Ex-Gucci star brings 70s haute bourgeoisie ladies in trailing chiffons and Gen Z boys in tattoos and pearls to the runway

Valentino was the hottest ticket of this Paris fashion week, and the show had a sense of occasion to match.

A vast floor was laid with smashed mirror tiles, glittering like a ballroom after an earthquake. Five hundred armchairs and a smattering of glowing lamps lay beneath a shroud of white sheets, as if a grand house had been locked up for a long winter. The house of Valentino was shaking off the cobwebs for a new era and hitting the dancefloor.

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Party projected to beat centre-right People’s party by three points, surpassing expectations

Preliminary results from Austria’s general election showed the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) winning the most votes for the first time in the postwar period as it rode a tide of public anger over migration and the cost of living. It was projected to beat the co-ruling centre-right People’s party (ÖVP) by three points, surpassing expectations.

Data reported on public television indicated the FPÖ, which campaigned hard on a pledge of “remigration” of undesired immigrants, had taken about 29.1% of the vote, comfortably ahead of the ÖVP of chancellor Karl Nehammer on 26.2%. The opposition Social Democratic party scored its worst ever result – about 20.4% – while the liberal NEOS drew about 8.8%. Despite devastating flooding this month from Storm Boris bringing the climate crisis to the fore, the Greens, junior partners in the government coalition, tallied just 8.6%.

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Two countries agree to modifications beneath Matterhorn peak, one of Europe’s highest summits

Switzerland and Italy have redrawn a border that traverses an Alpine peak as melting glaciers shift the historically defined frontier.

The two countries agreed to the modifications beneath the Matterhorn peak, one of the highest summits in Europe, which straddles Switzerland’s Zermatt region and Italy’s Aosta Valley.

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Far-right FPÖ could become strongest force in the country for first time in postwar period

Here are some images from election day in Austria.

Austrians are going to the polls today.

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At least nine people have died and 48 are missing after vessel carrying 87 people sinks off island of El Hierro

Patrol boats and helicopters were searching on Sunday for about 48 people missing after their migrant boat sank near the Spanish island of El Hierro in what could become the deadliest such incident in 30 years of crossings from Africa to the Canary Islands.

Nine people, one of them a child, have been confirmed as dead after the vessel sank in the early hours of Saturday morning, emergency and rescue services said.

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City authorities take case to Lombardy regional court in effort to block initiative by Matteo Salvini

Milan council has appealed against a “grotesque” move to rename the city’s main airport after the scandal-tainted late former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The council approved a resolution to take the case to the Lombardy region’s administrative court after the initiative to rename Malpensa was accelerated by Matteo Salvini, the transport minister in Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government.

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Philippe Boxho’s macabre true stories are approaching 1m copies sold and shedding light on a ‘misunderstood’ job

A girl on a farm is devoured by pigs. A walker’s throat is slit by the broken-off blade of a lawn mower after it hits a stone. A woman fires 13 bullets into the body of her seemingly sleeping father but is cleared of murder because he had died of an aneurysm three hours earlier.

Miniature tragedies like these cram the pages of the books of the Belgian forensic pathologist Philippe Boxho, and explain why his bestsellers are at numbers one, two and three of France’s nonfiction charts: they are macabre but also darkly comic and, above all, true.

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By focusing on its strengths and pooling information, the west can disrupt Russia’s war machine – but there’s no time to lose

Russia is a “mafia state” trying to expand into a “mafia empire” , the foreign secretary, David Lammy, told the UN, nailing the dual nature of Vladimir Putin’s political model. On one hand Russia represents something very old – a world of bullying empires that invade smaller countries, grab their resources and indoctrinate their people into thinking they are inferior. But it is also something very new, weaponising corruption, criminal networks, assassinations and tech-driven psy-ops to subvert open societies. And if democracies don’t act to stop it, this malign model will be imitated across the globe.

Ukraine is resisting the older, zombie imperialism every day on the battlefield, and democracies will have to arm Ukraine and ourselves to constrain Russia properly. But how should we fight the more contemporary tools of political warfare that Russia pioneers? These are becoming ever more prevalent. Globalisation was meant to make us all so integrated that it would diminish the risk of wars. Instead, the free flow of information, money and people across borders also made subversion easier than ever. At the Labour party conference, Lammy indicated that democracies need to work together to stop Russia: “Exposing their agents, building joint capability and working with the global south to take on Putin’s lies.”

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

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The former Arsenal player’s legal action against Fifa’s ‘draconian’ rules could lead to the age of Bosman 2.0

By the time Lassana Diarra played his last game as a professional footballer, on 20 October 2018, he had become a “what if?” player. What if he had stayed more than a single season at Arsenal? What if he hadn’t made the catastrophic decision to leave Real Madrid and La Liga for Anzhi Makhachkala and the Russian league? What if he hadn’t made the even more disastrous move from Anzhi to Lokomotiv Moscow? What if he hadn’t had to pull out of Didier Deschamps’s Euro 2016 squad at the very last moment because of a knee problem?

Another injury forced his retirement shortly after a rare cameo for his last club, Paris Saint-Germain, for whom he was no more than a squad player. Diarra was set to remain a footnote in the history of some prestigious clubs, a series of unanswered questions, something of an enigma – but then we have a legal case, which will finally be settled on 4 October, putting the final full stop to a story that has been dragging on for adecade. It is Diarra v Fifa and if the player wins it could completely change the transfer market, possibly leading to anarchy.

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