Some moments are not forgotten because they are not fully understood when they happen. Only later, when you return to them, do you discover that something started there. My story with Haute Couture did not begin in a studio, nor in front of a canvas, but sitting, almost silently, observing.
The first impact
In 2017, I attended a Stéphane Rolland fashion show for the first time. It was at the Opéra Bastille, celebrating its tenth anniversary.
Until then, fashion had been for me just images, photography and references. But that day I saw it in motion. Haute Couture ceased to be something distant and became something alive.
The volumes advanced, the light transformed the fabrics, and the sound accompanied each step as if everything was choreographed.
I left there with one certainty: I needed to draw that. Not to copy it, but to capture it.
Learning to look
I continued to attend his shows. I returned again and again, like someone who returns to a place that they still do not fully understand.
In 2019, in January, I experienced one of those moments that mark a before and after. For the first time, I went backstage at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
It was snowing outside. Inside, the models were dressed for summer.
The collection evoked the twenties: whites, blacks, precise volumes, an elegance suspended in time. I remember the contrast the cold outside, the lightness of the fabrics like an almost cinematic image.
There, I understood that fashion is not only what you see on the runway. It’s what happens before. It is the previous moment.
That same year, in summer, the Opéra Garnier. The theatricality reached another dimension: feathers, stones, structures that seemed impossible. Each outing was a scene. Each dress, a character.
Drawing what disappears
At first I drew on small sheets. Almost intimate formats, as if it didn’t want to take up too much space. Then, at home, I would take up those strokes and transform them with acrylic. It was another speed, another time.
But the runway demands being decisive.
In 2019, I leaped into medium-format notebooks. I needed more space, but also more precision. The lines began to become safer, more direct. Less correction, more intuition.
Drawing live is accepting that there is no turning back.
Before the silence
In 2020, shortly before everything changed, I witnessed the parade in front of the Eiffel Tower.
The colors were vibrant: intense fuchsias, an unforgettable cobalt blue worn by Nieves Álvarez. The energy was different, almost expansive. As if fashion celebrated something without knowing that it was about to stop.
Then came the pause.
During the pandemic, the fashion shows became a screen. I kept drawing, but it was different.
The sound, the scale, and the shared breath were missing. The error, the urgency, the unrepeatable, were missing.
To feel again
In 2023 I returned to Paris. I sat down in the front row again.
And then I understood it all again.
The excitement was not only in the clothes, but in the fact of being there. To look again without mediation.
In feeling that each outing happens only once.The collections had body, presence. The details, so precise, looked like tattoos on the skin. And my drawing changed with that: it became more synthetic, more aware of the essential.
The present: between analogical and digital
Over time, my way of drawing has also evolved.
If in the beginning everything was paper, today two languages coexist. In 2025 and 2026.
I leap to integrate digital drawing without leaving hand drawing behind.
It is not a substitution, but a dialogue.
The immediacy of the stroke coexists with new layers, new ways of interpreting.
But the basis remains the same: look and decide in seconds.
Barcelona. The Open Circle
In 2026, Barcelona Bridal Night became more than just a fashion show. It was a story.
Stéphane Rolland presented Love for Peace, a proposal where Haute Couture merged with music, art and poetry in a ceremony designed as a tribute to love and life.
The catwalk was filled with sculptural volumes, bridal whites crossed by red and black accents, and a staging accompanied by a live orchestra that transformed each outing into an almost emotional act.
But there was something else.
A dialogue between generations. Young designers, craftsmanship, transmission of knowledge. An idea of the future built from the trade.
For me, it was inevitable to look back.
The catwalk was filled with sculptural volumes, bridal whites crossed by red and black accents, and a staging accompanied by a live orchestra that transformed each outing into an almost emotional act.
Everything I experienced the Opéra Bastille, the snow in Paris, the Garnier, the Eiffel Tower, the silence of the pandemic, the return was there, condensed.
Drawing to Stay
Today I understand that my job is not to record fashion.
It consists of retaining what escapes.Each stroke is a decision, but also a memory.
Each notebook is an archive of instants that no longer exist. And in that gesture quick, imperfect, inevitable I find meaning.
Because there is something profoundly human about drawing the ephemeral.
And perhaps, something profoundly necessary too.
