The 2025 LVMH Prize: ALAINPAUL

“I’ve always been fascinated by rules,” admits Alain Paul, the young Hong Kong-born, Paris-based designer behind the eponymous label ALAINPAUL. “In dance, you start with classical to know the rules, and then you learn about contemporary, and you realize there are no rules at all,” he says. “But you have this base that is so strong. It’s the same with fashion. You cannot do a great collection without knowing how to make a jacket.”

The designer was speaking from his studio in the eleventh arrondissement, where he was busy working on his Spring 2026 collection with his husband and co-founder Luis Philippe and the small team they built together. The brand launched in September 2023, soon after Paul left Louis Vuitton, where he spent almost five years working alongside the late Virgil Abloh until his passing. Paul’s own line has fast become a quiet rising star of the industry, known for its exquisitely constructed, sculptural garments which often pay homage to the strength and subversion of choreographers like Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham while incorporating subtle, deconstructed references to the dancer’s wardrobe. There’s an elegance to Paul’s work. There’s also a very intentional and discreet unpacking of the classic.

Founding his own label with his husband had long been a dream. But it wasn’t his first. As a child in Hong Kong, Paul was introduced to dance at six years old. When his family moved to Marseille a little over a year later, he auditioned for the Opéra de Marseille, now directed by the trio behind the innovative dance company La(Horde). “I was just eight years old,” Paul recalls. “Going into this big institution was scary, but I loved it. After not even a year there, my mindset was shifted: ‘I’m going to be a dancer or a choreographer.’ You grow up so fast in such an institution. You become an adult too early.”

Dancing at the Opéra lent Paul a discipline that came to inform his approach to craftsmanship. It was also the space in which he first encountered design as a language. The arrival of a new and more experimental creative director when he was fourteen inspired him to choreograph his own productions with friends. “I would be the only one thinking, ‘Oh, maybe we should dress these dancers this way.’ I found that clothes and volume could really enhance a story and make it more powerful,” Paul says.

He fell in love with fashion more and more and began to research designers like Gaultier and Margiela in his free time. “I started dressing for myself,” he says. By eighteen, it was time to decide whether to begin auditions and become a dancer or go into fashion. The choice was clear. “It was quite instinctive,” Paul says. “I was seeking freedom and a new world.”

A few years later, after graduating from the Istituto Marangoni fashion school in Paris, Paul joined a soon-to-be-launched Vetements alongside Demna Gvasalia, who was just leaving Margiela and developing the vision for the brand that would inject so much life into the industry over the coming years. “It was very different,” Paul says of the house’s perspective. “It was a new silhouette that we brought to fashion, and it was very needed in that era.”

He spent five years working all week and all weekend with Gvasalia. “It was a lot of work, big, long hours,” says Paul. “That’s the path, the passion keeps you going. I’ve learned a lot. I learned everything about how to build collections, identity.”

When the Vetements team relocated to Zurich, Paul joined Louis Vuitton. By this time, he had met his husband, who was at the legendary Paris store Colette working alongside Sarah Andelman on the buyer side. Working with Abloh was a game-changer. “There was a lot of experimentation. Everybody had a seat at the table,” says Paul. “We were a studio that I think he trusted a lot. It was beautiful.”

By the time of Abloh’s passing, Paul was ready to go out on his own with Philippe, who had logged time with Jacquemus, Alaïa, and Balenciaga after Colette closed. The results are emotive and tightly edited pieces emphasizing movement, posture, and always (de)construction. A jacket is tailored according to the rules of traditional menswear but given a six-centimeter shoulder to add posture to a woman’s body; vibrant colors and a sense of femininity and freedom—inspired by Bausch—are interwoven throughout. A black ankle boot is deformed at its edge as if it were a pointe shoe used too long. Cozy warm-up trousers are extended onto the foot like tights. There’s a beauty in Paul’s delicate and strictly refined approach; a gauzy, fine-knit yellow dress is layered over a pale pink slip.

Every collection begins with two elements: a collection of images illustrating the energy of the season and the composition which will become the heartbeat of the show and garments. This past season, like the one before, Paul worked with composer Mikael Karlsson on the show’s music. In the years to come, Paul hopes to explore new elements. “So far, we cannot take risks doing too much,” he says. “It will show in the work, it will show in the collections. We will be able to do richer fabrics: prints or jacquards. We still haven’t developed a bag—things that take time.”

Many people interpret the brand as telling a literal story. If you ask Paul, the line is doing something much more abstract. “People really think it’s about classical ballet, which is really not about the ballet class at all. It’s the discipline that shaped me for ten years, that is present in me, and I have this discipline with the way I work on clothes and the way I see things very, very meticulously,” Paul says of the brand. “But it’s really more about the controversy that Pina brought on stage, saying very loud how women are treated in society, or things like that, I think are very strong. This is all that I aspire to do.”

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