Thirty-seven looks, no author’s name on any of them. Alaïa’s studio proved it can hold the line – and showed how little a house can say when nobody is speaking for it
PARIS — Alaïa presented its Winter-Spring 2027 collection Saturday, Oct. 3, at the former Fondation Cartier on Boulevard Raspail, with 37 looks shown without a creative director’s name attached to a single one. It was the house’s first runway outing since Pieter Mulier’s exit in March, and the second time Richemont has put an Alaïa collection on a runway with the studio, not a named author, in charge.
The first interregnum ran longer than anyone planned: from Azzedine Alaïa’s death in November 2017 until Mulier’s appointment in February 2021, the in-house team designed the collections. Richemont is in no hurry to end the second one. Boaz Eli, the ready-to-wear design director who arrived in January 2024 after Acne Studios, Loewe and Burberry, led the studio this season. When it confirmed Mulier’s departure, the house said the studio would “ensure continuity in the interim period until a creative director is confirmed.”
The show notes call the season a set of exchanges – “conversations with women, discourse with craft, memories of history, shared experience.” A dialogue needs two voices. This one had the archive talking to itself.
A Show Engineered So No One Bows
There were no rows. Guests stood inside the glass-walled Jean Nouvel building while models moved through them and video played across curved screens, the house’s notes tying that curvature to the body. Removing the seating removed the front row, the hierarchy and, more to the point, the finale bow – the one moment a fashion show is built to deliver a person. Mulier’s farewell in the same building in March ended with the atelier walking out beside him. Seven months later the room was arranged so that nobody had to walk out at all.
One Pleat, Carried Across 37 Looks
The collection’s single developmental idea was a pleat that behaves like a frill. It entered in leather, rigid and structural, then loosened across the sequence into something softer, lighter and progressively asymmetrical. As a craft exercise it is legible from the first look to the last. As an argument it goes nowhere: the device changes texture without changing position, and across 37 exits a gradient is not a proposition. Repetition is a real Alaïa habit – Mulier said as much about his own work – but repetition reads as conviction only when there is something to be convinced of.
Spencer Jackets and the Safety of Known Shapes
The tailoring was the most controlled thing in the room. Taut black Spencer jackets came with small, tightly spaced rows of buttons; leather skater skirts spiraled their pleats down the body; a burgundy leather dressmaker coat was pin-tucked at the midriff into a built-in bustier. Jersey dresses and skirts, hauled up and rolled at the hips to suggest panniers and slit high on the leg, were the only passage that took a risk with proportion rather than finish. Everything else is a shape the house already owns, and the customer already recognizes – which is the point and also the limit.
Jewel Tones Read as Citation, Not Decision
The palette stayed muted, with color arriving in merlot, olive, eggplant, sapphire and fuchsia, plus a butter yellow on new versions of the knit skater dress. Each of those is defensible as archive reference. None of them is a choice a studio makes when it is trying to be read. Mulier spent five years pushing Alaïa’s color toward brights and pastels; the retreat to jewel tones is the most risk-averse interpretation of the founder, and the clearest tell that this collection was designed to be unimpeachable rather than interesting.
Richemont Can Wait. The Order Book Cannot.
A collection this legible is easy to buy and hard to build a season around, which puts the pressure on the sales floor rather than the studio. Richemont does not disclose Alaïa’s figures; it reports the house inside an “Other” business area that posted €724 million in the quarter ended June 30, up 9 percent at constant exchange rates and 7 percent at actual, against group sales of €6.3 billion. That segment lost €96 million at the operating line in the year to March 2026 even as ready-to-wear grew. The results do not say whether a house can hold a wholesale book on known shapes through a second and third authorless season, and nothing in Winter-Spring 2027 is designed to answer that. Nicolas Bos, group chief executive since June 2024, has the balance sheet to take his time. Buyers writing spring are working to a different clock.
What the studio proved is that Alaïa’s codes survive the removal of the person interpreting them – the cutting, the body, the finish, all intact without supervision. What it could not prove is that those codes mean anything new. The house asked for a dialogue and supplied both sides.
See the complete collection below:
Images courtesy of Alaïa
In other fashion week news, Acne Studios Spring 2027 Ready-to-Wear Collection at Paris Fashion Week
