news
Paris Haute Couture Week AW 2025/26: Why It Still Matters.
11/07/25
Article by JOYS team
Twice a year, Paris hosts the kind of fashion week that doesn’t aim for mass appeal. Haute couture is not about trends or wearability. It’s about craft, identity, and the luxury of time—time to design, time to make, time to wear something that exists purely for the sake of beauty and expression. It’s fashion’s highest discipline and its most protected tradition, rooted in the elite world of Parisian ateliers, but increasingly open to new conversations.
In a moment when digital speed drives the fashion calendar and much of what we wear is algorithmically predicted, couture offers something different. It rejects the idea of scale in favor of significance. Every garment is made by hand, made to measure, and made to last—three values that feel surprisingly urgent now. And while its audience remains niche, its cultural relevance is only growing. These shows don’t just set the tone for red carpets or editorial shoots. They shape the way fashion dreams.
Here’s how five designers approached the Autumn-Winter 2025/26 season—with vision, discipline, and imagination.
Photos courtesy of the brands
Tamara Ralph: Fragile Geometry, Softened Power
Two years into her solo label, Tamara Ralph knows what she’s doing. At Palais de Tokyo, she staged La Perle Rare, a study in restraint and precision—a collection that read like a private diary written in silk, crystal, and shadow. The opening look? Winter white, feather-light, corseted but not constricted. Ralph is fluent in elegance, but this season she dialed into something cooler, more deliberate.
There were shards of mother-of-pearl arranged like sunrays across bodices, scooped corsets that whispered about intimacy rather than screaming seduction, and silk crepe that didn’t just move—it melted. The Art Deco references were present but not performative; think more understated grandeur than Gatsby overload. Crystals glinted without drama. And the palette—blush, ivory, whisper-pink—refused the trend of maximalist couture for a return to softness with steel beneath.
If couture is about building worlds, Ralph’s was one of quiet conviction.
Elie Saab: Queens, Rewired
Elie Saab’s gowns have always belonged to another realm—one where women glide instead of walk, time slows, and beauty is an unspoken law. But for Autumn/Winter 2025, his La Nouvelle Cour show grounded that fantasy in something more assertive. Held at the Pavillon Cambon, the collection opened with Lara Stone —casting that signaled Saab’s intention to balance tradition with edge.
What followed was a regal procession of sculpted velvet corsets, moiré sheaths, and feathered chiffon, rendered in a palette that flipped from sugar-dusted pastels to imperial black and bullion gold. Saab’s language is always one of embellishment, but here it felt cleaner, sharper, more in control. Corsets hugged the waist, embroidered florals bloomed across brocade, and black ribbons added a final soft touch to the models hair.
Still, the fantasy was intact—no one does the red-carpet daydream quite like Saab. The finale bride arrived as expected: a celestial queen in moonlit embroidery and a pearl-toned overskirt, confirming that in his world, elegance isn’t a trend, it’s a condition.
.
Robert Wun: Dressing as Becoming
There was something cinematic about Robert Wun’s Becoming—not just in the lighting or staging, but in the way each look unfolded like a frame in an interior film. He took the act of dressing and cracked it open: the nerves before a big moment, the last glance in the mirror, the memory of how the night ended.
But while his previous work flirted with incompleteness, this season felt meticulously maternal—structures articulated with architectural precision yet infused with personal care. The debut dress, for instance, was embroidered with sequins shaped like bloody handprints—a visceral symbol of origin, creation, and imprint—each crystal “hand” painstakingly stitched to evoke its mark. Some gowns were clipped and hinged, slung hip-side to create asymmetrical silhouettes that suggested movement in slow-mo.
A standout detail: models carried spare suit jackets or shirts like soft sculptures—hanging from their arms not as accessories, but as second skins. And in a clever doubling, some looks featured four hands—two fake arms sculpted around the bodice, two real ones—in a surreal embrace that blurred boundaries between garment and wearer. These appendages tied into Wun’s exploration of dressing as ritual and relationship. He didn’t just show clothes; he built relationships—between hand and hold, between person and persona.
Then there were the almost-gothic flourishes: feathery headpieces, veils trailing like whispers, and splashes of color or “fake dirt” rendered through clusters of stitched crystals, as though garments had lived, breathed, and acquired their own histories. Becoming wasn’t just a fashion statement—it was Wun’s manifesto: couture as caretaking, as memory, as metamorphosis. In Paris, this was one of the continent’s most structurally bold, emotionally intricate collections.
Stéphane Rolland:
Boléro in Black and Fire
With Stéphane Rolland, the theatrical is a given. But this season, the drama came tightly wound. Inspired by Maurice Ravel’s rhythmic precision and Ida Rubinstein’s Spanish aesthetic, Rolland presented a couture collection defined by structural rigor and baroque flourish. The results? Black crepe gowns with collars shaped like sharp musical notes, red flares of embroidery that burned through the monochrome, and matador coats that swaggered rather than strutted.
Silhouettes were engineered—tuxedos with monumental lapels, pant jumpsuits shaped like crescents, samurai-style capes weighted in sequins. Then came the bride: a white icon crowned in a golden dome, walking like the final chord of a symphony you didn’t want to end.
It was couture as choreography—controlled, pulsing, and ornate.
Viktor&Rolf: Two of Everything,
and Then the Void
Leave it to Viktor&Rolf to twist duality into something sharp enough to cut through the noise. Their Angry Birds collection—15 pairs of looks, 30 in total—offered a single concept: the same silhouette shown twice, once extravagantly feathered and once stripped bare.
The result was quietly profound. The feathered looks were bonkers in the best way—overstuffed, cartoonish, ecstatic. Their shadow selves? Fluid, featherless, blank. Couture stripped of its tricks. But here’s the magic: both versions carried weight. The absence amplified the presence. The silence screamed back.
It was a collection built on contrast and choreography. And yes, all those feathers were faux, but the effect was real: Viktor&Rolf reminded us that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is to show the same thing twice—and make you feel it both ways.
