Threads of Two Lives – between light and shadow, movement and stillness, artifice and reality, we dress in roles. As the identity we seek to reclaim, the essence of a performance – ALAINPAUL’s Fall-Winter 2025 collection reflects the subtle balance between the personas we inhabit and the truths we return to.
The resurrection of the sun in Paris shapes behaviors. All smiles, could it be? We are delving into the Théâtre du Châtelet’s aura, not mere observers. Pitch black, on stage, the boundary dissolves, and the lines disappear – it’s a theatric world. Alain Paul’s vision, alive and in motion, meets the intimacy of life beyond it. Tailoring, once an emblem of control, is undone—lapels dissolve, collars fade, and pockets vanish, leaving only the essence of form. Suits, coats in traceable wools, and rescued cashmere float between precision and abandon, structured yet yielding.
But the performer is never truly at rest. Even off-stage, the body carries the imprint of its craft, and the garments of Alain Paul move in kind. Fixed-movement dresses and skirts—draped in recycled creased nylons, silks, and cotton—contract and expand, breathing with the body’s pulse. Pivoter garments—tops and elongated skirts in structured tailoring wools—turn and shift, defying symmetry, unbalancing proportion, as if suspended between stillness and motion.
And then, the unraveling. The slow shedding of costume, the return to something raw and unguarded. Pleated and ruffled dresses and shirts seem to loosen, slipping from the body like echoes of a final curtain call. A mad crush for the all-white three-dimensional silhouette—knitted from repurposed deadstock stockings paired with a blazer —blurring the lines between form and dissolution, caught in movement momentum. Perhaps the same duality I unconsciously attempted to replicate on Zoom calls with my blazer and PJs bottoms combo.
ALAINPAUL’s Fall-Winter 2025 captures the essence of existence itself – the rigor of the stage and the selves we conceal. The collection is not merely worn; they are performed. Between structure and surrender, between discipline and dream, they move with us, through the perpetual rhythm of becoming.
