Paris Fashion Week: Issey Miyake’s exploration of ma, Casablanca’s ode to festive Brazil, and Lanvin’s elegance
Published
October 5, 2026
Paris Fashion Week unfurled across the capital’s neighbourhoods on Friday, from Issey Miyake at the Dojo de Paris in the south of the city, to Casablanca at the Espace Niemeyer in the 19th arrondissement, with Lanvin at the Grand Palais Immersif in the 12th arrondissement — each exploring distinctly different creative worlds.
At Issey Miyake, Satoshi Kondo plays with pleats and volumes
For once, fashionistas made for the tatami mats on Friday. The pleats faithful rallied at the Dojo de Paris, at Porte de Châtillon in the south of the capital, to discover Satoshi Kondo’s latest staging for the Japanese label Issey Miyake. The designer’s shows, which he has been presenting since 2019, place strong emphasis on performance. For Autumn/Winter 2026, the Tokyo-based brand explored the confinement and release of the body at a show in the Carrousel du Louvre.
For Spring/Summer 2027, the designer delved deeper into his interpretation of ma, the Japanese term for the interval between fabric and body.
Within the confines of the dojo, framed by large black panels, a dancer in a flesh-coloured top and shorts launched into a contemporary, tension-charged performance on the vast black lacquered floor. She came alive while much of the audience still had eyes glued to smartphones or chatters about the previous day’s rumours.
She stretched the lengths of her costume, contorted and twisted for an extended spell until, finally, to the rhythm of a deep breath, a single-file group appeared, carrying a huge sheet. Unfurled, it blanketed the stage as a pianist began a gentle melody. As if animated by a breath, the sheet became a membrane, rising and falling, beneath which the dancer moved. Suddenly, the troupe bunched the cloth into a giant, vibrating air bubble, then a wave that crested and soared, immense to let in the first model of this spring–summer collection.
Building on this dreamlike tableau, executed with impeccable technical control, Kondo offered a delicate, poetic showcase of his expertise in both cut and materials. His language intrigued: Kondo teased the eye with destabilising constructions and trompe-l’oeil effects, never at the expense of the final intent.
The first demonstration came in the opening look: wide black trousers with a cylindrical silhouette, asymmetrically draped and held in place by the model’s hand, paired with a vivid blue, ultra-fitted top. In looking closer, the designer worked with an innovative material blending natural fibres and traditional Japanese paper to form a highly organic bodice. With the same process, he created longline tops that skim the buttocks, their lower edge echoing the waistband of a pair of jeans.
All of Issey Miyake’s house obsessions are returning for next spring–summer. Pleats were layered upon pleats. By design, a single panel became a long black tube dress with a plunging neckline, a sarong and a turban, its pleats sometimes vertical, sometimes diagonal. Elsewhere, Kondo spliced bands of pleated fabrics in differing colours to create tunics and dresses with complex architectures, all hinging on pleating. He also gathered silky fabrics to varying intensities, inflating them into surprising volumes and irregular protrusions — as if the famed ma were carving out a path, coming into its own. It finally took its ease with a series of dresses rimmed with generous ruffles and voluminous yet ultra-light pastel capes which, caught by the models’ movement, seem ready to billow into flight.
Granted, one might question the straightforward commercial translation of these creations, but the Japanese house included billowing trousers, fairly fitted shirts, neatly proportioned jackets, lightweight knits in acid-bright prints, along with elegant clogs and a line-up of covetable bags — notably a medium format in supple leather, seen in blue and black, carried by slipping the hand through a sleeve-like handle.
Still independent, the brand has its formula, anchored in Pleats Please, Homme Plissé and Bao Bao. That is the strength of a company that has patiently built its reputation and network (some 150 boutiques worldwide, including Homme Plissé outposts, and probably around half a thousand retailers): the injection of techniques and innovations bolsters and refreshes the house’s long-defined proposition rather than replacing it.
Casablanca, the Brazilian version, champions love rather than order
A summer with Casablanca conjured the promise of a neo-chic afternoon at a Florida tennis club, early evenings in a stylish Mediterranean lounge bar, or a stay at a coveted South China Sea resort. It also summoned visions of sensual dresses and glitzy suits for nights in a Macau casino or a Los Angeles club. Since 2018, silk shirts with festive prints, sporty-chic styling and figure-hugging, rhinestone-studded evening dresses have defined Charaf Tajer’s world — one to which the Moroccan-born designer, raised in Paris’s Belleville neighbourhood, returned for 2027. This time, though, Casablanca took its hip, young set to Brazil.
Named “Amore e Progresso”, a nod to Brazil’s motto (‘Ordem e progresso’), the collection was unveiled at the Niemeyer building in Belleville, named for the Brazilian architect. Concrete walkways and an impressive retro-futuristic amphitheatre rang with parrot calls before Tajer’s imagined Brazilian youth strode out, purposeful, to infectious rhythms that fused samba and electro. A veteran of nightlife, the designer outfitted this generation in an easy uniform pitched between resort and club.
One look played with asymmetry: a crop top peppered with cotton floral details and a matching midi skirt in saturated red knit, paired with a multicoloured striped leather bag. Another pairing — a crop top and pencil skirt in openwork knit bearing a wave motif Tajer has mined for several seasons — reinforced the mood, and soon the call of the ocean or the pool was palpable. Young women wore a blouson with a matching travel bag, both printed with a hand-painted tropical landscape, over green-and-yellow crocheted bikini bottoms; or, against bronzed skin, a minimalist top made of jewelled tropical flowers, teamed with brown leather boxer shorts with pink side stripes and rhinestone heels.
For evening, she slipped into an unstructured white shirt, left wide open over a bralette, and a pink sequinned skirt that grades into white and ends in long fringes, all paired with a jewelled bag. She also opted for a dramatic, body-conscious dress whose deconstructed drape reveals the left half of the chest, veiled by a jewelled flower.
For the men’s line, the designer stretched between his signature, historically rooted streetwear-chic codes and assured oversized tailoring. One model carried a Casablanca surfboard (a version already installed in the brand’s two standalone boutiques in Paris and Los Angeles); his crocheted swim-and-shorts set riffed on Brazilian football references, while elsewhere another stepped out in an intense orange terry ensemble, in lug-soled flip-flops.
Tone-on-tone floral-embroidered denim, silk shirts with floral or abstract prints, and commanding leather pieces enriched the offer, while suits — deep green in extra-large proportions, or in head-to-toe white — invited long nights.
In 2027, Casablanca Paris, under newly appointed managing director Didier Nguyen, is openly leaning on the joyful, festive fundamentals that built its success.
Lanvin moves forward, but without clear direction
Women shone at Lanvin, yet the overall bearings remained unclear. For his first collection since Barbara Werschine’s arrival as CEO, Peter Copping welcomed guests to the Grand Palais Immersif in the 12th arrondissement of Pari, in a hall of imposing height. Raw concrete walls, bathed first in warm, flickering light and then in bright white, witnessed more than forty Spring/Summer 2027 looks in succession, composing an elegant, if somewhat disjointed, wardrobe.
In post since 2024, Peter Copping offered numerous dresses this season in at times markedly different styles. One, cut through with white, black and camel stripes, stopped at the knees to reveal white trousers beneath. Others spotlighted pastoral or geometric lace, in black or white, set against a powerful yellow or sheer ground.
The collection’s turquoise-blue dress broke the palette’s monotony, its bodice pleated and its skirt cascading in tiers of ruffles from the hips; another, in a nude shade, was overlaid with a semi-transparent black dress traced with futuristic lines, themselves embellished with floral embroidery.
Shawl and classic collars also appeared, with one lapel sometimes turned inward, giving a twist to blazers, trench coats and lightweight jackets cut from beige, black or white cloth. And while one piece — a slender metal plastron linked to a matching mini-skirt — seemed to answer the profusion of jewellery worn by the models, another gleaming ensemble verged on pattern overload, alternating squares and rivets, topped with a black belt edged in metal studs and paired with a skirt covered in silver sequins and cut along previously seen lines.
Beyond the jewellery, the footwear was more cohesive: high heels in punchy colours fitted with a belt buckle at the front or a coloured screen, plus a handful of sandals worn beneath the longest dresses.
The bags, meanwhile, were more varied: medium-sized in white leather with a wide flap; red with a wavy handle; small and yellow or black with adventurous leather tabs; or large in black leather and woven straw. After several seasons at the creative helm of the historic Parisian house, is Peter Copping edging closer to Lanvin’s new DNA?
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