SHEIN, Marina Yee, DRIES VAN NOTEN and the last gesture.

France suspended Shein on the same day its first Paris store opened. Crowds lined up in the capital of haute couture, while protestors filled the streets. Two models of fashion collided. One built to replicate, the other to remember.

Shein manufactures up to 35,000 garments a day. Many images are AI-generated and some products don’t exist until ordered. Design becomes data. Creation becomes computation. Fashion, in this model, is not made. It is just produced.

A few days earlier, Marina Yee passed away. A founding member of the Antwerp Six, she worked quietly and instinctively, altering garments ”with one corner off” to let imperfection reveal the human hand. Her work was small in scale but immense in integrity. It was an persistent argument for fashion as reflection, not reaction.

I rewatched the Dries Van Noten documentary that same week, an ode to slowness, collaboration, and the intimacy of human skill. What moved me most was not nostalgia, but attention. The devotion of time to form.

Barthes wrote that fashion speaks in signs, not in cloth, a language of surfaces detached from the body that once gave it meaning. Adorno warned that industrial culture turns uniqueness into standard form, difference into repetition. Agamben saw the gesture as the last trace of humanity, the visible act of making, carrying both thought and time.

Shein erases time. Marina Yee honoured it. But there is hope. Dries Van Noten continues it, in the hands of Julian Klausner.