CRAFTING LIGHT
What I Saw at Kevin Germanier's Atelier Before the Met Gala
On a Thursday morning, the week before the Met Gala, I joined Kevin in his atelier to look up close at a dress from his Les Joueuses collection that his team was retouching for a fitting. It might be on the red carpet the following Monday.
There are weeks, in couture ateliers, when the silence you walk into is not calm. It is the concentration of a few people doing the same thing at the same time, with care and focus. The dress was upright on a stockman, full lit. Three pairs of hands were at work beneath the skirt, on their knees, on the lining. The beads going on that morning had been set aside elsewhere, dismissed as worthless by an untrained eye. In Kevin's hands, they were turning into treasure. The surface they were landing on was not, in any case, going to be the part that got photographed.
Kevin is Swiss, trained at Central Saint Martins. Since his graduate collection, Swarovski has given him access to its deadstock: crystals from discontinued collections.
In 2020, Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 Europe list. Taylor Swift and Cardi B have worn his pieces. He designed the 120 costumes for the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics in 2024, directed by Thomas Jolly. The Golden Voyager, that gilded alien wrapped in 20,000 recycled pearls, came out of his atelier. So did the train of the vertical pianist Alain Roche: six metres of VHS tape cut from his own family's archive, sewn here, in the stairwell of La Caserne, the only space in the building tall enough to let it fall straight down.
On January 30, 2025, Kevin Germanier entered the official Paris haute couture calendar. It was the institutional confirmation of what the work had been saying for seven years. Sustainability has no obligation to be beige.
The Met Gala, since Anna Wintour and the Costume Institute, has become the most photographed event in the industry. Every centimetre is scrutinised, captioned, reposted. This year's theme was Costume Art. Fashion as art object. And Kevin Germanier, six days before that night, was having his team embroider the part of the dress nobody would photograph.
While doing some research on hidden embroideries in fashion history, I landed in Edo Japan (the future Tokyo). For two centuries of peace, from 1603 to 1868, under the Tokugawa shogunate, a merchant class grew rich there without any right to show it: silk, gold, and embroideries were reserved for samurai. They found a workaround as elegant as the law was rigid. They turned the inside of their jackets, the haori-ura, into masterpieces. Painted landscapes. Embroidered koi. Maps of the Inland Sea. An entire hidden visual culture, displayed only when the jacket was removed and turned out, for the right people in private.
I think Kevin Germanier is making haori-ura. Or I am projecting. That is also possible.
The piece I was looking at that morning had the palette of an exotic flower: deep red, oxidized gold, sea-anemone teal. Up close, it dissolved into a thousand decisions. Beads clustered into mosses. Mineral incrustations. My brain read magical ecosystem on first sight.
Three people have been working on it for three months. To spend part of that on a surface no one will photograph is heavy with meaning. The gesture refuses the logic of the image. It rewards the wearer over the viewer.
The Joueuses pieces do not let themselves be fully photographed. They only reveal themselves when worn. Kevin has slipped inside each one something no algorithm can index. These are objects that hold their value across decades, against the rolling forgettability of the feed.
Monday night, the Met Gala happened. Kevin dressed Bronwyn Newport with another piece, made of upcycled plastics, which fit the Costume Art brief.
Maeva Bessis
May 4, 2026
