My Paris show schedule started eight days ago with the two independent female voices of Julie Kegels and Hodakova, and it closed today with another, Meryll Rogge, who showed a strong and strongly witty collection of sportily layered embroidered dresses, hand knit sweaters with low-slung multi-belted leather skirts, jeweled safety-pin punctured English tweed coats for the girls, and floral/check collaged shirts, shrunken jacquard sweaters, and oversized leather jackets for the boys. (This is a loose grouping, to be clear, informed by the presentation; I mean, you know, wear from this collection what you want, whoever you are.) In a Paris season stoked with anticipation and excitement around so many (male) debuts at global luxury brands, the symmetry of that opening and closing feels encouraging and uplifting; that designers’ voices are able to be heard loudly even without all the wherewithal at their disposal enjoyed elsewhere.
Rogge, of course, is currently a one-woman juggling act, as she acknowledged at a pretty chill pre-show visit backstage. “Obviously, there’s a lot going on in my life,” she said, laughing, “what with Meryl Rogge, my work for my new knitwear brand BB Wallace, and starting as creative director of Marni. (She mentioned she, her husband, and their family have decamped from rural Belgium to Milan.) I’ve got a lot of creative outlets with which to say something; I always compare it to musicians who have the luck to play in different bands, like Damon Albarn. Sometimes as a designer you want to make different things.”
What that meant for Meryl Rogge spring 2026, she said, was that she felt that she could let herself go, and dare a bit more, a feeling spurred on by reading the late iconic downtown actor and writer Cookie Mueller’s 1990 autobiography, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. Mueller’s life story gave Rogge the desire to honor the way Mueller had lived; it was an emotional, not aesthetic, homage to her. “I wanted to translate the lightness she had, even in her most difficult moments,” Rogge said. “There was freedom, and an independence, to her. I’m kind of obsessed with lightness right now,” she went on to say. “I’m not feeling things being heavy, heavy, heavy. The ultimate thing, the ultimate luxury, even if that word is complicated, is lightness.”
That impulse touched everything. It upended the usual day to night order of a runway show in favor of a whatever, it all works approach. Rogge opened with an acid lime boudoir slip and kingfisher lace peignoir layered beneath a slouchy beige trench, blithely mixing up the practicality of day with the glamour of evening, before emblazoning Mueller’s most famous line about not being wild, but wild finding her (I’m paraphrasing here) over a vividly hued satin dress with a photo print of a searing blue sky on one side, and on the reverse fucked up, bow-trimmed leather, or later, presenting a wedding dress, traditionally the closing look in an old school Paris runway show, about two thirds of the way through the lineup. “Just because you’re married it doesn’t mean life stops,” Rogge said was the point of that running order. I eyed the show’s remaining looks, all short swingy dresses—one of the major stories of the season—some of them worn with the elegant punketerie of the graphic silver chokers and bauble necklaces by Belgian jewelers Wouters & Hendrix in collaboration with Rogge. “It certainly looks like she’s still having fun,” I said to Rogge. “Maybe she chose polyamory after she got wed.”
It was the sparky attitude and woman-centric approach of this collection (even if there were 12 men’s looks in it, the most Rogge has ever done) which made it work so well. It was a singularly compelling way to bring the Paris season to an end. Rogge had recently gone to see the Girls show at the MoMu fashion museum in Antwerp, which celebrates the power of pubescent girls, and that had struck a chord with her too. “It’s not about looking to the past, but what is happening now,” she said. “And that’s interesting, because there’s not enough of that about now.” Indeed not. But Rogge, on current form, is doing a lot to redress the balance.