Cuckoo for Crinoline Poufs at Paris Couture
Icarus is the poster child for burnout. The mythological Greek boy who flew too high and got scorched by the sun, only to fall and drown in the sea, was the starting point for Daniel Roseberry’s Spring 2025 couture collection. He used the story as a metaphor in order to make a point about our collective obsession with perfection, specifically when it comes to the practice of making couture. Roseberry said in his show notes that “haute couture aspires to reach great heights; it promises escape from our complicated reality.” He added, “It also reminds us that perfection comes at a price. How high can we couturiers go? As high as the sun—and the Gods—allow us.”
His collection was certainly an example of the heights couture can reach, with exquisite forms and shapes created with sculptural techniques like figure-enhancing boned corsets and toile that fit to the hips and exaggerated them to bulbous proportions. Kendall Jenner, the poster girl for perfection, wore that incredible dress like some kind of digital-age character from myth— Icarus if he got burned by his ring light.
Elsewhere, a beaded corset jacket came with an oversized neckline that hovered like a thick ring around one model’s shoulders. All around, the ruffles were big, and the 3D peplum was bigger. Roseberry’s lines were smooth but jutted and jolted here and there—a visual rendering that he calls “liquid deco.” It was all precise, painstakingly cultivated, golden age couture made for modern-day clients, women who are more than happy to cinch themselves into an unbreathable corset in order to get the content.
Jenner’s sister Kylie did exactly that when she attended Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s guest couture show for Jean Paul Gaultier. She wore a brown halter gown with a sequined skirt and corseted bodice that dipped dangerously low in the front and fit her body like melted-on wax. Jenner’s gown was not dissimilar to de Saint Sernin’s entire outing for Gaultier, which he titled “Le Naufrage” or, in English, “Shipwreck.” Clearly, de Saint Sernin had fun, straying a bit from his sensual, slinky minimalism to explore more unbridled fantasy. It is JPG, after all—a house founded on the idea that fashion should make us laugh and blush and raise an eyebrow all at once.
This was de Saint Sernin’s first-ever encounter with the world of haute couture, which is pressure enough without it having been inside Gaultier’s house. There were very Gaultier-ian vibes in the collection, of course, like homages to his pioneering work in the art of corsetry and his general penchant to put sex on a platter. But de Saint Sernin made it his own by imbuing his sultry merpeople with elements that speak to the way cool, fashion-obsessed people dress today—sheer dresses with nothing beneath, cutouts here and there, and soft textures a la feathers and lace. And—thank god someone did it at couture!—de Saint Sernin actually cast models of different sizes in his show. These models are more than deserving of being a part of the couture conversation, and this season, they became part of the conversation around body, form, and the true meaning of perfection.
Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture Spring Summer 2025
Shapes and how they take up space were themes that ran through Maria Grazia Chiuri’s couture collection for Dior. The designer looked to the classic fairytale Alice in Wonderland and, like the little girl who fell down the rabbit hole, aimed to take us to another realm. She spent time doing deep dives on historical fashion references from the 18th and 19th century, namely crinoline, a hoop-shaped garment worn underneath skirts in order to make them appear poufy and stiff. The models with their punkish mohawks looked like beautiful little sprites in their bouncy skirts with fringed hems and intricately beaded gowns and tailcoats. The looks unmoored the concept of restrictive clothing for women of a certain era, but brought historical style confidently into the now. Even if the clothes felt at times slightly too girlish, it was powerful in the construction and movement of the garments. There was a lightness to the collection, but one ignited with a confident power.
Christian Dior Haute Couture Spring Summer 2025
Chanel and Armani went full-on in the lightness category, with beautiful couture collections that were much more subdued and streamlined than their over-the-top, whimsical peers. Armani, for one, is as obsessive as ever at the age of 90, constantly striving to outdo himself with the perfection of a simple black suit or a tailored jacket. His fantasy is about achieving the pinnacle of chic, of dedicating one’s life to the pursuit of beauty, perfect or not.
Chanel Spring 2025 Couture
Armani Privé Spring 2025 Couture
Couture is ultimately about that, in the end—a quest to mine through amalgams of ideas and techniques in an effort to create something absolutely beautiful. Sometimes it’s funny, as in Viktor & Rolf’s couture collection, which featured jeans and a simple white shirt with a gown-bedecked Victorian doll attached to them. Sometimes it’s simple, a la Mr. Armani, and sometimes, it’s an intellectual study of the way we see things, how we create things, and why. At Valentino, Alessandro Michele went deep into some cuckoo cabinet of curiosities that only exists in his head, as well as into the Valentino archives to pull out a head-spinning couture debut that was equal parts strange and spectacular. He may have overdone it with the 100-page-plus list of show notes. He may have gone overboard with the strobe lights and the wind tunnel and the scope of his hard-to-walk-in crinolines. But really, who cares? Let him cook.
The point of couture isn’t to be wearable or even digestible. It’s about being unrestrained, even if the craft is intensely precise. It’s about taking risks and turning up the volume, or at least it should be. It’s about making the old, new. It’s about getting a little crazy. The last few days of collections felt like a timely reminder to face challenges by taking up more space and letting our freak flags fly as high as we want, Icarus be damned. There’s no limit to what we can achieve, creatively speaking, sartorially speaking, and otherwise, if we take on this chaotic, vertigo-inducing world right now by throwing caution to the wind.
Valentino Haute Couture Spring Summer 2025
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