Aelis is one of fashion’s open secrets, a fixture of the Official Calendar of Haute Couture Week, the most exclusive stage the industry has, and still a name that rarely leaves the room. Every pièce it makes is Couture, cut and finished by hand, unrepeated, unreproduced. Sofia Crociani has sustained the House on that alone since founding it in 2017, after training under two of the loudest names fashion has produced, styling for John Galliano at Dior, then spending over a decade at Karl Lagerfeld’s side. This season, she walked out her most startling argument yet.
A cropped fur bolero lost its sleeves to two long falls of human hair instead. Another gown wore its hair as a curtain, ink-black strands falling from the shoulders clear to the floor over a beaded nude tulle. A third draped a single length of hair down the chest like a stole, over a pale pink sheer column. The opening cape, the collection’s true showstopper, dissolved from cream into black at its tips, egret feathers pulled from archive stock, a nod to the plume trade that hunted the bird to the edge of extinction a century ago. Whatever the material, the silhouette made the same point, worn against skin, none of it behaves any differently.
Power, this season, arrived as a collaborator’s signature rather than a mood board. Working with the sculptor Arnaud Briand and the Grand Palais’ Atelier de Moulage, Crociani revisited the draped togas of Roman commanders, then cast that drape itself in plaster mixed with black pigment until it looked, and nearly felt, like concrete. The fragment closed over the shoulder of a lead-grey duchesse satin gown, lined in organic hemp, held by a fibula, the clasp Roman soldiers once used to pin a toga shut, set down here like a piece of Brutalist architecture. The House’s long-running partnership with the Paris Opera continued too, and Les Intéressantes threaded upcycled jewellery through the models’ hair, cast for the show by Julie Doidy.
The ecological argument reached further than the runway this season. Crociani has said she met Amnesty International’s Morgane Joffredo at a screening of the documentary Yintah, about the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s fight against a gas pipeline through their land, and has since followed the wider legal movement arguing that nature itself deserves standing in court rather than protection as mere property. A month before the show, the small Quebec town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil became the first municipality in Canada to sign the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Tree, recognising trees in its own bylaws as living beings with a right to exist. Seen next to that, Crociani’s own materials read less like a design conceit and more like a rehearsal, in silk and hair, of the same argument.
Crociani’s collaboration with Hong Kong Polytechnic University has produced an ultra-tech fabric infusing gold and silver particles into natural Italian silk without chemicals or water, a fabric she describes as remaining flowy and delicate despite the treatment. By Fall 2024, that same partnership had evolved into an opalescent finish sprayed onto vegan BioSilk, gold and silver nanoparticles recalling the sheen of a butterfly’s wing, still chemical and water free and fully biodegradable. That same season, working with archival costumes from the Paris Opera Ballet, she left the original performers’ tags sewn inside the upcycled garments, since, in her words, those dresses carry an incredible background capable of telling something new, and sent men down the runway in gowns beside women in tailoring, calling it a free exchange as fashion evolves into another dimension.
Crociani’s manifesto has stayed consistent for longer still, working with fabric freely, suspending it without necessarily building a shape beneath it, insisting the material needs the freedom of air passing through it. On artificial intelligence, she takes the same position rather than retreating from it, these are incredible tools when used with awareness, since humans created them and must now learn to master them. Almost ten years in, Aelis has built a House the slow way, but never a narrow one, patience matched at every turn by vision, by generosity, by an appetite for invention.
