Florals for Spring... Groundbreaking.
+ floristry has fashion's co-sign, Selfridges goes big on luxe wellness, racist AI images and more
Hey, hi, hello! Welcome back to Fashion Tingz.
So, I’m a big anime fan. And not since it became trendy in recent years due to pop culture approval and celebs liking it, I remember racing home from school in the early noughties (before TV recording was a thing, can you believe) to catch my favourite shows. That’s how far we go back.
Anyways, I’m doing some deep dive research on anime and fashion for a big project I’m working on (more to come on that soonish). I’d love to know your thoughts, vibes, opinions, and anything you want to share about the world of anime and everything in its orbit...
What’s your favourite anime, stylistically? Who are your favourite characters and why? Who has the best style and dress sense? What plot had you hooked from the moment you started watching? Comment, direct message, reply to this newsletter, whatever’s easiest. I’m down to chat!
— J’Nae xoxo
IN THIS EDITION: Fashion is better with floristry’s co-sign. Blackpink’s Jennie is the industry’s favourite K-pop it girl. Beloved British marigolds are putting in overtime. Racism is alive and kicking in viral AI-generated imagery. Board reshuffling over at D&G. Selfridges debuts a members-only club for HNWIs.
I’ve never been into flowers. The hype does and doesn’t make sense to me… why give someone something that’s only going to die anyway? Is that a sign of your feelings towards them? Do you inevitably think your relationship is going to end? Are you dooming something to fail before it’s even begun? This could be the chronic overthinker in me talking, but I’d rather keep flowers where they’re supposed to be, in good old Mother Nature as intended.
That being said, the fashionification of flowers hasn’t escaped my attention. I’m both mesmerised and enthralled by it. Look no further than this TikTok from @ezralastingarms, who has made bouquets for Charli XCX, Troye Sivan and Shy Girl. Or this from September Studio, who capture stems in their finest form while shaking ass. Then we’ve got Ross the florist from Manchester, who elevates the everyday bouquet, placing flowers firmly in the spotlight.
Flowers used to be polite. They sat quietly in vases, turned up dutifully at weddings, and wilted on dining room tables. Their job was to decorate, not to speak. Now, they have opinions. Scroll for thirty seconds and you’ll find bouquets that look less like arrangements and more like outfits: chaotic, sculptural, undone in a way that feels intentional. Stems jut at improbable angles, petals bruise on purpose, colour palettes clash. Somewhere along the way, floristry stopped being background décor and stepped into the frame.
This shift arrived gradually, then all at once. Florists began talking about composition the way stylists talk about silhouettes. Negative space matters. Texture matters. Narrative matters. A bouquet could be minimalist, romantic maximalist, or something in between: like a look that shouldn’t work but does because the person wearing it insists. The language of fashion migrated into floristry, and with it came a new kind of authority.
What’s changed is simple but significant: flowers are no longer just decorative, they’re expressive. A bouquet now signals taste in the same way a handbag or a pair of shoes might. The choice of stem, the looseness of the structure, the decision to leave something slightly off, all of this communicates something. High-end floristry, in particular, has become a form of status signalling. It’s luxury translated into something fleeting, money spent on an object designed to disappear.
And that ephemerality tickles me. Because in a culture saturated with permanence — endless archives, saved folders, AI-generated images built to go on and on — flowers resist optimisation. They are physical, time-bound, and indifferent to documentation. You can’t pause them, perfect them, or keep them. To buy flowers is to invest in something that won’t last, to prioritise a moment over a record of it.
At the same time, there’s a parallel movement toward accessibility. While luxury floristry is booming, so is the DIY approach. People are buying supermarket flowers and treating them as raw material, reworking them at home with an eye trained by hours of scrolling. The appeal is partly aesthetic, partly tactile. After years of living through screens, there’s something grounding about making decisions in real time without an undo button. It’s low-stakes creativity with a high visual payoff.
Flowers are appearing as collaborators on runways, in campaigns, across editorial like they always have done, but with more emphasis. Florists are being brought in to concept, building installations that frame collections or compete with them entirely. Blooms become sculptural, exaggerated, breathtaking. They don’t just support the image; they help define it.
So, where am I going with all of this? Well, I think this points to something larger. This moment isn’t just about flowers trending again; it’s about why they feel culturally central. Floristry shapes atmosphere, mood, and identity. It tells us how softness can look right now, how luxury can feel, and how spectacle can be staged. And the florist, once relegated to the background, is emerging as a new kind of tastemaker.
And yet, for all my scepticism, I can’t quite deny the appeal. Because if flowers used to symbolise endings, they now feel oddly aligned with something much more current: visibility. Mystique used to do a lot of the heavy lifting in fashion. Editors were anonymous, designers elusive, and figures like Anna Wintour existed more as silhouettes than people. You weren’t supposed to fully see them; power thrived in partial opacity.
When The Devil Wears Prada first came out, it relied on that mystique. Miranda Priestly worked as a figurehead because she felt just out of reach; she was recognisable, but never confirmed. The film could orbit its real-life inspiration without collapsing into it. It was fiction doing what fiction does best: sharpening reality by keeping it slightly obscured.
Now, two decades later, that distance has eroded. The veil has lifted, as everything does in the age of constant access. We see Anna Wintour and Anne Hathaway side by side at the Academy Awards. We hear that Wintour herself called Meryl Streep the moment a sequel was announced. We get a Vogue cover where reality and caricature sit next to each other, knowingly, winking at the audience.
It’s no longer myth-building. This? This is myth maintenance. And it feels familiar, because it mirrors what’s happening with flowers. Just as floristry has moved from background decoration to visible authorship, fashion’s traditional gatekeepers have moved from distant arbiters to active participants in their own narratives. The tastemaker is no longer invisible; they’re the content. Authority hasn’t disappeared, but it has decentralised. Taste no longer trickles down; it circulates.
Which is where the flowers come back in.
Because if legacy media is grappling with relevance, floristry has already solved that equation. It exists both at the highest level of luxury and at the most democratic level of DIY. It thrives on visibility rather than mystique. It doesn’t pretend to have permanence because it doesn’t need to!
And maybe that’s the point I’m trying to make. In a moment where even the most established institutions feel the need to reassert their place, flowers are doing something much simpler. They’re existing fully in the present, unapologetically temporary, entirely self-assured in their role. No legacy to protect. No myth to uphold. Just a very good arrangement, doing exactly what it’s meant to do… until it doesn’t.
Reigning K-pop it girl Jennie has entered her “new era” chat. This time, she’s joined forces with Ray-Ban and Ray-Ban Meta as their latest global ambassador. To mark the moment, Ray-Ban unveiled a campaign that feels like a mood board of Jennie herself — cool, controlled, quietly commanding. I dig it. More thoughts on the K-fashion, K-culture takeover coming to an inbox near you soon.
Looks like Levi’s performed well this quarter. The denim giant came in ahead of expectations on Tuesday, with organic sales climbing 9% and earnings per share outpacing what analysts had pencilled in. Naturally, confidence followed: full-year guidance got a polished upgrade. For the three months ending March 1, net sales jumped 14% to $1.7 billion. Maybe this is the start of the comeback they’ve desperately been searching for.
Washing-up gloves have officially clocked out of the kitchen. From the Oscars red carpet to Prada and Givenchy runways, Marigolds are suddenly high fashion’s most unexpected accessory. First introduced in 1947 as a British household staple, the sunny yellow glove has now been rebranded as a statement piece. But is this a coincidence or a cultural shift? As Dazed reports, the rise of tradwife aesthetics suggests the latter. But fashion, ever self-aware, seems to be in on the joke. After all, when Lady Gaga and Julia Fox are leading the charge, it feels less like domestic nostalgia and more like playful subversion, rubber gloves and all.
A ‘Nike’ campaign image showing a Black man with a swoosh branded into his back made the rounds online, sparking outrage exactly as it should have. The catch? It wasn’t real, it was AI. And the emotional response wasn’t misplaced, it was historical memory. Branding isn’t abstract when it echoes the very real violence inflicted on enslaved people, where marks signified ownership, not identity. What makes it sharper still: the image wasn’t even original. It borrowed (without credit) from the visual language of Hank Willis Thomas, whose 2003 work Branded Head seared a Nike logo into a Black man’s scalp to critique how consumer culture inherits the logic of commodification. Still unclear whether or not this was commissioned by Nike, and their thoughts on it. Either way, fashion needs to do better. While the artist has come out and apologised, we all need to speak up and participate in the anti-racism conversation.
The fashion girls are putting in that workkkk. brenda is back at 032c as Editor-at-Large, and Emily Kirkpatrick is Interview Magazine’s new Digital Editor. We love to see it!
Stefano Gabbana appears to be editing more than just hemlines these days. The co-founder of Dolce & Gabbana quietly stepped down as chairman and is now weighing what to do with his stake, just as talks with the company’s bank lenders loom. According to an Italian filing, Stefano Gabbana, 63, exited the chair in December. He originally built the brand alongside his then-partner Domenico Dolce, whose brother, Alfonso Dolce, has since slipped into the chairman role after already serving as CEO. Despite the boardroom reshuffle, Gabbana hasn’t ceased his creative responsibilities just yet. Just curious… who’s still buying D&G?
Selfridges has decided that loyalty isn’t just earned, it’s curated, tiered, and reserved for those who spend up to £20,000 a year. Its latest move to captivate the elusive 1%? A members-only enclave. Dubbed 40 Duke, the 25,000-square-foot overhaul of its London flagship is the store’s biggest reinvention since 2016. Think: private dining rooms, treatment suites, a high-security salon for jewellery and watches, a terrace café, and no fewer than 24 personal shopping cabins. But entry isn’t granted; it’s “unlocked.” You have to spend the equivalent of many Londoners’ yearly salaries to unlock such benefits. A slightly less rarefied tier can still peek behind the curtain — subject, of course, to availability. This store gives me PTSD from my time spent shooting e-commerce there, but this move makes sense amid luxury’s downturn in sales.
I'll start the ball rolling... I love Demon Slayer, and I think the most stylish character in that anime is no other than super villain Muzan Kibutsuji. He has lived for hundreds of years, embodying different characters and genders throughout but his fashion never wavered.. Sharp suits and tailoring.
As far as flowers go, I think we can see their greater inclusion as statement within the realm of fashion to potentially be another aspect of the "east asian" wave that's washed over western fashion in the last half decade or so. Some of what you describe as being undone, unusual, etc, is part of a flower arranging tradition that has been a part of, at the very least, japanese culture for a very long time. The view of flowers as passive is, in my opinion, much a western perspective on the matter. Generally, looking into east asian flower arranging might just be interesting for the sake of interest. I get videos on the subject occasionally on my social medias variously, and they are always so expressive, unique, and sometimes almost at odds with the materials they start with!