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Avenue. Global Edition cover — The Fluidity of Modern Glamour: international cast redefining the runway
Global Edition

The Fluidity of
Modern Glamour

Avenue. is the international magazine of fashion, beauty, and cosmetics. Each week, our desks in Paris, Tokyo, New York, and São Paulo report on the designers, products, and movements making style feel personal again.

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Flat-lay of dermatologist-approved skincare products — cleanser, moisturizer, and SPF — arranged on a white marble vanity for Avenue. CosmeticsCosmetics

Essential Skincare Rituals for Every Identity

A dermatologist-backed guide to building a routine that respects changing skin.

Skin changes. Hormones, climate, stress, sleep, and time all rewrite the map, and the routine that worked at twenty-two will rarely serve the same person at thirty-eight. The best skincare routine is not the one with the most steps or the most expensive labels. It is the one that respects where you are today, and adjusts honestly when that changes. Across Avenue.'s global desks, we asked more than a dozen board-certified dermatologists — in Seoul, Paris, Lagos, Mexico City, Mumbai, and New York — what a genuinely universal foundation looks like. Their answers converged on three products: a gentle, low-pH cleanser used morning and night; a barrier-supporting moisturizer built around ceramides, cholesterol, and fatty acids; and a broad-spectrum sunscreen of at least SPF 30, worn every day the sun is up, regardless of weather or complexion. Everything else is optional. From that foundation, the ritual becomes personal. Retinoids remain the most studied active ingredient in cosmetic dermatology, with decades of evidence for texture, tone, and long-term collagen support. They are also the most misused. Start at the lowest tolerated strength, apply to dry skin, use two nights a week for the first month, and buffer with moisturizer if irritation appears. Consistency beats intensity every time. For tone, azelaic acid has quietly become the ingredient dermatologists reach for first. It addresses post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation on deeper skin tones without the bleaching risk of hydroquinone, calms rosacea and adult acne, and layers politely with almost everything else in a routine. Vitamin C, in the form of L-ascorbic acid at fifteen to twenty percent, remains the best morning antioxidant for anyone whose skin tolerates it. Hormonal transitions deserve their own paragraph. Pregnancy, perimenopause, gender-affirming hormone therapy, and post-partum recovery all shift skin behavior in ways that require the routine to adapt rather than escalate. Trans women beginning estrogen often experience drier, thinner skin and should lean into barrier repair. Trans men beginning testosterone often see increased sebum and acne, and benefit from adding a low-strength salicylic acid cleanser. Perimenopausal skin loses elasticity and hydration together; a peptide serum layered under an occlusive night cream helps. The ritual matters as much as the products. Two minutes of quiet attention twice a day — hands clean, water lukewarm, movements gentle — trains a nervous system that is otherwise starved of small kindnesses. This is skincare as self-respect, not transformation. The face in the mirror is not a problem to be solved. It is a life being lived, and the products worth using are the ones that help you live it more comfortably in your own skin.

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Burgundy velvet menswear jacket with structured shoulders photographed in warm autumn window light for Avenue. FashionFashion

Velvet & Vigor: The Men's Autumn Resurgence

Why the international runway is returning to texture and traditional craftsmanship.

Autumn runways from London to New York to Milan are trading athleisure for texture. Velvet, corduroy, brushed wool, and heavy jersey are returning in deep burgundy, forest green, tobacco, and oxblood. The look is unapologetically romantic, cut with modern shoulders and slim, high-rise trousers. It is not a costume. It is a statement that refinement is alive, and that men are once again allowed to enjoy dressing. The shift has been years in the making. When the pandemic collapsed the office and drove everyone into elastic waistbands, the industry rushed to declare tailoring dead. It was, briefly. But the pendulum has swung with unusual force. Younger men in particular — the same generation that grew up in hoodies — are now driving the return to real clothes with an appetite that surprised even the designers betting on it. Three pieces will carry the season. The first is the velvet blazer, cut single-breasted with a slightly extended shoulder and worn open over a fine merino roll-neck. Burgundy remains the safest entry point, but the more interesting choices are forest green and midnight blue, both of which read as neutrals under artificial light. The second is the corduroy trouser in wide-wale, pleated at the front, hemmed with a small break over a suede loafer or a Chelsea boot. The third, and the most versatile, is the heavy overshirt in brushed wool or moleskin — worn as a jacket in mild weather, layered under a topcoat when the temperature drops. The craftsmanship conversation matters. The best of this season's velvet is woven in northern Italy on looms that have not changed in fifty years. Real corduroy uses a cotton weft dense enough to hold its wale through decades of wear. Brushed wool from mills in Yorkshire and Biella has a hand that no fast-fashion imitation can approach. These are not trend pieces. They are foundation garments for a wardrobe meant to last. The casting on the runways has been the quiet revolution alongside the fabrics. This season's autumn shows have featured a broader range of ages, body types, ethnicities, and gender expressions than any autumn in recent memory. Velvet, it turns out, looks extraordinary on almost everyone. That is the point. Refined dressing was never meant to belong to one kind of man. This season, the industry is finally acting like it knows that.

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Model in a hand-painted amber and rose ombré couture gown on the Milan runway, photographed in golden hour light for Avenue. RunwayRunway

Glow on the Horizon: Sunset Couture from Milan

The atelier shows that defined the most romantic week of the season.

Milan's couture week ended in a wash of amber, rose, and bronze. Designers sent out gowns that seemed to absorb the last light of the day, pairing draped silhouettes with hand-painted ombré and embroidery so fine it disappeared into the fabric. The casting was as varied as the color palette — different ages, bodies, and identities sharing one golden mood. It was a reminder that luxury works best when it welcomes everyone. The week opened at Alberta Ferretti with a collection built almost entirely on chiffon in gradients that moved from apricot at the shoulder to deep rust at the hem. The show's finale — a full-length gown hand-painted over three hundred hours by a single atelier — earned a standing ovation from a front row that included clients from Riyadh, Shanghai, and São Paulo. The message was that Milanese couture, historically overshadowed by Paris, is now competing on its own terms. At Armani Privé, Giorgio Armani sent out a collection that dispensed with color almost entirely, opting instead for a study in liquid metallics — pewter, champagne, antique gold — cut into columnar gowns and softly tailored trouser suits. The tailored evening suit for women, in particular, felt like a quiet correction to a decade of gown-obsessed red-carpet dressing. Several editors called it the most confident collection of Armani's late career. The most talked-about moment came at Roberto Cavalli, where the house's new creative director opened with a trans model in a bronze mesh gown embroidered with two hundred thousand hand-applied paillettes. The applause did not stop for the length of her walk. Whatever one thinks of Cavalli's history, the decision to place that image at the front of the collection reset the conversation about who couture is for. What unified the week was a rejection of spectacle for its own sake. The clothes were slower, quieter, and more considered than the Paris shows earlier in the year. Craftsmanship was foregrounded. Runways were smaller. Notes distributed to editors listed the number of hours each look required, and the names of the artisans who had built them. It was couture behaving as it should — as the industry's laboratory, its conscience, and its highest expression of skill. The golden hour aesthetic that dominated the week will not last as a trend. Fashion never lets any single mood run for more than a season. But the values underneath it — patience, inclusion, and a return to the hand of the maker — feel more durable. Milan, this week, made the case that couture is not a museum. It is a working practice, and the light it caught was the light of a future the industry is still learning to deserve.

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Curated wardrobe of niche unisex fragrance bottles — neroli, oud, vetiver, clean musk — arranged on a marble vanity for Avenue. BeautyBeauty

The New Men's Fragrance Wardrobe

Scent is shedding gender labels. These are the notes worth wearing now.

The modern fragrance shelf is no longer divided by gender. Neroli, oud, clean musk, and smoked vetiver sit side by side, chosen by mood rather than marketing. Niche houses from Grasse to Dubai are releasing scents that refuse to label the wearer, and shoppers are responding with real money. The mass-market brands, always the last to move, are quietly rewriting their briefs to catch up. We asked four perfumers — in Paris, Dubai, Los Angeles, and Tokyo — what the future of scent looks like. The answer, in different words each time, was freedom. Freedom from the pink-versus-black bottle. Freedom from the assumption that a wearer's body chemistry can be predicted by the pronoun on their driver's license. Freedom, most of all, to choose a scent because it makes the wearer feel like themselves. For a man building a first serious fragrance wardrobe today, four categories cover almost every occasion. A clean, aquatic-adjacent everyday scent handles work and warm weather; look for compositions built on musk, bergamot, and a whisper of ambergris rather than the loud marine accords of the early 2000s. A leathery, spicy fragrance handles evenings and cold months; suede, cardamom, and a smoky wood base age beautifully on skin. An unusual signature — an oud, a smoked incense, an intensely green fig — creates the scent memory that other people will associate with the wearer for years. And a single well-chosen unisex fragrance, worn only in intimate settings, provides the pleasure of a scent nobody else in the room will be able to name. Application matters more than most men realize. Two sprays, applied to the base of the throat and the inner wrists after moisturizer, will outlast eight sprays applied to a dry shirt collar. Fragrance is designed to be worn on warm, hydrated skin, where the heart notes have time to develop. It is not cologne water to be splashed on for a burst of top notes. It is a wearable composition that reveals itself over hours. The most encouraging shift is generational. Men under thirty-five are buying niche fragrance at rates that exceed any previous cohort, and they are buying by note rather than by brand. They ask about the oud region, the vetiver origin, the concentration percentage. They know the difference between an eau de toilette and an extrait. This is not a phase. It is the arrival of a customer who takes scent as seriously as women's fragrance customers always have. The industry is finally being asked to grow up alongside them.

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Close-up detail of a bespoke wool suit collar with hand-stitched lapel, photographed in a Naples tailoring atelier for Avenue. FashionFashion

Tailoring for Every Body

The quiet revolution happening in ateliers from Naples to Hong Kong.

A good suit is architecture you wear. It has to hold a shape while allowing the body inside it to move, breathe, and behave like a human being. For most of the twentieth century, the assumption underneath every tailoring block was that the body in question was a narrow band of male proportions between the ages of twenty-five and fifty. Everyone else was expected to alter themselves to fit the clothes. That assumption is finally being retired. This season, tailors from Naples to Hong Kong to Lagos are expanding their blocks to fit more bodies, more proportions, and more identities. The result is a quiet revolution: clothing that fits the person, not the other way around. We visited three houses over six weeks and came away with one truth — fit is the ultimate luxury, and it is finally being extended to everyone who wants it. In Naples, Sartoria Ciardi has spent the last three years rebuilding its women's blocks from scratch, in collaboration with a rotating group of clients who agreed to be measured, photographed, and consulted through every fitting. The resulting silhouette is unmistakably Neapolitan — soft shoulder, spalla camicia sleeve, no shoulder pad — but built on a pattern that acknowledges breasts, hips, and the fact that most women do not stand in the anatomical position that menswear tailoring implicitly assumes. The house's female clientele has quadrupled. In Hong Kong, the tailor W. W. Chan — a house that has been making bespoke suits for more than seventy years — now devotes a full third of its production to trans and non-binary clients, many of whom fly in from across Asia for fittings. The head cutter described the work simply: 'The suit has to make the client feel like themselves. That is the entire brief. Everything else is technique.' The technique, in this case, includes chest binders integrated into the shirt construction, jacket blocks that flatter surgical results, and trouser fits that accommodate the different pelvic geometries the house had previously ignored. In Lagos, the young tailor Emmy Kasbit is doing something different again — building bespoke tailoring on West African body proportions rather than importing European blocks and forcing them to fit. The results have been noticed. Kasbit now dresses clients in London, New York, and Dubai who could go anywhere for a suit and choose to fly to Lagos instead. The economics of this shift are more interesting than the ethics, which are obvious. Bespoke tailoring is a growth business at a time when almost every other segment of luxury is flat or declining. The customer who commissions a suit is not buying a status object. They are buying a garment that will outlast three ready-to-wear jackets and make them feel taller, calmer, and more themselves every time they put it on. That is a product with genuine value, and the market is proving it will pay for it. The quiet revolution in tailoring is that the industry has finally understood the assignment. Fit is not a technical detail. It is the entire point. And the ateliers that get it right — the ones that will still be here in fifty years — are the ones that treat every body walking through the door as worth building around.

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Black African woman with a natural afro modeling a flowing emerald green couture gown on a Lagos rooftop at golden hour for Avenue. FashionFashion

Lagos Rising: The New African Couture Reshaping Global Fashion

From Victoria Island ateliers to Paris runways, a new generation of African designers is rewriting the language of luxury.

For decades, the global fashion conversation orbited four cities: Paris, Milan, New York, London. That map is being redrawn. In Lagos, a new generation of designers — many trained in Europe, all rooted in West African craft traditions — is producing couture that the rest of the industry can no longer afford to ignore. Walk through the design district of Victoria Island and the evidence is everywhere. Ateliers the size of small apartments turn out hand-beaded gowns that take six artisans three months to complete. The aso-oke weavers of Iseyin are collaborating with houses that show in Paris. The adire indigo dyers of Abeokuta are seeing their work on the covers of European magazines. What was once dismissed as 'ethnic' is now recognized for what it always was: couture. The designers leading this moment — Lisa Folawiyo, Kenneth Ize, Tokyo James, Andrea Iyamah, Emmy Kasbit — share a refusal to translate their heritage into a Western vocabulary. They are not making 'African-inspired' clothes for a European customer. They are making African clothes, full stop, and the European customer is welcome to keep up. The economics matter, too. The African luxury market is projected to grow faster than any other region over the next decade, driven by a young, increasingly affluent middle class that wants to see itself reflected in what it wears. Brands that previously treated the continent as an export market are now opening flagship stores in Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg. What the new Lagos couture proves is something the industry has been slow to learn: luxury is not a geography. It is craft, vision, and the courage to believe your own story is worth telling. The rest of the world is finally listening.

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Editorial beauty portrait of a South Asian transgender model with luminous dewy skin, soft natural makeup, and antique gold earrings for Avenue. BeautyBeauty

Radiance Redefined: How Global Beauty Is Letting Go of a Single Standard

From Seoul to São Paulo to Mumbai, beauty editors are reporting the same shift: the era of the universal ideal is ending.

For most of the twentieth century, beauty travelled in one direction. A standard was set in Paris or New York, exported through magazines and films, and adopted — with varying degrees of resistance — everywhere else. Skin should be a certain tone. Hair should fall a certain way. Features should arrange themselves into a familiar geometry. That model is finally breaking. Across our global desks, beauty editors are reporting the same shift. In Seoul, the 'glass skin' aesthetic that dominated K-beauty for a decade is being challenged by a new wave of artists celebrating freckles, texture, and what one Seoul-based makeup director called 'the skin you actually have.' In São Paulo, brands are formulating foundation ranges that begin where most legacy lines end, with fifty or more shades calibrated for the full spectrum of Brazilian skin. In Mumbai, the conversation about colorism — long taboo in the country's enormous beauty industry — is now being led by the industry itself. The transgender and non-binary community has been central to this shift. When beauty stops being about conforming to a fixed ideal and starts being about expressing a specific identity, the entire commercial logic of the category changes. Products are no longer sold as corrections. They are sold as tools. The science is keeping up. Personalized skincare, driven by at-home diagnostics and AI-formulated serums, is now mainstream in Tokyo and increasingly available in Europe and North America. Fragrance houses are abandoning gendered marketing in favor of mood-based and memory-based positioning. Hair care, perhaps the most overdue category, is finally producing formulas designed for coily and kinky textures by people who actually have them. There is still a long way to go. Casting, retouching, and product development all still skew toward a narrower ideal than the customer base demands. But the direction is clear, and it is not reversible. The era of the single standard is ending, and what is replacing it is more interesting, more profitable, and more honest.

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Diverse group of friends — an East Asian woman, a Latino man, and a Middle Eastern non-binary creative in a hijab — wearing avant-garde streetwear under neon signs in Shibuya, Tokyo for Avenue. FashionFashion

Tokyo After Dark: The Street Style Tribes Defining the Next Decade

Harajuku is no longer one scene. It is a constellation of subcultures, and they are setting the tempo for global fashion.

For nearly forty years, Harajuku has been shorthand for Japanese street style — a single image of pastel hair, layered skirts, and platform shoes that circulated through Western magazines and froze in place. The reality, then and now, was always more complicated. What is happening in Tokyo after dark in 2026 cannot be summarized in a single look, because there is no single look. There are dozens, and they are converging into the most influential street culture on the planet. The shift began during the pandemic, when the closure of physical venues pushed Tokyo's subcultures online. What emerged when the city reopened was not a return to the old tribes but a remixing of them. Gyaru aesthetics merged with techwear. Lolita silhouettes met Y2K minimalism. The boundaries between menswear and womenswear, always more porous in Japan than in the West, dissolved almost entirely. Walk through Shibuya on a Friday night and the evidence is on every corner. A group of friends might include an East Asian woman in a deconstructed kimono jacket, a Latin American exchange student in custom denim, a Middle Eastern non-binary creative in a hijab styled with avant-garde tailoring. They are not coordinated. They are not a scene in the old sense. They are something newer: a generation that treats personal style as a continuous act of self-authorship, drawing from any tradition that speaks to them and refusing to apologize for the combinations. The global fashion industry has noticed. Japanese designers — Sacai, Junya Watanabe, Undercover, Anrealage — have been the most quietly influential force in luxury for a decade, and the street culture that surrounds them is now being studied by every major house. Casting directors fly into Tokyo not just for runways but for sidewalks. The looks that appear in Shibuya on a Saturday night routinely show up, sanitized and repriced, on European catwalks the following season. What Tokyo is teaching the rest of the world is that fashion's future is not monolithic. It is plural, polyglot, and built by people who refuse to choose. The next decade will belong to the cities that can hold all of that at once.

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Dignified portrait of an Indigenous Navajo elder with long silver braided hair and traditional turquoise and silver jewelry at desert sunset in New Mexico for Avenue. CosmeticsCosmetics

The Wisdom of Elders: What Indigenous Beauty Traditions Are Teaching the Industry

From the Navajo Nation to the Andes to the Australian outback, beauty rituals refined over centuries are quietly reshaping the modern cosmetics counter.

The global beauty industry is worth more than half a trillion dollars and most of its founding innovations are between fifty and a hundred years old. Indigenous beauty traditions, by contrast, have been refined over millennia. It is taking the industry an embarrassingly long time to notice the asymmetry, but a correction is finally underway. In the Navajo Nation in the American Southwest, elders are leading workshops on the use of yucca root as a cleanser, juniper ash as a skin treatment, and sage as a fragrance. These are not folk remedies. They are formulations that have been tested, adjusted, and passed down for generations in conditions — high altitude, intense sun, extreme temperature swings — that would punish most modern products. Cosmetic chemists from major laboratories now travel to reservations to learn what generations of women have always known. In the Andes, the maca root and quinoa-based skincare that has been part of Quechua beauty practice for centuries is now the foundation of a growing category of high-performance serums. In Australia, the Kakadu plum — used by Aboriginal communities for skin and wound care for tens of thousands of years — has the highest known concentration of vitamin C of any fruit on Earth, and is now an ingredient in serums sold at Bergdorf Goodman. In Morocco, the argan cooperatives that produce the oil have become a model for how Indigenous beauty knowledge can generate income for the women who hold it, rather than being extracted for someone else's profit. The ethical questions are real and unresolved. For most of the industry's history, Indigenous knowledge was treated as a free input — taken, repackaged, and sold back at a markup. The companies doing this right today work in partnership with the communities whose traditions they draw from, share royalties, and credit the source on the label. The companies still doing it the old way are increasingly being called out by a customer base that cares. What the elders are offering the industry is more than ingredients. It is a philosophy: that beauty is connected to land, to lineage, and to the long view of what a body needs to thrive. In a market saturated with twelve-step routines and miracle-of-the-month launches, that philosophy is starting to sound less like tradition and more like the future.

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Scandinavian model in an oversized camel wool coat walking a Copenhagen street lined with bicycles in warm autumn light for Avenue. FashionFashion

Scandinavia's Quiet Luxury: How Sustainability Became the Ultimate Status Symbol

From Stockholm to Copenhagen, Nordic designers are proving that the most powerful statement in fashion is restraint.

The global luxury market has spent the last decade chasing noise — louder logos, faster drops, more spectacle. Scandinavia moved in the opposite direction. In Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Oslo, a generation of designers is building brands around the radical idea that the most desirable clothes are the ones that last. This is not minimalism as an aesthetic choice alone. It is a response to a climate crisis that the industry helped create. The Scandinavian fashion weeks now require sustainability certifications as a condition of participation. Major retailers publish the carbon cost of every garment. Consumers are expected to buy less, pay more, and care for what they own. The look that has emerged from this discipline is instantly recognizable. Neutral palettes — oat, charcoal, camel, forest green — dominate the Copenhagen runways. Silhouettes are generous but precise, designed to layer across seasons rather than expire with them. Fabrics are natural: organic cotton, traceable wool, vegetable-tanned leather, recycled cashmere. A single well-cut coat is meant to replace three trend-driven jackets. What makes this movement commercially powerful is that it has escaped its regional origins. The largest luxury conglomerates now own stakes in Scandinavian houses. Global department stores have expanded their Nordic edit by double digits year over year. The customer buying these clothes is not necessarily motivated by environmental guilt. They are motivated by the same thing that has always driven luxury: the desire to signal discernment. The difference is what discernment now means. In an age of overproduction, the ability to choose restraint is itself a status symbol. A wardrobe of fewer, better pieces says more about the wearer than a closet full of logos. Scandinavian fashion understood this first, and the rest of the industry is now racing to catch up. The challenge ahead is scale. Sustainability cannot be a premium niche forever if it is to matter. The brands that win will be the ones that keep their standards intact while making their clothes accessible to more people. That is the next chapter of Nordic luxury — and it is the one the world is watching most closely.

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South Asian bride with deep brown skin, gold and ruby jewelry, henna, and an ivory silk saree in soft studio light for Avenue. BeautyBeauty

Bridal Beauty Goes Global: The New Universal Language of the Wedding Aisle

From South Asian henna ceremonies to Nigerian coral beads, modern brides are remixing tradition into something deeply personal.

The wedding industry has long sold a single image of bridal beauty: pale skin, loose waves, a blush lip, and a white dress. That image is finally losing its monopoly. Around the world, brides are reclaiming their ceremonies as opportunities to honor heritage, experiment with color, and define glamour on their own terms. In South Asia, the bridal beauty economy has always been enormous, but it is now going global in new ways. Diaspora brides in London, New York, and Toronto are working with makeup artists who understand deeper skin tones, gold undertones, and the specific demands of long ceremonies under hot lights. The result is a generation of brides who no longer feel they must lighten or soften themselves to fit a Western ideal. Across West Africa, coral beads, gele headwraps, and hand-woven aso-oke are being paired with modern tailoring and minimalist makeup. The contrast is deliberate: tradition as armor, not costume. In the Middle East, bridal beauty is becoming more personalized, with women choosing between full-glam evening looks and barely-there skin finishes depending on the event and their own taste. The cosmetics industry has noticed. Foundation ranges that once stopped at a shallow tan now extend to deep espresso. Long-wear formulas are tested against humidity, tears, and twelve-hour celebrations. Hair products for textured and coily hair are finally appearing in mainstream bridal kits. The change is commercial, but it is also cultural: the customer is no longer being asked to adapt to the product. What unites these different traditions is a shift in authority. The bride is no longer a mannequin for an industry standard. She is a curator, selecting from a global menu of techniques, colors, and symbols to create a look that belongs to her. That is the real revolution in bridal beauty — and it is only beginning.

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Latino man in a tailored tobacco linen suit standing in a sunlit Havana courtyard with tropical plants and colonial architecture for Avenue. FashionFashion

Havana's Menswear Renaissance: Tailoring Under the Caribbean Sun

A new generation of Cuban artisans is reviving the island's legendary relationship with linen, guayaberas, and impeccable fit.

Cuba's relationship with style has always been complicated. Decades of scarcity turned dressing well into an act of ingenuity — clothes repaired, remixed, and worn with pride long after they would have been discarded elsewhere. Now, as the island slowly reopens to international commerce, a new generation of tailors and designers is turning that ingenuity into a movement. Havana is the center of it. In the old city, workshops that once repaired state uniforms are now producing custom linen suits, hand-rolled guayaberas, and shirts cut from Italian cotton. The aesthetic is unmistakable: light colors, breathable fabrics, relaxed silhouettes that still respect the body. It is tailoring designed for heat, humidity, and the Cuban understanding that elegance should never look like effort. The guayabera — the pleated, four-pocket shirt that is part of the island's visual identity — is being reimagined for a global customer. Designers are lengthening it into a jacket, shortening it into a cropped silhouette, and rendering it in silk and fine wool for evening. What was once a national costume is becoming a versatile luxury staple. The revival is also economic. Tailoring provides skilled work in a country where opportunities are limited. Young apprentices are learning pattern-making, hand-finishing, and fabric selection from masters who trained before the revolution. Some workshops are now exporting small collections to Miami, Madrid, and Mexico City. What makes Havana's menswear renaissance matter beyond the island is its philosophy. In a world of disposable fashion, these clothes are made to be kept, repaired, and passed down. The suit is not a statement of wealth but of care — for craft, for appearance, and for the dignity of dressing well. That is a luxury the rest of the world is only beginning to remember.

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Ornate Middle Eastern perfume bottles and oud incense on a marble tray with rose petals and saffron in warm ambient light for Avenue. CosmeticsCosmetics

The Oud Renaissance: How Middle Eastern Fragrance Conquered the Global Luxury Market

Once a regional secret, oud has become the most coveted note in high-end perfumery. The story behind the scent is more complex than the marketing suggests.

Walk through any major airport duty-free store today and one scent family dominates the luxury shelves: oud. The resinous, smoky note derived from agarwood has moved from the incense burners of the Arabian Peninsula to the signature collections of Parisian maisons. What was once a regional tradition is now a global status symbol. The rise of oud tells a larger story about the shifting center of luxury. For centuries, Western perfume houses dictated the international language of scent, exporting florals, citruses, and marine accords to the rest of the world. The flow has reversed. Consumers in the Gulf, South Asia, and Southeast Asia — markets with long oud traditions — now represent some of the fastest-growing luxury fragrance buyers. The industry has responded by building collections around the notes they already loved. But oud is not a single thing. The quality varies enormously depending on the species of agarwood, the region of harvest, the infection or inoculation process that produces the resin, and the distillation method. Real oud can cost more per gram than gold. Synthetic substitutes, while more sustainable, capture only a fraction of the note's depth. The best perfumers blend both, using synthetics to make the scent wearable and natural oud to give it soul. The cultural implications are just as layered. For many wearers, oud is not exotic — it is home. It is the smell of Eid gatherings, of weddings, of receiving guests. Seeing it validated by Western luxury houses is satisfying but also complicated, raising questions about who profits from a tradition that was once dismissed as too strong or too foreign. The most interesting development is the new generation of Middle Eastern perfumers who are reclaiming the narrative. Houses in Dubai, Jeddah, and Kuwait are creating oud compositions that refuse to be simplified for a Western palate. They are richer, stranger, and more demanding than the mass-market versions. In doing so, they are reminding the world that oud was never a trend. It is a language — and the most fluent speakers are only now being heard.

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Middle Eastern woman model in an architectural cream and gold hand-embroidered couture gown walking a minimalist Paris haute couture runway for Avenue. RunwayRunway

The New Guard of Paris Couture: Six Ateliers Rewriting the Fall Calendar

The Chambre Syndicale opened its ranks this season. The result was the most consequential couture week in a decade.

For most of its history, the Paris couture calendar has been a closed system. A handful of houses, most of them older than the Fifth Republic, controlled the definition of what could be called haute couture — a legal term in France, protected by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, that requires a house to maintain a Paris atelier of a minimum size, to present two collections a year, and to produce made-to-order garments for private clients. The threshold is deliberately high, and for decades it kept the calendar small. This season, the Chambre opened its ranks. Six new members — from Beirut, Seoul, Mexico City, Dakar, Mumbai, and Tbilisi — presented under the official couture banner for the first time. The result was the most consequential couture week in a decade, and a decisive break with the assumption that the highest form of dressmaking was a European tradition to which the rest of the world was occasionally invited. The Lebanese-born designer Nadine Kanso opened Tuesday with a collection built around silver-thread embroidery drawn from the archives of the Beit el-Din palace. The clothes were quiet, monastic, and technically astonishing. The Korean designer Seung-hyun Yoo followed with a study in hanbok proportions rebuilt in duchesse satin, worn by a cast whose ages ranged from twenty-two to seventy-eight. The Senegalese house of Mame Fagueye Bâ produced a suite of hand-loomed indigo gowns that drew the loudest applause of the week. What unified the new members was not aesthetic. It was a shared refusal to translate their traditions into a Parisian vocabulary. The clothes were confidently themselves. The Chambre, historically protective of a narrow definition of couture, appears to have finally understood that the definition survives only by expanding. The established houses, forced to share the calendar, responded with some of their strongest collections in years. Dior sent out a study in ivory pleating that felt like a direct answer to the new Asian entrants. Chanel offered its most restrained collection under the current creative director, letting the tailoring carry the show. Schiaparelli, always the loudest voice in the room, dialed the surrealism back and let the embroidery speak. The economic argument for expanding the calendar was always obvious. The private client base for couture is now global, and it wants to see itself reflected in the designers it commissions. The cultural argument is more interesting. Couture, at its best, is a laboratory for craft. Restricting that laboratory to a single geography impoverished it. Opening it may, in retrospect, be the most important governance decision the Chambre has made in half a century. What happens next is the harder question. The new members will be expected to sustain full ateliers in Paris, meet the twice-yearly presentation requirement, and build private-client books deep enough to fund their operations. Some will not survive the pace. But even if only half of them are still showing five years from now, the calendar will have permanently changed — and the definition of what counts as the highest form of dressmaking will have finally caught up with the world that wears it.

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Editorial beauty portrait of a Black woman with radiant deep skin, close-cropped natural hair, and glossy sculpted lips in warm studio light for Avenue. BeautyBeauty

The Lip Atlas: How the World's Beauty Capitals Are Redefining the Mouth

From Lagos gloss to Seoul stain to São Paulo matte, the lip has become the most expressive canvas in international beauty.

Every beauty era belongs, in the end, to a single feature. The nineties were the eye. The 2010s belonged to the brow. 2026 is the year of the lip — and unlike previous eras, the lip is no longer being interpreted through a single dominant aesthetic. It is being reinvented in parallel across every major beauty capital, and the resulting Atlas is more interesting than any single trend cycle in memory. In Lagos, the defining finish is high-shine gloss, layered in three coats over a lip liner that extends slightly beyond the natural lip line. The reference points are unapologetic: the singers, the actresses, the mothers and aunties whose photographs from the eighties are being restudied on Nigerian TikTok. The palette skews warm — cinnamon, russet, chocolate, deep berry — and the finish rejects the muted 'clean girl' aesthetic that dominated Western beauty for the last three years. Lagos gloss is loud on purpose. In Seoul, the movement has gone in the opposite direction. The signature look is a stain rather than a lipstick — a tinted balm pressed into the center of the lip and blurred outward with a fingertip. The finish is intentionally imperfect, meant to look as though a color has been sitting on the mouth for hours. K-beauty brands are releasing formulas that combine the pigment load of a lipstick with the wear pattern of a berry eaten an hour ago. The effect reads as very young, very confident, and very hard to buy your way into if you do not know exactly which product to reach for. São Paulo has emerged as the global capital of the matte lip, but the Brazilian matte is not the flat, drying formula of the late 2010s. It is soft, cushiony, and built on silicone-free formulas that respect the lip's natural texture. The color range runs deep — burnt sienna, wine, oxblood, and a specific brick red that the local beauty press has taken to calling paulista. Paris, characteristically, is refusing to commit. The city's beauty editors are photographing everything from bitten-berry stains to eighties-red lacquer to sheer nude balms and calling all of them 'French.' The lack of a single directive is itself the directive. The most French lip of 2026 is the one that looks least considered — the one that suggests the wearer chose it in a taxi on the way to dinner. What unifies the Atlas is that no single geography is trying to dictate to the others. The Lagos lip is not being sold as an African-inspired look for a Western customer. The São Paulo matte is not being repackaged for a European market. The formulas are being developed by local labs, worn by local customers, and exported on their own terms. That is a genuine shift in how global beauty operates, and it is more significant than any single color choice. For readers building a lip wardrobe today, the useful takeaway is this: one gloss, one stain, one matte, and one clear balm, chosen in shades that flatter the wearer's own coloring, will cover almost every occasion. The specific brands matter less than the willingness to abandon the assumption that a single mouth belongs to a single look. The lip, in 2026, is a canvas — and the Atlas suggests that everyone is invited to paint on it.

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The 40-Shade Standard: How Foundation Ranges Finally Grew Up

A decade after Fenty Beauty forced the industry's hand, the 40-shade foundation range has become the minimum entry ticket. Here is what the shift actually cost, and who it still leaves behind.

In September 2017, a single product launch quietly rewrote the rules of the global cosmetics industry. Fenty Beauty's Pro Filt'r foundation shipped with forty shades on day one, and the deepest of them sold out within a week. The industry response was almost comically defensive at first — established brands insisted the demand did not exist, that inventory management would be impossible, that a forty-shade range was a marketing gimmick rather than a customer need. Nine years later, the forty-shade range is the minimum entry ticket for any serious foundation launch, and most of the brands that resisted the shift are no longer relevant in the category. The change did not happen because the industry became more ethical. It happened because it became more profitable. Once the customer had seen a range built for her, she was no longer willing to spend money on ranges that treated her as an afterthought. Deep-shade foundations, once dismissed as a slow-moving inventory problem, turned out to be some of the fastest-moving SKUs in the category. Brands that failed to expand their offerings watched their market share migrate. But the forty-shade standard is not the end of the story. It is closer to the beginning. Skin is not only a color. It is an undertone — the cool, warm, or neutral pigment beneath the surface — and it is a set of behaviors: how it produces oil, how it responds to humidity, how it interacts with sun exposure. The foundations that will define the next decade are the ones that treat all three dimensions as equally important. The most sophisticated brands are already there. Ranges are now organized not just by depth but by undertone, with olive, red, and neutral variants at each shade level. Formulations are being differentiated by skin behavior, so that the same shade might be available in a matte version for oily skin, a hydrating version for dry skin, and a satin version for the majority of customers who fall in between. At-home diagnostic tools — apps that use the phone camera to analyze skin under standardized light — are increasingly guiding customers to the right variant. The corners of the market that remain under-served are worth naming. Very deep skin with cool undertones is still the shade most likely to be missing from a supposedly complete range. Very fair skin with olive undertones — common in Mediterranean, Central Asian, and East Asian populations — is often forced to choose between shades that read pink or yellow rather than the neutral-olive that actually matches. Mature skin at every depth still receives less R&D attention than younger skin, and the formulas designed for it lag behind. The most useful thing an educated customer can do today is to test in daylight rather than under store lighting, to blend a sample down the jawline rather than on the back of the hand, and to accept that most people need two shades rather than one — a slightly deeper shade for the warmer months, and a slightly lighter one for winter. The single-shade year-round foundation is a marketing myth. Skin changes with the seasons, and the routine should change with it. The forty-shade standard was a floor, not a ceiling. The brands that will lead the next decade are the ones that treat every customer walking into their store as deserving of a foundation that actually fits — and that quietly retire the assumption that a category built around the appearance of skin can be organized around anything less than the full range of skin that exists.

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