Looking through the spring 2025 couture collections, a thought kept running through my mind. “What a great time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd.” It’s a quote from one of David Lynch’s daily weather reports on YouTube, and while he was absolutely not referring to the spectacle of Parisian high fashion, it does fit the mood quite well.
At Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri explored the history of fashion by imagining she was making clothes for a child or perhaps a doll. The result was an odd mix of saccharine-sweet broderie anglaise bloomers layered underneath panniers, gilded cages-as-skirts, and fringe like so many homemade jellyfish costumes (if your home happens to be made up of the most exacting ateliers in Paris, of course). “Nonsense and fairy tales. Alice in Wonderland,” said Sarah Mower in her review. Couture has always been known for being the realm of fantasy. We want to follow designers down their rabbit holes.
No one knows their way through a rabbit hole quite like Alessandro Michele, whose debut couture collection for Valentino came with a 200-page tome of references for each look (if you didn’t feel like reading, the references were also projected on the screen behind each look as the models walked slowly by). He titled the collection Vertigineux, a reference to the dizzying heights to which he pushed himself—and the Valentino atelier—as he put together the collection. “It’s like every single person is like a little wizard, something magical, and everything is under a spell,” he said on the Vogue podcast. “Time doesn’t exist. The ritual of making is completely different.” And time did not exist. Just like at Dior, there were panniers—in fact, there were panniers in almost every couture collection this season—a nod to harlequins, luxe Mexican wrestling masks, the vestments of 1980s high society, sober Elizabethan gowns, fringe, ribbons, embroidery, lace, ruffles, jacquards, velvets, patchwork, pleats, and simple harem pants.
References to everything mean references to nothing, mean something new. Each model was like a character from a different Cinecittá film; but how is that any different from the way we all get dressed every morning, ready to play our own character: being a worker, a wife, a mother, a daughter; going through our routine like performing lines in a play. Indeed, how much better would it be to go about it all while wearing the red jacket with the curved lapel from Look 24? (It would be the same, but we tell ourselves stories in order to live.)
Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry was also thinking of magical tales, his spring collection was inspired by the myth of Icarus, someone else who flew higher and higher, and though Roseberry did not wish to engage with the bit about “flying too close to the sun,” the clothes were bathed in golden light just the same. In seeking to make something modern, he also collapsed time and refashioned the body: in his world waists are tinier and hips are wider though not always in that va-va-voom way that’s supposed to make us think about fertility. He padded the hips in convex ways like Picasso, expanded sternums into carapaces, and finessed all manner of topsy-turvy effects in the way he draped. Ludovic de Saint Sernin, who took over the Jean Paul Gaultier couture this season, also molded the body, though the sensuality that is his raison d’être pushes that va-va-voom feeling to the forefront. His finale gown, with it sweetheart necklace and skirt covered in feathers, did indeed bring to mind the foam left behind after a wave crashes ashore. An attainable fantasy.
On the other side of the fantasy, the designers who stayed grounded did so on their own terms. Giambattista Valli, known for his ultra-femme flights of fancy, looked to Morocco and the life he leads there when he visits with his partner or with a good friend that’s since passed. In his hands, the volumes, the feathers, and the dramatic capes and Poiret-esque soft “lumps and bumps,” appeared almost as mirages, an homage to classic beauty and glamour. Giorgio Armani celebrated 20 years of Armani Privé with an emphasis on swishing, secretly hedonistic trousers (The sheerness! The caressing touch of liquid satin against the skin!) and gossamer gowns that will soon have their moment on the red carpet. Matthieu Blazy arrives at Chanel later this year, but this season, the house studio zeroed in on youthful skirt suits in a Sweet Tart color palette, each one groovier than the next. And yet one of the most beautiful gowns was also one of the simplest, an Easter-chick long yellow shirtdress. It was akin to decorating your house with fresh flowers to receive a visit from a new love.
And yet it was Viktor Rolf’s collection, rooted in the most mundane and everyday of garments—a white shirt, a beige trench coat, navy trousers—that showed the real absurdity of life in the year 2025. Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren exploded them, shrunk them, scrunched them, covered them in bows, turned them into gowns, or blew them up so big that a ruffled collar sometimes threatened to swallow the model. They called it “a human interpretation of the endless possibilities of AI. Except that we are our own AI.” And that’s really the best lesson to take away from the shows this season: Feed your brain all your own references, mix them up inside yourself. Be your own AI.
Short n’ Sweet
The new power suit is disarming in its proportions.
Gold-Dust Woman
Gold is couture’s answer to a neutral color.
Hips as Heaven Is Wide
Go ahead, take up space!
The Gentlest Suggestion of a Shoe
Tailor-made for your own Cinderella moment (losing a shoe while walking down stairs), but worth it.
And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Opulence
Dripping in diamonds and pearls and jewels and chains.
The New Naked Dress Sparkles
Take a shot if you see these walk the red carpet during the next awards season.
Child’s Play
Designers just want to have fun!
Look at Me, Don’t Look at Me
Diana Vreeland would definitely suggest, “Why don’t you….get a fabulous couture wrestling mask from Alessandro Michele’s debut collection for Valentino and wear it while you do the dishes and listen to a podcast?”
A Great Gray Suit
Perfect proportions, styling, accessories. Already feels vintage. “Oh this old thing?” You’d say when you receive compliments, which would be often.
Tie a Ribbon to Remember
Go on Etsy and buy a ton of velvet ribbon in different sizes. It’s the perfect finishing touch.
Shimmy Shimmy Shake
Big shapes in feathers, fringe, tinsel, ribbons are made for the dance floor. It’s poetry in motion!
A Cape: The Drama You’ve Been Craving
This is your call to make dramatic entrances and exits. For not caring that you re cleaning the floor as you walk. For having to say “Oh, I’m sorry, you’re standing on my cape.”
The Higher the Hair the Closer to God
Two-toned, and with a little handle like a cup and saucer.
Some Lovely Yellow Dresses…
Vintage-inspired and oh, so chic.
And Some Shocking Citron Looks Too
Yellow is clearly the hue of the season.
Wear the Pants, Softly
Welcome Back, Poiret Cocoon
A classic shape feels surprisingly modern.
A Carrie Bradshaw-esque Extraneous Belt
Chanel takes on one of Carrie’s greatest style moments, the belt over the bare midriff, but makes it palatable for the office.
’Til Death
Nothing says couture like a devastating wedding gown.
