This is Yungmea

From 1 to 10 August, the inaugural sā Ladakh Biennale will unfold across 230 kilometres of northern India, following the road between Leh and Kargil through villages, monasteries and Himalayan landscapes that rise beyond 4,000 metres. Titled Signals from Another Star, it proposes an exhibition shaped by the conditions of Ladakh: its altitude, distances, communities and increasingly precarious climate.

Zayn Qahtani works as both maker and archivist, building a visual language that feels unearthed rather than authored The Bahraini, London-based artist moves between drawing, painting, and sculpture to assemble what she describes as a personal, synesthetic archaeology. Her works read like fragments from an alternate lineage; objects that suggest a life before, and beyond, the hand that shaped them. Material is central to this illusion of discovery.

Every summer brings the same pressure: the feeling that this is the moment your life is supposed to truly start. The season of visible skin, visible lives, visible milestones. Everything feels heightened under the weight of the solstice: the electricity of adolescence, the desperate pursuit of beauty, and the shimmering promise that this year, your transformation, your glow up, your reinvention will be complete.

It seems I keep finding myself coming back to the same problem over and over. Identity. How it’s treated. What we are doing with it. What is being done to us through it. The discourse around the diaspora. The politics of the language of representation. Something is imploding. I think identity is often treated as a destination when it is, in fact, a condition, something lived, shaped by constant internal and external pressures.

Presented in partnership with PUBLIC, the first edition of Duette+ transforms the restaurant at Dubai Mall into a Cultural Clubhouse. Running until 2 August, the project brings together listening, design, film, conversations, collections and community within one evolving space. Duette Studio founders Fuad Ali and Rahat Kunakunova Rather than producing another event with a fixed beginning and end, Duette+ invites people to return throughout the month.

In The Week According to YUNG, fashion, art and culture meet across cities and generations. Jonathan Anderson reshapes a Dior classic, LOEWE welcomes David Jonsson, and Versace revisits its bold visual legacy. Elsewhere, Zendaya shines in Mouawad, Longchamp prepares an art-filled Paris takeover, and Echoes of Existence connects Lebanon and Italy through creativity, nature and collective memory.

For Mario Jr. Haddad, hospitality has never been about formality. It has always been about people, emotion, and the feeling of being welcomed somewhere that already feels familiar. With Mariolino The Beach House in Ramla, Sahel, he transforms that instinct into something deeply personal, a space shaped by friendship, food, storytelling, and human connection.

Lebanese creative Shaha Raphael approaches design as a tactile form of thinking. Trained as an architect, her practice moves fluidly between objects, furniture, jewellery, and space, guided by an ongoing dialogue between material, process, and use. Rather than starting with typology or scale, she begins with action; carving, bending, cutting, shaping, allowing form to emerge through the hand.

Walk into any rooftop in Dubai, any beach club in Mykonos, any dinner in Mayfair on a Saturday night and you will, without fail, spot the same three pieces. The global wardrobe delivered on every promise it made and somehow produced a world where opening your wardrobe feels less like a decision and more like a foregone conclusion. We did this to ourselves, to be fair.

The story of Oscar Kraye’s latest couture collection began with a small, recurring encounter. As designer Haidar Krayem entered a new chapter in his career, ladybugs seemed to appear wherever he went. Their presence sparked a curiosity that gradually developed into the visual foundation of Lady B. “Lady B really began with the ladybug,” Krayem explains. “It kept appearing wherever I travelled at a time when I was entering a new chapter as a designer.