Dear Shaded Viewers,
Paris Fashion Week is a season of performance. Everyone is watching everyone, everyone is dressed for someone else’s camera, and desire is mostly spent on being looked at. So it is oddly refreshing that the most interesting thing happening in Le Marais this week is a shop, where you can not only see pieces but touch them and speak to those who are behind the process of making.
A Bunch of Designers, an initiative by AZ Academy and Richemont, opened yesterday at Heureux les Curieux (23 rue du Pont aux Choux) and runs until 17 October. Six emerging designers present their first commercial collections. Sketches have turned into prototypes, and prototypes into things with price tags. What I like is that nearly all six are occupied with the same quiet problem: the body is inconvenient, and clothing has been lying about it for centuries.
Brais Albor makes menswear for the bodies that conventional menswear politely ignores. His “Love Revolution” is simple and almost indecent: make room for the body instead of asking it to apologise. Tailoring, sportswear and underwear, with humour in the seams. Underwear in a manifesto is always a good sign.
Merle Breuker builds a wardrobe that can be extended, detached and recombined, made from leftover European stock. “The Lasting” is a project about clothes that change as you do, which is a rather intimate idea. Most of us cannot keep a relationship adjustable for a whole season, but a jacket can.
Sandra Jao turns ropes, umbrellas and outdoor structures into sculptural silhouettes, somewhere between Japanese technical invention and Italian craft. There is something erotic about a material forced to forget its purpose. An umbrella, finally, is allowed to want something else.
Liwen Liang has spent years teaching Jingdezhen porcelain to become light, flexible and wearable. His fragility is worn openly, and the kintsugi workshop invites you to repair broken things with gold, admitting that the scar is the most expensive part. It is the most romantic proposal of the season.
Manon Marcelot brings leather back to the farm with her “agricultural sophistication”: bags shaped by tools and landscapes she grew up among. Luxury with mud under its fingernails always looks more honest than luxury that has never seen weather.
Caterina Moro scans natural forms and turns them into prints, embroideries and embossings under her “E ART H” philosophy. Earth as art, which is a lovely way of saying that nature was the first couturier and never sent an invoice.
The programme is also a rare piece of good manners from a big house. The six were chosen in December 2025 from the first cohort of AZ Academy: Business for Designers, a twelve-month Milan programme that teaches independent designers finance, pricing, production and distribution. All the unglamorous subjects, in other words, that decide whether a beautiful idea survives. Lutz Huelle mentors them as ambassador, and the legacy of Alber Elbaz hangs over the whole thing like a very elegant blessing.
Live demonstrations run throughout: Albor cutting patterns, Breuker embroidering patches, Jao applying AiryString, Marcelot making small leather goods. Watching someone make a thing with their hands is now the rarest luxury in fashion, more than any logo.
