What Remains After the Show
At WHITE Milano, KIMHĒKIM, KENNEL & SCHMENGER and MARCELL PUSTUL offered three different ways to think beyond the next collection.
At a fashion trade show, the difficult part is rarely finding something new. It is deciding what deserves to remain interesting after the exhibition has closed.
Invited to attend WHITE Milano during Milan Fashion Week, we visited a September edition that was visibly widening its definition of fashion. Between 24 and 27 September 2026, the Tortona Fashion District hosted around 450 brands, 24 per cent more than the previous September edition, according to the organisers. Two new venues and expanded areas for design, beauty, accessories and resortwear brought yet more disciplines into the conversation.
For an independent multi-label boutique, scale has its attractions. But it can also make the act of choosing more difficult. The question we brought away was not which label might produce the most next season, but how a designer develops an idea without exhausting it.
Three names offered quite different ways of considering that question: Seoul's KIMHĒKIM, German shoemaker KENNEL & SCHMENGER, and Warsaw-based MARCELL PUSTUL.
A larger exhibition, a more difficult edit
WHITE's expansion was not confined to the number of exhibitors. Its T31 venue introduced lifestyle, beauty and accessories; T35 focused on resortwear, while new areas such as Nuvola and Box explored accessories and urban wardrobes. The organisers also brought public events into what had traditionally been a business-to-business environment.
The resulting breadth raises a useful distinction. A successful fair creates opportunities to discover. A good retailer must then decide what to leave out. Being independent is not an excuse to buy everything unfamiliar. It is the responsibility to recognise what has a point of view, and what might still have one several seasons later.
KIMHĒKIM: the confidence to repeat an idea
One of WHITE's special guests was KIMHĒKIM, founded in 2016 by designer Kimintē Kimhekim. Its practice draws together Korean heritage, Parisian training and the skills of the house's Seoul atelier. Familiar pieces of a wardrobe become the setting for playful interventions: a bow, a pearl, a distortion of proportion.
A black tailored suit punctuated with pearls, pictured in the organisers' materials, makes the point with unusual clarity. From a distance, the silhouette is almost austere. The embellishment changes its mood without erasing the structure underneath.
What interests us is less the surprise of that detail than its recurrence. Certain motifs return across KIMHĒKIM's work, but repetition here is not necessarily a refusal to develop. It can be how a designer builds a recognisable vocabulary, testing how far a single idea can travel.
Fashion rewards novelty, yet a visual signature takes time to become meaningful. An idea does not need to be discarded simply because it has appeared before.
KENNEL & SCHMENGER: knowing what not to add
The contrast with KENNEL & SCHMENGER could hardly be greater. Founded in 1918 in Pirmasens, the German shoemaker has accumulated more than a century of experience around a familiar object. The company says each shoe requires roughly 150 manufacturing steps and an average of 125 components; its production operates in Germany and in its own facilities in Hungary.
At WHITE, we were especially interested in the restraint of the range shown to us: a tightly considered selection of shoe forms, developed rather than endlessly multiplied. That is an observation about the collection that caught our attention, not a claim that the company manufactures only a small number of styles overall.
It suggests a different kind of design discipline. With a shoe, fit, the shape of the last, construction and the choice of materials are as consequential as its appearance. Revisiting a familiar form gives a manufacturer the opportunity to refine what experience has already taught it.
Of course, a long manufacturing history does not guarantee longevity, and producing fewer designs does not by itself prove a smaller environmental footprint. Yet the choice to work patiently with existing forms is worth noticing in an industry often built around replacement.
MARCELL PUSTUL: a collection without a deadline
A third perspective comes from MARCELL PUSTUL, the Warsaw-based label whose strong-shouldered tailoring and architectural outerwear appeared in WHITE's editorial selection. The designer's work moves between structure and sensuality, making a coat or jacket feel assertive without relying on elaborate decoration.
The brand's approach to time is explicit. It describes its collections as seasonless and maintains a selection of core pieces intended to remain available. Ready-to-wear is made in Poland, with its shoes and bags produced in Italy and Portugal, according to the label's own published information.
That does not mean nothing new should be designed. Rather, the product calendar need not dictate when an established piece becomes irrelevant. There is room to revisit a form, to keep a successful design in the collection, and to allow customers to come to it on their own schedule.
Claims about responsible production require evidence, not simply appealing language. But the distinction between a collection and a season remains worth examining. When a brand is willing to keep its most considered pieces in circulation, the catalogue can become a body of work instead of a succession of replacements.
What remains after the show
KIMHĒKIM, KENNEL & SCHMENGER and MARCELL PUSTUL share neither a single aesthetic nor a single business model. A theatrical jacket, a well-developed shoe and an architectural coat serve different wardrobes and different people.
What connects them is a more useful question: what deserves to be carried forward? For one label, it may be a recognisable design language. For another, a shape refined by technical knowledge. For a third, a piece that need not disappear when the calendar turns.
WHITE Milano brought together hundreds of labels and many possible futures for retail. What stayed with us was a reminder that discovering new designers need not mean encouraging an endless stream of new things.
Sometimes the most interesting decision is to look again at something that already has a reason to exist.
Primary sources
- WHITE Milano — September 2026 closing press release and WHITE Magazine (supplied to of CLOSET)
- KIMHĒKIM — brand background and atelier
- KENNEL & SCHMENGER — history and manufacture
- MARCELL PUSTUL — brand background
- MARCELL PUSTUL — production and seasonless model
Editorial note: of CLOSET attended WHITE Milano at the invitation of the organisers. The selection of brands and editorial commentary are independent.
