Culture and Codes01.10.26
Renew Gypsy: When the Holiday Feeling Stays With You
How a fabric can make you feel as though you’re still on holiday
We come back from our holidays, but the holidays don’t come back with us. Between the inevitable nostalgia that trails behind the end of every summer and the struggle to get back into the work routine – What was the password for the server again? – there is another back-to-work trauma that still doesn’t get talked about enough: the return of the “office uniform”. As we wait in vain for temperatures to remember they are supposed to drop – preferably without plunging us straight back into the freezing depths of winter – we find ourselves wondering what miraculous solution we can turn to in the meantime. Or at least once we have stopped staring forlornly at the three hundred photos we took of our aperitifs overlooking the sea.
SS26 HAD SHOWN US MERCY: FROM KAFTANS TO SORBET-SHADED MENSWEAR
From April onwards, we had it easy, thanks to a Spring/Summer season that saw beach wardrobes and beachwear hues firmly take over our office looks. “City fashion has made peace with beach cover-ups,” announced the fashion magazines, and suddenly we felt perfectly entitled to face 35°C in the metropolitan shade in oversized shirts, kaftans, mini dresses and feather-light trousers. A sarong worn over lightweight jeans became the ultimate act of social subversion: the rebellious gesture of turning up to a budget meeting dressed as though we were ready for a date on Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos world tour. Sanctioned by none other than the Goddess Fashion herself, we were untouchable behind the assertion: “It’s so on trend”.
Menswear also got a refresh over the past few months, more in its colours than its cuts. The green light was given to sorbet shades and palettes, arriving unbidden from the Prada, Dior and Saint Laurent runways, where mint, yellow and mango tones featured in the Spring/Summer 2026 collections. A chromatic deconstruction of menswear rigour that would have made Michel Foucault smile: he saw the “uniform” as one of the first technologies for disciplining bodies – and perhaps he had a point.
Having won the freedom to take swimwear onto the scorching city streets, we have to admit that we felt a little freer too.
BACK TO THE OFFICE: NEITHER BLEISURE NOR BLAZER
September is back, and we are back with it, flung at 100 km/h into the open-plan office: the company thermostat simulating tundra conditions and, illicitly tucked away beneath our desks, our faithful Birkenstocks – the undisputed stars of summer ’26 after a spectacular glow-up from “ugly” to “cool”. It may not be the most appealing snapshot of our return, but above all it is the visual representation of an unavoidable disconnect: the calendar orders us back to the office, while body and mind remain stubbornly stretched out along the shoreline, refusing to process the grief of August coming to an end. The transition from beach to ergonomic chair is a minefield: it is too early to invoke bleisure – that almost desperate attempt to blur the boundaries of a business trip into a long weekend by the sea – but still far too hot to contemplate putting the blazer back on.
As we linger in front of our open wardrobes, one question occurs to us: has the work-life balance become a wardrobe issue too? Frankly, no one has the energy to pick a side anymore.
SUMMER IS A FABRIC THAT LASTS ALL YEAR
To escape this disconnect and preserve the relaxed elegance we so envy in celebrities such as Zendaya and Uma Thurman – without succumbing to combinations of oversized pieces with an unfortunate “pyjama effect” – we need to look a little deeper for the answer. Not in the garment or the styling, but one step further back: in the fabric. While outside the asphalt melts the city, our lunch boxes threaten spontaneous combustion, and resigned stickers circulate through team chats as the last form of collective resistance, one innovative company has taken the problem to heart and turned it into a solution.
The name already says it all: Renew Gypsy – a stretch crépon designed to retain its structure while adapting to the contours of the body, without asking us to choose between freedom, style and elegance. Wearing it at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning becomes an act of pure chic insolence – or rather, Afro-chic: an effortlessly provocative expression of slow luxury that carries the memory of the shoreline straight into the heart of the open-plan office. Without alarming a single client.
Its only downside? The risk that its vibrant, natural appearance may eventually convince us that summer is not merely a box marked out on the calendar, but an existential condition that can be prolonged through the material itself.