Everyone’s Over ‘Quiet Luxury.’ Here’s What’s Next

“Quiet luxury” has become a bit of a dirty phrase in Milan. To some at the Italian brands that embody the term , it’s reductive—an overly TikTok-ified way of describing classic, refined clothing. Many fashion industry people roll their eyes when it comes up.

Brunello Cucinelli , one of the kings of natural textiles, prefers the term “gentle luxury.” At his fall presentation in Milan this past week, the (extremely expensive) clothing at which he excels looked especially touchable. Cashmere sweatsuits were layered with blanket-like scarves and silky suiting hung in loose pleats. Even an evening look, composed of a black sweater tucked into a feathered skirt, appeared comfy. Holding a pillowy bag, one Brunello disciple called it “accogliente”—Italian for “cozy.”

One step beyond coziness is protection, and there was plenty of that in Milan, too. Chalk it up to an uncertain luxury market , the roiling geopolitical climate or global warming, but using clothing as a sanctuary seemed to be on many designers’ minds. For some, like the excellent Brioni La Donna and Loro Piana collections, that means impeccable tailoring and forever-worthy double-breasted coats. Others, like Luke and Lucie Meier at Jil Sander, took the cocooning more literally, making succulent, quilted floor-length capes.

Not everyone is swaddling themselves in shearling. Architect Bianca Censori, who joined her companion, the rapper Ye, at the Marni show, wore a mere scrap of leather that failed to cover her buttocks among other body parts. No protection needed—except her bodyguard.

The Look of Love at Prada

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, the co-creative directors of Prada, are on quite a roll. If you were feeling hyperbolic, you might even say that they’re making fashion history. The duo’s fall collection started with thinking about love, explained Simons backstage, but “all the elements of love,” including loving your home, or even loving your sheets. There’s that theme of comfort again.

That manifested in a romance for different eras of fashion, remixed: A Jackie O. linen shift dress shot through with a streak of shearling. A leather bomber jacket embellished with “1913,” the year Prada was founded. A twin set in shocking red and ultraviolet. High-tech nylon jackets in midcentury couture shapes.

“There is no way to think about the future unless you have a good understanding of the past,” said Simons.

Everyday Allure at Bottega Veneta

In less than four years, Matthieu Blazy has completely renewed Bottega Veneta, making it a cult spot for creative types that want unique clothing and accessories with plenty of craftsmanship. Without succumbing to naked dresses and other revealing gimmicks, the brand appeals to a broad demographic, as shown by front-row neighbours Julianne Moore, 63, and A$AP Rocky, 35.

The fall collection, Blazy said backstage, was a “celebration of the everyday.” He found himself thinking about the allure of everyday clothing on his nightly dog walks. This meant recognisable pieces like peacoats, skirts and sweaters, reduced to their essential essence but rendered fabulous through textile innovation and fabrication. A simple yellow evening dress had a shirred-fabric fraying (not unlike recent work by Phoebe Philo ) and a long column skirt boasted leather plumes.

Blazy wanted to express resilience, he said, like flowers blooming in the desert. Fittingly, he designed giant Murano glass cactus flowers to decorate the show space.

Womblike Sumptuousness at Jil Sander

Real life crept into the fashion bubble on the day of Jil Sander’s show, when guests were confronted with a triple-whammy of rain, traffic and multiple public protests that closed the streets. Supermodel Mariacarla Boscono, like several models and editors, had a harrowing trip from Dolce & Gabbana to Jil Sander, and was swept right into hair and makeup and then onto the runway. Wearing the first look, a cocoon-like rounded red suit, Boscono was worth the wait.

Jil Sander put forward an extensive 68-look collection chock-full of satisfyingly sumptuous pieces. Chunky knitwear was sheathed in fine netting, tailored pieces were lined in silky quilting. Coats in deer leather and Himalayan goat fur looked like outerwear for an Icelandic wedding.

Androgynous Realism at Tod’s

At conservative Italian stalwart Tod’s, Matteo Tamburini executed an impressive debut. Upon arriving from Bottega Veneta in December, the first thing Tamburini discussed with Tod’s group boss Diego Della Valle was the need to create “desirable objects.” “You don’t want to have a big fashion show and then find nothing in the store,” said Tamburini after the show.

So in just a few short months, Tamburini was able to create a tightly edited women’s collection full of androgynous separates and light, appealing accessories. Stylist Brian Molloy, who’s also worked with The Row and Hermès , worked magic with restraint. One supersoft foldable tote big enough for a laptop had a slit at the top so it could fit under your shoulder—easy stuff that merits a high price tag.

The newly minted Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has a message about the artificial-intelligence systems he helped create: get more serious about safety or they could endanger humanity.

“I think we’re at a kind of bifurcation point in history where, in the next few years, we need to figure out if there’s a way to deal with that threat,” Hinton said in an interview Tuesday with a Nobel Prize official that mixed pride in his life’s work with warnings about the growing danger it poses.

The 76-year-old Hinton resigned from Google last year in part so he could talk more about the possibility that AI systems could escape human control and influence elections or power dangerous robots. Along with other experienced AI researchers, he has called on such companies as OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Alphabet -owned Google to devote more resources to the safety of the advanced systems that they are competing against each other to develop as quickly as possible.

Hinton’s Nobel win has provided a new platform for his doomsday warnings at the same time it celebrates his critical role in advancing the technologies fueling them. Hinton has argued that advanced AI systems are capable of understanding their outputs, a controversial view in research circles.

“Hopefully, it will make me more credible when I say these things really do understand what they’re saying,” he said of the prize.

Hinton’s views have pitted him against factions of the AI community that believe dwelling on doomsday scenarios needlessly slows technological progress or distracts from more immediate harms, such as discrimination against minority groups .

“I think that he’s a smart guy, but I think a lot of people have way overhyped the risk of these things, and that’s really convinced a lot of the general public that this is what we should be focusing on, not the more immediate harms of AI,” said Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, during a panel last year.

Hinton visited Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters Tuesday for an informal celebration, and some of the company’s top AI executives congratulated him on social media.

On Wednesday, other prominent Googlers specialising in AI were also awarded a Nobel Prize. Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, director at the AI lab, were part of a group of three scientists who won the chemistry prize for their work on predicting the shape of proteins.

Thinking like people

Hinton is sharing the Nobel Prize in physics with John Hopfield of Princeton University for their work since the 1980s on neural networks that process information in ways inspired by the human brain. That work is the basis for many of the AI technologies in use today, from ChatGPT’s humanlike conversations to Google Photos’ ability to recognise who is in every picture you take.

“Their contributions to connect fundamental concepts in physics with concepts in biology, not just AI—these concepts are still with us today,” said Yoshua Bengio , an AI researcher at the University of Montreal.

In 2012, Hinton worked with two of his University of Toronto graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, on a neural network called AlexNet programmed to recognise images in photos. Until that point, computer algorithms had often been unable to tell that a picture of a dog was really a dog and not a cat or a car.

AlexNet’s blowout victory at a 2012 contest for image-recognition technology was a pivotal moment in the development of the modern AI boom, as it proved the power of neural nets over other approaches.

That same year, Hinton started a company with Krizhevsky and Sutskever that turned out to be short-lived. Google acquired it in 2013 in an auction against competitors including Baidu and Microsoft, paying $44 million essentially to hire the three men, according to the book “Genius Makers.” Hinton began splitting time between the University of Toronto and Google, where he continued research on neural networks.

Hinton is widely revered as a mentor for the current generation of top AI researchers including Sutskever, who co-founded OpenAI before leaving this spring to start a company called Safe Superintelligence.

Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award, a computer-science prize, for his work on neural networks alongside Bengio and a fellow AI researcher, Yann LeCun . The three are often referred to as the modern “godfathers of AI.”

Warnings of disaster

By 2023, Hinton had become alarmed about the consequences of building more powerful artificial intelligence. He began talking about the possibility that AI systems could escape the control of their creators and cause catastrophic harm to humanity. In doing so, he aligned himself with a vocal movement of people concerned about the existential risks of the technology.

“We’re in a situation that most people can’t even conceive of, which is that these digital intelligences are going to be a lot smarter than us, and if they want to get stuff done, they’re going to want to take control,” Hinton said in an interview last year.

Hinton announced he was leaving Google in spring 2023, saying he wanted to be able to freely discuss the dangers of AI without worrying about consequences for the company. Google had acted “very responsibly,” he said in an X post.

In the subsequent months, Hinton has spent much of his time speaking to policymakers and tech executives, including Elon Musk , about AI risks.

Hinton cosigned a paper last year saying companies doing AI work should allocate at least one-third of their research and development resources to ensuring the safety and ethical use of their systems.

“One thing governments can do is force the big companies to spend a lot more of their resources on safety research, so that for example companies like OpenAI can’t just put safety research on the back burner,” Hinton said in the Nobel interview.

An OpenAI spokeswoman said the company is proud of its safety work.

With Bengio and other researchers, Hinton supported an artificial-intelligence safety bill passed by the California Legislature this summer that would have required developers of large AI systems to take a number of steps to ensure they can’t cause catastrophic damage. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently vetoed the bill , which was opposed by most big tech companies including Google.

Hinton’s increased activism has put him in opposition to other respected researchers who believe his warnings are fantastical because AI is far from having the capability to cause serious harm.

“Their complete lack of understanding of the physical world and lack of planning abilities put them way below cat-level intelligence, never mind human-level,” LeCun wrote in a response to Hinton on X last year.