Louis Gabriel Nouchi realized a childhood dream with his spring 2026 presentation. Trading the runway for the screen, the designer invited the fashion week set to Silencio, the iconic nightclub founded by David Lynch and named after the one in his 2001 film Mulholland Drive. It wasn’t a fashion film that Nouchi presented, however, at least not exactly. The designer took over the venue’s screen rooms to unveil a short animated film. As it turns out, Nouchi is a certified anime “geek” (his words). So much so that before he went to Belgium to start his career in fashion, he had applied to—and been accepted to—an animation program. Here’s another fun fact: France is a prolific purveyor of animation, responsible for some of the earliest animated films in history. “It’s in our culture as much as fashion,” Nouchi said in the morning at his studio. “I thought it would be quite cool to combine them.”
Even cooler: Nouchi worked with animation studio Milli to create the film, which is around two-and-a-half minutes long, entirely by hand. Meaning that each frame was hand-drawn before being turned into a motion picture. “It feels more relevant than ever to do it this way because of AI,” the designer reflected. “So much of what I do is about craft, my tailoring, our knits, all of our fabrics,” he continued, “and so is this. I wanted that to be clear.”
Nouchi crafts his collections around novels. While his output has progressively evolved to become less narrative-driven and more loosely based on the tomes, they have proven to give his work worthwhile conceptual backing. Such was the case of this season’s inspiration, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, which was adapted to become Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Nouchi fixated the most on the “replicants” in the film, the synthetic humanoids that come to develop emotions and are “retired” when they do. His rumination on the impacts of AI on craft, here realized by a hand-drawn anime that featured a set of identical figures in key LGN items—his long-line coats and that best-selling speedo—was clever and particularly poignant.
The title of this collection was Do Androids Dream of Wet Desires? It’s a fitting name for the work of a designer who has made a name for himself partly for selling sexy to men—of all body types, that is, and always worth mentioning. And he joked about it, too: “I used to put naked men on the runway!” he quipped. That helped him make a splash on the scene and differentiate his label. Nouchi putting hairy, beefier men on the runways was, in hindsight, a true turning point for Paris menswear, even if most labels have walked back from their subsequent adoption of the practice.
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