Arthur Robert opens the OUEST Paris SS26 show inside the refined setting of a Parisian hôtel particulier, but the atmosphere shifts quickly. He reimagines the space as a drive-in theater, setting the stage for a surreal reworking of American masculinity. The collection continues OUEST’s fascination with workwear, but Robert takes it further, twisting familiar references into characters pulled from warped memory and stylized imagination.
The starting point this season comes from NASA’s archives. Robert zeroes in on late 1960s Houston, a place where engineers navigated both bureaucratic office life and high-stakes technical experiments. His focus isn’t on astronauts in space, but on the men behind the scenes, those who toggled between boardrooms and labs. The clothing reflects that contrast. Structured suits echo corporate uniformity, with sharp Sixties tailoring and patterned fabrics. But then Robert collides those elements with silver nylon, oversized zippers, and synthetic finishes pulled from the era’s aerospace aesthetics.
Hints of cowboy styling run through the collection, pointed collars, bootcut trousers, western cuts, but these pieces don’t lean into nostalgia. Instead, they feel displaced, as if borrowed from a different narrative and dropped into another setting. A leather ensemble evokes pilot gear but slips into fetish territory. Throughout the collection, Robert draws from masculine codes but treats them as material for distortion. He flips each symbol on itself, remaking the cowboy, the engineer, the executive as costumed types, stripped of authority and reconstructed through irony.
Rather than tell a linear story, Robert arranges the looks like a series of invented roles. Each outfit steps forward as a persona: the technical worker reimagined in vinyl, the office manager redone with a space-race shimmer. The tailoring stays tight, holding firm in the shoulders, clean in the leg. There’s no softness here.
The materials push that exaggeration further. Glossy finishes give the clothes a synthetic gleam. Exposed fastenings, metallic sheens, and rigid surfaces call attention to their construction. Nothing tries to look natural. Robert builds a visual language from artificiality, creating garments that speak in the vocabulary of work, authority, and gender, but do so in quotation marks.
Irony continues to guide his hand. Robert isolates the classic signals of masculinity, suiting, leather, checks, nylon, and rearranges them as performance wear. The collection doesn’t stage masculinity as power, but as theatre.
Supported by the French Ministry of Culture and Dr. Martens, OUEST Paris frames this reimagined Americana from a European vantage point.
