IFM students open Paris Fashion Week with experimental menswear show
IFM’s 27 BA students turned a Seine-side campus into Paris Fashion Week’s first menswear stage, using fabric play and sharp silhouettes to push against conformity.
The Institut Français de la Mode opened Paris Fashion Week Menswear 2026 on Tuesday, June 23, with 27 Bachelor of Arts fashion design students showing outdoors beside the Seine on the school’s Paris campus at Les Docks - Cité de la Mode et du Design. Staged at 14:30 and set as an invitation-only presentation on the official FHCM calendar, the show gave IFM’s next generation the first word of the menswear season.
What made the collection land was not polish but nerve. The students worked across varied fabrics, silhouettes and messaging, turning the runway into a live argument against sameness. Some looks leaned into crisp structure, others into looser volume and a more unsettled sense of shape, and the overall effect was less a finished commercial proposition than a smart, searching proving ground. That is precisely where the strongest young fashion often begins, when clothes are still asking questions about how they should be worn, and by whom.
IFM has built that instinct into its Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Design program, a three-year course that combines craftsmanship, creativity and culture on the same campus overlooking the river. The school describes the program as a place where experimental creativity meets technical innovation and artisanal know-how, and the students’ June 23 presentation fit that brief exactly. It was fashion with ideas in motion, shaped by the practical challenge of making clothes that feel current without collapsing into gimmick.
The program’s structure explains some of the discipline behind the experimentation. In earlier IFM BA shows, about 30 final-year students were selected from 70 graduating collections, and each collection consisted of six looks. That level of curation keeps the school’s runway sharper than a simple student showcase, and it helps explain why IFM has become a familiar opening note on the Paris calendar. The school’s co-directors, Thierry Rondenet and Hervé Yvrenogeau, have worked together since 1993 and both taught at La Cambre, where their former students include Anthony Vaccarello, Julien Dossena, Marine Serre, Matthieu Blazy and Nicolas di Felice.
IFM’s growing presence was reinforced again this season when its March 2026 Master of Arts fashion design and knitwear design show opened Paris Fashion Week with 23 students from 13 nationalities. Together, the two presentations show a school using the runway less as a diploma exercise than as a platform for the problems young designers are trying to solve right now: climate, wearability and the search for individual style that still feels like clothes.
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