The most anticipated debut of Paris Haute Couture Week took place on Wednesday morning at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, under a baking July sun, in the open air, on a dramatic staircase bordered by lush landscaping, a deliberate departure from the history-weighted salons at Balenciaga’s Avenue George V headquarters. Pierpaolo Piccioli presented Balenciaga’s 55th Haute Couture collection, his first since joining the house as creative director in May 2025. That this was his first couture show since leaving Valentino, and the first couture Balenciaga has presented under his direction, made it the most scrutinised collection of the week before a single look had been revealed.
The Idea
Piccioli described the collection’s premise plainly in his show notes: “Couture as information, a manner of creation that may orientate both the actions and reactions of a house. A territory for experimentation and engineering, it can be a prism through which to witness both the current moment and the identity of Balenciaga. A fundamentalism, couture here is once again placed at the center of the house’s meaning, shaping its being.” He was careful, before the show, to resist the word homage when it was put to him, and the collection proved him right to resist it. It wasn’t an homage to the work of Cristóbal Balenciaga: it was more. It did him justice. Piccioli did it on his own terms.
The Collection
The collection is built on the same fundamental principle that Cristóbal Balenciaga attributed to fabric as the beginning and end of his designs, crafted from tulle, muslin, feather details, and the same silk gazar fabric that the Spanish designer invented, which allowed him to give volume to his astonishing creations. Ostrich feather embellishments ran throughout, reimagined as the fringe of lime green wool coats, in a thneed-like baby pink gown, and in an extra-large, egg-shaped garment with no sleeves, as modelled by Gigi Hadid, whose return to the couture runway after a four-year absence gave the presentation an additional charge.
A fluorescent yellow cashmere coat worn with glycerine-coated feather trousers in Gonzo lilac, a Pepto Bismol-pink chiffon veil worn over cranberry slacks and purple opera gloves, the colour was pure Piccioli, glorious under the beating sun. He nodded to the house’s historical palette with a sequence of dresses executed in dead black, which reset the colour-saturated eye and focused attention on the form. Trains spilled out from the back of glorified tracksuit trousers, vest tops in silk duchesse satin were tucked in, bomber-y jackets in spongy silk gazar inflated like gourds around the shoulders.
The Verdict
Where his predecessor built a decade of provocation, Piccioli’s opening chapter in couture read instead as a study in ease, garments extravagant enough for the occasion yet grounded in the rhythms of a woman’s daily wardrobe, a vision he has described as central to redefining what couture at Balenciaga looks like under his direction. He said it himself most clearly before the show: “This is a couture house. It’s not that haute couture is one thing, and ready-to-wear is completely separate, and sneakers are separate. If you think with a couture culture in mind, everything is infused by the same idea.” Wednesday proved he meant it.
