Ashi Studio’s Fall/Winter 2026 Couture show, titled A Different Skin, begins with a simple but loaded idea: getting dressed has always carried an element of roleplay. Clothes alter posture, behavior, and permission. They let the wearer borrow another mood, another century, another self. For this collection, Creative Director Ashi pushes that thought into a warped historic fantasy, where each look becomes a character and the runway becomes a court outside fixed time.
COUTURE COLLECTIONS
Last season stayed inside a Victorian interior, with its restraint, concealment, and layered ornament. This season opens that world outward. The Victorian reference remains, but it now sits among other figures: the Napoleonic officer reduced to a trace, the court ambassador, the broken doll, the creature of the forest, the guest who has spent too long in the ballroom and started to absorb its surfaces. Ashi does not treat history as costume. He treats it as material that can bend, fracture, and return in altered form.
“The ball, for me, is where that becomes possible,” Ashi says, linking the collection to the idea of a mask as a route into another skin. That ball carries the surrealist charge of a legendary Dalí gathering, where decadence becomes a method for shifting reality. In this world, bodies and rooms begin to exchange properties. Leather reads like ceramic. Beading catches the light like glass. Opaline surfaces carry metalwork that feels embedded into their structure. Japanese paper, painted to resemble fallen leaves, gathers at hems. Hand-painted insects land across folds of fabric, caught between ornament and life.
The collection’s strength lies in how much of its labor stays close to the body. Hand-sculpted buttons, gilded pomegranates, frayed lace, bells that move with the wearer, and hand-painted crustaceans hidden inside linings create a private system of details. Lingerie emerges beneath tailoring, giving structure a more vulnerable charge. A Venetian mirror appears on the back of one look, turned outward, making the wearer both image and reflection.
Ashi Studio builds atmosphere through accumulation, but the collection avoids simple excess. The details behave like objects in a room that someone has lived in for years. They carry meaning without announcing themselves too loudly. Each piece invites a different performance, yet the transformation never feels like escape. It suggests that trying on another character can reveal something more precise about the self.
With A Different Skin, Ashi Studio turns couture into an act of controlled haunting. The Fall/Winter 2026 Couture collection moves through history, fantasy, craft, and disguise, using clothing as a way to cross from one identity into another. Its power comes from that uncertainty: the moment when a garment stops dressing the body and starts changing the person inside it.
the designers really didn’t let the corps of Alexander McQueen sleep this season damn it. There are McQueen references literally on every haute couture runway this season and this is just one of them – these pieces can easily be swapped for what you see on the Schiaparelli runway and vice versa – sometimes the budget is bigger for execution but we are all seeing this in repeat.