The light and fluid designs of Skall Studio's SS26 collection. Photograph (above) by Andrea Heinsohn for DAM.
AMID the tranquil garden of Copenhagen’s Designmuseum Danmark,
Skall Studio unveiled the new Spring/Summer 2026 collection, La Danse – Act II, a reflective journey into movement and emotion. This season, the design duo of sisters Julie and Marie Skall explored softness, and
a more fluid expression of femininity in their designs. Flowing silhouettes in sun-washed tones,
crafted from natural fibres, evoke the early light of a new day, while
nostalgic Liberty florals reappear with quiet charm.
For the first time, the
label introduced accessories made from innovative, plant-based materials
derived from Sicilian orange and cactus, extending its commitment to
sustainable, animal-free design and the show was also complemented by Le Sundial’s sculptural jewellery. The presentation featured live classical
music, transforming the event into a sensory encounter with stillness and
grace. Founded in 2014 by the Skall sisters, the label draws on its
roots in Northern Jutland, where their family once collected seashells ~ a
symbol still central to their philosophy of conscious, connected living. ~ Antonio Visconti
See all of the highlights from the Skall Studio SS26 collection by Andrea Heinsohn below
Mobile habitats awaiting the Zeuneriana marmorata eggs float on the water in Venice. Photograph: Marco Zorzanello.
By Miriama Young
It was late January when I got the call. I’m asked to bring my sound art to a collaborative ecology and design project, Song of the Cricket, for the Venice Biennale of Architecture. When such as invitation arrives, you have no choice but to jump in.
I see an image of the site for the project: the Gaggiandre at the Arsenale – a medieval shipyard that serviced the Venetian military at its imperial peak.
Once a resplendent hive of industry, it is even detailed by Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy:
As in the arsenal of the Venetians,
all winter long a stew of sticky pitch
boils up to patch their sick and tattered ships
that cannot sail (instead of voyaging,
some build new keels, some tow and tar the ribs
of hulls worn out by too much journeying;
some hammer at the prow, some at the stern,
and some make oars, and some braid ropes and cords;
one mends the jib, another, the mainsail)
The Gaggiandre is a cavernous, church-like space flanked by stone colonnades, wooden roof beams, and situated, in true Venetian style, on a bed of water. With long reverberation times, music in this space would need to be slowly unfolding, drawing the listener in and inviting them to meditate.
It is a place of reflection, both metaphorically and physically. To a sound artist, creating for the Gaggiandre is a dream.
Art and the Anthropocene
The Song of the Cricket exhibit has been on display at the Biennale since May. Its purpose is to bridge ecological research with sound art to raise awareness for our fragile biodiversity, with a focus on the critically endangered Adriatic bush-cricket, Zeuneriana marmorata.
Zeuneriana marmorata is a rare species found in wetlands in north-eastern Italy and Slovenia.Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
What better place than Venice – a city slowly sinking – to reflect on where we stand in this moment of environmental collapse?
The exhibit was created by a large team of collaborators. It features several mobile habitats populated with Zeuneriana. Some of these habitats sit on the Arsenale lawn, while other symbolic habitats float on the water as life rafts. Alongside the enclosures, my pre-composed “sound garden” plays through speakers onto the lawn.
At the end of the Biennale, the team, led by landscape architect and ecologist Alex Felson, intends to use the life rafts to ceremonially transport incubated eggs to a new home on the mainland.
The installation features mobile cricket habitats on the lawn, as well as symbolic life rafts on the water.Miriama Young
Sounds of nature and Vivaldi
On the lawn, the chirrup of live courting bush-crickets blends with pre-recorded sounds of their ancestors. These ancestral sounds might double as a lullaby for newly orphaned eggs, as adults only live a few months.
The accompanying sound garden is richly diverse, created from an array of fauna sounds drawn from Northern Italian wetland environments, including the Eurasian reed warbler, the cuckoo and, my personal favourite, the green toad.
My intention is for the soundscape to transport audiences to a different time and place: to a future where these species thrive in a healthy ecology.
Excerpt from the Song of Crickets sound installation.
Miriama Young and Monica Lim1.73 MB (download)
There is a second element to the sound installation, created with support from sound technologist Monica Lim. Informed by the music of Antonio Vivaldi, this element serves to further activate the untapped airspace and enhance visitors’ experience of the site.
Born in Venice in 1678, Vivaldi is a ubiquitous and avoidable cliché for locals. Yet his music was the perfect inspiration for this project, as it encodes a hidden ecological story.
Vivaldi incorporated the literal sounds of nature into The Four Seasons (1723), with particular species’ songs annotated onto the score.
The Song of the Cricket borrows elements from Vivaldi’s Summer: Allegro non Molto. In the short section I drew from, the cuckoo, turtledove and goldfinch are all musically described and credited by Vivaldi.
And although they are not expressly mentioned, I imagine bush-crickets also pervade Vivaldi’s Summer movement, as we know they were once prolific in the Venice lagoon, and would have filled the summer air during his lifetime. You might hear them in the rapidly repeating (tremolo) string gestures.
The cricket’s song serves as a indicator of an ecosystem’s health. But the sound of crickets in Venice today is largely missing.
Our take on Vivaldi is slowed down 30 times, magnified and fragmented, voiced through synthesizers, and piped into the Gaggiandre through five speakers – creating an immersive experience that feels at once futuristic and Baroque.
Bridging the past and an imagined future
The decision to borrow from music of the Western historical canon (in this case Vivaldi) fits into a burgeoning movement that composer Valentin Silvestrov coined “eschatophony”.
This is presumably a portmanteau of “eschatology”, the study of the end of the world, and “phony”, which in this case relates to sound (such as symphony). Here, we are left only to wrestle with and re-contextualise our musical past, to create “echoes of history”.
The inclusion of sound is still a novelty at the architecture Biennale. Of the 300 exhibits this year, I can count on one hand the projects that incorporated sound. All of them were special.
Sound creates a remarkable theatre, both through its immediacy, as well as its capacity to elevate a project beyond the prosaic, into the poetic.
Venice is a city where history pervades at every turn. The Song of the Cricket invites listeners in, offering them space to reflect, and to imagine a future where ecosystems might once again thrive.
Miriama Young, Associate Professor Music Composition, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, The University of Melbourne
Clothes communicate a great deal of information about us, including our social position and the causes we espouse.
By Sarah Richmond
With a few exceptions, philosophers have had little to say about clothes. Maybe this is because the topic seems frivolous, or feminine, unworthy of the attention of a predominantly male collection of thinkers.
Perhaps, too, the transience of fashion, and the fact that clothes belong – quite literally – to the domain of mere appearance, also has something to do with it. In A Philosopher Looks at Clothes, an engaging and informative book, Kate Moran, philosophy professor at Brandeis University in the US, urges us to think again.
As Moran points out, clothing looms large in life. Every day we dress, deciding how many layers to wear and whether we need a coat – or might a cardigan suffice? We gaze critically at other people’s choices (“OMG, those shoes!”). We wonder how to rise to the challenge of an imminent Eurovision-themed party.
From a historical point of view, also, our species-specific recourse to clothes stretches back to the earliest human society. In mythical time, it begins with Adam’s and Eve’s discovery, in shame, that they were naked. If fashion is transient, clothes, per se, are not.
Clothes, Moran tells us, serve three basic purposes: protection, modesty and decoration. At once, these introduce questions of deep philosophical interest. Are the purposes equally important? Why, throughout human history, have we refused to settle merely for protection, desiring for example that a hat should be of some favoured colour or shape? To what extent do our decorative choices express our personal identity? Do clothes ever qualify as works of art? Why is modesty an abiding concern, given that we all know the contours of the unclothed body?
In many contexts, and especially today, clothes invite ethical and political assessment. Clothes communicate a great deal of information about us, including our social position and the causes we espouse.
We may knowingly exploit this, choosing to flaunt an obviously expensive garment or to wear our football team’s scarf. In other cases the meanings are imposed. The uniforms forced on prisoners, for example, emphasise subordination and erase their individuality.
Poignantly, research into textile history has uncovered a streak of resistance in even the most ill-treated captives. In concentration camps during the second world war some prisoners altered their uniforms, or mended them, or added pockets. As Moran remarks, these actions were not just practical; their aim, too, was to “recover some sense of identity and dignity”.
Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche by Edvard Munch (1906).Thiel Gallery, Stockholm
In the brilliantly conceived series by Cambridge University Press to which this title belongs, each author discusses some general topic from a perspective that is philosophically informed and at the same time personal.
We need more books like these, to counteract the entrenched pretence of disinterestedness in philosophy. (Nietzsche, exceptionally, saw through it, denouncing philosophers as “advocates who do not want to be seen as such … sly spokesmen for prejudices that they christen as ‘truths’”.)
Knowledge of the significance, in an author’s life, of her subject-matter enriches the reader’s imaginative experience of a book. Describing herself as an “ardent hobbyist” who sews her own clothes, Moran provides an additional facet to her account of today’s fashion industry and its scandalous environmental costs.
The reader knows that Moran herself has found an alternative. This lends a certain authority to her judgement that, however futile it may seem for any one person to step off the fast-fashion bus: “There is an important moral difference between being inefficacious and being innocent.”
Moran shows how many areas of philosophy can illuminate the phenomenon of clothes: not only ethics and political thought, but also aesthetics, theories of communication, of personal identity, of gender and cultural appropriation.
For readers unfamiliar with academic philosophy, these forays offer a path into a rich conceptual landscape. Along the way, we are offered a multitude of riveting facts. Who would have guessed that pink has not always been for girls, and blue for boys? And there are pictures, too. My highlight was the “revenge dress” that Princess Diana wore to a gala dinner in the midst of hostilities with Charles, in a successful bid to divert press attention from his appearance on TV.
Sarah Richmond, Honorary Associate Professor of Philosophy, University College London (UCL).
Backstage before the Yuima Nakazato show as model Akuol Deng Atem is dressed in a sleek gown of silvery porcelain plates. Photograph (above) by Jay Zoo for DAM
Yuima Nakazato prepared to unveil his new haute couture collection Glacier at the Palais de Tokyo in
Paris. From the rehearsal led by the Japanese designer and Communications and Creative Officer Bradly Dunn Klerks to the quiet
rituals of dressing, sewing, and transformation backstage, this intimate photo
reportage captures the moments where concept meets craft revealing a collection
shaped as much by deep thought and emotion as skill and design. Story by Jeanne-Marie Cilento. Photographs by Andrea Heinsohn and Jay Zoo
Yuima Nakazato and Bradly Dunn Klerks
at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris after
the well-received 'Glacier' show.
Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
IN the cavernous halls of the Palais de Tokyo, in the Passy neighborhood of Paris opposite the Trocadéro, the final
rehearsal for Glacier is underway.
Below the stark light of the storied art centre's industrial spaces, Yuima Nakazato and Bradly Dunn Klerks
move with quiet focus through the unfolding sequence. Together, they oversee the details, the alignment of silhouettes, the pace of the walk, the emotional
rhythm of the finale.
At the centre of it all, stands Nakazato, rehearsing his role in
the performative piece at the heart of the show: the slow, deliberate pouring of black ink onto
the white-shrouded body of dancer Evgeny Ganeev. Even in rehearsal, the moment
carried gravity. Around them, models trace their steps across the concrete
floor in silence, garments moving and clinking, porcelain masks glinting under the lights. The show is hours away, but already, the world of
Glacier has begun to take shape ~ fragile, meditative, and charged with meaning.
Nakazato moves through the rehearsal and the pre-show planning with composure and intent, guiding his team with a steady presence.
Backstage in Paris as a hand-made
ceramic mask is fitted pre-show.
Photograph: Jay Zoo
Just beyond the echo of footsteps in the main space,
backstage tells a quieter story, one of hands and touch, of seams and stillness.
In the fluorescent-lit dressing area, models stand patiently as final fittings are completed and delicate garments are layered onto bodies like a second
skin.
Seamstresses crouch low with needles and thread, adjusting lengths,
checking fastenings and the ceramic armour, as fragile as
eggshell. Each look requires time and care. Nothing here is rushed.
Hair is sculpted into glacial coils or swept back from the forehead while make-up artists shade eyes with a dash of silver or blue and lips are muted to a pale shade. Ceramic masks are slipped on gently, each one a
protective shield as much as an artistic statement.
Some conceal the face
entirely; others leave only a single feature exposed. These coverings, like the
garments themselves, carry meaning far beyond aesthetics, they ask questions
about identity, anonymity, and resistance in a hyper-visible world.
The show was hours away, but already, the world of Glacier backstage has begun to take shape ~ fragile, meditative, and charged with meaning
Bradly Dunn Klerks looks on as
Yuima Nakazato runs through the
rehearsal before the show.
Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Nakazato and Dunn Klerks rehearse and plan the pre-show with composure and intent,
adjusting silhouettes, smoothing fluttering textiles, guiding their team with a steady
presence.
His designs ~ long coats bearing giant photographs of bare skin, gowns
constructed from translucent layered mesh, mohair-crocheted chainmail threaded
with metal ~ are not just garments. They are designed as emotional statements, fragile
armours that speak of survival and memory.
These backstage moments are more than preparation, they
are the quiet heartbeat of a collection that speaks in gestures, and
touch. Here, the spectacle is not performance, but process. The world of
Glacier emerges not only in the spotlight, but behind the scenes: in the bowed head
of a model being dressed, in the quiet before the ink falls, in the silence
of a seam being sewn by hand.
This is couture not as embellishment, but as an invocation to change. Not
as show, but as ceremony. And before a single guest enters the room, Yuima
Nakazato has already created his story.
Scroll down to see more behind the scenes before the Yuima Nakazato AW25/26 show in Paris.
Dancer Evgeny Ganeev, Yuima Nakazato and Bradly Dunn Klerks rehearsing the performance before the Glacier show, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn.
Backstage models try on the ceramic masks. Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph; Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage as Evgeny Ganeev is in make-up at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph; Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph; Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Evgeny Ganeev rehearsing before his performance at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture.Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph; Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Bradly Dunn Klerks and Yuima Nakazato before the show, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Backstage at Yuima Nakazato, Glacier, Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Jay Zoo
Yuima Nakazato and Bradly Dunn Klerks walk out of the runway space at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Autumn-Winter 2025/2026, Paris Haute Couture. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn
Liam and Noel Gallagher have reunited Oasis and are touring Europe this summer with shows in the UK and Ireland, part of their 'Oasis Live 25' world tour.
By Glenn Fosbraey
The trend for naming summers has become something of a cultural phenomenon. Think for example of 2019, which was branded a “hot girl summer”, inspired by rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s song.
In 2021 there was the much-ridiculed “white boy summer” (named after a song of the same name by Tom Hanks’s son, Chet). Then 2022 was “feral girl summer” and 2024, of course, was a “brat summer”, after Charli XCX’s cultural phenomenon album Brat.
And this summer? Well, with the likes of Oasis, Pulp, Supergrass, Suede, Shed Seven and Cast all playing UK dates between June and August, it’s “Britpop summer”, of course. The question is, though, whether these names are actually (and accurately) representing the zeitgeist, or if they are just the result of savvy marketing strategies.
Such things may now be occurring more frequently, but they’re nothing new. The year 1967 was famously coined “the summer of love”, a moniker supposedly invented by the Californian local government to put a positive spin on the druggy, hairy, hippy gatherings taking place across the state.
Then, just over two decades later, there came the imaginatively titled “second summer of love” in 1988 which, like its predecessor was drug-inspired, but this time involved British ravers taking ecstasy in London warehouses instead of hippies “dropping acid” in San Franciscan parks.
The “summer of love” has largely been presented to us as a psychedelic utopia, wherein London was the “swinging, cool and hip” epicentre of a new cultural movement. Everyone was blissfully stoned, with messages of peace and love on their lips, kaftans and floral blouses on their bodies and flowers in their hair.
In reality, though, in the UK at least only 8% of adults had actually tried cannabis and fewer than 1% had taken LSD or acid, and the fashion of the day (for men, anyway) involved sensible slacks and short-back-and-sides.
Such un-psychedelic appetites also spilled over into mainstream music. Although it’s now the UK’s bestselling album ever, in 1967, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was only the sixth-biggest album of the year in terms of sales. It was bested by the very suitably non-flower-power Herb Alpert, The Monkees and The Sound of Music soundtrack.
Pink Floyd’s debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – “the founding masterpiece in psychedelic music” – sold 275,000 copies in 1967 in the UK (compared to The Sound of Music’s 2.4 million) and was number 34 on the list of big-selling albums in the UK that year.
The same year, 1967, also saw the “best double-A side ever released”, The Beatles’ Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever. It was kept off the number one spot by Engelbert Humperdinck’s Please Release Me.
Inside the so-called ‘second summer of love’.
It seems, then, that for most of the British public, it was less a “summer of love” and more a “summer of Humperdinck”. Fast-forward five decades, and we see the same kinds of things happening. The year 2019 was a “hot girl summer”, Megan Thee Stallion’s song only peaked at 40 in the UK singles charts and her gigs sold poorly.
Like our “summer of Humperdinck”, were such things based on popularity, we may have expected a “Sheeran summer”, with Ed Sheeran’s duet with Justin Bieber, I Don’t Care, dominating the charts and airwaves.
Similarly, although 2024 was a “brat summer”, Charli XCX’s album was actually only the UK’s eighth-biggest selling album of the year, with Taylor Swift’s very un-Brat-like The Tortured Poets Department achieving 783,820 sales – almost double Brat’s.
Britpop summer
Britpop itself may have peaked in 1995, but in the summer of 1996, with Oasis and Blur still omnipresent, Tony Blair talking about the prospect of freedom, aspiration and ambition, England progressing through the Euros on home soil, and sunny day after sunny day, it was (according to The Guardian, at least) the most optimistic period in recent British history where anything seemed possible.
Pulp performed a secret set at Glastonbury 2025 to huge crowds.
We may all have become more cynical in the intervening years, but in the midst of another heatwave, with Pulp at Glastonbury, and the Gallaghers reunited, it does feel like there’s something in the air again.
Indeed, standing among tens of thousands of fellow music fans in the sweltering heat watching Jarvis Cocker strutting his gangly stuff, if I ignored the grey in his beard, the iPhones in the crowd, and the aching in my legs, it could have been the nineties all over again.
Britpop summer? I’m all for it. And maybe this will be one time that the name really does represent the nation’s mood.
Glenn Fosbraey, Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Winchester
