On waiting, watching and the intelligence of letting people reveal themselves.

So far wisdom looks, from the outside, remarkably like doing nothing.

You don’t confront.

You don’t expose.

You don’t demand explanations.

You simply wait.

Not passively. Not bitterly. Not with the theatrical patience of someone secretly hoping to be proven right.

You watch.

And eventually, people tell you who they are.

On losing time, missing chances, falling in love and why sometimes the only way forward is to run wild.

There is a deep cruelty to grief: it makes time visible.

Before loss, time is something we spend without looking at the receipt. We postpone dinners. We answer messages tomorrow. We assume there will be another summer, another conversation, another chance to say the thing we were too embarrassed, too busy, too afraid to say today.

Then someone dies and suddenly every minute acquires a price.

You begin to understand that time was never unlimited. You simply had the luxury of pretending it was.

Grief is often described as an ending. I have started to think of it differently. Grief is an interruption, a violent one, certainly but an interruption nonetheless. It stops the life you thought you were living and asks an uncomfortable question:

What are you going to do with the life that remains?

There is a shot you have seen a thousand times without ever registering it as one image repeated: the infinity pool in Bali, shot from behind, one arm raised toward a horizon nobody is actually looking at. The pastel stairwell in an unnamed European city. The hotel breakfast tray, untouched, photographed from directly above. You could build a supercut of any given week on Instagram using only these frames, sourced from a hundred different accounts and the disturbing part isn’t that they’d all look similar. It’s that they’d all look identical, same crop, same light, same faint air of a moment being manufactured and not lived. Nobody in these photographs appears to be having a particularly good time. They appear to be working.

Italy and Milan in particular, has long been synonymous with artisanal excellence. Yet in an era dominated by artificial intelligence and mass production, a question arises: how can traditional craftsmanship not only survive, but thrive? The answer lies in “Artisanal Intelligence,” an approach that merges a rich heritage of craftsmanship with technological innovation.

Luxury has always thrived on aspiration.

Distance created desire.
Exclusivity created power.
Visibility created status.

But in 2026, something feels different.

The question is no longer whether luxury is desirable.
It is whether constant excess is still aspirational.

We may be entering an era of what could be called luxury fatigue.

If you’ve been paying attention during recent time, you might have noticed something subtle but significant.

Fewer obvious paid partnerships.
Fewer hashtag-heavy captions.
Fewer influencers posting multiple sponsored looks in a single day.

At first glance, it may seem like influencer marketing in luxury is slowing down or even declining.

It isn’t.

It’s evolving.

And it’s getting quieter.

There was a time when designers spoke primarily through their collections.

Interviews were sparse, appearances rarer still. The work arrived twice a year, sometimes less. Between shows, silence was not absence but structure , a pause that allowed anticipation, interpretation and, crucially, distance.

That structure has largely disappeared.

At Paris Haute Couture Week this year, something unusual happened at the Théâtre du Lido on the Champs‑Élysées, not simply atypical but, to some observers, almost sacrilegious. Alexis Mabille, a seasoned couturier and permanent member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, presented his Spring‑Summer 2026 “haute couture” collection in a fully digital format: no physical clothes, no live models on the runway, no tactile presence but just a looped, immersive film of AI‑generated figures and garments projected on wraparound screens. 

On paper, it was a bold experiment, a creative collision of fashion and machine learning. By working for months with the French studio Glor’IA, Mabille trained algorithms to interpret his sketches and textile choices, creating hyper‑realistic digital silhouettes ranging from embroidered crepe frock coats to blush‑pink tracksuit dresses with bead details. The visuals, astonishingly convincing in motion, were rendered with the sort of sheen and comportment that, at a distance, might fool even seasoned fashion insiders.