Marine Serre Expands on "The Grace of Time" for FW26
During the busy Paris Fashion Week schedule, we visited Marine Serre HQ to find out more about this season’s collection.
In the years we’ve followed Marine Serre‘s career, we’ve watched her work with upcycled fabrics, with coins and watches and even host an entirely “zero-waste” show during Paris Fashion Week. For her latest venture, the sustainably-minded designer has turned her attention to something a little more unexpected: the literal Louvre.
During the busy hustle and bustle that is fashion week, we took a trip to Marine Serre HQ, where Serre showcased her Fall/Winter 2026 collection, “The Grace of Time.” Described in the press release as “a meditation on time, craft and continuity,” the collection reflects on the concept of endurance and how garments can live on and transform.
It’s partly for that reason that the designer chose to step from the traditional runway format this season. “Here, fashion is not conceived for the instant but for duration,” the release notes, and Serre tells Hypebae, “I really wanted to focus on the garments, on every detail and the construction, like an architect. This [format] also made a lot of sense with the fact that I’m collaborating with the Louvre.”
The iconic institution might seem like a random choice considering its focus isn’t exactly on found objects, but Serre has a fairly good reason for choosing it as a big part of FW26’s focus. “I spend most of my year actually wandering around in the Louvre, and I thought what could be more beautiful than actually to create paintings from the garments?”
The result of the collaboration was a total of five looks, each rooted in couture sensibilities. If you’ve been on your phone at all in this last week, you’ll have seen one of the standout pieces from the Louvre collection: the Mona Lisa dress. But the story behind it is even more impressive than it first seems. As the first designer to have the rights from the Louvre to recreate the piece, it marks a pretty special moment in Serre’s career.
“This dress, it’s actually a puzzle of ‘La Joconde’ made by Leonardo DaVinci,” the designer tells us. “It’s a full puzzle, at the bottom it’s fully brown, in the middle it’s fully beige and at the top it’s fully green. I wanted to create a sense of duality within the puzzle, since most of the time we see it flat and in 2D, and this will be worn in 3D around the body. The puzzle was then wet to make sure it could take the shape of the body and after that, stitched in brown, white and green.”
If you thought that would be the only painstakingly unique piece in the collection, you’d be entirely wrong. After the Mona Lisa dress comes Serre’s standout couture piece: a corset dress covered in used paint tubes.
“I wanted to make, especially for the Louvre, a couture piece,” Serre notes, explaining the detailed process step-by-step. “I used upcycled deadstock to create a kind of armor. First, we hammered the paint tubes to make them really flat, then created a kind of multi-colored base, and after that, they’re embroidered one by one onto a corset underneath. It was really exhausting work, but we’re so happy.”
Speaking about the decision to use paint tubes, Serre explains, “As you know, Marine Serre is always working with materials that actually have no value to give you a new perspective. It’s about taking things that have no sense of luxury and seeing how they can become luxury.”
Along with the couture pieces, Serre’s FW26 collection revisits the signature crescent moon motif, pairing technical sportswear fabrics and textured details with upcycled silk scarves, recycled T-shirts and performancewear. Second-skin dresses, catsuits, bras and leggings make up the remainder of the collection, offering an evolution of the Marine Serre brand. The final result is somewhat anti-trend, favoring “contemporary femininity anchored in time rather than trend,” according to the collection notes.
When it comes to what’s next for Serre, it’s hard to say. “There’s so much I haven’t tried yet,” are her famous last words to us, so it seems we’ll just have to wait and see…
