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Time and attention — what the contemporary world can no longer afford 

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What couture demands, and what a society built on speed and scale struggles to understand


Time and attention are human capacities: the patience to wait, the care to notice. They are what it means to be fully present. Attention, after all, comes from the Latin attentio, -onis — to turn your soul towards something. To look at, listen to, think about something with deep interest, with care. But in a world where attention spans are shrinking, is there still room for them?

We wrote about this back in 2022, in a piece on quality and attention. The argument was simple: quality demands attention, and without attention, you can’t understand quality. What was popular, we noted, required no attention at all — and that was precisely the ground where the “shop & toss” culture thrived.

The connection to couture and luxury fashion is closer than it might seem.

Pierpaolo Piccioli’s departure from Balenciaga was in the air. When officially announced, though, it brought a contradiction into focus: the distance between what couture requires and what the contemporary luxury business seems prepared to accommodate. If not a complete lack of understanding of what couture is. 

Piccioli wrote on Instagram: “Couture requires time and attention; it demands conviction and courage. It is where I have always wanted to be, it is the place I have chosen to inhabit.”

Note the vocabulary: time, attention, conviction, courage. These are not commercial terms. They are the terms of a craft that asks you to turn your soul towards it. 

The failure to understand couture (or fashion at large) comes from within the fashion industry itself — an industry in the hands of finance. 

BOF writes: “Balenciaga’s designer pivot offers lessons for luxury houses managing creative director transitions”.

The lesson is: do not follow what Kering is doing. De Meo is certainly a top-class manager, but fashion is not the automotive industry. 

Before Piccioli, it was Vaccarello’s turn at Saint Laurent. His tenure, despite the commercial pressures surrounding the business, produced one of the most beautiful representations of Saint Laurent. Kering parted ways with Alexander McQueen’s creative director, too. 

Piccioli, appointed at Balenciaga only in July 2025, had to sweep away Demna’s deformed aesthetic, which had nothing to do with the house’s historical identity. Could he do it in a year? If Kering appointed him, perhaps it meant they were tired of seeing clothes that had become a circus of horrors. Were they? 

So what’s the rationale behind Kering’s choices?

Luca de Meo, CEO of Kering, released this official statement: “Pierpaolo is an exceptional couturier and creative talent for whom we have the greatest respect. Our ambition is to build on Balenciaga avant garde spirit, honor its remarkable heritage and continue to push creative boundaries, further establishing the House as a powerful and relevant voice.”

Can you feel the empathy here? The one of a refrigerator. Has Balenciaga — pre-Demna — ever been avant-garde in the sense we intend now? Why did they appoint Piccioli if they still wanted to preserve the circus of horrors? 

Balenciaga was never avant-garde in the sense the word has acquired today. It was couture. Its innovation came from construction, silhouette, proportions and an extraordinary understanding of the body. But it wasn’t provocation. It was the work of a couturier who changed the way clothes could be conceived and made.

Yet it seems crystal clear that those who should understand this suffer from a fluent incomprehension.

Time and attention are no longer values. Quality and attention imply one another — but a culture that stops at the logo, at the price, at the surface, cannot perceive either. 

The rationale behind it is making money. Which means focusing on commercial products. Which, in turn, means clipping creative directors’ wings. Except Demna; no matter Gucci’s slump, he’s still there.

Piccioli had to stay at Valentino. He was perfect there. All these shifts happening in several brands are simply damaging an industry already in a bad predicament.

Brands are losing credibility.

De Meo certainly had a great career in automotive. But fashion and cars aren’t the same thing. A car is built around specifications, standardisation and repeatability. Couture starts from a different premise: a garment is conceived around a body, shaped through exceptional craftsmanship and, often, made as a unique creation. Automotive rewards standardisation; couture refuses it. 

Automotive makes money by selling more of the same thing. Couture makes money by selling the things that cannot be mass-produced. Kering seems to have confused the two business models.

Meanwhile, finance is killing the dream, the desire that fashion once offered.

Right, couture takes time and attention. And Piccioli is one of the few who understand what couture really means. The patience to develop an idea, the conviction to pursue it and the courage to resist the pressure to make everything immediately desirable and commercially viable. 

But ours is a society that has no attention left for listening, reading beyond two lines, or allowing things to take shape. It has lost its capacity to notice quality. Imagine expecting it to understand couture. 

Yet one would expect more than mass-produced items from a house that calls itself couture.

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Bangladesh: the other end of the logo

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Why the Dhaka protests and the European store raids are the same story


In Bangladesh, protests in textile districts around Dhaka entered their third day on Monday. Thousands of garment workers blocked roads, clashed with police and walked out of at least 529 factories. Around 500 factories were temporarily closed.

At the centre is the minimum wage: about 13,000 taka a month — just over €90 — against a union demand for 30,000, to keep pace with rising food, gas and electricity costs. “Among the lowest textile wages in the world,” says one union leader. The government has set up a wage commission; manufacturers warn of “no work, no pay”.

But read this alongside what happened in Milan and elsewhere in Europe a few days ago, and the picture completes itself. Here, young people ransacked fashion stores and resold the goods on Vinted — protesting a culture where a logo can cost two weeks’ wages. While in Bangladesh, the people who stitch those logos earn €90 a month making T-shirts and jeans for the same European and American retail chains.


Same industry, opposite ends of the value chain. 

In Europe, the grievance is the cost of living and the fact that consumption has become the language of belonging — and that those excluded from it grabbed the logos. In Bangladesh, the grievance is simpler and harder: wages don’t cover food. The country’s garment industry is worth around $38 billion and is the world’s second-largest exporter after China. Its factories supply the international chains whose shop windows are being boarded up in Milan.

The temptation in Europe is to treat the two as separate stories — social unrest at home, labour unrest abroad. They aren’t. They’re two halves of one supply chain in the fashion industry. And the bill for the culture of the logo is paid at both ends.

Condemning the broken windows is easy. Asking who set the price of the stitching is harder. Yet the answer is closer to home than anyone likes to admit.

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Social protest — why young people are targeting fashion stores

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From the cost-of-living crisis to the culture of consumption, what the protests reveal about the world adults have created


Social protest has spread across Europe, with demonstrations in France, Spain, Belgium, Albania, Greece, Portugal and Italy. Demonstrators took to the streets to protest poor school conditions, unaffordable housing, and a cost of living that doesn’t allow a minimally decent life. A palpable cost-of-living crisis that politicians don’t see because they are worlds away from it — totally detached from reality.

Rising fuel prices — a direct result of Trump’s erratic policies — were the last straw. Likewise, a luxury coastal development backed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, triggered protests in Albania in early summer.  Although details vary by country, the protests have one thing in common: a message that is impossible to ignore.

The large-scale unrest tells us that people aren’t doing well. Their discomfort is real. Most importantly, protesters are very young, some as young as eleven. 

Unfortunately, a violent fringe has obscured the protest’s true meaning. Fashion stores became the most visible stage for the unrest: young people ransacked them, then sold stolen items on Vinted.

How did the fashion store become a target of social protest?

In Italy, students started protesting for better schools and for their rights — and even against the new law capping migrant children at 30% per class. As if that were the real problem Italian schools face. So, for the second weekend in a row, stores in Milan’s centre boarded up their windows as if bracing for a hurricane.

In a video published by Il Fatto Quotidiano, a young boy says: “My family struggles to make ends meet. The items in those shops cost two weeks’ wages, or even my parents’ entire salary. We have to build our future on our own.”

Luxury has always existed. As kids, we grew up wanting things we couldn’t afford — we were told no. Yet we grew up aware of the cost of things, of the time it takes before you can allow yourself even small luxuries. But something has changed. Now the richest 10% own 75% of global wealth, while the bottom 50% hold just 2% (World Inequality Report 2026). While prices skyrocketed, wages remained stuck. Instead of investing in social policies, governments kept favouring the wealthiest. As a result, social injustice has grown sharply. Governments find money for wars — even for a genocide (Gaza) — but not for a decent life.

Those most affected are the young people, who have no job prospects and struggle to imagine a future. Their lives are shaped by a virtual world that pushes them to compare themselves with others on superficial terms.

But look again at what the protesters did. They targeted specific stores for what they represent: the logo. Which raises the real questions: Who did they learn from? Who taught them that the logo is the point? 

And who, precisely, taught them the culture of consumption? For our society, we exist only if we buy something. 

What kind of world have adults modelled and handed down? We taught kids that status lives in a logo, then acted surprised when the excluded ones went and grabbed the logos. As adults, we’ve spent time with youngsters, buying things for them and for ourselves, then taking selfies to show everyone our latest purchases.

We behaved as if we could buy their love instead of being role models.

What we weren’t told — what we didn’t tell the next generation — is that wanting was the point. We built an economy that sells belonging, and we sold it hardest to the ones with the least money. The latest iPhone, Nike, not books: that’s not a kids’ problem. That’s a curriculum. We wrote it.

And when the bill comes due, governments look for enemies to accuse. Migrants are the easy excuse — never the decision to move manufacturing offshore, never the wages that stayed flat while prices didn’t.

Prices keep rising. Wages stay stuck. Social injustice grows. That’s the whole story, and it’s the one nobody wants to say out loud.

Condemning violence is necessary. But it is not enough. If we want to understand the reasons for this social protest — and what young people are telling us — we must look beyond the broken shop windows and ask what we have taught them to value.

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Small businesses are paying the price of the EU’s new parcel regime

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The rules were designed to curb fast fashion and low-value imports. Our stalled garment shipments show who’s really paying.


Like many small businesses, we are thrilled when brands email us about our order shipments. So we were over the moon to hear our garments from Japan had arrived in Italy. We completed the customs paperwork immediately because we couldn’t wait to receive them. 

Then we waited. Waited. Waited. And waited. 

And then, we called customer service multiple times — almost every day — only to reach a digital assistant that gives zero assistance. When we’ve been lucky, we’ve been able to talk to a human — hurray, a human voice! — but we got no meaningful explanation: procedures take time.

Meanwhile, the garments we had carefully selected for our customers remain inaccessible. We cannot photograph them and upload them to our website; we cannot present them. And for those of you asking to try them: no, we cannot sell them. Every day of delay means lost income those garments were supposed to generate. Small businesses will understand.

Hourglass in shadow — a metaphor for small businesses waiting on delayed EU customs clearance.

We asked ourselves what could be wrong this time. Customs procedures were slow, but we have never experienced delays of this magnitude, nor such a wall whenever we tried to get information. After some research, we connected the dots. 

The introduction of the new rules changed the circumstances significantly. 

The new duties and fees on parcels from outside the EU — such as the €3 EU duty per tariff item in force since 1 July 2026 and the upcoming €2 EU handling fee from 1 November 2026, plus the Italian national levy postponed to 1 December 2026 — are indeed causing delays, customs congestion, and operational problems that also affect business goods and the B2B supply chain.

Why even small business shipments are caught in the backlog

Three things make the situation particularly concerning. 

First, the EU is changing how it processes low-value imports. Removing the €150 customs-duty exemption, introducing the €3 duty on qualifying consignments, and adding new data requirements all increase complexity — at a time when customs authorities are already handling enormous parcel volumes. Requiring checks on every individual tariff line, rather than the parcel as a whole, multiplies the number of declarations to process.

Second, these measures sit within a broader transition. The new duties and handling fee have specific scopes and don’t apply indiscriminately to all business imports — but changes to processing requirements and data systems raise wider questions about how efficiently goods move through the supply chain, and small stocks, components and samples get pulled into the same verification flows.

Third, businesses can be left bearing the commercial consequences of delays they cannot control. Stock remains unavailable, money is tied up, planned sales are lost. And because fees accrue when the declaration is accepted — non-refundable even if goods are later held — carriers have little incentive to speed things up, and some incentive to slow deliveries for extra checks.
When communication from carriers offers no real explanation or timeframe, there is little a small business can do except wait.

Layer overlapping national and EU measures on top of this, and the risk of confusion and operational friction becomes even harder to ignore.

Sadly, this was predicted. 

In a letter dated 22 May 2026, DHL, FedEx and UPS warned EU finance ministers of a “real risk” that shipments could be held up at EU borders “without a stable and workable legal framework,” citing new data requirements that “cannot realistically be implemented” by the 1 July deadline. Specifically, they flagged supply chain bottlenecks and possible shortages of some medical supplies. (Reuters, 22 May 2026)

Ultimately, the EU’s new parcel levies were intended to curb fast fashion imports and address the surge in low-value e-commerce. Yet the wider disruption feared by logistics operators could affect businesses far removed from the online marketplaces these measures are intended to regulate.

In fact, they’re hitting small businesses, including our B2B shipments. We are not a logistics giant, and our shipment carries no medical supplies. But when our garments have been sitting in customs for weeks, we have become one of those bottlenecks.

As of today, our garments are still sitting there. More than a month after the first shipment arrived at Italian customs on 16 September.

For a small independent business doing everything possible to survive while keeping its environmental impact as low as possible, selecting a limited number of carefully chosen pieces, this isn’t an administrative inconvenience. It can mean the difference between making a living and being unable to keep the business going.

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Tailoring meets sportswear: Ujoh at SS27 Paris Fashion Week

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Beyond the spectacle: when clothes speak for themselves


Tailoring meets sportswear — that’s the central tension in Ujoh’s Spring-Summer collection, shown at Paris Fashion Week. It was also a recurring trend across the season, from Milan to Paris. For us, though, it isn’t just a trend. It’s a styling classic.

Ujoh’s design codes are unmistakable: clean lines, precise tailoring. Asymmetrical structure and bold cuts. Distinctive layering; form and function in seamless balance. The result is a modern elegance that never needs to shout.

The same restraint defines the brand’s philosophy: no loud logos, just good design and excellent quality. Most pieces don’t change completely every season. Ujoh builds on an established vocabulary, creating continuity, timelessness — a wardrobe that doesn’t expire. That consistency is what keeps their universe culturally relevant.

In a market saturated with novelty, that consistency feels rare. The industry demands new drops, new stories, new noise. Ujoh quietly rejects that logic.

Model on the Ujoh SS27 Paris runway demonstrating the collection's tailoring meets sportswear concept through a powder pink blazer layered over a white shirt and balloon terracotta jeans.
This season, the brand explores what happens when established categories begin to dissolve. 

Tailoring meets sportswear, casualwear and workwear. Garments shift purpose and acquire new identities. A single piece can function as a shirt from the back and a jacket from the front. Denim breaks free from familiar constructions through asymmetry and cut-outs, while generous, balloon-like trousers and jackets that balance heritage with freedom of movement challenge conventional silhouettes.

Ujoh SS27: Tailoring meets sportswear on the Paris runway

The collection also looks to traditional Japanese craftsmanship. As the brand’s press release describes, flowers are hand-painted in Kyoto directly onto long rolls of fabric through a painstaking process that takes nearly a week. Techniques traditionally associated with kimono fabrics find a new expression in a contemporary wardrobe. The past isn’t discarded; it becomes part of something new.

And that’s where it all converges: the formal and the everyday, tradition and experimentation, structure and movement. Nothing needs to be confined to a single category or occasion.

Versatility isn’t a compromise between style and practicality; it’s a design value in its own right. A garment that moves between formal and casual, changes character through layering, or adapts to different occasions offers more than functionality: it invites us to experiment, combine and make it our own. 

For us, this is what makes Ujoh compelling. We believe in garments that are distinctive without being difficult to wear. And in meaningful pieces that can be combined, reinterpreted and adapted to different moments. Clothes that leave room for the wearer to make them their own.

This is the new luxury: identity and values. 

Because the best-designed clothes don’t dictate how we should wear them. They give us more ways to express who we are.

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