Explorations

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

/ Leave a Comment
Reading Time: 4 minutes

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.

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

Tailoring meets sportswear: Ujoh at SS27 Paris Fashion Week

/ Leave a Comment
Reading Time: 3 minutes

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.

Tailoring meets sportswear: Ujoh at SS27 Paris Fashion Week Read More »

Designer or image maker: who actually makes fashion now?

/ Leave a Comment
Reading Time: 3 minutes

The industry traded designers for pure spectacle. The market noticed.


Designer or image maker: fashion spent a decade pretending that was a false choice. The market made it real:  growth slowed in Europe; luxury sales in China remain deeply depressed.

These days, watching shows from New York to Milan to Paris, we can’t help but wonder: has fashion become pure entertainment? And if so, does the industry still need designers, or just image makers? 

The industry has always been partly entertainment. Now it is almost nothing but spectacle. Impressive runway shows, campaigns, and viral moments now matter more than the clothes themselves. The industry doesn’t want designers for their design skills anymore. It wants people who can create an image around fashion.

Designer or image maker. The distinction matters.

A designer’s job is to design clothes: to understand proportion, construction, fabric, silhouette, technique and how all those things come together on a body. An image maker’s job is different. It is to create desire, attention and a world people want to look at — and, ideally, belong to.

The fashion industry has increasingly rewarded the second.

It wants creative directors who can generate images, buzz, and viral moments. Creative directors are expected to build worlds. Celebrities bring their audiences with them. Influencers become the campaign. The clothes are almost secondary to the universe built around them.

Attention is the scarcest resource, and image makers are very good at attracting it.

For a while, this worked. 

But where does the spectacle end and the clothes begin to speak? 

Because when the show ends, that is what we are interested in: clothes. Not their social-media representation. Not the celebrity wearing them. And not the campaign. The garments themselves — the things we can actually wear, and want to wear.

And perhaps this is where fashion has lost something important: the ability to recognise value in design.

A beautifully designed garment does not necessarily produce a viral moment. Its value can be quiet. It can live in the cut, the fabric, the construction, the proportion, the way it moves on the body. It requires looking. Sometimes it requires knowledge.

Spectacle requires none of that.

It tells us what to look at.

And when an industry becomes increasingly dependent on attention, what can be seen easily starts to matter more than what requires understanding.

That question used to be philosophical. Now it is economic.

Luxury brands have spent years raising prices in the name of exclusivity, with runway shows growing bigger than ever. Yet demand has cooled. Perhaps consumers haven’t stopped wanting luxury. Perhaps they are becoming more selective about where luxury feels real. They grew less willing to pay luxury prices for products whose value they no longer recognise.

Because luxury hasn’t disappeared.

People still spend on exceptional experiences, craftsmanship, jewellery, hospitality, travel and objects that feel genuinely valuable.

The customers didn’t leave luxury. They left fashion’s version of it.

And that should worry fashion. What does the spectacle say when consumer desire falls? What happens when the attention machine keeps growing, but people become less willing to buy what they see? Ultimately, what’s the point of these huge shows, and who are they for?

Because an image can create desire. It can create excitement, status and conversation. In the short run. But an image cannot replace the thing itself. And that is where fashion’s spectacle collides with the market: consumers want less and less of what is selling. Quality has plummeted; exclusivity and scarcity, once the industry’s selling points, now read as artificial. 

Fashion doesn’t need fewer designers. It needs to remember why it needed them in the first place.

Image makers can create attention.
Designers create the reason to look.

Fashion needs image. It just can’t survive on image alone.

Designer or image maker: who actually makes fashion now? Read More »

Vogue World Milan and the spectacle of “Made in Italy”

/ Leave a Comment
Reading Time: 4 minutes

The lost meaning of Italian elegance and craftsmanship


Vogue World Milan is all over social media, but not for the reason one might expect. Rather than embodying class and sophistication, it generated enough grotesque memes to last for years. Some viewers even described it as a “plastic surgery expo.” Even Miuccia Prada appeared to have something to say without saying a word. So, spectacle yes, but not exactly in a flattering sense.

However, some people commented, “It was so Italian” — which left us astonished. What was so Italian about it? Just Milano and those sitting in the front row. Certainly not what Vogue claimed. In fact, it seemed closer to the Met Gala idea of fashion spectacle than to any distinct Italian vision.

Created by Anna Wintour in 2022 for philanthropic purposes, Vogue World is an international event less a fashion show than a highly produced spectacle that brings together designers, models, celebrities, performers, and technology. This Milan edition took place in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, bringing together Italian craftsmanship, fashion, performance, and technology.

Staged on September 22nd, the event was in collaboration with the Milan Municipality, Teatro alla Scala and its Academy. More than 500 guests were seated along the four arms of the Galleria. The front row was historic and exceptional: many of the biggest names in Made in Italy were there — Miuccia Prada, Raf Simons, Donatella Versace, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Domenico Dolce, Stefano Gabbana, and more. The event raised €2.65 million for the Biblioteca di Quarto Oggiaro redevelopment and expansion.

According to the official programme, Vogue claimed to move through “The Artisanal Revolution,” “The Industrial Revolution,” “Made in Italy,” “The Age of Intelligence,” and “The Imagination Revolution.” Vogue specifically said the event was intended to address the value of craftsmanship in the age of AI.

But was Vogue World Milan really so? 

Elegance, craftsmanship, Italianness — these didn’t seem to be the main values. Elegance, in particular, seemed a lost concept. 

There is an interesting contradiction at the heart of the evening. Vogue explicitly presented the event as a celebration of “Made in Italy,” craftsmanship and the human touch in the age of AI, while sponsors including OpenAI and Meta supported the event. The very forces the spectacle claimed to examine were footing the bill.

So, Vogue World Milan claimed to celebrate “Made in Italy” and craftsmanship. Yet the spectacle seemed to undermine both. Most importantly, what does it mean to celebrate “Made in Italy” when the people and production system that actually make it possible are increasingly under pressure? 

For an event ostensibly celebrating human craftsmanship and “the human touch,” Vogue World Milan’s defining moment was four robots waving at the crowd. A fitting confession that fashion would rather borrow Silicon Valley’s hype than trust its own hands. The irony runs deep: Vogue World was billed as a tribute to Italian artisanal tradition, yet the segment everyone talked about featured Unitree humanoid robots wearing nothing at all, doing little more than waving and mimicking a lasso motion.

Il Fatto Quotidiano called the staging “extremely didactic.” A wooden model of the Duomo, tailors in white coats, then the Industrial Revolution, then the irruption of technology, all seasoned with ostentatious luxury and so much show-off that it left doubts about the event’s true meaning: a mere and self-referential celebration of fashion as the status quo.

On her Instagram, Frida Giannini highlighted the disconnection between the rhetoric of Italian craftsmanship, elegance and “Made in Italy”, and the extravagance of the event itself. She wrote:

“Tacky and ridiculous… Nonsense. Nonhumor. Nonelegance. Only an embarrassing circus. For Milano and Italy… With Open AI and robots??? Please, a bit of consistency. And dignity. So sad.”

She was having fun, she swore — but only because she could see all the details of those creepy faces having fun. The point stands: the inconsistency between the rhetoric and reality wasn’t a detail. It was the whole show.

While Italian craftsmanship was being celebrated as a marketing slogan, a few kilometres away the Made in Italy supply chain was enduring one of its most dramatic moments. The figures released by Milan’s CGIL paint a stark picture: in just three years, Milan’s fashion system has lost a quarter of its exports (−23.3%), sliding from over €3 billion to under €2.3 billion. Artisan businesses are shuttering (−19.7% in clothing, −17% in leather). And hours of temporary layoff schemes (cassa integrazione) soared in the second quarter of 2026. (source: Il Fatto Quotidiano)

The hands that actually make Made in Italy possible went unmentioned.

Is this Italian? Is this Italian elegance? Or is it simply a spectacular representation of what fashion has become — a circus of its own making?

Find the response in Miuccia Prada’s eyes.

Vogue World Milan and the spectacle of “Made in Italy” Read More »

When “sustainable” isn’t the whole story: rethinking wool

/ Leave a Comment
Reading Time: 4 minutes

The wool protest at New York Fashion Week raises an uncomfortable question: can a material be sustainable if animal welfare is not part of the equation?


Rethinking wool starts with admitting that “sustainable” doesn’t tell the whole story.

Wool is natural, renewable and often presented as a responsible alternative to synthetics. But what happens when we look beyond the fibre to the animal it comes from?

The closer we look at fashion’s sustainability claims, the more complicated they become. A material can have environmental advantages and still raise serious ethical questions. “Better for the planet” and “ethical for animals” aren’t necessarily the same thing.

That tension came into sharp focus during New York Fashion Week this month, when PETA protesters disrupted the COS show on 13 September to protest the use of wool and alleged mistreatment of sheep. The confrontation escalated when Steven Kolb, then president and CEO of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, physically restrained protesters. He subsequently resigned.

But beyond the disruption, the protest raised a question that deserves more attention than a few minutes of fashion-week drama:

Can we call a material sustainable if the way it is produced raises questions about animal welfare?

What do we actually mean by sustainable wool?


Wool is a natural, renewable protein fibre — sheep grow a new fleece each year — and it biodegrades under the right conditions, rather than persisting as plastic microfibres. Its durability, temperature regulation and odour resistance can also mean less frequent washing and longer use. Wool garments can be repaired, resold or recycled, although what happens at the end of a garment’s life depends on the garment and the system available to recover it.

Yet none of these characteristics tells us how the sheep were treated.

COS (owned by H&M Group) says its virgin wool is sourced from farms certified under the Responsible Wool Standard (RWS), developed to address animal welfare, land management, and social requirements. Textile Exchange, which owns and manages the standard, describes animal welfare as a fundamental requirement. 

But what does a certification actually tell us — and what does it leave out?


We explored this topic in our eBook, This is Greenwashing. As with certified paper, RWS certification is designed to verify specific practices against a defined set of criteria. But certification has limits. Animal welfare standards are not the same thing as animal rights. People can reasonably believe that properly regulated sheep farming meets a meaningful animal-welfare standard while still disagreeing about what that standard should include.

Fashion loves categories. Natural. Synthetic. Sustainable. Circular. Responsible.

Labels make complicated systems easier to understand — and easier to sell. But sustainability isn’t a material category. It is a question of how something is produced, by whom, under what conditions, with what consequences, and for how long it remains in use.

Wool doesn’t become sustainable simply because it is natural. Nor can the sustainability of a synthetic fibre be judged solely by the fact that its raw material is fossil-derived. That does not diminish the well-established role of fossil fuels in driving climate change. But the sustainability of a finished product depends on its full lifecycle, not just whether its raw material is natural or fossil-derived.

The reality is messier.

So should we stop buying wool?


There isn’t a single answer.

Someone concerned primarily with fossil-fuel dependence may see wool differently from someone whose first concern is animal welfare. Someone buying a wool coat they expect to wear for twenty years is making a different choice from someone replacing polyester jumpers every winter.

But these aren’t separate conversations. If we’re serious about responsible fashion, we have to consider all of them: how a garment affects people, the planet and animals, and how long it remains in use. Prioritising one doesn’t automatically cancel out the others.

The material is only one part of the equation.

Perhaps the more useful question isn’t “Is wool sustainable?”
Rather, it is: “What exactly do we mean when we call this wool sustainable?”

Rethinking wool doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting it. It means resisting the temptation to stop at the label. Natural doesn’t mean harmless. Renewable doesn’t mean ethical. Certified doesn’t mean beyond question. And “sustainable” — perhaps the most overused word in fashion — doesn’t tell us nearly enough on its own.

The more responsible approach may simply be to ask better questions.

When “sustainable” isn’t the whole story: rethinking wool Read More »