We stand before the mirror, a silent jury awaiting our transformation. A collar tugged sideways, a jacket torn into two stories, a skirt folding from the memory of a shirt. Nothing sits still—everything rehearses its exit, its chance to become. Dressing is a ritual of risk; our body learns to speak in fragments. For Spring-Summer 2026, ALAINPAUL delves into an act of self-examination. “The Audition” reimagines the rituals of dressing as gestures of vulnerability and reinvention.
The décor unfolded as the Judgement Day – jury tables expanding into infinity, a surreal nightmare of multiplying critiques. We leaned into the seriousness, scribbling and nodding with theatrical gravity. No golden buzzer, no televised drama—just us, some with varying degrees of conviction, delighting in the ritual of audition.
Garments appear caught mid-motion—shirts folding into skirts, blazers colliding with draped silks, trousers hanging loose as if about to fall. Jackets splice apart, corsetry slips away from the torso, collars seem tugged off-axis. Each construction freezes the intimate language of undressing and redressing, turning the runway into a score of suspended gestures. Echoing the corps de ballet, Paul repeats and varies archetypes—skirts, tops, dresses—multiplying them like dancers in formation. Within their synchronicity, individuality surfaces: the sharp, the delicate, the disruptive. Character, not costume, is the true currency here.
Throughout the collection, fragile motifs resurface: poppies and carnations drifting across translucent layers, their holographic shimmer evoking petals both falling and offered. They speak of the vulnerability at the core of performance, and the fleeting applause that follows. Paul continues his dialogue with repurposed garments: a jacket made from jackets, a shirt born from tights, coats assembled from antique stage costumes. Draped over bare dance uniforms, these pieces embody transition—between rehearsal and performance, past and future, self and role. The audition is never the role itself. It is the trembling threshold, the breath before the leap, the ritual of becoming someone new.
