Ashi Studio presented its Spring 2026 Haute Couture collection inside a glowing white tent in Paris. There, the eponymous designer transformed historical obsessions into contemporary fashion provocations. Titled The Beginnings, the collection emerged from a fascination with the Victorian era’s fixation on control, desire, and death.
| 📌 Key Facts |
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| 🏛️ Brand: Ashi Studio 🐍 Creative Director: Mohammed Ashi 🕯️ Inspiration: Victorian mourning rituals and death symbolism 🪡 Craft: 18th-century corsetry, burned and distressed materials 🖤 Signature detail: Hair woven directly into garments 🎬 Collaboration: Film-set artists, including Dracula hair designers 🧠 Theme: Desire, loss, memory and feminine empowerment 🎨 Palette: Dusty beige, rust, time-altered neutrals 👗 Silhouette focus: Cinched waists, bell shapes, architectural volumes |
Victorian corsetry reimagined through contemporary couture
The designer used 18th-century corsetry techniques to create pieces that tightly cinched waists and pushed silhouettes into exaggerated, ultra-feminine forms. Bell-shaped dresses extended into rounded, shell-like structures. Peplums and skirts took on architectural volume. Yet these weren’t simple reproductions of period garments. Ashi subjected historical construction methods to burning and distressing, producing surfaces that looked both ancient and urgent.
Hair became fabric within the collection. Braided and twisted strands were sculpted into intricate swirls and sewn directly onto gowns, referencing the Victorian practice of weaving the hair of deceased loved ones into jewelry. Other pieces featured hair trailing down the back like a spine. Ghostly handprints appeared under layers of gauze. Long-lost love letter script and red wax seals suggested correspondence with the departed.
Cinematic collaborations and trompe-l’œil materials
The designer collaborated with artists who typically work on film sets, including the hair design team from last year’s Dracula production. This collaboration pushed the collection toward cinematic territory. Under the tent’s carefully manipulated lighting, materials behaved unexpectedly. Cotton treated with a glue technique appeared wet and dripping, clinging to the body. Trompe l’oeil painting transformed flat fabric into intricate bows and elaborate draping. One look featured a plastic covering that gave the model the glossy perfection of a porcelain doll.
The palette remained subdued. Dust, rust, and muted beige tones dominated, evoking objects altered by time. These colors represented material memory rather than seasonal optimism.
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Gothic symbols, death motifs and surreal accessories
Skeleton keys dangled from garments. Death moths appeared repeatedly throughout the collection. A standout black sequined gown was dramatically cut in the back in the shape of a T and accented with tassels along the vertebrae. The back became a focal point for many pieces, including designs with pearl-drenched bustles and trains.
Accessories carried the same otherworldly sensibility. Clutch handles were fashioned from antique doorknobs in the shape of human heads that the designer collected at the Marché Clignancourt flea market in Paris. These objects introduced a macabre element that felt less like decoration and more like artifacts from another century.
The return of the corset as a symbol of feminine power
Corsets have appeared on several runways this season, and Ashi embraced the trend. Rather than viewing the corset as a symbol of restriction, the designer framed its return through feminine empowerment. He noted that modern women want to accentuate their figures on their own terms. The collection explores the tension between historical control garments and contemporary body autonomy.
Desire, loss and the emotional language of mourning
The collection operates within what the designer describes as a threshold state, one that exists before resolution. A central female figure holds a locket of hair against her skin. She stitches letters in an invented language addressed to someone who is either absent or perhaps perpetually present. These gestures define the emotional register of the entire collection.
In The Beginnings, longing and abandonment are not treated as opposites, but as forces that arrive together. Desire consumes and yields simultaneously. Garments trace the tension between preservation and decay, presence and haunting, and attachment and erosion. The result is fashion that examines how bodies carry memory through structure and surface and how intimacy operates at the point of collapse.
