detail matters because it is built around how the digestive enzymes and herbal extracts are meant to work, supporting the body through the heaviest part of a day’s eating rather than trying to preempt it. It also means there is no elaborate ritual involved, no shaking, no mixing, no measuring scoops. You eat dinner, or whatever your biggest meal happens to be, and then you take the capsules.

“Women are already managing a lot in their routines, so we designed this to be something you do once and move on from, not another five step process,” said Lauren, wellness lead at ellēkay. “The capsule format was a deliberate choice. We wanted something that fit into a life that is already full, not one more thing competing for attention.”

Is It Meant for Occasional Use or an Everyday Habit?

It is built for daily use, which is part of why ellēkay offers the product both as a one time purchase and through a recurring Recharge subscription. For a lot of women, digestive comfort is not a one off event tied to a single big dinner or a flight; it is a running background concern that shows up daily, which is the reasoning behind a routine that repeats rather than a supplement reached for occasionally and then forgotten. The subscription option exists for exactly that kind of consistency, so restocking is not something a customer has to remember to do manually every few weeks.

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That rhythm matters for a reader who travels for work, sits through back to back fittings, or moves through several time zones in a single month. Digestive comfort tends to unravel exactly when a routine gets disrupted, whether that disruption is a flight, a new city’s food, or a stretch of long days with irregular meals. Building a habit around ellēkay ahead of that kind of disruption, rather than reaching for something only once discomfort has already set in, is closer to how the brand intends the capsule to be used.

What stands out in conversations with the ellēkay team is how much emphasis is placed on the capsule format itself, not just the ingredients. There is a real difference, from a user experience standpoint, between something you have to prepare and something you simply take. A powder requires a kitchen counter, a glass, a spoon, and a few minutes of stirring. A capsule requires water and about ten seconds. For anyone getting ready in a shared bathroom before a call time, or packing for a trip where counter space and time are both limited, that difference is not trivial.

There is also something to be said for how ellēkay has resisted the urge to expand into a full supplement line the way so many wellness brands do once they gain traction. Instead of ten products with overlapping claims, there is one capsule, one clear use case, and one instruction: two capsules, with water, after the biggest meal of the day. That kind of restraint reads less like a limitation and more like a point of view, one that treats a customer’s morning as something to simplify rather than complicate further.

For women building routines around how they want to feel as much as how they want to look, a gut wellness capsule that asks for ten seconds and a glass of water is an easy thing to fold into a schedule that already has enough steps. ellēkay’s approach, built around a single product and Lauren’s insistence on keeping the process simple, is a reminder that wellness additions do not need to be complicated to be worth paying attention to. Sometimes the routine that sticks is the one that asks the least of you, and for a growing number of women, that routine now includes ellēkay.

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_Ellekay Team, Women’s Wellness Experts_

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For years, the beauty conversation around ageing skin has centred almost entirely on the face — serums, retinols, in-office treatments, all deployed in the name of a dewy complexion. But a quieter shift is underway, and it’s happening from the neck down. Dermatologists and style-watchers alike are pointing to body lotion as the unlikely new frontier of a polished, put-together look, arguing that the texture of skin on arms, legs and décolletage says as much about personal style as the clothes draped over it.

It makes sense, in a way. As hemlines shorten again and sheer fabrics return to the runways, more skin is on display than in recent seasons of long sleeves and covered-up layering. That visibility has pushed body care out of the utilitarian “apply after shower” category and into something closer to a style ritual — one that dermatologists say deserves the same intention as a skincare routine for the face.

“When used consistently, anti-ageing lotions can improve the skin’s appearance by reducing fine lines, wrinkles, and age spots,” says board-certified dermatologist Pearl Rimtepathip. “Body moisturisers can also improve skin tone, texture, and hydration, which helps with the overall appearance of the skin. I like to think of anti-ageing body lotions as a key tool for skin maintenance.” In other words: the smoothness of an elbow or the firmness of a forearm is no longer an afterthought, it’s part of the outfit.

The formulas driving this shift read less like drugstore basics and more like face-serum science shrunk down for larger canvases. Brands are leaning on resveratrol, squalane and hyaluronic acid to target what dermatologists have taken to calling “inflammaging” — low-grade inflammation linked to visible signs of age. Others are borrowing patented technologies once reserved for high-end facial treatments, using peptide and amino-acid complexes to support cell renewal across the whole body, or combining botanical extracts with caffeine and horse chestnut to address puffiness and encourage what’s marketed as lymphatic drainage — a concept that has migrated from wellness clinics into mainstream beauty aisles.

Texture-specific concerns are getting their own dedicated fixes too. Crepey, thinning skin on the upper arms and chest — a common complaint as collagen production slows with age — is now addressed by firming lotions built around ingredients designed to support collagen and elastin. “This one’s excellent for helping with that thin, crepey skin we see on the arms and chest,” notes Manhattan dermatologist Michelle Henry of one such formula. “It supports collagen and elastin production and makes a real difference if you use it consistently.” Meanwhile, ceramide-rich creams — many popularised through the Korean skincare pipeline — are being recommended for sensitive or barrier-compromised skin, particularly for those dealing with dryness worsened by hard water or seasonal changes.

What ties all of this together is a broader cultural reframing of what “getting dressed” actually includes. Stylists have long argued that confidence is the most important accessory in any outfit, and dermatologists are now making a similar case for skin: that comfort in one’s own texture, tone and hydration levels changes how clothing sits, how sleeves are rolled, how much skin a person is willing to show. A well-moisturised arm reads differently under a cropped sleeve than a dry one; a firmer décolletage changes how a plunging neckline is worn.

None of this means every mature-skin lotion is interchangeable, dermatologists caution. Formulas vary widely by price point, texture and intended concern — some are richer and better suited to very dry skin, others are lightweight enough for daily wear under clothing, and a few are positioned as luxury treatments meant to be massaged in slowly, almost ceremonially, rather than slapped on in a rush before leaving the house. As with any skincare category, the “best” product is the one matched to an individual’s specific skin concern rather than whichever has the flashiest marketing claims.

Still, the underlying message from the beauty and fashion world this season is consistent: style no longer stops at the hemline. As more skin becomes part of the season’s silhouette, the products meant to care for it are being treated with the same scrutiny — and enthusiasm — once reserved strictly for what goes on the face.