Collina Strada Designs Burnout Armour

In case you missed the Collina Strada show under the digital rubble of NYFW, this is the one worth digging back up. Titled The World Is a Vampire, Her latest collection absorbs unbearable exhaustion and transmutes it into something luminous. “How do you stay open when under attack?” asks founder Hillary Taymour in the show notes — and her answer unfolds within a tension between carapace and exposure through pieces that somewhere protect, and somewhere lay bare.

Dramatically inflated shoulderproofs in deadstock satin glisten like soft armour, echoing the shape of the brand’s infamous bug glasses: panopticon eyes for an age of constant witnessing. Gothic ruff collars nod to Dracula and Victorian restraint, but here they function as posture braces for phone-fatigued bodies, propping up collapsing necks for one more scroll. Makeup is teary, glazed, digitally overworked — the face we recognise in the mirror from fifteen-hour screen days. Even support systems give up on rigidity. Bra cups slump. They are uninterested in firmness, discipline, performance. The body is allowed to be tired.

Elsewhere, painted foreheads flicker between third eye and lightbulb, like  a fragile hope for enlightenment. Hairstyles are messy, drowning out the noise; fur glimmers throughout like a buffer against impact, only to reveal itself as Taymour’s biodegradable “bio fluff”: a material designed to die, decay, and disappear. Despite its bleak title — and the even bleaker world it reflects — the collection never abandons pleasure. It remains whimsical, strange, politically alert yet landing softly. Rooted in ready-to-wear and genuinely imaginable on our own bodies (amen, let a girl dream), it refuses to flatten its vision for marketability. At a time when fashion increasingly mirrors cultural burnout and instability, trading imagination for safety, Taymour has garnered an impressive negotiation. What emerges is a philosophy of guarded permeability: sheer, flesh-like fabrics invite feeling, while padding and structure offer defence. Stay open, but not empty. Curious, but not depleted. In a world that feeds on us, Collina Strada designs better skin.