American fashion showed its staying power at the CFDA Awards in New York, where Rachel Scott and Ralph Lauren took top honors and the stars turned out in force. In Los Angeles, Scott’s Proenza Schouler has planted a flag on Melrose Place, while Dior celebrated Richard Avedon with a screening of Ron Howard’s tender documentary — and a reminder of the imagination that fashion photography could use more of today. Plus, Hollywood celebrated women’s power and the election’s blue wave at Max Mara’s Face of the Future party.
Star Power and Staying Power at CFDA Awards
American fashion has had its share of drama lately, but it can still fill a room.
Monday’s CFDA Fashion Awards brought celebrities and designers out in force at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, offering a show of solidarity during a particularly rocky moment for the organization. Longtime President and CEO Steven Kolb resigned in September after physically restraining PETA protesters at the COS runway show during New York Fashion Week. With interim CEO Hildy Kuryk and Chairman Thom Browne presiding, the Amazon Fashion-sponsored evening offered the industry a chance to turn its attention back to the people making the clothes.
And there was plenty of fabulous American style to look at. Indya Moore wore a richly textured butter-yellow Spring 2027 Diotima look, while Demi Moore chose a custom denim GapStudio gown by Zac Posen. Matt Damon went classic in a Ralph Lauren Purple Label turtleneck and tuxedo combo. Cole Escola brought theatrical flair to the event in Luar tailoring with frothy white lace cuffs and cobalt-blue shoes, while Shaboozey served up his signature Western swagger in Ralph Lauren.
Hailey Bieber, Rosé and Zoë Kravitz went for gold in Spring 2027 Saint Laurent from Anthony Vaccarello’s final collection for the house. Together, they presented him with the International Designer of the Year award, giving his work a major celebrity endorsement as he exits the label after a decade. Lupita Nyong’o, Pamela Anderson, Elle Fanning, Megan Thee Stallion, Travis Scott and Gracie Abrams also attended, alongside designers Michael Kors, Vera Wang, Wes Gordon, Willy Chavarria and others.
The night marked another milestone for Rachel Scott, who won the American Womenswear Designer of the Year award for Diotima for the second time, following her 2024 win. It’s an incredible achievement for a label that launched just in 2021, particularly when you consider that Scott is also designing Proenza Schouler. She’s been able to build a distinctly personal fashion vocabulary for Diotima, rooted in craft and sensuality, while helping write the next chapter of the established American house.
“It’s very unusual that someone like me can stand in a space like this, and in a world where independent and marginalized voices are systematically quieted, I feel extremely lucky and very, very responsible,” she said in her acceptance speech, before a call to action on Election Eve, “And we have a lot more work to do, starting tomorrow morning.”
From the new guard to the old guard, Ralph Lauren won American Menswear Designer of the Year. His win after nearly 60 years in the business is a testament to the consistency he’s brought to fashion across the decades, creating desire for his brand across generations. His recent business results prove it. Even in this challenging environment, Ralph Lauren recently reported fiscal 2026 revenue of $8.1 billion, up 15% year over year — the first time the brand has surpassed the $8 billion threshold. Whoa.
Colleen Allen took home the Emerging Designer Award, another vote for an impressive young talent, while fine jeweler Ana Khouri won her first American Accessory Designer of the Year award.
The rest of the honors spanned generations and creative categories. Fashion photography duo Inez and Vinoodh received the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award; Bergdorf Goodman fashion director Linda Fargo, the Founder’s Award; Instagram fashion exec Eva Chen, the Media Award; designer and artist Susan Cianciolo, the Isabel Toledo Board of Directors’ Tribute; retail architect Peter Marino, the Fashion Icon Award; and Gap Inc., the Innovation Award.
Tory Burch, meanwhile, was recognized for doing good. Anna Wintour presented her with the Positive Change Award, honoring the foundation she established in 2009 to help women entrepreneurs access capital, education and mentorship.
The Tory Burch Foundation is working toward a 2030 goal of adding $1 billion to the economy through women’s entrepreneurship. Since announcing the target last year, its fellows have contributed $470 million to the economy, putting the foundation nearly halfway toward its goal. For a designer whose own business began with an entrepreneurial leap, it was recognition of how much she has done to help other women take theirs — and a reminder of what fashion can accomplish beyond the runway and the red carpet.
Richard Avedon Is Having a Moment. Fashion Photography Could Use One, Too
At a time when so many fashion magazine covers look interchangeable, with the same celebrities in the same poses and the same airbrushed, PR-approved perfection, Richard Avedon’s singular vision of beauty feels more relevant than ever.
The legendary photographer, who died in 2004, is having a renaissance, with a new Ron Howard documentary arriving on Netflix Nov. 11, a lavish book celebrating his years at Harper’s Bazaar and an exhibition opening this week at Gagosian Beverly Hills.
Dior brought the celebration to L.A. on Monday night, hosting an intimate screening of Howard’s “Avedon” at the WME Theater in Beverly Hills, followed by cocktails on the VIP floor of the Rodeo Drive boutique.
Dior’s involvement was fitting. Avedon helped create some of the house’s most famous imagery, including his cinematic photographs of Dior’s postwar New Look in Paris and his 1955 photograph of the model Dovima posing with elephants at Paris’s Cirque d’Hiver in a Dior evening gown. The juxtaposition of couture and lumbering circus animals turned a fashion photograph into something extraordinary, perfectly illustrating Avedon’s obsession with capturing tension in his work.
“It’s the high notes and the low notes of our culture. One of his most iconic images and one of the most valuable photographs he made,” Larry Gagosian says in the film. “I think we sold one for $2 million.”
The evening, hosted by Derek Blasberg, drew guests including model Lauren Hutton, actor Emma Watson, restaurateur Michael Chow, artist Honor Titus, L.A. fashion designer and photographer Eli Russell Linnetz, jewelry designers Lisa Eisner and Jennifer Meyer, among others.
Howard’s film is a surprisingly tender portrait of an artist whose career spanned six decades, revolutionizing fashion photography but never allowing himself to be defined by it. Drawing on archival footage, interviews and his extraordinary photographs, the film explores Avedon’s lifelong curiosity about humanity, from the supermodels and Hollywood stars who made him famous to the Chicago Seven, Malcolm X and other civil rights activists, politicians, ordinary Americans and laborers he photographed with an eye toward social commentary. The common thread was his renegade spirit: his ability to strip away artifice and reveal something new about his subjects, finding vulnerability and emotion even against a simple white background.
It was a thoughtful and touching reminder of what fashion photography once aspired to be. Avedon brought balletic movement, humor, psychology and, at times, provocation to magazine pages, transforming models into personalities and bringing even celebrities like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor down to earth.
Compare that with today’s increasingly homogenized covers, where commercial concerns, celebrity control and digital retouching leave little room for creative risk. Where are the images that surprise us, challenge us and make us look twice? Avedon knew that a great fashion photograph could be about the clothes and beautiful people, but it also had to be about something more.
The timing of the film couldn’t be better. Blasberg contributed an essay to the newly published book “Richard Avedon: The Harper’s Bazaar Years” from Abrams, which also features a previously unpublished oral history by the photographer and a foreword by Harper’s Bazaar editor in chief Samira Nasr. Gagosian’s “Richard Avedon: Hollywood,” on view now through Dec. 19, brings together more than 120 photographs spanning five decades, from Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor to Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg. Together, the projects offer a welcome reconsideration of the photographer who dared to challenge celebrities and other subjects with his approach.
The film’s most haunting moment comes at the very end, when Avedon expresses his fear that photography might not exist in the future. It’s a sad and eerily prescient thought from someone who devoted his life to the medium.
Two decades after his death, in an age of AI-generated imagery, endless digital content and fashion photos that increasingly look as though they could have been taken by almost anyone, his words land with a particular chill. Photography is everywhere now. But the kind of photography Avedon believed in, one that required an artist’s eye, imagination and willingness to take risks, sometimes feels like an endangered art.
Rachel Scott’s Proenza Schouler Makes Its L.A. Move
Fresh off her second CFDA Womenswear Designer of the Year win for Diotima in New York on Monday, Rachel Scott is building momentum at Proenza Schouler, too.
In October, Cynthia Erivo wore an asymmetric navy floral dress from Scott’s Fall 2026 collection while promoting “Children of Blood and Bone” at New York Comic Con. And Kaia Gerber attended September’s Specs launch in Beverly Hills wearing a look fresh off the Spring 2027 runway. Both made the case for Scott’s tactile, slightly offbeat approach to the New York label.
Now, that vision has a Los Angeles address. Proenza Schouler has opened its first West Coast flagship on Melrose Place, joining fellow New York brands The Row, Khaite and Thom Browne on the shopping stretch. For the brand, the opening adds a retail foothold to its growing celebrity fan base.
“Los Angeles has always held a special place for us. There is an innate ease to the city and a creative rhythm spanning film, art, fashion and design that instinctively aligns with the global women we dress. Los Angeles is home to some of our most devoted customers, so Melrose Place isn’t just a retail expansion; it is an uncompromising environment built to deeply engage with our West Coast community,” said CEO Shira Suveyke Snyder.
Designed by James Mills Studio, the space translates Scott’s and Proenza Schouler’s shared love of craft and texture into an interior that balances modernism with warmth. Stainless steel and mirrored surfaces meet custom plaster and onyx details, along with an oversized floating walnut desk, while handmade Murano glass shelves by Milan-based studio 6 add another layer of texture. It’s an inviting setting for a designer whose clothes reward a closer look.
The assortment is tailored to the city, too, with lighter tailoring and knitwear alongside handbags, shoes and accessories. Private appointments are available for VIP clients, and the brand plans to welcome artists and makers to show their work in the space, allowing Scott to demonstrate how her ideas can shape an entire environment as well as a wardrobe.
Proenza Schouler, 8424 Melrose Place, Los Angeles.
Hollywood Celebrates Women’s Power and the Election’s Blue Wave at Max Mara’s Face of the Future Party
All anyone wanted to talk about at the 2026 Women in Film Max Mara Face of the Future celebration Wednesday night was the blue wave.
Fresh off the Democrats’ sweeping victories in the midterm elections, the mood among guests was jubilant. Fashion editor and stylist Joe Zee said he’d been crying listening to the victory speeches of newly elected senators James Talarico of Texas and Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan. Others pointed out that the timing couldn’t have been more perfect for a party celebrating women’s strength, with female candidates making history at the ballot box, including Gina Hinojosa in Texas, Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia and Deb Haaland in New Mexico.
The cocktail party honored actress Adria Arjona as the 2026 WIF Max Mara Face of the Future, drawing a Hollywood crowd including Saara Chaudry, Zoey Deutch, Leighton Meester, Jackie Tohn, Natalia Bryant, Kathy Hilton, Julianne Hough and Victoria Justice. There were faces of the future, but also some familiar faces from the past, particularly the Hilton sisters, Brandon Davis and Bijou Phillips, who helped define the early-aughts Hollywood social scene. They added some fun Y2K nostalgia to the event focused on what comes next.
Created in partnership with the nonprofit organization Women in Film, the Max Mara award recognizes an actress whose career, style and social impact signal her as a rising force, not only on screen but in the broader cultural conversation.
For Max Mara, the partnership also reflects the Italian fashion brand’s decades-long dialogue with professional women, and its belief in dressing them for power on their own terms.
Known for impeccable tailoring and classic outerwear that was quiet luxury before it was called that, Max Mara has long favored substance over spectacle, a philosophy mirrored in the roster of past award recipients including Maude Apatow, Emily Blunt, Zoey Deutch, Elizabeth Debicki and Gemma Chan.
“Women’s empowerment, not just giving them a beautiful look but also a voice, is such an important part of the DNA of our brand,” Max Mara brand ambassador Maria Giulia Prezioso Maramotti told me of the mission.
Max Mara’s Face of the Future Award has become something of a bellwether for Hollywood talent on the brink of a breakout, though this year’s honoree already has an impressive résumé.
Beloved for her role as Bix Caleen in the Disney+ “Star Wars” prequel series “Andor,” Arjona has also been on the big screen, starring with Glen Powell in Richard Linklater’s romantic action-comedy “Hit Man,” in A24’s horror film “Onslaught,” and appearing in Zoë Kravitz’s “Blink Twice.”
Next year, she’ll be in an even bigger spotlight as the female lead opposite Michael B. Jordan in Amazon MGM Studios’ highly anticipated reimagining of “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
Founded in 1973, Women in Film supports women across the entertainment industry, from actresses and directors to writers, cinematographers and producers, through career development, networking and advocacy for systemic change.
The organization’s 2026 Women in Film Honors on Friday will recognize Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chair and CEO Pamela Abdy with the inaugural Vanguard Award, actress and producer Salma Hayek Pinault with the Jane Fonda Humanitarian Award and actress Gemma Chan and filmmaker Beth de Araújo with the Crystal Award for Advocacy in Film.
After a historic election night, the celebration of women wielding their power felt especially timely.
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