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CNN
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Amid a record-breaking heatwave in the City of Lights — with temperatures so high the Eiffel Tower summit was closed to tourists last week — fashion designers prepare their pièce de résistance for Paris Haute Couture Week, which runs from 7-10 July.
The clothes on show at Haute Couture are hand-sewn, hand-embellished and expertly crafted by a fleet of artisanal seamstresses, tailors, pattern cutters and other garment workers in ateliers. What they produce, which often clocks up hundreds of hours of labor, will be sold to the world’s most affluent customers — celebrities, royalty or wealthy aristocrats and individuals.
In an email to CNN, Pascal Morand, executive president of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (French fashion’s governing body), emphasized the week’s “unparalleled creativity, diversity and savoir-faire”, where “artisanal skills and atelier hold a central place.”
This season, the compact schedule is bursting with moments to watch out for. Schiaparelli, the hallowed couture house helmed by US designer Daniel Roseberry, will kickstart the week with a new collection that will likely become ubiquitous on the celebrity red carpet circuit (Lauren Bezos Sanchez chose to wear one of his designs for her controversial nuptials in Venice last month).
Giorgio Armani, Iris Van Herpen, Elie Saab and Chanel — the latter whose collection will still be designed in-house, as new designer Matthieu Blazy is set to take the reigns in October — remain on the schedule as reliable tent poles of Haute Couture Week, while Robert Wun (the first Hong Kong-born designer to join the calendar back in 2023) will return once more.
On Wednesday afternoon, Demna (who only goes by his first name) will present his swansong for Balenciaga, a label he has helmed for a decade (his retrospective in Paris at Kering headquarters included an enlarged copy of the rejection email Demna received from the brand after applying for an internship in 2007).
Later that day, Belgian designer Glenn Martens — the wunderkind credited for revitalizing Italian label Diesel and the now-defunct Y-Project — will make his debut for Maison Margiela. Martens will have big shoes to fill, since the house’s last couture show in January 2024, creatively led by John Galliano, was considered a landslide success by critics and fans the world over. So popular was the doll-like glass skin makeup used in the show, its creator Pat McGrath released a product line so fans could recreate it at home.
Off-schedule, designer Jonathan Anderson is set to present another collection for his eponymous brand JW Anderson. Fresh off the heels of Anderson’s Dior debut during the men’s shows last week, the Irish polymath plans to reveal the new direction for his label at the Galerie Joseph in the Marais on Monday via a presentation. While he focuses on Dior — he is reportedly the first designer since the label’s founder to design both men’s and womenswear, after all — Anderson told WWD he would par back runway shows for JW Anderson until “I feel like there is something to say within my own brand.”