After making his debut last season, Area’s new creative director Nicholas Aburn made a return to New York Fashion Week for AW26. The lyrical show notes were written like a film script: a woman alone on a dark stage announces that she longs to be seen and, upon being ignored by the darkness, creates her own spotlight out of thin air. She then embarks on a monologue, musing on a “magic that doesn’t let me keep much, but it holds everything I need. A dress that wraps around me like a scarf, a magic that dresses me like a spotlight.” The show, it seems, is about fashion as a form of wilful self-creation, glamour as a form of enchantment.
Photography Hatnim Lee
