Now that it’s over, and the dust has finally settled on Paris Fashion Week, we’ll remember SS26 as a historic season for designer debuts. Sure, it might have felt like an intense and incessant stream of non-stop carnage while it was happening – but that’s fashion week, baby! Across all the catwalks, there were nipple-ringed showgirls at Miguel Castro Freitas’s Mugler debut, models in spooky mouthguards at Glenn Marten’s first Margiela ready-to-wear show, and a new dawn at Dior thanks to Jonathan Anderson’s womenswear debut. Elsewhere, Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez brought bold and beautiful designs to Loewe, Pierpaolo Picciolo brought back Balenciaga’s elegant past, while Duran Lantink shocked and proved with his naked onesies at Jean Paul Gaultier.
But while all that was going on, show goers not only kept up with the energy of all those debuts, but matched it and then some. One guest with a ‘Galliano Gazette’ clutch bag waved it about while wearing Vaquera’s racy bra and panties tee, another strutted the street in gargantuan hairy shoulder pads, another painted themselves entirely shocking pink, while FKA twigs hit up the Matières Fécales show in uncensored style.
At other points across the week, both Vivienne Westwood and Rick Owens’ shows brought out the street style aficionados (as expected). The former saw a cast of corseted women and foppish men descended on Versailles in punk-infused style, while Rick’s gang of gothic acolytes covered every corner of the Palais de Tokyo. Whether it was a historic designer debut or an old favourite coming back for more, the street style outside the shows was better than its ever been. Never change Paris.
Scroll through the gallery above for all our favourite picks