Kevin Germanier and Marine Serre turn leftovers into stunning collections made from deadstock and gift shop remnants.
One of the pieces in Kevin Germanier’s Spring 2026 Haute Couture collection — the one he presented in Paris in January, and then again at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen last week — is a dark denim outfit decorated with spiky thistle appliqué. The appliqué is made from sliced Coca-Cola cans. The denim is sourced from LVMH’s overstock. The thistle, in botanical terms, is a weed — beautiful, sharp, structurally intricate, and, until someone decides to use it as a motif, essentially worthless. Germanier named the collection “Les Chardonneuses.” Chardonneret is French for the goldfinch, a bird that eats thistles. He is Swiss, and describes his arrangement with LVMH as operating from a position of “Swiss neutrality”; he refuses to name which of the seven contributing maisons supplied which materials, maintaining that this is between him and them.
That arrangement began in 2024 with a capsule called “Prélude” — developed with LVMH’s environmental deputy director, Alexandre Capelli, through Nona Source, the group’s surplus fabric platform, and weturn, a startup that won the LVMH Innovation Award in 2022. Seven undisclosed houses donated unsold garments and fabric scraps; Germanier’s studio strip-cut them to weave new textiles, unravelled knits to reknit them into new forms, ground down offcuts into powder and mixed them with resin to make buttons and hardware. When Berluti contributed its uniforms from the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games — pieces made for one specific occasion and then rendered instantly obsolete — they requested that the patinated collar be left visible in the finished garments. The original object stays legible inside the new one. The collection was presented at GFA Copenhagen on May 6 as what LVMH and Germanier are jointly calling the first upcycled haute couture collection produced in collaboration with a luxury group. A further presentation is scheduled for Paris Haute Couture Week in July.
“Essentially, we need to build a new industry,” Germanier said, adding that upcycling is a “double win” that brings visibility both outside the group and internally. “This aspect is crucial.”
What Marine Serre did is, on its face, much simpler. She took archival merchandise from the Louvre’s museum shop — the kind of souvenir T-shirts that get bought, briefly worn, and then forgotten in a drawer — cut them apart, reprinted them, and reassembled them through her signature upcycling process into a three-piece capsule. A baby-fit T-shirt (€410), a short-sleeve round-neck T-shirt (€150), and a gold-plated keyring (€130). Available at the Louvre boutique in-store and online, and through Serre’s own channels.
The Louvre collaboration grew from a dinner in 2025, and it follows the FW26 couture project in which Serre spent 420 hours constructing a single dress from nearly 3,000 sewn-together Louvre puzzle pieces, each fitted onto a reinforced base and then varnished. The puzzle dress is extraordinary and unwearable and exists as proof of concept. The capsule is the proof of commerce: that the same logic — museum surplus as raw material — can produce an object someone will actually buy and wear on the street.
The two projects arrived in the same week and are making the same observation from different angles. Luxury institutions — a conglomerate, a museum — generate more dormant inventory than they ordinarily discuss. Seven LVMH maisons had overstock significant enough to furnish an entire haute couture collection. The Louvre had archival souvenir merchandise sitting in storage. Neither institution set out to have a waste problem; both accumulated one as a consequence of operating at scale. What Germanier and Serre have in common is that they went looking for the warehouse.
This is a different argument than the one usually made for upcycling — not that it’s responsible, or that consumers should choose it for ethical reasons, but that the material is already there, it’s interesting, and it was going nowhere. Germanier is selling the Berluti collar. Serre is selling the Mona Lisa T-shirt. The value was always in the object; it just needed to be cut differently.
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