On January 28, 2026, Paris Haute Couture Week staged a small earthquake: Alexis Mabille invited guests into a classic runway setup, then replaced the runway with a wall-to-wall screen and a hyperreal, AI-generated show.
On January 28, 2026, Paris Haute Couture Week staged a small earthquake: Alexis Mabille invited guests into a classic runway setup, then replaced the runway with a wall-to-wall screen and a hyperreal, AI-generated show.
January 28, 2026
The room followed familiar rituals, two rows of people, the hush before the first look, right up until the moment the logic snapped. Reports described photographers being asked to step out, the reveal of a screen, and a dawning realization: the models, the audience behind them, the clothes, the gleam of the catwalk, everything the eye usually trusts as proof of couture had become pure image.
Couture, at its most elemental, begins with touch: pins, hands, needles, fittings, the tiny decisions that live in seams. Mabille’s provocation was simple and brutal: remove the garment from the room and keep the perfection. In doing so, he pressed on couture’s most sacred pressure point, its definition as a made-to-measure practice with craft at the center.
And yet, the shock value hides a quieter truth: this virtual couture still demanded labor, just a different kind. Alexis Mabille described months of development, scanning fabrics and embroidery references, iterating silhouettes hundreds of times until chiffon behaved like chiffon and feathers held their exact arrogance. The work moved from atelier tables to an image pipeline, from dress forms to repeated renders, from the hand to the prompt, still obsessive, still perfectionist, still authored.
That’s why the moment feels bigger than a stunt. AI isn’t only making moodboards faster; it’s challenging fashion’s hierarchy of proof. For decades, couture has justified itself through difficulty: the hours, the scarcity, the human stamina behind beauty. This show flipped the argument.
The Alexis Mabille AI-generated couture show arrived as an illusion: a runway translated into pure screen, detail polished to the point of inevitability. Yet couture lives on evidence, not effect, fittings that reshape a bodice by millimeters, hands that wrestle silk into obedience, hours that turn ambition into structure. When the AI becomes the main character, the result feels less like couture evolving, more like couture being used as a prestigious backdrop for a tech demo, glossy, and quietly dismissive of the human intensity that couture has always demanded.
