What if a handbag were large enough to swallow you whole? For Spring/Summer 2027, Maitrepierre turns that strangely simple question into the setting for Untitled, a digital fashion film that feels less like a runway than a trip into a parallel dimension. Inside Le Peigne, the house’s new bag, everything seems slightly out of proportion: the models, the clothes, even the space around them. What usually sits quietly at the bottom of a handbag suddenly becomes an entire landscape.
The effect is wonderfully unsettling. There is something almost extraterrestrial about the silhouettes, but also something deeply familiar in the way they borrow from the textures and markings of the natural world. Maitrepierre seems to be asking what happens when a woman’s wardrobe stops imitating reality and starts inventing its own species.
The second look is perhaps the clearest example. A sleeveless dress is almost completely covered in long strands of pink, red, black and white, which fall from the neckline and spread over the skirt before pooling around the legs. The technique gives the garment an unpredictable movement: depending on how it catches the light, it could recall hair, feathers, sea creatures or some brightly colored organism discovered on another planet. The dress is playful, even seductive, it looks less constructed than grown.
That strange relationship between fashion and the animal world appears again in the collection’s prints. In look 11, an intense composition of orange, red, black and white wraps around the body in irregular, hand-painted strokes. Rather than resembling a conventional animal print, the pattern feels as though it has been observed through a distorted lens. The marks follow the body, gathering around the waist before breaking apart across the flowing fabric of the skirt. It gives the impression of skin without quite looking like skin, another familiar reference pushed just far enough to become something else.
This ambiguity runs through Untitled. A button is no longer simply a button, a print does not have to remain flat, and an accessory can become the starting point for an entire visual universe. Even the eyewear, created with Emmanuelle Khanh, plays with the silhouette of a comb, while the jewelry by Maxime Mathieu brings together chains, pearls and fragments that feel collected rather than conventionally designed.
What I find most interesting, however, is the tension between the collection’s highly constructed digital presentation and the very physical quality of the clothes. The film may manipulate space through digital effects and AI, but the garments themselves remain tactile: they have weight, texture and movement. Hand-painted prints, manipulated fabrics, embroidery, laser cutting and three-dimensional surfaces all insist on the fact that these strange objects still have to exist on a body.
That contradiction feels particularly appropriate for Maitrepierre. His fashion has always had an instinct for the slightly surreal, but Untitled pushes that instinct into another dimension. The woman at the center of the film is not escaping reality exactly; she is carrying her own version of it with her. And perhaps that is the most charming thing about the whole idea: the handbag is no longer where she keeps her world. It is the world itself.
