By June Roberson
Paris-worthy couture isn’t always born in an atelier, at least not for Ashi Studios. Long guided by life and happenstance, flashback to Fall 2025 when Ashi’s bout of designer’s block was cleared during a spontaneous traipse through a Paris flea market. It was during a long-haul flight to Paris and the Gothic horror film, Nosferatu, that shaped his vision for this season. Ashi Studio’s Spring Couture 2026 collection, The Beginnings**,** landed somewhat paradoxically as a meditation on death as an ultimate end, yet one that survives through both preservation and decay through the lens of mourning. The Palais de Brongniart, cloaked in white drapery and lit by a phosphorescent glow, echoed the eerie elegance of a Victorian residence for a collection far more visceral than wearable.
What Color Do You Mourn In?
Taking on a similar palette to last spring’s couture, Ashi Studios once again abandoned the present day, stalking the gothic obsession and vampire couture through the 18th-century’s macabre lens. While his collaboration with film set artists initially bordered on costume, the theatricality became intentional when framed by Ashi’s recent film fixation. Through a primeval palette of rust, dust, and beige, garments became relics resisting time’s natural fade, both battleground and harmony for passion and grotesque rebirth. Human hair, a fragment of death that resists decay, spiraled in braided, spinal formations down corseted gowns, adorned sheer undergarments, and even manifested as a one-legged skirt fastened at the thigh with a garter in the opening look**.**
Ashi Studio Haute Couture Spring 2026: Opening Look (Image courtesy of Ashi Studio)
Death moths evoked haunting mortality beneath sheer fabrication, recalling The Silence of the Lambs, where obsession became a grotesque pursuit of transformation. Across the gauzy tattered maxi, an undeciphered language scribbled in gold calligraphy was marginalia for lost loved ones, while a reptilian crimson wax seal in Look 14 suspended the collection between vulnerability and finality. Bodices seemed caught in transformation, macramé purgatory, as cotton-rendered sheer clung to the body through Ashi’s neo-glue technique, Look 20. Painted surfaces infused latex wear as pearls blanketed trains and frayed hems, and a clutch accessory, featured only three times (Looks 3, 19, 28), seemed less a figurative bridge between what haunts and what is being haunted. As the show notes suggested… and perhaps literal conduits disguised by their elusive origin, having been sourced from a vendor at an antique Paris flea market**,** the Marché Clignancourt.
Ashi Studio Haute Couture Spring 2026: Looks 3, 14, 19, 28 (Image courtesy of Ashi Studio)
Couture Shouldn’t Be Practical… Right?
Ashi has formed, perhaps unintentionally, a narrative within a narrative between last fall’s couture and the collection unveiled this past Thursday. Where last season arrived unnamed, driven by creative freedom and spontaneous inspiration, this spring’s offering felt predefined, inevitable, and inescapably tethered to a single vision. Together, the seasons mirror one another in inversion: rebirth through freedom followed by ritualistic confrontation with life’s ultimate end. Closing cycles in their most grotesque forms: what once lingered in the shadows of previous collections now steps fully into the light. Ashi’s impromptu inspirations may seem crazy to some, but isn’t that where the most powerful creativity lives? Why make couture everyday when it can be a mourning Victorian witch, her sister’s hair bound around her throat, suspended between beauty and decay?
Ashi Studio Haute Couture Spring 2026: Looks 29, 24, 7, 16 (Image courtesy of Ashi Studio)
Who Died?
Ashi also welcomed several of his longtime supporters back into the audience, led by Cardi B, frequently seen in his designs — including her custom look for the 2018 Grammy Awards. Front row regulars followed, from former Miss Universe and couture-week staple Pia Wurtzbach, legendary fashion editor and street-style icon Anna Dello Russo, alongside model and education advocate Pritika Swarup. The collection further drew attention from France’s niche fashion insiders such as Léna Mahfouf, better known as Lena Situations and Chiara Ferragni.