Anya Taylor-Joy, Pharrell Williams, Gabriela Hearst, and more turned out for the LVMH Prize showroom at La Samaritaine during Paris Fashion Week, where 20 semifinalists are competing with some of the most inventive materials in fashion right now.
The glass-roofed top floor of La Samaritaine — its walls draped in an Art Nouveau peacock mural, sunlight flooding through — made for a fitting backdrop to some of the most radical fashion happening right now. This is where the 20 semifinalists of the 2026 LVMH Prize set up shop during Paris Fashion Week, and where material experimentation was out in full force.
The room drew a who’s-who of the industry: Pharrell Williams stopped by, as did Gabriela Hearst, and Loewe creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez. Jury members Sidney Toledano and Jean-Paul Claverie — both advisers to LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault — were also in attendance, along with Dior’s makeup creative and image director Peter Philips and Pucci’s artistic director Camille Miceli.
But the evening’s most visible guest was Anya Taylor-Joy, this year’s prize ambassador, who arrived in a colorful asymmetric jacquard peplum jacket straight off the Dior runway. “It’s so inspiring. I feel really grateful to be amongst artists,” she said of the semifinalists, adding that what struck her most was “the ingenuity, whilst also being connected to roots or to something that goes beyond this plane. A lot of the designers are talking about the world before something becomes real or the world of the past, and it feels like they are trying to bridge these two worlds together.”
Eight finalists will be selected by a committee of more than 80 experts. The main prize awards €400,000 and a year-long mentorship within the LVMH ecosystem. The Karl Lagerfeld Prize and the Savoir-Faire Prize, meanwhile, each grant €200,000 and targeted mentoring, while three fashion graduates will join one of the luxury group’s design studios for a year.
Delphine Arnault noted a visible shift in the room from previous years. “Every year, the level just keeps getting better,” she said. “There’s less genderless fashion, much less sportswear. Instead, it’s really about fine materials, great cuts, craftsmanship and know-how. A lot of things are handmade.” Several semifinalists, she pointed out, have logged time at major houses: Gabriel Figueiredo of De Pino freelances for Dior; Harry Pontefract of Ponte works alongside Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela’s Artisanal haute couture division; and Luke Derrick launched his menswear label in 2021 after stints at Dunhill, Brioni, and Alexander McQueen.
“I’m always very excited to see young designers, because the future is theirs,” said Hearst. “We were all young brands once upon a time.” She was particularly taken with Thevxlley designer Daniel del Valle’s top crafted from Victorian pipes individually hand-dredged from the Thames. “They’re absolutely incredible,” she enthused. Her broader takeaway resonated through the room: “Anyone that is doing the elements of craft is really important for me. It’s the duty of designers today to preserve craft. It matters to use our hands.”
For McCollough and Hernandez — preparing for their sophomore outing at the helm of Loewe — the showroom was a chance to pay it forward. “It takes courage; follow your guts,” Hernandez said. “You’ve got to believe it. If you don’t believe, no one else will. We had it a bit easier, there was less competition, less designers when we started — now it’s a crowded field.”
The designers rewriting what fashion is made of
Del Valle, a former florist, showed a ceramic bust that had been growing orchids for over a year — and which he periodically stopped to spritz with water. “It’s like a living sculpture, in a way. There are almost 10 different species of orchids growing in here,” he said. “Each piece is a different technique, because I like the experimentation of working with different materials. I haven’t studied art or design, and my way of learning is getting into the field until I get it.”
Nigerian-born, Ghana-raised, Kenya-based Bubu Ogisi of Iamisigo brought handblown glass handbags, rings made from reclaimed TV screens and window panes, a coat covered in bagasse — the fibrous byproduct of tequila production — and a bag woven from the plastic bindings of recycled clothing bales. Her production web spans South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Togo, and Benin. “It’s just about, how do we create this unison through matter, and how do we bring all these things together to create one piece of magic,” she said. It can also be a deeply meditative process: “When things take a lot of time for me, I see it as a meditational process too. It also allows me to relax, because I have a lot of anxiety, so a lot of things I have to do with hand detailing sort of calm me.”
“The material comes first. It’s absolutely everything,” said Bryan Conway, cofounder and design director of Ponte. “Either it’s so special that it’s incredible and rare and scarce, or it’s the thing that is everywhere and no one cares about, and then we make something with that.” A dress made of plastic grapes. A metallic dress fashioned from copper foil plumbing tape. A beanbag T-shirt. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute bought eight pieces from the brand’s last collection. Ponte keeps its distribution deliberately tight, with only six stockists worldwide.
Bangkok-based duo Cherry W. Rain-Phuangfueang and Teerapat Phuangfueang launched Nong Rak — “little love” in Thai — as vintage resellers before pivoting to colorful knitted mohair pieces in 2021. Their yarn sourcing is intentional: “We have tried to use modern mohair, and the quality is never the same,” Cherry said. The pair just opened their first boutique in Bangkok and have expanded into cut-and-sew pieces made with Thai silk. “Opening the shop has completely changed our world after multiple years of just being online,” Cherry said. “Clothing is so emotional and it holds history and it holds feeling, so we love to talk to everybody and see how they’re feeling and get the feedback. I think people have been really connecting with our stuff, because at its heart, we want to have fun, and we want other people to have fun.”
Hong Kong-based Kinyan Lam, who launched his label in 2023, is building a network of artisans in the Guizhou province of southern China to catalog — and rescue — vanishing textile techniques. “We’re trying to preserve them because some of the crafts are fading away, because the new generation are not willing to learn them. That’s why we think we should bring it back to the market,” he said. His current collection features appliqué embroidery, chain stitching, and indigo-dyed Dong cloth, and the brand’s mission statement puts it cleanly: “We exist to prove that true luxury is not a price tag, but a commitment to honesty, time, and the irreplaceable human touch.”
The 2026 LVMH semifinalists
Act N°1 by Luca Lin, Italy, genderless collections
Colleen Allen by Colleen Allen, United States, womenswear
De Pino by Gabriel Figueiredo, France, womenswear
Derrick by Luke Derrick, United Kingdom, menswear
Golsaah by Golnar Ahmadian, Iran, womenswear
Iamisigo by Bubu Ogisi, Nigeria, womenswear and menswear
Institution by Galib Gassanoff, Georgia, womenswear, menswear and genderless collections
Julie Kegels by Julie Kegels, Belgium, womenswear
Kartik Research by Kartik Kumra, India, womenswear and menswear
Kinyan Lam by Kinyan Lam, China, genderless collections
Lii by Zane Li, China, womenswear and menswear
Maz Manuela Álvarez by Manuela Álvarez, Colombia, womenswear
Nong Rak by Cherry W. Rain-Phuanfueang, United States, and Teerapat Phuangfueang, Thailand, womenswear, menswear and genderless collections
Petra Fagerström by Petra Fagerström, Sweden, womenswear
Ponte by Harry Pontefract, United Kingdom, womenswear and menswear
Shinyakozuka by Shinya Kozuka, Japan, menswear
Ssstein by Kiichiro Asakawa, Japan, menswear and genderless collections
Thevxlley by Daniel del Valle Fernandez, Spain, genderless collections
Tíscar Espadas by Tíscar Espadas, Spain, and Kevin Kohler, Switzerland, genderless collections
Yoshita 1967 by Anil Padia, Kenya, womenswear
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