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Seven things that dawned on me at Paris Haute Couture AW27
Spectacle and surrealism
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Forty-eight hours, several shows, three high jewellery appointments and one nagging thought I couldn't shake by the time I boarded the Eurostar home (delayed, of course): couture has never been more of a spectacle, and it really hit its high notes this time around.
Text and images by Caroline Issa
1. The Schiaparelli set is in an arms race. Community has become key (in the same way that Alessandro Michele's Gucci customers set the standard for misfits banding together in an aesthetic, or Rick Owens), and nowhere is that more visible than outside Schiaparelli, where clients seem locked in a quiet competition to out-outlandish one another with their poses on the steps of the Petit Palais - wings with huge span, horns coming out of breastplates, tiny waists in tight corsets, whatever it takes - in outfits that cost roughly what a mortgage on a house outside of London.
2. The new gold rush have taken over old money. Tech wives — and tech daughters — are the client couture houses are now building collections around. Bezos and Sánchez at Schiaparelli last January wasn't a one-off. It was the opening scene. One of my couture show seatmates wore a dress that had essentially a cage around her, and she complained of both the sweat and non-movement but said she loved the pain, it's Couture!
3. Turns out those same tech gazillionaires are a new advertising revenue stream - as they are now paying for media platform (usually digital) covers, not just the dress. The whispers this season weren't about the atelier hours going into a gown - they were about which clients had bought their way onto a magazine cover, or into a brand's platform, as part of the fitting. Content is now a line item in the couture invoice.
4. Craft is where the excitement actually lives. Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson are both leaning hard into textile, drape and savoir-faire — and it works twice over, because that same close-up, hands-on-the-fabric footage is exactly the content layer every brand now needs to out-post the next.
5. We are all paparazzi now. Press, brand, platform — we're all chasing the same impressions. Celebrity still drives front-row heat, and the stylists behind the celebrities generate their own kind of client excitement. But what struck me most was the crowd outside: Cardi B at Rahul Mishra, the phalanx of new names threaded through Dior's veterans, Armani's living icons filing past barriers like it was a premiere, not a presentation with the fans holding their papers out for autographs for good measure.
6. Standouts from the days I was there, other than the mega brands: Olivier Theyskens delivering Belgian Victoriana for men and women in his new RTW offering with Boloria, Standing Ground's Michael Stewart's exquisite offering of sensual silhouettes (give that man the Alaia job!) and Julie De Libran's ever charming show set in a pilates studio!
7. The jewels are getting serious(er). One-off pieces, years in the making, set with mega stones that took the earth millions of years to form — held up next to phones, filmed for stories that vanish in twenty-four hours. It's genuinely mind-boggling. It's also, unmistakably, peak circus.
