Cult Gaia. Fall/Winter 2025/2026 - Lookbook

 

(Images:  Cult Gaia 2025)

Clothing, and style as a way of relaxing into oneself, and feeling safe.  Better still, when it's effortless and nonchalant.  But, there is a caveat, it is difficult, particularly if one is entrapped materialistically trying to feel grounded, and then beaming it all back to yourself, like a rapid fire mirror of deception, via the billions of digitized, replayed impulses, yes, through your 'smart' phone.   So, how do we avoid, or balance this dysregulating affect?  Simple, as a start, turn off your phone, and just use the mirror, and dress with ease.

And Jasmin Larian Hekmat, of her label Cult Gaia, with all its 1970s and 1980s hedonistic charm, can show you how it's done, or at least inspire you to loosen up the shackles, sans the shock value, of new found conservatism which has, unfortunately entrenched itself over two decades, even if we don't want to admit, my goodness we're all at an aesthetical 11th hour.  And for her Fall 2025 and Winter 2026 collection, Hekmat has absorbed the artistic and sculpture resonation of Paris, in all of its paradoxical and cultural exuberance, to be that statement through the eras of the rise and fall of society, human beings, and culture.  With monuments built, outlasting both the biology and its societal confines, to be inspirited as moments in time. 

Which as mentioned, we are very much living through a hyperreal version of bygone conservatism, and to see this, one only needs to view the plethora of young women covering up their nipples, breasts and behinds, so they can sell their cheap 'sheer' clothing via Depop, a sort of sexulaized  self censoring under the digital platforms, or AI telling us it's "inappropriate", while male nipples are ok.  When Hekmat for her latest collection, as mentioned, inspired by statues and sculptures in around around Paris, created the "boob" clutch, to be sexy and free, and yes, I'm sorry, once again, you'll need to tuck your phone away, or at least turn it off.  This is the tangible, what was once real to our grandmothers, and mothers, they weren't so uptight.

Thus, the collection has a relaxed freedom to it, and a sabaratic joy, via Hekmat's amorously tinged flows, with viscose and sleek satin, elbow high leather clothes, sleeveless tops, and one piece textured fabric, tassels everywhere mini skirts.    Aligned, despite being in Paris, with her L.A. cool, be it the 1970s starlets and groupies, all participating in that chaotically grounding epicurean, which followed on after the 1960s counterculture, where all the neurodiverse came together as one, and regulated well into the 1980s.

Bless Hekmat and Cult Gaia. 

___

(A.Glass 2025)