Couture Week F/W 2025: The Oracle Goes Silent

If fashion is a mirror of the world, then haute couture — its high-concept, high-craft, high-ticket showcase spectaculaire — is meant to be its oracle. So what does it mean when our visit to the oracle is all ritual, no prophecy?

Paris Couture Week F/W 2025-26 delivered beautiful, meticulously constructed garments, but as designer after designer retreated to blacks and neutrals, leaned on historical and cultural references, allowed message or concept to precede fashion, or showed a retrospective, the entire event felt more reverent than relevant.

Spectacle or Strategy?

Couture has only 4,000 regular buyers in the world, and while those buyers spend massive amounts with these ateliers, the fact that these shows have become public spectacles is more of a marketing strategy than a sales channel.

The general framework is: (1) distill the brand’s design history into a heritage design language comprised of a small set of key elements, (2) reinvent that design language for a new era, and (3) repeat and scale that design language into all manner of widely recognizable derivative products and content. 

As this design language becomes more synonymous with the brand, demand increases, sometimes even allowing the brand to raise prices. At the same time, a more standardized design language allows the company to produce, distribute and market its goods more efficiently since the narrower design window means, for example, volume discounts on materials, more easily repeatable and optimizable production processes, and more predictable production and stocking levels. And if revenue increases and costs decrease, profits explode.

In just this way we come to find that tweed marks Chanel, opulent embellishment stands for Schiaparelli, and oversized architectural forms for Balenciaga. And we also end up with luxury goods juggernauts like LVMH, Kering and Richemont that we have today.

This works for a while. Ideas can have more range of exploration and interpretation than perhaps one or two garments — or even a couple of collections — can allow. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with reference or reinvention. After all, even Shakespeare relied on source material.

But what we saw in Paris this July wasn’t Shakespeare. It was a more beautiful Medium.com: content engineered more for SEO than substance.

A Beautiful Hypnosis

The march of Paris Couture Week F/W 2025-26 felt like Ravel’s Boléro, employed so ingeniously by Stéphane Rolland in his presentation. Boléro is, for all intents and purposes, just two elements: a beautiful melody and a mechanically rhythmic percussion line. These repeat, with almost no invention, to the point of hypnosis. The only evolution in the music is the long crescendo achieved by progressive orchestration throughout the duration of the piece.

The same rule seemed to apply to Couture Week F/W 2025-26: add more layers to the recognizable forms to turn up the volume and keep the audience in a trance.

The result is, to Daniel Roseberry’s credit, a manifestation of that beautiful beaded heart necklace that closed the Schiaparelli show: exquisite, pulsing with life, but crowning a silhouette that faces backwards.

Brilliance in the Ruins

Let me be very clear: I don’t blame the designers. The workload of the creative director in a couture house is almost unfathomable. They produce multiple collections each year from concept to completion, while also being charged with overseeing associated marketing campaigns and ensuring that the brand itself not only continues to resonate, but grows in power and value.

They are also put into nearly impossible creative corners: tell a new story through a design language that’s decades old and has been wrangled to death, and do it multiple times each year.

The amazing feat is that the best of them do actually manage to do this rather successfully for a time. Demna’s remake of Balenciaga has been a revelation in recent years, as has been Daniel Roseberry’s revival of Schiaparelli.

And Glenn Martens’s explosive debut at Margiela promises a similar arc. A jaw-dropping journey of destruction, death and rebirth, the collection brimmed with new silhouettes, phenomenal layering of materials and an exciting color story that was not only spellbinding at first viewing, but actually manages to be more captivating every time we go back for another look.

But wouldn’t it just be so much more exciting to let Demna and Roseberry and Martens (and, for the love of God, Alessandro Michele!) loose, instead of tasking them with reinterpreting the work of ghosts? Would we maybe then get capital-F Fashion that shapes our culture?

The Cost of Playing It Safe

What we also have to acknowledge is that these shows don’t just affect what 4,000 customers around the world (largely in Russia, the Middle East and Asia) buy and wear, or even what the many, many more who choose to buy a small accessory like a wallet, belt or sunglasses from a luxury house put on their bodies.

These shows also decide what gets made today, tomorrow and for the next few years at every tier of the fashion industry downmarket of these brands. That was one of the great lessons Miranda Priestly taught us in The Devil Wears Prada, no?

If Paris was blacks, neutrals and metallics with the saving grace of cardinal red as the only bold color story, you’d better believe we’ll see the same in every department store and boutique in America. The same goes for the romantic florals, bows, and beading, the strong shoulders, and the rhinestone statement jewelry.

It’s not that it’s bad design — I wear so much of this myself and stand by that decision — but rather that it becomes monolithic and, frankly, boring very quickly.  It’s fashion increasingly driven by data, metrics and spreadsheets, not imagination, and it’s what happens when finance, not creative, leads the way.

This isn’t just a byproduct of rotating creative directors like fund managers or treating collections like asset portfolios. This is also a function of the industry not investing in the pipeline between schooling and luxury brand leadership, including creative jobs paying livable wages, apprenticeships, investment in emerging and mid-tier brands, and so forth.

And it’s what happens when journalism and media sink to being little more than PR awarded to the highest bidder, rather than a true supporter of fashion discovery, appreciation and criticism to aid the customer base.

Beauty isn't a luxury. It’s how we pattern, perceive, and progress.

This is probably not the most crucial thing any one of us faces today. Over time, however, if we let creativity and expression slip from our lives, it takes a toll.

Beauty isn't a luxury. It's how we pattern, perceive, and progress. Our brains process beauty in the same region as we make decisions and regulate our emotions, and beauty is what lets us see both patterns and breaks in patterns in our world. A world that reins in beauty and creativity gradually erodes our mental and emotional health, our decision-making abilities, and our capacity to innovate in our own professional and personal lives.

Reclaiming Prophecy

Perhaps this is one of the reasons teens and young adults are so wild about vintage: all of the “new” isn’t particularly new or exciting. And perhaps it’s also why it can be so delightful to discover new voices on TikTok, Instagram or even just walking down the street. These are people who treat fashion as art, not business, and they create styles guided by curiosity, joy, and instinct. 

Flappers didn’t come from couture houses. Neither did jeans nor punk. Maybe it's time we stopped looking to the same old institutions for direction and started tuning into the bold, original voices reshaping fashion's edges — the emerging designers building from scratch, the micro-labels operating outside the capitals, the unexpected brands rewriting the rules in real time.

If the oracle has no prophecy, perhaps it’s time we write our own.