SPHERE PARIS FASHION WEEK®: FREEDOM, I WEAR YOUR NAME

CACHÍ, C.R.E.O.L.E LA CAGE, LAZOSCHMIDL, MOUTY, OUEST PARIS, VICTOR CLAVELLY: seven brands that are shaking things up – sometimes the result of a collective effort. This is the case with Cachi, founded by the Franco-Argentinian duo Belen Frias and Elise Girault, winners of the AMI x IFM Paris Entrepreneurship Award in 2023. Think clean lines rooted in a sense of tradition. 

Another example is Bertille and Thomas Mouty, who have been revisiting the men's wardrobe since 2020, giving it an urban and poetic twist.  Then there’s duo Andreas Schmidl and Josef Lazo (Lazoschmidl), who celebrate a colourful pop universe through their paper-cut patch effects on jeans and a highly narrative vision of fashion. “The ‘Rendezvous’ collection is rooted in the emotional tension of long-distance desire. It's about the intimacy of preparing for a date, of getting dressed and undressed for someone you haven't touched in months. It’s autobiographical – a collage of memories from flights, voice notes, zines, and screenshots. It also plays with the queer ritual of becoming: how clothes help us flirt, protect, reveal, and transform. This season, we wanted to make the preparation itself the main act,” they explain. 

Once again working as a duo, Victor Koehler and Victoria Baia founded LA CAGE while they were still students at the Duperré School. Finalists in the 39th International Fashion Festival of Hyères 2024, they celebrate the art of parade and costume. “LA CAGE is still making films, this time about a musician whose prototypical hippie silhouette stands out under the Hollywood sign, bathed in the white sun of 1960s Los Angeles. Through the figure of Eden Ahbez, a whole mythology of uniforms unfolds. A boy scout as a child; a young man in an Indian tunic; a traveller whose clothes bear the marks of his wanderings; a singer wearing a costume pinned with lucky charms gleaned from the road. So many fantasised memories that reinvent the wardrobe of magnificent wanderers," says Victor Koehler about this "dreamlike docu-fiction" from the summer of 2026.

That's how it goes with this generation, keen to rework wardrobe staples and bring them into a world where technology and storytelling come together in an inspired marriage. Of course, we're thinking of Ouest Paris, who joined the official Paris Fashion Week® calendar in 2024. Here, they use denim and sustainable fabrics to remix workwear and the wardrobe of the golden age of the American West. "This season, I drew inspiration from the NASA archive images: cowboys and astronauts watching a rocket take off. Hence this mix of dry wool with tennis stripes and more technical nylons," explains Arthur Robert. "We live in increasingly dark and crazy times. The role of fashion is not to reconstruct or be nostalgic, but to echo more positive eras through slightly more retro references."

As for Victor Clavelly, he is conducting solo research combining technology and sustainable commitment by playing with trompe l'oeil and metamorphoses to explore silhouettes that look like mobile sculptures. 

Strangely, it is less about projection in time or space than it is about almost metaphysical questions, with fashion as the vehicle. Fashion that stands as the absolute expression of freedom.  What to say, what to do, what to defend? Beyond trends, the intention is expressed in an uninhibited way – outside the box, outside conventions. Whether embodied as iconic images associated with westerns or urban landscapes, or deployed in futuristic silhouettes, this generation moves freely between the past and the future, technology and craftsmanship. In these troubled times, far from the activism that obstructs it and all the useless rhetoric, imagination is rising to the fore. Individual agility is more than ever a trademark. SPHERE remains the ideal setting for these prodigies. Says Andreas Schmidl, "SPHERE feels like a space where fashion can breathe.”