Sacai Fall 2025 Ready-to-Wear

Try a little tenderness.

For all the imagination Chitose Abe invests in her clothes, she’s also sensitive to women’s needs. There’s a lot of fear and anxiety in fashion at the moment—and in the world. Understanding that we all could use a hug, she designed a fall collection of clothes that feel like an embrace.

Abe built her empire and her influence on her ingenious hybrid mashups: sophisticated garments with complex construction that nevertheless retain their real-world viability, a neat feat that few other designers can pull off. You know it’s Sacai Day in Paris by the cliques of women you see in puffers that are also cargo jackets, and bombers that have sprouted ruffles on their sleeves and back.

Here, she was up to something different, focusing less on colliding two separate silhouettes together than expanding the capabilities of one. “We feel that the wrapping is a feminine, sensual gesture, so to create a new form with one gesture was a key element of the collection,” she said via her interpreter. At its simplest, that meant incorporating a scarf into a jacket to throw over one shoulder. At its most complex, the tailoring appeared to be unfurling, as if, perhaps, caressed by the wind. The scarf details can, of course, be worn in a multitude of ways—up, down, swaddling, loose—which might be the most generous gesture of all.

There were other feminine touches as well, like the paillettes and hand-cut feathers that turned cargos into party pants. And Abe made embroideries of photographer Man Ray’s famous Glass Tears and The Lovers because “he was the artist who brought the most beauty for women.”

At Sacai, Abe has often preferred hulking platforms to balance the overscale proportions of her clothes. This season, the models padded out in faux-fur scuffs or manageable low-heeled slouchy boots. She must have clocked that women just don’t have the appetite for hard-to-wear shoes these days. Another kindness.