Andy Warhol said it best: “Bulgari jewellery was the eighties.” Not a part of them, it was them, which is either the greatest endorsement in the history of jewellery, or a warning, depending on your relationship with that decade. I’d argue it’s neither. What Bulgari understood then, and what makes it feel so urgent now, is something more enduring than fashion: that boldness, done with rigour, never dates.

The eighties were when that logic fully crystallised. The house’s defining move was the Parentesi collection, launched in 1982 and inspired, in the most Roman way imaginable, by the travertine joints in the city’s ancient paving stones. Modular, architectural, designed to be worn from morning until night by the post-feminist working woman who needed jewellery to keep up with her life, it was the first truly modern jewellery system. Each piece connected to the next; gold and steel combined without apology; the structure was the ornament. It was also, notably, the most copied design of its era, which tells you everything about how right it was.

Then there was the cabochon, perhaps Bulgari's most quietly subversive move. Where high jewellery had long prized the faceted stone, all light return and technical display, Bulgari turned instead to the smooth, domed cut: emeralds, rubies, and sapphires worn like river stones, their colour deep and still rather than brilliant and performing. It read as almost primitive against the conventions of the time, and that was entirely the point.

What makes it collectible now is precisely what made it scandalous then: the refusal to be delicate. The Tubogas bracelets, the Cabochon rings, the hematite and gold combinations, these are pieces with the confidence of architecture. Sotheby’s noted recently that signed eighties jewellery from houses like Bulgari is commanding serious attention at auction, and on the resale market, Parentesi and Tubogas pieces are consistently among the most sought-after. In a jewellery landscape that spent a decade whispering, something that was always willing to speak at full volume feels, right now, like a relief.

AE X

Subscribe now

Sleep is the thing I protect most. More than my diet, more than exercise, more than anything else I do for my health. In my early forties, with children, with hormones doing whatever they’re doing, sleep is no longer something that just happens. It’s something you build.

Read more

Into the Water

I came to simple swimwear later than I should have. For a long time I was drawn to the printed, the embellished, the thing that announced itself. Now I want the opposite. A white one-piece, cut cleanly, nothing asking for your attention. The kind of thing that looks better wet, which I think is the only real test.

Resort dressing interests me because it’s where people either try too hard or completely let go. The white broderie cover-up thrown on over a swimsuit and worn to lunch without a second thought. The linen that creases immediately and looks better for it. A yellow striped towel spread out on the grass, because in Britain, this is sometimes as close to the Mediterranean as you get, and you lean into it fully. Sun on your face and the particular joy of not being cold.

The Tennis Whites (and the Navy)

There’s a particular kind of British summer dressing that I find myself returning to every year, the kind built around sport, or at least the aesthetic of it. A pleated skirt, a polo shirt, trainers on your feet and a tote large enough for a towel, a paperback and not much else. It’s the Wimbledon effect, I think. Even if you’re nowhere near SW19, something about June makes you want to dress like you might be.

This year I’ve been drawn to navy and white. Clean, a little preppy, effortlessly at home on a terrace or a court or the back of a friend’s car with the windows down. The MiuMiu polo layered under an oversized sweatshirt for the morning, silver shield sunglasses, a black raffia tote, and a copy of The Inner Game of Tennis, which is as much about life as it is about sport, and worth the re-read every summer.

The Casual One

And then there’s the version of the long weekend that asks almost nothing of you. Cut-off denim shorts. A faded graphic tee, something with a sense of humour, because British summer requires one. Flat leather sandals worn in just enough. A woven leather bag that could go to the farmers’ market which is probably the plan anyway.

A striped beach towel in navy, the kind that looks equally right in Dorset or Devon or draped over a garden chair in London. White triangle bikini underneath for optimism. Tortoiseshell sunglasses. Factor 50, always, because hope is not a sun strategy. The afternoon is unscheduled. That’s the whole point.

When the Evening Finally Comes

The best thing about a British summer long weekend is what happens when the day doesn’t end. Seven o’clock and it’s still light. The kind of warm that finally justifies the outfit you’d been saving. You don’t need much — just the shift from afternoon into something that feels a little more considered.

A draped black skirt and a Burberry bandeau, that signature check glimpsed at the hem — enough to feel dressed without feeling overdone. Clear sandals, a good necklace, cat-eye glasses you’ll keep on longer than necessary because the light deserves it. The black raffia bag that’s been with you all day transitions without effort. A dash of Ilia, a fountain pen tucked in beside your Smythson notebook for whatever the evening brings.

British summer teaches you this more than anywhere. The weather won’t hold. The light is borrowed. So you go outside anyway, you dress for the version of the day you want rather than the one being forecast, and you stay at the table a little longer than you need to.

Three days is enough. Sometimes three days is everything.

AE X

Subscribe now

That’s the thing about certain spaces. They don’t just impress you in the moment, they rewire something. You leave seeing differently. Not just other interiors, but objects, light, your own walls at home.
The château was extraordinary. Plaster in colours that had no name, powdery, deep, walls that felt like they had absorbed centuries rather than been painted last year. One Fontana. A single painting, hung without explanation, doing everything it needed to. Linen-covered sofas on a scale that felt almost architectural The light cinematic is the only word that comes close. Sensual. The kind of light that makes you aware of the air in a room.

And yet none of it announced itself. That was the shock of it. Something so considered, so intentional, so clearly the result of decades of thinking about beauty and it felt like it had simply always been that way. Warm. Liveable. Completely at ease.

There is another register to Vervoordt’s work that the interiors alone don’t fully prepare you for. Between 2007 and 2017, he took over the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, a Gothic building in Campo San Beneto, once the studio of the designer Mariano Fortuny, and staged six consecutive exhibitions there, each built around a single idea. Time. Infinity. Proportion. Intuition.

I went back year after year. At least four times. It remains, honestly, the place I would choose if I had one day left. Not the Uffizi, not the Louvre, those rooms in Venice, the light coming off the canal, ancient Neolithic menhirs placed in the same room as a 1982 Basquiat, objects that had no name and needed none. The juxtapositions were never clever in the way contemporary curating so often is. They were quiet.

Each exhibition was built around a single concept, and yet none of them felt like an argument being made. They felt like a question being asked. Which is, in retrospect, much harder to do.

Vervoordt’s great subject is restraint, he is the restraint of someone who has looked at so much, handled so much, lived so closely alongside objects and rooms and light, that he has learned precisely what to leave out. It takes more confidence to hang one picture than twenty. More knowledge to choose a single material and trust it completely. More courage to light a room dimly when everything in the commercial world tells you to light it brightly. What looks like simplicity is, in fact, a position held with absolute conviction, about what a room is for, and what it does to the people inside it.

He also taught me something I’ve never been able to unlearn: that a truly great piece of furniture is not a functional object that happens to be beautiful. It is a sculpture that happens to be sat in. The oversized linen sofa, the particular weight of a table. These things hold space in a room the way a Fontana holds a wall. Once you see furniture this way, you cannot unsee it. It changes what you buy, what you keep, and what you quietly remove.

And then there is light. Not as a practical consideration but as a material in its own right, something to be shaped, withheld, directed. The rooms at Kanaal and the Palazzo Fortuny were lit like films. You felt held by them somehow, and also very awake.

The wabi principle that runs through all his work, beauty in imperfection, in transience, in the incomplete, isn’t a style. It’s an argument about what matters. That age is not a flaw. That emptiness is not a failure. That the worn, the weathered, the unfinished can carry more than the new ever could.

Three books worth having. Wabi Inspirations is the best entry point — his philosophy in full, the Japanese concept of wabi applied to Western interiors with extraordinary results. Living with Light is the visual companion to everything described above. And Stories and Reflections, his memoir published by Flammarion, is unexpectedly moving, less a design book than a portrait of a life spent paying attention.

It’s there in everything I do, the inspiration to leave space, to trust a single extraordinary piece to do the work of ten ordinary ones. Vervoordt didn’t give me a manual. He gave me a standard.

AE x

Subscribe now

Some weekends stay with you. This was one of them.

Read more

Read more

In spring I always think I’ve got it right, and then end up carrying something around all day. Usually a coat I don’t need but don’t quite trust myself to leave behind. It spends most of its time over my arm, which is annoying, but also feels safer than not having it.

Then at some point you just stop doing that. You leave without the extra layer and don’t really think about it again. Later you realise you haven’t once wished you’d brought it, which feels slightly surprising.

Everything gets a bit simpler. You put something on in the morning and it more or less stays. It creases, it loosens, it looks different by the evening, but in a way that’s fine. Better, probably.

You also notice you’re out for longer without meaning to be. You go somewhere for a quick drink and then it isn’t quick, and no one seems particularly concerned about that.

There’s less to hide behind, I suppose. Not in a big way, just in the sense that what you put on is what people get. Which sounds worse than it is. It’s actually quite a relief.

By the time it’s properly summer, you’re not really dressing for all the possible versions of the day anymore. You just get dressed and leave.

And then one day you realise you haven’t thought about a coat in ages. Not because you decided not to wear one, just because it stopped occurring to you.

AE x

Subscribe now

Pierre Chareau was a French architect and designer, born in Bordeaux in 1883. He came up through furniture and interiors before moving into architecture, which probably explains everything about how he thought. He wasn’t a theorist. He was someone who understood objects, materials, and rooms from the inside out. He spent most of his career in Paris, moved to New York after the war, and died in 1950 — relatively unknown outside a small circle. He built very little. His reputation rests almost entirely on one building.

Read more

Lately it’s been about small shifts rather than full changes. A shirt worn slightly undone, sleeves pushed up just enough to feel relaxed but still intentional. Swapping one layer for another—cashmere for cotton, or something lighter over something structured—and it’s surprising how much that can change the tone of the whole day. These are the kinds of choices that don’t require much thinking, but still feel considered. There’s a quiet confidence in that kind of simplicity.

In the evening, it’s more of the same, just tightened slightly. A jacket thrown on instinctively, a different shoe that alters the silhouette, or a piece of jewellery that catches the light in a way that feels a bit more deliberate. I like keeping everything mostly pared back and then adding one element that feels a little unexpected—something that disrupts the neatness just enough to keep it interesting. It’s never about overcomplicating, just refining.

Off-duty is probably the most instinctive of all. The pieces you reach for without hesitation, the ones that feel lived-in but still reflect your sense of self. There’s comfort in that familiarity, but also room to play—introducing a bit of colour, not anything loud or overwhelming, just enough to lift everything and shift the mood. Sometimes it’s as simple as a different accessory or a texture that feels right for the day.

I think that’s what I’ve been enjoying most: not overworking it. Letting things remain easy, wearable, and adaptable. Trusting that a few small, thoughtful choices are enough to carry a look, rather than building something overly constructed. It feels lighter this way—more natural, more reflective of how I actually want to dress and move through the day.

AE X

Subscribe now

There’s a photograph of Andrée Putman’s Paris apartment that I keep coming back to. Not because it’s styled, but because it isn’t. A bed, a lamp at exactly the right height, a chair by Mies van der Rohe that she put there when she was fifteen years old, having cleared her bedroom of everything else she considered unnecessary. She was fifteen, and most of us are still acquiring things we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to get rid of.

Read more

Terence Conran didn’t just design furniture. He redesigned the British idea of home and quietly talked an entire nation into caring about the plate they ate from.

There’s a version of British domestic life that existed before 1964. Heavy furniture, dark rooms, a dining table dragged out for special occasions like a slightly embarrassed relative. The kitchen was a place you disappeared into and emerged from, rather than a room you actually lived in. Good design was for other people- French people, mostly.

Then Terence Conran opened Habitat on Fulham Road, and something shifted.

The idea that a simple wooden table, a crisp white duvet, a decent casserole dish, that these things could be beautiful, and that you could afford them. That good design wasn’t a luxury; it was just common sense dressed up nicely.

"Good design is probably 98% common sense. Above all, an object must function well and efficiently"

Conran had spent time in France. He’d eaten long, informal lunches and understood the relaxed confidence of the French table. The earthenware, the linen, and the wine opened on a Tuesday were about attitude. He’d absorbed Scandinavian functionalism too: the belief that everyday objects deserved to be thought about. He brought both of these ideas home and translated them into something that felt, crucially, achievable.

Democratising the Beautiful

The word “democratise” gets thrown around a lot in design circles, usually by people who haven’t actually done it, but Conran did. This wasn’t just about taste —plenty of people have taste— it was the recognition that most people wanted to live better, and just needed someone to show them how, without making them feel stupid in the process.

Habitat wasn’t intimidating. You could wander in, touch things, and buy a colander. And in buying that colander, you were buying into an idea of yourself, someone who cooked properly, who cared about their kitchen, who had, without quite meaning to, developed opinions about storage.

The open shelving, the simple tableware, the notion that a kitchen could be the best room in the house rather than an afterthought with a gas ring. These things feel so obvious now that it’s hard to remember they had to be introduced. Someone had to make the argument. Conran made it with a shopfront.

What made him genuinely rare was the coherence of the vision. Conran understood that design wasn’t a product category; it was a way of thinking about how people lived. And so his interests expanded accordingly: restaurants like Quaglino’s and Bibendum, where the room itself was part of the meal. The Design Museum, because he believed design deserved the same cultural seriousness as art. Architecture, food, writing, it all belonged to the same conversation.

He was, in that sense, one of the original lifestyle editors — long before that was a job title anyone used. He understood that the British public wasn’t uninterested in beauty. They’d just never been invited in.

That invitation, extended through a shop on the Fulham Road, and then through fifty years of restaurants and museums and books and buildings, changed the texture of British daily life in ways that are genuinely hard to overstate. The casual modern interior we now take entirely for granted, the dinner party that doesn’t require the good china, the kitchen that’s also the sitting room, that’s Conran’s world.

Not bad for a man who started out wanting to sell nice wooden tables.

AE X

Subscribe now

About twelve years ago, my friend Graham Steele organised a tour of Donald Judd’s house on Spring Street. I went along the way you do, curious, vaguely informed, and not remotely prepared for what it would do to me.

I knew Judd as an artist. I’d seen the stacks, the boxes, the precise industrial surfaces. What I hadn’t understood —what I don’t think you can understand until you walk into that building— is that the work and the life were entirely the same thing. There’s no separation; the art wasn’t hanging on walls, it was the walls, the table, the shelf with the books on it, all placed exactly where they needed to be.

Judd had a word for this; he called it “specific objects”, a deliberately awkward phrase for a deliberately radical idea. His argument, laid out in an essay in 1965, was that painting and sculpture had run out of road and that the real opportunity was in three-dimensional work that didn’t apologise for existing in actual space, with actual materials, at an actual scale. He wasn’t interested in representation or metaphor or things that pointed at other things. He wanted simple objects. Furniture included, shelves included, and the coffee cup, presumably, included.

What strikes you about the Spring Street loft —a five-storey cast-iron building in SoHo, which he spent the rest of his life refining— is how completely he meant it. This wasn’t a minimalist aesthetic applied to a lifestyle like some design magazine editorial; it was a genuine philosophical position that happened to also require an extremely good eye for proportion.

There’s a dining table I always come back to. It opens up, and stored inside it are all the glasses, the cutlery, the plates, everything you need to use it. The table is also the cupboard. Function folded into form, nothing added on, nothing tucked away somewhere else as an afterthought. It’s such a simple idea that it makes you feel slightly embarrassed about every other table you’ve ever sat at. Why are they all separate? Why have we accepted this?

That’s the particular Judd trick: he makes you feel the wrongness of ordinary arrangements you’d never previously questioned.

He was also, it should be said, quite relentless about it. He bought a whole town in Texas, Marfa, which was then essentially nothing, and spent twenty years turning it into a permanent installation of his work and the work of artists he respected. Artillery sheds filled with his aluminium boxes, arranged in the desert light, unchanged since he placed them. He designed his own furniture because he couldn’t find any that was right. He wrote extensively, argued frequently, and did not seem to have a great deal of patience for people who weren’t paying attention. There’s something almost funny about that level of commitment. The man chose a town, and yet it’s also completely serious, and you feel the seriousness of it.

What I came away with from Spring Street was something I’m not sure I could have articulated at the time. A rearrangement of how I thought about objects. Not minimalism exactly, that word has been so flattened by usage it means almost nothing now, but something more like intention. The idea that everything you live with makes a claim on you, takes up space physically, mentally, and even spiritually, and that it matters, therefore, whether it earns its place.

Fewer things, but better ones. Things you use constantly, that work hard, that last, that hold the room. I didn’t fully know what I was walking into that day. But each time I go back (and I do go back!), I find it’s done something new to me. That’s the mark of something that works.

AE X

Subscribe now

I am not a doctor, a nutritionist, or any kind of medical professional. Everything here is personal things I’ve tried, tested on myself over the years, and formed strong opinions about. Please do your research and consult a specialist before starting anything new, especially anything injectable. That said, here is my honest edit.

For a long time, I did what most people do: I read something interesting on the internet, I bought the supplement, took it for a few weeks, and felt that this was the piece I wished someone had handed me five years ago.

Read more

Few garments carry the quiet authority of a perfect shirt. It slips easily into daily life, becoming part of a rhythm rather than a decision.

Read more

Thirty years of loving Hervé Chapelier is really a story about constancy in a fashion landscape that rarely rewards it. While trends have surged and collapsed in ever-shorter cycles, the structured nylon tote has remained, unbothered, unfussy, and utterly reliable. There is something deeply reassuring about a bag that does not try to seduce you with novelty.

Read more

A shared sensibility begins to emerge: that a meaningful life is not something to be optimised or displayed, but something to be quietly shaped through attention, through what we keep, what we discard, what we notice, and how we allow things, and ourselves, to remain imperfect, transient, and open.

This 7 Edit is dedicated to the select writers who have evoked such a feeling, and have led me to the idea that not everything needs to be perfect, and how to practise a philosophy that will aid you in rethinking how you shape your everyday life.

1. ⁠Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers - Leonard Koren

Possibly the Philosophy finds an unexpected echo and a quiet tension, as both reject unconscious accumulation and elevate simplicity, mindfulness, and the emotional resonance of objects, yet diverge in their sensibilities, moving from deliberate curation toward an acceptance of time, patina, and the quiet poetry of things as they are.

2.⁠ ⁠The Book of Tea - Kakuzō Okakura

The Book of Tea is ostensibly about tea—but only in the way a doorway is “about” wood. What Kakuzō Okakura is really doing is offering a philosophy of life, aesthetics, and culture, using the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) as his central metaphor.

Written in English for a Western audience in the early 20th century, the book argues that Eastern and Western sensibilities diverge not just in taste, but in worldview, and that something essential has been lost in the Western pursuit of scale, speed, and perfection.

3.⁠ ⁠In Praise of Shadows - Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

In Praise of Shadows is a slender, luminous essay that does something deceptively simple: it asks what is lost when darkness disappears. Writing in the early 20th century, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki reflects on the encroachment of Western modernity. Electric lighting, polished surfaces, bright interiors, and contrasts it with a distinctly Japanese aesthetic that finds its depth not in illumination, but in shadow, subtlety, and obscurity.

4.⁠ ⁠Goodbye, Things - Fumio Sasaki

Goodbye, Things is not a method so much as a confession; Fumio Sasaki offers something more exposed: a first-person account of stripping life down to its barest essentials. His apartment becomes almost empty; his possessions are reduced to what is strictly necessary.

But the real subject isn’t objects, it’s identity, and that’s why Sasaki writes so eloquently and candidly about insecurity, comparison, and the anxiety of modern life, suggesting that accumulation is often less about need and more about self-definition. To own less is, in his framing, to loosen the grip of those external measures.

5.⁠ ⁠The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - Marie Kondo

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo reads like a quiet manifesto for editing one’s life with emotional precision: by gathering possessions by category, confronting them directly, and keeping only what “sparks joy,” tidying becomes a singular, almost ceremonial act that transforms the self, infusing even mundane objects with a kind of tenderness and respect.

6. On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho - Matsuo Basho

On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho gathers the work of Matsuo Bashō, the great master of haiku, whose poems reduce experience to its most fleeting, essential form: a crow on a bare branch, the sound of water, the passing of seasons, the quiet ache of travel and solitude, and yet, in that compression, a worldview emerges.

7. Wabi-Sabi Welcome - Julie Pointer Adams

Wabi-Sabi Welcome takes the abstract, aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi and brings it into the most intimate of spaces: the home, and more specifically, the act of welcoming others into it. Where earlier texts circle beauty, imperfection, or minimalism, Julie Pointer Adams asks a quieter, more social question: What does it mean to host, without performance?

Drawing from homes across the world, the book replaces the polished ideal of entertaining with something gentler: spaces that feel lived-in, unforced, and open to imperfection.

What ways do you practise wabi-sabi?

AE X

Subscribe now

We’ve lived through cycles of maximalism, quiet luxury, hyper-luxury, and anti-luxury. Each trend declares itself as the correction to the one before, and perhaps the real correction is permanence.

A Charvet slipper is a palate cleanser, not because it is neutral as they come in so many shades and hues, such as the perfect Cadbury’s purple and beautiful bright red oxblood- but because it isn’t trying to say anything at all.

It’s just good. It’s in fact the best. I have worn mine for over 14 years, since my twenties. In a sea of trend-led objects engineered for attention, that feels almost subversive. Originally, they were what they sound like: slippers, house shoes, the kind of shoe you would wear in an apartment in the centre of Paris, on parquet floors, hosting friends for dinner, or reading late into the night.

They belong to a world of private elegance where interiors are watching, not runways, reminding us that it’s a ritual for oneself, and not a spectacle for others to witness.

And now they appear on pavements, with jeans, tailoring, nothing performative around them. The effect is always the same: ease. A refusal to try too hard.

There’s something delicious about a shoe that suggests you have somewhere better to be, even if you don’t.

AE X

Subscribe now

Lately, my reading has been a mix of novels that observe people closely and books that offer a bit of perspective on how we live. I tend to move between the two: one for immersion, the other for reflection.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep is one I return to often. Set at an American boarding school, it captures the awkwardness and intensity of adolescence with real precision, the quiet hierarchies, the need to belong, and the feeling of constantly watching and learning. While Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection looks at a more contemporary version of that same instinct: the carefully curated life, and the gap between how things appear and how they actually feel. André Aciman’s Stowaway sits somewhere else entirely, reflecting on memory and longing in the thoughtful, understated way he does so well.

Alongside fiction, I’ve been reading books that are more about mindset and self-awareness. Roxie Nafousi’s Manifest and My Next Chapter both focus on taking ownership of your direction, thinking more deliberately about what you want and how you shape it. Alain de Botton’s A Therapeutic Journey approaches similar ideas through psychology and philosophy, looking at how understanding our patterns can shift how we move through the world.

And then there are small daily habits that support all of it. The Five Minute Journal is exactly what it sounds like: a short moment in the morning and evening to write down a few thoughts. Simple, but surprisingly grounding.

Together they make up my current reading stack: a combination of stories about people, and books that help you think a little more clearly about your own.

What are your favourite books?

AE X

Subscribe now

At a time when fashion was coming down from the theatrical excess of the 1980s, Calvin Klein offered something different; what he proposed was a regurgitation of looks, but a philosophy: that simplicity -when done well- could be the ultimate form of luxury.

The shift from excess to precision in the early 90s marked a cultural recalibration, with shoulder pads softening, colours neutralised, and silhouettes lengthened.

What is often overlooked in discussions of Calvin Klein’s 1990s visual language is the role played by Kelly Klein, whose sensibility helped shape the environment in which the brand’s aesthetic matured.

A photographer and collector with a deep interest in modern architecture and art, Kelly Klein cultivated a world of quiet refinement around the brand. Her eye for restraint and uncluttered spaces mirrored the same philosophy that defined Calvin Klein clothing: remove the excess until only the essential remains.

There was a sensuality in the restrained fabric against skin, clean lines against the body, and an absence of unnecessary detail that allowed the wearer to lead.

Part of what made Calvin Klein the defining blueprint of the 1990s was the clarity of this vision. While other designers explored minimalism, including figures such as Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, Calvin Klein translated the idea into a cultural language that reached far beyond the runway.

Through advertising campaigns photographed by figures like Herb Ritts and Steven Meisel, and through the now-iconic pairings of Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg, the brand created images that felt less like fashion campaigns and more like cultural moments.

These visuals distilled the 1990s into a set of recognisable codes: youth, intimacy, bare skin, and an emotional honesty that contrasted sharply with the constructed glamour of the previous decade.

Just as importantly, Calvin Klein made minimalism accessible.

Denim, underwear, white tanks and slip dresses were familiar garments elevated through proportion, fabric, and attitude. In doing so, the brand reframed everyday clothing as something quietly aspirational.

Shot against plain backdrops, often in monochrome or muted tones, the visuals rejected theatrical styling in favour of something far more influential: authenticity through simplicity.

Much of what now circulates across contemporary editorials and digital mood boards, the monochrome palette, the intimacy of the imagery, the confidence of pared-back dressing, can be traced directly back to the visual and cultural language Calvin Klein refined in the early 1990s.

Minimalism existed before Calvin Klein. But in the 1990s, Calvin Klein made it the modern uniform.

AE X

Subscribe now

Rather than entirely new wardrobes, the season often comes down to small shifts in styling, subtle adjustments that make familiar pieces feel fresh again.

Read more