Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
“Form as style”: This is how Duran Lantink describes his Autumn/Winter 2025 collection, staged in a rive gauche office space during Paris Fashion Week. Streaming between cubicles in a beige brave new world, silhouettes emerge as if cut to size for an urban jungle. Blending animal prints (the collection is titled “Duranimal”) and protheses, the Flemish designer plays a new game of construction and trompe l’oeil textile cloning.
Lantink’s research is often informed by upcycling, and this time it’s American sportswear classics like bombers and hunting jackets which are being resized as if by a plastic surgeon. “Hollowed-out” jeans float around the bodies of models, cut out to leave their buttocks bare. Suspended Scottish kilts dangle like loincloths for a highly surreal hunting party. With his upside-down white shirts, trench coats with artificial hips, or jackets with shrugged, padded shoulders, the body becomes the subject for all manner of stylistic experiments revolving around the question of identity.
In their radicalism, some looks are reminiscent of images by Erwin Wurm, the Austrian artist who has been developing “a reflection on volume, three dimensions, the relationship to space, the envelope” for almost four decades. One is reminded of Wurm’s bloated “fat cars” among other banal objects transformed into absurdist sculpture.
Lantink is just one of the designers leaning into experimental silhouettes this season — playing, notably, with representation of the body. Far from the focus on easy-to-wear wardrobe dressing that has lifted (but also homogenised) many fashion businesses in recent seasons, experiments with form are helping to differentiate young designers in a world increasingly saturated by images and prone to “desire fatigue.” An anemic luxury market is a further incitement for the likes of Lantink, Vautrait, Hodakova, Marie Adam-Leenaerdt and more to rebuke old formulas, placing art and fashion at the pinnacle rather than reproducing “codes” for the sake of storytelling rooted in the idea of heritage.
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During and after the Covid-19 crisis, colour was often turned up a notch, letting itself loose after lockdown while simultaneously sounding the alarm for the fears of our times. Today, in an era torn between euphoria and uncertainty, form comes into focus: It literally explodes, subjecting itself to every twist, volume and amplifying effect.
As at Lantink, extreme volumes are present in the collection of Marie Adam-Leenaerdt, who has sought inspiration in the world of furniture. In her fall collection, a padded base provides “the structure, the framework of the garment,” paired with “a cover” in silk or wool. “It’s this interplay between carcass and fluidity that interests me,” she says. “You can wear the garment with the structure, or not.”
Another stand-out brand this season, Vautrait mixes effortless chic and unexpected forms in a sort of manifesto for unconventional elegance. “A shape is not just an outline — it is the foundation of everything that follows,” founder Jonathan Carmel says. His latest collection features an enormous circular motorcycle jacket. “I find the circle interesting as it is a form without a beginning or end. Unlike a line with a start and an end, the circle is whole, unified, and self-referential — it returns to itself.”
Elsewhere, an age of uncertainty and post-truth provides a backdrop for all kinds of fashion detour. At Dilara Findikoglu, the body becomes the canvas for lacing, riveting, shadow play and cut-outs. The London-based designer’s austere erotica Venus sport corseted looks are cut from the super-100 gray wool usually destined for businessmen’s suits. At Zomer, launched by Danial Aitouganov and Imruh Asha (semi-finalists for the LVMH prize), garments are worn front to back. “To play is to create, to transform the familiar into something new,” the label says.
By liberating the most banal pieces in the contemporary wardrobe, emerging designers are putting a new spin on normality, questioning it from within. Galib Gassanoff’s Institution takes plaid and down covers and restructures them into enveloping pieces. Hodakova transforms men’s trousers into a jacket, hangs them from the straps of a panel dress or cuts them up into gabardine balaclavas. The label’s subversive vision turns “sartorial” technique on its head while sticking to a meticulous sense of cut and volume.
The revenge of abstraction isn’t limited to young brands. In a sign of the times, surrealist couturiers Viktor and Rolf are getting back into ready-to-wear for the first time in a decade, transposing the silhouettes of their “Haute Abstraction” couture collection from last year into a wardrobe rendered in everyday materials such as denim or waterproof canvas. (The collection features a collab with coat maker Mackintosh.) “It’s not about losing bold expression, but using it to elevate the ordinary,” the brand says. If you can wear it, it’s clothes: At Issey Miyake, creative director Satoshi Kondo turns a simple paper bag into a top. And in the current fashion moment, Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons stands out more than ever for her exemplary, obsessive and unceasing explorations. The designer has long been fashion’s lodestar when it comes to defying the laws of global commerce, designing runway shows that go to the end of a more conceptual story. This season is no exception.
Rarely has the silhouette been so deconstructed and reconstructed since 1993, when Martin Margiela carefully placed eight pairs of socks so that the heels covered the round parts of the bust, chest, elbows and shoulders. But designs that seem quirky or anecdotal today challenge perceptions of the body — potentially changing how we dress tomorrow. That’s what Alexander McQueen did with his first bumsters (Autumn/Winter 1995–1996), or Demna Gvasalia with his high-shouldered hoodies for Vêtements (2015).
Challenging designs also have the potential to bring back fashion’s clubby, insider spirit — an antidote to the massification of style. Three decades later, however, the latest crop of conceptual fashion brands seems less interested in shocking the world with their abstractions than in transmission, in sharing their passion for research with a community.
“Rather than chasing innovation as an isolated act, I see design as a continuity, a dialogue with history, tradition and craftsmanship,” Vautrait’s Carmel says. “Fashion is not about rupture but about returning, reinterpreting and uncovering the essential logic of a shape, a silhouette, a material.”
