Photo Credits: ©Launchmetrics/FranckSorbier
There are collections that grace the runway with elegance. And then there are those rare moments when fashion doesn’t walk — it erupts. Symphonie Barbare, Franck Sorbier’s Summer 2025 Haute Couture opus, is not merely a show, but a sovereign act of creation — fierce, poetic, and laden with memory. It is couture as symphony, composition as confrontation.
Sorbier, ever the aesthete of paradox, poses a deceptively simple question: Can a symphony be barbaric? With this collection, his answer is neither rhetorical nor restrained — it is a bold affirmation dressed in torn silks, sculpted jacquards, and whispered legends. Drawing from the deep well of history, he casts light on the so-called “barbarians” — those who stood outside the Roman Empire, its language and laws, and who were, in their defiance, creators of new worlds. Goths, Celts, Huns, Normans… their names echo through time like percussion beneath the orchestral fabric of civilization.
Photo Credits: ©Launchmetrics/FranckSorbier
Yet, this is not a costume drama. It is haute couture with teeth. Through his signature technique of compression, Sorbier continues to reject the sterile precision of the purely mechanical. Instead, he invites the gesture, the imperfection, the intuition of the hand. In a world of silence, he listens to the fabric. He lets it breathe, resist, revolt.
Photo Credits: ©Launchmetrics/FranckSorbier
The silhouettes in Les Révoltes Barbares carry with them an exquisite violence — not of destruction, but of transformation. Organzas are crinkled like ancient parchment; jacquards cut into sinuous slivers evoke mythic skin. Black dominates — matte, lacquered, shredded — offset by glints of gold, beige, or bone. From lacerated tailcoats to pannier skirts sculpted from reassembled lace mosaics, these garments are not clothes. They are relics reborn, sacred and savage.
Photo Credits: ©Launchmetrics/FranckSorbier
But Sorbier, ever multidimensional, offers a second movement — one of grace, courage, and tribute. With Les Guerrières de la Paix, he honors the women of “Women Wage Peace,” an informal movement of Israeli and Palestinian women who defy borders with hope. Through tunics woven in fil coupé brocades, embroidered guipures, and hand-frayed silks, Sorbier creates not costumes of protest, but ceremonial garb for warriors of empathy. Each piece, a votive offering to peace. Each stitch, a declaration.
And then, in the final passage — Paix — the storm stills. The silhouettes soften. A bandeau dress of sky-blue silk chiffon. A cascade of feathers embroidered over dusky satin duchesse. Panels of apricot, ivory, and pale gold chiffon float like the quiet after a battle. The drama does not end. It resolves.
Photo Credits: ©Launchmetrics/FranckSorbier
Sorbier, named Maître d’Art in 2010 and a Grand Couturier since 2005, has long transcended the traditional boundaries of fashion. He is not a designer; he is a custodian of memory, a sculptor of silence, a dramatist of the thread. To call him the Bernard Palissy of couture, as Janie Samet once did, is not mere flattery — it is factual reverence. Like Palissy, he builds worlds from clay and fire, persistence and vision.
Symphonie Barbare is not for the faint-hearted. It is for those who understand that couture can speak in tongues, cry out in myth, and ultimately, reveal truths too often buried beneath refinement. Sorbier does not tame beauty. He allows it to roam — untamed, undressed of expectation, and gloriously free.
Photo Credits: ©Launchmetrics/FranckSorbier
