Holding onto Summer!

August, 2026

Our summer issue is a sensory rush, candy skies, chrome eyelids and colour turned all the way up.

Sugar Rush takes us into a world where colours collide, art directed and shot by Zoë Zeppel, with the story behind the art direction straight from the people who made it happen. There's a full breakdown of the beauty and styling tricks as we catch up with stylist Kay Ferguson and hair and makeup artist Anke Swart on everything worth noting before the season turns, plus an exclusive look behind the scenes of the shoot itself. We take a much-needed break online in the heatwave for the last moments of summer, and look ahead at what's coming next in fashion.

Because summer, even at its most saturated, always has one eye on what's next. As founder Erica Bergsmeds and art director Zoë Zeppel spend as much time watching the runway calendar as they do behind the camera, this season's schedule has them paying particularly close attention. Fashion month returns in September for S/S27 across New York, London, Milan and Paris, four weeks that come fast on the heels of a season already defined by colour. We await McQueen's return to London under Seán McGirr, and Christopher Kane's runway return at Mulberry. As Blowout expects it to filter down, into colour, into silhouette, into exactly the kind of unapologetic maximalism our summer issue centred on, that same rush of seasonal excitement, change and colour, holding its ground right through a summer of dry heat.

Sugar Rush is a story about breaking out of seasonal constraints. Blooming and bursting through the cold into that sweet, sugar rush feeling as summer arrives after spring and starts its slow turn into autumn and winter, this story doubles as a lens into what's anticipated for S/S27, with clear odes to the feather and movement Matthieu Blazy brought to Chanel's Haute Couture Spring 26 collection, his multicoloured feather skirts among the season's most talked about runway moments. Damp hair, bare shoulders, nowhere to be and no rush to get there now that summer has properly arrived and everyone lays back to relax again before we hit the ground running. These are the visuals we're holding onto as we talk you through the rest of this exciting summer issue.

Colour is where it's at this year. Colour blocking, colourful makeup and certainly unpredictable mixing and matching, as we see it throughout the trends of clashing brights and unexpected pastels. Some good and uncommon popular colour combos are blue and red, yellow and purple, and coral and teal.

At Blowout we think colour is one of the most powerful tools in fashion right now.

A contrasted language of the created and the natural world, featured here in both an outdoor landscape and an artificial flower, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data centres playing a role in rising global temperatures, the tension between man-made fabrication and nature feels more relevant than ever. Zoë Zeppel leans into instinctively across her work. She's also often drawn to a pop art sensibility, pulling from contemporary art and leaning into bold colours that bring a completely new edge to a summer story. "The art direction behind this shoot was to emulate seasonal feelings and changes in a contemporary way, through sculptural styling and intense, colourful maximalism," Zeppel says.

Stylist Kay Ferguson built the wardrobe around exactly that kind of friction, going looking for pairings that shouldn't work on paper. Soft pastels sit next to saturated tone, one plush texture set against something sleeker. It's an approach worth borrowing for your own closet as the season turns. Get comfortable having a loud, bold element, a feather, a fur, a fringe, and let everything else stay quiet around it.

"These pieces aren't competing with one another," Ferguson says. "They're having a conversation. It's not about matching the colours, it's about balancing them."

And a takeaway from Kay for anyone wanting to change things up this summer: "The minute you stop dressing to make sense is the minute your style gets interesting."

Beauty followed the same instinct, even inside all that colour. Hair and makeup artist Anke Swart kept the base fresh and skin like throughout, letting one wash of pastel do the talking on the eyes rather than jumping to a full pigment moment. Blush sits high and diffused, with lips that stay glossy. "Blush is worn with intention," Swart explains, "diffused across the cheeks for an ethereal, lit from within flush, while blurred lips offer a modern, romantic finish that feels effortlessly undone."

Anke's beauty verdict on where it's heading this season sums up the whole shoot in one line: "Understated beauty continues to make the boldest statement." Swart's use of hair clips as accessories throughout adds a whole other layer of intimacy to the story too, half in, half undone. It's a small gesture that carries a lot of the shoot's meaning, dressing for a season in transition.

This is Zoë Zeppel's first cover shoot for Blowout, and Sugar Rush is exactly the kind of introduction we hoped for. It's playful and considered in equal measure, colour used as her own visual language, styling and beauty working in step with it.

From here, the issue keeps moving, right in the thick of the heatwave, proof that the best part of the season doesn't stop just because the temperature climbs. With fashion month returning in September across New York, London, Milan and Paris, we're already looking ahead, watching for exactly the kind of colour, texture and movement we know from our summer issue will be back and making its way onto the S/S27 runways.

If you're in London before the season turns, there's a lot worth carving out an afternoon for. Tracey Emin's career spanning retrospective at Tate Modern, forty years of work including the iconic My Bed, closes at the end of August, so it's genuinely now or never. The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition is staying open late on Fridays and Saturdays with a gin bar set up inside the show itself, easily one of the more fun ways to see contemporary art all year.

Over at the V&A, Elsa Schiaparelli's world of fashion and surrealism, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, runs into November, a good one to hold onto if the summer calendar's already full. Between the shows closing and the ones just getting started, it's a genuinely exciting month to be curious about art in this city, and exactly the kind of energy we want this issue to carry you into.

Credits

Editor in Chief, Erica Bergsmeds
Art Direction and Photography, Zoë Zeppel
Styling, Kay Ferguson
Hair and Makeup, Anke Swart
Model, Kelsey Theunis
Production Assistants, Tylei Cameron, Christina Botha
Set Assistant, Rachel Turck

SUMMER ISSUE

Holding onto Summer!

BLOWOUT MAGAZINE

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