Haven’t you heard? Fashion loves the news! This may not be the week’s most pressing headline, and it certainly isn’t a breaking story, but the industry’s storied obsession with newsprint continued this morning at London Fashion Week.
The newsflash from this morning: Emilia Wickstead sent models down her fall 2025 runway show holding a copy of The Wickstead Times, a newspaper created for the show. One of last season’s headlines was that Stella McCartney’s own The Stella Times, which her models held copies of as they walked down the runway. Keen observers will remember Matthieu Blazy’s spring 2024 dispatch for Bottega Veneta, when the designer accessorized some looks with vintage-looking leather newspapers and even fashioned a few handbags out of the same print. Past runway reports see Blazy speak of his fascination with the way people dress in Milan and around the world, the nuances of which he studies to inform his collections.
Blazy’s models on the runway often hold folded newspapers and flowers and shopping bags, and their tote bags and carryalls are often spilling over with clothes. Miuccia Prada did a similar thing for fall 2024 when she sent overstuffed handbags down her Miu Miu runway. What these gestures do is burst the fantasy bubble of the catwalk to bring these collections to the street. What’s more relatable than holding shopping bags and newspapers and carrying a handbag that just won’t zip? This could be you, is the message, and it’s a pretty effective one.
But back to today’s news, here’s the scoop of where this trend comes from. Unsurprisingly, it is the iconoclast designer Elsa Schiaparelli who is often credited for bringing the newspaper into fashion. Except that rather than holding a newsprint, her models would wear it: It was in 1935 that the couturier used press clippings written about her and her collections as prints on ready-to-wear and accessories. Almost seven decades later, John Galliano, another of fashion’s famous rebels, adapted the idea for his fall 2000 collection for Christian Dior. He created The Christian Dior Daily and plastered headlines all over his collection—you will most famously remember the slinky frock Carrie Bradshaw wore on Sex and the City. Galliano has returned to this idea many times over, making it one of his signatures both at Dior and at his eponymous label, where he made everything from speedos to jeans and bermuda shorts with his headline-clad print.
Just under two decades later, Demna explored the idea for his spring 2018 collection of Balenciaga, as did Shayne Oliver for his one-collection experiment at Helmut Lang during the same season. Kim Jones did it at Dior Men in 2023 when he worked with Eli Russell Linnetz of ERL for his resort 2023 collection, and so did Donatella Versace, Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee of Vaquera, and many, many more.
This is, as ever with fashion, a developing story. Scroll through for a brief visual history of newspapers in fashion; and stay up to date with the latest news—and news prints!—by downloading the Vogue app and checking up on the fall 2025 season’s shows as they hit the runway.
