ALEXIS MABILLE - Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2026

At the Lido on the Champs-Élysées, the guests arriving for Alexis Mabille’s Spring/Summer 2026 show expected couture as usual. What they witnessed instead was its quiet revolution. The designer, who oversaw the Lido’s transformation three years ago, turned the venue into a stage for what he calls couture’s entry into the world of artificial intelligence. The lights dimmed, photographers were sent outside, and an illuminated wall dissolved into darkness. Then a virtual audience appeared, staring down the real one in an uncanny mirror. From the screen emerged the first model, dressed in a gown that existed only in pixels. The show, titled Hors-Champs, unfolded in a crimson, gilded space that seemed to hover between imagination and reality.

The digital garments floated by in gradients of red, fuchsia, violet and Nile blue, each one created through five months of work by production company Gloria. Some designs required up to three hundred tests to reproduce the texture and fall of real fabrics. Mabille’s petites mains collaborated with technicians to teach computers how organza ripples and how ostrich feathers move with air. He selected materials from physical swatches, ensuring that the virtual couture remained tethered to the tactile. “The human element remains essential,” Mabille explained after the show. “Without us, without our ideas, without the hands behind every calculation, there isn’t much that happens.”

Despite the experiment’s ambition, traces of the uncanny remained. Models glided rather than walked, their pupils flickering, the virtual audience unmoved. Yet these imperfections made the message stronger. At the close, Mabille’s mother, Mireille, appeared in a cascading white organza wedding dress, her image digitally recreated, a symbol of tenderness within the technological spectacle. The collection was not about replacing artisanship but redefining it, proving that in a world rushing towards automation, couture’s beating heart still belongs to the human touch.