The Past, Held in Present Tense
Review of Ashi Studio Spring 2026 Couture Fashion Show
By Mackenzie Richard Zuckerman
Ashi Studio’s latest couture collection moved with the quiet confidence of a house that knows its own handwriting. This season, the designer used Victorian mourning as a point of departure—less historical costume, more emotional temperature. The premise was heartbreak: love held at a distance, longing turned ritual, restraint made romantic. Yet the result never felt trapped in the past. It read as old-world feeling translated into new-world glamour, with a modern clarity that kept the drama intimate rather than performative.
That sense of intimacy was built into the presentation itself. In his post-show remarks, the designer described the set—his tent and flashlight—as “a little world,” a space meant to feel close and private. It framed the collection as something witnessed rather than broadcast, and it aligned with his broader philosophy: couture as a discipline of care, where modernization comes through clean lines, ethical craft, and a refusal to chase noise. The larger question the collection begins to ask is one couture keeps returning to this week: how do designers make emotion feel current without flattening it into aesthetics?
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
Mourning Modernity & Lace and Longing
The strongest achievement here was how seamlessly Ashi Studio fused period emotion with contemporary allure. Victorian mourning appeared through symbols and texture—most poignantly in the recurring gesture of hair, including locks embedded in garments as a reference to mourning traditions. Lace carried its own kind of ache: delicate, devotional, slightly severe. The silhouettes, meanwhile, stayed disciplined enough to let technique do the storytelling. As the designer put it, this season was “really about the techniques,” and you could feel that conviction in the surface language: oil painting, aging, rusting, distressing, handwork layered until it became atmosphere.
Several moments translated craftsmanship into illusion. A rippling, hand-done treatment created a “wet” effect with feathered softness; one dress was hand-painted to evoke an 18th-century painting. Corsetry served as both structure and metaphor—beauty with tension built in—executed using 18th-century methods, then painted to look timeworn. In his words, he’s been exploring corsetry for two years and finally feels he has mastered it, with a wink to the client’s desire to feel “snatched.” That balance—serious technique, human desire—helped the collection land as couture that understands its audience. The throughline wasn’t a single visual motif; it was coherence of intent. Ashi Studio showed newness and continuity in the same breath, the way the most compelling modern designers do: a recognizable hand, expanded through research, disciplined editing, and emotional precision.
THE DIRECTION
THE QUOTE
It’s Victorian mourning—bittersweet, restrained, emotional. I try to preserve the ethics of couture while pushing it forward in my own way, keeping it simple and clean—but made by hand, with care.
THE WRAP UP
What this collection ultimately proved is that modernity in couture can come from clarity, not disruption. Ashi Studio preserved the ethics of couture—human hands, time, technique—while letting the silhouettes stay clean enough for the work to speak. The risk here was tonal: mourning is easy to aestheticize, easy to over-romanticize. Instead, the collection treated heartbreak as a form of craft in itself—layered, restrained, intimate, and strangely universal. It made the Victorian reference feel relevant because it insisted on something enduring: human emotion doesn’t date.
If anything played it safe, it was the decision to keep the overall line controlled—an approach that prioritizes refinement over shock. Yet the experimentation lived in the surfaces, the treatments, the patient accumulation of detail. It’s also where the designer’s language continues to sharpen: you feel an increasingly confident translation of research into a world that belongs to him and still feels desirable to a client. Couture, at its best, is a form of communication. This season, Ashi Studio communicated with unusual clarity—through technique, through restraint, through a heartbreak that still felt recognizably ours.
