The AW26 changeover has landed at Dover Street Market Paris, a wave of first collaborations, exclusive labels, and debut collections arriving all at once inside the space Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe built for creators to gather and collide.
Of everything the season set down on the floor, L’ABBEYE selects two: Institution and amachi.
Two points of focus where clothing shifts from mere product into something with memory. Pieces shaped by construction, landscape, or a quiet dialogue within the space. What follows is not the whole floor, but what holds its ground once the noise clears.
Institution
Institution arrives as the season’s most singular exclusive. Founded in 2024 by Azerbaijani designer Galib Gassanoff following his success with Act N°1, the project operates less like a commercial label and more as an anthropological platform for cultural preservation.
Fresh off winning the Zalando Visionary Award 2026 and securing a finalist spot for the LVMH Prize, Gassanoff uses fashion to document endangered knowledge. For FW26, he turns to Peri-Khan Sofieva, among the first Muslim women elected to public office in the Caucasus after 1918, translating her legacy into powerful, statuesque forms.
The collection builds an imposing presence through cocoon-like drapes, heavy knitwear, and raw, hand-woven textures. Disappearing textile traditions are reimagined as sculptural tailoring and monastic hoods: a wardrobe that carries its own archive on its back.
Available now at Dover Street Market Paris · Exclusive
amachi.
From the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, amachi. reads as the season’s quietest and most elemental arrival. Founded in 2016 by Japanese designer Amachi Yoshimoto following years as a master pattern maker, the label operates far away from conventional fashion cycles, grounding its work in the relationship between land, memory, and the body.
Born in California’s Elk Valley and now based in rural Japan, Yoshimoto brings a deeply conceptual approach to menswear. His garments draw directly on natural phenomena and rural rhythms, relying on artisanal textile development, intricate handwork, and deliberate construction.
The FW26 collection approaches clothing as a physical record of human interaction with landscape and time. Organic silhouettes, textured knitwear, and layered, weather-worn outerwear hold that idea directly in the cloth: dressing understood as a kind of geology, slow and accumulated.
Available now at Dover Street Market Paris · Photography by Yuriko Takagi
Credits
Cover by Yuriko Takagi for amachi.