Titled “Contain and Release,” the Rabanne Fall 2025 collection moves like a breath held tightly, only to be exhaled at the perfect moment. It feels like the moment when something beautiful finally reaches its breaking point, the slow build of tension before the inevitable crack. And really, doesn’t that feel familiar?
The world itself seems to be teetering on the edge—economic uncertainty, political instability, environmental crisis, and the ever-present digital noise making it impossible to tell where reality ends and spectacle begins. Fashion has always reflected its time, and this season, Rabanne seems to have absorbed the uncertainty, translating it into garments that feel like they’re in flux, unraveling, morphing, refusing to settle. There’s an urgency in the collection, a sense of being caught between wanting to hold everything together and accepting the inevitable unraveling.
The collection thrives on that sense of controlled collapse. Fur explodes from beneath prim wool coats, refusing to be contained. Paillettes coat entire garments like shattered glass, catching the light with an almost aggressive brilliance. Silver panels peel back like something shedding its own skin. Even the silhouettes seem to be caught mid-transformation—rigid tailoring interrupted by wild textures, skirts fraying into untamed movement.
Take the massive rust-hued fur coat, sleeves puffed into exaggerated volume, with transparent plastic encasing the arms like an afterthought. It’s as if the model stepped out of two different realities at once—one pristine and preserved, the other animalistic and unrestrained. Then there’s the silver dress, bristling with metallic filaments, almost dangerous in the way it flickers under the lights, wrapped up in another oversized fur coat as if to muffle its impact. And the menswear? A razor-sharp leather trench, its collar engulfed in fur, cinched just enough to suggest control but never quite enough to feel safe.
And then, the most jarring yet mesmerizing contradiction: metal dresses (and matching Nano bags) encased in plastic, a visual metaphor for the paradox of modern life—our desire to keep things untouched while still demanding their constant display. The tension between rawness and artificiality, exposure and containment, runs through every thread of this collection.
The colors push this tension even further—apricot colliding with deep blue, glass green rubbing up against burgundy. Nothing sits comfortably. Even the styling feels like it was thrown together at the last second but somehow lands with absolute precision: combat boots laced high, Mary Janes paired with shimmering socks that belong to a different era, accessories dangling from hands like relics of a lost world.
This season felt different from what we’ve come to expect from Julien Dossena’s Rabanne. The brand, known for its futuristic chainmail, high-shine metallics, and sculptural silhouettes, has always embraced a kind of utopian radicalism—clothing as armor, fashion as a space-age fantasy. But Fall 2025 cracked that polished veneer. It was rawer, more untamed, less about constructing a perfect future and more about grappling with the beautiful mess of the present. Of course, there was still that signature Rabanne DNA—the metallic flashes, the structured outerwear, the play between rigid and fluid—but it was delivered with a different kind of energy. Less space-age, more primal.
