Search Results

Restraint was once a discipline. It is now, far too often, an absence of decision. And the difference between those two things is the difference between a great room and a showroom. There is a particular kind of interior that has become so familiar it no longer registers as a choice. You have been inside it many times, possibly without quite noticing, because that is precisely its quality: it does not ask to be noticed. The walls are white or a shade of white that has been given a name suggesting earth or mist or something harvested. The floor is pale timber or large-format stone tile in a colour that does not commit. The furniture is low, its lines clean, its upholstery a variation on the same narrow range of tones that the walls and floors have already established. There are no books visible, no accumulated objects, no evidence of particular taste or specific passion or accumulated life. The kitchen has no handles. The storage has no visible presence. Everything that might reveal who lives here has been resolved, resolved being the word the design world uses when it means hidden. The room is, by every current measure of the professionally desirable interior, very good. It is also, if we are being honest with ourselves, completely interchangeable with ten thousand other rooms being photographed this month for ten thousand other Instagram accounts and design publications and property listings across the world. We have arrived, somehow, at the condition in which the most ambitious design aspiration a client can bring to a project is a room that looks like it could belong to anyone. This is worth examining carefully, because minimalism was not always this. When Mies van der Rohe designed the Barcelona Pavilion in 1929, the radicalism of the project lay not in the absence of ornament but in the precision of the decision-making behind every element that remained. The cruciform column was not a simple column from which decoration had been removed. It was a specific object, proportioned and positioned with an exactness that made the space around it legible in a way that no conventionally detailed column could achieve. The marble planes that divided the interior were not blank surfaces. They were selected for their specific veining, their colour, the particular quality of their surfaces, so that the material itself carried the visual complexity that the overall compositional restraint withheld. Mies understood something that the current culture of minimalism has largely lost: that restraint is a technique of concentration, not elimination. You remove everything that is not necessary so that what remains carries full weight. The discipline is in knowing what is necessary. The difficulty is in making that determination honestly, for a specific space and a specific life, rather than defaulting to what has become aesthetically safe. "We have arrived at the condition in which the most ambitious design aspiration a client can bring to a project is a room that looks like it could belong to anyone." The shift from minimalism as a philosophical position to minimalism as a stylistic template happened gradually and is difficult to date precisely, but its acceleration is clearly visible in the decade following the widespread adoption of platforms like Instagram and Pinterest as primary reference tools for the brief-writing process. The consequences of this shift are architectural as well as aesthetic. When clients arrive at a project with a folder of saved images that all share the same spatial vocabulary, the designer's role changes from the development of a specific response to a specific set of conditions into the faithful execution of a pre-existing image. The room is designed backward from its photograph. And a room designed backward from its photograph is a room in which every decision has been made in service of legibility at a glance, which is to say in service of the very opposite of what the best domestic interiors have always offered: the quality of revealing more the longer you spend time inside them. There is a psychological dimension to this that the design world has been reluctant to discuss directly. Maximalism requires commitment. It requires the willingness to accumulate and display objects that reveal specific passions, specific histories, specific personalities, and in doing so it exposes the person who made those choices to a form of judgement that the neutral room entirely avoids. A beige room with concealed storage and handle-free cabinetry does not tell you anything about the person who lives in it. That is not an accident. The rise of the neutral interior has coincided precisely with a cultural moment in which the performance of taste has never been more public or more consequential, and the safest form of taste, in a world where everything is photographed and shared and evaluated, is the taste that offers no target. Minimalism, in its current dominant form, is not a design philosophy. It is risk management. It is the spatial equivalent of declining to have an opinion. The architects and designers who understand this are not, by and large, the ones currently dominating the conversation. Lori Morris, whose work is examined at length elsewhere in this issue, has spent thirty years building rooms of such layered specificity and accumulated personality that they remain genuinely difficult to categorise, which is precisely why they are so resistant to imitation. Renzo Mongiardino, the Milanese designer whose theatrical interiors for clients including the Rothschilds and Lee Radziwill treated the domestic room as a complete narrative world, made spaces that told you everything about the life being lived inside them within the first thirty seconds of standing in them. The apartments that Jean-Michel Frank designed in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s were spare without being empty, stripped of historical ornament without being stripped of material intelligence, the walls upholstered in vellum and parchment, the furniture designed with a sculptural exactness that required the room around it to be equally precise. These are all, in their different ways, minimal interiors. What distinguishes them from the current template is that the discipline behind them is evident, the decision-making is specific, and the resulting rooms carry the unmistakable character of a point of view. "Minimalism, in its current dominant form, is not a design philosophy. It is risk management. It is the spatial equivalent of declining to have an opinion." The question for the design industry is whether this represents a temporary plateau in the development of a still-vital aesthetic position, or whether it signals something more significant: the exhaustion of an idea that has been stretched well beyond the discipline and intelligence that originally animated it. The evidence suggests the latter. A design movement that began as a rigorous response to the visual excess of a particular historical moment has become, through repetition and commercial adoption and the flattening effect of social media reference culture, the new visual excess. The rooms that would have seemed radical in their restraint thirty years ago are now indistinguishable from the developer finish of a new-build apartment in any major city in the world. That is not the sign of a living idea. It is the sign of an idea that has completed its journey from the studio to the showroom to the commodity catalogue, which is the journey that all design movements eventually complete. The question that follows is always the same: what comes next. That question, at this particular moment in the history of interior design, feels genuinely open in a way it has not felt for some time. Which is, if nothing else, a reason to be interested. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

Adriana Santanocito, Ohoskin In an exclusive conversation with Shweta for Style Essentials, Adriana Santanocito, the woman who co-founded Ohoskin in Catania and watched it travel from a local citrus farm to a Ganni runway, a Sonus Faber speaker cabinet, a motorsport track and the Quirinale Palace, talks about what the future of luxury materials actually looks like when someone is brave enough to build it. The next time you peel an orange, consider what happens to the skin. Not in your kitchen, but at industrial scale. Sicily alone generates 1.3 million tons of orange processing waste every single year. Peel, pulp, seed, the residue of the juice industry that nobody asked for and almost nobody knew what to do with. For decades it was treated as a problem to be managed, a cost to be absorbed, something that needed to disappear. Adriana Santanocito grew up in Catania looking at it differently. She studied fashion in Milan, specializing in textile materials and production technologies, and spent enough time inside the industry to understand both how materials are made and how they fail, what luxury demands of a surface and what the conventional answers to that demand are costing the planet. She came back to Sicily with a question simple enough to sound naive and specific enough to become a company. What if orange byproduct was not the end of something but the beginning of something else entirely? In 2019, she co-founded Ohoskin with Roberto Merighi and Stefano Mazzetti. The material they developed takes orange peel and prickly pear cactus residue, blends the plant fibers with biopolymers and natural resins into a compound, and produces through a coating process powered by sustainable energy a finished material that looks, feels and performs like premium leather. It comes in a wide range of colors, textures, softness levels and tactile finishes. The entire supply chain runs through Italy, the first phase in Sicily close to the raw material, then through manufacturing partners in Lombardy, Tuscany and Veneto depending on the application. Two international patents protect the process. Every step of the supply chain is tracked so that anyone, a brand, a consumer, can follow the material from orange byproduct to finished product and see exactly what happened along the way. It is not a sustainable alternative. That framing, Adriana will tell you directly, is precisely the problem with how the industry has approached materials innovation for the last decade. Because a material, first and foremost, must perform. If it does not meet technical requirements, it will never be adopted at scale, regardless of how sustainable it is. This is a crucial point that is often overlooked. From the beginning, Ohoskin chose to prioritize performance. Each material comes with a detailed technical datasheet, Martindale abrasion tests, Bally flex tests, durability and resistance benchmarks, because without that data no serious brand can integrate a new material with confidence. For us, she says, sustainability is not a standalone concept. It is the result of good material design. A material that performs, lasts and is actually used is inherently more sustainable. This distinction has defined every significant milestone in the company's story. When the industry was moving toward PU and away from PVC as its preferred sustainable chemistry, Ohoskin chose PVC. Not out of stubbornness but out of a clear-eyed reading of what durability actually means for a material's environmental footprint. New generations of bio-attributed PVC, combining recycled content with components derived from renewable sources, produce a material with exceptional longevity. And a material that lasts is, across its lifetime, more responsible than one that degrades quickly and needs replacing. One square meter of Ohoskin generates approximately 2.57 kilograms of CO2, significantly less than many conventional alternatives. At the beginning, brands were skeptical, Adriana says. But once they saw the material and the test results, the conversation shifted. In the end, it is always the product and the data that speak. Ganni was the first brand to believe. The material was presented in 2022 and by January 2023, after an initial testing phase, it was already on the runway and subsequently featured in Vogue UK. That moment, years of research and development becoming something worn and experienced by real people in real rooms, was the confirmation that Ohoskin had crossed the threshold from interesting idea to serious material. Ganni has continued to integrate it across multiple collections since. But what has followed demonstrates that the story is far larger than fashion. The collaboration with Sonus Faber, one of Italy's most respected high-end audio manufacturers, placed Ohoskin inside the Concertino G4 speaker cabinet, an object defined by acoustic precision and aesthetic refinement in equal measure. Seeing Ohoskin interact with wood in such a sophisticated object, Adriana says, confirmed its versatility in a way that no fashion application could. Then came motorsport. In January 2024, Ohoskin became the first plant-based material in history to pass the FIA fire resistance tests, validated on Sabelt racing shoes. The FIA sets some of the most demanding technical standards in the world. Passing them with a material made from orange peel and cactus is not a small achievement. It is proof that the original ambition, performance first, sustainability as consequence, was the right one. And then Patricia Urquiola chose Ohoskin for her installation at Heimtextil 2026. One of the world's most respected designers, selecting a material not for its story but for what it could do structurally and aesthetically in a demanding installation context. When a studio of that stature makes that kind of choice, she says, the way the material is perceived changes. It is no longer seen as an alternative. It is seen as a solution. The recognition has come from directions that Adriana could not have anticipated when she was asking her first questions about orange peel in Catania. In October 2023, the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, presented her with the ENI Joule Award for Entrepreneurship at the Quirinale Palace in front of a jury that included Nobel Prize laureates. For me, as a founder from Catania, she says, it was a powerful affirmation that ideas rooted in local contexts can have a truly global impact. In April 2024, Ohoskin won the Best Product or Service for Sustainable Development award at the Enterprise Environment Award, the most important Italian recognition in the sector. In November 2025, she received the Semplicemente Donna International Award for sustainability and female-led innovation. In April 2025, her story was exhibited alongside Adele Casagrande Fendi and Cristina Bombassei of Brembo at the Made in Italy Women's Enterprise exhibition at Palazzo Piacentini in Rome, part of Italy's first National Made in Italy Day. A second patent was filed in February 2025. The company is committed to hiring at least fourteen new staff members in 2026 as it scales toward broader industrial partnerships and new applications. What does all of this tell us about where the world is going? It tells us that the most interesting materials of the next decade will not come from laboratories designing new synthetic compounds. They will come from people who looked at what already exists, what agriculture discards, what industry throws away, what geography provides in abundance, and asked a different question about it. Ohoskin is not the only company doing this. But it is one of the clearest examples of what it looks like when it is done with genuine technical rigour rather than as a marketing exercise. The traceability, the FIA certification, the Martindale abrasion tests, the patents, none of this is decoration. It is the evidence that the material is serious, that the people who made it understand what serious means, and that the luxury industry has found in it something it did not know it was looking for. Transparency is essential, Adriana says, because without it there is no credibility. We have built a fully Made in Italy supply chain, and this represents a significant value. Telling the story of this supply chain means highlighting not only the material, but also the people, skills and processes behind it. The question is not where Ohoskin can go next. It is what it can enable. Sicily still generates 1.3 million tons of orange waste every single year. The difference now is that at least some of it is becoming something worth wearing. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

Mauro Colagreco, Mirazur In an exclusive conversation with Shweta for Style Essentials, the chef who has won everything the industry has to give speaks about surrendering control to the moon, what a pandemic garden taught him about creativity, and why the most radical thing a three-Michelin-star restaurant can do is stop deciding what you eat. He did not grow up wanting to be a chef. For four years at university in Buenos Aires he studied economics, dutifully and without particular passion, until the clarity that only wasted time eventually produces made it obvious that this was not the life he was built for. He enrolled in a gastronomy school, found his first shift in a friend's restaurant kitchen in the middle of a dinner service, and understood immediately, standing in the heat with the orders coming in and the plates going out, that the particular energy of this work, at once completely concrete and completely ephemeral, existing fully only in the seconds between the pass and the table, was what he had been looking for without knowing he was looking. He has never once looked back from that moment. What followed was the kind of formation that does not happen by accident. He arrived in France in 2001 and worked his way through the most demanding kitchens the country had, Bernard Loiseau, Alain Passard at L'Arpège, Alain Ducasse at the Hotel Plaza Athénée, Guy Martin at Le Grand Véfour, four chefs who between them represented the full range of what French gastronomy had understood about itself in the twentieth century. He absorbed all of it without becoming any of them, which is the hardest thing a young cook can do in France, where the weight of tradition presses down on every plate. In 2006, at thirty-one, he opened Mirazur in Menton, a seaside town on the French Riviera thirty metres from the Italian border, in a 1930s villa above the Mediterranean. He had never been to Menton before. He described it later as the place where he found his kitchen and himself, a location so particular, straddling two culinary traditions, facing the sea and backed by mountains, that it made a borderless identity not just possible but inevitable. The first Michelin star came within a year, the second in 2012, and the third in January 2019, making him the first chef not born in France to receive three stars in the French Guide and the first Latin American chef to receive them at all. Six months later, Mirazur was named the best restaurant in the world by The World's 50 Best Restaurants, voted on by over a thousand food professionals across twenty-six regions. That version of the story ends there, at the summit, which is where most profiles of Mauro Colagreco end. What happened next is the part that has not been properly told, and it is the more interesting story by some distance. In March 2020, the world stopped. Mirazur closed, and Colagreco found himself with a small team cooking for the healthcare workers of the village hospital, spending his days in the restaurant's garden, the Rosmarino, which was connected directly to where he lived. He was, as he describes it, a close witness of nature, almost locked outside. Day after day in that garden, watching biodynamic principles at work in the soil, speaking with his gardeners, observing how the moon and planetary cycles moved through the plants, something shifted in him that the previous fourteen years of accumulating accolades had not produced and could not have. When the question of reopening arrived, it was impossible for me to reopen as if nothing had happened, he says. This moment required a transformation, a deeper commitment. And so the idea was born, to carry a strong message, to see the Earth as a living organism and to reconnect with our ecosystems. In one month, with the whole team, he rebuilt Mirazur entirely around a biodynamic lunar calendar. The menu now changes daily according to whether it is a root day, a leaf day, a flower day or a fruit day, determined not by what the chef wants to cook but by the biodynamic calendar and where the moon sits in its cycle. Some guests arrive not knowing which world they will eat in, even if this specific calendar is published on Mirazur's website. Something older and less rational than any culinary training decides for him. This is the surrender that no school teaches and no star prepares you for. Every chef is trained to control, the heat, the seasoning, the timing, the arc of the guest's experience from the first course to the last, and the lunar calendar introduced a new dimension of creative complexity that no classical training had ever demanded of him — one that required not mastery but attention, not authority but listening. What it gave back was something that twenty years in the finest kitchens in France had not found a way to give him. Direct contact with the soil, he says, especially through permaculture and biodynamics, teaches you to listen, to be patient, to be flexible. It is this dialogue between a very clear philosophy, respecting natural cycles, and creative freedom that now defines his cuisine. The loss of control, it turns out, was the condition under which genuine creativity became possible. The garden is not a supplier to Mirazur. It is a collaborator, and the distinction matters enormously to Colagreco, who traces the moment the relationship changed to a specific book. The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, the Japanese farmer and philosopher who spent decades arguing that the most sophisticated agriculture is the one that interferes least with what the land already knows how to do, arrived in his hands at exactly the moment he had the opportunity to develop the Rosmarino garden. The principles of permaculture, of cultivated biodiversity, of treating the earth as a living system rather than a production facility, went into the ground alongside the seeds, and step by step the gardens became, as he puts it, the heart of the experience we offer to our guests. The circular gastronomy manifesto that has grown from this work rests on a single idea, rendered as simply as any great principle can be: by choosing what we eat, we choose the world we want to live in. The breadth of what this philosophy has required of him goes well beyond what most people understand by sustainability. According to the FAO, seventy-five percent of cultivated crop varieties have disappeared in the last one hundred years, and food systems are responsible for approximately seventy percent of global biodiversity loss, numbers that do not sit comfortably alongside a tasting menu and that demand a response from anyone who cooks seriously for a living. Colagreco's response has been to make his research team genuinely multidisciplinary, bringing together cooking, gardening, ethnobotany, archaeology and anthropology in the same conversation, because understanding a territory and its living systems requires more than culinary training. This is why the recognition he received in 2022 as the first UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity from the culinary world makes a particular kind of sense. What a chef brings to that conversation that a diplomat or a scientist cannot, he says, is that food is a universal language that concerns everyone every day, and everyone can act through their food choices. The question of borders has followed Colagreco his entire career and he has refused it his entire career, not as a political position but as a creative one. He grew up in Argentina, trained in France, cooks on the Italian border, and structures his menu around a Babylonian astronomical system, and he was not, at the beginning, trying to build a borderless identity. He was trying to build his own identity, his own cuisine, in a place whose geography made borders feel like an invitation rather than a constraint. Being located between France and Italy gives us the richness of two exceptional culinary traditions, plus the Mediterranean, which is a symbol of exchange and cultural influences, he says, and Mirazur could not exist anywhere else. The refusal of borders, understood in retrospect, was never a refusal. It was a recognition that the most interesting cooking has always happened in the places where cultures meet and negotiate with each other. Bread arrives at every Mirazur table with Pablo Neruda's Ode to Bread, and this is not a flourish but an intention, as Colagreco is precise about the difference. The sharing of bread sets the tone for everything that follows because it is a reminder that food is also a language, an emotion, and a memory. He traces the gesture to his childhood, to his grandmother welcoming the family with warm bread in a moment that was simple and joyful and complete. Cooking is, above all, an act of love, he says. Welcoming someone and giving them food is a deeply human and almost universal gesture, a way to take care of others and, in a way, to extend their life, and beyond feeding and giving pleasure, food creates connection, tells stories, shares values, and reconnects us with others. He now runs thirty restaurants across twenty destinations from a foundation that begins every time at Mirazur, where each new project starts with an immersion, a team going on site to understand the territory, meet local producers, and imagine a concept deeply connected to its environment. What connects all these places is a shared philosophy that started in that villa above the Mediterranean and has never needed to be revised, only deepened, and to keep Mirazur's spirit of innovation and risk-taking alive he has invested in a dedicated research and development space driven by curiosity, experimentation and an insistence on local roots that no amount of global expansion has been allowed to dilute. The chef who left the restaurant did not leave cooking. He left the version of cooking that places the chef at the center of every decision and the guest at the mercy of that centrality, and what he found on the other side of that leaving was something that the most rigorous classical training in the world had not prepared him for, which is the discovery that creativity does not require control. It requires attention, not to what you want to make, but to what is already happening in the soil, in the light, in the position of a moon that has been pulling at the tides and the roots of plants for longer than any culinary tradition has existed. The guest who sits down at Mirazur tonight does not know what they will eat. Neither, entirely, does the chef. And in that shared unknowing, something becomes possible that no menu written in advance has ever quite managed. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

From the stirrups of Persian cavalry to the mirrored floors of Versailles, from Roger Vivier's steel rod to the runways of contemporary menswear — the high heel has never really been about the shoe. It has always, without exception, been about power, and who gets to wear it. A CONFESSION, FIRST Let us begin with something that tends to make a certain kind of man quietly uncomfortable at dinner parties. The high heel was not invented by or for women — it was invented by men, refined by men, elevated into a symbol of masculine authority by the most powerful court in 17th-century Europe, and then, at the precise moment it became associated with excess and frivolity, quietly handed over to women as though this were the most natural transfer in the history of fashion. It was not natural. It was convenient, and there is a meaningful difference between the two. The story of the high heel is, at its deepest reading, a story about the objects we use to communicate things we cannot bring ourselves to say plainly — status, desire, danger, authority — and about how those objects change meaning as they pass between hands, between centuries, between genders. It begins not in a Parisian atelier or an Italian workshop, but in a landscape considerably less glamorous: the dusty, arrow-swept plains of ancient Persia, somewhere in the neighborhood of the 10th century, with a soldier who had a very specific and very pressing problem. CHAPTER ONE — THE HORSE DID IT Persian cavalry archers faced a biomechanical challenge that had nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with survival. When a mounted soldier rises in his stirrups to draw a bow and release an arrow at full gallop, the foot naturally slides forward in the stirrup, destabilizing the rider at precisely the moment when stability is most critical to not dying. The solution that Persian cobblers arrived at was both elegant and devastatingly practical — a raised heel on the riding boot that caught against the stirrup, anchoring the foot and allowing the archer to stand firm, draw cleanly, and fire with accuracy while the ground moved beneath him at speed. The very first high heel, then, was a piece of occupational safety equipment, designed for men whose working conditions involved galloping horses and incoming arrows, and it would have been genuinely baffling to those soldiers to learn that their functional boot design would, a thousand years later, become the defining symbol of feminine glamour in the Western world. History has a gift for trajectories that nobody in the middle of them could possibly have predicted, and this is one of the more delightful examples. As Persia's trade routes expanded westward and Persian ambassadors began arriving at the courts of Europe in the late 16th century — riding, naturally, in their heeled boots — the European aristocracy responded with the particular enthusiasm it reserved for things that looked powerful on someone else. Within a generation, the heeled shoe had spread from the stables of Persia to the throne rooms of France, England, and Spain, worn freely by both men and women of the court, understood simply as what sophisticated, important people put on their feet. The very first high heel was a piece of occupational safety equipment. The soldiers who wore it into battle would have been baffled by what came next. CHAPTER TWO — LOUIS XIV AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF POWER If one figure in history can be credited with transforming the heel from a fashion accessory into a political instrument, it is Louis XIV of France — a man who stood approximately five feet four inches tall, ruled the most powerful nation in Europe, and had absolutely no intention of allowing those two facts to exist in tension with each other. His solution was characteristically theatrical and, in retrospect, rather brilliant: he commissioned heels of up to four inches in height, had their surfaces lacquered in vivid red — a color associated with wealth because the dye, derived from kermes insects, was extraordinarily expensive — and then issued a royal decree stating that only members of his immediate court were permitted to wear red-heeled shoes. The hierarchy of Versailles, that endlessly complex and exhausting performance of proximity to power, was now legible at a glance, from the ground up. Louis also understood instinctively something that modern brand strategists spend considerable budgets trying to replicate: that exclusivity is not simply about cost, but about visible permission, and that the most potent status symbols are the ones that other people are legally prevented from copying. He was, in the vocabulary of the modern age, doing a drop. He just had the army to back it up. What the Sun King enshrined in those lacquered heels was an idea so deeply woven into human psychology that it has never fully unravelled — that height, literal physical height above others, is a legible signal of power, and that the person who controls how high they stand controls how they are perceived in a room. It is an idea that would survive the revolution, the Enlightenment, and three centuries of social transformation, and it is still, if we are being honest, doing most of the work every time a heel leaves the ground. THE TIMELINE YEAR EVENT NOTES 10th Century Persian Cavalry Heeled riding boots invented to lock the foot in stirrups during mounted archery. Entirely practical, entirely masculine, with no dinner party ambitions whatsoever. 1590s Arrives in Europe Persian ambassadors ride into European courts in heeled boots. The aristocracy, always alert to a power signal, adopts the style immediately — for both men and women. 1670s Louis XIV — Red Heels by Royal Decree Heel height becomes a measurable index of closeness to the king. The French court invents the world's first dress code enforced by law, enforced by soldiers, enforced by the king's rather impressive ego. 1700s The Enlightenment Exits Gracefully Reason, science, and a deep suspicion of ornamentation flatten men's shoes entirely. Women retain their heels. Nobody asks why this particular division of labor seems so natural. 1954 Roger Vivier Invents the Stiletto A steel rod inserted into the heel of a Dior shoe makes the narrowest heel in history structurally possible. Physics objects. Fashion does not care. Now Full Circle Men's heels reappear on runways and red carpets — worn not as transgression but as clothing, completing a thousand-year journey back to where it began. CHAPTER THREE — THE GREAT MALE EXIT The 18th-century Enlightenment was enormously productive for human civilization in nearly every respect, and rather catastrophic for the men's shoe. As the philosophical project of rationalism took hold across Europe and the idea of decorative excess became associated with the ancient regime — with everything corrupt and indulgent that the new age of reason was positioning itself against — men's fashion underwent a rapid and comprehensive sobering. Wigs shortened, colors muted, silhouettes simplified, and heels, those gorgeous, impractical, politically loaded heels, disappeared from men's shoes almost entirely within a few decades. The heel did not disappear from fashion. It simply transferred. Women continued wearing heels throughout this period, and the cultural meaning that attached itself to the heel began its long, gradual shift from symbol of power and status to symbol of femininity and elegance, two categories that the 18th century was only just beginning to separate cleanly from each other. The crucial point, and it is one that fashion historians return to repeatedly, is that women did not choose the heel as an expression of something inherent to womanhood — they inherited it at the precise moment men decided they were done with it, having concluded that it was too frivolous for the serious rational business of being a man in the Age of Reason. The heel went from throne room to boudoir not because it belonged there, but because someone had to take it, and the men were already on their way out the door. CHAPTER FOUR — ROGER VIVIER, STEEL RODS, AND THE BIRTH OF THE STILETTO For most of the 19th century and the early 20th, heels had settled into a relatively moderate existence — present, elegant, a few inches in height, broad enough at the base to distribute weight with some mercy to the wearer. What happened in 1954 changed the terms of the conversation so dramatically that the shoe industry has never quite recovered its equilibrium? Roger Vivier, working in the ateliers of Christian Dior, inserted a steel rod into the shaft of a heel, providing the structural support necessary to make it extraordinarily slender without it snapping under the weight of a human body — and in doing so, created a heel so narrow, so visually audacious, so architecturally improbable, that it was named after the thinnest blade in the Italian armory. The stiletto concentrated the entire weight of a human body onto a contact surface sometimes smaller than a square centimeter. The pressure exerted per square inch by a stiletto heel on a floor surface is, according to engineering calculations, greater than that exerted by an elephant standing on the same spot, which is a fact so extraordinary that it deserves a moment of quiet contemplation before we continue. Ballroom owners and museum curators of the 1950s and 1960s were, as a professional class, not having a particularly good time. Some venues simply banned them. The shoes, not the women — though the distinction was at certain establishment events somewhat academic. CHAPTER FIVE — WHAT IT IS ACTUALLY DOING TO THE BODY A conversation about heels that avoids the ergonomics is like a conversation about Formula 1 that avoids the crashes — technically possible, but dishonest in a way that eventually catches up with you. The heel, for all its history and beauty and cultural resonance, is genuinely difficult for the human body to accommodate over extended periods of regular wear, and it is worth understanding precisely why, partly because knowledge is useful, and partly because the way the body negotiates with the heel is, in its own way, rather fascinating. THE ERGONOMICS — WHAT THE HEEL DOES, STRUCTURALLY Weight Distribution In a flat shoe, body weight is distributed across the entire foot. A 3-inch heel shifts up to 76% of that load onto the ball and toes alone — a structural rearrangement the foot was not designed for. The Knee Heels increase compressive load on the medial knee joint by up to 26%. Orthopedic surgeons have long noted a correlation between regular high heel wear and accelerated onset of osteoarthritis in the inner knee. The Achilles Tendon Held in a shortened position for hours each day, the tendon gradually loses its resting length and flexibility which is why long-term heel wearers often find flat shoes genuinely painful to walk in. The Lumbar Spine To compensate for the forward shift in center of gravity, the lower back arches more deeply than its natural curve. Over time this increases compression in the lumbar vertebrae and is a meaningful contributor to chronic lower back pain. The 2-inch Consensus Podiatrists and ergonomists broadly agree that a heel between 1.5 and 2 inches delivers most of the visual and postural benefits elongated silhouette, lifted posture, defined calf, while reducing biomechanical stress significantly. Block vs Stiletto A block heel at the same height as a stiletto distributes weight across a far greater surface area, improving balance and reducing the concentrated pressure that makes stilettos so structurally demanding on both floors and feet. None of this, it should be said, is an argument against the heel it is simply the honest account of the trade that the heel has always offered, and which millions of women make every single day with full awareness and zero apology. The postural shift that heels produce is real and measurable: the lifted chest, the elongated line of the leg, the particular quality of movement that a heel forces, slightly slower, more deliberate and more considered, all of these things change how the body occupies space and how it registers in the perception of others, and the people who choose to wear heels are, by and large, choosing them because that change is exactly what they want. The question has never been whether heels are practical. The question has always been what they are worth, and that is a calculation that only the person wearing them is qualified to make. CHAPTER SIX — FULL CIRCLE Something has been quietly, undramatically happening on the runways and red carpets of the past decade that most fashion commentary has underplayed, perhaps because the full historical weight of it takes a moment to register. Men are wearing heels again not as costume, not as provocation, not as the carefully labelled transgression that mainstream culture once required as a framing device, but simply as clothes, chosen from a wardrobe and put on in the morning with the same unremarkable intention as everything else. Harry Styles in platform boots at Coachella. Billy Porter in heeled velvet shoes at the Oscars. The collections at Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Prada quietly reintroducing heeled footwear into their menswear lines without announcement, without explanation, and without any apparent expectation that one was required. When you remove three centuries of accumulated gendered meaning from the heel and look at it simply as an object — a device that adds height, alters posture, changes the quality of a silhouette, and signals a particular kind of deliberate, considered self-presentation — it becomes immediately obvious why men find it as useful as women always did, which makes sense, because that is precisely what it was designed to do, by men, for men, on a Persian horse, a thousand years before anyone thought to make it complicated. History, when it completes its circles, has a way of making the long route seem inevitable in retrospect, and this particular circle — from cavalry stirrup to Versailles to Dior to Gucci menswear — is one of the more satisfying ones fashion has given us. Louis XIV would, one imagines, have strong opinions about where the red heels belong in all of this. He would also, one imagines, be wearing them regardless. Strip away three centuries of gendered meaning and you are left with exactly what the Persians built — a device for standing taller, being seen, and taking up space. It was always everyone's. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

Poltrona Frau has been putting artists and designers in conversation with its Archibald armchair for several years now, working through Felipe Pantone, Ozwald Boateng, and Fornasetti in a sequence that has pushed the brand's leather craft progressively further in terms of what is technically possible on an upholstered surface, and the Archibald Delicate Balance Limited Edition with Shepard Fairey, unveiled at Salone del Mobile 2026, represents the most ambitious iteration of that ongoing dialogue yet, both in the complexity of the artwork and in the production technique required to put it on the chair. Fairey, whose career began in the underground scene of the 1990s and has expanded into one of the most recognised bodies of work in contemporary visual culture, has brought to the Archibald a visual meditation on the relationship between humans and nature built from fragments of his own existing iconography, a central female figure embodying Mother Nature drawn from his 2015 Make Art Not War work, birds suspended from flowers referencing his 2024 Natural Springs Bird series presented in Milan, and large floral motifs continuing the exploration of birth and transformation that runs through his 2022 Rise Above Flower work, all recomposed into a new narrative synthesis specific to this collaboration and to Poltrona Frau's 2026 collection theme of True Over Time. The production of the limited edition required Poltrona Frau to develop a new technique that extends the digital printing process introduced with the Pantone collaboration in 2022 considerably further, applying multiple color layers to specific areas of the armchair's graphic to enhance visual depth and texture expressiveness, with selective 3D embossing added to certain areas to create delicate tactile reliefs that echo the dimensionality of Fairey's printed works in a way that flat digital printing alone could not achieve. The leather itself is Pelle Frau ColorSphere Impact Less, produced through a sustainable tanning process that eliminates chromium, achieves a 15% reduction in chemical substances and a 10% reduction in water consumption through advanced wastewater recovery, and has earned Leather Working Group Gold certification, the highest available rating from the global body that evaluates environmental and social performance within the leather industry. Each of the 200 numbered pieces carries a polished brass plaque and a certificate of authenticity signed by both Fairey and Poltrona Frau CEO Nicola Coropulis and is accompanied by a bespoke clutch that echoes the artwork's narrative. A QR code inside each chair allows the owner to redeem two coffee trees planted in Guatemala's Huehuetenango region through Treedom, part of a dedicated initiative developed for this collaboration that supports a community of 80 indigenous women through a supply chain model that compensates them above the local market average, translating the edition's themes of natural balance and human responsibility into a measurable social and environmental commitment that extends well beyond the object itself. The Archibald Delicate Balance Limited Edition is available exclusively at Poltrona Frau flagship stores and a curated selection of authorized retailers worldwide. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

Prada has spent over a decade running its Made In project, identifying master craftspeople across the world and building contemporary collections around their techniques, and the latest chapter lands in India with a limited-edition sandal collection inspired by the Kolhapuri Chappal, manufactured by skilled artisans from the Maharashtra and Karnataka regions, where this GI-tagged craft has been made by hand for generations; it is now available in 40 selected Prada stores globally and on Prada.com. The collection is developed in collaboration with LIDCOM, the Sant Rohidas Leather Industries and Charmakar Development Corporation established by the Government of Maharashtra in 1974, and LIDKAR, the Dr. Babu Jagjivan Ram Leather Industries Development Corporation established by the Government of Karnataka in 1976, both of which have spent decades safeguarding and promoting the traditional leather craft communities whose work sits at the heart of this project. What Prada has built around that craft foundation is a dialogue between the traditional hand techniques of Kolhapuri construction and the brand's contemporary design language and premium materials, producing something that carries the heritage of the original without reducing it to a reference or a surface detail. Alongside the collection, Prada has announced a fully funded three-year artisan training program reaching 180 craftspeople across the eight districts of India where Kolhapuri Chappals are traditionally manufactured, running in structured six-month modules and delivered in partnership with the National Institute of Fashion Technology and the Karnataka Institute of Leather and Fashion Technology. The program covers design fundamentals, digital skills, trend literacy, and the complete journey from product development to market readiness, with dedicated studios at each institute equipped for hands-on learning, and select participants from each module given the opportunity to continue their training at the Prada Group Academy in Italy under the group's Maestros. Applications for the first 30 seats open in May 2026 across the LIDCOM, LIDKAR, NIFT, and KILT websites, with the first module commencing this summer. The program will be funded in part through proceeds from the sale of the limited-edition sandal collection itself. Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada Group Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, has described the program as translating a shared cultural dialogue into a concrete opportunity for learning and growth, making the point that supporting artisans through structured training is simultaneously an act of cultural preservation, community investment, and a commitment to ensuring that traditional craftsmanship continues to evolve and find relevance in contemporary markets rather than becoming a static heritage reference. For a craft as technically specific and culturally embedded as the Kolhapuri Chappal, that combination of global visibility through a luxury collection and localized skill investment through a structured training program represents one of the more considered approaches to craft collaboration that the luxury industry has produced recently. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

Marca Corona has been making ceramic surfaces in the Sassuolo district longer than any other company in the area, and the Calcecreta collection draws on that depth of material knowledge to do something that requires genuine craft confidence, recreating the imperfect, time-worn surfaces of lime, earth, and clay in porcelain stoneware with enough textural conviction that the result reads as something remembered rather than manufactured. The collection achieves that quality through rich pigmentation, the dynamic visual language of trowel marks, and an interplay of low-relief decorative patterns that give the surface a handmade depth without tipping into literal reproduction of any single natural material, landing instead in a territory that feels authentically organic while remaining entirely consistent as a large-format architectural surface. Five colorways, Spuma, Argilla, Bisque, Terracotta, and Selva, carry the collection through a range of warm and earthy tones that add chromatic nuance and graphic depth to floors and walls without demanding visual attention in a way that competes with the spaces they are designed to ground. Calcecreta is available in both a natural finish and a non-slip grip finish suitable for outdoor use, which gives the collection genuine relevance to the continuing architectural conversation around seamless indoor-outdoor living, where the ability to run a single surface language from interior floor through to terrace or garden without a material break has become one of the more sought-after qualities in contemporary residential and hospitality design. Five format sizes ranging from 30x60 cm to 120x278 cm in 6, 8.5, and 9 mm thicknesses give specifiers the flexibility to work across very different spatial scales within the same collection, with the new 7.5x60 cm Longarine format adding an elongated option whose proportions open up a further range of layout and stylistic combinations that the standard formats do not cover. Marca Corona, now part of the Concorde Group, has maintained a consistent connection to the art world since the company's founding, a relationship that continues through the Marca Corona for Art project and the Marca Corona Award for artists and designers under 35, both launched in 2022, and that connection to art as a way of understanding material and surface informs Calcecreta as much as the ceramic craft behind it. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

Pininfarina and InkPoster walked into Milan Design Week with something that the interiors and technology worlds had not seen before, a colored ePaper art poster in A1 format extending to over one meter wide, presented inside the Reflex showroom as the largest of its kind ever made, and the conversation it started at the fair has less to do with screens and displays and considerably more to do with what wall art is allowed to be in a contemporary architectural interior. The display technology behind InkPoster Duna comes from PocketBook, the Swiss company behind the InkPoster brand with nearly two decades of experience in electronic paper, and it is built around an E-Ink Spectra 6 panel that produces images through millions of tiny ink capsules physically rearranging to create colors and details rather than projecting light through a backlit surface, which is why the poster looks like a print, responds to ambient light the way a print does, emits no blue light, heat, or flicker, produces no glare, and remains fully visible even when the device is powered off entirely. Energy is consumed only when the image changes, a single charge lasts up to a year, and the wireless design means the poster hangs freely without cables or outlets, none of which sounds like a description of a screen because experientially it does not behave like one. Pininfarina's contribution is the frame, and it carries the studio's automotive design language without apology, with fluid aerodynamic lines creating a subtle curvature across the metal surface; a visually minimal perimeter edge that keeps the composition light; and an Alcantara covering whose soft tactility references high-end automobile interiors directly, presented at Milan Design Week in light, dark, and brown finishes that shift the object's register in a room considerably depending on which is chosen. Connected to the InkPoster app, the poster gives access to thousands of curated artworks, with the Pininfarina collaboration adding an exclusive selection of design sketches from the studio's creative archives, material that does not exist in this format anywhere else. Nicola Girotti, Head of Product Design at Pininfarina, has described InkPoster Duna as a design element that integrates into sophisticated architectural spaces rather than simply occupying wall space within them, and at over a meter wide with the surface quality of paper and the flexibility of a digital library, that description holds. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

The kitchen has been renegotiating its place in the home for years, moving steadily away from its origins as a purely functional service space and toward something considerably more central to how people actually live, entertain, and experience their homes on a daily basis, and Italian kitchen brand Febal Casa has been tracking that evolution closely enough that Origina, its newest system presented at Salone del Mobile, reads less like a product launch and more like a considered position on where the contemporary kitchen has arrived and what it now needs to be. Febal Casa has spent decades building its reputation in the Italian kitchen market around the intersection of modularity, material quality, and design rigor, and Origina carries all three of those commitments into a proposal that is conceived from the beginning as an architectural project rather than a furniture system, one that is as concerned with how it shapes and connects the spaces around it as it is with what happens at the worktop. That architectural ambition is most visible in how the brand has approached the composition's central element, the Atlas Island, whose essential geometry and generous proportions give it the authority of a sculptural object in the room, commanding the visual logic of the entire living space while remaining entirely functional as a cooking surface, a storage volume, and the social gathering point around which a household organizes its daily rhythms. The material selection across the island's worktop, sides, and base is what gives the piece its tactile presence and keeps it from reading as simply a large rectangular form in the center of a room, the surfaces carrying a physical quality that rewards proximity and distinguishes Origina from kitchen systems that prioritize finish over substance. A plinth detailed with 45-degree joints works against the island's considerable volume, lightening it visually from across the room, while doors with bronze mirrored aluminum frames introduce a reflective quality that captures and redistributes light through the composition, adding depth and a sense of spatial generosity to the kitchen without any decorative gesture that competes with the design's fundamental restraint. The tall unit system that completes the Origina configuration takes the same architectural seriousness into the vertical plane, with glass doors and backlit shelves that turn the wall-mounted elements into something closer to a lit interior facade than conventional cabinetry, adding rhythm and warmth to the surfaces surrounding the island and ensuring the composition reads as a unified spatial intervention rather than a collection of individual kitchen components. These elements provide both storage and decoration, fulfilling the practical needs of a kitchen while maintaining the scenographic quality that defines Origina's aesthetic. For households that need a separation between the kitchen's public and working faces, Origina accommodates a secondary operational zone that sits within the system's overall stylistic logic but remains discreet enough to handle everyday tasks without pulling attention toward the more functional aspects of kitchen life and away from the composition's primary visual statement. It is a detail that speaks to how thoroughly Febal Casa has thought through the way people actually use a kitchen of this kind, balancing the desire for a space that looks considered and resolved with the reality that a kitchen, however architectural its ambitions, still needs to work hard every single day. Origina is available through Febal Casa's authorized dealer network across Italy and internationally, with the full system presented at Salone del Mobile. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

Scavolini's new Stilo system, designed by Spalvieri & Del Ciotto, arrives as a whole-home proposition that moves from kitchen to living area to bathroom within a single coherent design language, built around the understanding that the contemporary home no longer organizes itself around fixed, single-purpose rooms but around spaces that shift function across the day and need furnishings that can move with them. The kitchen sits at the center of the Stilo proposal and is treated as the social and architectural heart of the home rather than a purely functional zone, with large sculptural islands as the defining element, each featuring a sliding covering top that conceals the cooking and washing areas when closed, turning the worksurface into something closer to a considered piece of furniture than a kitchen fixture. Wall-mounted units, storage cabinets, display cases, and open elements extend outward from that central island, with a material and finish selection that expands the system's modularity and makes it deeply customizable across different spatial configurations and personal aesthetics. The unifying thread running through every element of Stilo, across every room and every function, is the cylinder, a pure geometric form that Spalvieri & Del Ciotto have deployed horizontally and vertically throughout the design as handles, shelves, desks, lighting bars, and equipped rails for organizing utensils, giving the system a signature detail that is simultaneously functional and decorative and immediately recognizable whether it appears in the kitchen, the living area, or the bathroom. Available in black and titanium finishes, the cylinder reads differently in each: bolder and more sophisticated in black, brighter and more balanced in titanium, giving specifiers and homeowners a meaningful choice that shifts the character of a space without changing its fundamental design logic. Taken as a whole, Stilo makes the case that compositional continuity across the entire home is not a stylistic luxury but a functional one and that a system rigorous enough in its design language to hold together across kitchen, living, bathroom, and home office gives contemporary living the coherent framework it has increasingly been looking for. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

Foundry, the new British luxury beauty brand created by cosmetic formulator and perfumer John Kilroy, builds its entire identity around that transparency. It launches from a former Saxon water mill in Frome, Somerset, with an edit of skincare, bodycare, and fragrance that sits as comfortably in the language of high science as it does in the Somerset countryside that physically surrounds it. What makes Foundry genuinely distinct from the wave of science-led brands that have defined the premium skincare conversation over the past several years is that Kilroy is not simply sourcing advanced ingredients from external laboratories and assembling them into formulas; he is growing, harvesting, and processing a significant portion of his own botanical extracts, ferments, and lysates from wild berries, flowers, and plant material gathered on site, producing small-batch artisan materials that sit alongside technically advanced ingredients from specialist global suppliers in a formulation approach that treats science and nature as genuinely complementary rather than competing narratives. The result is a brand with both the rigor of a laboratory and the rootedness of something made slowly and deliberately in a specific place. The launch serums reflect that formulation ambition clearly, with ingredient lists that move through peptides, amino acids, AHAs and BHAs, and plant-derived extracts with real purpose and specificity. One serum addresses the skin's microbiome using vegan placenta extract and fermented vitamin B9; another delivers retinaldehyde paired with vitamin C through nano-encapsulation for controlled and targeted release; and a third combines a full spectrum of vitamins with enzymes and antioxidants in a formula that covers the breadth of skin health in a single step. A night oil built around a large and carefully selected range of plant compounds rounds out the skincare core with the same considered intensity. The body care and fragrance side of the launch follows the same logic, pairing active-led formulas with fragrance compositions that draw from high perfumery. This includes using citrus oils sourced from specific vintages, Melissa oil from a Norfolk grower, and blackcurrant bud absolute from Burgundy. These sourcing decisions reflect the same attention to provenance and quality that runs through every other aspect of what Foundry makes. All of it produced at the Saxon water mill in Frome, a site that has moved through farming and textiles across the centuries and now houses one of the more quietly remarkable new addresses in British beauty. Foundry is available at foundryformulas.co.uk, priced from £25 to £180, shipping to the UK and US. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think

Birkenstock has spent 250 years making footwear and the better part of the last decade making ugly-chic not just acceptable but genuinely desirable, so a nail polish collection is either the most logical extension of that brand universe or the most surprising, depending on how you look at it, and the answer turns out to be both at once because the range lands with exactly the kind of considered restraint and functional honesty that has always made the brand difficult to dismiss even when it should be easy to. The polish collection sits within Birkenstock's Care Essentials line, which launched in 2024 as part of the brand's 250th anniversary with a foot care-focused edit of bath salts, scrubs, balms, and oils built around the premise that feet doing serious work deserve serious treatment. The nail polish is a deliberate tonal shift within that same line, less about repair and more about finish, less fix and more color, but still entirely anchored in the same no-nonsense ingredient philosophy that runs through everything Birkenstock has built in the care space. The formulas are vegan, plant-based, and 23-free, meaning a defined list of potentially harmful or toxic ingredients has been removed and replaced with alternatives derived from sources including sugar beet and cane, keeping the collection aligned with the brand's wider care narrative without making the sustainability credentials feel like the main event. The shade edit is tight and entirely on-brand: Eggshell, Light Rose, Crocus, Surf Green, and Red, five colors that slot neatly into Birkenstock's seasonal and classic open-toe palette without overwhelming or overreaching, completed by a top coat, base coat, and a nail polish remover infused with sweet almond oil that handles the practical end of the routine with the same ingredient consideration as the polishes themselves. Packaging is minimalist, functional, and made from recyclable glass, each bottle paired with a precision brush for even application, all of which is to say it looks and feels exactly like a Birkenstock product should, which for a first entry into an entirely new category is harder to achieve than it sounds. The collection is available exclusively in the US at birkenstock.com, priced between $11.95 and $19.95. You May Also Like Product Review : 2% Alpha Arbutin Depigmentation Serum by Proven Honest Derma Product Review: Blurré Pudding Matte Blush by LUXIORA Truth & Hair Launches Crayon Hair Mascara for Instant Grey Root Coverage Moondew Mogra Toner & Glow Getter – Gotukola Face Serum by Dusky India Product Review: REFINE Beauty's Collection Just Landed on Our PR Desk and Here Is What We Actually Think