From Our Vanity . 10/12/2025

All About the SS26 Fashion Weeks

Every fashion season feels like a new movie, full of characters, stories, and surprises. The Spring/Summer 2026 season was no exception. Fashion Weeks took place around the world, from New York and Milan to Seoul and Shanghai, showing what style will look like next year.

The main takeaway from SS26: fashion feels alive and free again. After a few years of minimalism and calm tones, designers returned to color, texture, and playfulness.

And this year made one thing clear, you can’t talk about global fashion without mentioning Asia. Brands from China, Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong are no longer in the background; they’re standing right beside Western labels, confidently shaping the future of style.

Shopping & Style . 10/15/2025

Algorithm-Proof Style: Why Asia’s New Luxury Basics from Seoul, Singapore and Hong Kong Are Quietly Logging Off the Trend Cycle (And Still Owning Your Feed)

Open Instagram, scroll for ten seconds, and you’re already late. Tomato girl, office siren, mob wife, clean girl but French; the algorithm serves up aesthetics the way convenience stores stock new drinks: relentlessly, seductively, with an expiry date baked in. You’re not just dressing for your day any more; you’re dressing for a “For You Page” that has the attention span of a fruit fly. And yet, quietly, something different is happening in the wardrobes of Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong and every Asian city plugged into that same algorithm: a soft retreat from costume-level trends and a return to what we’ll call algorithm-proof style; luxury basics that don’t care what’s trending on a Friday, because they’ll still feel right in five seasons’ time.

Conversations . 09/05/2025

In Conversation with Shaun Liew: Malaysia’s Brewer’s Cup Champion

By the time most of us are still negotiating with our alarms, Shaun Liew has already had his first serious conversation of the day.
Not with a person, with a cup.
“Morning brew ritual?” we ask him. He doesn’t miss a beat. “Hot black coffee,” he says, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

If you follow Southeast Asia’s café scene, you already know his name. Shaun is a two-time Malaysian Brewers Cup Champion (2017 and 2019), a title that’s basically the Olympic gold of hand-brewed coffee. He walked away from a university lecturer job in hospitality to dive headfirst into specialty coffee, and today he splits his time between running Ono Specialty Coffee & Matcha and his own roastery, Curate Coffee Roasters, both known for making high-level coffee feel wonderfully approachable.

From Our Vanity . 09/03/2025

The Blend Mag’s Picks: Beauty & Wellness Products That Actually Deliver (And Deserve a Spot in Your Vanity and Snack-Obsessed Life)

It’s that moment when a product looks like a dream on your FYP, arrives in the chicest packaging, you try it for three weeks… and your skin looks exactly the same. In Asia, where humidity, pollution, screen-time and night markets are all part of a normal week, we don’t have the patience (or the pores) for pretty-but-pointless formulas.

At The Blend Mag, our beauty desk decided to quietly rebel. No more “nice to have” serums. No more twelve-step routines that collapse the first time you take a red-eye to Seoul or Bangkok. We wanted products that survive monsoon commutes, chilli-oil lunches, fluorescent office lights and 2 a.m. karaoke, and still make you feel expensive.

Escapades . 08/03/2025

Of Luxury, Mountains & A Little Bit of Heaven: Our DusitD2 Fagu Escape Above the Clouds

There’s a very specific moment when your regular city brain gives up.
For us, it was somewhere on the winding road past Kufri, when the air turned pine-sharp, our phones started losing signal, and dusitD2 Fagu suddenly appeared on a ridge like a glassy cruise ship anchored in the sky. The hotel sits on a hillside above Fagu, wrapped in 360-degree views of the Greater Himalayas, all balconies, clean lines and that faintly surreal feeling of being much closer to the clouds than emails.
Dusit’s first India property has been talked about as a “serene Himalayan retreat” with Thai hospitality at its core, and that’s exactly what it feels like when you step out of the car: a classic Thai wai greeting, warm smiles, and someone quietly placing a welcome drink in your hand before you even realise you’re thirsty.

Food & Culture . 08/03/2025

Asian Coffee Tables: Where to find the best coffee places in the heart of Asia?

Here’s a very Asian truth: you can tell who your people are by how seriously they take their coffee plans.
“Where are we meeting?”
Not “any café”. A specific one. With that flat white. And those chairs. And hopefully a barista who already knows your order.

So when we started putting together Asian Coffee Tables, our mental map of cafés we’d happily cross time zones for, we realised something: the spots we loved most weren’t necessarily the fanciest, or the most famous. They were the ones that felt like a tiny, caffeinated summary of their city.

Fashion . 28/04/2026

Dressing for the Life You Actually Live: Inside Knotted

Long before Knotted became a sustainable clothing brand in India, it existed as a feeling
In a room where women gathered, fabric passed between hands, and stories unfolded as naturally as stitches, she was watching. Learning, without realising she was. Her grandmother didn’t just sew; she created a rhythm, a quiet community where craft meant connection.

I grew up watching my grandmother stitch,” Jasmeet tells us. “Not just garments, but relationships

Fashion . 20/05/2026

Olakh and the Intimacy of Becoming Yourself

There are some things women curate with extraordinary care.
The jacket bought in a hidden bazaar abroad. The ceramic cup carried home wrapped in newspaper. The perfume attached to a specific season of life. Objects with memory stitched into them. Objects that mean something.

For Tanvi Ghate, it was a suzani jacket from Bukhara.

“I know the man who made it,” she tells us. “I know which bazaar, which stall, which conversation.”

Fashion . 16/07/2026

The Woman Before the Wardrobe:How Priya Agarwal Built a Label That Feels Like Home

In an industry increasingly driven by speed, Priya Agarwal has spent the last decade building a fashion label around the exact opposite: slowness, craftsmanship, and the radical idea that comfort is not the enemy of luxury. For her, fashion was never simply about designing beautiful clothes. It was always about understanding the body that would eventually wear them.

Fashion school gave Priya the vocabulary. The years that followed taught her how to speak it fluently.

After graduating from NIFT, she immersed herself in pattern making and garment construction under master pattern maker Mr. Nandakumar, whose understanding of Indian body measurements fundamentally changed the way she approached clothing.

I stopped thinking about clothes as aesthetic objects," she reflects. "I started thinking about them as things that live on real bodies, in real heat, through real days

Fashion . 16/07/2026

Inside Cavora: The Dubai Brand Building Luxury Through Storytelling, Craftsmanship & Confidence

How a young founder is redefining handbags, fragrance, and modern luxury through craftsmanship, storytelling, and quiet confidence.
Luxury doesn't always begin with certainty.

Sometimes, it begins with uncertainty so profound that building something becomes the only way to find your way forward.

For Meenal, the founder of Cavora, one of Dubai's emerging luxury brands, the journey wasn't sparked by a lifelong business plan or a family legacy in fashion. It started during one of the most uncertain chapters of her life, a period spent questioning not only what she wanted to do professionally, but what genuinely brought her joy.

Fashion . 28/07/2026

How Fig Living Is Redefining Lighting for a New Generation of Indian Homes

Walk into almost any beautifully designed home, and your eyes will probably land on the furniture first. The sculptural sofa. The marble coffee table. The statement artwork.

But stay a little longer, and you'll notice something else entirely. It's the warm pool of light falling onto the dining table. The bedside lamp that softens the room after midnight. The quiet glow that makes an ordinary apartment suddenly feel deeply personal. Furniture fills a room. Lighting decides how it feels.

That's the belief behind Fig Living, the Indian design brand quietly changing the conversation around home interiors, not by asking people to buy more décor, but by helping them rethink the role of light itself.

"We're not a lighting brand," founder Sushant Sharma tells us. "We're a light and living brand."