What Happens When the Clothes Are the Body?
4 min readThe surreal feather-covered gowns at Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut Balenciaga couture runway show in Paris last week were so sculpted, they appeared to stand up on their own. Even the otherworldly embellishment couldn’t distract from the satisfyingly chiseled forms. “I don’t think that couture is only about a dress, it’s about a mindset,” Piccioli said backstage after the show. “Always thinking in 3D, having a conversation with the body.”
Pearl embellished boob corsets and hourglass sculpture dresses in the Ozempic age are ready for their close-ups—and their next clients. Who needs body sculpting, prosthetics, or injections when your clothes are quite literally your body? The haute couture runway shows are always fashion at its most extreme, but they’re also an experimental playground for designers to make a statement. And at Schiaparelli, Jean Paul Gaultier, Robert Wun, Ashi Studio, Germanier, and Standing Ground, designers showed us a series of highly anatomical looks (some more hyperreal than others) that served as new wearable bodies.
Balenciaga Couture Fall 2026
Consider this a new frontier of bodycon, driven by technology, provocation, and perhaps a current need to feel something human in an obsessively digital world. The bodycon concept began in the late 1980s, seen through athleticwear, eventually morphing into tight dresses as club culture progressed into the early 2000s. Azzedine Alaïa and Hervé Léger redefined cling for generations of women, followed by the modern-day examples of Skims and Lululemon. Now that GLP-1s have reached mass accessibility, almost anyone can achieve skinny and wear tight, traditional bodycon clothing. Not everyone can buy a couture body, however.
At Schiaparelli’s couture fall 2026 show, creative director Daniel Roseberry created lifelike torso corsets covered in those aforementioned pearls. Zendaya wore a striking white version replete with a fringed, light-up skirt fresh off the runway the same day for the world premiere of The Odyssey. The creative process began with Studio Junon, which makes lifelike babies for film productions, and involved casting and sculpting the faux bodies in clay. “I always think of that Cristóbal [Balenciaga] quote, ‘You don’t need a body when you come to me, I give you a new body,’” said Roseberry backstage after the show, who much like Piccioli, referenced the original Balenciaga. “We use that mantra all the time.”
One of the most strikingly viral looks from Duran Lantink’s Jean Paul Gaultier couture debut was male model Leon Dame wearing a realistic body torso, with a surreal bend and twist, like it had been turned into a piece of metal and crashed into by a car. It’s a reference to both Gaultier’s surreal take on nudity as well as Lantink’s cheeky nude provocative hyperreal breastplates he’s done in the past for his own label. A burgundy leather robot-like form also walked the runway. “I prefer to interrogate the silhouette rather than the body,” Duran Lantink wrote in the show notes. “I want to challenge the garment itself, to push it to the very limits of its sculptural potential.”
Jean Paul Gaultier Couture Fall 2026
Both Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier utilized 3D technology for the occasion. Balenciaga took three-dimensional digital scans of individual bodies, using those as a basis for molding leather as internal skeletons for some of the most sculpted garments. Lantink’s team used flexible TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) and PA12 (thermoplastic polyamide) via 3D printing. Put together with the handcrafted nature of couture, the idea that the body is literally a detachable garment you put on becomes unsettling and ironic but undoubtedly perplexing. Shapewear of the past was always used as a corrective measure, but these clothes are instead presented as an artistic way to reshape, expand, and reinvent one’s own body.
Jean Paul Gaultier Couture Fall 2026
In an era when body diversity is seriously lacking (some may say nonexistent) on the runways, it’s definitely an interesting time to be making clothes that give you a new body, often with curves. In the case of Schiaparelli, the sculpted bustiers could be seen as art, or the ultimate fetishization of the female form. The 2026 Met Gala in May gave us a preview of the body as fashion with its “Costume Art” theme. Kim Kardashian walked the red carpet in a tangerine fiberglass breastplate created by British pop artist Allen Jones and leather specialists Whitaker Malem, whom Lantink also collaborated with for the burgundy body at his recent couture show. The accompanying “Costume Art” Met Museum exhibition also featured body-diverse mannequins 3D scanned from real bodies including Sinéad Burke, Aariana Rose Philip, Charlie Reynolds, Michaela Stark, Yseult, and more.
Kim Kardashian at the 2026 Met Gala
Schiaparelli Couture Fall 2026
These wearable bodies also symbolize a new kind of armor in many ways, and we’ll undoubtedly be seeing more of them. After all, is there anything more interesting in fashion right now than a hyperreal fake body made by human hands, designed to stop your digital scroll in an AI-dominated world?