Róisín Pierce Autumn/Winter 2025 at Paris Fashion Week

Róisín Pierce Autumn/Winter 2025 / AW25 at Paris Fashion Week entitled Nothing Pure Can Stay presented 7th March 2025, Embassy of Ireland, Paris.

Nothing Pure Can Stay, Róisín Pierce AW25 / Autumn/Winter 2025 is sixth collection, summons the ephemeral and invites us to savour fleeting moments. The snowflake, the spring bud, even the self must wither, and the certainty of this transience demands heightened appreciation. This collection rests in the tension between a concession that all joys and wonders are released to time, and a resolution to preserve. Loss and gratitude, decay and beauty. Death fragments and paves a path of little losses for us to flit between and we’re tasked with cherishing what’s most fragile.

“Beauty plus pity — that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.” – Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing Pure Can Stay, Róisín Pierce’s sixth collection, summons the ephemeral and invites us to savour fleeting moments. The snowflake, the spring bud, even the self must wither, and the certainty of this transience demands heightened appreciation. This collection rests in the tension between a concession that all joys and wonders are released to time, and a resolution to preserve. Loss and gratitude, decay and beauty. Death fragments and paves a path of little losses for us to flit between and we’re tasked with cherishing what’s most fragile. To navigate, Pierce draws from myriad sources that deal in matters of the transient. In Death & Co., Sylvia Plath wrote, “The frost makes a flower / The dew makes a star”. Evanescent gifts of nature. That perishing forces can usher in beauty also cuts through in photographer Wilson Bentley’s vast collection of snowflake photographs, studied in the studio during the collection’s conception.

“Every crystal was a masterpiece of design,” said Bentley. “When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost.” Pierce, too, ventures out into whitewashed landscapes after snowfall to catch a glimpse of the crystalline forms before they melt away, and that brief, cleansing purity washes over this collection’s palette and motifs. Clusters of hand manipulated snowberries float on crushed silk peaks, and white petals of tulle stream down in a flurry from the neckline of a death gown amid swirling pintucks. Beauty is only made fleeting by the endless stretch of the eternal. Nothing Pure Can Stay is created to remain while all else fades, an endeavour to eternalise the non-eternal. Fingers that trace the contours of forget-me-not embroidery and soft cotton spirals will retreat, shoulders that bare feathery tulle will falter, but the garments will endure. Thread and cloth are the heirloom, the wearer a guardian.

In Róisín Pierce AW25 / Autumn/Winter 2025 collection, Pierce again reaches into the depths of blue. Inky depths meet the clarity of white in new textile innovations. Powdered silk velvet is manipulated into smocked fragments, miniscule hand-made pintucks splinter through medals of Irish crochet, and sharp edges splice dense spills of smocked ruffles. Elsewhere in the collection, silken tulle cascades down mountain trousers, an artisanal sweater is crafted from icy dendrites magnified in crochet, and air bubbles formed of tulle and cotton lace bounce atop the fragments of a sheer dress. A lattice bag hangs gently from the shoulder with a strap of crocheted cocoons.

In Proust’s magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, Pierce discovered the sweetness of transient memories and the eternality we can create within our own retelling. In crafting Nothing Pure Can Stay, and each before it, the brand commits wholly to the act of creation. The preservation of craft is grasped within novel materiality and new fabrications. With care and precision, Italian silk, Japanese cotton lace, French bespoke embroidery and deadstock textiles are pushed towards new boundaries. The process is savoured before it is released to memory – embroidery, needlework, and crochet sparking rare structures that escape the ebbing moment of their creation.

Róisín Pierce AW25 / Autumn/Winter 2025 – Nothing Pure Can Stay is host to two creative collaborations. Leather bow and button lattice bags are handcrafted in collaboration with Polène, while intricate snowberry hats are designed in collaboration with Stephen Jones.

Róisín Pierce x Stephen Jones, An exclusive collection of hats represents a creative exchange between Stephen Jones and Róisín Pierce, grown from the intricacies of our brand’s craft innovation. In response to Pierce call for an essence of dreamlike sweetness, a bow and berry world of halos and coronets emerged. White cotton snowberries are looped with ribbons, twirling in connette form; a petalled cap is topped off with tiered bows; and playful ribbon ties flutter across the lips and eyes. The hats will be available exclusively at select Dover Street Market and Comme des Garçons stores. A harmony of radical yet enchanting design, Stephen Jones elaborate hats have enriched and expanded the horizons of millinery for over forty years. As the fashion industry’s most-lauded milliner, Jones has crafted beguiling pieces for a vast suite of luxury brands and haute couture collections, alongside designing his own much-coveted collections.

Polène x Róisín Pierce, A collaboration with French house Polène expands the Róisín Pierce universe further into the realm of leather bags. Expertly crafted in Ubrique, Spain, the limited collection of rare and intricate accessories represents a new embodiment of Pierce’s brand design language and a burgeoning evolution of its core materiality. Imagined in box and sphere silhouettes, each bag is wrapped with looped bows and neat buttons that run onto the next and the next; the delicate meeting a fresh, clean edge. The bags will be available 8th April 2025, in the Polène Champs Elysées store and on the website. Founded in Paris in 2016, Polène is a confluence of refined sculptural design and exacting Spanish artisanship. More than 2,200 craftspeople in the town of Ubrique lend their skill and finesse to the creation of Polène’s subtle yet dynamic organic forms, which emerge through expert wood-moulding, drapery, hand stitching, braiding and complex origami folds.