Noir Kei Ninomiya’s Spring 2026 collection opened with Japanese poet Aoyagi Natsumi’s voice reciting the names of sea creatures, but what emerged on the runway looked less like anything from the ocean and more like someone’s childhood bedroom ceiling come to life : goth Syfy channel creatures wearing the cosmos.
Star-shaped metal frameworks sprouted from bodies in geometric sprawls, crusted with crystals and glittering elements that looked like Ninomiya had raided several glamorous aunties’ jewelry boxes, plucked out all the most aggressively bling and sparkly bits, and used them to bedazzle the night sky.
Tulle dresses exploded into impossible three-dimensional structures – one resembling a tutu crossed with a full-body loofah – while sharp blazers and crystalline pentagram bralettes anchored the more sculptural experiments. Harnesses extended into sprawling wire halos, and dresses grew pointed, silvery tinsel-esque extensions that swayed and bobbed with movement.
Shinji Konishi’s molded headpieces looked like they’d been constructed by alien insects, wasp nests made from something inorganic and vaguely sinister, bulbous forms painted in midnight hues with surfaces that suggested secretion rather than craft. The Jimmy Choo collaboration brought loafers studded with star-shaped grommets which seemed oddly practical footwear for otherwise celestial beings!
The designer said he wanted something playful, “like childhood, the first drawing,” and you can see that impulse in garments as modular systems where fabric and metal build wardrobes for a dimension where midnight skies walk around on two legs and the stars from a pulpy Ed Emshwiller comic book cover illustration have developed their own sartorial obsessions, complete with Lookbook.nu accounts and everything.
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Santa Maria Novella Quercia I know I talk a lot about grey overcast skies and thunderstorms and fog and mist and loving the glooms, but even I can appreciate an objectively beautiful day. Quercia is that day…clear clear air, clean clear water, when people say fresh air or water is sweet, this is what they mean, a sharp lucidity you can taste. Something green but not heavy, not dense forest green, lighter than that, the pale spring green of new growth and tender stems crushed underfoot releasing their watery juice. A cloudless, cool spring morning that makes you genuinely think “I am glad to be alive,” the kind of day that feels like a gift you didn’t ask for but accepted anyway. Dappled light pooling through ancient oak branches, the tree itself barely present except as shadow, as the reason for this filtered sun, this meadow existing in its patient protection. Lying in the grass eye-level with buttercups and bluebells, yellow and blue blooming heads, their petals hold that papery, delicate sweetness, barely-there floral, more like the idea of flowers than their actual heavy perfume. They’re good-natured about being trampled. They know they’ll be growing on your grave one day, gentle and insistent, reclaiming everything with the same cheerful persistence. For five hundred years, the oak has stood watching smaller things bloom and fade and bloom again, and you’re just another small thing, bright and brief and beautiful. Studio Ghibli sunlight, that glowing animation warmth where death exists but doesn’t overshadow, where graves get flowers and flowers get walked over, and it’s all the same turning wheel, all the same dappled afternoon. The shadow is there – hence the coolness, the morbid turn – but that’s the way of things. Just keep enjoying the flowers while you can. (Many thanks to my dear Flan for bringing this back from her recent travels for me!)
Air & Weather Paris, 5 A.M. Gourmand, but make it runway, through a filter of sheer delectation. You could bite into it theoretically, but you wouldn’t; it’s the expansive, exultant feeling right before you laugh with unexpected joy at something beautiful. Amber laminated like a croissant, all those folded layers, but impossibly light, airy where it should be heavy and resinous. Hollow chambers of golden fluff, bird bones that shouldn’t be able to support flight but do. Plumage structured in tiers, soft but strange to the touch, not quite what you expect when you reach for them. Phoebe Buffay as amber confection as a trilling Bjorkian lullaby swan dress. Wearing something ridiculously elegant and beautiful and warmly nourishing all at once. Playful spectacle of soft golden resin folded over and over into itself, sweet baked warmth and downy impossible lightness, earnest and gorgeous and committed to the charm of taking pleasure seriously without being serious.
Arcana Wildcraft Black Death There’s a particular kind of gothic imagery that Black Death calls to mind: baroque church architecture in shadow, where stone angels tucked into dusty alcoves have awakened hungry, wings once outspread in reverence now twist inward in sacrilege, enfolding flesh in the dark. A century’s worth of prayer-stained marble suddenly weeping blood; an inverse of holiness; the stony flame of the frozen heart. Black Death is cold where it should be warm. Clove should read as warming spice but here it’s numbing, that sharp eugenol prickling before the needle’s sting, tingles cold and strange. The smoky haze of offerings burnt to forbidden names. Sweetness emerging from the dry smoke and numbing spice, out of place, a lure you know better than to follow but follow anyway. Temptation heavy and inescapable, smooth and terrible in its certainty, the sweetness of something you were always going to do. Desolation and eerie stillness, the chilled moment of being found by what you’ve forever been circling. This is what it smells like to stop praying for the shadows to spare you and call them closer instead. Fear and desire meeting in the same alcove, two faces of one shadow. The darkness was coming regardless – might as well open the door to it yourself.
Hellenist À l’Ombre d’Artémis The wild goddess of the hunt peeling citrus in a mossy starlit clearing, an unlit Baies candle wafting blackcurrant and dewy rose from her pocket. In another pocket (cargo pants, lots of pockets): crushed mint, pale green sparks, cold mineral facets. Retinal ghosts when you close your eyes after staring at something bright. The quality of light more than light itself. Green stems snapped, leaf sap on fingertips. Petals pressed between glass slides. Forest floor dampness clinging to knees. Atmospheric, solitary. Citrus as quartz as starshine, crystalline and remote. Grains of light-fall suspended. Psychic gossamer, sour afterimage. Florals at dawn, night’s lingering chill. The moon in your mouth, its clear eye sees all.
Epichron Nightchild When I first sampled Nightchild months ago, I thought it smelled like an epic ballad by a Finnish heavy metal band, all Nightwish operatic drama and intensity, soaring vocals over crushing walls of reverb and distortion, cathedral-sized forests rendered in smoke and electric guitars, everything amplified and enormous. After purchasing a full bottle, I realize it’s something equally intense, but different: not operatic shrieking but guttural chanting, throat-singing incantation, Heilung summoning spirits in a clearing. Green-earth-smoke, tangled and inseparable. Coniferous sap weeping, clinging in translucent filaments. Forest floor moss, rooty, dark, and creeping, peeled away in damp handfuls, exposing Xenolithic scars. Loamy sweetness and soil, minerals apothecary-bitter. Cedar knife-edge, incense cutting sharp, clean and cold. Herbs twisted and wrung, citrus peel, crushed pine needles, and black pepper ground fresh. Less actual smoke than the drama suggests, more breathing near where smoke was, its ghost hanging in frigid air. A ritual performed for an audience of one. Maybe you’re dreaming—the clearing, the figures circling, the intranslatable incantations carved on gold, the owl cries, the wolf howls, the gods laugh like thunder, that kind of thing. Dry ice fog rolling low across the stage floor, backlit for maximum atmosphere and vibes. Hazy incense shrouding stark forest, ancient spells you mouth without understanding, throat-singing layered with crystalline chant, the ceremony private and enormous simultaneously. You’re watching from inside the dream, close enough to smell the vapor, far enough to know it’s performance. The ancient forest rendered, amplified, made devotional, and only for you.
Brown Sugar Babe Wildcard (BR540 dupe) Wild Card smells posh, polished nonchalance, elegance carrying a slight edge. The dryness of unlit cigarettes, tobacco-adjacent without being tobacco. Something golden and floral threaded through, warmed with spice, woods that feel cosmopolitan rather than earthy. Smart, savvy, confident, plugged-in – an It-girl who knows everyone, goes everywhere, looks expensive doing it. No interior life to speak of, but she doesn’t need one. A pack of Gitanes tucked in a Parisian model’s handbag alongside a perfect lipstick, a vintage Hermès wallet soft with age, a dog-eared French paperback, loose euro coins, and keys to an impossibly chic old apartment. (I don’t know if it smells anything like BR540; I had a little sample ages ago, but it didn’t leave much of an impression. Probably a little too sweet, though. No matter how much or how little Wildcard resembles that scent, it is by far a better purchase.) Over on Patreon this month, I share a favorite layering combination involving this scent!
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