Maryam Nassir Zadeh’s Fall Winter 2025–2026 collection unfolds as a quiet rebellion—an exploration of instinct, attitude, and the poetry of unconventional styling. Shot in the sunlit intimacy of a Parisian apartment, the lookbook reads less like fashion documentation and more like a sequence of painterly, cinematic stills. Each frame distills the ineffable cool that has become the designer’s signature—not through grand gestures or ornate embellishment, but with an almost nonchalant disregard for traditional codes.

This season, Zadeh asserts that style is as much about the how as the what. A belt worn unexpectedly high reshapes the body’s proportions in ways that feel both jarring and alluring. Bubblegum-pink leather jackets appear on men and women alike, styled without distinction, while trousers tucked into boots feel improvisational—spur-of-the-moment decisions that somehow define the look. Familiarity is subverted with subtle shifts, producing something off-kilter yet irresistibly compelling.

Gender dissolves into fluidity. Tailoring retains its sensuality across bodies, with pleated trousers, oversized blousons, and softly structured outerwear forming the backbone of the collection. Accessories become moments of disruption: a bi-color cummerbund-style belt pulls focus, its presence sharpening the silhouette with unexpected tension. A fringe suede piece—neither skirt nor belt—appears in multiple guises, wrapped at the wrist, draped at the hip, or knotted at the neck, blurring the boundary between garment and ornament.

The anchor of the season is a 1970s Saint Laurent Rive Gauche–inspired bustier, one iteration in vivid orange scattered with shell-like discs. Styled with animal-print boots and an off-shoulder neckline, it slips free of retro confines, landing instead in a space of playful reinvention. Textures and prints carry layered narratives: patterned silks nod to the wardrobes of 1980s royalty, while ruffled skirts and Juliet-sleeved blouses reframe nostalgia through a contemporary, romantic lens.

Light itself becomes a material in the lookbook, filtering through the imagery with the softness of Sheila Metzner’s photography. The effect is intimate, reflective—a world built from memory and quiet provocation. Subtle homages to personal history run through the collection, informed by the designer’s grandmother, whose influence surfaces not through literal references, but in the warmth, vibrancy, and idiosyncratic charm of the clothes.

Rather than chasing trends, Maryam Nassir Zadeh delivers a meditation on clothing as a living, mutable language. This is fashion as self-invention—a wardrobe that invites spontaneity, disrupts tradition, and makes space for the unexpected.