Democracy may be challenged on many global fronts at the moment but there is one corner of the fashion industry where the essence of the idea is thriving.

Glenn Martens opened Diesel up to the world before his latest show: 72 hours of live streaming every last detail about the preparation of a fashion show, complete transparency in an industry which prefers a veil over its activities. For the show itself, Dieselettes around the world were invited to join online; a thousand people signed up within a minute. They created the digital front row that was the backdrop for Wednesday’s presentation. I’m not sure they were all of this realm. There was at least one full-blown alien. But maybe that’s testament to Diesel’s new reach. Under Martens’ unique and unyielding vision, Diesel has finally begun to click with the universe. Parent entity OTB Group confirmed as much in releasing 2023 results last Friday.

But I wasn’t thinking about cash while I watched the show. Instead, David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs swarmed my brain. More specifically, Future Legend, the album’s grand opening: mutant eyes gazing down on Hunger City, ten thousand peoploids splitting into small tribes, ripping and rewrapping mink and shiny silver fox, family badge of sapphire and cracked emerald…and so it goes. Martens has honed a particular kind of post-apocalyptic vision at Diesel, road warriors and fearless amazons composing a new world from literal shreds of the old, but this time, he glossed it all with a layer of finesse, of elegance. And it was gorgeous.

There were still the survivalists in huge shearling parkas, cropped pants and brutal boots. Some padded coats burst with tufts of electric stuffing. Others looked like they’d been blowtorched to reveal the wadding inside. And there was a new story with men and women dressed like puli dogs in shaggy coats, shrugs, balaclavas, even a tailored skirt suit. Like I said, Diesel now reaches everywhere, even Svalbard.

But the takeaway from the collection was a new level of construction rather than destruction, of finery tailored from tatters. Martens has developed a way to layer fabrics then dissolve them so that what remains is an elusive fusion of what was and what will be. The way that a leopard coat literally evaporated into florals, or an elegant peak-shouldered dress with a fitted, ruched skirt turned into a tattered memory before our eyes was a tribute to whatever extraordinary Frankenstein’s lab that Martens has working at full tilt back at Diesel HQ. The show opened with looks that artfully duplicated sweatstains in armpits and on chests, which made fabric transparent. But by some strange alchemy, the effect was delicate, almost lace-like, rather than EWWW!!!!

However extraordinary they may be, the technical achievements that glossed denim so it took on the appearance of black leather, or gifted it with a deep, velvety pile that exploded into a Wookie ruff, are part of the Diesel repertoire now. It was the chicness of this particular collection that felt new. Like the Diamond Dogs themselves, it was emblematic of a seductively transgressive sophistication. And, if there is any justice in the fashion world, Glenn Martens is a Future Legend in the making.

Diesel Autumn/Winter 2024

Kim Jones has already felt the warmth of that moment when you can move the dial for the whole industry with the fusion of street and salon which originally launched him as a menswear designer. His tenure at Fendi’s womenswear has been marked by sober restraint, lean, elegant, untroubled, with the emphasis on silhouette and fabrication. Maybe too tentative, it was almost like he was over-emphasising his maturity as a designer. And yet there have always been swirls and eddies running under his collections for Fendi, and it might have been the surfacing of those that gave the kick to Wednesday’s show that made it his best yet for the brand.

Jones is a born archivist, a forensic specialist in fashion’s past, and, poking around in the files, he uncovered sketches by Karl Lagerfeld that reminded him of the 1980s in London, an era that Jones is umbilically connected to as a collector of clothes by labels that are now lost in the mists of time. Somewhere between the New Romantics, the utilitarian bent of designers like Willie Brown and Modern Classics and the extravagance of Leigh Bowery, he isolated a common ground with Fendi’s own longtime appetite for mixing tradition and perversity. You don’t need to know much more than this: the Chuba Chups lollipops dangling off the big squishy bags on the catwalk came from Silvia Venturini Fendi’s memory of Italian horror maestro Mario Bava’s 1973 film “Lisa and the Devil,” with Telly Savalas as a lollipop-sucking psycho killer (“How can you turn something so ordinary into something so macabre?” she wondered), while the embroidered dots that decorated filmy chiffon skirts were inspired by Bowery’s designs. (Completists might fancy a deep dive into @trojan_garybarnes.) The first dress — stark, black, shapely — reminded Jones of something his friend Princess Julia might have worn as a shopgirl in Covent Garden’s PX boutique in the 1980s.

But all that would be mere bull’s wool if the collection itself hadn’t had a convincing and very clear point of view. Strong lines seductively softened into rounded shapes. Delfina Deletrez Fendi’s jewellery mixed metal and wood in a similarly potent blend of hard and organic. Her own personal style continues to influence Jones’s approach to the brand, and here it reached a critical mass in trompe l’oeil iterations of her casually draped sweaters which echoed the Japanese influence that was strong in those early 1980s years in London.

Fendi will be 100 years old next year so it was appropriate that the strongest look in the collection should be one that felt like the brand bringing past and future together: a mid-length leather shift topped by a coat stitched with the artisanal selleria technique that has been a Fendi signature since Adele and Edoardo founded the house in 1925, all of it, bag, boots and Chuba Chup included, in a muted but luxurious mulberry monotone. When Kim Jones takes on a brand, he always learns how to speak its language fluently.

Fendi Autumn/Winter 2024

Rihanna is set to reprise her role as the face of Christian Dior, industry sources said.

The Barbadian singer, actress and beauty entrepreneur — who was spotted in Paris fêteing Valentine’s Day last week with partner A$AP Rocky — came to the French capital to shoot a campaign at the Château de Versailles, lensed by Steven Klein and styled by Carine Roitfeld, BoF has learned.

Rihanna became Dior’s first Black ambassador in 2015, starring in a blockbuster accessories campaign for the brand, also shot by Klein and set in Versailles, that year. The partnership — which coincided with major brand projects including the “Dior & Me” documentary and the “Designer of Dreams” fashion retrospective — helped anchor Dior’s cultural relevance as it navigated its second designer transition in less than 5 years.

Rihanna’s memorable Dior looks over the years have included extravagant pink capes, androgynous oversized suiting and a stomach-baring, see-through couture ensemble that made waves during her pregnancy in 2022.

While the scope of Rihanna’s new deal with Dior remains unknown, the Fenty Beauty founder did not attend the shows of other brands when she travelled to Paris for Dior’s January haute couture outing, suggesting that a renewed partnership could be in the works beyond the campaign. Representatives for Rihanna and Dior declined to comment.

As interest in luxury brands cools following a multi-year boom for the segment, fashion’s biggest names are accelerating efforts to stay in the cultural spotlight through brand ambassadorships that help reach an audience beyond fashion. LVMH stablemate Louis Vuitton announced Wednesday it had signed French basketball sensation Victor Wembanyama; while Chanel recently signed K-pop star Minji.

Renewing its ties with Rihanna would be a boon to Dior, as the singer has long managed to cultivate both mainstream recognition and high-fashion clout. The brand is currently seeking to maintain industry-beating growth after a cycle of rapid expansion under former chief executive Pietro Beccari, during which revenues more than tripled in 5 years.

Under new CEO Delphine Arnault, the brand is targeting annual growth of 8 to 10 percent, LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault said in a January presentation to investors: more moderate than in previous years but higher than expectations for the broader luxury industry, which is set to grow by 1 to 4 percent in 2024 (slower than global inflation), according to Bain.

“The goal is desirability… It’s great what we did with Pietro these past few years with Dior. But we’ve reached a stage such that we no longer need to have such high growth. Between 8 percent and 10 percent is perfect,” Arnault said.

As a source of inspiration for everything from hair styles to fashion, social media — like magazines before it — has served some users better than others. Marginalised groups haven’t always seen images of people with their features when searching for ideas online.

Pinterest, which built its base of nearly 500 million users largely as a place to find and save inspiration, sees artificial intelligence as at least a partial solution. The company introduced AI-powered filters for skin tone in 2018, allowing users to search for images of people with the same skin colour as them, along with one for body type last September. Pinterest also launched a separate filter for hair patterns in 2021 that lets users find images of people based on hair texture.

The features are popular. In 2023, searches using hair-pattern filters grew 41 percent year over year, and those using skin tone filters grew 51 percent.

“Our approach was really first to look at our most marginalised users, who were having to add a lot of qualifiers to find results that inspired them,” said Rachel Hardy, Pinterest’s director of consumer product marketing. “Every time you have to add a modifier about who you are, it’s painful and it’s not inspirational.”

The company’s “inclusive AI” automates what would be a gruelling manual process of sifting through its catalogue of 5 billion images to serve user images of people with similar features. Pinterest also sees it as a way to help it build out its social commerce.

The personalisation it provides attracts more Gen-Z users, who have a higher expectation for personalised content and are spending more time on the platform than other groups. Since they’re finding the kind of inspirational content they want, they’re also more willing to click on tools like Pinterest’s shoppable “product pins,” which take users directly to a retailer’s site to buy.

Gen-Z consumers now account for more than 40 percent of monthly active users, Hardy said, and shopping behaviour among this group increased 50 percent year over year in 2023.

“These are the people that are our future audience. These are the people with the purchasing power,” Hardy said. “They are spending the most time on the platform. They’re saving the most. They’re buying more and more.”

For years, Pinterest was slower to push commerce on its platform, despite its purpose as an inspiration board easily translating to shopping, for fear of undermining the discovery-centric user experience, said Mark Mahaney, senior managing director of Evercore ISI. The company’s focus on commerce has ramped up since its chief executive Bill Ready took the helm in June 2022, including more tools for advertisers to drive sales like its direct links feature that was introduced in 2023 and takes users to advertisers’ product pages.

“[Pinterest] went from a hesitant or a tentative focus on e-commerce to a much more aggressive focus on e-commerce,” Mahaney said. Ready is “much more focused on treating advertisers and marketers almost as equal customers as users.”

Algorithmic recommendations can be a double-edged sword for social media companies pushing into commerce, however. Since TikTok introduced shopping, users have complained they’re constantly served content pushing products they don’t want instead of getting the entertaining videos they do.

When “social media uses AI, the algorithms are about understanding probability for engagement,” said Anabel Maldonado, founder and chief executive of software company Psykhe AI, which provides personalisation as a service to retailers. “When you introduce commerce, you’re now introducing a competing goal. These models that are showing commerce content need to be optimised for conversion.”

Pinterest balances these competing goals by using AI to try to identify when users are in a purchasing versus a browsing mindset so it knows when to push shopping-oriented content. For users seeking inspiration, who will often type in generic terms like “summer cocktail dress vibes,” Pinterest will show generic images such as people in attractive frocks in the appropriate social setting. But users that search specific terms, such as “black Adidas in a size 7,” are served the product pins, which include the item’s price, brand name, availability and a link to purchase.

People who are looking for something specific but not yet ready to buy will often save content, giving Pinterest a signal on who to follow up with product pins down the line.

Hardy said Pinterest’s development of tools like inclusive AI, which entices consumers who drive commerce on the platform, is far from where it needs to be. The company will continue to improve its ability to filter images by partnering with inclusivity experts and users. In the past, these partners have helped Pinterest tweak its machine-learning tools and identify the right words to feed into the AI filters, such as determining whether a term like “coily” or “kinky” should be used to describe textured hair.

“As we expand to these different communities, they have different needs. We want to do it all, we want to be able to serve, but it takes time and investment,” Hardy said. “We have to be really thoughtful and deliberate about partnering with real humans, getting feedback, talking to experts who know this space, who know the things that can be harmful or not inclusive.”

As Pinterest sees it, the more users are able to find content that’s relevant to them personally, the better for them and the better for Pinterest, too.

The rapid rise of fast-fashion e-commerce retailers such as Shein and Temu is upending the global air cargo industry, as they increasingly vie for limited air-cargo space to woo consumers with rapid transit times, more than ten industry sources said.

Shein, PDD Group’s Temu and ByteDance’s TikTok Shop, which recently began online shopping in the US, ship the majority of their products directly from factories in China to shoppers by air in individually addressed packages.

And their growing popularity - Shein and Temu together send almost 600,000 packages to the United States every day, according to a June 2023 report by the US Congress - is boosting air-freight costs from Asian hubs like Guangzhou and Hong Kong, making off-peak seasons almost disappear and causing capacity shortages, the sources said.

“The biggest trend impacting air freight right now is not the Red Sea, it’s Chinese e-commerce companies like Shein or Temu,” said Basile Ricard, director of Greater China operations at freight forwarder Bollore Logistics.

According to data aggregated by Cargo Facts Consulting, Temu ships around 4,000 tonnes a day, Shein 5,000 tonnes, Alibaba 1,000 tonnes and TikTok 800 tonnes. That equates to around 108 Boeing 777 freighters a day, the consultancy said.

Driven by robust demand for their low-priced apparel like $10 tops and $5 biker shorts, Shein alone accounts for one-fifth of the global fast-fashion market, measured by sales, and has fuelled growth of China’s e-commerce industry, according to Coresight Research.

Fast fashion now accounts for half of China’s total cross-border e-commerce shipments and takes up about one-third of global long-distance cargo aircraft, according to cross-border transportation media firm Baixiao.

Shein and Temu’s growth is squeezing out space for other industries on air freighters, just as global firms are scrambling to find alternative logistics options due to the Red Sea disruptions.

“When the Suez Canal [crisis] hit, there was no capacity to be bought, because e-commerce has bought it all,” said an executive at an air cargo carrier, who requested anonymity due to industry sensitivities.

Pronounced demand for air freight from fast fashion started increasing dramatically in the second half of last year, several sources said.

A German logistics source said even large tech firms like Apple transport only 1,000 tons maximum a day and the growing cargo demand from fast fashion could push out traditional long-term customers, as they vie for limited air capacity.

Some air-freight carriers have responded to the increased e-commerce demand by providing additional charter capacity, “which is already heavily booked for the long term,” said a spokesperson for German logistics firm Schenker.

Apple declined to comment. TikTok Shop did not return messages seeking comment.

“Shein is continually optimising its efforts to ensure the best customer experience and fulfillment efficiency,” a Shein spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.

The Hunt for Capacity

The sudden spike in demand from fast fashion that began last year has lifted air-cargo rates from China and is raising concerns about longer-term capacity shortage.

“Based on what we have seen, this model of [airborne] e-commerce is not sustainable, neither from a profit or environmental standpoint,” said Guillermo Ochovo, director at Cargo Facts Consulting.

He said both Shein and Temu are now looking more at sea freight due to the high cost of air freight and considering opening warehouses outside of China to shorten transport times to other regions.

Shein has started sending goods to US warehouses to speed up shipping times.

According to Baixiao founder Wang Yongqiang, in a presentation to a Boeing air cargo forum in China in December, supply growth of long-distance freighters cannot keep up with the growth of cross-border e-commerce.

In its 2023 commercial market outlook, Boeing estimated China’s air cargo fleet would more than triple to 750 aircraft between 2022 and 2042. Boeing declined to comment.

E-commerce firms are trying airlines directly to secure more capacity, according to the executive at a major air cargo carrier and Unique Logistics.

“Temu, we understand, is looking to lease 12 wide-body freighters. They are scouring the market for any aircraft they can find. We even received a request to our website,” Marc Schlossberg, executive vice president of Air Freight at Unique, told Reuters.

Temu told Reuters in a statement that it is looking for sellers based in the US and Europe “to reduce shipping distances and delivery times” to shoppers.

Airlines and freight forwarders are also contemplating how much capacity to set aside for Temu and Shein’s business as shipments and prices fluctuate.

Niall van de Wouw, chief air freight officer for air and ocean freight rate benchmarking platform Xeneta, said fast-fashion brands are causing a “trade imbalance” with large amounts of cargo leaving Hong Kong but merchandise volumes being “much lower on the journey back across the Pacific.”

The impact of China’s new e-commerce giants is “game-changing,” said Schlossberg. “They ... are emerging as the most important drivers in the industry.”

By Arriana McLymore, Markus Wacket, Lisa Barrington, Casey Hall, Sophie Yu and Valerie Insinna; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Matthew Lewis)

The Body Shop is to cut 300 jobs at its head office while almost half of its 198 stores in the UK could close with the loss of hundreds more jobs as the business battles for survival.

Administrators told staff on Tuesday that seven stores would close immediately, with more set to follow, while numbers at its offices in London and Littlehampton in West Sussex were being cut by 40 percent to 400. It is not clear if jobs at the group’s warehouse, also in Littlehampton, will be affected.

The retailer, which employs more than 2,200 people in the UK, called in administrators last week, less than two months after being taken over by the restructuring specialist Aurelius. It is understood The Body Shop’s entire team focused on activism – a key part of the ethical group’s identity – has been ousted.

The seven stores that will shut on Tuesday are: Surrey Quays (London), Oxford Street near Bond Street (London), Canary Wharf (London), Cheapside (London), Nuneaton (Warwickshire), Ashford Town Centre (Kent) and Bristol Queens Road.

The joint administrators Tony Wright, Geoff Rowley and Alastair Massey from FRP said: “After years of unprofitability and following a full evaluation of The Body Shop’s UK business, the joint administrators have concluded that the current store portfolio mix is no longer viable. As an immediate step, seven stores will close today, with additional closures to follow. It is expected that at the conclusion of the restructuring, more than half of The Body Shop’s 198 UK stores will remain open.

“A reduced store footprint will coincide with a renewed focus on the brand’s products, online sales channels and wholesale strategies, bringing the brand in line with industry peers and supporting a return to financial stability.”

In total, 1,600 people work in the retailer’s stores, so almost 800 jobs could go if the group closes half the estate.

The administrators said the head office job cuts were part of creating “a forward-looking strategy and more nimble, financially viable model” and that swift action would “help re-energise The Body Shop’s iconic brand.” They added that relationships with key franchise and wholesale partners in Asia, the Middle East and Europe would be “a cornerstone of future success.”

Staff said they would have to apply to the government-backed Redundancy Payments Service for their payoffs, with some having spent served decades at the ethical business.

“It’s a shocking way to treat people,” one insider said.

It is understood that most departments have been hit by at least some job cuts, including IT, marketing, sustainability and those working on the European websites, as well as the activism team.

Aurelius is understood to be the main creditor, with secured debt that will ensure it gets paid by administrators before most other creditors. It is expected to take back the chain, but only after many shops have closed and jobs been cut.

The Body Shop was bought by Aurelius for an initial payment of £117 million in a deal agreed in November and finalised in early January.

The future of the group’s Irish, mainland European and Japanese divisions also hangs in the balance after being sold to a group called Alma24, whose main director has close links to Aurelius. The German arm of The Body Shop, which has about 60 stores, was put into insolvency last week and workers in Belgium, where there are about 16 stores, have been told it is also heading for insolvency.

The Body Shop’s fair trade suppliers who work with local communities of growers and producers from the Amazon to Africa say they have been left with more than $1 million worth of beauty ingredients that may now never be ordered or paid for by the beauty chain.

The Body Shop has passed through three owners since it was sold by its founder, Anita Roddick, shortly before her death in 2007.

Roddick, who set up the business in Brighton in 1976, campaigned against animal testing of cosmetics and promoted natural products sourced ethically in a way that would support small producers around the world.

She shocked fans of the brand by selling up to L’Oréal, the cosmetics multinational that owns Maybelline and Garnier, for £652 million.

The brand was then sold on to the Brazilian natural cosmetics group Natura, which already owned the Australian Aesop beauty brand, for €1 billion in 2017. After Natura built up debts in buying the home-selling cosmetics group Avon, it quickly sold off Aesop and then The Body Shop.

By Sarah Butler