PARIS — Junya Watanabe’s new collection was a stupendous couture evolution of last season’s witty ready-to-wear readymades. Whereas that one wrapped relatively simple shapes in clever tangles of shoes and straw hats and cutlery, this latest outing artfully assembled entire looks from the detritus of late-stage capitalism, a much more imposing proposition, worthy of the title Junya gave it: “The Art of Assemblage Couture.”
In terms of the Art, there were immediate echoes of John Chamberlain’s car sculptures. The Couture came through loud and clear in the swooping, curving, billowing silhouettes. The Assemblage was obvious in the scrupulous symmetries, the ingenious bricolage. These dresses were built, rather than made in any conventional way. And the fact that they were presented as a performance, something Junya never does, suggested a special significance for him.
Watanabe’s models were coached by movement maestro Pat Boguslawski, the man who helped create the sublime magic of John Galliano’s last show for Maison Margiela. A single chair on a harlequin floor conjured up a dance studio. A kiss-curled, heavily mascara-ed Irina Shayk emerged to the strains of Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango,” tossed her coat dramatically onto the chair and paraded down the catwalk defiantly, her mascara flowing with her tears. Her sisters in emotional extremity followed one by one, gripped, tortured by the torrid rhythms of the tango. Maggie Maurer hurled her coat, a cocoon patchworked together from a symphony of hypersynthetic fabric samples (plus a lurid wig or two), to the floor in a gesture of contempt. Whoever done her wrong was in for a rough night.
Close up, the materials that made up the collection were a literal grab bag: car parts, sporting equipment, security accessories, home décor. I saw picture frames, an inescapable stole of stuffed animals… and was that a car license plate? Everything was stitched together to create glamorous vintage silhouettes, an effect that was heightened by Eugene Souleiman’s hair and Isamaya Ffrench’s makeup. The act of creating something rare, precious and beautiful from dross is the very definition of the arcane science of alchemy, but in the present climate (“the surrounding social environment,” as Junya decorously called it), it’s almost a political act. Defiance! For her second appearance, Maggie Maurer may have been wearing a windshield as a cape. She was even more furious, her cheeks streaming with mascara. She came to a screeching halt at the end of the catwalk, arms extended, fingers splayed. The lights clicked out. The crowd screamed for more in the darkness but Junya had already left the building.
The fusion of the human and the mechanical — a kind of fashion singularity — had already been explored a day earlier by Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough at Loewe. In a curious coincidence, their presentation also featured stuffed animals, courtesy of the designers’ collaborator, German artist Cosima von Bonin, who introduced the Vichy check to their world — and their show venue — and seated some of her creations amongst the audience.
Loewe’s 180-year history is heavy in handcraft, courtesy of its leather artisans, but also sanctified by Jonathan Anderson’s decade-long tenure at the brand. In their New York incarnation as Proenza Schouler, Hernandez and McCollough had a reputation for craft-iness. But the duo had been brooding on what exactly contemporary craft looks like. How could they apply the possibilities that technology offers? “How do we push the boundaries, maybe even create something so crafted that the hand is erased and the product looks like something that could have been made in a car factory?” McCollough wondered.
Loewe Autumn/Winter 2026 (Courtesy of Loewe) Loewe Autumn/Winter 2026 (Courtesy of Loewe) Loewe Autumn/Winter 2026 (Courtesy of Loewe)
So that’s what they’ve done, married the hand and the machine. For their first Loewe collection, they mastered leather jackets moulded by hand. In their latest collection, Hernandez and McCollough showed plaid sweater dresses knitted from leather. Handcut strips of leather were rolled into a yarn which was fed into an updated knitting machine that was able to mimic hand-knitting. Maybe, in their perfect precision, the dresses lacked the charm of grandma’s knit, but in terms of technique they embodied the duo’s plans for Loewe.
For sheer audacity, however, nothing could match this season’s evolution of last season’s moulded leathers: lace slip dresses were 3-D scanned, moulds were made and filled with latex. Every single detail — from zigzag top stitch to bra strap adjuster to tiny bow — was duplicated. Later in the show, there was an impressive apple green coat, scanned and duplicated right down to the rubbery-soft buttons. So now it’s latex, not leather, at Loewe. “We love the sensuality of it,” said Hernandez. “And the toy aspect. There’s an aspect of play that’s so important to experimentation.”
A primary-coloured playful spirit was a winner for Jack and Lazaro in their Loewe debut. They stuck with the colour, introduced new play (latex being the grown-up version) with flourishes like inflatable mac jackets and coats with side vents that allow the Vichy check lining to be inflated and expanded into huge panniers. “Creating volume and silhouette without adding weight,” Hernandez explained. Inflatable scarves served the same purpose. Knit dresses had a body-conscious silhouette that was shaved into them by a real poodle parlour. Same with shearlings whose tips were bleached, then cut into jackets, which were sent to the poodle parlour where they were shaved to the skin in places, creating a range of textures and tones in the finished product. The shears were also useful in shaving a corduroy effect into shearling pants.
Loewe Autumn/Winter 2026 (Courtesy of Loewe) Loewe Autumn/Winter 2026 (Courtesy of Loewe) Loewe Autumn/Winter 2026 (Courtesy of Loewe)
People would once have called this high tech, soft touch. It’s a world that Issey Miyake moved through for decades. There has never been another designer who managed such a combination of human hand and technical innovation, but Satoshi Kondo, artistic director since 2019 (Issey died in 2022) comes close. The things the Japanese could teach their Western peers about body moulding! Grace Jones was forever immortalised in her Issey breastplate. Kondo opened and closed his show with models in sculptural forms, like a combination of a traditional Japanese obi sash and a Western bustier, shaped from large sheets of handmade washi paper on 3-D printed moulds then lacquered. Papier maché, in other words.
Maybe I’m a fool but the collection’s concept flummoxed me a little: the body creates the shape, design intervention is minimised. I could understand that with a single piece of cloth zipped into a tube that was shaped into three dimensions once it was on the human form. But most of the time, the sheer intelligence on display rather negated the negation of design. The pleating was extraordinary. It’s always been a signature of this brand, but here the “wring” pleats, which according to my playbook were “hand-wrung pleated twists integrated with linear machine pleats,” created entrancing ripples of fabric. There was vintage Issey in a coat made from a single rectangle of cloth, and a one-legged suit was actually a spiral of fabric curving down the body.
A foundation of the house was always Japanese traditional dress, in which Issey strove to find something as generic as Levi’s jeans. The instantly recognisable signature he created is far from a pair of Californian railway worker’s denims. It’s so much more spirit than flesh, and to have it so successfully sustained by Satoshi Kondo is inspiring. His models walked like cosmic nomads on a rectangle of silver sand to live music by Matthew Herbert and Momoko Gill, whose hums, taps and pulses coalesced into an hypnotic aural tapestry — which actually felt like spirit and flesh entwined, if you were feeling optimistic.
Speaking of which, Michel Rider makes people feel optimistic. Sitting at the Celine show on Saturday, I imagined being the people speeding down the runway, especially the ones with tufts of feathers in their hair. Rider said he felt the same way. Others have noted it already but I agree that his secret sauce is attitude. Coats slung casually over an arm, a generous scarf knotted high, a hat pulled low, a necklace of shells. You could carry off anything when you had that ease, but a wide-cut suit and a long coat (maybe leopard for fun) and charmeuse pajamas and a careless sash or huge paillettes hiding under a topcoat definitely helped. The suggestion of something slightly off, underneath the surfaces we present, seemed to appeal to Rider. He claimed he loved “the rareness of authenticity.”
And he said he liked “people with bite.” The kind of people we see and want to be. Clothes can help us. “Putting on clothes can change how we walk and feel,” he said. “I love that.” It all sounded as irresistible as the music that was relayed by giant vintage speakers, as loose as a jam session if you happened to be at Prince’s place. But that was the sound. The substance is, as I said, an attitude, which is something more elusive.
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On the seventh day of Paris Fashion Week, Duran Lantink’s Jean Paul Gaultier revamp delivered the sense of playfulness that was missing from Seán McGirr’s McQueen a few hours later, reports Angelo Flaccavento.
