The T-Shirt Style Everyone Is Wearing Right Now

You may recall several years ago when graphic tees with cheeky spins on designer brand names were all the rage. Not since then have we seen graphic tees back with such a vengeance, but this time around, the tees are less specific and a little more subtle.

It's safe to say that we have cool designer-of-the-moment Vetements to thank for the return of the trend. The brand's penchant for graphic tees is best represented by the ultra-popular yellow DHL tee. The new wave of graphic tees favor company names and logos, Disney characters, artistic renderings, and years (i.e. 1990), as opposed to cheesy sayings. Band tees are more of a classic at this point, and are aligning with the '70s theme of the past several seasons.

We spotted more graphic tees than ever on the streets of the most recent fashion month, and stylish celebs like Kendall Jenner regularly wear them for off-duty outings. The best part? They pair perfectly with a pair of cropped flare jeans and sneakers.

Click below to see how stylish women have been wearing their graphic tees and to shop our favorite iterations.

On the Runway: The Incredible, Escalating Resort Game

Photo The Louis Vuitton Cruise 2016 collection, shown in Palm Springs, Calif. This year it will be in Rio de Janeiro. Credit Michael Nelson/European Pressphoto Agency

The endless game of fashion show one-upmanship continues. On Sunday, Nicolas Ghesquière unveiled — via Instagram — the venue for the next Louis Vuitton Cruise show, to be held on May 28 outside Rio de Janeiro, in the run-up to the Olympics: the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, designed by Oscar Niemeyer.

The swirling, saucer-shaped museum is one of the area's landmark buildings. Though rumors had swirled that the show might be canceled (or moved) because of the Zika virus, the brand has instead doubled-down on its commit ment on the area and the opportunity the Brazilian market and the Olympic association both present.

It's pretty impressive, but consider that Dior Cruise is being held in Blenheim Palace in England, Gucci in Westminster Abbey in London, and Chanel in Havana (specific location to be announced), and you can understand why Vuitton chose to take a gold-medal position rather than to retreat. And get ready for what is going to be a month of image-making and power plays among the major European fashion brands.

The goal is to position themselves as the royalty of the industry: authorities not just on clothes, but on all related aspects of design and lifestyle and on sucking you, the fashion buyer or the fashion viewer, ever deeper into their orbits.

It is also, however, indicative of a widening gulf between brands that believe shows are becoming entertainment, and those that believe they are at risk of overexposure, with its resulting consumer boredom backlash. Over the last few seasons, brands such as Céline and Proenza Schouler have pulled back, presenting their Resort collections in their showrooms but banning photos or social media reports until the clothes are in stores, while the Cruise shows of these four brands have become ever more elaborate and far-flung, the better to dazzle consumers both in person and on the web. They are fashion's equivalent of the 1 percent.

Photo The Dior Cruise 2016 collection, shown at the Palais Bulles in Théoule-sur-Mer, France. Credit Sebastien Nogier/European Pressphoto Agency

In May, Dior took its Cruise to Le Palais Bulles, Pierre Cardin's space-age architectural marvel in the South of France, which followed an extravaganza at the Brooklyn Navy Yard the year before. Vuitton was at the Bob and Dolores Hope estate in Palm Springs, Calif., which followed a 2014 event at the Place du Palais de Monaco in Monte Carlo in front of the royal family. And Chanel was in Seoul, South Korea, after Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, in 2014.

You do the map.

The money involved is, of course , enormous. Aside from the rentals of such space, models and clothes are imported, sets are built and parties are held. The show is effectively the cherry on top of a few days of cultural and consumer experience, courtesy of a company. But presumably the effort is worth it, both as a fertile source of content creation for a number of digital platforms (livestream! and Instagram! and Snapchat! and so on), and as direct-to-shopper outreach.

And, because the pre-collections — of which Cruise, or Resort, is one — are in stores longer than the official fall or spring runway collections, and they comprise a majority of a brand's seasonal sales, it makes a certain amount of sense to invest in them.

Once, at a lunch, I sat next to the woman in charge of a group of Dior's V.I.P. shoppers — customers who are treated to the Cruise show by the brand, wined, dined and massaged — and she said that the expense of bringing them to the show and showing them a good time was more than offset by the amount of shopping they did to outfit themselves for the event.

Still, it's hard not to wonder if Vuitton, Dior, et. al., are not creating the ir own set of very special problems by escalating their Cruise shows to this extent. After all, how do you top an Olympic year? A royal palace? What happens next?

Maybe the space station is available.

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