There was a strange, beautiful stillness in Paris this week. A palpable sense of a breath being held. During the Fall 2025 Haute Couture shows, the rarefied spectacle where fashion is elevated to the level of art, the most significant statements were often made by the absences. Creativitys.UK will tell you about a couture week that felt less like a declaration and more like a séance. With major houses like Dior and Valentino dark, and a tectonic shift of creative directors about to remake the landscape, this was a season defined by ghosts. The ghosts of formidable founders, the ghosts of departing visionaries, and the phantom-like anticipation of a future that is still waiting in the wings.
This was not a week of revolution. It was a magnificent, anxious, and deeply fascinating interregnum. The collections on display were often acts of homage, of consolidation, or of spectacular farewell. In the quiet pause between eras, the designers who did show were forced into a conversation with history, summoning the spirits of the past to guide them through a moment of profound uncertainty.
A formidable Belgian ghost
Nowhere was this conversation with a ghost more potent than at Maison Margiela. The formidable debut of Glenn Martens as creative director was less an unveiling of a new vision and more a powerful act of channeling the spirit of the house’s famously elusive founder, Martin Margiela. Martens, a fellow Belgian, understands the Margiela syntax in his very bones. The collection was a masterful display of the house codes: the obsessive upcycling, the deconstruction, the love of trompe-l’œil.
Leather jackets were distressed to a state of beautiful decay. A bodycon dress, stitched from photorealistic prints of moulding wallpaper, seemed to peel away from the body, its edges raw and fraying. Models’ faces were obscured by veils or encased in papier-mâché–style masks, a classic Margiela gesture of depersonalisation that forces the viewer to focus on the clothes themselves. The atmosphere was gothic, intellectual, and deeply reverent. Martens was not trying to erase the ghost of his predecessor; he was dancing with it, proving himself a worthy medium for the house’s formidable, avant-garde soul.
A farewell to the king
If Margiela was about summoning a ghost, Balenciaga was about watching one gracefully depart. Designer Demna staged his final collection for the house, and the event felt less like a fashion show and more like a spectacular, star-studded curtain call. The front row was a testament to his ten-year tenure, a glittering convocation of the faces who defined his era: Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Katy Perry, and the newly-wed Lauren Sánchez Bezos. Even Demna’s named successor, Pierpaolo Piccioli, was there to pay his respects.
The collection itself was a perfect, poignant summary of Demna’s work. He referenced the “dress codes of ‘La Bourgeoisie’,” a theme he has long explored, with sculpted leather gowns and houndstooth ensembles that nodded to founder Cristóbal Balenciaga’s original 1967 designs. He brought back the waxed floral prints from his own early, edgy work at Vetements, a nod to his grandmother’s tablecloths and a reminder of his personal journey. The casting was a final flourish of his celebrity-obsessed, pop-culture-fluent vision. Kim Kardashian walked in a white silk gown inspired by Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, wearing earrings once owned by Taylor herself. This was not just a collection; it was the closing chapter of a book, a victory lap for a designer who fundamentally remade a historic house in his own, uncompromising image.
The ghost of Coco Chanel
At Chanel, the sense of interregnum was even more literal. Following the departure of Virginie Viard, this collection was designed by the brand’s in-house studio, a “faceless” creative entity tasked with holding the space before the arrival of the new creative director, Mathieu Blazy, this autumn. In this moment of transition, the studio wisely and gracefully retreated into the very DNA of the house, summoning the ghost of Coco Chanel herself.
Instead of the usual vast spectacle at the Grand Palais, guests were ushered into a recreation of Coco’s original, intimate couture salons. The collection was a deep dive into Chanel’s lifelong affair with British culture, specifically the Scottish Highlands, where she discovered tweed during her romance with the Duke of Westminster. The result was a collection of incredible grace and quiet power. A chartreuse tweed blouson paired with a baby-blue satin skirt; a black satin halter-neck gown cinched with a utility belt; a double-breasted tweed coat layered over a tiered pleated skirt. It was, as brand muse Caroline de Maigret told CNN, “a powerful yet graceful woman – and it was almost goth sometimes.” It was an act not of revolution, but of beautiful, respectful consolidation, a reminder of the enduring power of the house’s foundational codes.
The beautiful, mad scientists
While the great empires of Paris were looking to the past or pausing for breath, the true, radical vision of couture’s future was being forged elsewhere, in the laboratories of fashion’s beautiful mad scientists. This is where the real electricity was found. At Robert Wun, the grotesque became gorgeous, with embellishments designed to look like cinematic blood stains, and a celestial gown was given two extra fake arms to create an otherworldly, insectoid silhouette. At Viktor & Rolf, the Dutch duo continued their conceptual games with form and shape, presenting inflated and deflated versions of the same dress, questioning the very nature of volume and silhouette.
And then there was Iris van Herpen, who continues to operate in a league of her own, at the intersection of fashion, technology, and biology. This season, she grew a dress out of bioluminescent algae, a living garment whose ethereal glow reacted to the model’s movement. These are the designers who are not waiting for a new era to be announced. They are building it themselves, pushing the boundaries of what clothing can be, what it can be made of, and what it can mean.
This was a couture week of quiet conversations and loud absences. It was a season that looked backwards more than it looked forwards, a collective moment of taking stock. The clothes were, as always, extraordinary feats of craftsmanship and artistry. But the real drama was in the spaces between the shows, in the anticipation of what comes next. It was a week that proved that fashion is never static. It is a constant, restless, and beautiful negotiation between the ghosts of its past and the intoxicating promise of its future. The magnificent, anxious pause is over. The real show begins in September.
