IFM students open Paris Fashion Week with identity-driven collections

The Institut Français de la Mode opened Paris Fashion Week at its campus at Les Docks - Cité de la Mode et du Design with a class of 27 graduating designers, and the heat made every fabric choice read like a decision. Each student showed six accessorized looks after a jury narrowed 69 final-year projects to the final line-up, and the most distinctive thread was a clear move away from decoration for its own sake toward identity made visible through cut, cloth and styling.

That identity story carried across a wide field of references, from Breton folklore and Swedish coastal life to Buddhist monastic dress, adolescence, gender identity, Black identity, cinema, technology and personal memory. The range mattered because it pointed to where young French fashion is headed next: not toward sameness, but toward collections that can hold a strong point of view while still translating into wearable product. The silhouettes and fabrics did not fight the weather; they answered it, with the kind of measured construction and lighter handling that feel increasingly essential in a season when polished clothes have to survive real heat.

Michael Rider, artistic director of Celine, was part of the show’s patronage, and his presence gave the student work an unusually pointed industry frame. Rider has been associated with a Celine debut that mixed familiar codes with subtle disruption, which makes his support for IFM feel less like ceremonial goodwill than a quiet scouting exercise. For luxury houses watching the next 12 to 18 months, that is the useful signal: the designers most likely to move into the commercial pipeline are the ones who can make personal narrative, strong fabrication and restraint sit in the same look.

IFM has turned the Bachelor of Arts presentation into part of the official Paris Fashion Week calendar, alongside the Master of Arts show that opened the season in March. The school also pointed back to its 2024 BA show, which opened Paris Fashion Week on June 18, 2024, when 70 final-year projects were reduced to 27 and each collection was again built from six looks. This year’s edition also drew support from Le Défi and Teintures de France, while students from other IFM tracks worked backstage as dressers, alteration staff and social media managers, reinforcing the school’s emphasis on production as much as concept.

The clearest commercial lesson was in the discipline of the clothes themselves: accessorized, specific and built to stand up in punishing heat. That combination is what will travel fastest into the market.