Paris Fashion Week: Pieter Mulier delivers a swansong collection at Alaïa

It still remains relatively rare for a designer to deliver a ‘goodbye’ collection when departing a fashion house: more often, when the announcement is given, they have already exited, and their successor is waiting in the wings.

There have been some exceptions in recent times. At Hermès, menswear artistic director Veronique Nichanian rounded off a 38-year-long tenure with a celebratory runway show this January; in July 2025, Demna held a final haute couture collection at Balenciaga before heading to Gucci; and, in June 2024, Dries Van Noten said goodbye to his eponymous label with a finale collection shown on a glimmering silver catwalk (before an enormous disco ball was lowered for the after-party).

As was evidenced yesterday evening at the former Fondation Cartier in Paris, where Belgian designer Pieter Mulier held his swansong runway show for Alaïa after a five-year tenure. Hired in 2021, four years after the death of the house’s namesake designer Azzedine Alaïa in November 2017, he would be the couturier’s successor (the time between was overseen by an anonymous in-house team). His time at the house has been defined by commercial expansion and critical acclaim, a veneration of house codes – architectural construction; body contouring silhouettes; superlative craft – with a resolutely modern eye.

Speaking to Wallpaper* in 2022, he would call it a search for ‘modern beauty’. ‘I like the idea of working with a small but devoted team of highly skilled technicians and dressmakers – it’s a reminder of the purest form of fashion,’ he said. ‘It’s a big problem if you make clothes without knowing the people who will help you to build them. And also without knowing who is wearing them. The women who wear Alaïa are not static works of art, but are active in society, working, running, busy with children. I want to create clothes that carry this idea of a modern beauty, always in movement.’

It was an idea he echoed in a letter distributed to attendees before last night’s show. ‘This collection is not about me,’ he wrote. ‘It is about the Alaïa team – our family – and an expression of all we have learned, and felt, and loved across the past five years.’ An exhibition of portraits by Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima of the Alaïa atelier and staff served as the show’s prelude. ‘His photography, like the work of Alaïa, affects and shapes those who see it,’ Mulier continued. ‘[Keizo] has created a series of portraits of the people who have created this collection. In turn, this collection is itself a portrait of Alaïa.’

Watched on by designers Raf Simons and Matthieu Blazy, the A/W 2026 collection was one of intimacy (guests were within touching distance of garments) and reduction, an expression of simplicity that Mulier, despite some of his more experimental recent collections, said was at the heart of Alaïa. ‘This collection is about clothes to wear. What is a jacket? What is a dress?’ he elucidated backstage after the show. ‘It’s basically a vocabulary of the last five years. It’s what I learned at Alaïa, that I’m giving to the next designer. It’s like leaving the keys on the table. At Alaïa, I learned precision, editing and [that] real luxury is not what we all think. It is a perfectly cut jacket.’

This search for perfection infused the collection, which began with a series of tank dresses, 1990s in flavour and engineered to cling to the body, while equally meticulous suiting and lean double-breasted overcoats demonstrated tailoring prowess. Contouring knit sweaters were worn with elongated jersey skirts, while more dramatic silhouettes came in trapeze-style overcoats and flared peplums and ruffles, which appeared on jackets and gowns (albeit in Mulier’s graphic, contemporary style). The Alaïa hood – a house signature – emerged in scarves which looped over the head and across cocooning overcoats.

Such was the clarity of his vision, looks were often repeated, appearing in new colours, fabrications or lengths. Mulier said that repetition was ‘very Alaïa’. ‘He would do one skirt fifty times, and the last one was the best one – the same, same, the same. This collection is a bit like that, trying to be perfect, even though perfection doesn’t exist.’