He explains to us — a small group of three — that the conversation around his namesake brand’s spring–summer 2026 collection, titled “En plein Cœur,” began about a year ago with the museum, which presented its first major monograph dedicated to Paul Poiret. The French couturier was one of the most influential visionaries of the early 20th century who pushed the boundaries of womenswear — and practically reinvented it. Swept away by his brilliance, Alphonse wanted to find some way to honor the master couturier — even if he wasn’t sure how or whether it could be done at all. 

When he shared the idea with the museum, they welcomed the opportunity to collaborate. “They allowed me and my team to go into the archives and see everything from Paul Poiret,” Alphonse explains, rocking a perfectly-curly, cool Chalamet-esque mop and a smile, with which he punctuates every sentence. The designer spent the following months mining the archives and dreaming up his interpretation of Paul Poiret’s work to showcase during Paris Fashion Week. 

“Maybe we can start by this one,” he says, guiding us up the staircase and to the right. “This one is the opening look.” There’s something so incredibly intimate about this experience; it’s not everyday that you get to go on what seems like a private tour of a museum-worthy exhibit led by the person who created it. The look, he explains, is an explicit reference to an illustration created for the couturier, titled “En Plein Coeur,” depicting a woman with her head tilted back dramatically and an arrow piercing right through her chest. 

Cast in a creamy, parchment-toned fabric, the asymmetrical tunic-dress makes the 1922 illustration its focal point. (Before photography, Alphonse explains, fashion illustration was the primary method for designers to communicate their ideas; Paul Poiret is especially known for being the first to commission artists to create special catalogues of his work.) An exaggerated panel swoops around the back and folds over the shoulder of the dress, like a dogeared page of a well-loved book. Another dress, a cloud-like mini, features three-dimensional polka dots — inspired by Paul Poiret’s “dot and line” signature.

Alphonse’s creations are part prêt-à-porter and part couture, which is how the designer described his work to Vogue back in 2019. A graduate of La Cambre, a visual arts school in Brussels, Alphonse launched Maitrepierre in 2018, after working at design studios the likes of Acne, Chanel, and Jean Paul Gaultier. My first introduction to the brand was through its “Manette” bag, which Alphonse created in the shape of a video game controller. I loved its aesthetic strangeness — and how it was crafted entirely out of deadstock leather. Standing here now, seeing a broader spectrum of his work in person, I’m even more convinced of his genius than ever. 

Le Magnifique

Known as “Le Magnifique” or the King of Fashion in Paris, Paul Poiret was an “extremist” — at least according to a 1910 New York Times article. “He works for the silhouette and for combination of color,” it reads. “He is daring, individual, independent. He cares not a fillip for what the other dressmakers are doing, or what they think of him. He stands alone in Paris. Every woman may not want to wear his clothes, but few women can deny his wide-spreading influence.” That’s exactly what made his ideas so revolutionary.

He disregarded social convention, freeing women from corsets and embracing the natural lines of the body. He approached fashion as a “lifestyle,” venturing into perfumes, textiles, and interior design. He embraced the bold and exotic, often guided by a flair for showmanship. He traveled widely and often, in search of ideas — and he adopted many, including kimono-style robes, lampshade skirts, and harem jupe-culottes. Deriving its silhouette from South Asia’s salwar pants, this garment, characterized by tailored ankles and loose-fitting form for easy movement and comfort in hot climates, was Paul Poiret’s attempt at breaking away from rigid, structured dressing. 

Although some considered it an attack on Western fashion and way of life, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Paul Poiret predicted, “half a century ahead of time, that some day women would take to wearing pants.” Harem pants also redefined fashion by relying on the art of draping over conventional tailoring. “And it was, for me, one of the greatest because he gets to do some volume — but with fluidity,” Alphonse says. “And this was really the idea of the collection: to try to do some volume but with some fabrics that are very liquid and very fluid.”

The harem jupe-culotte is reincarnated in Alphonse’s hands with pear-shaped silhouettes that form no small part of the collection. Through clever architectural fabric engineering, he creates soft, draped folds around the hips of several skirts. The technique is carried through a floor-grazing black skirt, which flares out into its broadest circumference around the hips. In another, Alphonse throws fullness into a trench skirt — which, together with an abbreviated trench jacket, forms a decidedly modern, statue-esque outline. 

“The mood was trying to go into all the shapes from Paul Poiret — but definitely to break [them],” Alphonse tells the group, explaining that he leaned into the couturier’s affection for volume with an “illusion of a big trench” chopped into two parts. The group is collectively awed by the revelation. “It looks like one piece!” One of the members says. Again and again, I feel lucky to be a part of this little tour guided by Alphonse, who pulls the layers of his own work apart right in front of us. I can actually see the creative process and follow the artist in how he’s made his every decision — discovering little secrets along the way. 

Like, how he constructed a floor-grazing, backless gown out of two layered deadstock fabrics — python lace over vibrantly colored silk — which gives off a certain kind of three-dimensional effect when viewed up close. Paul Poiret, too, was known for secreting away bright fabrics in linings of coats and wraps. Alphonse also tells us that he wanted to spark a dialogue between past and future, and his way of doing that was to give some pieces a “dusty, messy” feeling — like garments that may have been forgotten in storage. Take, for example, the bubble-shaped, amorphous charcoal pants that gradually fade in color at the ankles.  

This intersection of past and future also meant transforming the old in new, high-tech ways — a practice that’s been a cornerstone of Maitrepierre from the start. Case in point: The brand is an ambassador for Nona Source, LVMH’s new platform that sells deadstock fabrics to both in-house design teams and independent designers. Throughout the collection, Alphonse ingeniously recasts unused materials into several laser-cut fringed pieces with some serious sway. Think: a larger-than-life mini with purple fringe layered to a stunning effect and a floor-length halter gown covered in cascading mint-green and brown fringe — drawing from the colors of the aforementioned “En Plein Coeur” illustration.

Fantasy and Theater

Paul Poiret’s designs were heavily influenced by theater, opera, and ballet — he was particularly drawn to Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which introduced Parisians to sumptuous and colorful “exotic” costumes. In 1911, Poiret hosted the famous “The Thousand and Second Night” costume party in the garden of his atelier, where he required guests to dress up in Persian-inspired outfits. The event wasn’t just a party — it was a publicity spectacle to promote his latest work. (Guests who failed to follow the dress code could either leave or change into one of the designer’s creations.) 

One of the night’s most spectacular looks: harem pants and a wired skirted tunic that featured intricate beadwork and turquoise teardrop-shaped decorative stones. Alphonse, who also once dabbled in costume design, wanted to lean into the theatricality of Paul Poiret’s designs with a butter-yellow ensemble: an embellished mock-neck blouse worn with a harem jupe-culotte “I really wanted to work on this, but have more Paul Poiret-y …” he pauses, gesticulating with his hands as if to find the right word, “… view on it.”

To bring that vision to life, he collaborated with Les Teintures de France — a French artisanal dyeing workshop that also specializes in laser and 3D printing. Working with Les Teintures de France, he explains while tracing the blouse’s teardrop motifs with his fingertips, they recreated the couturier’s jewel-like embellishments in a way that felt modern yet still respectful of the garment’s history. Maitrepierre also partnered with Parisian shoemaker Carel, dreaming up an eight-piece collection of whimsical footwear, including slingback pumps with pointed toes shaped like mouse snouts, small pink tips for noses, and little rounded ears that stick up. 

I can sense Alphonse’s tour is coming to an end, but for me, it’s the perfect prelude to viewing the museum’s exhibition, Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast. Here, the group splits off. Alphonse walks me to the entrance of the exhibition, and after offering him my heartfelt thanks and well-earned congratulations, I head inside. The monograph is incredibly enlightening. I pick up on the parallels between the two designers’ works; the striking color juxtapositions, the forward-thinking cuts for their respective eras, and the powerful use of volume all stand out as shared signatures. 

It’s uplifting to see the Poiret fashion house being celebrated with such excellence — especially considering its heartbreaking decline. Paul Poiret lost his business in 1929. The stock market crash and depression played a part in the house’s shuttering — but so did the changing tastes of the time. Women no longer felt the pull of the couturier’s extravagant styles; they were drawn instead to more chic and modern designs like those of Coco Chanel. The man who once dressed the crème de la crème of Europe died in poverty and obscurity in 1944 — his work largely forgotten until recently. If the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’s exhibition and Maitrepierre’s collection are any indication, the master couturier’s legacy is — finally — in good hands.