A Parade of Presence

PFW Haute Couture 2025.

Couture this season is controlled, focused, and unflinching. Designers reject excess in favor of clarity. Every line, every material choice feels intentional. There’s a sense of weight in the work, emotional, structural, historical. Fashion turns inward, away from performance, and back toward presence, craft, and the body itself. Across the collections, from Schiaparelli’s stripped-back intensity to Iris van Herpen’s liquid forms, from Balenciaga’s quiet farewell to Robert Wun’s tense, sculptural drama, from Viktor & Rolf’s doubled silhouettes to Peet Dullaert’s precise draping, a shared language takes shape, controlled, intentional, and exact.

What if the future looked like the past after the world has ended? In Schiaparelli’s Haute Couture AW2025/26, time collapses. Roseberry doesn’t design for today — he designs for a world with no screens, no systems, no signal. The collection haunts in black and white, stripped of trend, like a dream remembered from a past life. There are no corsets, no tech, no spectacle — only form, memory, and a kind of sacred severity. The silhouettes feel ancient and yet unearthed from a future ruin: matador coats stiff with pearls, dresses with resin eyes that stare like oracles. You don’t wear these pieces, you inherit them, like family secrets or sacred curses. Roseberry isn’t making fashion modern. He’s making it a myth again. And what emerges isn’t retro or radical — it’s elemental. A post-future world built not with code, but with cloth, thread, and feeling. Couture as a quiet resistance. Elegance as an afterthought. Or perhaps, as a prophecy.

Schiaparelli: “BACK TO THE FUTURE”

The collection Sympoiesis doesn’t begin so much as it emerges, like light fluttering on top water— something ancient stirs just below the surface. Iris Van Herpen conjures a tide, slow and sentient, swelling with life. Models drift like jellyfish half-dreaming, their bodies threaded with silky membranes, silver eyes flickering like echos. Gowns ripple with memory, algae-lit, and alive. One dress breathes through 125 million bioluminescent microorganisms, its glow not theatrical but biological, like something pulled from the ocean floor and reawakened. Another, spun from a synthetic protein, softer than silk, stranger than skin — dances around the body like a second atmosphere. Everything moves with intelligence, with intimacy. No harsh seams, no weight, only fluid tension, like sensing the swell in a still ocean. Sympoiesis isn’t about fashion at all. It’s about proximity — to the body, to the earth, to the things we’ve forgotten how to exist with.

Iris van Herpen: “SYMPOIESIS”

It felt like watching a body remember itself. A model and a bodybuilder—same garment, different ghosts—moving through Demna’s final offering like a memory collapsing. The clothes didn’t shape the body; they submitted to it. Nine looks, one size, and none of it static. Fabric clung, fell, recoiled, breathed. Black molded garments—sharp at the shoulders, collapsing at the waist—moved like armor softened by memory. The final look, a floor-length veil of hand-embroidered lace, floated down the model like a relic of something sacred—its weight not in fabric, but in farewell. There was no crescendo, only a slow, deliberate unraveling—of form, of ego, of what couture is allowed to be. No fantasy Paris, no ornate spectacle. Just cobblestone, dusk light, and garments draped in Demna’s farewell. You didn’t watch Couture No. 54, you stood inside its silence, and felt the exchange between flesh and fabric.

Balenciaga: “COUTURE NO. 54”

Robert Wun’s 2026 couture collection begins mid-scene, like waking up in someone else’s skin. A silk duvet slung across the body, streaked in red— encrusted with red crystals that catch the light like dried blood—an echo of a night blurred and heavy with aftermath. It’s the first beat in a distorted “get-ready-with-me” sequence, where the ordinary rituals of dressing fracture into something more loaded, more intimate. Each garment builds tension: collars too crisp, jackets that grip rather than drape. The silhouettes are sharp but unsteady, like trying to walk in someone else’s idea of who you should be. Limbs appear where they shouldn’t, sprouting from spines or ribcages—extensions of effort, anxiety, becoming. Nothing is simply worn; everything is inhabited. There’s beauty here, but it’s the kind that trembles—precision used as a shield. The final look, all tulle and restraint, arrives without softness. Like the moment before stepping out the door, when the version of yourself you’ve built holds for just a breath, before the world starts looking back.

Robert Wun: “BECOMING”

A body enters. Then it’s double. One is loud—plumed, swollen, spilling with color. The other is dark, emptied out. Same shape, different charge. Fifteen pairs move like arguments—presence pulling against absence, volume against void. Feathers flare like temper. Their twins, stripped bare, fall soft and slow, like the aftermath. Each garment traces the line between what stays and what escapes. The same cut made heavy, then light. Ornamental rage beside its shadow. Feathers don’t decorate here, they articulate. They shout, they obscure, they haunt. Even the heels, slick Louboutins, feel like punctuation marks. Final, deliberate, a bit cruel. It’s not about birds, but about becoming the feeling before flight. Or the moment right after.

Viktor and Rolf: “ANGRY BIRDS”

Silhouettes curved for breath, not bravado. Jackets cinched with intention, not restraint. Trousers that follow the leg like language—fluid, exact, never loud. The body isn’t corrected here, it’s considered. Défilé, a parade not of spectacle, but of presence. Each step measured, deliberate, an intimate procession celebrating form in all its variation. Draping that understands gravity, but never submits to it. Pleats placed like punctuation. Satin skimming the skin with quiet certainty. Precision for every shape, every posture, every presence. Feminine, not fragile. Each look a gesture, not overspoken, but exact.

Peet Dullaert: défilé

A Parade of Presence / PFW Haute Couture 2025

Credits:

Words: Shannon Enriquez / @shhaaannoon
Designers: @schiaparelli, @irisvanherpen, @balenciaga, @robertwun, @viktorandrolf, @peetdullaert

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