Tastemaker’s Note → A July to remember starts with Piccioli at Balenciaga, Blazy's second act at Chanel, and Malhotra making his couture debut. By the weekend, the conversation moves to London for Wimbledon finals, where the dress code is older than the tournament and Serena is back on the draw. New York's West Side opens up entirely for free, waterfront, with the right crowd. And the YSL show at ICP is the quietest thing on this list, which is exactly why it's worth going to.

There is a story we like to tell ourselves about innovation: that it arrives like weather. A bolt of luck. A mistake in a laboratory. A sunburn.

It's a comforting story, because it means genius is optional and timing is everything. But look closely at almost any "accident" that changed how we live, and you find something less romantic and much more useful…..

It came from someone who was simply paying closer attention than everyone else standing in the same room.

Coco Chanel is the best example we have, because her accident is the most famous one in fashion, and also the most misunderstood.

In the summer of 1923, Chanel fell asleep on the Duke of Westminster's yacht somewhere off the French coast and woke up sunburned. She stepped off the boat in Cannes bronzed, and within a few years, a suntan (for centuries the unmistakable mark of outdoor labor, and therefore poverty) had inverted into the complete opposite.

Tan skin now meant you had somewhere to be tan at.
Leisure. Travel. Money.

One of fashion's oldest status signals flipped in less than a decade, and the popular version of the story ends there: Chanel napped, Chanel burned, Chanel changed the world by pure accident, alongside the little black dress and the quilted bag.

→ Picasso was showing up to the beach in bathing trunks and a black Stetson while his wife danced barefoot in the sand.
→ Hemingway and Fitzgerald were trading drafts and grievances in the same rooms.
→ Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, Cocteau, Stravinsky, all cycling through the same villa, the same beach, the same handful of summers.

The world that was a glamorous and free-spirited lifestyle on the Riviera was invented by and belonging to the wealthy American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy, in their legendary home Villa America.

It happened because instead of leaving when the season "ended," they simply stayed. They talked a hotel into remaining open through July. Gerald personally dug the seaweed off a stretch of beach with his own bare hands.

And boy, were they trendsetters in their own right too, The Murphy’s. Inspirations through art and global fashion trends emerged just from habits of Sara sunbathing with pearls draped across her back, explaining that the sun was good for them, too — a habit so striking that Picasso painted her wearing them, and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote her into literature because of it.

At the time, the French Riviera was a winter destination. The fashionable came for the mild season and fled before summer arrived, because nobody sunbathed and nobody wanted a tan. But The Murphy’s, they simply stayed…

The people who shape a season, an asset class, a category, are rarely the ones with the most original idea.

They're the ones who were already standing on the beach when everyone else had gone home for the summer. Their eyes were open, looking for opportunity, inside a circle that made the looking worthwhile.

If you really think about it, it’s a much more useful story than the one about the sunburn. You see, luck needs an audience. Opportunity needs a room. The accident was never really the point, to begin with.

So, if you want my advice:
Take the meeting. Throw the party. Keep the door open past the season everyone else thought was over. Build with people whose attention you trust, because the next accidental fortune (the next Chanel, the next Villa America) is far more likely to happen near good company than in isolation.

Summers are short bursts of magic. But it only takes a second, inside the right circle, to discover something that quietly reshapes an entire industry influencing resortwear, suntan oil, sunscreen, an aesthetic, an asset class.

Now this is precisely the kind of work I salivate thinking of: unearthing the unthinkable.
Consider this letter an open door.

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Maybe you tried the ingredients before but this time the format simply reels you in….

The same can be said about innovation. A completely new way of thinking and when the sequence changes, so does the flavor.

P.S. Like my style (and taste)? Work with me.