Alaïa’s Clothes That Cry
Anders Christian Madsen reviews the Alaïa Spring/Summer 2026 collection by Pieter Mulier.
Considering current affairs, it’s been a weirdly non-sociopolitical season. Around the fashion capitals, it seems designers are either shying away from voicing their views or at a loss for how to deal with it creatively. Not Pieter Mulier. “In the world we live in today, fashion seems a little bit not necessary,” he reflected. The floor of his Alaïa show set—created within the Fondation Cartier—was a huge screen reflected in a mirrored ceiling. It played moving imagery of close-ups of naked models: pure, honest, human.
“I wanted to create a little cocoon for you all, just to experience something else, just being off Instagram and the news and everything else that’s happening in the world,” Mulier said. In that transition, surrounded by screens and moving imagery, his set was also a reflection on the social media life he was pulling us out of, albeit with much less unsettling visuals. If the pictures we’re subjected to have the power to change how we feel, so do the clothes we and others around us wear. Mulier used that fact as a tool in a collection that served to move and impact the mind, and hopefully the heart, too.
ALAÏA
“They are clothes that cry; clothes that are all about releasing,” he explained of his fluid silhouettes dripping with draped volumes, drop-shaped hems and fringing. “I hate fringes but I love fringes like these,” he said, likening them to tears. He translated his poetic premise into covetable cocoon-like jackets and sculpted short coats for day that had nothing to cry about, and the beautiful big volumes that closed the show. “I said, ‘Make ball gowns! We want to dream! But make them sexy.’ We found patterns from Azzedine where everything is cut like balloons, like air.” They represented a moment of escapism in an otherwise contemplative collection that did what fashion does best: peace through beauty and emotion.
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