Ready-to-Wear Autumn-Winter 2025: AI, Inclusivity, and Artistic Vision in Fashion

Fashion Week Opens with Student Collections

• 🎓 The Institut Français de la Mode's international students kicked off the autumn-winter 2025/26 ready-to-wear presentations.
• 🌍 Their collections were inspired by feelings about a fractured society and contemporary challenges.

Navigating AI in Design

• 🤖 Students identified artificial intelligence as a major challenge, questioning its role in design and the future relationship between designers and AI.
• 💡 One student used generative AI to create prints for a collection, translating the mental images of inmates from a women's prison into landscapes.
• 🎨 This approach aimed to understand and respect inmates' choices in images and colors, reproducing them identically with AI.

Designers' Statements on Inclusivity and Artistry

• 🏳️‍🌈 Designer Victor Weinsanto rejects AI but addresses the Zeitgeist with humor, featuring trans models to support the trans community, stating, "these people are downright vilified."
• ⚫ Weinsanto also drew inspiration from Pierre Soulages's black paintings, using satin and draping to mimic brush strokes, with a focus on material differences.
• 📚 At Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri fused elements from Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" and the legacy of past designers.
• 👔 The Dior collection explored the dialogue between masculine and feminine elements, with transformable pieces like a jacket that could be worn with or without a corset, referencing Dior's codes like the cannage and oval.

Artistic Vision and Staging

• 🎭 The Dior show featured phantasmagorical set design by Bob Wilson, which aimed to evoke a sense of passage of time and one's place within it.
• ⏳ Wilson's staging creates a unique temporality, a moment that feels outside of time.