The Guardian — Fashion • Jan. 12, 2026, 2:34 a.m.

Clothes can be tricky presents to pick, but follow my simple rules and you’ll have your shopping all wrapped up Once upon a time, Christmas shopping meant grabbing the newest album release or an old-favourite DVD box set, wrapping it in glitter paper, depositing it under the tree and putting your feet up with a highlighter pen to annotate the Radio Times. Now that music and film lives in the cloud, we’ve turned to clothes as the new go-to gift.

But choosing them for another person is a high-risk endeavour. How can we boost our chances of getting it right?

Because we do really, really want to get it right. Kids just want Santa to bring them the swag, but one of the things that happens when you become a grownup is that you care more about whether other people like the gifts you’ve given them than you do about what you receive.

The Guardian — Fashion • Jan. 12, 2026, 2:34 a.m.

With Balenciaga’s new range embracing a term that the fashion industry once shied away from, the era of quiet luxury may finally be over Is luxury an £8m Birkin bag ? Logging out of social media ?

A Japanese toilet with a pre-defecation misting function? A three-figure lipstick ?

A morning bath? Or even a £9,000 stainless steel coffin that looks a bit like Elon Musk’s “luxury” Cybertruck ?

The Guardian — Fashion • Jan. 12, 2026, 2:34 a.m.

Fashion has always been political. Now, demonstrators are putting pro-Palestinian slogans and symbols on their clothes – and not just for marches It’s early afternoon at the latest national march for Gaza in central London.

A man is wearing a sweatshirt bearing a photograph of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old girl who was killed in the Gaza conflict last year along with family members and the paramedics who tried to save her. He doesn’t want to be named.

But it is, he says, his attempt “to keep her memory alive, until we get justice … Whether it takes one month, one year, 100 years, I’m not giving up.

The Guardian — Fashion • Jan. 12, 2026, 2:34 a.m.

The designer reinvented power dressing, redefined what it meant to look modern and was the architect of how we dress now Giorgio Armani dressed all of us. Whether or not you ever had the money for a jacket with an Armani label, you wore a jacket that he invented.

He was the mastermind of contemporary style, the architect of how we dress now. If you have worn an unstructured suit with a T-shirt to a wedding; if you have worn muted neutrals to work; if you have thought it might be chic to paint your living room grey: that was Armani.

Armani was working until his final days. Invitations had already been sent out for his next show, to be held on 28 September in the 14th-century courtyard of Milan’s Palazzo Brera.

The Guardian — Fashion • Jan. 12, 2026, 2:34 a.m.

A world-class beauty who didn’t lead with her looks, she broke all the rules of celebrity dressing with a sunny smile Diane Keaton dies aged 79 Peter Bradshaw on Diane Keaton Diane Keaton interviewed in 2023 A life in pictures Personal style is the best kind of style there is, and no one did personal style better than Diane Keaton. Her signature look was shirts and ties, snappy waistcoats and baggy trousers, an idiosyncratic version of menswear that was somehow both elegant and goofy.

It was part Beau Brummell and part Charlie Chaplin. “Borrowed from the boys” does not do it justice; she made it entirely her own.

The charm of her wardrobe was that it was exactly her. She was a world-class beauty who didn’t lead with her looks.

The Guardian — Fashion • Jan. 12, 2026, 2:34 a.m.

New book The Making of an Icon examines artist whose works have become almost ubiquitous It seems like a new Jean-Michel Basquiat fashion collaboration drops online most weeks, from a £20 Uniqlo crew neck T-shirt to a kimono or a sports bra. But more than 35 years since his death in 1988, would the New York artist have been flattered or horrified by the mass marketing of his art?

Basquiat’s premature death at 27 means that questions will remain as to whether he would have signed off on things like bathmats on Redbubble or Ligne Bath’s Trumpet candle . How would he, for example, have felt about a Basquiat collaboration with MeUndies underpants – with the tagline: “Jean-Michel Basquiat … taught us all to look inward and find our authentic self.

MeUndies always strives for authenticity.” Continue reading...

The Guardian — Fashion • Jan. 12, 2026, 2:34 a.m.

Artist, writer, fashion editor and raconteur whose bohemian lifestyle inspired her bonkbuster novels Though she accomplished much else, Molly Parkin has died, at the age of 93 after suffering from Alzheimer’s, as an acknowledged artist, which is what she had really wanted from life. She had passed through fashion, journalism, writing fiction and nonfiction, notoriety and foulmouthed fame, on television and off, plus more than 50 dwelling places, two husbands, and encounters with men beyond enumeration.

But art – paintings super-aware of emotion in a landscape – was her first and last love, and her serious talent. A male artist living so expansively could expect to be appreciated for surviving into old age, the loss of muse and money, the bottles and the cigarettes, the energy invested in the constant pursuit of sex and in telling the world about it.

The Guardian — Fashion • Jan. 12, 2026, 2:34 a.m.

In politics, clothes matter – as the mid-market formal wear favoured by the new, young New York mayor testifies Growing up in London in the 00s, I was surrounded by suits. On City boys darting around the Square Mile.

In Hyde Park, where Arab dads in baggy suits kicked footballs with their children in honeyed light. At school, where cheap grey suits were our uniform.

The suit has always been a costume of seriousness that signals powerfulness and performance; all the things I was apparently supposed to want if I ever intended to become a “man”. But until recently, my generation seemed to wear them less and less, and they had all but disappeared from my consciousness.

The Guardian — Fashion • Jan. 12, 2026, 2:34 a.m.

Against a backdrop of rising white nationalism, the ‘global authority on colour’ has chosen white as the shade of 2026. Four experts wade in on the implications for everything from interior design choices to racial politics • Don’t get Fashion Statement delivered to your inbox?

Sign up here For more than 25 years, Pantone, which describes itself as “the global authority for colour communication and inspiration”, has attempted to prophesy the year ahead by choosing its specific colour. For 2026, it is hedging its bets on something called cloud dancer .

The Guardian — Fashion • Jan. 12, 2026, 2:34 a.m.

They don’t have to be expensive, they go with everything and they boost confidence – if you get the styling right The eternal appeal of the white shirt is not just that it goes with anything, although it does. And not only that it can take you anywhere, although it can.

It is not even that it never goes out of style, or that good quality versions are accessible at real-world prices, although those are true also. A white shirt is self-confidence.

It stands for it, and it brings it, and that’s the real secret. It is a superhero cloak that bestows you with this formidable power.

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