For the staging of his spring collection, designer Alain Paul landed on a clever idea. Having spent the better part of the past year auditioning for highly coveted awards—he took home the 2025 ANDAM Special Prize—he found himself thrown right back to his days auditioning as a contemporary dancer, so he decided to reprise the whole to-do and bring the audience to the jury’s table. To complete the exercise in meta-theater, he recruited a handful of dance-world friends, among them Germain Louvet, star dancer at the Opéra National de Paris, and dancer/actor/director Adrien Dantou, to walk in the show. The result was mostly charming, and not just for the set-up.
Paul has already staged four shows at Châtelet, but for spring the designer opted instead to focus on the nuances of what happens behind the scenes, away from the footlights, when clothes are pulled on (or off). “It’s a more vulnerable part of myself that I’d never shown before, and what I went through this year reminded me of doing my first audition at eight years old,” he said. “It’s part of a dancer’s life: you’re always trying to prove yourself, but it also says something about who we are every day.”
The show opened with a sculpted white hourglass jacket slipped over a seemingly offhand skirt made of five layers of fabric, a look that neatly showcased Paul’s tailoring skills as well as this season’s mood of “Victorian flou.” Constructions appeared wrenched and skewed, with a shirt collar permanently popped, an armhole recast as a neck hole, or a men’s jacket spliced with part of a silky shirt inside one lapel. The idea of costume came through in corsetry that peeled away from the torso, a trench over bloomers—a spring micro-trend—and props repurposed from vintage finds, but it was the skirts with the trompe l’oeil folded-down tops that, surprisingly, convinced.
Two flowers—poppies and carnations—appeared as double-layer prints showered over skirts and tops, a nod to Pina Bausch, the designer said. A dress and skirt made from elastic ribbons bound together with knitted stitches, the fruit of a collaboration with artist Cécile Feilchenfeldt, were the show’s made-to-order couture statements.
Of his many-layered styling, the designer explained that he wanted to hold up a mirror to the ballet corps: “sometimes a movement or gesture is more impactful if a group of dancers are all doing the same thing, rather than just one person.” His growing fanbase will find plenty to wear here: sharp suiting, feminine flou, silk polos, sculptural tops and this season’s toe-dividing slingback based on the dancer’s “turner.” Smart pieces in leather, such as a sculpted sleeveless top and the aviator worn by Louvet, were crafted from multiple pre-loved finds. Overall, this collection felt like a step in the right direction. In the audience, one or two people turned up in those repurposed tights numbers. It’s become a recurring gesture, but the jury is still out on that one.
