Amid the jumble of fashion humanity packed to the rafters of the old Cartier Foundation on Wednesday night, Pieter Mulier sent out his final collection for Maison Alaïa, establishing a slender line as the line of fall 2026 – and him as the one of hottest designers of the moment.
It was a pitch-perfect swan song as Mulier, who starts July 1 at Versace, stripped back the fashion theatrics to a minimal, pure expression of the Alaïa essence, leaving a clean slate for whomever takes over next at the Paris-based house.
The clothes were as ravishing as they were restrained, from the clinging, sexy tank dresses that opened the show, some with ghostly references to the founder’s crocodile tailcoats, and the form-hugging velvet suits through to gently flaring calfskin coats and the densely ruffled skirts that brought the display to a crescendo.
“It’s basically a vocabulary of my five years at Alaïa, what I taught and that I’m giving to the next one,” Mulier told reporters after the show. “When you leave a house, you keep it calm, you go back to the roots. And I want to show what I learned also from the house.
“I learned precision, I learned editing, and I learned that real luxury is not what we all think. Real luxury is the perfectly cut jacket,” he continued.
The late, great Azzedine Alaïa was famous for toiling late into the night on his precision silhouettes, never straying far from his vocabulary of white shirts, knit dresses, tailoring and evening columns.
Mulier said the droning, swooning soundtrack with a steady techno throb was deliberate.
“Repetition is also something very Alaïa,” the designer said. “He would do one skirt 50 times, and the last one was the best one. He did the same, same, the same. And the collection is a bit that, also trying to be perfect, even though perfection doesn’t exist.”
Mulier went a step further than bringing out the design team or the atelier for a bow – not that they would have fit in the standing-room-only runway theater, crowded benches leaving only a narrow passage for the models.
He commissioned photographer Keizo Kitajima to shot portraits of his extended team, from the chief executive officer on down, and compiled them in a hardcover book left on each seat. Here was a more ordered assembly of humanity, tilted young, female and proud.
While some fashion shows seem more about image and cultural relevance, this one was about the work. Viewed up close, the collection was a treat for connoisseurs of fashion, which included his BFFs (best fashion friends) Raf Simons and Matthieu Blazy.
Asked if he might take his strict, reduced approach to his next job in Italy, he replied: “No, that will be the opposite – with a little bit of that.”
