
The most spectacular looks from the Spring 2025 Haute Couture collections
Pay attention fashion fans, these are the most fabulous frocks you’ll see this season
As the curtain falls on the Spring 2025 Haute Couture Fashion Week, and with New York Fashion Week AW25 just around the corner, kicking off on 6 February, let’s take a moment to collect ourselves and reflect on all the fabulousness, shall we?
The spiritual (and legal, thanks to the restrictions put on the meaning of ‘couture’ by the French Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode) home of the world’s most innovative designers, skilled seamstresses and artisanal craftspeople, Paris comes alive during couture week. Spring 2025 was, of course, no different, with the fashion pack buzzing about Alessandro Michele’s couture debut for Valentino and Jacquemus’ is-it-or-isn’t-it Le Croisière collection (technically, it isn’t, but more on that later).
So, did it live up to the hype? Read on for all the most spectacular moments from the Spring 2025 Haute Couture collections.
Valentino


In the (100-page long) show notes for his debut couture collection, Vertigineux, Alessandro Michele offered up an extended quote from The Infinity of Lists by Italian semiotician Umberto Eco. This illustrated essay and compendium expounds on the human need to create order out of chaos and the potential of lists to become poetic in their own right, offering up examples by luminaries including Homer, Joyce and Dalí as evidence. Which is all very interesting — but what exactly does it have to do with clothes?
Well, according to Michele, the list as “both an instrument for order and a source of disorientation” pushed him to “imagine every unique, finite and unrepeatable dress, as an uninterrupted and potentially infinite catalogue of words.” On the runway, this translated into 48 gowns imbued with a dizzying array of historic, artistic and literary references, from 18th-century panniers to the kaleidoscope swirls of a mandarin fish and a nod to the 12th-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. The cumulative effect is a collection which defies definition, shifting and transforming with each new look, as if wandering through Michele’s Sherlock-style mind palace. Yes, the theme may be so intellectual as to border on non-existent, but the end result is a range of truly exquisite looks — which is, frankly, hard to complain about.
Dior


For a house like Dior, the archive naturally provides rich inspiration for a designer to draw on and, for Spring 2025 Haute Couture, Maria Grazia Chiuri looked specifically to Yves Saint Laurent’s 1958 Trapèze line for the house, as well as at historic silhouettes more generally, for a collection that the designer hopes “belongs neither to past nor future”. What this meant in practice can be, perhaps, summed up as underwear-as-outerwear but make it Victorian. Or Georgian. Or mid-century.
As ever with Grazia Chiuri’s collections, the emphasis was squarely on silhouette and texture. The Dior petite mains have long excelled in the art of embellishment and here it was in evidence across almost every look. A series of voluminous crinolines, petticoats and panniers were alternately adorned with delicate silk flowers, like a spring garden trellis, or ornately beaded to recall the regal splendour and chivalric toughness of a medieval knight. Elsewhere, frothy bloomers and feminine ruffles were offset by high Victorian necklines and the shapely tailoring of the ‘50s and ‘60s popularised by Mr Dior himself. In short, there is much to love here; I have no doubt we’ll be seeing a lot of this collection on the red carpet this awards season.
Giambattista Valli


Giambattista Valli is always a highlight of couture week, not because the Italian fashion designer is particularly boundary-pushing or innovative, but because his collections are just so much fun. Valli can always be relied upon to provide the kind of require-a-double-door dresses, sumptuous colour palettes and playful fabric work that many tune into the couture collections for — in fact, it’s become something of a tradition that at least one gown should force the front row guests to shuffle back to let it past. Happily, Spring 2025 was no different.
Drawing on his Moroccan heritage, as well as aiming to provide the dose of escapism we all so sorely need right now, the frothiest, most voluminous confections, in hues of candy pink and scarlet, took inspiration from Morocco’s abundance of roses. Elsewhere, golden embroidery and robe-style gowns played on traditional Moorish interiors and the expansive thawb and bisht garments symbolic of royalty and wealth in the Arab world, while cloudlike ruching and layered draping leant the collection a dream-like quality. Princess dressing at its absolute finest.
Armani Privé


At the other end of the scale, if your idea of a dream wardrobe is louche tailoring, intricately embroidered strapless gowns and the kind of understated, old-money glamour that requires nothing so OTT as bright colours or big bows, Armani Privé is the collection for you. Marking 20 years on the couture runways this year, and still going strong at the ripe age of 90, Mr Armani remains the go-to couturier for much of Europe’s elite class, and his Spring 2025 Haute Couture will have given them much to covet.
Showing no signs of slowing, this latest collection was shown at the newly opened Palazzo Armani on Paris’ affluent Rue François Premier, which also houses the brand’s couture atelier. The setting harkened back to the early days of couture, when collections would be shown at intimate presentations to select VIP clients in a fashion house’s boutique, rather than via the enormous, attention-grabbing, social media-friendly shows that now dominate the fashion calendar. Accordingly, the clothes themselves were equally genteel. Paraded in front of a refined front row, including Demi Moore, Jessica Biel, Poppy Delevingne and Letitia Casta, the 87 looks making up the Lumiéres collection were appropriately luminous, with cascading crystals, shimmering silks and a palette of metallics, creams and pastels. This is the woman you want to be when you grow up.
Tamara Ralph


Named Poétique Symphony, Tamara Ralph took her cues from the pin-sharp solos, harmonious layers and undulating structure of an orchestral symphony. Rendered in a fresh spring palette of pastel pink, sunshine yellow, aquamarine and shimmering gold, the vibe, appropriately, was very much ‘night at the opera’.
Old Hollywood silhouettes — think hourglass corset dresses, mantua trains and plenty of feathers — were taken to the extreme via skirts comprised of strings of pearls, and graphic detailing designed to guide the eye in the manner of a conductor, rising to a crescendo with head-to-toe bead and sequin embellishment. These are special occasion gowns guaranteed to make you the belle of the ball.
Jacquemus


Okay, so Jacquemus’ Le Croisière collection isn’t technically couture (the clue’s in the name: croisière means ‘cruise’ in French) but it was, according to Simon Porte Jacquemus, ‘couture inspired’ and shown off-schedule during couture week to just 40 guests at the Parisian home of French architect August Perrets. Technicalities aside, it's all very much giving couture, and marks a defined tone shift from the brand’s usual runway spectacles (although Porte Jacquemus couldn’t stop himself from throwing in a few headline-grabbing moments courtesy of supers Christy Turlington and Adriana Lima).
The clothes themselves, however, were decidedly more understated than one would usually expect from a couture collection. Presented almost entirely in a monochrome palette, save for a smattering of daffodil yellows and pillar box reds, one gets the sense this collection was (ahem) tailored to showcase what the Jacquemus brand is capable of when it comes to the sheer artistry of dressmaking. Slick overcoats and sharply pleated tuxedo trousers found friends in double-breasted blazers and generous A-line skirts and, while a sprinkling of feathers and fluffy embellishment nodded towards the usual frivolity of couture, this was clearly not a collection destined purely for grand balls and red carpets. So, no, this wasn’t couture but it perhaps offered something even more valuable: timeless investment pieces you can actually wear.
Read more: All the jaw dropping jewels from the 2025 high jewellery collections