Tag Archives: Fashion

KFC Brazil Wants to Dress You the Way It Dresses Its Chicken

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I love fried chicken as much as the next person. Probably more. So when KFC Brazil announced it was offering to customize your actual clothes with a fabric texture inspired by its iconic crispy coating, I had questions. Not the skeptical kind. More the “can they do that with a tote bag, and if so, when?” kind.

The concept is called the KFC Wardrobe, created by Lola\TBWA Brasil. The logic behind it is almost too simple to ignore. KFC’s most recognizable feature, that golden, seasoned crust Colonel Sanders spent a lifetime protecting, shares a lot of DNA with what fashion has always celebrated: something original, textured, and completely impossible to replicate. The KFC Wardrobe takes that parallel seriously and makes it completely, earnestly literal.

Designer: Lola\TBWA Brasil

Here’s how it worked: buy a medium bucket of KFC fried chicken, bring your own clothing to the brand’s flagship store in São Bernardo do Campo, and show your receipt. Eligible items included jackets, coats, jeans, skirts, bucket hats, tote bags, and waist bags. Leave them behind, and within three weeks, they’d come back to your door with a fabric treatment that mimics the texture of fried chicken breading applied to the surface. Crunchier. More textured. Somehow more interesting than before.

The promotion ran for just three days, from March 27 to 29, which makes “limited edition” feel like an understatement. It kicked off during Design Week at BAFU, described as one of São Paulo’s most prominent and respected creative hubs. KFC set the whole thing up as Colonel Sanders’ atelier. An atelier. For a fried chicken brand. I had to read that phrase twice before I could fully commit to it, and then I decided it was actually one of the most correct things anyone has said about fashion in years.

It’s worth noting that KFC has been leaning into fashion for a while now, and with increasing conviction. KFC Australia dropped a streetwear collection during Australia’s Fashion Week in 2023. KFC UK has been particularly active, releasing a ten-piece distressed leather range with Aries and collaborating with designer Sinead Gorey on a London Fashion Week show, both in 2025. At this point, the brand has clearly decided it belongs at the table, and the fashion world has quietly and somewhat bafflingly agreed.

But the KFC Wardrobe does something the earlier drops didn’t. It doesn’t ask you to buy a new KFC product. It asks to work with what you already have. That’s a fundamentally different creative stance. Most brand-adjacent fashion moves are wearable advertisements dressed up in aesthetic language. This one is a genuine collaboration with your existing wardrobe, and that’s more interesting and, honestly, a lot more respectful. KFC isn’t asking you to represent the brand. It’s asking to be part of your look, on your terms.

Fernanda Harb, KFC Brazil’s marketing director, described the initiative as a way to “expand the relationship and closeness between the brand and its customers beyond just food.” Lola\TBWA made that statement mean something real by developing an actual textile treatment, not a printed graphic or an embroidered logo, but a physical crunch-inspired texture applied to fabric. The crispy coating became the design language. That’s a design decision, not just a marketing one, and the difference shows.

The whole thing works because the metaphor at its center is genuinely earned. Fashion has always celebrated what can’t be copied. So has Colonel Sanders, for decades. You can eat KFC your whole life and never come close to the recipe. The KFC Wardrobe takes that same mystery and stitches it into your denim jacket, and that’s a creative idea worth wearing more than once.

KFC Brazil committed to the bit fully and without apology. And now there are people walking around São Paulo in textured, crunch-finished jackets, wearing their taste on their sleeves, quite literally. Fashion has come full circle, and I’ve never been this hungry for what comes next.

The post KFC Brazil Wants to Dress You the Way It Dresses Its Chicken first appeared on Yanko Design.

Tati Ferrucio’s Onda Clog Is the Most Geologically Correct Shoe Ever Made

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The Yeezy Foam Runner opened a strange and genuinely productive door in footwear design, proving that a monolithic, organically sculpted clog could capture serious cultural attention. Tati Ferrucio‘s Onda walks through that same door but ends up somewhere quite different. Where the Foam Runner borrows loosely from athletic heritage, the Onda goes fully geological, its dense flowing ridges reading more like layered sandstone strata than anything borrowed from a sportswear archive. The comparison is worth making once and then setting aside, because the Onda has its own logic and it holds together well on its own terms.

That logic starts with landscape. Ferrucio drew directly from waves, sand patterns, stone surfaces, and tree bark, treating nature as the original generative designer and asking what footwear would look like if it followed the same rules. The cutouts are sculpted voids, not punched holes, and the ribbing on the sole wraps continuously into the upper so there is no visual seam between base and body. It reads as a single carved object, the kind of thing you might find in a tide pool if tide pools produced wearable foam.

Designer: Tati Ferrucio

Ferrucio developed the Onda using Vizcom, an AI-assisted design platform that takes a designer’s sketch and generates a field of iterated possibilities rather than a single resolved outcome. The workflow is worth pausing on because it explains something about the result. The Onda does not look like a design that was decided in one session; it looks like a form that accumulated, the way sediment does, layer by layer under consistent pressure from the same directional force. Just FYI, Vizcom did not generate the design; Ferrucio directed it, feeding creative intention into each round of iteration and pulling the form toward her reference material until the surface stopped arguing with itself and settled into something coherent.

Positioned along the sides of the upper, the cutouts allow water and sand to escape when moving through wet or granular terrain, which is a functional requirement in a clog built for outdoor use. But structurally, they also reduce material mass without compromising the integrity of the upper, and visually, they create depth in the silhouette that a solid body would not have. The oval void near the heel is particularly well resolved; it sits inside the ribbed surface like a window cut into a canyon wall, framed by ridges on all sides, and gives the rear of the shoe a formal completeness that most clogs never bother to achieve.

Three colorways exist in the current lineup: a grey-blue that photographs like wet stone, a sand beige that almost disappears against the layered rock surfaces in the campaign imagery, and a sage green that reads somewhere between sea glass and weathered copper depending on the light. Each one is photographed in a context that suits it specifically, which is the kind of creative direction that signals a designer who thought carefully about what the object is actually communicating and to whom. The grey-blue sits on a rocky riverbed in shallow water. The beige is shot against sedimentary cliff faces in warm light. The green lands on dry sand with hard shadows. Every environment reinforces the geological reference without stating it out loud.

The Onda is a mere concept at this stage, developed in collaboration with Vizcom as a demonstration of what AI-assisted industrial design can produce when the designer maintains genuine creative authority over the process. Whether it goes into production depends on factors Ferrucio has not specified, but as a design object it makes a coherent and confident argument: that the clog format, for all its utilitarian plainness, has more formal ambition available to it than most brands have been willing to extract.

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The 44-Pocket Coat That Makes You Question Home Itself

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Picture this: you’re standing on a sidewalk with nothing but the clothes on your back. No wallet, no keys, no lease, no address. The only shelter you have is what you’re wearing. For most of us, that thought is hypothetical enough to be brushed aside. But for Japanese designer Kosuke Tsumura, it became a thirty-year design obsession.

FINAL HOME, the label Tsumura founded in 1994 under the Miyake Design Studio, is built on a single uncomfortable question: if home disappears because of disaster, war, or economic collapse, what can clothing become? The answer, it turns out, is a translucent nylon parka with 44 pockets.

Designer: kosuke tsumura

The 44-pocket parka is FINAL HOME’s most iconic piece, and it earns that status through sheer conceptual density. Those pockets aren’t decorative. They’re meant to carry food, medicine, tools, whatever you need to survive. When the temperature drops, you stuff them with newspaper or any insulating material you can find, and the coat does the work of keeping you warm. Optional down cushions slot into the pockets too, turning the whole thing into a proper down jacket at a moment’s notice. The coat can even be adjusted for fit by stuffing specific pockets, which means it adapts to any body type without tailoring. There’s even a FINAL HOME Bear, a small companion designed to nestle into a pocket and add a layer of insulation.

That last detail is the one I keep returning to. A teddy bear as thermal technology. It sounds absurd until you realize it’s also kind of genius, and deeply human. Tsumura isn’t just designing for survival in a cold, mechanical sense. He’s designing for the full experience of being displaced: frightened, possibly alone, needing warmth in more than one way.

This is what separates FINAL HOME from the streetwear brands that borrow its visual DNA. Plenty of labels have done the oversized translucent nylon thing. Few of them are asking anything of it. Tsumura is asking everything. The coat lives at the intersection of fashion, architecture, and emergency preparedness, and it doesn’t apologize for the weight of that position.

The fact that the 44-pocket parka has been in MoMA’s permanent collection since 2006 says a lot. Museums have a way of freezing things in amber, turning useful objects into relics. But FINAL HOME resists that fate because its premise only becomes more relevant over time. We are, by most reasonable measures, living through an era of compounding instability. Climate events, economic precarity, the slow erosion of what people once assumed was stable. A jacket designed for when the floor disappears doesn’t feel like a curiosity anymore. It feels almost prescient.

Tsumura has described utopia not as a destination but as a method, something embedded in everyday life rather than promised in some distant future. That framing reframes FINAL HOME entirely. It’s not a coat for the apocalypse. It’s a coat for right now, for a world where the safety nets are showing their age and adaptability matters more than ever. The chocolate candles included in the broader FINAL HOME universe push this even further, objects designed to serve two purposes at once, comfort and function, because the line between them is thinner than we like to admit.

The 44-pocket parka doesn’t look like survival gear. It looks like art, which is partly why it works so well. Wearing it doesn’t announce crisis or declare emergency. It just quietly insists that preparedness and design don’t have to be mutually exclusive, that you can move through the world looking completely intentional while also being ready for it to shift beneath you.

Tsumura started this project over thirty years ago, and it still feels ahead of where most design conversations are happening. That’s not a small thing. Most ideas burn bright and fade. FINAL HOME just keeps asking its question, and the world keeps making that question harder to ignore.

The post The 44-Pocket Coat That Makes You Question Home Itself first appeared on Yanko Design.

Rimowa Classic Aluminium Grid Revives a Forgotten 1969 Design

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Most luggage brands don’t have a 127-year-old story to draw from. Rimowa does, and it seems to know exactly when it’s worth pulling from that history and when to let the present speak for itself. With the Classic Aluminium Grid, they’ve clearly decided the archive deserves a second act.

The Classic Aluminium Grid is the German brand’s latest limited-edition release, and it’s generating the kind of quiet excitement that reserved design circles usually save for restored mid-century furniture or a first-edition book that resurfaces at auction. The reason is simple: Rimowa didn’t just design something new. They reached back to 1969, pulled out a hand-carry case design that had been sitting in their archives, and asked what it would look like today if it were treated with the same reverence they give to the grooves.

Designer: Rimowa

That grooved shell, by the way, is practically synonymous with the brand itself. You know a Rimowa from across an airport terminal. Those parallel ridges running down the aluminium surface are one of the most recognizable design signatures in travel goods, and they’ve been that way for decades. So when the brand quietly steps away from them and replaces the lines with a grid, a structured, geometric, embossed pattern pressed right into the aluminium shell, it feels like a real statement. It’s not a gimmick. It’s a choice that speaks to a different kind of confidence.

The grid comes from a real place. In 1969, Rimowa was producing hand-carry cases featuring this geometric pattern: practical, modular, and rooted in the kind of technical precision that defined that era’s design thinking. There’s a reason so much design from that decade still holds up. It wasn’t chasing aesthetics for their own sake. Form followed function, and it did so elegantly. Reviving that spirit in 2026 doesn’t read as nostalgia pandering. It reads as a brand that knows exactly where its DNA lives and isn’t afraid to dig for it.

The collection comes in three sizes: the Classic Hand-Carry Case, the Classic Cabin, and the Classic Trunk. All three are made in Cologne, Germany, which matters more than it might seem. Manufacturing location is one of those details that’s easy to gloss over until you’re actually holding the product, and with Rimowa, the German-made quality is part of the whole point. The embossed grid pattern, the blue leather handles, the individually numbered serial number patch on each case: these aren’t details you’d notice in a thumbnail. They’re details you notice after living with the piece and realising it only gets better over time.

And yes, price matters here. The Classic Aluminium Grid sits in the $2,725 to $3,225 range, which puts it firmly in the territory of deliberate, considered purchasing. That’s not casual spending, and it shouldn’t be. This is the kind of purchase that functions as an heirloom more than a travel accessory, something you keep, care for, and eventually pass along. The lifetime guarantee Rimowa extends to all its suitcases reinforces that framing. They’re not selling you a bag built for a few trips. They’re selling you something built to outlast most things currently in your home.

What makes this collection feel genuinely compelling rather than just another limited drop is the restraint behind it. Rimowa didn’t add bright colour for the sake of attention. They didn’t partner with a streetwear brand or commission someone’s artwork across the shell. They went to their own archive, found something worth preserving, and let the design carry the weight. The grid is subtle enough that it won’t read as flashy at baggage claim, but anyone paying close attention will recognise it as something different. Something that doesn’t quite look like everything else on the carousel.

That’s a hard balance to strike in design. Loud enough to be interesting, quiet enough to be enduring. The Classic Aluminium Grid lands squarely in that space, and for a brand with over a century of aluminium behind it, that feels less like luck and more like a brand that knows exactly what it’s doing.

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KFC’s Pickle Puffer Is Fashion’s Weirdest Power Move

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At some point, the line between fashion and performance art quietly dissolved, and I think we need to have a serious conversation about who’s holding the needle. Because KFC just debuted a puffer jacket filled with real sliced gherkins and acid-green brine, and it is fully, sincerely, unapologetically real.

The Pickle Puffer is exactly what it sounds like. A clear plastic puffer jacket, entirely see-through, packed with floating slices of pickled cucumber and brine so vividly green it almost looks radioactive. The insulation is gone, replaced with hundreds of actual pickles that shift and float with every movement.

Designer: KFC

Picture a standard puffer silhouette, the kind you’d wear on a cold commute, except every quilted chamber is sealed, transparent, and filled with floating pickle slices suspended in green liquid. The jacket moves the way a lava lamp moves. Tilt left and the gherkins drift. A hydration hose runs along the chest like something from a trail runner’s kit, except it feeds into a reservoir of pickle juice. The zipper pull is shaped like a pickle. The whole thing is lurid and weirdly beautiful in the way that only objects with absolutely no interest in being subtle can be.

I genuinely don’t know whether to call this genius or absurdist theatre, and I’m starting to think the distinction doesn’t matter anymore. What makes the Pickle Puffer particularly fascinating is its origin story. It didn’t start in a brand meeting or a creative studio. It started with an AI-generated video on TikTok of a man handing out gherkin slices from a pickle-filled puffer jacket. The video had barely a hundred likes. A hundred. And yet something about it triggered that very specific brand instinct that says: we should make this real.

The fact that KFC actually followed through says a lot about where we are right now. We’ve officially entered an era where a low-engagement AI fantasy can become a physical product, and the feedback loop between online imagination and real-world manufacturing has compressed to almost nothing. KFC UK brand manager James Channon was refreshingly candid, calling it “a bit unhinged, but that’s the point.”

And it is unhinged. But it’s also timed to perfection. The jacket dropped alongside KFC’s new Pickle Mania Menu in the UK, which includes Pickle Loaded Fries and a Pickle Pepsi, riding the wave of a full-blown cultural obsession. The #pickles hashtag on TikTok has racked up billions of views, and apparently the correct brand response is to wear that moment on your body, literally soaked in brine.

Now, this is a one-off. You can’t buy it. You have to win it through an Instagram giveaway, which is its own kind of genius because the scarcity makes it collectible and the competition makes it content. KFC isn’t really selling a jacket. They’re selling a news story, a talking point, and a social media moment that will keep circulating long after the pickles start to turn. That’s the actual product here.

It also puts the Pickle Puffer in the company of a growing category of fashion-as-marketing stunts increasingly committed to the bit. Aldi’s Jacket Potato Jacket came before it. Lidl has played in this space too. There’s a whole lane developing for grocery and fast-food brands to use absurdist outerwear as their loudest advertising medium, and it’s clearly working. I’m writing about a pickle jacket right now, so there’s your proof.

What I keep coming back to is how genuinely well it’s designed for what it’s supposed to do. The translucency is intentional. The floating pickles are the visual. The hydration hose is the punchline that also happens to be functional. Every element is deliberate and considered, even if the whole thing is engineered to make you laugh first and think second. Plenty of brands try for weird and land on confusing. KFC landed on weird and made it covetable. Fashion has always been partly spectacle. The Pickle Puffer just has better snacks.

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Samsung and DOMINNICO made a leather bag that doubles as a Galaxy gadget case

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Fashion accessories and tech gadgets have always occupied separate drawers, figuratively and literally. The phone goes in a pocket, the earbuds get buried somewhere in the bag, and the bag itself has nothing to do with either of them. It is a small daily inconvenience that nobody really complains about, mostly because nobody has ever offered a better alternative. Samsung and Spanish fashion brand DOMINNICO have decided that the arrangement is worth rethinking.

The collaboration produced a handcrafted leather bag that treats the Galaxy S26 Ultra and Galaxy Buds4 Pro as design references rather than just contents. It follows a baguette silhouette in off-white leather, produced in limited quantities under a slow fashion approach. The construction stays deliberately restrained: a zip closure bearing the brand logo, an interior pocket, and silver accents distributed carefully across the piece without overcrowding it.

Designer: DOMINNICO x Samsung

The most direct hardware reference runs along the handles. Silver eyelets line them in a pattern that mirrors the camera module rings on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, pulling one of the phone’s most recognizable physical details into a fashion context. It is the kind of detail that reads as decorative until you recognize where it came from, at which point it becomes something more like a private joke between the bag and the phone sitting inside it.

The exterior front pocket is sized specifically for the Galaxy S26 Ultra, secured with three buckles that make it a visual centerpiece rather than a plain utility slot. The design concept ties back to the phone’s built-in Privacy Display feature: the pocket keeps the device accessible while screening it from view when not needed. Whether that connection feels meaningful or just convenient as a marketing angle is a fair question, though the pocket itself is a genuinely practical addition.

Galaxy Buds4 Pro owners get their own dedicated carry solution through three keyrings attached to the bag. Two are extendable, each fitted with a small mirror that doubles as a functional charm. The third holds a soft pouch sized for the Galaxy Buds4 or Galaxy Buds4 Pro case. A fixed keyring with the DOMINNICO logo in silver completes the set. All three hang visibly from the bag rather than disappearing inside it, which keeps the tech ecosystem part of the aesthetic rather than hidden from it.

The bag was unveiled at CUPRA City Garage in Madrid as part of the Madrid es Moda program, a setting that positioned it squarely within fashion week territory rather than a product launch event. That framing matters because it signals who Samsung is trying to reach here: not the Galaxy power user looking for a rugged carry solution, but the fashion-conscious Galaxy owner who wants their accessories to cohere visually.

Available for preorder through DOMINNICO’s website at €420, the bag sits closer to a fashion collectible than a mass-market accessory. The limited production run and handcrafted construction support that positioning. What remains genuinely open is whether a piece this specific, built around two particular Samsung devices, holds its appeal once the Galaxy S26 Ultra is no longer the current flagship and the collaboration’s novelty has worn off.

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This Concept Shoe Looks Like a Sports Car Melted Onto Your Foot

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Car brands dabble in lifestyle merchandise all the time, and most of it follows a predictable formula: slap a logo on a jacket, maybe a watch, and call it brand extension. Footwear collaborations exist, too, but they rarely go further than embroidering a grille badge onto an existing sneaker. This Alfa Romeo-inspired concept shoe takes a different approach, asking what happens when automotive design is treated not as decoration but as a structural principle.

The answer turns out to look a bit like a futuristic slipper, which is either its most interesting quality or its most confounding one, depending on your expectations. The upper is a soft, seamless white shell that pulls over the foot more like a sock than a traditional shoe, with almost no visible fastenings, stitching, or hardware. That minimal surface exists to let the midsole do all the work visually, and the midsole is doing quite a lot.

Designer: Haamed Ansari

That red base is the conceptual core of the whole project. Rendered in high-gloss red, it wraps from heel to toe in a continuous form that borrows the surface logic of automotive body panels, where lines are load-bearing transitions between volumes, not decorative additions. A single glossy band sweeps diagonally across the lateral side before tapering into the toe, much like a racing stripe that has been folded into three-dimensional geometry.

Where the red midsole meets the white upper, a narrow grey seam line functions almost like a panel gap. Car designers use exactly this kind of negative space to separate body sections and give each component its own visual weight. Without it, the shoe would read as a simple two-tone colorblock. With it, the shoe looks assembled from distinct parts that happen to meet with precision, which is a different thing entirely and a far more considered one.

Seen head-on, the silhouette edges surprisingly close to a Japanese tabi shoe, the way the upper pulls cleanly away from a defined sole structure and wraps the foot rather than lacing or strapping around it. The proportions are quite different, but the underlying logic feels shared. Where the tabi’s separation is rooted in traditional craft and function, this concept’s version is purely formal, a visual argument about soft material against rigid geometry.

The ideation sketches make clear that the final form is a significant restraint from where the concept began. Earlier iterations pushed into armored, aggressive territory with angular protrusions and forms that read more like racing boots from a science fiction film. The decision to pare that down into something closer to a loafer-boot hybrid is either a maturation of the idea or a softening of it, and whether that calm reads as confidence or compromise is the question the final render quietly leaves open.

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This Seoul Concept Just Ditched the Hair Dryer Handle

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The hair dryer hasn’t really changed. Not fundamentally. You grip a barrel, aim at your head, and hold that position until your arm gives out or your hair is dry, whichever comes first. For something people use nearly every day, the hair dryer has been remarkably resistant to design rethinking. We’ve gotten quieter motors and better ionic technology and, yes, even a Dyson that costs more than a weekend getaway. But the form factor? The handle? The whole gun-shaped logic of it? That’s been largely untouched.

Seoul-based designer Giha Woo of UGLY DUCKLING ID apparently decided that was worth fixing. VOID, the studio’s 2026 concept, starts from a completely different question: what if we removed the handle entirely? Not just slimmed it down or repositioned it, but actually erased it and started over. The result is a geometric ring, a hollow torus-shaped dryer that sits in a freestanding cradle when not in use and can be held, angled, or used completely hands-free. The name is not accidental. The void in the design is literal: it is the absence of the handle that defines everything about this object.

Designer: Giha Woo (UGLY DUCKLING ID)

What I find genuinely exciting about this is not just the visual novelty, which is considerable. It’s the design logic behind it. Giha Woo describes the concept as “breaking away from the familiar, discovering new usability,” and that phrase is doing real work here. Most product redesigns tinker at the edges. VOID goes to the center of what makes a hair dryer a hair dryer and questions whether that thing needs to exist at all. The ring structure doesn’t force a single way of holding. You can grip it at different points, set it in the stand and step back, or orient it however the airflow needs to go. That kind of flexibility isn’t just ergonomically interesting; it’s philosophically interesting. It’s a product that doesn’t tell you how to use it.

UGLY DUCKLING ID has always operated at that intersection of wit and precision. Founded by Giha Woo in Seoul in 2010, the studio has developed a portfolio that reads less like a product catalog and more like a cabinet of curiosities. They’ve made a piglet-shaped VR device and a phone controller that looks like a gun. They’ve worked with Samsung. The name UGLY DUCKLING is deliberate: these are designs that don’t look like what you’d expect, and that’s the whole point. VOID is a natural extension of that sensibility, except it’s arguably their most commercially plausible concept to date.

There’s also the question of who this is really for. Hands-free drying isn’t just a convenience play. For people with limited mobility, shoulder injuries, or conditions that make sustained arm-raised postures difficult, a freestanding drying system is genuinely functional rather than merely aesthetic. Design that improves daily life for a wider range of bodies tends to be better design overall, and VOID seems to understand that without making it the centerpiece of its branding.

The textured inner ring, compact motor strategy, and directional outlet placement show real system thinking behind the design. This isn’t a rendering exercise dressed up as a product. Whether VOID ever reaches production is another question entirely. As a concept, it already does what good design concepts are supposed to do: it makes you look at a familiar object and wonder why it was ever made differently in the first place.

That said, I’ll admit the idea of aiming a ring of air at your head takes some imagination to warm up to. The muscle memory of gripping a dryer handle is real, and habits are stubborn. But every now and then a concept arrives that makes the existing solution feel like the strange one. VOID does that. After seeing it, the traditional hair dryer starts to look slightly absurd, a pistol grip that was developed by historical accident and never really questioned. That, to me, is the clearest sign of a good design idea: it makes the old normal look a little weird.

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This Miniature Chair Is Jonathan Anderson’s Smartest Dior Move

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The fashion show invitation has been quietly dying for years. What was once a piece of paper, then a gilded box, then a USB drive shaped like a perfume bottle, has steadily been reduced to an email attachment with an RSVP link and a virtual front row. So when Jonathan Anderson sent physical invitations for his Spring/Summer 2026 Dior debut, that alone was already worth noting. That the invitation turned out to be a miniature replica of the iconic green metal chairs from the Jardin des Tuileries made it something else entirely.

If you’ve been to Paris, you know the chair. That specific shade of green, the wrought iron frame, the slightly uncomfortable curve of the seat that you’d still happily sit on for hours just to watch pigeons and people drift by. The chairs of the Tuileries aren’t precious objects. They’re not behind glass. They’re public furniture, casually scattered across one of the most photographed gardens in the world, and anyone can pull one up. That’s precisely the point Anderson seems to be making.

Designer: Jonathan Anderson

Fashion invitations, at their best, are previews. They’re a designer’s handshake, the first line of the story they want to tell. At their worst, they’re just complicated garbage. Anderson’s chair manages to be neither. It sits somewhere far more interesting: a symbol loaded with Parisian identity but freed from elitism. The Tuileries chair belongs to everyone. Tourists sit in it, locals nap in it, lovers drag two of them together and angle them toward the Seine. For Anderson to choose this as his introductory gesture for one of fashion’s most storied houses reads as a very clear statement of intent.

Anderson is, by now, well-established as a designer who treats objects with the seriousness of a curator. His years at Loewe were defined by a fascination with craft, provenance, and the weight of things. He built a house culture around the idea that what surrounds us matters, that design exists at every scale, from the cut of a coat to the shape of a vase. That sensibility didn’t stay at Loewe when he left. It packed its bags and followed him to the Avenue Montaigne.

What I find genuinely compelling about this invitation is the restraint of it. Anderson could have arrived at Dior with something maximalist and declaratory. He is, after all, the first designer since Christian Dior himself to oversee all of the house’s fashion lines, a pressure point that would send most people reaching for something grand and unmistakable. Instead, he picked a chair. A chair that says: I see Paris clearly. I know what it actually is, not just what it looks like in campaign shots. And I’m asking you to sit down.

The Spring/Summer 2026 ready-to-wear show itself was held at the Tuileries, the very garden where those chairs live, which is a detail worth pausing on. That circularity feels entirely deliberate. The invitation wasn’t just a keepsake or a branding exercise. It was a spatial cue, a way of pulling guests into the landscape before they ever arrived. By the time editors and buyers took their seats in the show space, the chair in their mailbox had already done its work. The object had already oriented them toward something.

There’s a broader conversation happening right now about what fashion shows are for, who they’re for, and whether the spectacle has eclipsed the clothes. Anderson seems to be navigating that tension with real purpose. His debut was notable for beginning with a documentary short by Adam Curtis recapping the entire history of the house, an act that felt less like tribute and more like confidence: here is everything that came before me, and now watch what I do with it.

The chair invitation belongs to that same mode of thinking. It’s not a gimmick. It’s a gesture that understands the difference between noise and meaning. Fashion has plenty of the former. Anderson, at Dior, looks committed to the latter.

The post This Miniature Chair Is Jonathan Anderson’s Smartest Dior Move first appeared on Yanko Design.

Issey Miyake Just Made Sunglasses With Eight Lenses

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Most sunglasses get two lenses. That’s the standard, the baseline, the thing nobody questions because why would you? Two lenses. Two eyes. Done. But Issey Miyake Eyes just released UROKO, a pair of sunglasses with eight lenses, and it made me stop and genuinely reconsider what we accept as default in design.

UROKO is part of the IM MEN Spring Summer 2026 collection, titled “Dancing Texture,” and the name alone tells you this isn’t a collection built on safe choices. The eight-lens design draws inspiration from the ceramic works of Shoji Kamoda, a celebrated Japanese potter known for his distinctive scale-like surface patterns. In Japanese, “uroko” literally means scale, and the connection between the pottery and the eyewear is direct, visible, and surprisingly earned. This isn’t one of those cases where a brand name-drops an artist and calls it a day.

Designer: Issey Miyake Eyes

Four lenses sit on each side of the frame, arranged in sequence to mimic the overlapping scale motifs found in Kamoda’s pottery. Each lens features a concave cut, meaning they curve inward rather than outward. That engineering decision is clever. By pulling the lenses inward, they can sit close together without the whole structure ballooning into something unwearable. It’s a practical solution wrapped inside an aesthetic one, and I appreciate when design works that way. Function hiding inside form, each decision earning its place.

The 3D-printed frame goes through a finishing process that intentionally leaves slight surface variations intact. No two pieces are perfectly uniform. That part matters because it mirrors the very thing Kamoda was known for in his ceramics: surfaces that resisted smooth perfection. What could have been a production quirk becomes a design language, a deliberate echo of the source material. It’s the kind of detail you don’t notice immediately but can’t unsee once you do.

Made in collaboration with Kaneko Optical and crafted entirely in Japan, the frame is lightweight titanium, which strikes me as both the right material and the obvious one. Eight lenses on your face need a frame that won’t drag you down by the end of the afternoon. The brushed finish shifts subtly depending on how light falls on it, giving it that quality where the object looks different from one moment to the next. That feels intentional rather than accidental, which again speaks to how much thought went into this.

Seeing UROKO from a distance, I understand why one description floated around: it looks like a necklace before it looks like sunglasses. Only when you get close enough to see the hinges fold and the scale-shapes settle into the familiar form of a pair of frames does the full picture land. That delay, that moment of working out what you’re looking at, is actually the design doing its job. Not all eyewear needs to announce itself from ten feet away.

I’ll admit there’s a part of me that wants to ask whether eight lenses actually changes how you see. The short answer is probably no, not in any technical sense. But I don’t think that’s the point. UROKO isn’t positioning itself as an optical innovation. It’s positioning itself as a wearable object that carries a conversation between contemporary manufacturing and Japanese craft tradition, between function and sculpture, between an artist who shaped clay in the twentieth century and a design house still finding new ways to reference that legacy.

Available in Dark Gray and Brown, and offered in both optical and sunglass versions, UROKO is priced at ¥99,000 JPY, approximately $632 USD. It’s not a casual purchase, but it’s not trying to be. It sits firmly in the category of considered design objects, the kind you buy because you’ve decided to live with something that makes you think a little, even on an ordinary Tuesday.

The real takeaway isn’t about the lenses. It’s about what happens when a design team takes a constraint, in this case the question of how to honor a ceramic artist’s vision through eyewear, and decides not to answer it predictably. Eight lenses is a strange answer. It’s also, once you see UROKO in person, kind of the only answer.

The post Issey Miyake Just Made Sunglasses With Eight Lenses first appeared on Yanko Design.