Navi Ahluwalia

Navi Ahluwalia covers the evolving relationship between runway fashion, brand collaborations and culture at Hypebae. Her reporting tracks how major houses, emerging designers and beauty leaders shape each season, while highlighting the platforms and communities that sit around them. She focuses on show coverage, partnership stories and interviews that treat fashion as part of a wider cultural and media landscape, drawing on experience across editorial work, fashion journalism and brand strategy. Alongside this, she occasionally turns to travel and city guides that map the places and businesses defining a destination’s style culture.

SS27 and FW26 fashion week reporting

Ahluwalia plays a central role in Hypebae’s coverage of recent fashion weeks, particularly the SS27 and FW26 seasons. She curates roundups of Milan Fashion Week SS27, selecting standout shows that include Glenn Martens’ final outing at Diesel and the first collection from Moschino’s new creative director. Her runway reporting extends to house-specific pieces on FENDI, Prada and Onitsuka Tiger, capturing each brand’s seasonal narrative and visual direction.

In these stories she moves between front-row casting, styling details and footwear, showing how show production and design choices contribute to a label’s wider positioning.

Her FW26 work follows a similar pattern, covering Marine Serre, Victoria Beckham, Rick Owens and Bottega Veneta through focused reports on their latest collections. She connects these designer stories to broader FW26 trend pieces, distilling what she sees across multiple runways into clear themes, from fabric and silhouette shifts to more experimental hairstyling and beauty looks. She also compiles guides to the most striking shows at Paris Fashion Week, balancing coverage of established houses with newer names such as Julie Kegels and Hodakova. Across this body of work, fashion week coverage is less about single looks and more about what a season’s shows collectively say about where fashion is heading.

Brand collaborations and sponsorships

Brand partnerships and sponsorship models are a recurring focus in Ahluwalia’s reporting.

She covers collaborations like MM6 Maison Margiela’s teased Havaianas project, Cecilie Bahnsen’s work with The North Face and FILA MILANO’s FW26 collection that blends sportswear with “commutercore” aesthetics. These pieces pay attention to how joint collections reinterpret each brand’s heritage and how cross-category collaborations - between luxury and outdoor, or fashion and performance - signal strategic moves to reach new audiences.

Her article on Balenciaga’s partnership with Substack takes this approach into the media space, examining the house’s role as the first fashion label to join Substack’s native sponsorship program. She situates the move within wider shifts in publishing and the rise of newsletter platforms, framing the partnership as both a branding decision and a response to changes in how creative work is funded and distributed. By quoting the brand’s leadership and outlining Balenciaga’s earlier decision to launch a Substack profile, she shows how fashion companies are experimenting with content platforms, sponsorship and creator ecosystems as part of their cultural positioning.

Her coverage of Pat McGrath’s collaboration with Pandora sits in the same space, combining beauty, jewelry and fashion storytelling. Here she uses interview material with the makeup founder to explore the thinking behind the partnership and the way product design, campaign imagery and brand histories are woven together. Taken together, these stories position partnerships not as side notes, but as key mechanisms through which brands communicate values and extend their reach.

Interviews and community features

Interviews and profiles are another strand of Ahluwalia’s work, with a particular emphasis on representation and alternative fashion communities. In “The Body Issue: Jeanie Annan-Lewin on Curve Representation in Fashion Imagery,” she uses an in-depth conversation with a stylist to examine how larger bodies are portrayed in fashion visuals and campaigns. The piece focuses on casting, image-making and editorial choices, treating curve representation as a structural question rather than a trend.

She also interviews Halle Robbe, the founder of the Instagram account Girlscarryingshit, exploring how the platform built an unconventional community and later partnered with Nike. Through this story she links social media creativity, grassroots imagery and brand collaborations, showing how online communities can evolve into formal partnerships without losing their distinct visual language. These features sit alongside her conversation with Pat McGrath, where she combines Q&A material with product and campaign analysis, reinforcing her interest in the people driving fashion and beauty from behind the scenes.

Across these interviews, Ahluwalia’s focus is less on celebrity and more on the stylists, founders and creatives who challenge norms in casting, body imagery and content creation. She treats their work as part of the wider fashion ecosystem, connecting individual stories to questions of inclusion, community-building and cultural influence.

Local Hype city and travel guides

Beyond runway and collaboration coverage, Ahluwalia contributes to Hypebae’s Local Hype travel series.

In her Melbourne guide, she builds a tightly curated itinerary that brings together hotels, restaurants, shops and lesser-known spots into a single view of the city’s style landscape. The piece combines practical detail with discovery, highlighting “hometown hero” venues and local favorites rather than global chains.

These guides extend her fashion beat into place-making, showing how retail, hospitality and food interlock to shape the experience of a city for fashion-conscious visitors. While travel is not her core output, it aligns with her broader interest in how culture, commerce and design manifest in real spaces, complementing her runway and partnership coverage with a grounded sense of local scenes.

Across all of these strands, Ahluwalia’s work is defined by a consistent interest in how fashion interacts with media, technology, community and place, rather than by product alone. She writes in a way that connects shows, collaborations, interviews and city guides into a coherent picture of contemporary fashion culture.