Can Couture Be Modern? A Look at the Fall 2025 Season

Vogue

11-07-2025

Eighty years ago, in a groundbreaking exhibition, the curators at MoMA asked, 'Are Clothes Modern?' Reviewing the recent collections on Vogue Runway prompted another question: 'Is Couture Modern?' Based on what came down the runways in Paris this week, the answer is rarely, but it can be. This shouldn't be surprising—even in our fast-paced digital world, nostalgia is rife and society is trending conservative. Couture is an anachronism in 2025 precisely because it takes slow fashion to the furthest limits. Given that the métier is so associated with extremes—of cost, of craft, of fantasy—it produces a magnified view on ideals of femininity.
Presented back in May, Maria Grazia Chiuri's final couture looks for Dior were balanced, with straight-lined silhouettes that alternatively conveyed strength and romanticism. This past week, women were either made from 'sugar and spice and everything nice' or they were cosplaying a horror movie. Then there were the moodboard characters come to life: Kim Kardashian channeling Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on A Hot Tin Roof or BUtterfield 8 at Balenciaga; models resembling Marie Antoinette at Elie Saab, or Nancy Cunard, arms stacked with bangles, at Schiaparelli. And how to explain the profusion of female characteristics, particularly breasts and hips, built up with padding on thin model bodies—Ozempic with benefits?
Many of the silhouettes that appeared on the runways were as dramatic as the 'upholstered' figures on view at the Charles Frederick Worth retrospective at the Petit Palais. How today's couturiers achieved these padded effects has changed radically since Worth's time, of course, and it does seem that at least a few of them have something to say about the body modification that is possible in 2025 through medicine and technology. Viktor & Rolf, for example, showed pairs of dresses, one as-is and the other inflated with stuffing, in a sort of sartorial equivalent of adding fillers to skin.
Similar contradictions were at play at Balenciaga where archetypal haute bourgeois types rubbed shoulders with body builders. Tailoring based on the extraordinary physiques of the latter looked deflated when worn on less beefy male figures. This was Demna's final collection for Balenciaga, where he is credited with elevating street elements to the hautest of métiers. Nowadays, the trends at couture mirror what's happening in the ready-to-wear collections, as well as on the menswear runways. Giorgio Armani's smokings for women looked smart and modern. There's that word again: modern. Iris van Herpen's living algae dress, which glowed with bioluminescence, is as forward-thinking as it gets.