Kennedy took over in mid-February facing a major health crisis with an outbreak of the highly contagious disease that had previously been declared eradicated in the United States.

More than 300 people, mostly children, have now been infected with measles in Texas and New Mexico and two unvaccinated people have died—the first US fatalities from the disease in a decade.

"Some years we have hundreds of measles outbreaks, measles outbreaks every year," the man known as RFK Jr. said in a recent interview with Fox News at a fast food restaurant.

In recent weeks he has alarmed and angered medical professionals with comments downplaying the gravity of the crisis and ambiguous remarks on vaccination and others promoting alternative remedies.

"He couldn't do a worse job than he's doing," said Paul Offit, a renowned pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology.

"People assumed that when he became secretary of health and human services he would become somewhat more responsible to the public health, and they were wrong," Offit told AFP.

- Crisis management -

In an opinion piece published early this month by Fox News, Kennedy said: "Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons."

Still, he has raised doubts and stirred anger by continuing to question the safety of vaccines.

He claimed on Fox News in mid-March that the measles vaccine itself causes deaths "every year."

"It causes all the illnesses that measles itself cause, encephalitis and blindness, etc., and so people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves."

Offit disagreed. "He says that the measles vaccine can cause blindness and deafness. He says that measles immunity fades so that adults are no longer protected. All of those things are false, clearly and plainly false," he said, also rejecting Kennedy's suggestion of using vitamin A as an alternative treatment against measles.

Kennedy's crisis management skills have reportedly been criticised even within his own staff, with US media reporting one of his spokespersons resigned and even by some Republicans.

Last week the White House withdrew at the last minute the candidacy of David Weldon, a close associate of Kennedy, to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) -- the main public health agency in America -- after concluding he would lose a Senate confirmation vote.

- Transparency and beef fat -

Measles is making a comeback amid a decline in vaccination rates as more and more Americans, wary of the safety of vaccines, ignore warnings from health authorities to get shots.

Kennedy is accused of contributing to this problem by arguing that there is a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism -- a debunked theory that came from a study based on manipulated data and disproven by later research.

Still, Kennedy's health department recently ordered a new study of this alleged link. A spokesman told AFP, "the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening."

That pledge of transparency is a kind of mantra for Kennedy, a nephew of the late president John F. Kennedy, as he promises to make Americans healthy again, in part by fighting against consumption of heavily processed food.

Kennedy has set out to toughen rules on food additives but has also endorsed a fast food chain that cooks its French fries in beef tallow, or rendered fat, which had been phased out in America as unhealthy decades ago.

As for transparency, Kennedy critics say he has achieved just the opposite by doing away with a policy that let the public voice comments on health policy.

Under Kennedy, expert level meetings have been cancelled and new policies have been announced with no internal discussion in the department.

Nate Brought, who used to work for a US health agency but resigned last month, criticized Kennedy's management style.

"The way things are being handled is very much not transparent," he told AFP. "Everybody is intentionally being kept in the dark."

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Not words in a typical teen's vocabulary, but all come easily to Pakistani prodigy Bilal Asher, world under-14 Scrabble champion.

Despite a musty reputation, the word-spelling game has a cult youth following in Pakistan, a legacy of the English language imposed by Britain's empire but which the country has adapted into its own dialect since independence.

In the eccentric field of competitive Scrabble, Pakistan's youngsters reign supreme -- boasting the current youth world champion and more past victors than any other nation since the tournament debuted in 2006.

"It requires a lot of hard work and determination," said 13-year-old Asher after vanquishing a grey-bearded opponent.

"You have to trust the process for a very long time, and then gradually it will show the results."

- 'English in taste' -

Karachi, a megacity shrugging off its old definition as a den of violent crime, is Pakistan's incubator for talent in Scrabble -- where players spell words linked like a crossword with random lettered tiles.

Schools in the southern port metropolis organise tutorials with professional Scrabble coaches and grant scholarships to top players, while parents push their kids to become virtuosos.

"They inculcate you in this game," says Asher, one of around 100 players thronging a hotel function room for a Pakistan Scrabble Association (PSA) event as most of the city dozed through a Sunday morning.

Daunters (meaning intimidating people), imarets (inns for pilgrims) and trienes (chemical compounds containing three double bonds) are spelled out by ranks of seated opponents.

Some are so young their feet don't touch the ground, as they use chess clocks to time their turns.

"They're so interested because the parents are interested," said 16-year-old Affan Salman, who became the world youth Scrabble champion in Sri Lanka last year.

"They want their children to do productive things -- Scrabble is a productive game."

English was foisted on the Indian subcontinent by Britain's colonialism and an 1835 order from London started to systematise it as the main language of education.

The plan's architect, Thomas Macaulay, said the aim was to produce "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect".

It was instrumental in creating a colonial civil service to rule for Britain according to Kaleem Raza Khan, who teaches English at Karachi's Salim Habib University.

"They started teaching English because they wanted to create a class of people, Indian people, who would be in the middle of the people and the rulers," said Khan, whose wife and daughter are Scrabble devotees.

British rule ended in the bloody partition of 1947 creating India and Pakistan.

Today there are upwards of 70 languages spoken in Pakistan, but English remains an official state language alongside the lingua franca Urdu, and they mingle in daily usage.

Schools often still teach English with verbose colonial-era textbooks.

"The adaptation of English as the main language is definitely a relation to the colonial era," PSA youth programme director Tariq Pervez. "That is our main link".

- 'Language of learning' -

The English of Pakistani officialdom remains steeped in anachronistic words.

The prime minister describes militant attacks as "dastardly", state media dubs protesters "miscreants" and the military denounces its "nefarious" adversaries.

Becoming fluent in the loquacious lingo of Pakistani English remains aspirational because of its association to the upper echelons.

In Pakistan more than a third of children between the ages of five and 16 are out of school -- a total of nearly 26 million, according to the 2023 census.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif declared an "education emergency" last year to address the stark figures.

"People are interested in Scrabble because they can get opportunities for scholarships in universities or for jobs because it provides the vocab," said Asher's sister Manaal.

But the 14-year-old reigning female number one in Pakistan warned: "You've got to be resilient otherwise Scrabble isn't right for you."

In the Karachi hotel, Scrabble -- invented in the 1930s during America's Great Depression by an unemployed architect -- is an informal training programme for success in later life.

"The main language of learning is English," said Pervez.

"This game has a great pull," he added. "The demand is so big. So many kids want to play, we don't have enough resources to accommodate all of them."

At the youngest level the vocabulary of the players is more rudimentary: toy, tiger, jar, oink.

But professional Scrabble coach Waseem Khatri earns 250,000 rupees ($880) a month -- nearly seven times the minimum wage -- coaching some 6,000 students across Karachi's school system to up their game.

In Pakistani English parlance "they try to express things in a more beautiful way -- in a long way to express their feelings," said 36-year-old Khatri.

"We try to utilise those words also in Scrabble."

But when Asher wins he is overwhelmed with joy, and those long words don't come so easily.

"I cannot describe the feeling," he says.

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A new study published in Science on Thursday challenges assumptions about infant memory, showing that young minds do indeed form memories. The question remains, however, why these memories become difficult to retrieve later in life.

"I've always been fascinated by this mysterious blank spot we have in our personal history," Nick Turk-Browne, professor of psychology at Yale and the study's senior author, told AFP.

Around the age of one, children become extraordinary learners -- acquiring language, walking, recognizing objects, understanding social bonds, and more. "Yet we remember none of those experiences -- so there's a sort of mismatch between this incredible plasticity and learning ability that we have," he said.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, hypothesized that early memories are repressed, though science has since largely dismissed the idea of an active suppression process. Instead, modern theories focus on the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical for episodic memory, which is not fully developed in infancy.

Turk-Browne, however, was intrigued by clues from previous behavioral research. Since babies cannot verbally report memories before acquiring language, their tendency to gaze longer at familiar things provides important hints.

Recent rodent studies monitoring brain activity have also shown that engrams -- patterns of cells that store memories -- form in the infant hippocampus but become inaccessible over time -- though they can be artificially reawakened through a technique that uses light to stimulate neurons.

But until now, pairing observations of infants with brain imaging had been out of reach, as babies are famously uncooperative when it comes to sitting still inside a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine -- the device that tracks blood flow to "see" brain activity.

- Psychedelic patterns -

To overcome this challenge, Turk-Browne's team used methods his lab has refined over the years -- working with families to incorporate pacifiers, blankets, and stuffed animals; holding babies still with pillows; and using psychedelic background patterns to keep them engaged.

Still, inevitable wiggling led to blurry images that had to be discarded, but the team accounted for this by running hundreds of sessions.

In total, 26 infants participated -- half under a year old, half over -- while their brains were scanned during a memory task adapted from adult studies.

First, they were shown images of faces, scenes, or objects. Later, after viewing other images, they were presented with a previously seen image alongside a new one.

"We quantify how much time they spend looking at the old thing they've seen before, and that's a measure of their memory for that image," said Turk-Browne.

By comparing brain activity during successful memory formation versus forgotten images, the researchers confirmed that the hippocampus is active in memory encoding from a young age.

This was true for 11 of 13 infants over a year old but not for those under one. They also found that babies who performed best on memory tasks showed greater hippocampal activity.

"What we can conclude accurately from our study is that infants have the capacity to encode episodic memories in the hippocampus starting around one year of age," said Turk-Browne.

- Forgotten Memories -

"The ingenuity of their experimental approach should not be understated," researchers Adam Ramsaran and Paul Frankland wrote in an accompanying Science editorial.

But what remains unresolved is what happens to these early memories. Perhaps they are never fully consolidated into long-term storage -- or perhaps they persist but become inaccessible.

Turk-Browne suspects the latter and is now leading a new study testing whether infants, toddlers, and children can recognize video clips recorded from their own perspective as younger babies.

Early, tentative results suggest these memories might persist until around age three before fading. Turk-Browne is particularly intrigued by the possibility that such fragments could one day be reactivated later in life.

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One of the country's oldest instruments, the begena was once reserved for the elite -- and effectively banned during the Marxist Derg government between 1974 and 1991.

But it is experiencing a resurgence among Ethiopia's artistic community.

Ermias Haylay, 23, started playing as a teenager and founded a school to train students.

He now performs regularly in retirement homes and hospitals to bring "a bit of joy" after seeing its therapeutic effects.

Biruktawit is one of his students who often plays with the group at a nursing home in Addis Ababa.

The begena "is medicine for the soul", said Biruktawit, 23, who has been playing the instrument for about a year.

Legend has it that the instrument was brought over from Israel in the 10th century BC by Menelik I, Ethiopia's first emperor, who received it from King David.

For centuries, the instrument's music has accompanied the prayers and meditations of monks of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which represents about 40 percent of Ethiopia's 120 million people.

That association with religion meant it fell from favour as the country turned towards communism, but it has slowly returned.

Resembling a harp or a large lyre, trapezium-shaped and about a metre tall, it has 10 strings -- traditionally made from sheep's intestines -- that symbolise the Ten Commandments.

It is plucked with the left hand, either bare or with a plectrum, while players wear a netela -- a traditional white cloth -- draped across the chest for men, and in the form of a veil for women.

- Begena therapy -

At Grace Nursing Home for the elderly, the begena brings healing.

Sitting in a small courtyard where residents gather to listen to the soothing melodies, 60-year-old Solomon Daniel Yohanes gently shakes his head in his wheelchair as the tunes fill the air.

Yohanes has been a resident for two years and said the begena has "brought him peace".

"When you're looking for God, you look for him in different ways, and I see the begena as God speaking in his own voice," he said.

Natnael Hailu, a doctor and co-founder of the institution, admits to being "shocked" to see his patients "forget their pain and drift into sleep" to the tune of the instrument.

"It calms their heart rate, lowers their blood pressure and soothes them. More than any other instrument, begena therapy has a real calming effect," he said.

Gene Bukhman, a cardiologist and lecturer at Harvard University who attended one of the performances, told AFP the begena's melodies could have a positive influence on people suffering from chronic illnesses.

- Positive influence -

Ermias, who founded the Eman Begena School, started playing when he was 15 but admits he was not immediately convinced.

"I found it smelled bad since some parts come from sheep," he said.

But he soon came to love its "spiritual aspect".

His trips to nursing homes and hospitals has even led to him playing during surgeries.

Before long, he noticed "extraordinary changes" in patients with Alzheimer's, dementia and autism.

"They became very calm," he said.

Demands for the lessons have been booming and he hopes to open schools around the world to help more patients.

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As US astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams prepare to return home after nine months aboard the International Space Station (ISS), some of the health risks they've faced are well-documented and managed, while others remain a mystery.

These dangers will only grow as humanity pushes deeper into the solar system, including to Mars, demanding innovative solutions to safeguard the future of space exploration.

- Exercise key -

Despite the attention their mission has received, Wilmore and Williams' nine-month stay is "par for the course," said Rihana Bokhari, an assistant professor at the Center for Space Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

ISS missions typically last six months, but some astronauts stay up to a year, and researchers are confident in their ability to maintain astronaut health for that duration.

Most people know that lifting weights builds muscle and strengthens bones, but even basic movement on Earth resists gravity, an element missing in orbit.

To counteract this, astronauts use three exercise machines on the ISS, including a 2009-installed resistance device that simulates free weights using vacuum tubes and flywheel cables.

A two-hour daily workout keeps them in shape. "The best results that we have to show that we're being very effective is that we don't really have a fracture problem in astronauts when they return to the ground," though bone loss is still detectable on scans, Bokhari told AFP.

Balance disruption is another issue, added Emmanuel Urquieta, vice chair of Aerospace Medicine at the University of Central Florida.

"This happens to every single astronaut, even those who go into space just for a few days," he told AFP, as they work to rebuild trust in their inner ear.

Astronauts must retrain their bodies during NASA's 45-day post-mission rehabilitation program.

Another challenge is "fluid shift" -- the redistribution of bodily fluids toward the head in microgravity. This can increase calcium levels in urine, raising the risk of kidney stones.

Fluid shifts might also contribute to increased intracranial pressure, altering the shape of the eyeball and causing spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome (SANS), causing mild-to-moderate vision impairment. Another theory suggests raised carbon dioxide levels are the cause.

But in at least one case, the effects have been beneficial. "I had a pretty severe case of SANS," NASA astronaut Jessica Meir said before the latest launch.

"When I launched, I wore glasses and contacts, but due to globe flattening, I now have 20/15 vision -- most expensive corrective surgery possible. Thank you, taxpayers."

- Managing radiation -

Radiation levels aboard the ISS are higher than on the ground, as it passes through through the Van Allen radiation belt, but Earth's magnetic field still provides significant protection.

The shielding is crucial, as NASA aims to limit astronauts' increased lifetime cancer risk to within three percent.

However, missions to the Moon and Mars will give astronauts far greater exposure, explained astrophysicist Siegfried Eggl.

Future space probes could provide some warning time for high-radiation events, such coronal mass ejections -- plasma clouds from the Sun -- but cosmic radiation remains unpredictable.

"Shielding is best done with heavy materials like lead or water, but you need vast quantities of it," said Eggl, of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Artificial gravity, created by rotating spacecraft frames, could help astronauts stay functional upon arrival after a nine-month journey to Mars.

Alternatively, a spacecraft could use powerful acceleration and deceleration that matches the force of Earth's gravity.

That approach would be speedier -- reducing radiation exposure risks -- but requires nuclear propulsion technologies that don't yet exist.

Future drugs and even gene therapies could enhance the body's defenses against space radiation. "There's a lot of research into that area," said Urquieta.

Preventing infighting among teams will be critical, said Joseph Keebler, a psychologist at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

"Imagine being stuck in a van with anybody for three years: these vessels aren't that big, there's no privacy, there's no backyard to go to," he said.

"I really commend astronauts that commit to this. It's an unfathomable job."

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Fashion designers and retailers can book her digital double for photo shoots without her having to travel or physically be there, Gondora told AFP.

It is a solution that "saves time", said the model, who is also walking down in-person runways at London Fashion Week, which runs until Monday evening.

In the fashion industry, artificial intelligence is already used by brands to create visual imagery for e-commerce websites and customised advertising campaigns at a lower cost.

While the technology opens up opportunities for some, critics fear AI will render many professionals, including models, make-up artists and photographers obsolete -- and could risk promoting an artificial standard of beauty.

- Customisable -

In one video, sculpted male models flex their muscles next to glamorous women, with a backdrop of marble pools and gilded mirrors.

But none of it is real: this Christmas campaign was entirely generated with the use of AI by studio Copy Lab for the Swedish underwear brand CDLP.

"We are a very small company: I cannot go to a house in Beverly Hills and shoot a campaign," said CDLP co-founder Christian Larson.

According to Larson, "real" photography has limitations.

"You have a film of this many pictures, the sun will set, and the light will disappear, and the budget will run out," Larson told AFP.

But with AI, "you dive into this black hole of endless options."

Preparing an ad campaign involving a photo shoot in the French Alps for ski eyewear would normally take several months to complete and could cost 35,000 euros ($37,000), but can be done virtually for just 500 euros in a few days, claimed Artem Kupriyanenko, citing a campaign done by his technology company Genera.

London and Lisbon-based Genera boasts a catalogue of 500 AI-generated models, all of which it claims to own the copyrights for.

The avatars can be customised by clients: "We can do any body shape, any gender, any ethnicity," assured Genera's creative head Keiron Birch, who said the practice was "super inclusive".

But AI tends to create a characteristic face type, which differs from generator to generator, said Carl-Axel Wahlstrom, co-founder of Stockholm-based Copy Lab, an "AI creative studio".

MidJourney, for example, has a tendency to generate models with thicker lips.

- Grey area -

Generative AI is trained on banks of images of models that are often retouched or which reflect a dominant "white, Western" aesthetic, explained Wahlstrom.

To obtain less generic results, he refines the descriptions or "prompts" he provides to the AI engines.

And for more "authentic" results, he also trains them on "imperfect" databases, where he has, for example, added images of "regular skin, like my skin, my girlfriend's skin, people that we know's skin."

Alexsandrah Gondora was critical of brands which use AI images created from databases found on the internet without paying the model, who she called the "middleman".

Models also face being duplicated virtually without their knowledge.

The "Fashion Workers Act", due to come into force this summer in New York, hopes to tackle this grey area by enabling models to control the use of AI to reproduce their likeness. But its practical application could prove complicated.

Gondora, however, is compensated for the work done by her digital alter ego and has the final say on how it is used.

This is also the case when she helps bring Shudu Gram, an AI-generated black supermodel, to life.

This virtual character created in 2017 and billed as the "world's first digital supermodel" is followed by 237,000 followers on Instagram.

Gondora and several other real-life black models lend their features to various shoots and projects for Shudu.

Last year, Shudu was a model for a 1960s-inspired collaboration by fashion label MAX&Co and London-based designer Richard Quinn.

When used ethically, AI does not deprive models from diverse backgrounds of opportunities, assured Gondora, who claimed that this technology has "opened certain doors" for her.

One of them is that her AI model is "timeless".

"There is no expiration for my AI... it's timeless. Somewhere out there in the world, my AI will always be young to me, even when I'm old."

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Quite how the author, born in the small Hampshire village of Steventon on December 16, 1775, has managed to entice and enchant readers for more than two centuries in an ever-changing world remains a mystery.

Who would have thought that quotes from her six novels and pages of writings would adorn T-shirts and badges in the 21st century?

And not just in the UK, for the author who wrote of love and manners in the early 19th century has inspired fans around the world and her writings remain just as fresh and relevant today.

"Her novels are really concerned with wider moral issues," said Kathryn Sutherland, an Austen researcher and professor at the University of Oxford.

People feel Austen "is accessible, even though she is great literature, and also that you can read her books many times and each time you find something new in them", she added.

Sutherland also acknowledged it was fabulously filmed TV series and movies, with their brooding male leads, which had brought Austen wider audiences in the past decades.

The author of classic novels "Pride and Prejudice", "Emma" and "Sense and Sensibility" had only just become known when she died on July 18, 1817, aged 41.

But her six novels, wittily and sharply dissecting the lives of 19th century rural aristocracy, have since sold millions of copies, led to film adaptations and inspired many other productions, from "Bridget Jones" to "Bridgerton".

- Austen balls sold out -

Hundreds of people are expected to don period costume and stroll through the elegant Georgian streets of Bath in September for the annual 10-day Jane Austen Festival.

Austen lived for several years in the southwestern city, where she set her novels "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey".

A series of balls are planned, based around Austen's novels, with tickets already sold out for May and June despite a hefty £200 ($253) price tag.

With interest set to soar over the coming months, the BBC has kicked off the year with a new series -- "Miss Austen" -- devoted to the life of Jane's sister Cassandra, who burnt all her letters after her death.

She thus consigned to ashes some of Jane's deepest secrets, and to this day surprisingly little is known about the author.

Part of Austen's appeal rests on her depiction of a romanticised England with love affairs, tea and parties in the glorious surroundings of sprawling stately homes.

She also shone a harsh light on the status of women, for whom a good marriage was considered the only goal in a very restricted life.

The daughter of a clergyman, Austen herself remained unmarried despite a proposal, and spent most of her life with very little money.

- 'Women taking power' -

"Pride and Prejudice", with its main character Elizabeth Bennet who falls for the dashing Mr Darcy, is a firm fan favourite.

"Her female characters are very strong and vocal about their opinions and what they want," said Moa Aashacka, a 23-year-old Swedish student who was paying a Valentine's Day visit to the Jane Austen Centre in Bath with her boyfriend.

"They don't just accept marriage because they have to. They want to marry someone they actually like and love and who they feel respects them."

She added that Austen's novels were "more than romance... It's also about women taking power."

Tour guide Lauren Falconer, who helps giggling visitors dress up in Regency-style fashions, said all of Austen's characters are "so relatable" that "everyone has their favourite".

Maria Letizia d'Annibale, an English literature teacher visiting from Italy, said her pupils loved reading Austen's novels.

"Her stories are captivating. Young students really like her, especially the girls," she told AFP.

Part of the resurgence in Austen's appeal can be traced back to a stunning 1995 BBC adaption of "Pride and Prejudice", starring Colin Firth as Mr Darcy, and director Ang Lee's Oscar-winning adaption of "Sense and Sensibility", starring Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant.

Professor Sutherland credits these for propelling Austen "into a different level of popularity".

"In Jane Austen's novels, the hero, the male lead is really a kind of background figure. He is a moral instructor for the heroine, but he's not particularly sexy. Whereas in the films, of course, he's very sexy," she said.

"I think this turns the films into something that the novels are not, which is more narrowly romantic."

To coincide with the author's 250th birthday, Sutherland is organising an exhibition in Oxford called "Dancing with Jane Austen" with costumes from the films and examples of her writings about balls.

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Here are the main trends that were on show in Milan.

- Grey-

All the studios clearly had the grey suits from the 1980 film "American Gigolo" plastered all over their mood boards this season.

And it was in fact Giorgio Armani, who designed the famous suits worn by Richard Gere in the film, who showed a perfect mastery of the colour as the house closed Milan Fashion Week with its show on Sunday.

The "greige" colour invented by Giorgio Armani that skilfully combines grey and beige was spotted everywhere and in expensive materials: silk jacquard, cashmere and organza.

The brand showed off flowing jacket and trouser sets, trouser jumpsuits, and complex embroidery on floaty dresses.

Grey also played a central role in the collection of Antonio Marras, in prince of Wales suits, tartan and tennis stripes, always worn in a tailored style in both men and women's fashion.

The same went for Ferragamo, who used grey in large double-buttoned coats, worn over long silk dresses.

Just like its men's suits -- some contemporary, some in seventies style -- Gucci followed the same pattern for classic women's ensembles, with small jackets and knee-length skirts complemented by a pretty integral tunic emblazoned with the double GG.

Max Mara's collection highlighted flecked grey cardigans and dresses made from thick wool, while MM6 Maison Margiela showed off a greenish-grey hue in "Matrix" trench coats.

- Fasten your seatbelt -

The next season's trend will be belts.

Most looks at Max Mara's show involved belts, from coats and cardigans to a long woollen dress and both mini and long skirts.

Emporio Armani's looks also featured Japanese Obi belts, or belts made from velour with geometric buckles. At Gucci, the fashion house's symbolic horsebit was featured in a metallic belt.

In Prada's collection, thin belts created unexpected volume on oversize coats.

Meanwhile, for Tod and Ferragamo's collections, belts had a more functional role, with Tod's belts allowing for accessories and discreet pockets while Ferragamo's featured oversize bags.

Moschino's cheeky universe distorted the usual use of belts, using them to create structures that were part crinoline, part BDSM.

- Leather trench coats -

Next winter's coat could well be the leather trench coat.

Roberto Cavalli made a strong impression with an all-black rigid leather belted trench coat, while Tod's collection showed off trench coats made of supple, wrap-around leather in bright red, caramel and chocolate.

Rome-based fashion house Fendi featured a trench coat made of cognac leather in retro style with a shirt collar, while Gucci had several varieties, without belts, stripped down and with animal prints, made of beige old leather.

Dolce and Gabbana presented a big leather coat worn over a silk nightdress and accompanied with mustard yellow biker boots, part of the "Cool Girls" collection by the Sicilian duo.

- Matelasse -

The matelasse style was also very visible on the podiums at Milan on coats, jackets and sometimes skirts.

Fendi, which celebrates its 100th anniversary with an acclaimed collection by Silvia Venturini Fendi, granddaughter of the founders, featured a matelasse ensemble comprised of a flared skirt and small hyper-detailed golden ochre blouse that combined style and comfort.

Emporio Armani showed of the trend in short matelasse jackets with herringbone patterns, brightened up with velour details.

Max Mara produced a floor-length belted coat in matelasse style, while the back of Dolce and Gabbana's large coats featured matelasse leopard motifs that kept in line with the season's theme: street wear chic.

And Moschino took the matelasse brief literally with a humorous interpretation, featuring models wearing large padded quilts as coats and pillows instead of hats.

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Chiuri was inscrutable at the end of the 25-minute mega show in the Tuileries Gardens, briefly acknowledging applause from a crowd that was relatively low on A-list celebrities compared to usual.

Split into several distinct parts featuring the elements, the live streamed spectacle featured models in muted tones of black, beige, slate grey and green in 1980s-inflected designs for the Fall/Winter 2025 season.

Chiuri's collection included trench coats, a variety of embroidered white and cream blouses, high leather boots and long dresses featuring fake fur, as well as the lace and sheer materials that have dominated catwalks in recent seasons.

Her future remains a source of major speculation in the fashion industry with persistent rumours that she is on the way out.

Dior has boomed under her nine-year stewardship, becoming the second-biggest brand in the stable of luxury labels owned by French powerhouse LVMH.

But some observers have suggested the classic French house is growing stale and is ripe for a shake-up, with its growth of crucial financial and dynastic importance to LVMH owner Bernard Arnault.

He placed his daughter Delphine in charge of the brand in February 2023.

Chiuri, who in 2016 was the first woman to be named Dior's creative director after a career at Italian brands Valentino and Fendi, has refused to comment on rumours about her future.

Speaking to Grazia magazine last month, she mused on how the fashion business had changed over her 40-year career.

"Fashion used to be about family companies and there were small audiences -– clients and buyers," she said. "Now fashion is like a channel. It's something more popular, it's like pop. It's a form of media."

Dior parted ways with its long-time artistic director for menswear, Kim Jones, at the end of January.

- Designer debuts -

More than 100 fashion houses are set to unveil their Fall-Winter 2025-2026 collections during Paris Womenswear Fashion Week, hoping to rally sales in what is an increasingly difficult global luxury market.

Among the most anticipated moments will be Sarah Burton's debut at Givenchy on Friday.

Burton, a 51-year-old Briton who made her name as creative director at Alexander McQueen, was appointed to Givenchy in September.

Her nomination was one of a number of recent changes at major brands, with Belgian veteran Dries Van Noten stepping down from his namesake label last year and handing the reins to fellow countryman Julian Klausner, 33.

Klausner's first collection on Wednesday in Paris will also be closely scrutinised.

The French Haute Couture and Fashion Federation has also pulled off a feat by attracting Tom Ford, a mainstay of New York Fashion Week, to Paris for the first time.

Chief designer Haider Ackermann, in the top job at the label since September, will be making his catwalk debut.

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