C.R.E.O.L.E. enters the Spring Summer 2026 season with DOM TOP FEVER, a collection that confronts historical erasure and colonial violence while channeling a contemporary Caribbean consciousness. The designer focuses not on nostalgia or reenactment but on the political and personal stakes of remembering. The work grounds itself in the present while pulling from the memory of migration, systemic inequality, and erased histories.
DOM TOP FEVER refers to France’s overseas territories, formerly labeled DOM-TOM, now called DROM-COM like Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion, and French Guiana. But the phrase also injects irony. It riffs on queer slang to speak about dominance and submission, flipping those roles to suggest autonomy and authorship.
This season, the label draws from the BUMIDOM program, a French state-run migration scheme launched in the 1960s, and the 1967 Guadeloupe massacre, which remains underacknowledged in French public memory. These events, rooted in economic exile and political repression, still echo today. Rather than flattening these traumas into distant history, C.R.E.O.L.E. maps them onto present realities, systemic silence, displacement, and structural imbalance across France’s overseas territories.
Writers and theorists guide the collection’s conceptual base. Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Aimé Césaire’s poetry, and Édouard Glissant’s idea of the Tout-Monde each inform the design’s intellectual frame. Their work shapes the way the collection thinks about visibility, power, and cultural resistance. The designer also references the Revue Nègre, a 1920s performance project with ties to Josephine Baker, and zouk music, a genre rooted in Caribbean sensuality and protest.
The collection stays firmly in the present. It builds a daily wardrobe: oversized shirts, utilitarian silhouettes, streetwear pieces, and beachwear cut with volume and gesture. Materials such as poplin, ripstop, canvas, denim, jacquard, crêpe, and jersey define the collection’s tactile identity.
One standout look, a beaded ceremonial jersey, reaches into childhood. It recalls friendship bracelets and seaside souvenirs, filtering personal history through craft. In this garment, intimacy takes form. Across the collection, garments speak through subtle codes. Color plays a quiet but deliberate role. Brown tones, used often in C.R.E.O.L.E.’s past collections, reference marronage, the act of enslaved people escaping plantations to claim freedom.
Elsewhere, Pan-African colors appear: red, green, black, gold. They don’t dominate the palette, but they remain present, stitched in like quiet affirmations. Each one points toward shared struggle, shared knowledge, shared pride. Together, these colors act as visual reminders of global Black consciousness and solidarity.
Visual storytelling extends beyond fabric. Family photographs, reinterpreted through AI, break into the collection’s imagery. These digitally altered memories create a counter-archive, one that resists state narratives and reframes identity through intimacy. Sound also enters the frame, with echoes of the Guadeloupean gong threaded into the mood.
