Looking through the spring 2025 couture collections, a thought kept running through my mind. “What a great time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd.” It’s a quote from one of David Lynch’s daily weather reports on YouTube, and while he was absolutely not referring to the spectacle of Parisian high fashion, it does fit the mood quite well.
At Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri explored the history of fashion by imagining she was making clothes for a child or perhaps a doll. The result was an odd mix of saccharine sweet broderie anglaise bloomers layered underneath panniers, gilded cages-as-skirts, and fringe like so many homemade jellyfish costumes (if your home happens to be made up of the most exacting ateliers in Paris, of course). “Nonsense and fairy tales. Alice in Wonderland,” said Sarah Mower in her review. Couture has always been known for being the realm of fantasy. We want to follow designers down their rabbit holes.
No one knows their way through a rabbit hole quite like Alessandro Michele, whose debut couture collection for Valentino came with a 200 page tome of references for each look (if you didn’t feel like reading, the references were also projected on the screen behind each look as the models walked slowly by). He titled the collection “Vertigineux,” a reference to the dizzying heights to which he pushed himself—and the Valentino atelier—as he put together the collection. “It’s like every single person is like a little wizard, something magical, and everything is under a spell,” he said on the Vogue podcast. “Time doesn’t exist. The ritual of making is completely different.” And time did not exist. Just like at Dior, there were panniers—in fact, there were panniers in almost every couture collection this season—a nod to harlequins, luxe Mexican wrestling masks, the vestments of 1980s high society, sober Elizabethan gowns, fringe, ribbons, embroidery, lace, ruffles, jacquards, velvets, patchwork, pleats, and simple harem pants.
References to everything mean references to nothing, mean something new. Each model was like a character from a different Cinecittá film; but how is that any different from the way we all get dressed every morning, ready to play our own character: being a worker, a wife, a mother, a daughter; going through our routine like performing lines in a play. Indeed, how much better would it be to go about it all while wearing the red jacket with the curved lapel from look 24? (It would be the same, but we tell ourselves stories in order to live.)
