On the penultimate evening of Paris Haute Couture Week, Zuhair Murad staged a heroine who is fairy and sorceress at once — sovereign enough to hold her own magic in reserve.

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There is a particular hush that falls over a room right before Zuhair Murad‘s lights go down — a mix of anticipation and something closer to bracing. By 6:30 on Wednesday evening, on the third day of Paris Haute Couture Week, that hush had settled over a room built to disappear. The walls fell away into a forest of Murad’s own invention: ice castles that do not melt, trees that seem to hold their breath. We had come, as we do every July, expecting spectacle. What we found instead was restraint — and it was far more seductive.

“Love and Dominion” is the name Murad gave his Fall/Winter 2026–2027 collection, and by the second look it was clear the title was not decoration. This is a designer who has spent two decades perfecting the art of the reveal, and here he chooses, again and again, not to. The woman walking his runway has magic enough to burn the room down. She keeps it, instead, folded into her sleeve.

The Woman Who Wouldn’t Be Moved

She arrives self-possessed to the point of stillness, and that stillness is the collection’s real subject. Murad has always built his heroines out of contradiction, but this season he lets the tension sit in plain view rather than resolving it for us. She loves without keeping score, and never once loses herself in it. She gives everything she has, and somewhere behind her eyes, a door stays locked. Fairy in one breath, sorceress in the next, she is sovereign enough to hold her own power in reserve — and watching her walk, we understood that the reserve was the point.

It showed in the cut before it showed in anything else. Capes lifted from the shoulder like a storm caught mid-breath rather than released. Draping did not so much reveal the body as discipline it, fold after fold, the way a person holds themselves together in public because they have decided to.

“She has endured life’s trials and emerged a queen — vulnerable and unattainable in the same breath.”

Where the Embroidery Does the Talking

Up close — and Murad’s front row always finds a reason to lean in — the embroidery told its own version of the story. Nightjars, appliquéd and worked in sculptural relief, took flight across the black tulle of a ball gown that stopped the room. It is a bird history has treated unkindly, tangled up in old superstition, and here Murad turns it into something closer to a familiar: darkness recast as companion rather than omen.

A few looks later, rose brambles climbed a fitted black crepe jacket in three dimensions, their crystal embroidery catching the light like frost before spilling over a dramatic corolla neckline and winding down toward the waist. Wrought iron reappeared throughout as trompe-l’oeil, so finely rendered it read as air rather than bars. And the feathers — stoles, muffs, whispers of them worked into the embroidery itself — kept returning to the same idea: a woman who could fly, and chooses instead to glide.

A Palette for Midnight, Not the Red Carpet

Where last season leaned into the warm glow of Old Hollywood, this one retreats somewhere colder and more private: profound black, fir green, and wine in every depth from a whisper to a shadow, with one exception — a single, startling run of embroidery bleeding wine-dark across pale pink tulle, the closest the collection comes to tenderness. It is not a palette designed to be photographed under flashbulbs. It is one designed to be noticed slowly, by someone paying attention.

Leaving the show, into a Paris evening still humming with three more days of couture to come, the read felt clear. Murad has not lost his instinct for spectacle — he has simply redirected it inward. “Love and Dominion” does not ask to be desired. It behaves as though it already is, and lets the embroidery finish making the argument.