Dear Esteemed Readers,
Isn’t it strange how silence became the loudest thing in the room?
We’re in a moment where the people who used to be desperate to be seen are turning off their cameras. Where luxury doesn’t walk into the party first. It waits in the car. Watches. Where everyone’s slowly realizing that what looked like exclusivity might have just been markup and manipulation…..wrapped in marketing copy and sealed with a heritage logo.
This issue didn’t come together in a flurry of campaign decks or seasonal mood boards. It came together in fragments. Screenshots. Voice notes. Long messages sent from traffic and dressing rooms. Conversations about tariffs and TikTok, about legacy brands getting fact-checked in real time, about receipts, materials, margins, and memory. We didn’t try to name a trend. We paid attention to the temperature.
We called it Low Heat. Heavy Drip.
Because that’s what this is. Not loud. Not decorative. Just pressure with precision. Quiet presence that doesn’t need to explain itself. On the cover, the message is simple: no noise. just power.
The image was created using a new AI model developed and integrated by our Tech Architect, Yousef Hammoda. It isn’t our first AI cover. But it’s the first that felt this clear. The green car. The unbothered posture. The space between them. It tells you everything you need to know, without saying much at all. That’s the issue. That’s the mood.
I wrote the cover story because I couldn’t not. I’ve been in this industry long enough to feel the shift before the press release lands. The performance fatigue. The price-tag inflation. The fact that some of the smartest, most stylish people I know are buying less, but sharper. Watching consumers fact-check brands in real time. Watching TikTok expose the $47 guts of a $6,000 bag. Watching Xiaohongshu turn luxury marketing inside out. It all felt like a moment. But not the kind that comes with confetti. The kind that comes with stillness, followed by action.
Anyway, here’s what’s rolling:
Felix Adu writes about protest wear not as trend, but as truth. The ways bodies have always used clothing to speak when systems won’t listen. April Branch cuts through the self-congratulation of “quiet luxury” and shows how subtlety can be just as exclusionary as excess. Alina Balijja takes us into the arrival of Antonio Riva Milano in Dubai. She doesn’t chase the gowns. She listens to the pacing. The discipline. The restraint required to land with impact in a city that never whispers. Robert McFadden delivers what most financial writers won’t. A breakdown of tax planning without fear tactics or fluff. Just straight talk. Sonia Haboub writes from within movement. Her Technogym piece explores form, function, and how luxury is finding new language in the body. Mova Wonen NL brings material into the foreground—panels, textures, and surfaces that don’t scream for attention but shift how we feel inside our spaces. Manuela Pirola explores the creative friction between fashion and interior design. Not a merge. A conversation. Alexandra Popescu-Zorica writes about legacy without nostalgia. Her work is layered, clean, and knows exactly what to leave out.
EVVIE 7 also returns in this issue, not as a novelty, but as a voice that mirrors our own questions back to us in sharper focus. Her interview with Uma Ghosh covers more than just conscious beauty. It explores what it means to age with intent. To shed the noise. To reclaim a face and a routine on your own terms. It’s not about anti-aging. It’s about opting out of the pressure to disappear. And it’s one of the most human pieces we’ve published this year.
And then there’s Dania Khan.
Dania joins Gazetta this month as a contributor, but she’s already lived through half the stories people are just beginning to write. She studied under me at the Dubai Institute of Luxury Fashion and Style. She became my assistant. She built her own styling practice while raising two children, producing TVCs, shooting campaigns, juggling fittings and school runs without fanfare. Her voice carries all of that. Her Met Gala piece doesn’t chase virality. It reads like someone who knows what spectacle means and what it costs. Her Cullinan feature feels like memory. Detailed. Restrained. Present. She writes the way she styles. Unapologetically grounded.
And this month marks the return of Manic Momboss.
After maternity leave, she’s back. Not reinvented. Not rebranded. Just sharper. More distilled. Her latest column doesn’t pander to productivity or glamorize burnout. It hits. It’s for the women who are tired of being reduced to either-or. Tired of being called resilient when they’d rather be given the room to be quiet. Her work has always had bite. But this time, it’s quieter, and somehow, even sharper.
I don’t care if people skim this issue. But I care deeply that it holds. That if someone lands on a paragraph mid-scroll, they feel it.
We’re not here to fill space. We’re here to document a shift. And maybe call it out before it gets renamed and rebranded by someone else.
Luxury isn’t dead. It’s just tired of being misunderstood. But it was built to hold.
And if you sit with it long enough, it might say something you’ve been trying to name.
Welcome to Gazetta. Welcome to May. Sit with it.
