Inside Franck Sorbier‘s Haute Couture Winter 2026/2027 collection — a love letter to the women who circled the globe before it was easy, staged at the birthplace of the Red Cross, and sealed with the house’s first fragrance

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Set inside the Hôtel Regina, steps from a Tour Eiffel that was itself built for an exhibition of wanderers, Franck Sorbier staged his Winter 2026/2027 Haute Couture collection, Le Parfum des Globe-Trotteuses, as an act of time travel. The house rewound the clock to 1900, to the Universal Exposition and the birth of the grand hotel where, in 1919, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies would be founded — a coincidence of history Sorbier treats less as trivia than as thesis. This has always been a house obsessed with universality, and here it found a room that already believed in it.

Into that room walk Sorbier’s imagined chercheuses d’ailleurs — seekers of elsewhere. Rebel aristocrats, showgirls, poets, double-agent tragediennes, visionary dancers: women who had already crossed every ocean by the time the century turned, who took the Normandie and the Queen Mary for the crossing and the Orient Express for the rest, who followed the Silk Road on camelback from Almaty to Bukhara and slept in ashrams and Himalayan monasteries along the way. It is a biography built from Jules Verne and Marco Polo in equal measure, and Sorbier translates it into cloth with the same appetite for accumulation: an antique kimono embroidery revives a little black dress, a strip of Uzbek ikat becomes the spine of a long red velvet coat, and jacquards embossed like marbled bookbinding paper carry palmette motifs borrowed from Qajar Persia and Mughal miniature painting.

The trouser, unsurprisingly, is everywhere — cigarette-cut in brick-red shantung, zouave-shaped in black silk crêpe, jodhpur-fitted in zebra-dark jacquard — and Sorbier is unambiguous about what it signifies here: freedom of movement, and the freedom of status that came with it. Around those trousers, the house builds ample, enveloping coats indebted to Ottoman robes, Japanese silhouettes and the humble dressing gown, cut from fabrics that read as if they still carried the scent of the journey home. A recurring “photographic safari” motif threads through the silhouettes as tribute rather than costume — tiger-striped jacquard, ivory velvet astrakhan, black-and-white silk organza cut to move like feathers — while a charged palette of reds, gold, silver and unyielding black stages its own kind of contrast, natural white folded in like a yin to the collection’s yang.

To dress like a woman who has already seen the world, Sorbier suggests, is to dress for the next departure — not the last arrival.

The show also marks new territory for the house off the runway: Sorbier’s first fragrance venture, Sorbier Parfums, developed with Robertet, debuted alongside the collection with its Chapitre III — Damas eau in a drawer-edition coffret — a scent as much a character in this story as any coat. High jewelry throughout came from Payal Mehta’s Payal New York, whose Bird and Feather collections wound through the silhouettes as talismans of flight and protection, while Trippen shod nearly every look and makeup artist Natalia Vlasova, working with her own VINATA line, kept the beauty look deliberately unfussy — dewy, sun-warmed, well-rested, as if the women themselves had just stepped off a long flight and straight into the room.

A Closing Note

What lingers after Le Parfum des Globe-Trotteuses is not any single coat or one particularly extravagant hat, but the accumulation — the sense of a wardrobe assembled over decades of restless movement rather than a single season of research. Sorbier has never been a minimalist, and he does not become one here; instead he lets every reference sit in conversation with the next, trusting that a Tuareg-inspired scarf, a Tomesode re-embroidery and a Bukhara-bound ikat can share a room without competing for it. Staged in a hotel that once housed an idea as universal as the Red Cross, the collection makes its case plainly: elegance, like travel, was never meant to stay in one place.