Couture's New Generation: Storytelling, Risk, and Wonder at Paris Fashion Week

This couture season felt like designers deliberately rejected commercial pressures to pursue wonder, craft, and storytelling as their primary purpose, creating an unusually unified statement about what fashion can be.

Summary of Decoding Paris Haute Couture: Wonder, Restraint and the Call of the Void. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:58 — Couture this season succeeded in being couture—providing that pinnacle experience where designers work unbothered by commercial considerations and showcase what ateliers are truly capable of.
• 00:04:25 — There was a prevailing feeling of extravagance and craftsmanship throughout the season, with designers emphasizing storytelling and narrative within their garments.
• 00:05:14 — Some collections pushed embellishment to extremes—thousands of hours of beading and embroidery—creating elaborate silhouettes, though this sometimes sacrificed beauty for spectacle.
• 00:07:12 — Victor and Rolf made a conceptual statement by mounting one look labeled decadence and another labeled restraint on two models, capturing a key tension of the season.
• 00:09:20 — Mathieu Blazy used fairy tales from Gabrielle Chanel’s personal library as the foundation for his collection, embedding tiny narrative details into fabrics—like magpies and golden eggs—that required close examination to appreciate.
• 00:21:30 — Jonathan Anderson approached his Dior couture collection as experimental work in progress, removing tent walls at Musée Rodin to create an open-air Southeast Asian veranda aesthetic inspired by sculptor Linda Benglis’s life between New Mexico and Kerala.
• 00:27:21 — Both Blazy and Anderson achieved the technical feat of creating clothes with visual substance and elaborate embellishment that weigh almost nothing, a prodigious feat of couture craftsmanship.
• 00:37:07 — Pier Paolo Piccioli’s debut Balenciaga couture collection echoed his breakthrough Valentino spring 2018 show with white tanks, baggy chinos, and dramatic volume, establishing his creative vision at the house.
• 00:47:23 — Michael Stewart, an independent London designer showing his second-ever collection, generated significant industry buzz by meticulously executing uncompromising silhouettes with buried beading in a tiny studio, embodying a David-versus-Goliath narrative that resonated with fashion professionals seeking new talent.

In depth

Wonder as the season’s organizing idea, and its shadow

Tim Blanks builds his read of the season around a single line from Robert Wan, relayed to Vogue’s Tiziana Cardini: that couture cannot fix anything in the world but it can keep wonder alive, and that wonder is scarce right now 00:03:36. Blanks says this line kept resurfacing in his mind as he watched shows he mostly hadn’t attended in person, having only been in Paris Monday and Tuesday and relying on photos and write-ups for Balenciaga, Gaultier and Jean Paul Gaultier’s Wednesday slate 00:03:17. His broader claim is that couture actually delivered on its own premise this season: it functioned as the tier of fashion where designers and ateliers work free of commercial pressure and simply show what craft can do at its limit 00:04:25.

Imran Ahmed pushes back on how far that wonder tipped into something less flattering. Watching the season compressed into a half-hour scroll on his phone, he noticed a pattern he found troubling: houses, including some of the Indian couturiers he looked at, seem to be competing on sheer statistics — hours of beading, number of embroiderers — as if elaborateness itself were the point 00:05:14. His worry is that this arms race of embellishment can strip away beauty rather than deliver it, trading the sense of wonder for a kind of spectacle for spectacle’s sake.

Ahmed extends this into a question about decadence, tying it explicitly to the current moment of extreme wealth visible in tech-fortune valuations and the kind of ultra-wealthy attendees now populating fashion week front rows 00:06:04. He frames the couture embellishment race as part of the same cultural moment. Neither he nor Blanks resolves this tension cleanly — Blanks doesn’t dispute the decadence point, but he reaches for Viktor & Rolf’s literal-minded runway gesture, in which one look was labeled ‘decadence’ and another ‘restraint,’ hoisted onto the models’ shoulders, as evidence that even the designers themselves were naming this exact push-pull as the season’s live question 00:07:12.

Mathieu Blazy’s Chanel: storytelling as method, not decoration

The centerpiece of the conversation is Mathieu Blazy’s sophomore Chanel couture collection, built around a small, easily overlooked book of fairy tales Blazy found in Gabrielle Chanel’s own library 00:17:48. Blanks explains that Blazy mapped Chanel’s biography onto the Jack and the Beanstalk story — reworked in France as a chicken, not a goose, laying the golden egg — casting the young Gabrielle as the humble climber ascending toward fortune 00:10:15. Crucially, this wasn’t a loose thematic gesture: Blanks describes minutely embedded details, like a tiny egg tucked inside a monogrammed chicken charm, or a magpie perched on a model’s shoulder plucking at chains that formed the actual collar of the look — a literal rendering of the idea that Chanel, like a magpie, hoarded shiny found objects into her aesthetic vocabulary 00:17:53.

This granularity connects to a point Blazy made directly to Blanks: couture isn’t meant to be appreciated from a distance, the way ready-to-wear passes by in a runway blur 00:07:12. The Chanel show was staged in a smaller, more compact space specifically to let details register up close, including tweed weaves with elements so tiny Blanks says his own eyes struggled to resolve them, even knowing they were there 00:18:10. The implicit argument is that scale and grandiosity aren’t the only route to couture’s ‘wonder’ — legibility and intimacy can do the same work, just through a different register of attention.

Both speakers press on whether this joyful, narrative-driven Chanel is escapism, and Blanks resists the word: he notes Blazy insists these are ‘adventures of the everyday,’ clothes meant to be pragmatically worn, not costumes for retreat from reality 00:14:32. Ahmed counters that however wearable Blazy intends them to be relative to the rest of the couture field, they remain so ornate that only an unusually singular woman could actually live in them daily 00:15:01. The unresolved question Ahmed raises explicitly — since this is Blazy’s sixth collection for the house — is how Chanel evolves from here: can this joyous, already-resolved-feeling aesthetic keep surprising people, or does it risk becoming expected precisely because it has arrived so fully formed so fast 00:16:43.

Jonathan Anderson’s Dior: couture as visible laboratory

Where Blazy’s Chanel reads as resolved, Blanks frames Jonathan Anderson’s Dior as explicitly unfinished by design. Anderson has said from the start that he needs room to experiment and resents how quickly fashion judges and discards ideas 00:23:00, and Blanks argues this showed up structurally in the collection: some ideas landed, others didn’t, and the show visibly contained both happy and unhappy accidents rather than smoothing them into a single coherent statement 00:23:21. The literal setting reinforced this — Anderson removed the tent walls at the Musée Rodin gardens, turning the usual couture enclosure into an open-air veranda, partly a response to the heatwave and partly, Blanks suggests, in sympathy with the show’s reference point: sculptor Linda Benglis, who split her life between New Mexico and Kerala, India 00:23:36.

Benglis’s own biography carries a pointed subtext Blanks flags but doesn’t dwell on: her most charged work often addressed how the art world’s patriarchy treated her, and Anderson built an entire couture collection’s fulcrum around that reference 00:22:19. Blanks calls the move audacious, crediting LVMH’s evident trust in Anderson’s instincts for letting him take a couture house somewhere this personal 00:21:55. Concretely, this meant reworking house icons like the bar jacket with Benglis-style knotting, and using materials — metallics, cellophane — lifted straight from her sculptural practice, a literalism Blanks concedes some critics could reasonably object to, even as he found it worked more often than not 00:24:54.

Ahmed and Blanks converge on one technical point that cuts across both Dior and Chanel: garments that look visually dense and heavy — Anderson showed what was nominally a fall/winter collection in 38-degree heat — were in fact gossamer light, a paradox Blanks calls one of couture’s most reliably astonishing feats 00:27:10. Where they diverge is on trajectory: Ahmed notes Anderson himself has called his approach at Dior ‘a work in progress,’ consistent with how his Loewe tenure only found its shape over many years, whereas Blazy’s Chanel feels immediately whole — leaving open which model of creative evolution the industry should expect more of going forward 00:28:59.

Schiaparelli’s rupture and Balenciaga’s echo of the past

Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli offered the season’s clearest case of a designer deliberately breaking from what had been working. Blanks recounts that Roseberry described his previous season, ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy,’ as a genuine breakthrough and consolidation of his aesthetic — and that when he sat down to build on it, the ideas simply weren’t there anymore 00:32:44. Rather than force a repeat, he pivoted toward latex, silicone, and body-distorting ’tendril’ forms evoking artist Matthew Barney’s fetishistic Cremaster performances, dropping the gold-signature embellishment that had anchored nearly every Schiaparelli look since he took over the house 00:35:07. Blanks reads this as Roseberry consciously answering an internal ‘call of the void’ — the show’s own soundtrack included Roseberry’s voice describing the compulsion to swerve off a cliff or step into oncoming traffic — treating creative risk almost as self-destructive impulse 00:33:08. Ahmed asks directly whether dropping the gold motif was intentional, and Blanks affirms it, framing the unpredictability as valuable in itself, even if neither of them can predict what Roseberry does next 00:35:52.

Pier Paolo Piccioli’s first couture outing at Balenciaga poses almost the opposite problem: not a rupture but a return. Both Blanks and Ahmed, watching only via photographs, were struck by how strongly the collection echoed Piccioli’s own breakthrough Valentino couture show from spring 2018 — the white tank, baggy trousers, oversized Philip Treacy hats, and saturated color that made his name 00:37:31. Blanks likens this to musicians forever measured against their one classic album, and suggests Piccioli seems to be reasserting that grammar now that he has Balenciaga’s grander scale and resources to work with 00:37:59. Notably, Blanks admits Piccioli hadn’t yet ‘made sense’ to him at the house before this show, and that this couture outing was the first moment his presence there felt legible 00:38:27 — though he’s careful to say true equivalence with Cristóbal Balenciaga’s mastery isn’t really achievable, only gestured toward 00:40:46. When Ahmed asks how this couture grandeur reconciles with Piccioli’s more muted ready-to-wear at Balenciaga, Blanks declines to resolve it, saying flatly that he doesn’t try to make the two cohere and thinks it’s better simply to watch what follows 00:41:25 — an explicit, unresolved seam left in the conversation rather than papered over.

Duran Lantink and Michael Stewart: unpredictability and the outsider narrative

Duran Lantink’s debut couture show for Jean Paul Gaultier gave Blanks his most viscerally enthusiastic reaction of the conversation. He describes silhouettes that only make sense viewed from the side — bodies apparently displaced sideways, forms with pipe-like protrusions that read as organic and ‘peculiarly sexual,’ evoking what he again ties back to Matthew Barney’s body-transforming aesthetic 00:43:23. Blanks singles out a denim jacket from the show as possibly the best example of the garment he’s ever seen, framing Lantink’s work as carrying real daywear alongside its more alien, sculptural pieces 00:44:41. What excites him most, he says explicitly, is that Lantink doesn’t just reinvent silhouette — he reinvents the human form itself, and that this kind of formal audacity, backed by a loose reference to Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette-era French history, reads to him as a genuine manifesto whose full meaning is still unclear even to him 00:45:06.

The most unexpected story of the week, though, is Michael Stewart — an independent London designer showing only his second collection ever, working out of a tiny Strand studio with no comparable budget or atelier support 00:49:34. Blanks frames Stewart’s reception explicitly as a David-and-Goliath story: an industry insider told him before the show that people were ’looking for a hero,’ and Blanks argues Stewart’s near-mythic physical presence — pale skin, shaved head, a heavy beard — and his single-minded devotion to one signature technique (a beading method buried into seams that reads almost like scarification) gave the show an unusual sense of purity and stakes 00:47:52. Angelo Flaccavento’s BoF review compared Stewart to Azzedine Alaïa and Charles James, and Blanks pushes the comparison further by noting Stewart makes only floor-sweeping gowns and fishtail silhouettes — he showed one single pair of trousers purely to prove he could, then said plainly that daywear isn’t what his imagined clientele comes to him for 00:52:56.

Both Blanks and Ahmed treat Stewart’s show as evidence the industry still hungers for an origin story untethered from mega-brand infrastructure — the presence of respected collaborators like hairstylist Duffy and model Kirsten McMenamy closing the show signaled that people worth watching had already rallied around him 00:53:51. But Blanks resists tidy triumphalism: he speculates, almost uneasily, that Stewart might already feel he’d ‘made what he wanted to make’ even if he never showed again — a comment he immediately backs away from as too morbid a note, leaving Stewart’s future trajectory as openly uncertain as Roseberry’s or Piccioli’s 00:54:47.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.