The runway was once a destination in itself; now the world beyond it has become the runway.

The modern fashion pilgrimage unfolds in temples, coastlines, and deserts; places where culture, craftsmanship, and spectacle collide. From a Chanel temple in Kyoto, a Gucci clifftop in Puglia, and a Guess desert outside Marrakech, they are indeed the new catwalks of our time. The migration of fashion from studios to landscapes isn’t accidental. As audiences grow saturated by digital sameness, brands are rediscovering the value of the environment and how it shapes emotion. The rise of destination showcases, from Dior’s spiritual retreats to Jacquemus’ lavender fields, suggests that the runway is no longer a linear performance but a cultural pilgrimage. The emphasis has shifted from collection to communion: designers seeking not just to show clothes, but to stage them through belonging and identity.

Guess’ recent return to Morocco is part of a broader movement that redefines what luxury means in 2025. Through its One World, One Brand gathering in Marrakech and desert residency at The White Camel camp, the label joins a growing chorus of fashion houses turning their legacies into landscapes.

Legacy reimagined

Fashion’s fascination with legacy has entered its retrospective age. Where the early 2000s championed reinvention, today’s houses are preoccupied with reflection. In that sense, Guess’ interpretation of Morocco became the perfect metaphor for reflection: a landscape steeped in memory, identity, and myth. When Guess chose Marrakech as the site for its 45th anniversary gathering—One World, One Brand—the decision said less about marketing and more about the brand’s Moroccan heritage. Beneath the stars at the ruined El Badi Palace, the event’s theme, Never Forget Your Roots, saw Guess co-founder Paul Marciano pay tribute to his birthplace and to the brand’s evolving legacy. In the rush to make fashion feel personal again, geography has become philosophy: the runway is no longer a strip of floor, but a birthplace of origin and culture.

Runways as realms of desire

If Marrakech hosts the conversation, the Agafay desert provides the silence that follows. This vast, windswept expanse is where fashion’s newest fixation materialises into fully curated worlds that extend beyond the runway and into realms of desire. The White Camel is a remote luxury camp (more of a ‘glamp’) of terracotta and canvas tents set against the Atlas Mountains. This reimagination through the Guess lens is less a brand statement than a case study in how fashion now trades in atmosphere—in the sensory and the symbolic. Tents ripple like silk, lanterns glimmer with mirrored holograms, and a dusk falls over a desert wearing the brand’s palette itself.

Beneath the aesthetic of it all lies something more reflective. In returning to Morocco, Paul Marciano’s birthplace, Guess gestures towards fashion’s broader yearning for authenticity and the need to reconnect with story and soil. Just as Dior’s Moroccan escapades, Chanel’s presentation in Dakar, and Louis Vuitton’s Aranya show have proven, the runway is no longer a fixed address. It’s a landscape, an emotion, and an encounter with one's history.

What happens at the White Camel isn’t about commerce but context: how design occupies a place and how that place, in turn, reshapes design. In the age of destination storytelling, fashion has become less about consumption and more about immersion—an ever-shifting mirage between memory and desire. When a show becomes an experience and a collection becomes a landscape, the boundary between art and environment begins to dissolve. The desert becomes a metaphor of endurance, reinvention, and everything that cannot be owned.

Final thoughts

For a brand once defined by the American dream and sun-soaked sensuality, Guess’ return to the Moroccan desert signals fashion’s broader reorientation from nostalgia to nuance. The glossy billboards and city lights of the 1980s have given way to landscapes like these: elemental, reflective, steeped in richness and narrative. In Marrakech, One World, One Brand reads less as a corporate mantra and more as a quiet manifesto for connection. It is an acknowledgment that style, at its best, transcends language, geography, and viral trends. The message embedded within Never Forget Your Roots resonates beyond Guess itself. It mirrors the industry’s collective craving for authenticity; for fashion that doesn’t just move forward, but gazes inward.

As the final lights fade over the Agafay dunes, the scene appears almost symbolic: fabric, fire, and horizon folding into one another. What remains is not a product, but a feeling, this sense that even in fashion’s most transient moments, something eternal can still take root. Perhaps that is the promise of this new age: that desire no longer burns for possession but for presence. The industry’s most compelling stories now unfold where landscape meets luxury, where heritage becomes history. As brands like Guess look inward, they remind us that luxury’s truest form has always been desire. The desire to craft, to create culture, and to experience the world beneath our feet. It is desire, after all, that keeps the world, and the creativity of fashion, forever in motion.