This past June, I was in Antwerp as part of the external jury judging the work of senior fashion students at the Royal Academy Of Fine Arts and, since I was in town, decided to pay designer Julie Kegels a visit. Kegels is a graduate of the school, and the plans for her spring 2026 collection were well underway. There were fitting pictures of the samples she and her team were busy working on; smart, cool, and conceptual ideas. Witty ideas too. Around the notion of mid-century underwear breaking free from the clothing concealing it, for instance, like a pleated skirt exposing a camisole and knickers; it recalled Marilyn Monroe in the infamous airborne white dress moment in The Seven Year Itch, and indeed a still from the movie was on Kegels’s moodboard. There were looks which could be transformed as if by magic—Kegels likes sly winks, an off-kilter wit—so she’d been studying magicians’ manuals, all very now you see it, now you don’t, with a slip dress appearing from beneath a shirt and pencil skirt. Everyday banality, like garment bags, or old tablecloths which you inherited from grandma, was reimagined as bags, or as something you might wrap around yourself as you leave the house because, f–k it, you didn’t pick up your laundry or your dry cleaning the other day, and you need something to wear.
It’s a testament to the strength of Kegels’s vision—unerring and precise, but laced with humor and lightness—that her show today in Paris, outside under a bridge by the Passy Metro station, was pretty much unchanged since June. And her choice of venue, also banal and everyday, highlighted what this young designer does so well: Floating tons of great concepts, but she isn’t afraid to tether them down so they make sense in the real world all of us experience every single day. “I had three words in my phone’s notes app,” Kegels said backstage about the collection’s starting point. “Change, change, change, because after the first year of my brand, I really had this feeling of a lot of different impulses. I started then with this idea of how a woman changes during the day; transforming herself into so many different identities. The collection is really about transformation and movement.”
In terms of the clothes, where she began was with lace, abstracting it, leaning into negative space, mixing it with sheer fabrics, or with repurposed bed sheets, for graphic camisoles and pencil skirts; elegant but off-kilter. That set the tone for everything else. Kegels embraces femininity but loves it even more if we see it with quirks, faults, mistakes and messiness—and for this collection, it yielded terrific results. Her shirting, with its pointy shoulders, echoing the way it can look when you hang it out to dry and the shirt gets distorted from being on the line; other times the shirt tails escaped through the back of her pants, thanks to a slash which ran hip to hip. There were diaphanous skirts and dresses which had glitter trapped in their hems, shaking and shimmering as the models walked. That same glitter appeared on the elbows of her knits, as if you’d accidentally placed them on a table and thought, uh oh, what mess of myself have I made now? Speaking of mess, Kegels asked a friend who loves make-up to wear some then smear her face: that resulted in one of the collection’s prints. Kegels also brings a waste not, want not approach to the proceedings. In addition to the domestic table clothes and sheets, she repurposed the shoes from last season, adding cages of straps to them, or dipping their toes into yet more of that glitter. Kudos to Kegels, then, for her sparky urgency, and for making some noise as a young independent in a Paris which, in a big week for fashion, is about anything but right now.
