From long-awaited album releases to brilliantly curated art exhibitions and debut comedy specials, this fall is a collage of exciting cultural experiences.

We unpack everything you can’t skip, so all you have to do is enjoy.

WHAT TO LISTEN TO:
DAVID BYRNE BEGS THE QUESTION WHO IS THE SKY? WITH FIRST ALBUM IN SEVEN YEARS

In Who Is the Sky?, David Byrne’s first new studio album since American Utopia—now a Spike Lee- directed HBO film—the longtime shape-shifter enlists Grammy-winning producer Kid Harpoon and the 15-piece Ghost Train Orchestra to ask a characteristically oblique question (“Does any of it matter?”) with a deceptively simple answer (you’ll have to listen to find out). The album, out this fall, is playful and luminous, grounded in orchestral eccentricity and a pop sentiment that Byrne has long made his own. The songs are miniature parables and personal vignettes. He meets the Buddha at a party, finds comfort in the quiet presence of his apartment, and considers love as if filing a tax return. Byrne’s wry humor and spiritual bemusement course through the album, with vocal cameos from St. Vincent, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, and The Smile’s Tom Skinner. “At my age, at least for me, there‘s a ‘don‘t give a shit about what people think’ attitude that kicks in,” Byrne says. “I can step outside my comfort zone with the knowledge that I sort of know what I‘m doing. That said, every new set of songs is a new adventure. There‘s always a bit of, ‘how do I work this?’ We‘re now joined together, heading to the same unknown place.”

Who Is the Sky? drops on September 5, 2025 via Matador Records

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WHAT TO ATTEND:
LACRIMA UNRAVELS HAUTE COUTURE AT THE BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC (BAM)

In LACRIMA, acclaimed theater director Caroline Guiela Nguyen stitches a story of obsession, loss, and beauty onto the hushed floor of a Parisian haute couture atelier. Tasked with designing a wedding dress for the Princess of England, the craftspeople of Maison Beliana embark on an eight-month odyssey, sworn to secrecy and consumed by the pursuit of perfection. The play unfolds not on fashion’s glossy surface, but in its oft-unseen underbelly as viewers confront labor, fragility, and the quiet erosion of the self. Marion, the weary head seamstress, tries to hold her team together while master embroiderer Abdul sews 1,000 roses to duchesse satin, his vision rapidly dimming with each stitch. Guiela Nguyen’s fascination with fabric began at home, watching Bollywood films with her mother, who adored the lush fabrics of the characters’ costumes. In LACRIMA, that reverence becomes a meditation on making, more specifically, how a single dress might be dreamed in London, stitched in Alençon, finished in Mumbai, all the while at risk of being undone by time itself. “A fabric can suddenly be unobtainable, or the person who was supposed to wear a piece has changed sizes and alters the entire schedule,” Nguyen explains. “The inconsistency and fragility of time is an extremely valuable narrative component.”

LACRIMA will run October 22 & 24-26, 2025, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)

WHAT TO PORE OVER:
YSL AND PHOTOGRAPHY GIVES A PEEK BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Before the Instagram age flattened fashion into ubiquity, Yves Saint Laurent understood the value of an image. Across four decades, until his maison’s closing in 2002, he cultivated a visual mythology through fabric, silhouette, and an extraordinary constellation of collaborators behind the lens. Yves Saint Laurent and Photography, a luxe new tome by Phaidon featuring never-before-seen archival documents, maps the interplay between couture and camera. The publication is a luminous parade oficons-Naomi Campbell in mid-stride, Audrey Hepburn cast in soft shadow, Kate Moss doing what she so flawlessly does-lensed by photography’s greats-Richard Avedon, Helmut Vewton, Annie Leibovitz, Paolo Roversi, Juergen Teller. In essence, Saint Laurent lent fashion its rigor and sensuality, and photography returned the favor by making it eternal. The book also offers quieter glimpses. Archival ephemera, candid portraits, and notes in Saint Laurent’s looping hand complicate the spectacle with something discernibly more intimate.

Yves Saint Laurent and Photography is available beginning September 10, 2025, on Phaidon.com

WHAT TO EXPLORE:
PAOLO ROVERSI EXHIBITS HIS GREATEST HITS AT PACE NEW YORK

Slated to open alongside New York Fashion Week this September, a focused retrospective traces the luminous arc of Paolo Roversi’s career, from his early ’90s portraits to his most recent, enigmatic dreamscapes. Known for his diffused lighting, intimate compositions, unwavering devotion to film, and frequent flirtations with the Deardorff 8×10 camera (that clunky, archetypal field camera native to the ‘50s), Roversi has long blurred the line between fashion photography and fine art. Less about image than encounter-“Every portrait is a meeting, an exchange, a mutual intimate confession,” he once said-his work is infused with an ethos of long-standing collaboration and unadulterated intimacy. Inspired by industry giants August Sander, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus, Roversi began as a photojournalist for the Associated Press in 1970, before receiving an invitation to Paris from ELLE’s Peter Knapp, at which point his lens turned toward fashion, eventually shaping the visual language of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, and more. Roversi’s hauntingly soft portraits are steeped in classical beauty and the architectural rigor of his native Ravenna, Italy, and a variety of his work can be found in museum collections around the world.

Paolo Roversi: Along the Way will run September 12 to October 25, 2025, at Pace Gallery New York

WHAT TO LAUGH ALONG TO:
COMEDIAN CALEB HEARON DEBUTS STANDUP SPECIAL WITH HBO

This fall, Caleb Hearon makes his stand-up debut with his first HBO comedy special, a nervy, autobiographical hour that borders on a lucratively amusing dare. Best known as the host of So True with Caleb Hearon, the breakout podcast that has hovered atop the charts since its February launch and recently garnered a 2025 iHeartPodcast nomination, Hearon has become a kind of accidental star. “I just wanted somewhere to put the material,” he says, referring to the jokes, some nearly a decade old, that now find a home onstage. Fresh off a sold-out 20-city So True LIVE tour, Hearon brings that momentum to his yet-to- be-named show, a frank, funny reckoning with the forces that shaped him. A mix of long-simmering material and brand-new bits touch on his childhood, the loss of his father, a passing fascination with right-wing media, and a solo trip through Europe, all filtered through a sardonic sensitivity. Hearon cites influences with a kind of Midwestern bluntness—“a lot of women, and especially fat women”— naming Roseanne, Mo’Nique, and Bernie Mac as north stars. Their confidence shaped his own brand of emotionally edged, unapologetic comedy, and, like them, he’s drawn to the charge of not asking permission. “The most powerful thing in the room is standing up and saying, ‘I do not care what you think’,” he proclaims. “Here’s some jokes.”

Hearon’s special will premiere on HBO Max in the fall

WHAT TO EXPERIENCE:
ALEJANDRO G. IÑÁRRITU REVISITS AMORES PERROS WITH AN EXPERIENTIAL INSTALLATION AT FONDAZIONE PRADA

A quarter century after the debut feature Amores Perros (2000) first tore through the global festival circuit, Alejandro G. Iñárritu returns to the chaos that made it. Premiering this fall at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Iñárritu’s “Sueño Perro” is a film installation that resists nostalgia, turning toward what was left unsaid, unseen, or unsalvageable in the original film. Projected inside a dark, analog labyrinth, the installation is composed of a mosaic of 35mm fragments, unearthed from the archives of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and reassembled into something jagged and new. Footage flickers across walls in uneven loops, as celluloid scratches and reel slates interrupt the flow, but beneath its sensuous texture, “Sueño Perro” is anchored in something far more volatile. The work paints a portrait of Mexico City at the edge of collapse. “Stripped of all narrative, this installation is not a tribute, but a resurrection,” says Iñárritu, “an invitation to feel what never was. Like meeting an old friend we have never seen before.” The images, violent, intimate, and unresolved, speak to the fragility of institutions, the spectacle of inequality, and the precariousness of everyday life, displaying the lived realities that shaped Amores Perros as they continue to reverberate today.

Sueño Perro will premiere at Fondazione Prada in Milan from September 18, 2025 to February 26, 2026

This story appears in the pages of VMAN 55: now available for purchase!