What if the next generation of fashion designers is no longer interested in simply making fashion?
At Dover Street Market Paris, during Paris Design Week, HEAD – Genève’s NEXT FORM brings together a generation for whom clothing, jewellery and accessories are no longer separate disciplines, but tools for questioning the body, memory, identity and the systems surrounding us. Across Bachelor’s and Master’s projects, the exhibition feels less like a conventional graduate showcase than a snapshot of a generation trying to understand what wearable design can still become.
Here, the body is not a mannequin but a territory. Omar Amorim-Esenli turns his experience at Emmaüs Genève into a meditation on labour, abandonment and alienation; Zakarie Boubekeur’s Straycore transforms urban wandering into a wardrobe shaped by the figures, gestures and accidental encounters of the city; Hippolyte Laporte’s Anamorphoses turns dressing into a surreal game of identity, allowing clothes to destabilise rather than reinforce social codes.
Elsewhere, memory becomes material. In Tender Objects, Maëlle Lezebot and Flora Lingenhel reactivate inherited garments and jewellery that have become too fragile to wear, while Flora Pagliarani’s Archeologia familiare transforms broken family jewellery into blown-glass forms: fragile vessels for memories that are themselves constantly changing.
This may be the most revealing aspect of NEXT FORM: these designers are not necessarily searching for a new aesthetic language. They are questioning why we dress, what objects remember, how bodies are controlled, and which histories fashion chooses to preserve.
In a culture increasingly obsessed with speed, novelty and instant visibility, this feels almost radical. The new generation seems less interested in producing another image and more interested in giving an object something to say.
Perhaps the future of fashion is not about what comes next aesthetically.
Perhaps it is about what fashion can make us think next.
Photos Credits: ©️ HEAD – Genève, Raphaël Lugassy