“Brat” green and butter yellow may be the most recent flights of color fancy, but black is forever. And Paris, the City of Light, was a total blackout during the fall 2025 haute couture week.
Even Giorgio Armani, more synonymous with greige and lighter neutrals, passed on those colorways to explore noir’s seductive qualities at Armani Privé. “For a designer, black is the most classic of colors and, at the same time, the most demanding,” Armani told WWD’s Miles Socha. “When you work with black, you cannot afford to make mistakes: every detail must be perfect, because black reveals the very essence of a garment.” Those garments included curvaceous jackets with jodhpurs and slender gowns cut from both light-absorbing velvet and light reflecting satin.
At Chanel, meanwhile, the dark hue was used for military suits in nubby tweeds. Gabrielle Chanel first discovered the material in Scotland, hence the collection’s outdoorsy vibe and flat black stomping boots underfoot. The pioneer of the Little Black Dress offered plenty of those as well variations decorated in feathers. The embellishment also landed on all-black looks at Elie Saab and Viktor & Rolf where they were used to stuff up Victorian silhouettes like bed pillows.
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And while black is usually not the color of choice for attention-seekers, Cardi B went viral at Schiaparelli wearing a pearl beaded black column dress with a live black raven perched on her arm. “Was the Gothic bird a harbinger of doom, or simply a reflection of ambient angst?” asked WWD’s Joelle Diderich. Either way, it “was strikingly on-point.”
Inside the Petit Palais, creative director Daniel Roseberry paid homage to Elsa Schiaparelli’s revolutionary surrealism during the inter-war period, sending models down the catwalk with lips, matador jackets and a leather fetish dress affixed with saddlery all in black. Touching on the color’s funerary symbolism, Roseberry said: “there’s something about that era that felt mournful and also turbocharged at the same time.”
Given the current state of global affairs, he could’ve been talking about the present. In fashion, at least, many will be mourning Demna’s departure from Balenciaga after this season, so it’s fitting then that his swan song show had a funeral undercurrent. Oversize tailoring and hourglass-shaped evening wear, both in black, could’ve outfitted members of the “Addams Family,” Socha noted.
Robert Wun, Ashi Studio and Imane Ayissi leaned into a similarly dystopian quality, exploring ideas of death. This season, black definitely becomes her.
