The best of Haute Couture Week S/S 2025, from Chanel to Valentino

‘Haute couture aspires to reach great heights; it promises escape from our complicated reality,’ said Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry on Monday morning (27 January), as he opened Paris Haute Couture Week S/S 2025 with a show titled ‘Icarus’. He chose the tragic mythical figure to represent his own ‘quest for perfection’ in the medium, ‘a quixotic struggle, a climb, to reach an ever-higher level of execution and vision’.

Execution and vision are the bedrock of haute couture, which represents the industry’s very pinnacle of craft and making, a rarefied art form, undertaken entirely by the hand of the couture atelier and led by a designer’s singular vision. As such, the week – which is currently taking place in Paris – attracts a glamorous slew of attendees, from Hollywood celebrities to the dramatically attired clients themselves, who travel from all around the world to view the couture houses’ latest fantastical creations (to gain such status, a house must be approved by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, and have a dedicated haute couture atelier of at least 15 full-time employees creating at least 35 looks by hand twice a year).

Coming in the wake of Paris' Men’s Fashion Week, Haute Couture Week S/S 2025 has seen shows from the titans of Parisian fashion – among them Dior, Chanel and Schiaparelli, as well as Armani Privé and Valentino (the latter, on Wednesday, marked the much-anticipated couture debut of designer Alessandro Michele). Here, as the week concludes, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss selects the best shows of the week.

The best of Haute Couture Week S/S 2025

Jean Paul Gaultier by Ludovic de Saint Sernin

As the latest in a series of guest designers to take over Jean Paul Gaultier’s haute couture line (and if the whispers are to be believed, the last), Brussels-born, Paris-based designer Ludovic de Saint Sernin titled his S/S 2025 collection ‘Le Naufrage’, which translates from French as ‘shipwreck’. For this once-in-a-lifetime moment, de Saint Sernin, who is known for his sensually charged garments (a recent collection saw him collaborate with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, while perhaps his signature piece is a pair of men’s underwear which laces up along the back), began by thinking about a Seal and Mylène Farmer video in which the pair are lost adrift at sea. As such, the collection, which was full of Gaultier hallmarks (from impossible corsetry to dramatically sculpted silhouettes) had a dishevelled, windswept glamour, played up by the models, who prowled the runway at the house’s longtime headquarters in a theatrical manner. A sailing ship headpiece recalled an archival Gaultier style from the mid-1990s, while an underwear-clad male model in angel wings was a nod to the house’s particular brand of camp. If the rumours that the guest designer project is to come to an end are true, it is a shame: from Simone Rocha to Haider Ackermann, the collections shown under this unique way of collaborating have brought a thrilling new energy to the house. Last night, de Saint Sernin was no exception.

Valentino

Anticipation was high for Alessandro Michele’s debut couture collection for Valentino, which was staged in central Paris’ Palais Brongniart on Wednesday afternoon (29 January 2025). ‘48 dresses, 48 lists,’ the Italian designer wrote in the hefty press notes left on attendees’ seats prior to the show, explaining that he was inspired by Umberto Eco’s assertion that the list is a tool to ‘confine the infinite extension of the existing within a meaningful framework… to bring some order to the chaos of the universe’. Here, he used the list to attempt to harness the infinite opportunities that the haute couture atelier affords a designer (the petite mains who work on the collection represent the pinnacle of dressmaking, with a near-limitless potential for creation). So as the models walked across the long black stage, a stream of rolling words and phrases ran across a screen behind them, from notes on silhouette, fabric and colour, to philosophical musings, historical figures and personal reminiscences. They allowed an insight into the way Michele had designed the eclectic, era-spanning collection, which in his dizzying style shifted between enormous flared gowns, waterfalls of tulle, and showstopping surface embellishment. In his words: ‘a constellation of visions… a plurality of interconnected worlds. Each dress is not just an object It’s rather the knot of a net of significance, [recalling] eras, cultures and echoes of past stories.’ It was a thrilling opening act.

READ: Inside Alessandro Michele’s showstopping debut haute couture show for Valentino

Giorgio Armani Privé

‘Creating is my reason for existing,’ said Giorgio Armani prior to his latest Armani Privé show, which marked 20 years of the couture arm of the Milanese house (the line was started in January 2005). The celebratory show also inaugurated Palazzo Armani, a sprawling new residence in Paris’ 8th arrondissement that will house the Privé atelier and studio (a more modern addition to the 19th-century building will also become Armani’s offices in the city). Presented on a pearlescent runway that snaked through the palazzo’s upper rooms (evoking a traditional haute couture salon show), the collection had a celebratory air. Titled ‘Lumieres’ for the way it was designed to catch the light, in typical Privé style it was a collection rich in surface embellishment (here, a shimmering assemblage of crystals and coloured gems), lustrous fabrications, and a fluid line that drew inspiration from Eastern dress. The 90-year-old Mr Armani – who will celebrate a slew of other anniversaries this year, including 50 years of his original Giorgio Armani label – looped the runway to a rousing ovation at the end of the show, arm-in-arm with one of his glittering model muses.

READ: Armani Privé celebrates 20 years with a glittering show staged at the house’s opulent new Paris palazzo

Chanel

Celebrating 110 years of Chanel haute couture, the Parisian house staged its latest runway show on an enormous set of undulating ramps in the centre of the Grand Palais, created by the American designer Willo Perron. From above, they recalled the house’s emblematic double-C motif, but also an infinity sign – a symbol of the house’s status as the oldest couture house still in operation, and the ‘infinite excellence of haute couture’. It also was an assertion of the fact that, despite Matthieu Blazy not commencing his much-anticipated role as creative director until later this year, that Chanel is a house which is more than able to stand on its own (here, the collection was designed by an in-house team, alongside the petites mains of Chanel’s historic couture atelier). Presented in the fresh winter sunshine – which flooded the Grand Palais space through the vast domed glass ceiling, recently renovated for the Olympics – this was a collection of lightness and youth, seeing the team embrace a bolder palette of crimson red, royal blue and purple, alongside the satisfying softness of pastel pinks, greens and yellows. The inspiration, they said, was Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel’s embrace of colour in the 1980s, which was highlighted in the 2023 V&A exhibition of her work (she is more readily associated with black and white). Indeed, there was something of the 1980s to the silhouettes, too, like a billowing satin cape or a bold shoulder line in the collection’s tailoring, though there was a delicacy to tweed suits edged with folds of tulle and floating organza dresses adorned with feathers. It felt like a breath of fresh air.

Dior

This season Maria Grazia Chiuri stepped through the looking glass for a fantastical collection which drew inspiration from Alice’s journey through Wonderland. It spoke to what Chiuri called a renewed freedom this season, and there was certainly something in the exploration of silhouette – largely centring on a dramatically flared crinoline waistline – which felt like a departure for the Italian designer, whose signature at the house so far has largely been more columnar, rooted in traditions of classical Greek and Roman dress. The A-line shape was derived from the house’s archive – Chiuri has often referenced lesser-known moments in Dior’s history in her collections – seeing her draw inspiration from the flared ‘Trapèze’ line that was designed for Dior in 1958 by Yves Saint Laurent (the French couturier spent a brief two years at the helm of the house after Christian Dior’s death).

It led to a series of richly adorned mini dresses with jutting crinolines that fell away into strands of ribbon adornment or were overlaid with tulle. Suggestions of flora and fauna – echoed in a fantastical show set by artist Rithika Merchant – came in delicate 3D floral motifs on featherweight ruched tulle, while open-fronted tailoring, nipped at the waist, was reminiscent of 17th-century dress. Indeed, Chiuri said the collection had emerged from obsessive research on historical fashion; the aim, she elucidated, was to ‘disrupt the order of time, taking us back to a dimension that belongs neither to past nor future, but to fashion itself and the idea of transformation associated with it’. In this hopping through eras – or, indeed, stepping through the looking glass – Chiuri felt liberated to create perhaps her richest couture collection yet.

READ: Indian artist Rithika Merchant on her fantastical show set for Dior couture

Schiaparelli

The invitation for Daniel Roseberry’s latest Schiaparelli outing was a golden feather, cast in metal, a reference to the Greek myth of Icarus, from which this season’s show took its name. ‘How high can we as couturier’s go?’ said Roseberry, using the close-to-sun allusions to create a collection that paid ode to the great couturiers of our time, among them Yves Saint Laurent and Azzedine Alaia (‘I didn’t want to copy their work; I wanted to learn from them,’ he said). Silhouette was the focus: extraordinary sculpted gowns, darting inwards at the waist and outwards at the hips, recalled the work of Charles Frederick Worth, while others flared under the chest using crinoline-like structures that bounced as the models walked (or, indeed, twirled and posed in a manner reminiscent of traditional haute couture presentations). Elsewhere, equally architectural tailored jackets – replicating the nipped-waist silhouette of midcentury couture – fell away into waterfalls of tulle, while an opera coat worn by Alex Consani was adorned with fronds of feathers and hung seductively off the shoulder.

Roseberry called the silhouettes ‘rigorous’, and there was certainly a new clarity to his vision this season, which began with a series of vintage ribbons the designer had collected from the 1920s and 1930s. Alongside inspiring the colour palette – one of buttery beiges, brown, and mink grey – they also had him considering how such objects of beauty in the past could be translated to the present day. Why, he questioned, does modernity have to mean minimalism and reduction? ‘Can’t the new also be worked, be baroque, be extravagant? Has our fixation on what looks or feels modern become a limitation? Has it cost us our imagination?’ he questioned. Instead, with this collection, he sought to hit new heights, embracing rich adornment and dramatic, over-the-top construction – a recognition of haute couture’s status as fashion’s pinnacle. ‘Haute couture aspires to reach great heights; it promises escape from our complicated reality. It also reminds us that perfection comes at a price. How high can we couturiers go? As high as the sun – and the Gods – allow us.’