#clog-making

#clog-making

I think everyone embraced this storytelling concept because we have to talk about the materials, the product, but doing it in a way that drives an emotional connection with the consumer.

The UK dumps 149m pairs of shoes in landfill annually. This is unacceptable when the vast majority can be fixed. Sometimes all it takes is a small gluing or stitching job, and you're only paying £4 then those shoes might last for another 12 months or even longer.

This is just one item in a display that looks at how wood can be turned into all sorts of things that don't look or feel like wood at all. It's all because wood is a renewable resource and could be a viable replacement for plastics and other oil-based materials.

Think Claude Monet and Paris or Edward Hopper and New York. Those artists never stopped creating scenes that captured the vibrancy-and sometimes the more grotesque side too-of places that remain world capitals today. They both left legacies for others to follow, as one can see wandering around Montmartre or Central Park, spying the many artists with sketch books in hand or seated at easels.

The heavy brick mass of the early twentieth century warehouse stands steady at the corner, its facades still marked by decorative lintels and deep-set openings. Above, two added floors sit within a perforated aluminum veil that glows softly at dusk. The metal skin reads as a light canopy hovering over the old masonry, a precise intervention that contrasts the museum's new public life with its working past. See designboom's previous coverage here.

But this week I spotted an ingenious use for the extras, courtesy of NY-based company Proche Studio. Here's their proposal: Mail in a wool blanket, and they'll give it new life in the form of a great-looking-and uber snug-chore coat, vest, or scarf. I'm particularly smitten by the chore coat, a fresh version of the quilt coats that became popular a couple of years ago, and much, much warmer.

A gold ring with a deep-blue, oval setting - decorated with fine spirals of filigree and tiny granulated beads - has been recovered from medieval deposits in Tønsberg, a historic town in southeastern Norway. The ring was found during an excavation in the modern town centre, where archaeologists have been investigating layers of urban life preserved beneath today's streets. The discovery was made within the protected archaeological area known as Tønsberg Medieval Town.

In the show, "dirty" extends to anything that breaks fashion's pact with propriety. Here are clothes caked in grime, blotted with makeup, stiffened by salt, pieced from trash, frayed, and faded. The garments span decades, from the 1980s through the mid-2000s, when the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier built their fame on defying convention, to today, when corporatization has made such daring increasingly rare. But forgoing practicality frees certain designers from the demands that the body be polite-and thereby policed.

What I'm doing here is giving you fashion options. What boots should a man, a man who takes some amount of pride in how he looks, own? And sorry to be one note, but I'm also going to tell you to avoid the "trends" here. We're in a vacuum of trends at the moment. I've talked about this in other stories, and I try to avoid talking about it at parties

The Rural Cut places vintage fashion in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, among vineyards, open fields, and the animals that inhabit the land. As a Beirut-based stylist, I worked with a fully Lebanese team to create a shoot that feels authentic, where each garment and every frame reflects the textures, history, and rhythm of the rural landscape. Photography by Angele Basile / Instagram: @angelebasile Styling by Rinad Saad / Instagram: @rinaaaaddd

There is every chance that 2026 will be the year you see your first pair of Gardana gardening clogs in the wild. In fact, if you spend much time on TikTok, or live in Brooklyn, you've probably already been seeing them for months, if not years. I saw my first pair a few weeks ago. I watched a dad dropping his kids off at school in head-to-toe Carhartt, a pair of Gardanas peeping out from below his trousers like a shy frog.

Granted, a catwalk had been laid but it was still a short-ish trek through Française countryside to get to your seat, which is evidently a voyage Rider had in mind given the resolutely pragmatic design of Celine's Riley boots. They're a deluxe take on what the French call the botte de pluie (nicer than wellies, right?) in moulded rubber, nylon and calfskin, more than a nod to the equestrian antecedents of the house.

The earliest jewellery ever discovered wasn't gold or gemstone at all, but fish bones. In prehistoric times, hunters wore bones, teeth and claws from their kills as talismans of luck and prowess. For Italian shoe maestro Giuseppe Zanotti - famous for his sculptural, jewel-encrusted heels - this idea of turning humble scraps into ornamentation has long been second nature; during a seaside dinner in 2004, Zanotti sketched a fish skeleton on a tablecloth.

Stylists say Mary Janes and ballet sneakers will be trendy as they prioritize comfort and style.

Choosing a particular model does not necessarily mean focusing on excessive colour, but rather knowing how to identify the lines and volumes that communicate a precise aesthetic vision that breaks with convention. This process requires a certain awareness of materials and proportions, as a shoe with a strong design has the ability to transform even the simplest outfit into a sophisticated and modern style statement.

We could speculate as to why- the current political climate, the search for something meaningful in a disconnected digital landscape that deprioritizes the physical for an assortment of dopamine pixels, how hot everyone is in and -but we'll leave that for the cultural anthropologists in future decades. Right now, we're just happy to wear boots. For Esquire, western wear goes beyond flash-in-the-pan cultural moments. It may be currently on trend, but it's always been in style.