Natasha Zinko's FW26

Let’s face it: no one knows you like your local bodega owner does: the one who clocks you hovering between the Red Bull cans and the family-size kettle chips at 1AM, escaping childhood home drama in whatever outfit you panic-threw on. He doesn’t ask questions, but he’s seen the outfits. If he had to memorise them, perhaps they would land a bit like Natasha Zinko’s AW26.

Her collection, Family Biznes, is a collection and a family group chat come to life: the casting representing mothers, teens, grandmas, baby sisters, babysitters – the whole fam is included. In the collection, polo shirts are twisted diagonally, plaid shirt buttons are misaligned, curlers are still in, camo pants are yanked up with one hand like there was no time for a belt. The models look like they dressed mid-emergency (mid-divorcing parents?), when even the act of dropping off a package at your postage point begins to feel like a Mediterranean retreat (hence the packages as styling props, perhaps). 

The outfits are scrambled, a messy stacking of That Chair Pile (the wardrobe purgatory that’s not dirty, not clean). One male model wears a reusable shopping bag as a skirt, with a sweater two sizes too small: you imagine a secret boyfriend shimmying down the balcony after some hanky-panky with the family daughter, fleeing before her mother walks in, accidentally grabbing her knit instead of his own. 

The graphics are also sly. Sweaters slouch off the shoulders, revealing a T-shirt that reads “Happy Late Birthday” in balloon letters. Another simply says “Baby Sitter,” staking its claim in the family affair.

Under the banner of Family Biznes, Zinko pulls us back to post-Soviet Odesa, specifically to the street markets of the 1990s, where she first learned to make jeans as a teenager for her family to sell. There are two artisans at the heart of this season: her parents, Oleg and Margharita, both now in their 70s. The collection feels like a love letter to the perseverance they faced in her youth, which taught her that there are no limits to what you can achieve with your own hands.

Luckily, the family circus always needs a ringleader: so Mel B closes the show in furry dog shoes.