Closer to a Happening

Cortana, Quai de Valmy, Paris, October 4, 2026

On Sunday evening in Paris, Cortana gathered a crowd on the Quai de Valmy for something closer to a happening than a presentation. There was live piano and electronic sound, projections, food, and a small group of dancers moving through the space.

Movement itself wasn’t a revelation with this brand. Earlier this summer, W Department worked with a dance troupe and used Cortana precisely because of that quality, how the garments change once they’re in motion. Rosa Esteva has named contemporary dance among her own reference points for years, alongside art, architecture, and the landscape of Mallorca, so the dancers were not a device borrowed for one evening.

What was useful here was seeing how the brand situated that within a broader atmosphere. It didn’t feel overdetermined. It felt like an easy alignment of things that belong to the same sensibility.

Cortana is Esteva’s house, founded in 2001 and named for her grandmother, with roots in Mallorca and Barcelona. The clothes are cut in small workshops in both places, in silk, linen, ramie, cashmere, and cupro. They are built with very little construction and almost no hardware; a problem another designer would solve with a seam gets solved here with a choice of cloth.

Maria Solivellas of Ca Na Toneta created the food, which brought a distinctly Mallorcan note without feeling didactic. It sat alongside the music and the clothing as another expression of place and craft. Solivellas cooks in Caimari, a village in the island’s mountainous interior, on a single seasonal menu built from island producers, and she founded the Slow Food movement in the Balearic Islands. Her kitchen draws on Mallorca’s agricultural inland rather than its coast. It is the same island the cloth comes from.

We noticed something else, too. We knew almost no one, which is unusual during Fashion Week, and there were very few Americans. For a house that does not advertise and is still not widely known in the US, that felt fitting.

It was, ultimately, a very good party the night before the work became more practical. The showroom and the new collection came the following afternoon, and the evening before had given us a clearer sense of the world around them.

Continue Exploring

• Cortana at W Department, the house, the island it comes from, and the cloth it is cut in.
• The Cortana pieces we carry, the women’s buy, on the floor and online.
• Cortana: Now at W Department, written when we began carrying the house in May of 2026.
• Lonesome Heaven, Ann Demeulemeester Spring/Summer 2027, shown in Paris the day before this evening.
• Heavy Is the Head, Comme des Garçons Spring/Summer 2027, from the same week.
• Stone, With an Open Heart, Rick Owens Spring/Summer 2027, the women’s show at the Palais de Tokyo.
• From Ghost Ranch to the Palais-Royal, the new Ann Demeulemeester store in Paris, visited days earlier.
• Our report from the Paris women’s shows, Fall/Winter 2026, the season before this one, written from the shows.
• Our report from the Paris men’s shows, Fall/Winter 2026, the menswear week, from the same trip.
• One Step Closer to Heaven, our playlist for September, what W Department sounds like, month by month.
• The Library, our writing on the houses we buy, and the monthly playlist.
• The full designer roster, house by house.
• Visit W Department, 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza, open daily.