If last year’s haute couture shows were overshadowed by the hype surrounding the Olympics Games in Paris, the Spring/Summer 2025 season pulls fashion back into focus. It certainly helps that The Louvre has just opened its first major exhibition spotlighting fashion’s oldest tradition, titled Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces. The museum is showcasing over 100 looks and accessories from 45 different fashion designers, including Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and the master of them all, Cristóbal Balenciaga.
While The Louvre looks to haute couture’s past, the runway shows happening in the French capital from 27 to 30 January will show us haute couture’s future. A noteworthy name on this season’s Paris Couture Week calendar is Alessandro Michele, who will debut his first haute couture collection for Valentino on 29 January. Sohee Park, founder of the London-based fashion label Miss Sohee, has also been hand-picked by the Fédération de la Haute Couture to show her collection as a guest designer on the calendar. Speaking of guest designers, Jean Paul Gaultier has also tapped Ludovic de Saint Sernin to create a one-off couture collection for his fashion house, following last season’s collaboration with Courrèges’s Nicolas Di Felice.
Iris Van Herpen is absent from this season’s line-up; the innovative Dutch designer told WWD that she will now show her haute couture shows once a year, in July. And while Chanel is set to present its haute couture collection on 28 January, it will be the work of its in-house design studio, not Matthieu Blazy, who was announced as the maison’s artistic director of fashion activities last December. The former Bottega Veneta designer will only make his Chanel debut in October 2025.
There is still much to see, with the likes of Schiaparelli, Dior and Giorgio Armani on the calendar. Stay tuned for the latest updates on the Spring/Summer 2025 haute couture shows in Paris.
Miss Sohee
Valentino’s Alessandro Michele wasn’t the only one making his debut at Paris Couture Week. Sohee Park, the founder of Miss Sohee, was selected as a guest designer this season. Presenting her Spring/Summer 2025 haute couture collection in Paris was a dream come true for the 28-year-old designer. “It’s the world’s biggest [fashion] stage,” Park said in an interview. “Growing up as a student in Seoul, when I first saw an haute couture show, a Chanel show by Karl Lagerfeld, I instantly fell in love.” It must have felt like a full-circle moment for Park when she staged her haute couture show at the Hôtel Pozzo di Borgo, the 18th-century mansion where Lagerfeld used to live. On the runway, models including Coco Rocha flaunted corseted designs and evening gowns that exude opulence, glamour and femininity—qualities that have defined Park’s designs since she launched Miss Sohee in 2020. Park’s designs also nod to her South Korean heritage. The volume and silhouettes of her ballgowns and capes can be traced back to the traditional hanbok dress. Park’s signature motifs like peonies, butterflies and shells, which are often embroidered onto her dresses, are borrowed from the traditional Korean folk art known as minhwa. This season, Park collaborated with local artisans in South Korea who specialise in najeonchilgi, a technique for inlaying mother-of-pearl. This resulted in a spectacular slinky white gown with a croc-effect façade. Park used actual crocodile-embossed leather for the first time in her corsets, which bloomed with petal-like forms to create an hourglass silhouette to rival the ones seen at Schiaparelli. Miss Sohee may be a young fashion label, but it has proven to be a worthy competitor to the storied couture houses that regularly show in Paris. To date, Park’s red-carpet-ready designs have not only attracted celebrity fans (such as Ariana Grande, Anya Taylor-Joy and Bella Hadid) but also a roster of couture clients who have kept her independent fashion label profitable from day one. We won’t be surprised if Park is invited to present next Paris Couture Week, too.
Valentino
“And how, as human beings, do we cope with infinity? How can we grasp the ungraspable? Through lists, catalogs, collections in museums, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. The list does not destroy culture, it creates it.” So wrote Italian philosopher Umberto Eco in his book, The Infinity of Lists. The book was a key source of inspiration for the scholarly Alessandro Michele as he prepared his debut haute couture collection for Valentino. Eco’s ideas, said Michele, “pushed me to imagine every unique, finite and unrepeatable dress, as an uninterrupted and potentially infinite catalogue of words: an ungrammatical list that proceeds through accumulation and juxtaposition. Forty-eight dresses: forty-eight lists.” The dresses Michele presented at his fashion show in Paris were brimming with nods to history, art, film and culture—all highlighted on a screen behind the models. The screen also listed the fabrics, textile techniques and hours of handiwork that went into each haute couture creation, but who was actually reading all of that text when the most extravagant designs were being showcased? Michele stuck to his maximalist tendencies, creating voluminous ballgowns and dramatic capes and lavishing them with ruffles, feathers, crystals, beads, embroideries and the occasional bow. Michele’s use of colour was similarly indulgent. The opening look was a ballgown featuring a bustier of crisscrossing chiffon layers in blue, red, peach and green. The skirt was an explosion of tulle featuring a harlequin pattern in those same colours. The ensemble may look like it has Michele woven all over it, but it also pays homage to a dress from Valentino’s Alta Moda Spring 1992 collection. Michele makes other such faithful references throughout his collection, including a tulle number in rich Valentino red. It looks like he feels right at home at the Italian fashion brand.
Gaurav Gupta
Gaurav Gupta has made his grand return to Paris. Last June, the Indian designer had to cancel his show at Paris Fashion Week for an “urgent personal matter”. We now know that it was because both he and his life partner, the poet Navkirat Sodhi, were involved in a near-fatal fire accident. Sodhi was badly burnt. The collection that Gupta presented this week, titled Across The Flame, is a testament to her resilience and the power of transformation and rebirth. It also reflected the spiritual nature of their shared healing journey: Gupta used a brocade adorned with Sanskrit chants in his designs and sent down models with a “third eye sun”, a take on the Hindu tilak, painted on their foreheads. The brocade was woven in Banaras (or Varanasi), a city along the Ganges river that is often called the spiritual capital of India. The fabric glimmered in gold on a dress with a wide, open collar, as well as on a coat dress worn by Singaporean model Diya Prabhakar. For the first time, Gupta embroidered his signature swirl dresses with raffia and micro-pearls. He also introduced an ochre hue—a sacred colour in Hinduism—which was especially striking on the Twin Flame dress that was draped across two models. Another surprise was the use of denim, rendered couture-worthy on a distressed jacket embellished with metal ghungroo bells. More metallic touches were seen on the armour-like breastplates, including a deep purple one worn by a model painted in blue—a nod to celestial beings. The show closed with an equally cosmic image: a crystal-covered model, dressed in a sculpted dress that swooped around her body and seemed to leave star trails in its wake.
Chanel
Chanel’s fashion show at the Grand Palais marked the maison’s 110th year of devoting itself to haute couture. The presentation was rightly graced by some impressive guests: Blackpink’s Jennie and Kylie Jenner rubbed shoulders, Dua Lipa and Lily-Rose Depp shared a laugh, and Depp’s mother Vanessa Paradis posed for photos with Marion Cotillard. While many celebrities on the front row were clad in black—Coco Chanel’s signature colour—there was a rainbow of looks that came down the two looping C-shaped runways. The collection’s colour palette went from day to night, beginning with the soft pastels in the opening looks (a standout is the pale pink chiffon gown with feathers). The tweed jackets with puffed shoulders that followed offered richer purples, pinks and yellows, eventually leading to a high point: a halter-neck dress in fiery red. The evening dresses traded black for blues, as seen in a billowing sky-blue cape worn over a minidress sparkling with cerulean and indigo sequins. To close, a wash of whites and beiges: Mona Tourgaard’s white gown, with its glittering piping and delicate knots, looked ethereal in comparison to the veiled Chanel bride’s ensemble of a sequin jacket and a sheer, high-low dress.
Armani Privé
Let there be light, said Giorgio Armani for his 20th anniversary Armani Privé show. The Italian designer’s haute couture collection, presented at the gilded Palazzo Armani salon in Paris, was titled Lumieres, which translates to “lights”. Indeed, as some 90 elegant ensembles came down the runway, a sparkle could be found here and there. The show opened with relaxed yet refined jackets, trousers and vests in shining silk. Armani’s fascination with various material cultures across China, India, Polynesia, Japan and North Africa was apparent in the collection’s soft colours, striking silhouettes and elaborate patterns. The collection’s handcrafted embroideries, drawn from “the opulence of India” as mentioned in the show notes, covered entire ensembles in glittering crystals and beads depicting floral and paisley patterns. Japan’s “linear elegance”, meanwhile, could be found in the fine micro pleating of Armani’s strapless gowns. The show closed with the 90-year-old designer himself, walking down the runway with his Armani bride clad in a flowing, beaded caftan jacket and a crystal-embellished headpiece—a woman “illuminated by a clear, lunar light”.
Schiaparelli
“I’m so tired of everyone constantly equating modernity with simplicity. Can’t the new also be worked, be baroque, be extravagant?” asked Daniel Roseberry while backstage at the Schiaparelli Spring/Summer 2025 haute couture show. The designer answered himself: his Icarus collection featured extreme silhouettes, largely achieved by tight corsets that the likes of Kendall Jenner, Alex Consani and Mona Tougaard could walk in. Some of these corsets came with structured, almost alien-like hip bones that further emphasised the models’s hourglass figures. (The hourglass is significant to the house of Schiaparelli which, in 1937, launched its Shocking perfume in a bottle shaped like Mae West’s figure.) In rejection of minimalism, Roseberry lavished his designs with embroidery, feathers, pearls and beautiful beadwork. He also used sumptuous fabrics like duchess satin and tulle, which were favoured by couturiers of the last century (think Madame Grès, Charles Frederick Worth, Paul Poiret all of whom Roseberry referenced for his collection). The fabrics were further worked upon with draping and pleating—resulting in marvellous designs that are worth more than a second look.
Dior
Ahead of Dior’s Spring/Summer 2025 haute couture show, the maison revealed a key inspiration for the collection: Dorothea Tanning’s 1943 painting, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. The American artist, as well as fellow artist Leonor Fini, brought a woman’s point of view to the Surrealist art movement—which about sums up how their work caught the attention of Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri. Also on Chiuri’s moodboard is Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which made her reflect “on the moment of transition between childhood and adulthood and how this moment is represented in a transformation of what we wear.” At Dior’s fashion show in the Musée Rodin, Chiuri turned models into “punk Alices” with feather headpieces fashioned like mohawks. What they wore was less rebellious: models were fitted into corsets, cage skirts and tailcoats, paired with romantic touches like lace culottes, sheer panels and puff sleeves. The whimsical lampshade dresses stood out with their visible crinolines; they were inspired by Christian Dior’s Cigale dress from the 1950s, which was updated by Chiuri with a shorter hemline. Chiuri also looked to Yves Saint Laurent’s 1958 Trapèze collection for Dior, resulting in elegant silk coats and dresses with loose, liberating silhouettes. As models walked along the runway, lined with Indian artist Rithika Merchant’s colourful artwork, their mini crinoline dresses trailed with ribbons of fabric—a nod to the unravelling dresses worn by the two young girls in Tanning’s painting.
This article was last updated on 31 January 2025.
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