Backstage at Harris Reed’s Nina Ricci show, held in the gilded academic splendor of the Sorbonne university, the moodboard was awash with all the greats. There were David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Patti Smith, and the New York Dolls, all of whom genderfucked their way from the late 1960s onwards in a riot of slipper satin, chiffon, sequins, feathers, and polka dots. And when they weren’t doing that, they were skinny-hipping in lanky androgynous suiting, where the shoulders were as defined as the trousers were cut with a flick of a flare at their ankles. All of these gods and goddesses of rock breathed life into Reed’s vision of spring 2026 referencing this attire (and its attitude), except the starting point for it was a little closer to home: Reed himself.
It makes sense: I was looking at a moodboard of navel plunging shirting and lean guitar hero pants, and there was Reed… in a black plunge shirt and black second skin trousers which Ziggy Stardust would have been thrilled by. “Carine [Roitfeld, Reed’s stylist for Nina Ricci] said to me, ‘What do you want to wear?’” said Reed. “It’s the first time I’ve done that, and it was a really wonderful way of provoking a genuine response to that question. The collection is really an exercise in character building,” Reed went on to say, “so yes, there’s the presence of the likes of Bowie and Jagger, but there’s also this celebration of self, and of fluidity. And it’s the first time since I started here that instead of talking about the Nina Ricci woman, I’m talking about the Nina Ricci person.”
Reed’s instincts were correct here. He has by now established a playbook of all the tropes of French femininity that one can associate with Ricci—the polka dots, the tweeds, the lace, the bows—though it’s a playbook many a French house could claim as their own. How does he make them his and ergo Ricci’s? By instead of shellacking those tropes in some hazy scent of Paris of the past, choosing to free them up, and let them loose, in a way which can reflect him, Ricci, and today. Maybe that’s the real l’air du temps for fashion now; really getting out of the shadow of a past which doesn’t reflect all the gender and cultural nuances of where we are now, once and for all.
That’s not to say that Reed wasn’t also reveling in all that Frenchness, spun through his Anglo-American eye. (In some ways, this collection reminded me of Peter Schlesinger’s wonderful book A Checkered Past, with its images of the art and fashion demimondes of the 1970s, including a particularly louche Paris.) Reed worked his way through a black tux jacket and a billowing silken olive blouson over bow-festooned black ball skirts. There were also tortoiseshell sequins (on a one-shouldered be-bowed top with a rosette trimmed black pants, or a skinny blazer over golden cloque flares); and a buttoned turquoise snakeskin blazer over a sliver of a satin skirt—very Gala Mitchell, one of my all time style icons. A white-dotted black plissé jacket was shown with fluid pinstriped pants, a flurry of teal feathers—actually fluttery strips of chiffon, because Reed won’t use feathers—wrapped at the neck. It all moved at a snappy pace, and it felt like Reed was enjoying himself, and being himself. That’s going to be a fruitful way for him to continue moving Nina Ricci forward.
