Mono no aware

Travellers who sought out the Rhône Glacier at the turn of the last century lodged at the Hotel Belvédère. From its terrace, the glacier spread in full view; from its doorway, a tunnel cut through the ice itself. A passage between the human and the elemental. Sean Connery admired it enough to demand its appearance in Goldfinger.

By the late twentieth century the glacier had receded. What had once been immutable withdrew into the valley, too distant to serve as spectacle. The rooms emptied. Or perhaps the decline was simpler: changing appetites. Air travel cheapened, beaches beckoned. European tourists decided that basking on a beach was far more interesting than watching ice melt.

The hotel closed in 2016. What remains are images: the Belvédère crouched on the Furka Pass, its façade caught in the frame of automotive photography. A ruin reduced to backdrop, grandeur stripped to atmosphere.

What does this have to do with fashion? If cosmopolitanism has been one of our pillars, another is mono no aware (物の哀れ)—the pathos of things. The sudden recognition of impermanence. The pang at summer’s surrender, the ache for vanished hours. It is what we see in the Belvédère, and what we pursue in our work: rough tactility of cloth, a cold cast of imagery, the awareness that beauty is inseparable from its fading.

Everything ends. As Wallace Stevens wrote: “Death is the mother of beauty…” In an age of plastics designed never to die, the fact that our garments—cut from natural fibres—will one day dissolve into earth is not a flaw but the condition of their meaning.