Mugler reopens playbook with underground debut show in Paris

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PARIS (AP) — The fashion industry is deep in musical chairs this Paris season, and Thursday's spotlight swung to a Mugler debut.

Miguel Castro Freitas — Portuguese, Dior-honed, and a little-known name with a precise hand — took over a house built on shock and silhouette, and chose not to whisper. He hit the volume.

In recent seasons, Mugler has been a red-carpet magnet — Beyoncé, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Dua Lipa among its regulars, capped by Zendaya’s viral “Maschinenmensch” armor moment.

The venue set the tone: a sensual concrete underworld — warehouse/parking-garage bones — softened by velvety, carpeted seating. It felt illicit yet plush, a fitting stage for a label that made club-ready futurism a couture proposition.

Thierry Mugler’s DNA is no small inheritance: 1980s bravado, Amazonian shoulders, theater, and an unapologetic embrace of rubber and PVC. Freitas didn’t tiptoe around it — he accelerated it. Shoulders were exaggerated to sculptural width; giant cocoon faux furs swallowed the frame; lacquer-slick black PVC hugged the body like armor. Bare chests telegraphed Mugler’s body-positive provocation; one look was, quite literally, suspended from the model’s nipple rings — a jolt that made the room audibly react and fumble for their cameras.

If former designer Casey Cadwallader’s Mugler defined seduction as engineering — corseted waists, architectural hips, glossed-over surfaces — Freitas’ debut kept the charge but tightened the cut. You could feel the tailor at the helm: seams sat clean, volumes were plotted rather than piled on, and the show’s shock tactics served a clear silhouette strategy. Nothing felt nostalgic; it read as a contemporary reroute through familiar landmarks.

The choice, strategically, was canny. In a season of debuts, a brand this loud risks either pastiche or retreat. Freitas managed neither. He reopened the playbook and ran classic Mugler moves — shoulder/waist control, latex sheen, dramatic feathers, theater — with an insider’s discipline.

This wasn’t a triumph, but a solid, coherent opening statement.

It was less a manifesto than a proof of concept: that Mugler’s extremes still speak, provided the cut is unforgiving and the image lands in a single frame.

“Mugler reimagined the power and limits of fashion,” Freitas has said.

On Thursday, he signaled he intends to keep testing those limits, not by softening the house, but by sharpening it.

Verdict: a careful tailor delivering a daring debut. He didn’t rewrite Mugler; he set it to full volume — and people left talking.