At 15, Alexandre Mattiussi returns to the cafe terrace and the people who built his brand
The most important seat at an Ami Paris show has never been in the front row. It belongs to whoever walks past a cafe terrace on a gray Paris morning. Alexandre Mattiussi built a 15-year career on that sidewalk, tracking the student running late, the woman whose satin skirt means she is going somewhere, the man whose wool coat has survived a decade of Novembers. For Fall-Winter 2026, the collection that marks the label’s 15th year, he went back to that spot and looked again.
The staging made the point. In January, Mattiussi showed inside a vast, vacant retail space on the Champs-Élysées, the kind of emptiness that has become a running symbol of fashion’s uneasy season. What he sent through it was a cure for the gloom: characters you would actually want to sit near. Preppy was polished up with French sophistication and loosened with a soupcon of grunge. Ball caps and beanies knocked the formality out of roomy tailoring and studied layers. Oversized wool coats swung over full-legged trousers with enough swagger for a board meeting or a chilly Sunday brunch. Tomboys and art students filed past jocks and femmes fatales, who nonchalantly paired satin balloon skirts with snug sweaters and polished derbies, or pencil skirts with hoodies.
Mattiussi, who started the house in 2011, called the season a new start. “Back to my roots, deeply, to bring back that casualness, that richness, that easiness that made me successful since the beginning,” he said. His aim, he explained, was “the right mix between what I call the perfect wardrobe and something much more real, much more grounded.” He has little patience for мода that floats above daily life, and the news cycle keeps proving him right. “We live in a very difficult world,” he said. “We watch the news. What’s the point of doing this if it doesn’t look real?”
The clothes answer that question with a puzzle. Mattiussi designed the season with a Rubik’s Cube in mind, a toy that, for him, is pure possibility. “You just make the smallest move, and the cube changes entirely,” he said, and the collection obeys. The palette runs from quiet neutrals into sky blue, soft pink, vanilla, emerald, saffron and royal blue, with red arriving in flashes. Cable knits, argyle, checks, houndstooth and chevrons give the surface rhythm. Menswear plays long, wide lines against cropped, cleaner cuts, while womenswear sets volume around the hips and keeps everything fluid. The coats carry the emotional load, timeless in cut and built to last. Signature accessories complete the thought: the Carrousel bag in burgundy leather with a crocodile-embossed finish, the Mirage sneaker, and cotton caps stitched with a simple message, “Thank You for Being a Friend.”
A commercial argument sits beneath the charm, and Mattiussi makes it plain. At a moment when much of роскошь has priced itself into the stratosphere, Ami has stayed where its customers live. “We kept a good level of business,” he said, crediting accessible pricing for the label’s resilience. He recently opened Ami’s largest store in the world, a multilevel flagship in Seoul’s Hannam district, and he is preparing a new space on the Place des Victoires, a macaron’s throw from headquarters, that he describes as “my store, my selection, my curation,” with dinners and guest collaborations to come.
Now that the clothes are in stores, the campaign closes the circle. Photographer Karim Sadli shot a series of spontaneous portraits of the people who have shaped the house, including longtime friends and familiar faces like Saskia de Brauw, Rebecca Leigh, Dara Gueye, and George Anderson, against a clean studio backdrop with nothing to compete with their personalities. Ami means friend, and the casting turns that word into policy: a wardrobe for the people you know, not the people on a screen.
Mattiussi has said the real test of his work comes after the sale, when a piece enters a stranger’s гардероб and slowly becomes theirs. Fifteen years in, that is still the whole project. Clothes that look like life, priced like sense, and worn until the seams remember you.
Изображения предоставлены компанией AMI Paris.
В других новостях, касающихся рекламных кампаний бренда, Khaite Fall 2026 Campaign: Inside the Controlled Burn
