Staged against the tumbledown glamor of Salle Wagram against the soundtrack of a ticking chime, Maison Mihara Yasuhiro’s fall 2026 show traced a full-circle return to the vintage styles and deconstruction that defined the designer’s early work.
The collection opened with playfully tailored looks including generously cut jackets with voluminous, softened shoulders and rounded sleeves, single-button blazers fastened asymmetrically, and traditional button-down shirts topped with double – sometimes triple – collars.
These early looks established a sense of classic order before gradually unraveling – a jacket sliding off the shoulder here, a misaligned button there – then moving into patchwork constructions and distressed denim, nodding to Yasuhiro’s backstory of remaking secondhand garments at the start of his career.
Throughout, the most distinctive device was a front–back clash of materials. Skirts were pleated in front and rigidly pencil-straight at the back, rendered in contrasting fabrics such as satin and wide-wale corduroy. Trousers appeared as sweatpants from the front and jeans from behind, while denim jackets slouched at the sleeves with a distinctly 1990s volume.
Yasuhiro cited his inspiration from that era as Ralph Lauren, Margaret Howell, and schoolboy uniforms. The retro air was evident, but he added that he wanted to take the codes of the more recent quiet luxury trend and deliberately mess them up.
He went all in on layering: up to five pieces were stacked at once in upended combos such as track jackets underneath button downs. It worked well as a styling trick – on models at least, even if might be hard to replicate IRL. At 52 looks, the collection was ambitious and at times excessive.
Teddy-fur skirt suits evoked 1960s primness made modern, and fuzzy textures extended to shoes and T-shirts, adding to the show’s overall tactile richness.
The Japanese designer noted that while the sharply depreciated yen has led him to rethink the scale of future European shows, it has simultaneously boosted his business by making the collection more competitively priced for international buyers.
