Fashion and ballet converge in Drift Wood, the new Paris Opera production shaped by choreographers Imre and Marne van Opstal. For the first time, designer ALAINPAUL channels his dual background in dance and couture into costumes that merge sculptural clarity with emotional vulnerability. The result is a rare artistic dialogue where movement, material, and meaning evolve together onstage.
The costumes mark ALAINPAUL’s first foray into contemporary ballet, yet the project feels less like a debut and more like an inevitability. Paul’s background straddles two worlds. He spent his formative years immersed in the rigorous discipline of ballet and later honed his technical eye at Vetements from 2014 to 2017 and on Virgil Abloh’s design team at Louis Vuitton until 2022. When he launched his eponymous label with his husband, Luis Philippe, in 2023, the brand’s sculptural clarity and fluid construction bore traces of both worlds.
For Drift Wood, Alain Paul collaborated directly with the Van Opstal siblings and the renowned costume workshop of the Paris Opera. The choreographers, a brother-sister duo from the Netherlands, are making their debut with the company. They conceived a piece that explores vulnerability and resilience through the metaphor of driftwood shaped by tides and time. Their approach required costumes that could shift between fragility and strength without announcing themselves.
“Working with Imre and Marne, along with the exceptional workshop at the Paris Opera, has been an immense honor,” Paul said. “These are the first costumes signed by ALAINPAUL for a contemporary ballet, and we are deeply grateful for the trust placed in us for Drift Wood. We established a genuine dialogue between movement and costume design. Having grown up in the world of ballet, this project is a significant accomplishment that unites my two worlds.”
The costumes reflect the tension between what Alain Paul describes as a resolutely human society and a more instinctive nature. The costumes needed to function as extensions of the dancers’ bodies while expressing competing forces: mental conditioning versus primal instinct and control versus abandon. The Van Opstals wanted garments that could simultaneously reveal and conceal emotional secrets.
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Paul’s solution drew on ALAINPAUL’s signature minimalist cuts, adapting them for bodies under extreme physical demands. The pieces maintain the sculptural precision that earned ALAINPAUL a spot as a 2025 LVMH Prize finalist, while allowing dancers the freedom to push their movements to the edge.
Drift Wood appears alongside works by postmodern pioneer Trisha Brown and David Dawson’s Anima Animus in Contrastes, the Paris Opera’s exploration of opposing forces in contemporary ballet. The program places Alain Paul’s costume work within a lineage of designers who understand that clothing for performance requires thinking beyond aesthetics. Function and form merge when bodies are the medium.
Paul’s trajectory reflects broader shifts in the intersection of fashion and performance. His generation of designers, shaped by streetwear, the collapse of traditional fashion hierarchies, and social media’s democratizing force, approaches costume design differently than their predecessors did. There’s less reverence for historical convention and more willingness to let the work’s needs dictate solutions.
For Alain Paul, this project offered something even rarer: the freedom to work without commercial constraints. “This project represents a moment of accomplishment,” he said, acknowledging the luxury of creating purely for artistic expression.
