The CFDA Fashion Awards were presented on 2 November at Cipriani South Street in New York, and the most discussed silhouette of the night belonged to an architect.
Peter Marino was named the council’s 2026 Fashion Icon, an honour that usually goes to a designer or a performer and this year went to the person who builds the rooms they are photographed in.
He founded the Peter Marino Art Foundation in Southampton in 2021 with more than 500 works spanning antiquity to the present, and was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2012.
The commercial argument is that Marino turned the luxury store into a cultural object at precisely the moment retail needed one. Travertine, commissioned sculpture and controlled light became a way of justifying price in a market where product alone no longer could.
What the honour acknowledges is that fashion’s image is now made as much by architecture as by clothing. The leather is not a costume. It is a statement that the frame and the picture belong to the same profession.
The counterpoint is the work, which is anything but uniform. Marino founded his New York firm in 1978 and has since designed interiors for Armani, Bulgari, Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co. and Zegna, along with boutiques for Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Barneys New York.
His look has been fixed for decades: head-to-toe black leather, biker boots, dark sunglasses, hair cropped close. It is a uniform in the literal sense, unchanged across seasons and indifferent to the logic of trend.
