Designers Gabriela Hearst and Sir Paul Smith launch an artful collaboration with a starry dinner in L.A., while Donatella Versace turns Miley Cyrus’ Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony into a mega fashion moment. “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” a stunning ode to the multidimensional artist beyond her relationship with John Lennon, opens at The Broad, while Louis Vuitton cruises into The Frick in New York City.
Sir Paul Smith and Gabriela Hearst Launch Dreamy Collab in L.A.
Fashion designers Sir Paul Smith and Gabriela Hearst have a similar always-on energy, infectious enthusiasm and commitment to doing the right thing, not to mention their common love of tailoring and color.
So it made perfect sense when the two announced they were collaborating on a limited-edition collection, which they launched last week with a dinner soirée in L.A.
After being introduced by mutual friend Wesley Schultz, lead singer of the folk band The Lumineers, the designers first became pen pals.
“He has the joyfulness of a kid and the humbleness of a great,” Hearst said of Smith. “I’ll text him and he’s at the shop on a Saturday. Once a shopkeeper, always a shopkeeper.” When she suggested they work on something together, Smith’s first thought went to his father Harold’s photographs, which he credits with giving him a lifelong appreciation for detail that has served him well since launching his brand in 1970. Hearst was keen on the idea and eager to tap into Smith’s process of photo-printing on fabric, which he pioneered in the early 1990s.
She visited him in London at his famed studio and personal cabinet of curiosities, chock full of toys and oddities in every square inch. “People send him things from all over the world because he’s just so cool,” she said. There, the designers settled on two landscape photographs of the British countryside from the 1950s and ’60s — a mountain and a waterfall — translated in brilliant ombré color onto tailoring, slip dresses, Nina bags and hand-knit sweaters by Manos del Uruguay, the nonprofit cooperative supporting economic independence for women in rural communities that Hearst frequently works with.
It was Smith’s idea to launch the collab in L.A., where the Instagram-famous pink wall outside his Melrose Avenue boutique is a bona fide local landmark and his fanbase of Hollywood celebrities and stylists runs deep.
“You’ve got to sit down now, it’s the law,” he joked, helping guests to their seats on the terrace of Penthouse 64 at the Chateau Marmont.
A starry group of creatives came out for the dinner, including John Boyega, Diplo, Mamie Gummer, Jessica Alba, Quinta Brunson, Edward Norton, Quannah Chasinghorse, Tom Parker Bowles, Sean Baker, Michael Stipe, Warren Alfie Baker, Jeanne Yang, Paul Smith executive chairman Ewan Venters and Gabriela Hearst president Michelle Cohen. And the lucky ones were wearing pieces from the collab.
“Cheers to this lady! And to me!” Smith said, toasting the group. “Steal the napkins!” he added, referring to the keepsakes with similar ombré patterns to the collection.
Over dinner, the conversation touched on the Greater Together L.A. summit earlier in the day, which brought together British leaders representing 230 companies in an effort to grow trade between the U.K. and U.S. (Paul Smith was one of the speakers). There was also chatter about Cannes, where juror Chloé Zhao wore several looks by Hearst. The director has become something of a muse to the designer, who said, “Things that move her are the same things that move me.”
Fashion Hits the Hollywood Walk of Fame
It’s not often that a fashion designer hits the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which is why I did a double-take when I saw Donatella Versace introducing Miley Cyrus at her star induction ceremony last week. “A fighter, a rebel and a force for good,” Versace said of Cyrus, her friend, who has often worn her designs on the red carpet. “You champion kindness and equality and you are one of the hardest working people I know … Just remember if any of you step over Miley’s star, do it with attitude and of course major heels.”
Anya Taylor-Joy also spoke about Cyrus, adding, “She challenged the rules, rewrote them and, every once in a while, set them on fire in a teddy bear costume.” (She was referencing her infamous 2013 VMAs performance.)
“My name is laid in gold and pink terrazzo, and it’s fierce, and it’s fun, and it’s fabulous,” Cyrus said. “And I’m in Versace hand-picked from the atelier archives by Donatella herself, which makes it even more fun, and even more fierce and even more fabulous.” The ladies brought the glam for the afternoon event — and two major archival fashion moments, as it turns out. Cyrus wore a spiderweb lace gown from Versace’s Fall 2015 collection, which had previously been worn by Heidi Klum at the amfAR Gala in Milan that year.
And Taylor-Joy wore a crystal-and-white satin bugle-beaded fringe halter gown from Bob Mackie’s 1990 resort collection.
The confluence of Versace and Mackie got me thinking about why Edith Head and Ruth E. Carter are the only designers with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Undoubtedly, Mackie has earned his spot, with more than 60 TV and film credits as a costume designer for Cher, Carol Burnett, Elton John and many others, as well as his eveningwear collections. I’d argue that fashion designers such as Versace and the late Giorgio Armani deserve recognition, too. Time to get those nominations going.
Louis Vuitton Cruises Into The Frick
After Gucci took over Times Square, Louis Vuitton chose an equally impressive, if much more gilded locale to show its Cruise 2027 runway collection: New York’s Frick Museum. Reopened last year after a $220 million renovation, the museum has a stunning collection of Old Master paintings, which provided the rich backdrop for creative director Nicolas Ghesquière’s tale of two cities: Paris and New York.
Icons of American style were on parade, including jeans, jerseys, leather and sneakers, alongside groovy pieces made in collaboration with the late New York pop artist Keith Haring. (The collection’s key inspiration was a vintage Louis Vuitton suitcase graffitied by Haring in the 1980s.) Travel is in the DNA of Louis Vuitton, and Ghesquière is known for time-traveling through different eras and sensibilities in his runway collections. Here, it was downtown-meets-uptown in both setting and substance, with graffiti-style lace, tweed lady suits reworked into shorts suits with a skater vibe, and tooled leather jackets paired with tulle skirts. Accessories were standouts, including LV monogram boxing gloves, Chinese takeout box bags and ruff collars reimagined as capes.
The next U.S. runway stop? Back to L.A. again on June 4, for the second chapter of the Hermès Fall 2026 women’s collection.
Yoko Ono Gets Her Due
For decades, Yoko Ono’s identity was too often overshadowed by her proximity to John Lennon, and she was often cast more as a muse than as the pioneering conceptual artist she has always been. “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” open through Oct. 11 at The Broad, is a long-overdue correction.
The show restores Ono, 93, to the center of her story, tracing her work in shaping avant-garde, performance and participatory art over the past seven decades.
Her experience as a young girl in the World War II-ravaged Japanese countryside, hungry and seeking mental escape, was formative, curator Sarah Loyer asserts. Yoko Ono created a game with her brother, Keisuke, in which they lay on their backs, looked up at the sky and “exchanged menus in the air.” That experience inspired her belief that making art should not be limited to trained artists in studios but can be created in the minds of everyone.
What makes the exhibition so incredible is how contemporary Ono’s themes are and how her works continue to resonate. Across decades, her art has confronted war, displacement and human vulnerability in ways that feel strikingly relevant amid current global conflicts, refugee crises and the politicization of women’s bodies.
Ono’s “Instruction Paintings” transform viewers into participants through printed instructions that become communal rituals and acts of reflection — including, according to the exhibition text, Isamu Noguchi, whom she amusingly recalls stepping on her “Painting to Be Stepped On” while wearing a pair of elegant zori slippers. (In New York in the 1950s, Yoko Ono was part of an avant-garde circle that included the artist and others such as Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg and Peggy Guggenheim, who gathered to share and take part in each other’s works.)
These calls to action — to imagine, to mend, to shake hands — were experiential long before they became a buzzword and are particularly powerful today as invitations to slow down, dream and engage. Other works similarly ask visitors to draw, hammer, collect and write recollections.
The exhibition also explores Ono’s role as an early feminist artist. Watching the 1965 film of Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” at Carnegie Hall, filmed by David and Albert Maysles, was emotionally charged in a communal setting. On stage, she wears her best suit while audience members take turns cutting away pieces of her clothing, casting us, the viewers, as voyeurs and witnesses to her vulnerability and exposure.
Throughout, “Music of the Mind” demonstrates how Ono’s art was about activating people, which she is still doing with digital billboards featuring her messages of peace that are appearing across Los Angeles. Her invitation to participate emotionally, politically and in community feels more necessary now than ever.
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, through Oct. 11, The Broad, 221 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles.
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