BY NICOLE ZENIOU

Paris Fashion Week (PFW) Autumn/Winter 2025-2026 ready-to-wear calendar featuring a total of 72 shows, 37 presentations and three key debuts, which ran between March 3 and 11, held plenty of promise. Most prominently, it held the promise of the reviving of history of house codes but also its ability to constitute a repertoire of new possibilities, especially in times of flux. Designers thus seemed united by a playful fascination with the archival past but also, with the intimate redefining of the female body expressing a desire to subtly challenge its boundaries via form, insert costume, and proportion.

Dior: The multiple, feminine, costume nods to the past made modern

For the ready-to-wear AW 2025-2026 79-looks collection entitled “History of Fashions” presented during Paris Fashion Week, Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri explored one of her signature themes, that of femininity. This time, she extrapolated on the different versions and shapes of femininity and how they evolve over the centuries drawing inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s 1928 tale of transformation “Orlando”. She began by reconstructing those versions and shapes borrowing heavily from the male wardrobe and from the androgynous with modern adornments, but also, from era-spanning historical costume rendered resolutely contemporary. As she stated in the show notes, “Breaking free from a purely historical interpretation, the silhouettes are firmly anchored in the present, emphasising both the functional role of clothing and the part it plays in responding to modern desires.”

The collection revealed a series of crinolines - made shorter, velvet ribbons, bustiers and corsets enhanced with zips and fastenings, 18th century cutaway tail jackets, lace collars, frills, frockcoats, doublets via tailcoats. There were also references invoking the house’s archives, such as the series of masculine white shirts embellished with ruffles - a Gianfranco Ferré signature (who was creative director of the house from 1989 to 1996). And, the J’Adore Dior t-shirt signed by John Galliano during his 1997-2011 tenure at the house, reinvented with precious embroidery and brocade weaves. According to the show notes, it was all in effort to reconstruct the feminine and reposition its place both in the present and in the future, but also in the past. By exploring “the stories traversing fashion and its digressions [it] allows the celebration of a femininity that imagines possible futures by mixing evocations of a past that is ever closer to the contemporary wardrobe.”

Saint Laurent: A bold, wide-shouldered, but minimal retake of the past

At Saint Laurent’s Autumn/Winter 2025-2026 show, Anthony Vaccarello also referenced from some of the house’s greatest forgotten moments, to include Yves Saint Laurent 1980s bold colour work. But what was grandstanding, was the fact that he presented a 45-looks collection striped down largely to one theme. The collection featured mainly just one commanding, wide-shouldered, knee-length, power-suit-style dress silhouette with a structural sash tied low at the waist, with the exception of low-waisted, seductive ball gowns featuring soft lacy bustier tops at the finale. “This time, I wanted something more clean – no ornamentation, no decoration,” he said backstage before the show, a show that probed an exercise on singularity. It also raised questions about brand storytelling, that feels very much and especially in this era of great unease, trite and fabricated.

Nonetheless there was ornamentation and decoration, even as a metaphor, that adorned the “simplicity of silhouette - as if created with a few pencil strokes” embodied by Vaccarello’s unparalleled colour sense and use of unconventional fabrics. His hypnotic colour palette was fathomed to perspire burnt oranges, tangerines and persimmons, desaturated reds and purples, artichoke-greens, deep fuchsias and bruised blues, and also, rampant animalier and floral print patterns coated in silicone. “There is no structure, everything is moving, it’s all done by shape and fabric,” said Vaccarello.

Just like Maria Grazia Chiuri, Vaccarello also used yet one more collection to talk about the feminine and its strength by presenting a collection that featured “a sensitive body, inside strong clothes.” His use of low waisted everything - from leather jackets to gowns to power dresses - could also be a nod to the modernity, simplicity and freedom encapsulated within old shapes, as he breathed newness into the house’s vibrant, rampant, present past.

Chanel: House motifs largely reimagined and made young

For Autumn/Winter 2025-2026 Chanel held its second ready-to-wear show designed by the studio, as it is understood that the newly appointed creative director, Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy, will hold his debut ready-to-wear collection in October 2025. The 71-looks collection featured perennial Chanel signature motifs - pearls, ribbons, bows, camelias, quilted handbags, bouclé and tweed suits - reimagined in both proportion (see imaginative gargantuan-enormous pearl necklaces, bags and heels) and form (sportswear and denim incursions).

As the show notes read, “A ribbon rises at the heart of the nave of the Grand Palais, in Paris, in a spectacular and poetic play on proportions imagined on the occasion of the Fall-Winter 2025/26 Ready-to-Wear show.” Agreed, the house codes were enhanced with an almost larger-than-life touch which made the collection’s fabrics, just like Dior’s and Saint Laurent’s, skewed modern, and ever more so at Chanel, young. There were elements that were particularly naively youthful - a response to the new-gen zeigeist? - see flower, layered necklaces, an oversized sweater worn as a dress, a strapless red dress worn over trousers, transparent denim, and tulle skirts worn over colourful three-piece mini-skirt co-ords.

Overall, the question of brand identity was raised at Chanel, as it was apparent that the gamut of expressions presented called for a reconsideration of the house’s own history. It was a remaking of the past, but perhaps without a clear identity. For example, who is the Chanel (Fall 2025-2026) woman?

Valentino: A heightened, theatrical sense of intimacy reignites the house’s golden era

Titled “Le Méta-Théâtre des Intimités”, Valentino’s Alessandro Michele presented his third outing for the house - and it was a show about intimacy as a performance that took place in a square-shaped space built like a club restroom. In en effort, to speak via the concept of intimacy about truth and take us on a journey back to the beginning of things - the show referenced Valentino’s “golden era” of the 1960s and 1980s. “Sometimes the word intimacy seems to contain a halo of meaning that brings it closer to a promise of authenticity, a protected space where it’s finally possible to touch the hidden truth of persons, beyond the uni-forms of appearance,” read the show notes, referencing the philosopher Roman Màdera.

The 80-look collection was laden with layers of meaning, in signature Michele fashion. It featured numerous archival histories in each look, and just like Dior, heavily employed and borrowed from the world of theatrical costume. For example, it featured body stockings in delicate lace, ladylike bows, twisted knot-detailing, dresses and coats piled on textures with the heaviness balanced out with ruffles and delicate, fluid fabrics. Along with volume Michele also interchangeably employed the concept of “dressing and undressing” - an ode to intimacy - making for a collection supercharged with heritage but at the same time with the very much bare modern.

Bungalow 28 is a tech and creative agency dedicated to fashion, luxury and cultural brands worldwide.

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