PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 25, 2026 SPECIAL EDITON
THE STREET BECAME ITS OWN KIND OF VENUE.
WEARING ETRO
PHOTOGRAPHY KEVIN SINCLAIR TALENT LAÍS GARCIA
DOCUMENTED IN NEW YORK CITY.
FASHION WEEK PROFILE: LAÍS GARCIA
Total look ETRO.
WORDS BY KEVIN SINCLAIR
The day began in a studio overlooking Union Square. A rack of the ETRO Fall/Winter 2026 Collection waited nearby, cameras were being set up, and Laís Garcia sat in the makeup chair when the rhythm of the afternoon suddenly changed. An important casting had come through, and her agent needed her there. Within minutes, Laís was out the door and moving across Manhattan.
During New York Fashion Week, plans have a way of becoming provisional. Schedules shift, opportunities appear without warning, and a model can move from one commitment to another with little notice. For Laís, still at an important early point in her career, the call wasn't a disruption to the story we set out to document. It became part of it. The city was moving, the industry was moving, and so was she.
Back at the Union Square studio, the pace changed. What had begun as the familiar choreography of a fashion production became unexpectedly relaxed. The small team, many of whom were meeting one another for the first time, settled in. Conversations started, stories were exchanged, and cameras continued documenting the moments in between. There was something almost like camping about it, a group of creatives brought together in one room with nowhere particularly urgent to be for a few hours.
Those hours created a familiarity that would have been difficult to manufacture. Instead of everyone immediately disappearing into their individual roles, we had time to talk, observe, and understand one another. The production had begun before a single fashion photograph was made.
Nearly four hours later, Laís returned. No drama surrounded it, and there was little need to recover what had supposedly been lost. She came through the door ready to work, the ETRO pieces came off the rack, hair and makeup resumed, and the room shifted almost instantly back into motion.
Behind the scenes with Laís Garcia and Kevin Sinclair. Photo by Oprah Winfrey.
NO FRONT ROW WAS REQUIRED.
Total look ETRO.
Total look ETRO.
Total look ETRO.
Laís began the day in a makeup chair, left for an unexpected opportunity, returned hours later, and stepped immediately back into another creative environment. That said something more interesting about this particular stage of her career than a conventional profile might have. It also said something about New York. So we took the production outside. Union Square was still moving at full speed. Traffic, pedestrians, storefronts, cyclists, and New York's constant visual noise became the backdrop. Against it, Laís in ETRO looked almost amplified. The refinement and scale of the clothes met the disorder of an ordinary Manhattan afternoon, and the contrast immediately changed the photographs. People began to notice.
Some slowed down as they passed. Others stopped. Heads turned, questions were asked, and strangers watched as still and moving images were being made. An unmistakable excitement surrounded the production. For a few moments, people with nothing to do with Fashion Week became part of it simply because it was happening directly in front of them.
That exchange felt refreshing. So much of contemporary fashion is experienced at a distance, through invitation-only spaces, carefully controlled presentations, and images consumed later through a screen. On the streets around Union Square, there was no separation. No front row was required. Fashion was there, occupying the sidewalk alongside everyone else. The street became its own kind of venue. ETRO provided the visual language, Laís gave the clothes movement, and New York supplied everything that could never have been planned: the interruptions, the strangers, the changing light, the noise and the reactions. The documentary cameras captured those elements alongside the finished fashion imagery, preserving not only what was being created but everything happening around it.
Fashion here has always existed beyond the clothes themselves. It is connected to movement, ambition, chance encounters, and the possibility that whatever was supposed to happen next might suddenly change. The city demands adaptation, and sometimes the most interesting thing a production can do is stop resisting it.
By the end of the afternoon, there was no sense that the day had gone off course; quite the opposite. What began as a carefully planned editorial became something more human: a model moving through the realities of Fashion Week, a group of collaborators finding one another along the way, and a city responding when fashion appeared unexpectedly on its streets.
We set out to photograph Laís Garcia. What we captured was one day in fashion, unfolding in real time.
Total look ETRO.
Total look ETRO.
Total look ETRO.
Total look ETRO.
Creative Director & Photographer Kevin Sinclair, Editorial Associate Oprah Winfrey, Photo Assistant Stephani Spindel, Hair & Makeup Hiroshi Yonemoto (Honey Artists), Talent Laís Garcia (Elite Model Management), Location New York City.
WEARING ETRO
