Sustainable, genderless fashion brand Jeanne Friot presented its Fall Winter 2026 collection during Paris Fashion Week. Titled Awake, Collection Eight arrives after five years of brand development shaped by social rupture, political violence, and the steady erosion of rights for LGBTQIA+ and racialized people. The presentation sets its focus on the body as a site of agency at a time when institutions attempt to regulate, classify, and restrict it.
FALL WINTER 2026.27 COLLECTIONS
Jeanne Friot founded the brand in 2020, when the pandemic briefly suggested the possibility of collective repair following systemic shock. That early optimism has since collapsed. Current events inform the collection directly. In the United States, Renée Nicole Good, a queer woman, poet, mother, and wife, died after a federal ICE agent shot her on January 6. In Europe, legal exclusion continues to expand, including a ruling in the United Kingdom that removes trans women from the legal definition of womanhood. AWAKE takes shape within this political reality and addresses its consequences.
The collection responds to a moment when language struggles to counter disinformation and institutional force. Jeanne Friot shifts the focus toward physical expression. The runway places dance at its core, treating the body as an active form of speech. Choreographer Maud Le Pladec collaborated with dancers from Ballet de Lorraine to construct a performance that values difference within a shared structure. Each dancer asserts an individual physical grammar, allowing collectivity to emerge through plurality.
Dance here functions as a strategy. It interrupts routine order and creates a temporary zone where bodies resist fixed readings. Nightlife and club culture return as references already present in the brand’s first collection, Love Is Love (2022). For queer communities, these spaces have long operated as shelters and experimental grounds, especially during periods of repression. AWAKE revisits that history through form, rhythm, and presence.
The garments translate these ideas through intensified brand codes. Historic tartans appear with sequins, producing friction between pattern and surface. Oversized red coats wrap the body through volume that protects without restriction. Kilts shift in proportion through added width or length. Feathered jeans introduce contrast between daily wear and ornament. Belts appear in unexpected placements, including bustier dresses and coat collars, disrupting established eveningwear conventions.
Footwear reinforces the focus on bodily agency through a hybrid sneaker developed with Both, inspired by the ballet flat. Houndstooth tailoring pairs with knee-length skirts in a personal dedication to the designer’s grandmother, Micheline. She shaped Jeanne Friot’s early relationship with clothing as care and expression, and the collection carries that influence as a private foundation.
