The World Needs More Couture
What Haute Couture Week reminded me about beauty and being alive
Could couture save the world? Or maybe the better question is, do we need more couture?
When was the last time you actually gasped at the beauty of something? And I mean really gasped, out loud, without thinking. That is what Haute Couture Week did to me this week, over and over again.
I was watching these Paris fashion shows in between mom-ing and life’s responsibilities on my tiny phone screen and found myself gasping alone in my car. Pure joy. Awe. That kind of visceral, almost childlike response you cannot plan for. It made me feel something in a way that felt rare and deeply human, and it got me thinking about how often we give ourselves the chance to appreciate beauty purely for beauty’s sake. To make art, or witness it, without needing it to be productive or optimized or explained.
Creating and engaging with art is such a fundamental part of the human experience; it is how we take pain, anger, fear, joy, love, all of it, and distill it into something physical. Something we can see, feel, and hold. So often, most of us are moving through life on autopilot, always onto the next thing. We are also so used to quick dopamine hits from our phones, quick to react, quick to judge, quick to feel satisfied, and then immediately move on. When was the last time you really sat with something? When the longer you looked, the more it revealed itself. When beauty felt alive and kept unfolding.
That is what the couture shows did for me this week.
Fashion is wearable art, a moving language of expression, a reminder of what humans are capable of when imagination, emotion, and craft are allowed to exist together. The attention to detail. The reverence for the smallest elements. The ability to see the world through delicacy and intricacy. These shows took human emotion and transmuted it into something physical. A myriad of the rawest emotions all shaped through craft, time, and care. Thousands of hours poured into a single piece. Still gasping just thinking about it.
In a world where everything is mass produced and increasingly looks the same, couture celebrates the opposite. Uniqueness. Individuality. The beauty of something made slowly and intentionally. This week, I witnessed true art, and I feel changed by it. Who knew gowns and beading could make such an impact?
So no, maybe couture will not save the world, but it can stir that quiet sense of wonder, even in the most mundane moments, like sitting in your car staring at a tiny screen.
So the message for this week, in finding my pink, is this: find your couture.
The thing that makes you feel giddy, pulls you out of autopilot, and reconnects you to the depth and joy of being alive. The thing that reminds you that beauty still exists, if you are willing to slow down long enough to notice it.
Here are a few of my favorite looks from this week (so hard to narrow it down!)
Hopefully this inspires some beauty in your day—
Valentino Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2026 Collection. Images from WWD.
This show was exquisite and what made it even more interesting was the set in lieu of a classic runway.
“Michele presented a vision of grand characters; guests sat around carousel-like wooden circles looking into narrow windows to take in their looks one by one. The models walked into the center of the circles guests looked through the viewing windows. The optical device is more than just an unusual runway set—it’s a reinvention of a forgotten moving-image mechanism from the late 1800s called a Kaiserpanorama. In recreating the long lost cinematic device, Michele sought to slow down our gaze and give each look a solitary, delicate moment of concentration. In an age of overexposure and constant swiping, contemplation and total focus is a rarity. Michele’s sirens, in all their theatricality, come into view. In typical Michele fashion, the characters were full of all the lush drama we’ve come to associate with the dreamlike world-builder.” -Excerpt from W Magazine
Schiaparelli Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2026 Collection. Images from WWD
This might (maybe?) be my one of my favorites. Truly STUNNING.
“The emotional core of this collection was revealed to me in October of last year while I was on a creative retreat outside of Rome. One afternoon, I arranged a last-minute tour to see the Sistine Chapel. If you’ve been there, you know that the first thing you see isn’t the ceiling, but the walls, densely painted by an army of artists in the years before Michelangelo began his work in 1508. They’re decorated by ecclesiastical scenes: images meant to tell, to educate. But crane your neck skyward, and thought stops. Feeling begins. That’s because forty years later, one man came in and singlehandedly changed art forever, presenting a wild, visually rambunctious, vulnerable and romantic imagining of God, religion, faith, and the human condition. Here is agony and ecstasy comingled, terrible and exquisite. He didn’t tell us what happened, but instead gave his audience permission on how to feel when they looked at art.”
-Excerpt from Schiaparelli Site
Ashi Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2026 Collection. Images from WWD.
This show was so unique, focused more on modern and structural shapes. The construction of the garments were incredible.
“The Beginnings’. Taking as its starting point the love, devotion and longing that, inevitably for us all, eventually become loss, and couching them in the aesthetics of Victorian mourning rituals, what may in the hands of another designer have become a dark affair of heavy black fabrics and an abundance of lace in Ashi’s hands becomes earthier and more ephemeral.
A palette that runs the gamut from cream to chestnut recalls a lock of hair worn in a locket close to the body, echoed in leather fringing and sweeping trompe-l’oiel spirals, while distressed organza skirts, shredded silk hems and rigid, almost sarcophagi-like silhouettes reference the decay humans work so hard to hide from sight. Yet, while the subject matter is undeniably dark, taken as a whole, there is a lightness of touch and an undeniable adherence to beauty that bring levity and glamour to the collection. Simply sublime.” - Excerpt from Luxury London
Dior Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2026. Images from WWD.
I loved the color palette, shapes and botanicals in this show. The details were splendid as well, the more you look the more you see.
“Nature and art align in sculptural volumes and sinuous draping, tailoring contrasting with botanical embellishments. When you copy nature, you always learn something. Nature offers no fixed conclusions, only systems in motion – evolving, adapting, enduring. Haute couture belongs to this same logic: a laboratory of ideas where experimentation is inseparable from craft, and time-honoured techniques are activated as living knowledge. It is a way of seeing – an interpretive lens through which the present is examined, reassembled and imagined anew. Urgent. Subtle. Precise.” -Excerpt from Dior
Miss Sohee Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2026. Images from WWD.
This show was beautiful, the colors, the gowns, the drama, the east meets west details and the exceptional fit highlighting a woman’s body.
“Miss Sohee’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection frames the body as both structure and canvas, with the silhouette becoming a support for miniature landscapes—embroidered, painted, and layered across silk, organza, and taffeta.
Designer Sohee Park’s new collection is rooted in Korean heritage and memories of her Summer house in her native Korea. Wisteria, bamboo, and the changing skies she observed inform embroidery, layered sheers, and hand-painted organza.
East meets West in both detail and structure. Botanical motifs and chinoiserie shapes sit alongside clean lines that recall 1960s tailoring. Overskirts, capes, and sheers balance volume with proportion. Accessories continue this logic: mother-of-pearl bags shaped like fans, sculptural trinkets, couture phone cases—all reflecting the same attention to form.” - Excerpt from Couture Notebook
Georges Hobeika Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2026. Images from GlobalCouture.
This collection was stunning. I mean just stunning. The intricacy of the beading, bodices, and lace. So romantic and beautiful.
“Why must I love?”
So that you may understand.
Do you remember ever loving deeply? When you step beyond yourself, when your body and mind finally merge? You then grasp a truth that existed before you to become what you have always been: a creature interconnected with others, willing to give oneself without holding back, able to see in others what constitutes your very essence. Love makes you vulnerable, and therein lies the key to truth: the recognition that you are nothing more than an entity of love, seeking love, needing love, deserving love. And in this rush towards others, you discover what feels most like freedom.” - Excerpt from Georges Hobeika site
Until next time!