Kiko Kostadinov Women Spring/Summer 2026 at Paris Fashion Week

Kiko Kostadinov Women Spring/Summer 2026 / SS26 at Paris Fashion Week

It has been a good time to look inwards. When we do, we see elegant women, headstrong women, expectant women, and playful women who are always divining the future from the sands of the past. We want our women free to be radical in their clothes, unchained from the world’s demands. Kiko Kostadinov Women SS26 / Spring/Summer 2026, This season, it is not just the clothes we made that matter, but how we made them. We aim to strip away artifice and expectation, returning to the practices that defined our beginnings in fashion: engaging in a joyful exploration of material, composition, proportion, and construction. We push ourselves to design audaciously, think dynamically and abstractly, and refine our materials, Our most radical proposition is a series of bodices that frame and reshape the torso, paired with skirts of soft draped textiles and second-skin shirts with hand-dyed stretch tapes.

We also continue to develop the flou and the knitwear, threads present since our earliest collections. Draped plaid dresses, cocooning tops with zig-zag piping, and scarf-hem skirts convey lightness and motion. Our knits have become thinner and more painterly, in pastel colours with black-trimmed pocket details, layered three or four to a model for a watercolor effect. Collars snap up into snoods or fold down over the shoulders. Textured ikat argyles are anatomically placed in tonal patterns on skirts and dresses, inspired by blankets and wall hangings. Deliberately overlaid seams allow the body to sit within these paper-doll shapes. Signature Kiko Kostadinov Woman pieces-workwear-inspired jackets and coats, straight-leg trousers with shaped knees, and bubble-structured skirts-ensure our thread is always running.

To develop Kiko Kostadinov Women SS26 / Spring/Summer 2026 collection, we worked closely with mills across Europe to design custom woven and printed fabrics. Inky prints appear on short-pile cotton velvets, with a mélange of fine-line etchings and trigonometric patterns. Texture emerges in varying depths, particularly emphasized through an Italian cotton-viscose fringed fil coupé. A roasted brown jacquard produces an embossed reticella lace effect. A textured cotton-denim suit resembles fleece, with bleached construction points revealing its geometric structure.

The American artist Christina Ramberg, whose paintings of hulking female bodies with stiff brassieres, jagged corsetry, and backcombed bangs we first saw in Berlin, provides deep inspiration. Our translation of Christina’s structural and fetishistic bodies is not literal but spiritual: how can we embolden and radicalize the shape of the female form? Redefining femininity by pushing colour and beauty beyond tradition motivates us to cut new shapes, including shelf-like bustiers with circular suspensions, dramatic shoulders, peplums, and sculpted hips. With generous permission from the Christina Ramberg Estate, two of the artist’s works are used in collateral material for this presentation.

The warm, indulgent hues and insouciant spirit of 1970s cinema inspire the clash of colours and textures throughout the collection. We particularly drew from Lina Wertmüller’s The Seduction of Mimi (1972). In her headstrong protagonists, we found parallels to our women and our lives, where passion, tragedy, and beauty coexist. Cinched, shawl-collar skirt suiting in retro colourways, sleek leather jackets in black and brown, and utility sets with contrast trim all echo the refined eclecticism of Italian cinema. Even in the most uncertain times, we strive to find a silver lining: a freedom of body and mind.