Photo Credits: Elaine Zhong Via Instagram
There are moments when fashion transcends the temporal, brushing against something eternal. At the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Elie Saab did not merely dress the women who graced the crimson stairs—he draped them in dreams, in whispered stories woven of light and memory. His haute couture creations, each painstakingly constructed by the hands of masters, carried not just silhouettes, but spirit.
Photo Credits: Elaine Zhong Vía Instagram
Photo Credits: Elaine Zhong Via Instagram
From nocturne to dawn, Elaine Zhong’s appearance unfolded like a sonnet. Wearing a gown from Elie Saab’s Spring-Summer 2023 Haute Couture collection, she floated—barely touching the ground—as though her entrance were scripted in a myth. The dress, a sweeping ballgown in pale ivory, blossomed with embroidery so intricate it seemed grown from the threads of wild gardens, not stitched. Each flower, each pastel whisper, was a memory pressed into fabric. The structure of the bodice, soft yet commanding, gave her not just beauty, but presence. Saab, ever the romantic, cloaked her not in nostalgia, but in renewal—an ode to grace that refused to be nostalgic, because it was too alive, too present.
Photo Credits: Elaine Zhong Via Instagram
Eva Longoria emerged like a comet poised in descent, cloaked in the deep, celestial shimmer of midnight blue sequins. Her gown, drawn from the Autumn-Winter 2024–2025 Haute Couture collection, was less garment than incantation. Cut with architectural precision and wrapped in the fluidity of drapery, the halter neckline spiraled around her like a cosmic vow. The fabric caught the Cannes sunlight and fractured it, as though each sequin remembered stardust. In Saab’s hands, shimmer is never spectacle—it is language. It speaks in glances, echoes across time, and builds a woman’s silhouette not just around her form, but around her energy.
Photo Credits: Elie Saab Via Instagram
Photo Credits: L’Oréal Paris Official
And then, in the hush of mirrored halls and whispered flashes, came Araya Alberta Hargate. Her gown, taken from the Fall-Winter 2024 Haute Couture collection, did not simply reflect light—it refracted desire, elegance, and mythology. A sheer base, sculpted like an ancient goddess reborn, bore columns of embroidery and beadwork cascading like sacred geometry. Off-the-shoulder sleeves framed her like architecture from a forgotten empire. It was not about exposure—it was about reverence. Saab did not dress her to reveal, but to elevate. The transparency was not about seduction; it was about truth. This is the Saab paradox: in revealing the body, he honors it, never exploits it.
Photo Credits: Araya Alberta Hargate Via Instagram
Photo Credits: Elie Saab Via Instagram
Photo Credits: Araya Alberta Hargate
In a world quick to chase relevance, Elie Saab’s work reminds us of permanence. His presence at Cannes in 2025 felt less like a statement and more like a prayer. A prayer for beauty that listens, that remembers, that heals. A prayer for craftsmanship in an age of automation. A prayer for women to inhabit not just clothes, but their own mythologies.
For Saab, fabric is not passive. It listens. It yearns. It waits for a woman not to wear it—but to become it.
And perhaps that is the essence of what we witnessed on the Croisette this year: not fashion, but becoming. Not adornment, but awakening. In Elie Saab’s world, women do not dress to be seen. They dress to be remembered.
