By Alessio Nesi
“I ended up finding the disorder of my mind sacred.”
It is from this inner tension that Dear Night Thoughts, Ann Demeulemeester’s FW26 under Stefano Gallici, takes shape: a collection that reinterprets royal dress as if permeated by nocturnal, intimate, unresolved thoughts.
No longer just a code, but a state of mind.The military structure—jackets, buttons, braiding—remains recognizable, yet is unsettled: worn denim, fragile proportions, displaced details. It is as if the uniform loses its function of control to become an emotional surface.
The face of Arthur Rimbaud emerges as a key sign: not decoration, but a device. Rimbaud becomes the lens through which everything is read—adolescence, rebellion, identity in formation. In Dear Night Thoughts, his spirit translates into a restless, almost sleepless youth that runs through every look.
Gallici thus pushes the house’s heritage toward a more instinctive dimension, less disciplined: an irregular, nocturnal tribe where rigor is contaminated by desire.
The result is an unstable balance: discipline and disorder coexist, never fully resolved. The classic is not denied—it is disturbed, like a thought that returns in the night. And it is precisely within this friction that a new elegance emerges: more nervous, more emotional, more contemporary.
