Stories by

Phoebe Gates

788 stories

The No-Makeup Makeup Edit: Five Lessons in Looking Like You Slept Eight Hours

The No-Makeup Makeup Edit: Five Lessons in Looking Like You Slept Eight Hours

The no-makeup makeup edit, in five lessons: skin prep, skin tints, concealer in the right places, cream blush and the brow, lash and lip finish. I would treat it like a very good haircut, the kind people notice without being able to say what changed.

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Cropped Jackets for Women: Shell, Wool, Crepe, Leather and Suede Crops

Cropped Jackets for Women: Shell, Wool, Crepe, Leather and Suede Crops

Cropped jackets are back, stopping at the waist in everything from denim to cashmere. I sorted the range into shell and wool crops, trenches, crepe, leather and suede.

Gemstone Jewelry: Bold Statement Rings and Necklaces

Gemstone Jewelry: Bold Statement Rings and Necklaces

Embellish your look with the season's most striking gemstone treasures.

Midi Dresses: Zimmermann, Silk, Knit and Printed Picks

Midi Dresses: Zimmermann, Silk, Knit and Printed Picks

Midi dresses that work all year range from Zimmermann denim and ribbed jersey to silk, satin and prints.

Everyday Gold Jewelry: The Gold I Wear Every Single Day

Everyday Gold Jewelry: The Gold I Wear Every Single Day

The gold I wear every single day: 40 necklaces, huggies and rings from Aurate New York, Ettika and Cult Gaia, $31 to $1,498.

Wedding Guest Dresses: What to Wear to Someone Else's Wedding

Wedding Guest Dresses: What to Wear to Someone Else's Wedding

Phoebe's wedding guest selects: 40 dresses and heels from Amanda Uprichard, Cult Gaia and Zimmermann, $109 to $4,130.

Jennifer Behr: Hair Pieces and Bridal Jewelry

Jennifer Behr: Hair Pieces and Bridal Jewelry

Jennifer Behr hair pieces and bridal jewelry: 130 collars, earrings and headpieces, priced $142 to $848.

Designer Jeans: Straight Leg, Wide Leg and Denim Jackets

Designer Jeans: Straight Leg, Wide Leg and Denim Jackets

What designer jeans cost runs wider than most expect. Shop 24 pieces from Citizens of Humanity, FRAME and KHAITE, $168 to $1,780.

Sanderlak Jeans and Outerwear

Sanderlak Jeans and Outerwear

Sanderlak is the second act of one of the most missed labels of the last decade.

Kallmeyer: Downtown New York Shirting, Trousers and Suits

Kallmeyer: Downtown New York Shirting, Trousers and Suits

Kallmeyer has been a downtown New York institution for over a decade and only recently became an industry one. Daniella Kallmeyer, born in South Africa and trained at London College of Fashion, worked at Alexander McQueen and Proenza Schouler before launching her label in 2012 at twenty five with about seven thousand dollars. Today it is a top brand across Phia and the industry

FRANÇOISE: Johanna Senyk's Paris Label of Deadstock Silk

FRANÇOISE: Johanna Senyk's Paris Label of Deadstock Silk

Francoise is Johanna Senyk's most personal project after years spent working for other people's houses. The self-taught Paris designer, previously behind the cult label Wanda Nylon, has collaborated with Alexander McQueen, JW Anderson and The Row and dressed Beyonce, Rihanna and Taylor Swift. Her own label is made in Paris from couture deadstock and vintage fabric, which means most of what you see here effectively cannot be reordered. It's a personal favorite and items you pass down as heirlooms

SLOAN Tailoring and Dresses

SLOAN Tailoring and Dresses

Sloan was founded in 2020 by Julia Sloan, a Parsons graduate who studied strategic design rather than fashion design and spent eight years as creative director of a Mexican luxury house. The brand runs on an at-home production network of female artisans in Mexico who earn continuous income without leaving their households. The clothes are essentials, and the structure behind them is the actual innovation.

Who Owns Birrot: The Two Founders Behind the Label

Who Owns Birrot: The Two Founders Behind the Label

Who owns Birrot? Its two founders, Kyeongmin Kim and Seyoung Hong, who started the Copenhagen label in 2018 and still design it together.

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DARKPARK: Inna Gerchikov's Wide-Leg Pants and Cashmere Tops

DARKPARK: Inna Gerchikov's Wide-Leg Pants and Cashmere Tops

Darkpark exists because Inna Gerchikov could not find a pair of jeans she wanted to wear. She spent fifteen years importing Californian denim into Italy, then founded the label in Milan in 2021 with Maurizio Purificato, the Antonia co-founder behind Khrisjoy. It is luxury denim made in the Veneto and worked to precision

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Heirlome Dresses

Heirlome Dresses

Heirlome was founded in 2022 by Stephanie Suberville and her husband Jeffrey Axford on the idea that a skill can be an heirloom. Suberville left Monterrey for Parsons in 2004, spent two decades in New York fashion, and built the label out of what she describes as a constant state of nostalgia for Mexico. Every collection begins with an artisan rather than a trend.

Slip Dresses

Slip Dresses

The slip dress has survived every attempt to retire it. It arrived from lingerie in the nineties, got written off as a costume, and came back as the default answer to almost every dress code that is not explicitly formal.

Harris Tapper Pairo Dress: Shirts, Skirts and Trousers

Harris Tapper Pairo Dress: Shirts, Skirts and Trousers

The Harris Tapper Pairo dress is an embroidered velvet maxi dress from a label that launched with women's shirting alone. I go through founders Sarah Harris Gould and Lauren Tapper's shirts, dresses, trousers and skirts.

Harithand: Beirut Eveningwear and Gowns by Harith Hashim

Harithand: Beirut Eveningwear and Gowns by Harith Hashim

Harithand is the Beirut eveningwear house Iraqi-Lebanese designer Harith Hashim founded in 2012. It works on a pret-a-couture model, which means atelier-level dressmaking produced in limited runs rather than one-off commissions. The signature is what Hashim calls the chemistry between body and dress, and it is easy to see where that chemistry happens.

Alfie Tailoring and Dresses

Alfie Tailoring and Dresses

Alfie is what happens when a design student refuses to sell the postcard version of French style. Alice Fresnel launched the label in Paris in 2020 with deadstock fabric, a five piece collection and no plan beyond seeing how far it went. It grew through pop-ups and word of mouth, and it now reads as the most honest version of Parisian dressing in circulation.

ARAKII: Hanna Schönberg's Sculptural Dresses and Trousers

ARAKII: Hanna Schönberg's Sculptural Dresses and Trousers

ARAKII is the Stockholm label that came out of a stylist's own wardrobe gaps rather than a design house pipeline. Hanna Schonberg spent years as one of Scandinavia's most watched dressers before founding it in the early 2020s and moving the work in house. The result is bold minimalism, which sounds like a contradiction until you see the shoulders.

La Veste

La Veste

The brand began with two friends walking to a show during Paris Fashion Week deciding, more or less on the spot, to start a brand. Stylist Blanca Miro and designer Maria de la Orden founded it in 2018 and named it after the French word for blazer, because at first that was all they intended to make. It is now the most recognisable of the new Spanish labels and still runs on the same instinct.

Ashlyn Tailoring and Knitwear

Ashlyn Tailoring and Knitwear

Ashlyn is a New York label built by a patternmaker rather than a stylist, and the difference is visible in every seam. Ashlynn Park trained in Seoul and Tokyo, won Japan's SO-EN Award, then cut patterns at Yohji Yamamoto, Alexander Wang and Calvin Klein 205W39NYC before founding her own line in 2020. Five years later the Met owns her work and the CFDA named her American Emerging Designer of the Year.

Wiederhoeft Jeans and Dresses

Wiederhoeft Jeans and Dresses

Wiederhoeft treats a fashion show as a piece of theatre, which is exactly what its founder was trained to do. Jackson Wiederhoeft won Women's Designer of the Year at Parsons in 2016, spent three years on women's runway collections at Thom Browne, and launched the label in October 2019 with a ten-look story ballet called Spooky Couture. The press calls them the high priest of corsets made in New York, and the corsetry is genuinely the reason.

Róhe

Róhe

Róhe is named after the Norwegian word for calm and operates out of a seventeenth century canal palace on Amsterdam's Golden Bend. Marieke Meulendijks and Maickel Weyers, a couple who met in a bar in a southern Dutch village in 2000, founded it in 2021 after she had spent years carrying the idea around. It has since become the label people reach for when they have exhausted the obvious quiet luxury options.

FFORME Dresses

FFORME Dresses

FFORME was founded in 2021 by two businesswomen rather than a designer, which is still unusual enough to be worth saying out loud. Nina Khosla and Laura Vazquez hired Paul Helbers, a menswear veteran of Margiela, Louis Vuitton and The Row, and he built the first collection on a sewing machine in Brittany during lockdown. The double F stands for fundamental and foundational, and the brand has never really strayed from that.

Marie Adam-Leenaerdt: The Brussels Designer at Paris Fashion Week

Marie Adam-Leenaerdt: The Brussels Designer at Paris Fashion Week

Marie Adam-Leenaerdt is the Brussels designer who went from La Cambre graduate to Paris Fashion Week fixture in about a year. She trained at Givenchy and Balenciaga under Demna, launched her label in 2023, and was an LVMH Prize and ANDAM finalist by 2024. In July 2026 she won the ANDAM Grand Prize outright.

Amsale Dresses and Bridal

Amsale Dresses and Bridal

Amsale Aberra was born in Addis Ababa, the daughter of an Ethiopian diplomat, studied political science in Boston and then fashion at FIT, and worked as a design assistant at Harvé Benard. Unable to find a simple wedding dress for her own 1985 wedding, she made her own, placed an advertisement in Modern Bride and built a house out of the response.

ALAÏA Shoes and Bags

ALAÏA Shoes and Bags

Azzedine Alaïa trained as a sculptor in Tunis before he ever cut a pattern, and it shows in everything the house has made since. He worked briefly at Dior, then Guy Laroche and Thierry Mugler, opened his own atelier in a Paris apartment on rue de Bellechasse in 1979, and built a body-first vocabulary that the industry has been borrowing ever since.