Simon Cracker creates a brand uniform to highlight star upcycled garments during Milan Fashion Week

Simon Cracker's collection for next summer is an expression of exasperation with a world of uninformed 'experts,' and as an antidote the Italian upcycled brand has distilled its focus to singular, spotlight garments, paired with a Simon Cracker new uniform.
For designers Filippo Biraghi and Simone Botte, upcycling is the lexicon they use to tell the story. This season's was titled: 'The devil in the details.'
They took inspiration for their ironic and disproportionate details from the Belgian designer Martin Margiela, adding to the garments oversized buttons that were actually facsimile copies, huge safety- and clothespins and giant zipper pulls. 'We didn't copy Margiela. We tried to use the same language,'' Biraghi said.
New brand uniform highlights the stars
The basic Simon Cracker co-ed uniform for Spring-Summer 2026 was a simple square T-shirt fashioned from jersey stock that they saved and reconditioned after it became waterlogged in flooding. The T-shirts, each with a big care label sewn on the front, were paired with tailored black shorts.
The uniforms were backdrops for the real stars: A blazer with multiple crumpled arms that unfurled on the runway into dramatic trains. A triplicate of belted trousers tiered to make super low-waisted streetwear. Shirts sewn on dress fronts, with the arms tied behind the waist. A frenzy of shirts that become a ruffled skirt. Three pleated skirts layered to form a strapless tiered dress.
Each garment, made of clothes that had been in some way discarded, had its own architecture, and its own story.
Simon Cracker recipe
Biraghi said that the designers have come up with a 'recipe' for some core garments, including the Siamese T-Shirt he was wearing. It was made out of two T-shirts, one forming the sides with the arms, the second contributing the front and back panels. The idea is put out some identifiable pieces, while maintaining the uniqueness of each garment that is core to the brand.
'Our niche wants unique pieces. It is not the herd that interests us. Fewer but more devoted,'' Botte said.

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The Guardian

3 hours ago

• The Guardian

‘Get ready to sweat!' The animal mega-marathon stampeding from the Congo to the Arctic

Wide-eyed, a child peers at the metre-long corkscrew horns rising above the crowd. She takes in the enormous raggedy hide and the strangeness of the wild creature stomping through her streets. Up ahead, a giraffe peeks warily through a first-floor window as a zebra skitters backwards from a growling dog. 'Kudu, washa!' The instruction comes through my radio. We turn away from the child and hurl our hefty creature forwards. The crowd scatters. We thunder through the narrow alleys to catch up with the rest of The Herds. In 2021, Little Amal, the puppet of a refugee child almost 4m tall, walked from the Syria-Turkey border to the UK. The Herds, from the same team, is even more ambitious. This new theatrical mega-marathon is shepherding a pack of life-size animal puppets a distance of 20,000km, from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle. More than 1,000 people will take part in creating the odyssey and, as the animals march into Marseille, I become one of them – as a volunteer puppeteer – for a galvanising (if sweaty) week. The idea for The Herds was sparked when Little Amal reached southern Italy. Artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi began to hear stories from climate refugees who had come to see the little girl walk. 'They had left their countries because of droughts and failing crops,' Zuabi explains. 'As a Palestinian, it felt familiar: the world has collapsed on me and now I need to leave.' The climate crisis is predicted to create 1.2 billion refugees by 2050. 'It unites us,' Zuabi says. 'The rich societies are not immune. Hunger is coming.' With the movement of animals often proving a warning sign to the rest of us, The Herds disturbs our easy indifference, forcing us to pay attention. 'Lots of this hasn't been done before,' says line producer Annika Bromberg as we puff up a hill to my first rehearsal, 'so it has to be invented.' The team sprawls across continents, with producers including former artistic director of the Young Vic David Lan, and executive producer Sarah Loader, who spends her days quenching one logistical fire after another. They work alongside local producers at each stop. While Little Amal was animated by professionals, the puppets in The Herds are animated, in large part, by volunteers like me. In each city, up to 100 participants train and perform over the course of a week. When I arrive at the rehearsal, the animals are scattered sleepily across a sports hall: minuscule vervet monkeys, bulky gorillas and elegant zebras. Made from recyclable materials, there are wooden hooves, ragged cardboard mimicking the rough texture of pelts, and iron structures inside the biggest beasts. My group of 40 are in the expert hands of the South African puppet-building collective Ukwanda, who made these complex, delicate creatures. 'Breathing is the language of puppetry,' says puppet designer Siphokazi Mpofu, as she gently tends to a gazelle. 'The animals have to smell, they have to graze.' Her gazelle snuffles at the floor so realistically it wouldn't be surprising to see it gambol off on its own. I am in a trio with Bastien Bangil, a comedian, and Virgile Lancien, a student. They have been learning how to manoeuvre the kudu, a towering African antelope that is the heaviest animal in the room after the giraffe (the elephant is so weighty it rarely comes out in rehearsal). I am assigned the head, holding it above my own until my arms start to quake and fingers blister. Making these creatures seem real and alive is hard, grubby and surprisingly moving work. 'You have all these humans contorting themselves,' puppetry director Craig Leo says as he fixes the hind leg of a lion, 'to present these fragile creatures to the world.' When a puppet gets broken, the team, referred to as doctors, speak of it as an injury and mend it in their hospital. One day when we step out of our kudu, his head falls off and a stick flies out of his thigh. 'I'll be gentle,' says Ukwanda's Sipho Ngxola, wielding a drill. 'It's not just a puppet,' says technical director Muaz AlJubeh, explaining the level of care they take. 'It's a life.' As The Herds moves across borders, new animals will be added, with puppet-making workshops formed along the route, from Stockholm to Wigan. By the time the production reaches the UK, where it will rampage through London and kick off the Manchester international festival, the pack of puppets will be 100-strong. Alongside the volunteers, the troupe includes 42 young artists from 19 countries. Known as E-Co (Emerging Company), they have been recruited to hold the production together, and are travelling, learning, performing and helping Ukwanda teach participants across the European leg of the journey. Ochai Ogaba, a Nigerian choreographer who guides our herd's other kudu with enviable ease, is one of them. 'I come from a place where climate change is not talked about,' he says. 'Being a part of this project has unlocked my responsibility to look after this world.' When the rest of us are steady on our hooves, the Ukwanda puppeteers teach us a few words in the South African language Xhosa. These become the instructions we follow while performing, fed through headsets: when to stop, go, be alert, retreat, turn. And the most exciting, 'washa', meaning to act with fire: to gallop. When we run together, it feels like a stampede. In each city, the animals trample alongside local artists. These beautiful beasts have kicked up swirls of dust in Dakar and stamped with flamenco dancers in Casablanca; Ogaba's company danced in tandem with the animals in Lagos. Our first performance is in Arles, where we appear with local aerial artists Gratte Ciel, the air fizzing with pyrotechnics and dry ice. Everything moves at such speed in this production that we are frequently navigating on trust alone, awaiting Zuabi's next instructions. 'Get ready to sweat,' he warns. Suddenly the quiet roads are packed with people, elbows and cameras jostling to the front. Where the response to Amal was one of continual welcome, The Herds creates a buzz of uncertainty. Peel back the beauty and awe and there is a sense of wrongness at having these wild animals walled in on urban roads. Ogaba's kudu leads the pack. We nuzzle through the crowd to drink from the historical centre's fountain, Zuabi reminding us to keep our animals agitated and afraid in this unfamiliar environment. The Ukwanda team stay close throughout, on hand for any injuries (puppet or human). Our walk finishes by the river, where Gratte Ciel's topless artists stand on swaypoles, red skirts sweeping in the wind. To a soaring soundtrack, they start to bend, the giraffe's neck tilting upwards towards these strange creatures moving in the sky. Knackered, our kudu limps to the finish line. Bangil and Lancien emerge from its wooden body with matching exhausted grins. 'Tomorrow,' Bangil jokes, 'the elephant?' Catching our breath, we have a moment to watch the end of the show. The aerial performers' movements become more violent, their bodies now swaddled in flowing plastic sheets that swim through the air like clouds. The animals lower themselves to the ground. 'Nothing dies like a puppet,' Leo told us in rehearsal. 'You know that when the curtain closes, it won't get up and walk off. But it also always holds the potential of life.' The remaining puppeteers abandon their creatures in the street and walk away to rapturous applause. 'This won't stop the climate crisis,' says Zuabi before the next day's event. 'It is not trying to be successful. It is asking: how do you fail responsibly? We need to rewild nature, but we also need to rewild our imagination, rewild our political systems.' By placing these animals on our doorsteps, made internationally and held by local hands, The Herds makes all of this belong to us: the beauty of nature, the potential of life, the choice to take action or continue to look away. The Herds is in London 27–29 June, and across Greater Manchester 3-5 July, as part of Manchester international festival. Its global journey continues until August. Kate Wyver's trip was provided by Manchester international festival.

Sky News

4 hours ago

• Sky News

Why are activists protesting against Jeff Bezos's Venice wedding?

Billionaire Jeff Bezos is marrying Lauren Sanchez, a former TV journalist, in a glitzy multi-day event in Venice. While city officials haven't confirmed the wedding details, Italian media have reported it will be a three-day affair between Tuesday and Thursday. They also say it will take over the whole island of San Giorgio opposite St Mark's Square - but that the location of the ceremony itself remains private. Oprah Winfrey, Mick Jagger and Ivanka Trump are expected to attend, as is pop star Katy Perry, who joined Ms Sanchez in the all-female celebrity crew that travelled to space in April. They and other celebrity guests - rumoured to include Leonardo Dicaprio and Eva Longoria - are expected to be joining the couple for parties on Amazon owner Bezos's super yacht, worth about $500m (£371m), which will dock in the port of Venice for the wedding, Sky News Italy reports. But not everyone in the iconic city is excited. Members of the group No Space for Bezos are planning to disrupt celebrations and have already made clear that, to them, the billionaire is not welcome in the city. They unfurled a massive banner on 12 June from the bell tower of the San Giorgio Maggiore basilica with Bezos's name crossed out. They are planning another demonstration on 28 June where they will block guests from arriving at a party by blocking the canals with boats and their bodies. They say the protest will be peaceful. "We want to take back our city that we are seeing constantly being privatised and taken away from us," Federica Toninelli, an activist associated with No Space for Bezos, told Sky News. Why are there protests? Protesters do not have an issue with the marriage itself but with what they say is the "privatisation" and "exploitation" of the city. "He is basically going to treat the whole city as a private ballroom, as a private event area, as if the citizens are not there," said Alice Bazzoli, also an activist with No Space for Bezos. Both told Sky News that the event will close parts of the city and make it difficult for locals to get around, as well as posing environmental concerns with the use of yachts in the canals. "This is not what Venice needs. This is not what a city that is already suffering from overtourism needs," said Ms Toninelli. The city has long struggled with high tourism numbers. Millions come to see a World Heritage Site famous around the world for its medieval architecture, crammed into a picturesque canal network. But this pushes up the cost of living for locals and tends to create only low-paid temporary employment. "It's going to bring money, yes, but we are not going to see any money," said Ms Toninelli. The protests are also linked to wider issues around affordable housing and a dwindling local population in Venice's historic centre. "Do we want our city even more invaded by tourists, by oligarchs, and people who buy and privatise the city, or do we want services, jobs, health services, schools, universities? Do we want to live in the city like normal people, or sell it to the best offer?" said Ms Bazzoli. What has the response been to the protests? The Mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, says he is "honoured" that the city is hosting the event. "Once again Venice proves to be a world stage," he said. "Those 20 people who are putting up posters are clearly capitalising on [Jeff Bezos's] image." The city of Venice has previously denied that the event would disrupt locals, saying water taxi services would run normally and that only 200 guests had been invited. "Venice is used to being the stage for events and shows every week, without significant impacts," the city said, citing G20 and G7 summits, the Architecture and Cinema Biennales, as well as private events. They say the city has previous experience of hosting big events successfully. Is this the first celebrity Venice wedding? No, George and Amal Clooney famously got married there in 2014. The actor arrived at his ceremony at the Aman Grande Canal Hotel on a boat, alongside guests including Matt Damon and model Cindy Crawford. The city also hosted world leaders for the 2021 G20 summit, as well as the annual Venice Film Festival. Is tourism a problem in Venice? Venice has been struggling with the impacts of overtourism - when the number of visitors to an area worsens the experience of being there for locals or other tourists. There were around 50,000 people living in the historic city centre in 2023 when there were around 4.9 million tourist arrivals, according to the data gathering website Statista. In 2024, it became the first city in the world to introduce a payment system for tourists, with officials carrying out random checks to make sure people beyond entry points have a QR code. As it stands, those visiting between April and July for a day trip pay a standard fee of €5 - unless they have booked less than four days before their visit, in which case they must pay double. The city has also put in place a size limit of 25 people for tourist groups to reduce crowds. Where else have there been tourist protests? Venice isn't the only European city where locals are frustrated with tourist numbers. Protesters in Barcelona sprayed tourists with water guns as part of demonstrations over the number of visitors.

Daily Mail​

7 hours ago

• Daily Mail​

Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos shrug off protestors to kick off lavish Venice wedding celebrations with scantily clad FOAM PARTY on $500M yacht

and her billionaire beau Jeff Bezos have shrugged off anti-capitalism protestors with a rowdy foam party on board a $500million superyacht to kick off their opulent wedding-week festivities. The couple and a host of celebrity friends will descend upon Venice this week ahead of the highly anticipated June 27 nuptials, greeted by anti-capitalist demonstrators vowing to 'block the canals' and prevent the wedding from going ahead. But the Amazon founder, 61, and his soon-to-be-wife, 55, didn't let the backlash get them down, stripping down to their swimsuits for a soapy foam party on Bezos' superyacht Koru on Sunday. Pictures obtained by of the lavish celebration show the loved-up couple covered in little more than soap suds as they relished in the summer sunshine. The couple partied off the island of Cres in Croatia in a final pitstop before arriving in Italy for their long-awaited wedding, more than two years after Bezos proposed on board the superyacht while it was docked near the Cannes Film Festival. While they spent most of the afternoon celebrating with friends, the soon-to-be-newlyweds managed to find pockets of intimate downtime, pictured with their arms wrapped around one another and beaming in the foam pit. Both Sanchez and Bezos were mindful of the UV rays, wearing hats and sunglasses, while the bride wore an ombre black and red string bikini and the groom wore blue and black swimming trunks. The rowdy party saw young guests diving off the back of the yacht into the water below, utilizing the stand up paddle boards on board and ferried to and from shore on smaller boats. Other guests took the opportunity to relax, basking in the sunlight on one of the many day beds available on the top floor of the yacht. According to an insider, a police boat briefly approached the vessel during the festivities, but quickly moved on. A 'Happy Birthday' sign was pictured hanging from the yacht, amid reports the festivities were to celebrate Lauren's son Evan's 19th birthday. A relaxed-looking Sanchez and Bezos are in Europe ahead of their nuptials, which are expected to be a week-long affair estimated to be costing roughly $15 to $20 million. Ahead of their arrival in Venice, i mpassioned signs reading 'No space for Bezos' and 'Veniceland: A playground fit for an oligarch' have been plastered across the region, hinting that residents want Bezos and Sanchez to take their multimillion-dollar wedding elsewhere. Demonstrators have also been plotting to clog up streets and canals to throw off the wedding's events and hinder the roughly 200 guests from getting around the city. Federica Toninello, who is helping to organize one of the coordinated protests, told the New York Times that she has 'moles' who are leaking details of the upcoming events. The group has received intel that one of the key events will take place at Misericordia. 'Bezos will never get to the Misericordia,' she told a crowd of about 300. 'We will line the streets with our bodies, block the canals with lifesavers, dinghies and our boats.' Among protestors' biggest gripes is that tourists flocking to Venice have contributed to soaring housing costs which make it near impossible for 'ordinary Venetians' to live in the region. And the Bezos-Sanchez wedding has coincided with peak season in Venice, meaning hotels of all budgets are nearing capacity with tens of thousands of visitors arriving daily. But the couple's wedding organizers, Lanza & Baucina Limited, earlier spoke out on their high-profile clients' behalf, hitting back at suggestions that the couple have not been respectful of the locals during the planning process. 'From the outset, instructions from our client and our own guiding principles were abundantly clear: the minimizing of any disruption to the city, the respect for its residents and institutions and the overwhelming employment of locals in the crafting of the events,' Lanza & Baucina Limited said in a statement to Page Six. 'Before the recent news of protests arose, we had worked for there to be minimal negative impact or disruption to the lives of Venetians and the city's visitors.' The company added that Bezos and Sanchez have donated funds to various Venice charities in the months leading up to the nuptials. Bezos and Sanchez have also gifted funds on behalf of their guests, according to the report. The high-end wedding planning company has worked with stars including George and Amal Clooney, and Salma Hayek and François-Henri Pinault. Mayor Luigi Brugnaro also advocated for Bezos and Sanchez, telling The Associated Press: 'We are very proud. 'I don't know if I will have time, or if he will, to meet and shake hands, but it's an honor that they chose Venice. Venice once again reveals itself to be a global stage.' The highly anticipated ceremony is just one of three formal events - all at different locations. It is believed that on June 26, there will be a gala at a private cloister along the iconic Lid, possibly at Chiostro della Madonna dell'Orto. And on June 28 there will be an extraordinary party at a church, one source claimed. The insider confirmed guests should be steadily arriving in the country over the next few days and will likely leave by June 29. The guest list is thought to have less than 200 people, with A-listers like Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom and even members of the Trump family thought to be invited The couple and a flock of celebrity friends will descend upon Venice this week ahead of the highly anticipated June 27 nuptials, greeted by anti-capitalist demonstrators vowing to 'block the canals' and prevent the wedding from going ahead A-listers Lady Gaga and Elton John are set to perform. 'Lauren wanted some big talent to sing for them and it just doesn't get any bigger than Gaga and Elton,' a source previously told 'It also helps that Gaga and Elton are good friends and were happy to do it together, which is cool. It will be like a mini vacation for the besties.' Around 60 of Venice's water taxis are reserved for the week, with some of the 400 gondolas on the island out of commission as well, according to the source.