Couture Week 2025 opened the year with a renewed focus on craftsmanship and authenticity. This season’s haute couture collections moved away from excess, highlighting handmade fabrics, precise tailoring, and thoughtful details. Blending tradition and innovation, designers celebrated the true essence of luxury — time, emotion, and artistry in every piece.
It’s not a Margiela show without a touch of theatre, and for his first Artisanal collection, Glenn Martens went all in. The space looked like a forgotten basement, cracked walls, peeled wallpaper, dim yellow light, and the models came out like ghosts, faces hidden behind sculpted masks and slicked hair that clung to their heads. Titled Artisanal 2025, the collection played with everything Margiela stands for: deconstruction, illusion, and anonymity. The opening look, a translucent plastic dress that shimmered like liquid, was a straight nod to the house’s 1992 archives, but with Martens’ darker, Flemish twist.
Throughout the show, materials kept changing their identities, satin turned into denim, leather into plastic, and coats looked as if they’d been resurrected from thrift stores and stitched into new lives. Corsets were cut open to show their bones, while trench coats came oversized with rounded, almost inflated shoulders.Some dresses looked half-melted, others were wrapped in paper and lace, but all carried that sense of something found, reworked, and reborn. The masks erased individuality, leaving behind only shape and movement a reminder that, here, clothes speak louder than faces.
Alessandro Michele made his haute couture debut for Valentino with Vertigineux, and the title said it all. Vertiginous, overwhelming, and deeply romantic, the collection was a study in tension: between heritage and fantasy, restraint and excess, history and the present moment. Staged at the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild in Paris, the show unfolded in an atmosphere that felt suspended in time, walls heavy with gold, light softened to a glow, and models moving slowly, almost ceremonially. The silhouettes were sculptural yet tender: A-line dresses, arched shapes, and embroidery so intricate it seemed to hum under the light. Nothing felt casual, yet nothing felt frozen. It was couture on the edge of theatre, but grounded in emotion.
Michele dove into Valentino’s archives and found a dialogue between what the maison once was and what it could become. He reinterpreted 1990s couture codes through his maximalist lens, blending centuries and aesthetics with his signature visual layering. Knitwear and patchwork, rarely seen in haute couture, appeared as symbols of tactility and intimacy, giving the clothes a human pulse amid the opulence. The references were abundant but never overwhelming: Baroque, Georgian, Versailles, Emily Dickinson, all colliding without ever collapsing. What could have turned into costume instead became collage; a conversation between eras, stitched together with intention.
Robert Wun isn’t afraid of drama and this season, he turned it into ritual. Presented at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, his Fall/Winter 2025-26 haute couture show, titled Becoming, blurred the lines between fashion, performance, and psychological thriller. Guests entered in near darkness, seated in the round, as strange, otherworldly figures began to emerge drenched in red, black, white, and violet, each one part dream, part nightmare. The opening look set the tone: an immaculate white gown wrapped in a thick cape, embroidered with fake bloody handprints. It was both shocking and symbolic a nod to the violence and intimacy of transformation. From there, Wun pushed the conversation forward with silhouettes that felt sculpted, alive, and unsettling. A purple crystal-encrusted dress came with a massive matching veil held up by fake arms mounted on the model’s shoulders, while jackets morphed into bags, their stiff forms suggesting invisible bodies trapped inside.
Inspired by the chaos backstage at last year’s Met Gala, Becoming explored the rituals of dressing, weddings, funerals, first days, last nights, the moments when clothing becomes armor, memory, or confession. It was couture as character study: garments shifting between half-dressed and overexposed, seams revealing what the body tries to hide. Throughout, Wun’s fascination with distortion remained intact. Extra limbs wrapped around waists and necklines, gloves extended into claws, and blood-red crystals bloomed like spores across pleated fabric. The effect was eerie yet elegant, a collision between horror and haute couture, fear and fantasy.
For Fall/Winter 2025 Haute Couture, Ashi Studio presented a collection that felt both grounded and ethereal. Without an official title, the show came to life through fragments of history, old veils, tapestries, and porcelain pieces found in Paris flea markets, reimagined into new forms of beauty. The collection explored construction above all else. Sculpted corsets shaped the body into clean hourglass lines, while soft tulle and lace draped around it like second skin. Jackets and coats were structured yet fluid, revealing the precision and discipline behind every stitch. A standout moment came in the form of a coatdress embroidered with laser-cut mother-of-pearl, shimmering as it caught the light.
There was a focus on craft rather than spectacle. Every look highlighted the handwork of the atelier, feathers, embroidery, and delicate moulage techniques that gave the garments a sculptural edge. Inspired by artists like Louise Bourgeois, Ashi played with themes of transparency, transformation, and fragility. Natural elements such as pearl, wood, and lace appeared throughout, blending the organic with the architectural.
Daniel Roseberry’s latest Schiaparelli collection opened not with shock, but with silence — the kind that comes when a designer decides to turn everything inside out. For Fall/Winter 2025, titled Back to the Future, Roseberry looked to Elsa Schiaparelli’s surreal past not for nostalgia, but for reinvention. Gone were the pinks, and the playful surrealist quirks that have defined his tenure. In their place came greyscale, silver, black, white a deliberate desaturation that stripped the brand of ornament and revealed its skeleton. “It was the right time to go into the archives,” Roseberry said, and it showed. The collection paid homage to Schiap’s 1930s, an era of tension and creativity on the edge of crisis and that unease ran through every stitch.
The silhouettes were sharper, leaner, tougher. Tailored jackets came with sculptural shoulders and metallic surfaces that caught the light like armor. Sequins glistened over black tulle, reimagining the iconic Apollo of Versailles cape from 1938. Hourglass gowns wrapped tightly around the body before slicing open into flashes of skin, blurring fetish and elegance. A black satin fishtail dress dipped low to reveal a rhinestone G-string, while a red corset gown exposed crystal breasts on the back surrealism reborn as defiance. Roseberry’s couture has always flirted with fantasy, but this time the fantasy felt fractured, beauty laced with exhaustion, glamour as resistance. There was a kind of discipline in the drama, a precision that made the surreal feel almost real.
Demna closed his Balenciaga chapter the way he began it, with precision, provocation, and reverence. The Fall 2026 haute couture show at 10 Avenue Georges V felt like a quiet farewell, a love letter to craft and chaos. “La Bourgeoisie” set the tone: an exploration of power dressing across centuries, from 15th-century Medici silhouettes to contemporary corporate archetypes. Knit turtlenecks unfolded into tulip collars, suits hung oversized yet perfectly constructed, and gowns glimmered with a sense of faded opulence.
Hollywood ghosts lingered throughout, Naomi Campbell in sequins, Kim Kardashian transformed into Elizabeth Taylor, Isabelle Huppert in sculptural tailoring, each a reflection of Demna’s fascination with fame, illusion, and the artifice of beauty. The final look, a sculpted guipure lace gown, closed a circle that began with Cristóbal himself. As the voices of atelier members echoed through the salon, the show became less of a goodbye and more of a benediction, an acknowledgment of everything Demna rebuilt: the tension between couture and culture, irony and intimacy. Balenciaga’s future will move on, but its ghosts and Demna’s fingerprints will linger.
Credits:
Brands: Maison Margiela, Valentino, Robert Wun, Ashi Studio, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga / @maisonmargiela, @maisonvalentino, @robertwun, @ashistudio, @schiaparelli, @balenciaga
Words: Maria Diegues / @maadiegues
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