The invitation for Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore haute couture show was a tiny book-shaped charm, threaded onto a silver necklace. On its cover, it read ‘Once Upon a Time’; inside, a sprouting bean was etched, evoking the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. By the time guests arrived at the Grand Palais yesterday morning, that magical bean had grown: around the edges of the space, enormous creeping vines had been erected as part of the show set, while vases and mirrors were sized up, Borrowers-style, for a giant.

Happily ever after: Matthieu Blazy’s haute couture fairy tale at Chanel

Blazy said the collection began with the discovery of a leather-bound book of fairy tales, Les Fées, Contes des Contes (Fairies, Tales of Tales), owned by the house’s founding couturier, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. Paired with a version of the house’s tweed suit, crafted from sheer mousseline, the book accessorised the show’s opening look, held in the model's hand. ‘I started to wonder, was Gabrielle Chanel’s life a fairy tale?’ said the Belgian designer, who began at the house in 2025. ‘I asked myself if, together with the haute couture ateliers, we could make garments that tell stories like a book.’

From this starting point, Blazy presented an A/W 2026 couture collection of wit and whimsy, where small details – like a row of buttons that moved from ugly duckling to swan – conjured childhood memories. The heel of a shoe was a golden egg; garments were adorned with fluttering butterflies and blooming flowers; while others appeared to be made from straw, evoking an altogether more contemporary fairytale, The Wizard of Oz. Throughout it all, these richly embellished looks were contrasted with moments of ethereal lightness: a series of liquefied gowns, with Romanesque drapes, recalled Gabrielle Chanel’s pioneering work in jersey; others came in delicate organza or guipure lace, a fabric that recurred throughout.

This, of course, was the work of the haute couture atelier, which is a fantasy factory of its own. Besides the construction of the garments themselves – which, by the time they are purchased by clients, will be fitted to their bodies, fairy godmother-style – this collection was a demonstration of the might of the house’s various craft métiers. Metalwork was a particular focus, not only in the various buttons – which also evoked characters like Puss in Boots – but the delicate chains which edged garments, some adorned with beads and charms (Blazy said he wanted it to appear like magpie has been at work). Other such details were hidden from view: keepsakes had been stitched into linings and pockets, a nod to the ‘private pleasures’ of haute couture.

Backstage, he asserted that Chanel was both a house of fantasy and function, and, amid the more embellished looks were some that were striking in their simplicity, like a structured tabard-style bodice and trousers, rendered in black, or the elongated black overcoat which followed. ‘[Gabrielle Chanel] climbed the ladder to find her golden goose, by making clothes for real women. Her clothes were never parodies. They were rooted in life,’ he said. ‘Chanel couture is not just about the big “wow”. Chanel couture is about the details.’

Haute Couture Week represents the rarified pinnacle of the fashion calendar, taking place each year in January and June or July in Paris. To be considered a couture house – and show as part of the official schedule – you must adhere to a series of rules set by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (FHCM). Notably, garments must be made to order for clients using a dedicated couture atelier of over 15 staff and 20 technical workers, with participants showing more than 50 designs twice a year (several of fashion’s biggest names, including Chanel, Dior and Armani, have couture arms, and present during the week). The FHCM also chooses a series of guest designers to show each season, while off-schedule events take place across the city – including the presentation of high jewellery collections in showrooms in and around Place Vendôme.

Held this season from 6-9 July, the A/W 2026 edition of Haute Couture Week looks set to be defined by a pervading newness: Pierpaolo Piccioli and Duran Lantink will show their first couture collections for Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier respectively, while Olivier Theyskens – formerly of Rochas, Nina Ricci and Theory – will debut his new label, Boloria. Meanwhile at Chanel and Dior, Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson, respectively, will host their sophomore haute couture collections, after lauded debuts earlier this year. Rounding out the schedule are shows from Schiaparelli, Armani Privé, Viktor & Rolf, as well as a debut on the schedule from London-based label Standing Ground.

In anticipation, we break down all the moments to look out for at Haute Couture Week A/W 2026.

There will be debuts at Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier

On Wednesday 8 July, there will be a duo of debuts at two of haute couture’s major houses: Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier. At the former, Pierpaolo Piccioli will show his first couture collection for Balenciaga, taking the mantle from Demna, who reinstated the house’s haute couture arm in 2021 (the Georgian designer’s couture collections were critically acclaimed in their subversion of the historic medium, with memorable moments comprising haute couture ‘jeans’ and runway appearances from Kim Kardashian, Nicole Kidman and Dua Lipa). Piccioli is no rookie when it comes to haute couture, though: his memorable collections for Valentino were some of the most lauded of recent times.

At Jean Paul Gaultier, Dutch designer Duran Lantink will host his first haute couture show at the house, having presented two ready-to-wear collections at Paris Fashion Week in recent seasons. Expect the unexpected from the boundary-pushing designer: his debut was a polarising take on the French house’s codes, featuring bodysuits printed with the naked body. ‘I’m trying to break free of what’s considered good taste,’ he told Wallpaper* in our March 2026 Style Issue.

As well as sophomore shows at Chanel and Dior

Last season was marked by its blockbuster debuts: there was something of a fashion arms race as Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Jonathan Anderson at Dior showed their first couture collections (both for the houses, and personally, having previously worked at Bottega Veneta and Loewe respectively, which do not have couture offerings). Both presented different – but equally beguiling – debut collections, with Blazy striving for impossible lightness (memorably, a pair of ‘jeans’ were cut from featherweight organza) and Anderson conjuring a series of bold sculptural forms, inspired by the contours of Magdalene Odundo’s ceramics, which bloomed with floral adornment. ‘You realise that that's why we love clothing – it's this idea of the make,’ Anderson said of his first experience in the medium. ‘Couture is really a dying craft; it’s nearly instinct. There are only a few houses doing it. So in a weird way, it’s about protecting that.’

London label Standing Ground will join the schedule

The acclaimed Irish designer Michael Stewart, who started his label Standing Ground in 2022 after graduating from the Royal Academy of Art, has never been one to stick to the typical fashion schedule. In fact, he hasn’t shown on the runway since 2024, preferring instead to either present via cinematic lookbooks or simply work directly with the clients who purchase his designs. This season, Stewart will show as a guest of Haute Couture Week on the evening of Monday 6 July, a decision that tracks with the designer’s vision: his elongated, columnar silhouettes are painstakingly constructed by hand and to the wearer’s body, in an echo of the couture atelier. Winning the Savoir Faire award at the 2024 LVMH Prize, expect a continuation of his distinctive aesthetic, which marries the graceful forms of ancient standing stones with a more futuristic sensibility, where body-clinging contours and ectomorph-like protrusions have an HR Giger-esque bent.

Fendi will show in Rome

Maria Grazia Chiuri will host her first haute couture show for Fendi not in Paris – where the house has shown traditionally, and did so under previous creative director Kim Jones – but in Rome, the home city of both the designer and the house. Taking place on 9 July (many editors will fly straight from Paris to Rome for the show), it will unfold at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – a nod to both Chiuri’s longtime collaboration with the art world, and the location of a new exhibition, ‘After, a Creative Journey. Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985’. Marking just her second outing for Fendi, after a debut ready-to-wear show in Milan in February, the event will see guests move straight from show to exhibition preview, ahead of the latter’s opening to the public the next day, on 10 July.

Olivier Theyskens will reveal his new label, Boloria

The Belgian designer Olivier Theyskens, who began his eponymous label in the mid-1990s before roles at Rochas, Nina Ricci and Theory, is often seen as one of fashion’s most prodigious talents, forging a darkly romantic aesthetic that borrowed from historical costuming with an industrial edge (Madonna was an early fan, wearing a memorable corseted yellow dress for the VH1 Fashion Awards in 1998). On the eve of Haute Couture Week, 5 July, Theyskens will make his return, debuting Boloria, a new label led by the designer. Fellow Belgian Willy Vanderperre shot the teaser images for the brand, which is based in Antwerp and intriguingly funded by Weareone.world, a Belgian company that runs the Tomorrowland music festivals. What to expect? ‘[The] distinctly Belgian values – sensitivity, integrity, emotional resonance – that have always inspired Theyskens’ work and approach to fashion,’ said a statement when the news was revealed earlier this year.

A landmark Maison Martin Margiela auction will take place

For the wealthy few, Haute Couture Week is one for shopping: fashion house’s top-spending clients attend to shows to select the looks that they will purchase over a given season (they are then remade to the exact measurements of their body, and oftentimes in an edition of one). But, for those after something even rarer – or, at least, a definitive piece of fashion history – an unprecedented auction will take place on 9 July at 2pm in Paris, featuring 200 pieces from legendary Belgian designer Martin Margiela’s personal collection (known for staying entirely anonymous, he founded his highly influential eponymous house, Maison Martin Margiela in 1988, before leaving in 2009). Held in collaboration between Paris’ Maurice Auction and London’s Kerry Taylor Auctions, it will span clothing, photography and ephemera. ‘These objects are like holy relics of fashion; they’re part of a great mythology, which is a real dream for an auctioneer,’ Kerry Taylor Auctions’ Alex Baddeley told Wallpaper*.

READ: This auction sees Martin Margiela’s personal archive go on sale for the first time: ‘These are the holy relics of fashion’

Much has been written about the contemporary relevance of haute couture, a rarefied dressmaking medium that is built on tradition and strict rules (to call yourself a couture house, you must adhere to those set out by La Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode). It remains best defined by its impossible flights of craft – each garment must be stitched entirely by hand in a process that can take hundreds of hours – and its elite cortege of clients, which numbers (by estimate) around 5,000 worldwide. ‘Couture is really a dying craft; it’s nearly extinct. There are only a few houses doing it,’ said Jonathan Anderson at his Dior couture debut this week. Such is its need for protection, he asserted, that after the show, he would open ‘Grammar of Forms’, an exhibition in the runway space allowing visitors to see his work in conversation with original designs by Christian Dior. ‘[I want] to demystify couture and inspire the next generation to ensure its future,’ he said.

The standout collections of Haute Couture Week S/S 2026

Though rarely has Haute Couture Week – which concludes in Paris today (29 January) – demanded so much attention. This was largely down to its two new custodians, Anderson at Dior and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, both of whom would show their first couture collections during the event (their respective houses, two behemoths of Parisian style, are synonymous with haute couture, its design language filtering down to everything from ready-to-wear to cosmetics and perfume). Both seemed to shake off the weight of expectation in collections that expressed converging visions of contemporary couture – Blazy instilled everyday garments with an ethereal lightness through meticulous acts of craft (think: a hand-painted silk mousseline trompe l’oeil pair of jeans), while Anderson presented a ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas in a bold collection full of intriguing forms and bold flourishes, from pom-pom cyclamen earrings to enormous coloured stoles.

Elsewhere, Daniel Roseberry’s latest Schiaparelli collection revelled in the joy of creation; Alessandro Michele staged a ‘peep show’ at Valentino; and at Armani Privé – in the first couture show since Giorgio Armani’s death – Silvana Armani, Mr Armani’s niece, took the reins this season in her own debut show. Here, we unpack the best shows of the week.

Schiaparelli

There is an enjoyable sense of spectacle to a Schiaparelli show, which in its 10am Monday morning spot heralds the start of Haute Couture Week. The models – who always seem to be having fun – parade around the Petit Palais in American artistic director Daniel Roseberry’s always theatrical creations, striking poses that spark nostalgia for the more outré runway shows of the 1980s (there is always good music, too: this season, the euphoric Jamie XX remix of Robyn’s ‘Dopamine’). This season, those creations spanned sculpted tops that sprouted spiking horns or enormous scorpion’s tails; sharp, wide-shouldered blazers adorned with plumes of feathers reminiscent of a bird’s wing; and delicate lace flowers that hovered and floated away from the body. There were some beautiful details besides: a flared dress in millefeuille tulle, which looked as if it had been cut away in chunks, and floating panels of degradé organza, dyed as if by bleeding ink.

Roseberry said that this season he had been inspired by a recent trip to the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s famed ceiling: ‘a wild, visually rambunctious, vulnerable and romantic imagining of God, religion, faith, and the human condition’. The eclecticism of this season came from a desire to replicate the ecstatic feeling of the creative act, one that he imagined Michelangelo experiencing as he created his most well-known fresco. ‘I stopped thinking for the first time in years of how something should look, but instead about how I feel when creating it,’ he said. ‘That was it. The entire emotional heartbeat of this season became not what does it look like, but how do we feel when we make it? What a relief that was. What a revelation.’

Dior

There was a palpable anticipation in the room for Jonathan Anderson’s first couture collection for Dior, one compounded by Rihanna, whose late arrival only upped the anticipation. Under an upside-down meadow of wild cyclamen – inspired by a posy brought to him by former Dior creative director John Galliano – the collection that followed was a bold ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas, which began with the curved form of a vase by ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo (a longtime collaborator of the designer). Her work inspired the ballooning shape of the opening gowns – constructed from ultra-lightweight silk and wire, they seemed to levitate away from the body – while the rest of the collection drew on creative mementoes, from Galliano’s posy of cyclamen (which here transformed into pom-pom earrings) to a series of found objects that became embellishment, whether historic cameo brooches or shards of meteors and fossils.

The idea, said Anderson, was for a dialogue of the past: an elevation of the precious and the rare (after all, haute couture is all about the singular and the one-off). ‘There’s this element in the show of how to upcycle things,’ he said in a preview before the show. ‘Like, how do we take something and reinvent it? Things are found, and then reassembled.’ This idea of reassembly ran throughout: sinuous bias-cut gowns recalled Galliano’s signature silhouette during his time at Dior, while a sculpted black coat, jutting out at the waistline, seemed to nod to Raf Simons’ own couture debut at the house (the Belgian designer was womenswear creative director from 2012-2015). But other pieces felt entirely Anderson’s own: inspired by nature, looks became sculptural marvels: satin protruded from the waistline of a skirt; flared gowns were constructed from delicate shards of pearlescent mother-of-pearl, while bell-shaped tops ballooned around the body to create otherworldly forms.

‘I think what is nice is that [as a team] we’re exploring – it is not about working out the idea before we start, or working out the end customer, because ultimately, we don’t know what people want,’ he says, likening the couture arm of the house to a creative ‘lab’. ‘That’s the whole point. I think the idea of designing things is to make people want something they didn’t want. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt at Dior, it’s just about putting ideas out [there].’

READ: Jonathan Anderson’s historic Dior couture debut was a bold ‘Wunderkammer’ of ideas

Chanel

Matthieu Blazy’s brief tenure at Chanel so far has seen the French-Belgian designer embrace joy and levity over the weight of history. ‘I just wanted to have fun,’ he said after his debut ready-to-wear show last October, a feeling immortalised by model Awar Odhiang’s twirling runway finale, one of the year’s most memorable fashion moments (she wore a skirt adorned with hundreds of kaleidoscopic silk feathers).

With his first haute couture show, he sought a similar feeling of lightness, staged amid a fantasy-land set of enormous mushrooms and toadstools, as well as fluttering candy-pink trees. In the collection, that lightness was physical: the opening looks saw the classic Chanel suit rendered in featherweight silk mousseline rather than its usual tweed, while trompe l’oeil silk mousseline trousers were painted to recall denim jeans (a version of the ‘2.55’ handbag was also constructed from the fabric).

He said it came from an impulse to strip it all away and attempt to get to the heart of what Chanel is: ‘What makes Chanel, Chanel? What is the essence and essentialism of the house? How do you bear its soul?’ As such, he largely eschewed the theatrical towards the simplicity of a wardrobe – these were clothes that women could actually wear – though elevated through truly extraordinary moments of craft. There was tweed that sprouted with plumes of feathers; bouncing streamers of fabric at the hems of skirts; or the final bridal look, a simple collared shirt and skirt adorned with hundreds of petal-like mother-of-pearl paillettes.

Blazy said it was an ode to what he sees as the heart of Chanel – the communion between maker and wearer. As such, each model chose something personal to be stitched into their look – from a treasured initial to a symbol of luck. ‘[I] consider this collection almost as a break,’ said Blazy. ‘Something magical, something that makes you dream, something poetic, a calm moment of quietness, almost like a Sunday morning.’

READ: At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy lets the light in with a fairytale first haute couture collection

Armani Privé

It was to be the first Armani Privé show without Giorgio Armani at the helm: this past September, he passed away aged 91 after an extraordinary 50 years in fashion. Like at the Giorgio Armani menswear show in Milan – which was helmed by longtime creative partner Leo Dell'Orco – this was a Privé collection not of divergence but of continuance, mining previous signatures of the haute couture offshoot, from sinuous crystallised gowns to Eastern influences (heavily inspired by Japan, Mr Armani saw his design vernacular as a conversation between East and West).

Away from the more high-profile debuts at Chanel and Dior, this too ushered in a new design lead: Silvana Armani, Mr Armani’s niece, took the reins this season, having worked alongside her uncle for over four decades. She titled the collection ‘Jade’, using the precious stone to inform the collection’s largely green palette, shifting from Armani-esque tailoring (for their haute couture twist, ties came in sheer organza) to gowns that flared below the waist using clever petal-inspired pleats. Look out for them on the Oscars red carpet this coming March – in their ethereal beauty, they have winner written all over them.

Valentino

Alessandro Michele prefaced his latest haute couture collection for Valentino with an ode to the house’s eponymous founder, Valentino Garavani, who passed away aged 91 last week. ‘What we do today takes place within a history not of our making, in a house long inhabited, rich with traces and gestures,’ he said in a letter distributed to guests. ‘To work within this space means accepting both its weight and its grace. It means recognising that every form exists only in relation to what made it possible, that every creative act is also an act of custody.’ (As well as Garavani, Michele also name-checked his forebears Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli.) Garavani’s legacy, Michele continued, was ‘an ethics of making… a practice grounded in the belief that to create is to care for, and that beauty consists in radical, patient attention to bodies and forms.’

The collection had been finalised before Garavani’s death, and was full of the gestures that made the Roman couturier’s work so enduring: a lust for the theatrical, a note of sensuality and romance, as well as more formal references, from ruffles and feathers to the bold red of the opening gown, Garavani’s favoured hue (such was its ubiquity in his work, it was deemed ‘Valentino Rosso’). The show set comprised a series of circular chambers through which models walked; guests watched through a series of peepholes opened by a butler at the start of the show (they were based on the 18th-century Kaiserpanorama, a subject of critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin’s work). It allowed pure focus on the looks themselves: an appreciation of that extraordinary act of making, undertaken by Michele in communion with the petites mains of the couture atelier. ‘Valentino’s legacy remains what it has always been,’ said Michele. ‘An idea of beauty conceived as a noble form of responsibility toward time, bodies and the world we are given to cross.’

There is nothing on the fashion calendar quite like the Haute Couture shows, which take place twice yearly and represent the lofty pinnacle of Parisian craft – superlative expressions of construction and embellishment, with a couture gown taking hundreds of hours of handcraft to complete (to qualify for haute couture status, each garment must be made to measure to the particular contours of a client’s body). The presentations themselves reflect the rarefied status of the gowns on show, often featuring fantastical sets and starry front rows, or taking place in the historic couture salons in front of just a handful guests.

This season marks something of a turning point: it will be Chanel’s last collection by an in-house creation team before the arrival of Matthieu Blazy later this year; Dior will sit out the season to allow Jonathan Anderson time to settle into his new role; and Demna will present his final collection for Balenciaga before he heads to his new role as creative director of Gucci. Elsewhere, Glenn Martens will mark his first collection at Maison Margiela – replacing John Galliano – and shows from Schiaparelli and Armani Privé will round out the schedule.

Here, reporting from Paris, the best shows of Haute Couture Week A/W 2025, as they happen.

Balenciaga

‘Fashion lives on the edge of tomorrow – driven not by what we know, but the thrill of discovering what comes next,’ read a hand-written letter from Demna left on each seat at the historic Balenciaga couture salon on Avenue George V on Wednesday morning (Cristóbal Balenciaga opened the Parisian address in 1937; in 2020, Demna would renovate it to an exact replica, all the way down to the patina of age). The note was pertinent: later this month, the Georgian designer, who rose to prominence at Vetements before a ten-year tenure at Balenciaga, will undertake a new role at Gucci, overseeing the Italian house’s mens and womenswear collections.

It meant that the haute couture collection would be his swansong for the house, seeing friends and collaborators gather both on the salon’s gilded seats – the same as clients would have sat on during the era of M. Balenciaga – and on the runway, with celebrity muses Kim Kardashian and Isabelle Huppert both walking in the show. That was fitting, too: one of the inspirations for the collection was the Golden Age of Hollywood – a ‘perpetual obsession’ of Demna’s – with ‘mink’ furs (actually an intricate assemblage of feathers) worn with slip dresses, or the nipped-waist ‘Diva’ and ‘Debutante’ gowns. The former came in dramatic black sequins, inspired by Marilyn Monroe; the latter fell away to featherweight layers of organza. Around Kim’s neck were glimmering jewels inspired by Elizabeth Taylor, created by celebrity jeweller Lorraine Schwarz.

A more severe expression of glamour came in sharp, technical tailoring, which rose up, Nosferatu-style, at the collar. He said these looks were inspired by the ‘dress codes of “La Bourgeoisie”’, with one model brandishing a golden suitcase. For men, tuxedo tailoring was widened and loosened up – created by family-run ateliers in Naples and inspired by the Neopolitan jacket, the eight blazers in the show were designed to be ‘one-size-fits-all’ (to demonstrate the point, one was worn by a bodybuilder-cum-security guard).

It finished with house muse Eliza Douglas in a structured Guipure lace dress – an evocation of the couture bride in Demna’s subversive vernacular. It has been on this haute couture stage – since reinvigorating the line in 2021 – that Demna has achieved his greatest triumphs, a studied elegance which is modern in construction and without nostalgia. ‘I always knew that couture had this kind of magic to it, of being an experiential way of wearing clothes,’ he told Wallpaper in 2024. ‘I just wondered if it would still be like that. The world we live in is so oversaturated with information, colour, visuals. We’ve become numb to the beauty of the world. Why don’t we see the beauty anymore? We need it to survive as a human race. I don’t want to be numb to the sunset.’

Armani Privé

The colour black was the starting point of Giorgio Armani’s latest Privé outing, the couture arm of the Italian designer’s eponymous empire. ‘Far from monotonous, black reveals an entire spectrum of shades and possibilities,’ read the collection notes, and there was indeed a richness of expression here. This was largely done through surface embellishment – intricate floral motifs, hanging pailettes and the requisite swathes of light-catching crystals – alongside intriguing fabric choices, from rich jacquards to inky velvet and iridescent organza.

The show was staged at the Palazzo Armani, which opened officially last season, and Mr Armani himself was a notable absence, still recovering at home in Milan after a short illness (the designer also missed his bows at the menswear shows last month). However, word has it that he was omnipresent – at least via phone, overseeing proceedings remotely in his typically exacting style.

Chanel

Chanel’s latest show took place at the Grand Palais, its Salon d’Honneur transformed by the Canadian designer Willo Perron into a recreation of the house’s haute couture salon on Rue Cambon, complete with champagne-coloured drapes, a vast white carpet and plush banquette seating (an ode to ‘the imagination of 31 rue Cambon in Paris, the only Chanel Haute Couture address for over a century’, said the house). The collection itself, though, looked towards ‘wide-open nature’ – signalled by a single golden ear of corn left on each attendee’s seat – a reference to house founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel’s love of the great outdoors, particularly the Scottish Highlands.

As such, expressions of the superlative craft of the Chanel atelier – intricate beading and featherwork on tweed, diaphanous layers of silk and degradé tulle, and floral embellishment that appeared like petals were falling from a flower – were grounded with heavy, thigh-high boots, like those one might wear for a countryside walk. Elsewhere, a chunky bouclé recalled sheepskin, while feathers evoked the fullness of fur. ‘An invitation to greener pastures,’ said Chanel, a house in the midst of its own transformation – this would be the final collection by the Chanel ‘Creation Studio’ before Matthieu Blazy makes his much-anticipated debut in October 2025.

Schiaparelli

For his latest Schiaparelli collection, the American designer Daniel Roseberry began with a series of photographs he discovered in the house’s archive taken in 1940, just prior to the German invasion of France. ‘This collection is dedicated to that period, when life and art was on the precipice: to the sunset of elegance, and to the end of the world as we knew it,’ he said in a letter distributed before the show; afterwards, he elaborated that it was a time that felt ‘mournful and also turbocharged at the same time’. Archival references came from a 1938 ‘Apollo’ cape – here intricately bejewelled – while Elsa Schiaparelli’s part in the Surrealist movement of the interwar period was conjured in a dress which appeared like the body had been twisted back to front, completed with a glimmering mechanical heart which beat as the model walked the Petit Palais runway.

But Roseberry was looking forward, too, seeing the collection as an inflection point towards a new vision for Schiaparelli. On the runway this was symbolised by the rejection of the corset, a mode of construction that has so far defined his tenure. For this, he name-checked Gabrielle ’Coco’ Chanel, a contemporary of Elsa Schiaparelli who sought pragmatism over artifice. ‘Chanel was interested in how clothes could be of practical use to women; Elsa was interested in what fashion could be,’ he said. ‘Was a dress still just a dress, or could it be considered a piece of art? How could fashion speak to art? How could art inform and speak to fashion? Fashion – and what we want and expect from it – would never be the same.’

Here, Roseberry attempted to reconcile these two ‘poles’, combining a feeling of bodily liberation – even those garments which appeared corseted were done so using techniques which ‘offer the wearer both intensity and ease’ – with moments of fantastical expression, from trompe l’oeil to ruffles, surface embellishment and evocations of matadors and horse riders (one look came complete with an in-built satin saddle). In these references, Roseberry sought to blur the line between past, present and future. ‘If I focused obsessively on the past, could I actually make a collection that looks as if it was born in the future?’ Roseberry asked.

It was a question that had him looking towards his own future at the house, too. ‘I wanted it to feel like a bit of a farewell,’ he said cryptically backstage. ‘We’re going to be restructuring everything after this. I think if you want to change the result, you have to change the process, and I just want to keep pushing forward. I just don’t want anyone to know what to expect.’

Representing the very pinnacle of Parisian fashion – a dizzying haze of gowns, celebrity attendees and theatrical presentations designed to tempt a handful of wealthy clients – Haute Couture Week arrives next Monday in the French capital with plenty of moments to look out for. Because, while haute couture remains the preserve of the ultra-rich, its focus on superlative savoir-faire and fantastical design means there are true fashion thrills to be had – ones that so often filter down into the style zeitgeist.

Notably, these include the arrival of Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela – following the highly lauded tenure of John Galliano – and the swansong of Demna at Balenciaga before he border-hops to his new role at Gucci in Italy. There will also be the final Chanel collection to be designed in-house before the arrival of Matthieu Blazy, who will debut during ready-to-wear week in September, and the reveal of ‘new beginnings’ at JW Anderson. Elsewhere, Dior will press pause on showing at haute couture week (new creative director Jonathan Anderson will make his debut in the medium next January), alongside Valentino and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Here, Wallpaper* breaks down five of Haute Couture Week A/W 2025’s expected standout moments – stay tuned for live coverage, beginning next Monday on wallpaper.com (7 July 2025).

Glenn Martens will show his first collection for Maison Margiela

Though he has big shoes to fill – predecessor John Galliano’s ten-year tenure at Maison Margiela provided some of the most memorable runway moments of recent times – Glenn Martens comes with the goodwill of the industry, after a stellar tenure at Y/Project (he also is creative director at Diesel, a role he will continue alongside Maison Margiela). With the runway show scheduled for Wednesday evening as couture week’s final act, little has been revealed about what we can expect – neither Martens nor Maison Margiela have posted any kind of teaser – though expect a focus on deconstruction (a hallmark of both Maison Margiela and Martens’ work) through a subculture-inflected lens. ‘I feel extremely honoured to join the amazing Maison Margiela, a truly unique house that has been inspiring the world for decades,’ Martens said after the appointment, which was announced in January after Galliano’s departure.

READ: Glenn Martens is headed to Maison Margiela as the house’s new creative director

A new vision for JW Anderson will be revealed

Fresh off his acclaimed debut collection for Dior – which saw him ‘decode and recode’ the house’s archive – Irish designer Jonathan Anderson is undertaking a similar act of reinvention for his own label, JW Anderson, which remains based in London. He will reveal his new vision on Monday afternoon in Paris, having teased ‘new beginnings’ on Instagram for the past weeks – including a newly refreshed store design, labels, packaging, and what looks like an edit of homeware (from jugs and chairs to JW-branded trowels). Seeming to err towards a mood of British craft and timelessness, the glimpses of clothing have followed a similar track, from woollen plaid kilts and striped polo tees to cable-knit sweaters and workwear jeans. Though a sweater collaboration with Berlin-based queer artist Dean Sameshima, reading ‘Anonymous Trade’, confirms that the frisson of subversion that has long defined Anderson’s work remains.

Demna will hold his Balenciaga swansong

It has become increasingly rare for creative directors to have the opportunity to host a ‘final show’ after their departure from a house – in recent seasons, exits have largely taken immediate effect, with the reins being handed straight over to a successor or in-house design team. For Balenciaga’s Demna, his transformative tenure at the house is being celebrated by a final haute couture show, unfolding in the original restored haute couture salon on Tuesday (this is likely because he is moving to another house in the Kering roster, Gucci, rather than one under a competitor conglomerate). Expect a typically contemporary vision of haute couture from the Georgian designer, a medium that has perhaps been the highlight of his decade at the house. ’We’ve become numb to the beauty of the world. Why don’t we see the beauty anymore?’ he told Wallpaper* of his haute couture approach. ‘We need it to survive.’

READ: ‘What is beauty?’: Balenciaga’s Demna on creating thoroughly modern haute couture

Dior will take a pause from showing

Though Anderson hosted his opening act at Dior last week – showing his inaugural menswear collection for the house on Friday afternoon – fans of the newly refreshed vision will have to wait a little longer to see his first haute couture collection, which represents the pinnacle of Dior’s oeuvre (after all, the house’s namesake Christian Dior is arguably the most famous couturier of the 20th-century). Taking a rare pause from the schedule, Anderson is expected to make his couture debut next January for S/S 2026, though Dior is not entirely without a haute couture collection – Maria Grazia Chiuri’s final Cruise show in Rome included a number of couture looks, which will likely be offered to clients this July in a series of private appointments.

The couture heavyweights will show throughout the week

Rounding out the schedule will be outings from a trio of haute couture heavyweights: Schiaparelli, Chanel and Armani Privé (Valentino will not show, having shifted to a once-a-year schedule for couture, while Jean Paul Gaultier awaits the arrival of new creative director Duran Lantink). At Schiaparelli, American designer Daniel Roseberry will continue to hone his sculptural, theatrical vision for the house – which has amassed a legion of devotees and spawned a ready-to-wear line – while at Chanel, it will be the final outing for the in-house design studio before Matthieu Blazy’s tenure begins with a debut womenswear collection in September. Meanwhile, at Armani Privé, after Giorgio Armani did not appear for his final bow at his menswear shows in Milan – a note from the house said he was recovering at home after a recent hospitalisation – guests will hope the designer will be back in full health for the presentation, which takes place on Tuesday evening.

The rows of guests filming Balenciaga’s 52nd couture collection show in Paris turned the glittering spectacle into a cloud of digital confetti. We were left with what German artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl refers to as ‘a ghost of an image, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution’. We end up getting only some of the story. A glimpse at the magic.

‘I notice it from backstage,’ says Demna, the mononymous artistic director of Balenciaga. ‘People are seeing the clothes in person, but looking through their phones. They truly have become a physical extension of our bodies.’ Most of us have no idea how long it took to cover the bustier dress worn by Eva Herzigová in 9,000 hand-mounted crystals and 36,000 bugle beads. Or that a pair of jeans were, in fact, not jeans at all, but canvas trousers hand-painted by an artist over a period of two months to make them look like jeans. ‘Fashion, including couture, has become show business. You see things through the phone held in front of what you are looking at,’ continues Demna.

’What is beauty?’: Demna on his transformative Balenciaga haute couture collections

The seductive realm of couture ought to haul our focus away from the noise of the seasonal, the short term and the quickfire towards something that is more profound. For Demna, couture is the chance to pay homage to the métier of making clothes beautifully. This is the thing that he cares about most. Through couture, the designer has ushered in a modern type of elegance to our visual culture and the images broadcast into the palms of our hands.

Compared to the mere months offered between the ready-to-wear seasons, Demna has almost a full year to work on the couture collection. This encourages a different feeling and a more critical, almost spiritual process. ‘It’s a true luxury for a creative person to have that. It’s a platform where you can tap into things so when they don’t work out, you have time to try something else,’ he says. ‘I always start with a very vague collection of ideas. Then I learn from the process of making.’

Cristóbal Balenciaga once said that a couturier must be an architect, a sculptor, a painter, a musician and a philosopher. More broadly, the references Demna draws upon aren’t things grasped from what he might have seen on the streets of Paris or Geneva, where he is based. It is about the tactile job of a bolt of cloth around the body. ‘There are many fittings so one can learn how to make things happen,’ he says. ‘More than anything, making mistakes is the most important part of the process as it triggers decisions. It guides you somewhere. It’s also a very natural and human thing to make mistakes.’

But what does it mean to be human when a half smile to the camera will open your bank statement and a fingerprint can unlock a hotel room door? At the heart of couture is flesh and bone, the many skilled pairs of hands working mostly in time-honoured ways. When it is mentioned today, we are often suspicious of its sorcery, anxious about its place in modern life yet happily floored by its splendour. ‘There’s an element of perfection in control, which we will never achieve, of course, because we are not made to be perfect. But when it comes to couture, there is the aspiration to be perfect.’

Like all good art, couture – away from the weary discussions about who is going to buy it – should take our breath away. The reintroduction of a couture line at Balenciaga in 2021 was framed around life today, not 60 years ago. The beautiful things that Balenciaga make, and the lush surroundings in which they are revealed, curiously rely on the rampant technology that we are all – Demna included – grappling with. The tension is in how to inspire people to feel something intensely, while creating an image that speaks with alacrity.

In around 1917, the French artist Marcel Duchamp openly rejected the work of many of his peers, including the painterly topographies of Henri Matisse, dubbing them ‘retinal’ art. In Duchamp’s mind, they were works devoid of philosophical content, intended only to please the eye. He would try to present a more conceptual point of view. Duchamp’s judicious, cerebral approach is a big influence on Demna: ‘My work has been so misinterpreted for years because people wouldn’t take five minutes to go a bit deeper. There is a lot of what I call “retinal fashion”, something only made for our eyes that we don’t have to think about. That’s not what I do.’ With his ready-to-wear, a beige terry cotton towel wrap skirt will become a meme for a week, but in a decade might be rewarded with a sharp reassessment. In years to come, the 3D-printed armour dress in resin that closed the couture show in July will have the space to speak beyond its immediate Joan of Arc campy largesse.

‘Everyone wants an instant success. I think that’s a big problem,’ says Demna. ‘Duchamp once said: “The danger is in pleasing an immediate public, the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for a public that will come 50 years or 100 years after your death. It is the ideal public – the right public – that I want.” That really spoke to me.’

Couture should transcend the everyday. It should yank you out of your inbox, your problems, your anxieties. For those of us who will never buy the clothes, or even see them in real life, we get 50 per cent of the experience. Demna says: ‘The silhouette, the volume, the three-dimensional process, the experience of wearing it – it’s crucial. Somebody who goes into the couture salon and tries on the pieces wouldn’t need to know why it is so much work because they can feel it. Visually, however, if we are talking about this retinal layer of fashion that’s about visual perception, couture is powerful. It makes you think about what is elegant. [It makes you ask] what is beauty?’

Couture should make us raise an eyebrow and gasp for air. ‘I can’t remember the last time I had that feeling,’ says Demna. ‘It’s very rare. It doesn’t happen to me when I go to an art exhibition and it should, but it doesn’t. I might love something, but not to the point where I’m breathless, awe-inspired.’

In October 2023, he travelled to Venice with his husband and frequent collaborator Loïck Gomez, a musician and composer who works under the moniker BFRND. Walking around the city one evening without any GPS reception, the couple realised they were lost. ‘I cannot say it was breathtaking, but that was one of those moments where I thought, “Wow, this is so beautiful”, almost like an imaginary world that is not imaginary at all.’ Similarly, after Balenciaga’s Fall 2024 show in LA in December 2023, Demna found himself overwhelmed by the intensity of the sunset across the Hollywood Hills.

Both moments arose spontaneously. They were respites from the demands and rigours of his job. ‘I’m a very curious person and I need that unknown territory to be able to be triggered to have an inspirational experience. And it is always related to the situations where I have no control. You cannot control a sunset – and that’s great.’

In 2023, Balenciaga returned to its original address at 10 Avenue George V, where Cristóbal Balenciaga established his Paris ateliers in 1937 and lived until retiring in 1968. Although the location had served as a flagship store in the decades since, the historical couture salon on the fourth floor had remained closed. Today, a near- perfect facsimile of the original, lined with white stucco arabesques, patinated light grey carpets and ‘ash-stained’ curtains, exists just above street level. ‘For me, it’s very important for it to feel like a special place,’ says Demna. ‘It is the same place where Cristóbal used to be... he would look out of the window and see the same trees. From that point of view, it is a very emotional space.’

It makes an enchanting backdrop for the couture shows. ‘I always knew that couture had this kind of magic to it, of being an experiential way of wearing clothes,’ he says. ‘I just wondered if it would still be like that. The world we live in is so oversaturated with information, colour, visuals. We’ve become numb to the beauty of the world. Why don’t we see the beauty anymore? We need it to survive as a human race. I don’t want to be numb to the sunset.’

A version of this article appears in the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

All looks from Balenciaga’s 52nd couture collection. Models: Bo Exters at Next Paris, Diego Torrealba at Success Models. Casting: Ikki Casting at The Art Board. Hair: Kazue Deki at Calliste Agency. Make-up: Marielle Loubet at Calliste Agency. Digi tech: Carole Durosoy. Photography assistants: Louis Dumetz, Hugo van Manen. Fashion assistant: Kris Bergfeldt. Post-production: Courtoisie Fashion.

balenciaga.com

Haute couture represents the very pinnacle of French style and savoir-faire. Such is its exclusivity, that only a handful of houses are granted membership by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode each year. Naturally, this makes for some of the most opulent runway spectacles of the season – dwarfing show sets, star-crammed front rows – but it also represents a chance to celebrate the poetry of fashion and dressmaking, with each hand-crafted garment often taking hours and hours of work to perfect.

This season has been typically transporting. At Chanel, it began with a lost button as Virginie Viard took us down a rabbit hole of confections inspired by the romance of dance, while at Dior Maria Grazia Chiuri presented a melange of richly crafted fabrics backdropped with a set by artist Isabella Ducrot. Meanwhile, at Alaïa, Pieter Mulier opened up the doors to his store for a tight-knit show – an expression of intimacy from the always-emotive designer. While John Galliano at Maison Margiela Artisanal provided a shuddering crescendo, his cast of corseted otherworldly creatures populated a dingy nightspot underneath Paris’ Pont Alexandre III.

Reported from Paris, the very best of Haute Couture Week S/S 2024, as it happened. 

The best of Haute Couture Week S/S 2024

Maison Margiela Artisanal

Leave it to John Galliano to end haute couture week on a shuddering crescendo, populating a subterranean nightspot underneath Paris’ Pont Alexandre III with an otherworldly parade of corseted creatures, who out of the darkness emerged like figures from a Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painting or one of Brassaï’s leering photographs (the latter, the designer noted, had been on the season’s mood board). The contorted figures – faces with a queasy, doll-like pallor by make-up artist Pat McGrath – tottered and hobbled through the space in the cinematic spectacle, which the designer said recalled ‘a moonlit wander along the Seine’, recalling the ‘eerie, rainy ambience of Paris’ (the show took place under the first full moon of the year, as if to conjure the spirits of the past). ‘What lies beneath the imprint of their clothes?’ Galliano asked.

Indeed, the show’s looks hinged on a kind of revelation: the glimpses of those impossibly cinched corsets, the layers of tulle and lace which exposed the nude body beneath, or the held-together overcoats and knits which suggested the opposite (the attempt to conceal, a grasp for modesty). Strange, bulbous looks seemed almost torn apart, and others appeared as though pairs of tights had been pulled taught over their surface, split and laddered. This was a nod, no doubt, towards house founder Martin Margiela’s signature mode of deconstruction. He was also recalled in the dressmaker's stitches that ran across pinched waist tailoring, which looked much like it was in construction on a mannequin. It ended with a note of uncanny sweetness: a series of blousy striped blue and white gowns, which recalled Fragonard’s shepherdesses, albeit, in a warped manner, hands and arms contorted like broken dolls. A ringlet-haired Gwendoline Christie was the offering’s final act, her iridescent gown revealing the contoured line of the corset beneath its silky layers. 

You could not help but remember the designer’s seminal haute couture presentations for Dior in the collection’s unbridled spectacle. Post-show, several of the attendees – who noted their first experience of fashion was catching sight of those Dior runways on television or in the pages of a magazine – said that this was a moment which took them back to the very beginning; it was Galliano’s invitation to fall in love with the fantasy of fashion all over again.

Fendi

To be a contemporary couturier means finding a constant balance between past and future: how do you utilise the historical medium to create something new? At Fendi, British designer Kim Jones looked towards his forebear – and perhaps the 21st-century’s most well-known couturier – Karl Lagerfeld for inspiration. ‘I was thinking about Karl Lagerfeld’s futurism with Fendi,’ said Jones, continuing an undercurrent of sci-fi which has pulsated through the week (beginning with Schiaparelli’s technology-adorned looks and viral ‘robo baby’). 

Here, this mood was more subdued, emerging in molten fabrications and metallic adornments across the languid, sinuous silhouettes which are becoming a hallmark of his tenure at the Italian house so far. ‘There is a humanism at the heart of this future; there’s the body, the silhouette within the silhouette, the person and the handwork of the couture,’ he elaborated. ‘The collection is about structure and decoration, where the two become indivisible. I wanted an idea of precision and emotion at once.’

Indeed, there was a clarity to the looks, which balanced architectural rigour – nipped waist tailored jackets and gilets; fitted croco leather dresses and elongated overcoats – with the flou of floating silk gazar column gowns and serpentine twisted knit dresses and bra tops. A mass of embellishment, meanwhile, showed off the incredible handwork of Fendi’s atelier – the final series of looks, adorned with thousands of beads, sequins and iridescent paillettes, conjured explosions of silver fireworks.

Valentino

Pierpaolo Piccioli titled his latest haute couture collection for Valentino ‘Le Salon’ – an ode, the designer said, to the vaunted salons of Paris’ maisons de couture, ‘the habitat of haute couture - a space of expectation and wonder.’ As such, he chose Valentino’s own haute couture salon to show the collection, a series of gilded rooms in the house’s headquarters on Place Vendôme. It spoke of Piccioli’s desire the return to the ‘timeless essence of haute couture’, its spiritual home, a space of both craft and imagination.

But if this marked a return to tradition – historically, couture collections were shown to clients in such salon spaces – Piccioli nonetheless imbued his haute couture creations with a sense of modernity and ease. Silhouettes were largely languid and unrestricted, while a series of tailored jackets and overcoats, worn with gently flared trousers and plunging vest tops, suggested riffs on everyday style (albeit in luxurious manner). Elsewhere, flourishes of decoration were an ode to craft: whether bouncing plumes of feathers, metallic petals which bloomed across sweeping opera coats, or a series of garments made to evoke exotic skins and furs (the ‘fur’ was actually ‘rouleax’ of silk organza, or hand-cut sequins which evoked the scales of an alligator).

‘The salon here is not a stage, but rather a cultural milieu, to valorise craft, to celebrate the act of creation,’ said Piccioli, via the collection notes. ‘It is a place to bear witness to beauty, therefore to experience humanity. It is the heart of haute couture.’

Giorgio Armani Privé

It was a typically opulent outing from Giorgio Armani, whose Privé collections – according to the equally opulent front row, clad in last season’s runway looks – attract a phalanx of international clients devoted to the designer’s pursuit of beauty. He achieves it not just through the languorous line which also runs through his Emporio and Giorgio ready-to-wear collections, but in the extraordinary flights of embellishment and embroidery, alongside rich jacquards, lace, and the iridescent fabrics which here wrapped the body and glimmered in the light. Indeed, by way of inspiration points, Mr Armani simply said that this was him ‘indulging in unexpected bursts of creativity’, which set the collection’s freewheeling mood (dresses that erupted into fronds of tulle, enormous plissé hats). Like last season, the designer also noted an ‘imagined journey from west to east’, here emerging in richly embroidered kimono-like robes.

Alaïa

Every garment in Pieter Mulier’s latest collection was constructed from a singular piece of yarn – an extraordinary feat of engineering which pays ode to house founder Azzedine Alaïa’s own architectural approach to dressmaking. Mulier noted that this yarn – a merino wool developed over a year alongside the knitwear and textile suppliers who work with the house – signalled a mood of reduction, of stripping back fashion to its essence. This did not mean simplicity, as the fluttering mille-feuille of layers, looping, sculptural gowns, and pom-pom-like fronds which emerged from sleeves and hems, were anything but.

Rather, Mulier said he was thinking about ‘less meaning more – about intimacy, about reducing to an essence, about finding a freedom and invention in that. It is a decision, a choice, not to minimise but to focus, to expand possibilities.’ Indeed, the endlessly looping twists of yarn represented the feeling of intimacy at the heart of Alaïa, of ‘circles of friends, of chosen family, an idea essential to the essence of Alaïa. It was there with Azzedine always, like a heartbeat, and it remains,’ continued Mulier. The mood was reflected in the show itself, which was held in the Alaïa store on Rue de Marignan to just a handful of attendees, who balanced on Mollo sofas by Philippe Malouin to watch the show.

Chanel

A somewhat surreal opening video saw the actress Margaret Qualley losing a button from her Chanel jacket, before being aided by Naomi Campbell to find its replacement (cue the appearance of enormous spools of thread and gleaming scissors in the short, which was directed by Dave Free and scored by Kendrick Lamar). As if by magic – just after an enormous recreation of the signature Chanel button had descended from the ceiling of the Grand Palais Ephémère – Qualley had leapt out of the screen and onto the runway, sporting the collection’s opening look.

It heralded the start of a refreshing, romantic collection from Virginie Viard, who looked to the button as a symbol – the 'jewels’ with which Gabrielle Chanel had adorned her original jackets, and treated always with the ‘utmost respect’.  ’Chanel brings out emotions in me that I use for inspiration, collection after collection... my mission is to find new ways to tell its most beautiful stories,’ elaborated Viard, who used it as a jumping off point to explore the ’physical poetry’ of ballet and dance.

As such, the collection – which arrived in a sugared-almond palette of white and pale pink – was filled with flourishes that suggested both romance and movement, whether the fronds of tulle that emerged from the sleeve of a jacket or as a kind of pannier at the hip, or the layered body suits (on which extraordinary embellished bustiers sat) and white tights, which suggested the liberation of the dancer’s rehearsal room. ‘I often think about dance, it’s an important theme at Chanel,’ explained Viard. ‘The House is close to its institutions, to its choreographers and dancers, and we create costumes for the ballet. I have tried to bring together the power and finesse of bodies and clothes in a very ethereal collection, composed of tulle, ruffles, pleats and lace.’

Dior

Maria Grazia Chiuri largely eschewed strictly defined themes for an exploration of what the Italian designer called ‘aura’. It speaks to the mood she has conjured during her tenure at the house so far, where despite recalling moments from history – or indeed the house archive – she defined a distinct expression of contemporary femininity.

Here, the show was backdropped by a work by artist Isabella Ducrot titled Big Aura, a series of large-scale clothing silhouettes that in their construction recalled the warp and weft of cloth. Indeed, it was fabric – the medium of the couturier – which took centre stage here, with rich moments of moiré, meeting the sheen of iridescent fabrics and the lush textures of velvet. Of moiré – a fabric for which Christian Dior, she noted, had a particular infatuation – she said it ’unfurls over winter like a wave.’

For the silhouettes, Chiuri looked towards La Cigale, a dress that first appeared in Christian Dior’s A/W 1952 collection (there, it was also in moiré). A definitive Dior silhouette – narrowed at the waist and cantilevered at the hip to shape the posture – the strict line was reinterpreted with new ease by the designer, across gowns that wrapped around the body and gently nipped at the waist, or a series of hourglass tailored jackets worn with free-flowing plissé skirts.

Schiaparelli

Daniel Roseberry’s collections from Parisian couture house Schiaparelli have come to herald the arrival of the week in the city. And, they always have a star-studded guest list befitting the occasion (this season, Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya and Hunter Schafer all took their places front row). With Roseberry – who cut his teeth at Thom Browne, another designer fond of fantasy (and who made his haute couture debut in 2023) – you never quite know what to expect (an internet-ubiquitous S/S 2023 collection saw enormous replicas of animal heads used as adornment).

This season was no exception, with Roseberry presenting a cosmic collection inspired by outer space and sci-fi tropes – all the way down to a ’robo baby’ constructed from what appeared to be mounds of gleaming discarded tech (it was carried down the runway by model Maggie Maurer, who noted it was lighter than her own baby). A gown adorned with old mobile phones and compact disks had a similar effect. ’As art – and nature – teaches us again and again, the things and ideas that seem diametrically opposed to each other can also combine to make startling chimeras, objects composed of familiar parts that, when united, create something unexpected and new,’ explained the designer.

Elsewhere, gowns were cut with a typically sculptural line, whether richly embroidered and reaching high above the head on one side, or complete with enormous fan-like breastplates crafted from patchworked black lace. ’[It is] a series of profiles both familiar and not – part human, part something else,’ Roseberry continues. ‘And, therefore, totally Schiaparelli.’

Toteme

Swedish fashion brand Toteme has been going from strength to strength in recent months, which culminated with the opening of a sleek new London outpost on Mount Street late last year (the latest in a slew of openings, which span New York, Shanghai, Seoul, and of course Stockholm). Choosing to show off-schedule at Haute Couture Week, founders Elin Kling and Karl Lindman invited an intimate gathering of press and associates to view the A/W 2024 collection on a stark white-backdropped runway, which recalled the 1990s runway shows that have no doubt been an inspiration to the pair’s stripped-back stylings.

Indeed, Kling (who is creative director) noted a honing-in on ’line, cut and shape’ in an astute collection that spanned gently tapered wool overcoats, featherweight knits which wrapped sensually around the neckline (a silhouette which reappeared later in sinuous dresses), and a beautifully cut slew of gowns that closed the show, either hovering gently off the shoulder or knotted and adorned with crochet flowers. ‘Designed for real-life situations, the collection comprises a highly curated edit that explores and consolidates the Toteme codes,’ the designer noted. ‘Ultimately, the collection comprises the perfect combination of styles for a refined look.’

‘Forever Valentino’, a new exhibition in Doha, Qatar, marks the Italian house’s most comprehensive exhibition yet, leading viewers on a colourful journey through Valentino past and present with over 200 pieces which span its beginnings in 1959 to the current tenure of creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli. Held at M7, Msheireb Downtown Doha’s design hub, it also coincides with the continuing birthday celebrations of house founder Valentino Garavani who turned 90 this past May.

‘The title of the exhibition says it all. Forever,’ Piccioli tells Wallpaper*. ‘The value of maison Valentino is timeless, it reveals its authenticity by constantly evolving. 60 years of this experience were made possible by the work of a couturier named Valentino Garavani, whose vision is still meaningful for today. Our conscious heritage has always moved forward, towards the future and the complexity of humanity. This balance moved my aesthetic idea of the exhibition, which is a perspective, not a retrospective, an act of love.’

’Forever Valentino’ at Doha’s M7 hub

‘Forever Valentino’ is curated by artistic director of the New Museum New York, Massimilano Gioni and fashion critic Alexander Fury, in collaboration with Piccioli. The panoramic installation – featuring mannequins by La Rosa, known for its made-in-Italy recycled and sustainable designs – features both recognisable and rarely seen pieces, designed over the years for Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Kennedy and Zendaya, among others. Valentino’s home city of Rome is a particular focus, evoked in the exhibition’s scenography, but also in the pieces themselves which trace the house’s roots in Romanesque design, architecture and la dolce vita.

‘The legacy of Valentino Garavani – and therefore the meaning of Valentino – is to celebrate beauty, in all its incarnations, from every walk of life and every period of time,’ adds Fury. ‘That noble quest, that ceaseless search for and celebration of beauty to better the world is, for me, Forever Valentino.’

The collaboration comes as part of Qatar Creates, a year-round cultural movement aimed at championing arts, culture and fashion in Qatar led by Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, sister to the Emir of Qatar, who is tasked with boosting Qatar’s cultural programmes. Earlier this week, the Fashion Trust Arabia Prize 2022 also took place in Doha, celebrating young fashion talent from the MENA region, for which Piccioli was a judge.

Forever Valentino runs at Gallery 1 and 2, M7, in Msheireb Downtown Doha, from 28 October 2022 to 1 April 2023.

valentino.com

Ours is an age where fashion collections are admired and double-tapped on Instagram more widely than they are worn. Of course, if you’re as canny a designer as Kim Jones is, you can do good things with ’grammability. Jones spent seven years at Louis Vuitton ushering in a smart, sports-luxe approach – his influence can be seen in every tailored trackpant, every bum bag slung diagonally across the chest. But now, as menswear artistic director at Dior, he’s taking a new tack, learning to apply the majesty of couture to the masculine wardrobe.

At Dior, Jones is schooling Gen Z on the art of craft. He has drawn inspiration from archive pieces dating back to the 1950s and the couture techniques of the 70-year-old house are at the forefront of its new-look ready-to-wear men’s line. His debut, S/S19 show for the house included a tailored, wraparound, single-button jacket named ‘Tailleur Oblique’. ‘We were looking at women’s couture and with that comes this elegance,’ he says. What worked for womenswear in the 1950s, he adds, can be applied to a lot of menswear now. He sees his role as editor of custom-made codes, from the curve of the house’s classic 1947 ‘Bar’ jacket to the floral decoration in the palest grey and pink.

The ideas behind his application of high craft to the new collection were rooted in objects that Christian Dior handled every day: ‘I looked at everything from his homes to his childhood, his time as a gallerist before setting up his label,’ Jones says. Floral patterns were drawn from Dior’s personal dining service held in the Christian Dior archive at Granville, France, which were photographed and hand-drawn before they were translated into three-dimensional embroidery applied all over a collared shirt. The hand-beading took eight people three weeks to complete.

Jones has taken on traditional elements that then reveal themselves in modern ways. What looks like a simple lace vest is an ornate piece that took the atelier one month to develop. A traditional silk gauze was given a nylon warp to lend a technical finish to the surface; a fil coupé jacquard was then applied, adding clusters of flowers inspired by Dior’s crockery. ‘The house of Dior was only ten years of his life,’ Jones says. ‘His loves and passions were nature, art, design. [I’ve taken] all those things and mixed them together. ’

The toile de Jouy pattern from the interior of Dior’s original store at Paris’ 30 Avenue Montaigne, designed by Victor Grandpierre, has been resurrected as a new signature. It is used on a piece that combines a collarless shirt attached to the inside of a Saharan blouson. ‘Twice the material is pieced together so that the toile de Jouy matches at every seam,’ Jones says. ‘Having the atelier and being able to use couture techniques is a different way of working [for me]. We see things much more in person at Dior. Things are made in the building, which means you have more time to think about them.’

At least 15 people were involved in the creation of a sheer tulle shirt onto which laser-cut feathers were applied. The couture approach is about tactility, know-how, handwork. ‘I’m learning about things that excite me and I want people to see them too. I think a generation growing up looking mostly online are used to seeing things in 2D. Now they want to see them in real life.’

Jones’ work today has a lightness and an ease that comes from sportswear, yet it is rendered with fearsome opulence. In his 1954 book The Glass of Fashion, the photographer Cecil Beaton talked to Dior about the designer’s role in taking note of – and shaping – contemporary life. ‘The atmosphere of the times is an essentially unknowable element, but it is very important,’ Dior advised Beaton. Throughout his 16-year career, Jones has consistently measured and moulded the mood. And as screen dependence threatens to atrophy our sense of touch, the rarefied world of haute couture is a reminder of the dexterity of the human hand. Sure, it is extravagant, elusive, but its results suit social media’s appetite for spectacle. And the textures and techniques in Jones’ debut remind us of our own physicality. It reminds us of fabric touching the skin. And the hands that make our clothes. §

As originally featured in the March 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*240)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Dior website

Dior: For A/W 2015-16, Raf Simons invited us into Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights reimagined by Bureau Betak. Referencing the Adam and Eve tale of innocence and temptation, Simons' fashion vision was executed through the gaze of the Flemish and French masters of both art and couture craft, and all housed within a geometrically paned greenhouse-cum-church-cum nightclub that was painted with pointillist dots

Dior: Juxtaposing themes of depth and light, richly draped Vermeer-esque cape coats and billowing, smock-like embroidered sheaths looked like they'd walked off an Old Master's canvas. This flowing chiffon silhouette was later chopped into hand painted baby doll dresses jewelled with 'cannage' gilets, offering a modern spin on archaic chain mail.

Dior: Under the illustrated panes, red carpet dressing took a similarly charmed approach, as side-less gowns - secured to the body with gilt gold chains - appeared as if an offering to king or master. 'I was intrigued by the idea of the forbidden fruit, and what that meant now,' Simons explained in his show notes, 'The idea of purity and innocence versus luxury and decadence and how that is encapsulated by the idea of Dior's garden - no longer a flower garden but a sexual one.' 

Fendi: Set against the imposing backdrop of one of Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico's most famous works, Karl Lagerfeld presented his first Haute Fourrure collection for the Roman furrier, courting quiet controversy at the Theatre des Champs-Élysées and marking the designer's 50th year at the house. The Art Deco building lent a particularly theatrical stage upon which to flex Fendi's masterful fur pedigree; the house even provided Fendi-issued opera glasses to offer a more intimate viewing of the collection's finer details (fur corsages included).

Fendi: With both the Arnault and Fendi families watching from the venue's boxes, sable, chinchilla, lynx and mink pelts were finessed into myriad graphic patterns and sumptuous swirling combinations. Each exit, some festooned with feathers, others spliced with transparent panels, was a testament to the furrier's unparalleled expertise and warranted arrival on the couture calendar.

Chanel: Karl Lagerfeld transported his A/W Chanel couture show to a private casino within the Grand Palais, complete with a live high-rollers blackjack mise en scène (decorated with celebrity friends of the house), roulette tables and even Chanel branded slot machines. As chips changed hands, Lagerfeld's 'neo tomboys', parading about the card tables in 3D printed skirt suits, debuted the house's new high-tech 'selective laser sintering' technique, utilised in unison with Chanel's petites mains to fashion the collection.

Chanel: Also circumnavigating tradition was Lagerfeld's 2015 couture bride, resplendent in an off-white silk tuxedo and finished with a simple tulle veil, which spoke more of a Vegas-style elopement than the current trend for gala weddings that are littering our Instagram feeds

Viktor & Rolf: With their models donning gilt framed canvases, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren reprised their very first 1998 haute couture show's Living Art concept, taking to the stage for a performance piece that saw the designers undressing and hanging their works live within the Palais de Tokyo.

Viktor & Rolf: Titled Wearable Art, the morphing collection, grounded by blue smocks, blurred the baroque with action painting techniques, resulting in a fittingly unhinged presentation that was surreal to behold. Just as art imitates life, a piece from the collection is soon to be hung within long-standing Viktor & Rolf collector Han Nefkens' Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Schiaparelli: New creative director Bertrand Guyon (an alumnus of Valentino and Givenchy) looked to Elsa Schiaparelli's early years for his debut collection, which saw its founder's iconic motifs liberally lavished throughout. Schiaparelli's ES initials were monogrammed onto a frilled ivory blouse, just as her preferred iris bloom was patchworked into hyper-hued fur coats. The founder's Dali telephone powder compact was furthermore reinvented as a clutch bag

Schiaparelli: Jewelled brocade made up much of the show's strong tailoring offering, while Elsa Schiaparelli's riding culottes were re-cut in fringed plaid as Guyon's eveningwear ranged from a jewel strapped black plunging velvet column to a suitably 'shocking' pink diaphanous gown that will no doubt be swiftly snapped up for future red carpets.

Giambattista Valli: The Roman designer only conceives dresses that make an entrance, from his ruffled tulle gowns with two-metre-plus trains (this season in electric orange) to his baby doll minis patchworked with jewelled, laser-cut lace. This season was no different.

Giambattista Valli: That said, it was A/W's quieter tunic and Capri pant looks - one fringed in feathers from the knee, others entirely jewelled - that offered an intriguing break from the season's hyper sweetened, fairytale flou, which saw experimentations with volume via puffball hems and Regency-era trailing gowns. 

Jean Paul Gaultier: The French designer tripped back to his marinière striped signature and the sandy shores of Brittany for A/W - no doubt in response to the retrospective exhibition that has finally arrived back in Paris after a four year world tour. Gold thread embroidery emboldened velvet admiral's jackets, as Breton striped hosiery and knitwear anchored the season's particularly theatrical collection, that concluded with a bagpipe salute.

Dice Kayek: Turkish designer Ece Ege presented a 1970s spin on tuxedo dressing - from her show's opening Le Smoking tail coat to a backless bib top and bow-tie mini skirt - before rainbow hued crystals covered a disco's worth of mini crini dresses, which epitomised the collection's hedonistic theme.

Dice Kayek: Winter's nocturnal rhapsody recalled scenes from Paris' late night Warholian den Le Palace, as Ege revived the eras stroboscopic spirit - all the way down to the models' 1970s issue platforms and a show backdrop that saw a giant mirror ball hanging from the ceiling of Les Arts Décoratifs.

Elie Saab: Nirvana's Come As You Are is as far from an obvious choice for a couture show soundtrack as it gets, especially for a designer overwhelmingly known for high voltage glamour and femininity. That said, Cobain's strained lyrics made for a satisfying contrast to Saab's regal, gold dipped A/W collection, that saw his models crowned with molten Byzantium headpieces as their waists were nipped into glittering goddess dresses. The show was actually a personal nod to the gold wedding dress that Saab had himself designed for his wife Claudine, 25 years ago to the day, which made for a poetic quarter-century love letter.

Armani Privé: This season, Mr Armani was thinking pink - Schiaparelli's shocking pink, even - with a collection that, in addition to colour, was dominated by a exploration of texture; tinsel-like filaments electrified cocktail dresses, while bugle beaded fringes finished bustiers, gowns and tassel belts, reinforcing the rebellious theme.

Ulyana Sergeenko: The Russian designer loves to weave a story from her homeland into her collections' narrative and this season that meant a tale of post-Revolution Soviet communal living, which saw multiple families sharing rooms within the once-grand subdivided apartments of Saint Petersburg. The lawn of her A/W presentation space, Paris' Mona Bismarck American Center, was decorated to loosely reflect this eclectic union of mismatched tastes and levels of society.

Ulyana Sergeenko: Here, the designer's A/W muse found herself awake and listless in the early hours of New Years Day 1937 - the only celebratory day in the Communist calendar that didn't mark a victory or the glory of work. In general, there is something innately nostalgic in Sergeenko's designs, and this collection built upon boudoir-inspired, albeit slightly unhinged, tea dresses and busty sheaths, accompanied by three-quarter-length sleeved furs that could of come from a great aunt's closet. Best in show was a Yelets bobbin lace dress (named after the Russian town where it was made) that took a village of local artisans four months to fashion.

Atelier Versace: This season, Donatella Versace interlaced the house's insatiable air of sexuality with a more romantic, free spirited approach. The designer played with volume and deconstruction, primarily patchworking jewelled lace and hand frayed chiffon sheaths held together with vines of beaded flowers or metal couture 'staples'. From the girls' floral headpieces to their pleated and teased apart gowns, there was an unravelled 'festival' freedom felt throughout. But being a Versace show, there was also an abundance of chain and crystal mesh bustier dresses mingling with her encrusted fil coupé sheaths, floating from their velvet boned corsets and bell sleeves.

'I don't work with a still image,' ponders French designer Bouchra Jarrar, herself a picture of Parisian elegance, poised in the salon of her 1st district studio. 'I am a woman, I have a certain feeling for things – for the body in movement – and I think that is integrated into my work.' Such a simple interpretation belies the masterful technique of her eponymous collection, one the 44-year-old designer began in 2010 after a stint at Lacroix and close to a decade at Balenciaga alongside Nicolas Ghesquiere.

Known for the feminine touch that she brings to ultra-tailored pantsuits, scooped and structure cocoon coats and figure-hugging jackets in custom tweeds, Jarrar's haute-Parisian style is a quiet outlier to the unabashed glamour that drowns the couture world. She is a subtle colourist, drawn to monochromes and soft, blush shades sometimes touched with metallic sparkle, and her embroidery (by Lesage, no less) is used sparingly. The result is a startling modernity, haute couture translated as daywear and a cult following to match.

'I understand marketing; however for my brand I don't like the idea of projecting myself through a fantasy image,' explains Jarrar, whose dedication to her craft and its purity runs through all elements of her independent business. 'I don't show one thing in order to sell something else. What I show is pure technique, and I sell the same pieces, with the same quality.'

Since creating her haute couture and ready-to-wear lines, Jarrar has employed a full time tailor with whom she has previously worked for over two decades, allowing her to evolve the exquisite tailoring and more urban elements (the perfecto jacket and the cigarette pant, for example) that are the core of her business. 'Haute couture gave me the chance to create my own fabrics, which is something I still find extraordinary. It's something I now do in my ready-to-wear collection too, but in a more industrial way.' Those fabrics have become something of a calling card for the designer, whose expert slicing of patent leather zipped against lurex-shot houndstooth is (to the initiated) instantly recognisable, whilst her louche take on the 'Le Smoking' speaks a little more softly.

'I'm not someone who works with fantasies of the past, but I respect the past, and I know it very well,' muses Jarrar, whose references to the grand traditions of her craft remain evident, no matter how radical or pragmatic her cut. 'The history of fashion is very important to me, it feeds me, but today we have the chance to translate something new from today's society, from today's women.' And with her haute couture collection for A/W 2015 showing later in the courtyard of a prestigious Parisian college, there is no doubt Jarrar will leave her ladies waiting no longer for their next sophisticated step into her feminine, sartorial universe. 

Modern is a word that is rarely emphasised in the high and haughty world of the Paris Couture - a bi-annual fashion extravaganza where adjectives like elaborate, fantastical and extreme tend to fit more comfortably into the vocabulary. An adventure in fashion finery, the couture shows are renowned for their unique ability to push our imaginations (and pocket books) to the limit - even if these one-of-a-kind creations will only ever be worn by a very privileged few. That said, change was certainly afoot this A/W season with many of the most prominent houses presenting collections that centred around a couture interpretation of everyday clothing archetypes. For starters both Mr Armani at Armani Privé (left) and Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel (right) opened their shows with a series of shorts

Giambattista Valli paired his ombre-dyed ball skirts with collared shirts (centre), while Raf Simons at Christian Dior (left) and Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino (right) utilised turtlenecks and trousers as a backdrop to their cerebral century shuffles. This elegant juxtaposition drew the spotlight to the contemporary notion of wearability that somewhat unexpectedly crept into the couture equation. No longer needing to defend couture's relevance to their packed audiences, there was a freedom to the A/W season with maisons from Valentino to Chanel even showing their wares paired back with flat sandals - further extending a modern ease to fashion's highest art form

Atelier Versace: Donatella Versace opened the proceedings with a showcase that spelt out haute with a heightened Italian sex appeal. Rock 'n' Roll with a futuristic bent, the Matrix-esque collection was centred around an inky midnight blue colour palette, the show awash with open-boned corsets, daring splits, fringed leather and gold buckle hardware - Versace's flashy fastening of choice

Atelier Versace: Pushing couture conventions even further, the designer debuted hybrid one-legged skirt suits, a crystal encrusted silk tee for her hip-flashing contemporary devotees, and the latest edition of a micro crystal Swarovski mesh that Gianni pioneered 30 years ago

Schiaparelli: For his second season at the house of Schiaparelli, Marco Zanini explored the juxtaposition between couture's flamboyant artisanal craftsmanship and the more urban side of life that founder Elsa Schiaparelli was so fond of 'dressing up' in her collections

Schiaparelli: Fusing the ordinary with the extraordinary, New York City rats and Central Park squirrels from Schiaparelli's former hunting ground, crawled across jacquard silk gowns. Church tower pigeons settled on a bridal bustle (appropriately titled Les pigeons de Notre-Dame), as an ostrich feathered bolero was offered a similar 'grounding' - its plumage coated in Glycerine to resemble the monkey fur that Schiaparelli had a fondness for

Schiaparelli: This season Zanini was far from afraid to dig into the house's archives, designing a night butterfly print for Schiaparelli's 1938 day butterfly, while her shocking pink hue was back with a vengeance - most notably on a backless 1930s-style velvet sheath finished with a matching rose corsage

Schiaparelli: The addition of Stephen Jones' bespoke hats, glittering jewels and flat, croc boots that offered a Gothic edge in their pronounced point, completed the eclectic triumph that eloquently spoke Schiaparelli's unique lexicon

Christian Dior: Walking through the classical gardens of Paris' Musee Rodin, we were soon transported into a circular spaceship, designed as a palette cleanser for Raf Simons' impending time travel

Christian Dior: Designed by Eric Chauvin, the space's mirrored walls were obscured by white Phalaenopsis orchids that popped out from hidden openings masterminded by Simons' florist friend Mark Colle

Christian Dior: As for the collection, Mr Simons searched for providence, looking both backwards and forwards to prepare for what would come next. 'I started to think "what is modern?"' he explained in his show notes. 'What I was attracted to was an idea of architectural construction - that is a very Dior attitude - and how the foundations of one era are based on another, how the future is based on the past. That is what I found fascinating'

Christian Dior: Simons' response was a controlled cross-section of ideas drawn from eight different eras starting with bustled, 18th century silk gowns modernised in parachute silk, followed by embroidered silk astronaut suits and encrusted Rococo evening coats - paired back with classical clothing archetypes, including roll-neck knits and wide-legged trousers. 'The challenge was to bring the attitude of contemporary reality to something very historical; bringing easiness to something that could be perceived as theatrical. It is the attitude that matters,' he concluded

Giambattista Valli: The Italian couturier certainly has a captive audience in these parts, and mostly thanks to his tight grip on classically elegant gowns that would make any contemporary woman's heart sing

Giambattista Valli: The designer's success lies in the timeless beauty and endearing femininity of his clothes, which he took a step further this season marrying the purist white shirt with a feather-like, tiered ball skirt

Giambattista Valli: Opening the show with Riviera stripes fit for Grace Kelly, circa To Catch a Thief, daisies soon sprouted from transparent cocktail contenders, with each girl sporting a Slim Aarons' set turban and sunglasses to keep out the glare of the sun (and flashing light bulbs) - no doubt encountered during regular turns along the Promenade de la Croisette

Chanel: Karl Lagerfeld is never one to linger long on any one idea, so it's fitting that just when we'd come to expect another arena-style spectacular, he set fire to grandiose set theatrics in favour of a more intimate show space crowned by a gilt Baroque frame, and a concrete fireplace modelled after a Brutalist 1930s Le Corbusier Parisian apartment that once took his fancy, complete with 'digital flames'

Chanel: Wiping the slate clean, this season Lagerfeld was primarily concerned with new modes of construction, explored through an active silhouette, cemented by tour de force bike pants (or bloomers - tying into the season's decorative Baroque accents), which peeped out from under skirts and long-line jackets recast as geometric 'tiled' tweed

Chanel: Similarly modern was Lagerfeld's abandonment of stitched seams, superseded by moulded jackets and coats that were each sculpted from one single piece of bias-cut fabric. He also toyed with the literal use of concrete - embroidered into fabric and even perforated like Airtex

Chanel: Just as upwardly mobile was his choice of footwear, finishing each look with ribbon-wrapped sandals tied with an elegant bow at the ankle. No doubt the ideal footwear for a pregnant bride, such as Ashleigh Good, who closed the show in the last of a series of puritan white gowns, finished with gilt brocade or gold-dipped buttons.

Roger Vivier: A 45-minute turn around 'Henri Matisse: the Cut-Outs' at London's Tate Modern, en route to the Eurostar was all Bruno Frisoni needed to inspire his demi-couture S/S 2015 Rendez-Vous collection

Roger Vivier: Moved by Matisse's leaf and coral gouaches découpés shapes, the creative director began sketching during his journey back to Paris, where he later unearthed Mr Vivier's original collages completed in the 1990s, while the house's founder was in his late 80s

Roger Vivier: The result is wearable art in more ways than one

Ulyana Sergeenko: Designer and couture client Ulyana Sergeenko looked to her native Russia and its revolutionary transition, from the fall of the Tsars to its re-emergence as the 'modern' USSR, for her fifth collection

Ulyana Sergeenko: Musing on the remnants of a crumbling old world order, Sergeenko added a sensual twist courtesy of cinched waistlines, Latex-look leather finishes and her signature pointed corsets projecting superhero strength, while handkerchief headwear, wheat motif embroideries and bib gowns nodded to the peasantry

Ulyana Sergeenko: Pointy, pleated skater skirts teamed with patterned mohair jumpers (inspired by Ukrainian constructivist artist Kazimir Malevich), conjured up visions of late 1970s skiwear that lingered in the Eastern Bloc long after the Cold War...

Ulyana Sergeenko: ...before boudoir-ready gowns promised a more liberal future

Armani Privé: 'Red, white and black from a lacquer box' was Mr Armani's starting point for a season that opened with practical short suits - no doubt intended for the new generation of couture clients that he'd collected within his Theatre National de Chaillot show space. Similarly abbreviated, demurely ruffled cape coats followed, as Mr Armani experimented with all matter of textures, before we started seeing spots

Armani Privé: An enamel red fringed evening coat and a series of cropped 1950s-style strapless dresses were party perfect, before he got caught up in netted tulle ball silhouettes that resembled huge carnation flowers

Armani Privé: However, Mr Armani soon untangled his creativity, offering a series of decadent tiered evening gowns fit for a Spanish princess; their matching veils dotted with giant paillettes or tiny blooms resembling bobbing baby's-breath

Bulgari: Not content with the traditional salon jewellery presentation that frequent the couture calendar, Bulgari transformed Michelin starred chef Jean-Pierre Vigato's Apicius restaurant grounds into a field of white roses to unveil its MVSA high jewellery collection. Flower designer Jeff Leatham, famous for the tilted blooms that decorate Paris' Hotel George V, went to work on the 19th century château's gardens installing some 2,800 upright avalanche roses to create a decadent mise-en-scène.

Bulgari: The house's mega-watt jewels were then left to freely roam around the restaurant's 8th arrondissement grounds on model partygoers.

Maison Martin Margiela Artisanal: Uniting found treasures ranging from a 1930s children's party costume to nickel coins salvaged from a Brussels flee market, Maison Martin Margiela's Artisanal collection always serves as a sustainable flight of fantasy. Resurrecting and recasting vintage pieces into new guises, each garment is made by hand within Margiela's Paris atelier

Maison Martin Margiela Artisanal: This season, the line-up included a Surrealist lobster that landed atop a silken bustier and a 1949 souvenir bomber jacket from Tokyo re-imagined as embroidered silk dresses and teamed with jewelled masks inspired by Fabergé eggs

Maison Martin Margiela Artisanal: Brocade from 1880 was similarly cut into cheeky asymmetric dresses, while those tarnished coins adorned a transparent strapless gown. Here, anything old that fuels the maison's imagination can be new again

Jean Paul Gaultier: Monsieur Gaultier certainly got the blood pumping during his A/W couture show that matched Elvira 'mistress of the dark' with an Eyes Wide Shut sensuality. This was a presentation of extremes: power and pleasure, leather and lace, hooded capes and barely-there transparency, mega makeup and severe hair - the latter of which was teased high, and then left sashaying from behind like wild horsetails.

Jean Paul Gaultier: Dominated by a palette of blood red, jet black and Swarovski crystal glitz, the show was as dark as it was decadent - the runway lit by dripping red candles on blackened candelabras decreeing Gaultier's witching hour. If you didn't tweak to the theme all you needed were the show notes: cue the first look, 'Dahlia Noir', look two, 'Morticcia', 'Black Sabbath', 'Danse Macabre', and 'True Blood' to follow.

Jean Paul Gaultier: One model sported a transparent cloak that did little to conceal her Swarovski crystal body bands, while couture-weight parkas were cut from micro crystals, as a velvet column dress was edged in white pearls. The precious beads were also painstakingly strung from the end of the model's noir mane. But then this is couture, after all, where designers' deepest desires are expected to roam wild.

Vionnet: Renowned for his technical expertise with high construction shapes, Hussein Chalayan took a three-dimensional approach to Vionnet's demi-couture line for A/W. Three strong silhouettes leapt out from the runway show held within the crumbling, graffitied grounds of Paris' École des Beaux-Arts. The first involved spot cut-outs, laced with Madeleine Vionnet's historic sunray pleating

Vionnet: The second was built on an external 3D spine that circumvented gowns as though drafted as an architectural extension, while the third swept up a curtain of draped silk, which was elegantly gathered to one side in dualist hues of nude and steel

Repossi: There's no doubt that Gaia Repossi has transformed the storied fine jewellery scene with her contemporary spin, and the Parisian's latest 'Serti Sur Vide' collection further served to redefine this space.

Repossi: Presented within Hotel d'Evreux, a stones throw from her Place Vendôme studio, this season Repossi opened up her cult Berbère rings to create the illusion of stones floating suspended in mid-air.

Repossi: The same light hand was extended to the lattice-like lines of her Bauhaus-inspired 'Serti Sur Vide' cuffs - their toffee-thin, golden grid dotted with diamond carats and irregular lines of sparkling pave.

Valentino: Presented beneath arches of forest greens within the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli's collection laid out an essay in classicism for A/W, pairing rich textures with simple Romanesque silhouettes

Valentino: The elongated collection was united by recurring leather lacings that criss-crossed the body - be it on a backless cashmere knit or a toga-inspired gown - casting the bare back as the focal point of the collection. Not that A/W was in any way short on couture poetry - one coat was crafted from an 17th century tapestry, while laces were laminated and jewelled to fairy-tale success

Valentino: There was a monastic grounding to the collection that was styled back with flat-laced sandals, which echoed the pared-back purity of the house's Pre-Raphaelite beauties

Viktor & Rolf: The Amsterdam-based duo closed the couture collections with a pointed musing on red carpet dressing. Ordinarily, this would involve beads, sequins and certainly rolls of silk de chine. But here we were, of course, in for a Viktor & Rolf twist with designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren envisaging their starlets wearing the red carpet as well as walking it. Cue short dresses (carpet isn't as feather-light as silk) tied and twisted into giant knots and bows. The show was a witty reminder not to take everything… including the Paris Couture… too seriously

The start of the year is a crucial time in the luxury world, as fine jewellery and watch brands unveil their preview collections. The SIHH (Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie) in Geneva is the first major watch fair of the year, with a focus on brands owned by the Richemont group, such as Cartier, IWC and Ralph Lauren. Meanwhile, the haute Paris (a necklace by Chanel is pictured here) use Couture Week as a launch pad for a selection of fine jewellery collections. The demand for diamond-set and coloured gemstone designs is undoubtedly driving a new wave of creativity in watch and jewellery design. Here are our highlights from this year's previews

The Chanel name is as synonymous with a classic strand of pearls as it is with the little black jacket. This year, its fine jewellery maison offered a new take on pearls with its abstracted classicism. The result is big, baroque strands, gradated colour palettes, giant tassels and cool, precious metal elements

The 1970s was a particularly creative period in watch design, not least because fine jewellers and watchmakers collaborated on dazzling, glamorous pieces that appealed to the disco-obsessed jetset crowd. This spectacular one-of-a-kind high jewellery wristwatch by Cartier pays homage to that intensely creative era with an octagonal morganite of 143.99 carats – the undoubted star of this horological show

The Boucheron Quatre ring is ten years old this year. This four-in-one ring, designed for men and women, is Boucheron's homage to its home city: the narrow double rings on one rim represent togetherness and love; the diamonds reflect the City of Light tag; the ring of square 'nails' directly references the Clous de Paris street paving, while the grosgrain pattern on the other rim symbolises Paris' couture heritage. Two 'Radiant' editions, in yellow and white gold, have been added this year

Boucheron creative director Claire Choisne's playful approach to jewellery is similarly summed up in the house's new Quatre cuff, which was presented in plain gold and pavé versions. The light, geometric frame shows an increasingly fashionable take on high jewellery

Victoire de Castellane's La Mini D de Dior design is a contemporary classic, presented this year as the perfect accessory to this season's gauzy metallics: white gold, yellow gold and rose gold wrist straps

Despite showing a set of fully paved pieces, the Roman fine jeweller is in its element when toying with the graphic possibilities of coloured gemstones, as its new high jewellery necklaces show. Bulgari's take for Winter is a light-filled one; here, turquoise, aquamarine, sapphire beads, amethysts and diamonds have the effect of prisms of colour refracting through an iceberg

Carved gemstones are a Mughal tradition but in Bulagri's leafen necklace (pictured left), the sunny combinations gives it a Mediterranean feel. This pink-gold necklace contains turquoise, peridots, citrine quartz, rubellites, amethysts, aquamarine, mandarin garnet and diamonds. Right: The four seasons inspired this piece, composed from pink gold, tourmalines, amethysts and spessartite, which together offer an autumnal feel

Some watchmakers have a tendency to create high jewellery pieces in dainty little shapes with a pretty aesthetic. But that's not the Audemars Piguet way. This timepiece, with its abstracted forms and impressively sizeable dial (28.5mm), is perfect proof. The design is determined by two diamond ribbons, forming a classic Greek key motif, while the inspiration is the movement of the stars at night and, in particular, the stars as they move across the Vallée de Joux – the home of Audemars Piguet and the natural habitat of Swiss watchmaking

There's a real emphasis on high watchmaking at No. 12 Place Vendôme and, each year, Chaumet presents twelve exquisitely coloured decorative timepieces. So. here we have a garden scene depicted in opalescent mother-of-pearl, peachy orange and blue enamel, pink opal, turquoise and blue sapphire

High fashion's steady march into haute joaillerie and horlogerie gathers pace - and confidence - in the hands of Louis Vuitton. The Emprise collection reflects the design codes and materials of the traditional Louis Vuitton trunk - composed of beech wood, brass hardware and canvas

And so, this season practical becomes precious as amethysts, smoky quartz and diamonds are fashioned into watches, octagonal pendants rings and bracelets, all precisely studded with tiny, fine-gold nails

Art Deco lines are a regular design tick in Ralph Lauren's watches. This year's high jewellery offering makes no bones about it and is all the better for its literal 1920s take

Swiss jeweller Piaget is changing track: colour is the new focus, while a bolder narrative determines stronger shapes

There's a new modernity to these pieces, with various glossy cuts, sweet-like hues and satin ribbon adding a casual feel. This necklace features brilliant-cut diamonds, round-cut green tourmalines and various cushion-cut stones, including purple and lavender spinel, pink, green and blue tourmalines, oval-cut pink spinel and pink sapphire

Watchmaking is an increasingly important strand of the Hermès business and the French luxury maison has a century's worth of watch design in the bag. One of the big Montres Hermès stories this year is The Faubourg. This tiny little gem of a timepiece looks set to start a new trend for small watches, last seen in the 1980s

It's not unusual for French haute couture houses such as Chanel or Christian Dior to fly their one-of-a-kind confections around the world accompanied by its petite mains, to visit clients for follow-up fittings, or in the case that they could not attend the maison's Paris show. It's a high-flying privilege that has quietly been extended to the world of accoutrements by the storied house of Roger Vivier.

Marrying couture's artisan expertise with the creative fluidity of prêt-à-porter, Roger Vivier creative director Bruno Frisoni's 'Rendez-Vous' collection has clocked up platinum frequent flyer status over the past seven seasons – thanks to the 12-city world tour that the limited edition collection enjoys every six months.

'I wanted to have something that would be a good substitute to couture actually,' explains Frisoni, who is in London this week to showcase his S/S 2014 line. 'Not that couture is not the right thing to do, just that it was not suiting me anymore. I wanted a shorter delivery and another way to look at things, so now they can buy a beautiful bag or a pair of shoes like they would buy an edition of a beautiful photo in an art gallery, he says, adding, 'And you also have the security, not to have everybody [wearing] the same thing!'

After Frisoni's latest Fall collection debuted in Paris during the recent couture shows (think Rue Saint-Honoré via a Far Eastern discothèque), his Spring 'Rendez-Vous' collection – which revived the 'Virgule' comma heel that Monsieur Vivier built his reputation on in 1963 – began its journey with an intimate cocktail reception, hosted by the designer and Madame Isabelle Emie, wife of the French Ambassador, at her Kensington Palace Gardens residence. 'It could be a private place, it could be a lunch', Frisoni explains, within the property's grand hall, as to the variety of events built around the shoe and bag collection.

Each season, Rendez-Vous journeys across the globe (from Taiwan to New York), remaining for no more than 24 hours in each destination – essentially just long enough for Frisoni's clients to be fitted with black satin lasts, representing each new design, from which only 20 pairs of each style will ever be made.

Offering a glimpse into his design process, Frisoni's now iconic watercolour illustrations accompany the house's invitations. 'Actually if you look at the little book [invitation],' he continues, 'the first one and the last one were the two first sketches I have done when thinking about Rendez-Vous. For working drawings I like to have fun when I look at them, pin them on the wall, instead of having a very precise thing that doesn't make sense to me.' Next stop: Milan and then Tokyo, where the chaussure voyage continues.

The Spring/Summer season is always a test for designers of haute couture. They must direct their talent, research and craftsmanship towards the ultimate lightness (or legereté) in their hand-crafted, bespoke creations, while losing none of the luxuries of exquisite fabrics and embroideries for which haute couture is revered. Last week in Paris, the Spring 2014 shows saw designers take this challenge and run with it, with couturiers like Raf Simons at Christian Dior and Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel (pictured) breaking the institutional expectations of couture to deliver collections injected with ideas of youth and speed (even sneakers!), with embellishments both hidden and technical as opposed to ostentatious and overtly-handmade. That said, there are two sides to today's couture story and new designers like Ulyana Sergeenko and Giambattista Valli (having now shown his sixth collection) are still making a case for a return to opulence.

Chanel 

Karl Lagerfeld called his Spring 2014 haute couture show 'Cambon Club', transforming the Grand Palais into a pearly holographic amphitheatre, replete with dove grey banquettes and a revolving stage set-up, which revealed French musician Sébastien Tellier, an orchestra and a live opera singer

Chanel 

For the first look Cara Delevigne bounced down the stairs in tweedy lace-up sneakers and closed the show (as the bride) in the same - surely a bold statement of modernity for the house and one which manifested further in the athletic shapes that the Paris ateliers cut in metal tweeds, lace and diaphanous sheer fabrics, embellished in grids of crystal beading, sequins and tinsel

Christian Dior 

Raf Simons had an amorphous white labyrinth built in the gardens of the Musée Rodin for the Spring 2014 Christian Dior haute couture show, its trapezoidal skylights all hand-carved and streaming false daylight into the space he described as 'womb-like'. The motif of a circle was woven throughout his fourth couture outing for the house, appearing as polka dots, laser cuts, graphic motifs or elliptical pockets of floral beading on mini-dresses, jumpsuits and the signature 'Bar' jacket pantsuit

Christian Dior 

Like at Chanel, footwear took an avant-garde turn - silvery garters snaked up the calf attached to Glomesh pumps, and rosebuds sprouted from neoprene reef slip-ons, furthering Simons' calculated subversion of couture codes with an urban edge

Valentino 

Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri have had the history books open at Valentino lately, with their Spring haute couture show a decidedly daring breakout into graphic and mythological territories. Opera was a starting point, and the opening dress arrived in tucked, transparent tulle emblazoned with the musical notes of La Traviata dancing along a silvery stave

Valentino 

Later the musical tale expanded into appliqué animalia and ethnic tassels, cashmere sheaths and masterful featherwork, as each dress channelled a different opera in cloth

Maison Martin Margiela 

The anonymous team at Maison Martin Margiela call their 'haute couture' line the Artisanal collection, treating it as an experimental study rather than a purpose-built luxury wardrobe. That's why its collection remains the most curious and progressive of the week, even though the anchor of their Spring 2014 offering (as always, to some extent) was archival fabrics and homewares, like pleating by Mariano Fortuny and 1950s Frank Lloyd Wright designs transformed as coats and corsets

Maison Martin Margiela 

If the references sound retro - domestic, even - the effect was anything but. We witnessed an eclectic, embellished display of simple shapes resplendent in crinkled textures and jingly, jangly embroidery of found objects

Giambattista Valli 

Now three years into his haute couture journey, the self-made Roman couturier Giambattista Valli has amassed a formidable front-row following and a reputation for 'neo-classical' eveningwear, mixing blooms and leafy metalwork in two silhouettes - mini and maxi

Giambattista Valli 

Spring 2014 saw him discover a new muse, an insouciant, imaginary Parisian party girl found at the bottom of his garden. In swathes of emerald, mint and cobalt, she came wrapped in satin bows and draped asymmetry, with embroidery like armour: shiny beaded-tanks were layered on taffeta and clusters of tiny flowers were cut from holographic foil

Vionnet 

The latest coup in creative director Goga Ashkenazi's Vionnet takeover was the recent announcement that Turkish-Cypriot designer Hussein Chalayan would lend his hand to the demi-couture collection, the first of which was shown in a garage space strewn with gilded frames and roadwork signs

Vionnet 

Both technology and industrial design informed Chalayan's work (nothing new for the conceptualist), which manifested in the sinuous yet sterile way he incorporated electrical cords as jewellery, belts and halternecks on multi-pleated maxi-dresses, and the quiet symmetry of laser cut circles on pastel gazar gowns. A finale of tabard dresses were scored all over with tiny crosses and outlined like a paper patronage, in an ode to the atelier and proof that Chalayan's sense of metafiction is alive and kicking

Ulyana Sergeenko 

Haute Couture is an international playground, and the Russian designer Ulyana Sergeenko is quickly catching on - broadening her distinctly Soviet horizons for a train journey across the East for Spring 2014

Ulyana Sergeenko 

Sergeenko made up the Pavillion Cambon like a powder blue steam train carriage and employed milliner Stephen Jones to top her bustled satin gowns and boned corsets with scrunched headbands and bugle-beaded, pillbox hats

Armani Privé 

Mr Armani continued his global tour de force with an Armani Privé show entitled 'Nomade' for Spring 2014, before inviting guests to preview 'Eccentrico' at the Palais de Tokyo, now the sixth destination of his travelling exhibition

Armani Privé 

The Privé collection channelled the eclectic spirit of Armani's archival showcase, with cloudy blue silk wrapped as headscarves, cut in micro-dot jacquard blouses or sweeping the floor in fluid plissé skirts

A chorus of birds excitedly chirped the revival of Elsa Schiaparelli at Paris' Les Arts Décoratifs last night. But in a gesture that would have been appreciated by the iconic designer, who died nearly 40 years ago, the birds turned out to be a digital trompe l'oeil, a series of flat-screen images suspended within a canopy of flowers.

One year after the house of Schiaparelli reopened the doors of the designer's former apartment at 21 Place Vendôme, it finally unveiled the first collection, under the direction of Christian Lacroix.

Of the 99 sketches Lacroix dreamed up, only 18 became physical pieces. Yet the compact collection was produced with the same level of detail as haute couture. A pink and black striped duchesse satin gown required 40 metres of material and took 380 hours to complete. One beaded cape weighs 20 kilos, while a skirt was reportedly double that. No wonder the clothes weren't on models. Fifteen of the looks were mounted on a mirrored carrousel that took four minutes to make a full rotation; the remaining three occupied an annex where sketches lined the walls.

Nothing, alas, will be recreated to sell. Farida Khelfa, who bears the title of brand muse, said she is unsure whether even she will be able to wear the one-off designs - primarily because the mannequins are extra petite (though the midnight-blue coat with exaggerated pockets extending from the waist would be her first pick). Beginning next year, there will be two yearly couture collections and two prêt-à-couture collections, divided between a creative director and a guest design contributor, perhaps from the world of art or music.

If the collection was not as boundary-pushing as one might have expected Schiaparelli to be in the 21st century, it undoubtedly confirmed Lacroix as a kindred spirit. While he made sure to sprinkle the pieces with Schiap essentials - beetle bijoux, a jewel-encrusted lobster pochette, harem-style trousers and oversized bows - he also let us know he has not lost his flare for the fantastic.

Hosted in the Salon des Boiseries, a wood-panelled room overlooking the Tuileries Garden that is rarely open to the public, the cocktails drew footwear's leading men Christian Louboutin and Bruno Frisoni. Next-generation designers Roksanda Ilincic and Maxime Simoëns paid their respects - the former attributing her love of colour to Schiaparelli. Jean Paul Gaultier and Inès de la Fressange were overheard discussing the signature shocking pink (the hue appeared underfoot as a pile carpet, laid down for the occasion).

'The style of Schiaparelli is still possible because she was so much beyond and before others,' said de la Fressange once Gaultier had drifted off, pausing mid-sentence to snap a picture of the fox-fringed boots. 'She actually did boots like this. [Every] designer has been inspired by Schiaparelli. It's just impossible to avoid her - like Balenciaga, like Chanel. But even stronger.'

Milliner Stephen Jones confirmed the sentiment with charming candour. 'There is no one for me more inspirational than Schiaparelli,' he said. 'The shoe hat is the best hat ever made in the world. And I'm jealous of it every day of my life.'