Haute Couture Week has just taken place in Paris, bringing with it a series of surprises, precious details, and striking visions. In continuity with the last Paris Fashion Week, I have the very clear feeling that something is unfolding in fashion, and, by extension perhaps, in the way we relate to the world.
This intuition directly echoes Edit No. 13: In Paris, A New Romanticism Takes Shape, which I wrote last October. In it, I explored the emergence of a new form of romanticism, not a sentimental or nostalgic one, made of easy florals and clichés, but a romanticism in its historical and intellectual sense. One that, at the turn of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arose as a response to excessive rationalism, to the dominance of reason, and to the supremacy of technical progress over lived, sensorial experience.
It seems to me that we are living through a comparable moment today.
Our time is saturated with algorithms, artificial intelligence, and constant optimisation. An era that genuinely believed science and technology would resolve all human problems. Yet this promise of modernity, long perceived as unquestionable progress, now appears to produce a paradoxical effect: a loss of meaning, a symbolic impoverishment, a diffuse moral fatigue.
As early as 1917, the sociologist Max Weber spoke of the disenchantment of the world. We may have taken that disenchantment too far, confusing clarity with emptiness, efficiency with the absence of depth. What we lack today is not information (we are saturated with it), but meaning. Not performance, but emotion. Not novelty, but beauty.
And perhaps the answer has always been there, in plain sight: poetry, craftsmanship, slowness, our bond with nature, the symbolic, even the magical. Things long relegated to the background, dismissed as secondary, which now appear suddenly vital. This is precisely what Haute Couture allows us to see: not merely an aesthetic evolution, but a collective need for re-enchantment, a response, no doubt, to our profound contemporary disillusionment. Like the Romantic artists of the nineteenth century, today’s designers seem to be rediscovering a forgotten language, through silhouettes deeply inspired by the living world.
At Chanel, an enchanted forest came to life. Brooches and cufflinks shaped like parakeets or flowers, birds seemingly resting on earrings, mushrooms (perhaps magical) delicately embroidered onto tulle. Dresses alternately evoking scales or feathers. Long sleeves resembling wings. Others suggesting a turquoise spider’s web, beaded with morning dew and bathed in light. Mushroom-shaped heels on the iconic two-tone shoe, and white or translucent pearls embroidered along the edges of jackets and dresses like drops of dew. Everything evokes a sensorial, organic, almost animistic world, one in which clothing is not merely meant to cover or seduce, but to tell stories, to connect, to enchant.
Even tailoring, historically associated with rigour and structure, is undergoing transformation. At Dior, the setting was an undergrowth carpeted with cyclamen. Flowers embroidered across dresses and coats; pink blossoms adorning shoes and bags, worn as brooches at the side of garments. White feathers reminiscent of scales. Small bags shaped like beetles or ladybirds. The lines of the Bar jacket, subtly echoing the house’s New Look heritage, soften and curve; fabrics grow gentler; volumes become protective. Couture no longer seeks to dominate the body, but to accompany it. It no longer constrains; it envelops.
At heart, this new romantic period does not displease me. I, Léonce, am deeply romantic by nature. I see in it less a trend than a profound desire for rebalancing, a fragile yet sincere attempt to reintroduce poetry where everything had become functional, beauty where everything was measured, and magic where we believed everything could be explained. If this reading is correct, then we may only be at the very beginning. The first signs of an era seeking to re-enchant the world. And perhaps this is, today, one of the most essential roles of creation.
Below, a few images that gave form to this intuition.
1. Softening the Structure
2. A Language of Flowers
3. New Chimeras
4. The Enchanted Undergrowth
