The Body, Reassembled
- May 26
- 4 min read
Eyes, lips, hands, faces. In fashion, they rarely stay still. Again and again, the body is taken apart and imagined anew: as a gaze, a shell, a trace, or a surface that seems to look back.
A garment changes when it begins to carry another body on its surface. Fabric becomes less like a cover and more like an image with its own presence.
In Balmain’s Spring/Summer 2025 collection, the body appeared not as a silhouette, but as a set of fragments. Eyes, lips, hands moved across fabric through embroidery, shine and texture. The body was no longer only inside the clothes. It was on them.
Fashion has returned to this idea many times. Sometimes through a face. Sometimes through a hand, a torso, a shell, a trace. The body is taken apart, enlarged, softened, hardened or turned into an image. What changes is the method. What remains is the dialogue between the body that wears and the body that appears.
The clearest starting point is Elsa Schiaparelli. Her 1937 evening coat with Jean Cocteau remains one of fashion’s most memorable acts of illusion. The image shifts as the eye reads it. It is face and vase, drawing and garment, body and decoration at once.
The house’s recent collections still feel connected to that past without simply repeating it. In Spring/Summer 2026, anatomy remains part of the maison’s vocabulary, but it works less like nostalgia than a living code. The body is still fragmented, still theatrical, still slightly strange.
A different kind of body appears in Issey Miyake’s Plastic Body from 1980. The face disappears, and the torso becomes the central form. The piece sits somewhere between clothing, sculpture and armour. Rather than decorating the body, it reduces it to shape, surface and presence.
More than four decades later, a similar idea returns in another form. In Issey Miyake’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection, clothing seems to explore how close it can come to the figure without simply following it. Forms expand, shift and reshape the silhouette, allowing the body to appear differently.
Prada’s Spring/Summer 2014 collection placed the face in a different world. Surrounded by murals, portraits, eyes and painted women, the collection made the face feel public, visible and shared. These were not surrealist fragments in the Schiaparelli sense. They felt closer to posters and cultural memory.
Jean Paul Gaultier’s archival mesh pieces have long played with transparency, skin and trompe-l’œil, turning the body into a place where image and fabric meet. The “Eyes and Lips” print from the 1990s places close-up fragments of the face directly onto the figure, as if the garment were both a second skin and a moving image. Its current re-edition confirms why the print still works: it sits on the body with the same graphic clarity, sensuality and strange ease.
A similar directness appears in Vivienne Westwood’s Autumn/Winter 2022/23 “Vivienne’s Eyes” print. Here, spread across denim, dresses and accessories, the hand-painted eye motif turns the body into a field of repeated gazes. It is not the smooth gaze of a fashion image. It has the roughness of a mark, a talisman, a stare.
Maison Margiela’s Spring/Summer 2017 Artisanal collection offered a quieter reading of the face. On a white coat, a portrait appeared through layers of tulle, created in collaboration with artist Benjamin Shine. It did not sit on the garment like a print. It seemed to live inside the fabric, soft, blurred and almost passing.
Kiko Kostadinov, the London-based Bulgarian designer, takes the idea in a more constructed direction for Spring/Summer 2026. Inspired in part by American artist Christina Ramberg’s segmented figures of the body, the collection uses chest pieces, shaped panels and compressed forms to suggest a figure being quietly redrawn. The body is still treated as something that can be shaped, framed and seen differently.
Across these collections, the body keeps changing its place. What connects them is a shared way of looking: fashion does not only cover the body, but lets it appear differently, as an image, a second skin, a shadow, or a silhouette that feels quietly unfamiliar.
Image credits: Balmain Spring/Summer 2025, courtesy of Balmain / Elsa Schiaparelli and Jean Cocteau, Evening Coat, 1937, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / Issey Miyake, Plastic Body, Autumn/Winter 1980, The Kyoto Costume Institute, gift of Miyake Design Studio / Prada Spring/Summer 2014 Womenswear, courtesy of Prada / Maison Margiela Artisanal Spring/Summer 2017, courtesy of Maison Margiela / Schiaparelli Spring/Summer 2026 Ready-to-Wear, courtesy of Schiaparelli / Kiko Kostadinov Spring/Summer 2026 Womenswear, courtesy of Kiko Kostadinov / Issey Miyake Spring/Summer 2026 Collection, courtesy of Issey Miyake / Schiaparelli Face Bag, courtesy of Schiaparelli / Jean Paul Gaultier Eyes and Lips re-edition, courtesy of Jean Paul Gaultier / Vivienne Westwood Autumn/Winter 2022/23, courtesy of Vivienne Westwood.
