Photo Credits: Reproduction / Style Du Monde

Mugler’s Spring/Summer 2026 under Miguel Castro Freitas does not whisper. It roars. In the underground concrete bones of a Parisian parking garage, the house was reborn — fierce, sculptural, theatrical. Freitas stepped into the legacy of Thierry Mugler not to imitate, but to distill the essence, to sharpen the myth for a world that demands both spectacle and substance.

Photo Credits: Repçroduction

The collection is a hymn to duality: power and seduction, structure and skin. Sculpted shoulders, cinched waists, hips flared like winged armor; sharp tailoring draped with feathers, latex, soft satin, transparent flesh-toned fabrics that suggest vulnerability as a radical strength. The silhouettes evoke metamorphosis — the showgirl as goddess, the feline prowler, the modern Aphrodite reborn in light, in shadow, in audacious form.

Photo Credits: Reproduction

Freitas draws from Mugler’s archives with reverence — nods to Les Insectes, La Chimère, the hourglass that defined the house but never gets lost in nostalgia. He re-imagines rather than replicates. The celebrated nipple ring dress, reinvented. Bodysuits of latex juxtaposed with gowns that float, or flamboyant outerwear shaped as armor. The boundary between human and costume is blurred; the body is both stage and canvas.

Color here moves like breath: flesh-beige, soft grays, muted neutrals that become raw under skin; interludes of chartreuse, bursts of teal and deep yellow—like sudden lightning in a storm of sound and presence. Black is restrained, an accent, not the beginning, letting light and texture rise first, demanding attention in subtler ways.

The setting reinforces the message — brutalism meets glamour. Concrete pillars, dim lighting, plush carpets, echoes of footsteps and music. It is illicit space turned sacred, a place where the extremes of Mugler — fetish, fantasy, power — are sharpened but not compromised. The runway becomes ritual.

What Freitas has done is far more than a debut: it is a declaration. That Mugler’s drama doesn’t have to be caricature. That sensuality can be polished without surrendering its edge. That the myth of the showgirl, of the divine seductress, is not outdated, but eternally alive, perpetually reinterpreted.

Photo Credits: Acielle/ Reproduction

In this reawakening, Mugler SS26 reminds us what fashion at its most daring can do: collapse distance between the archive and the future, between illusion and identity. It asks, not what is novel, but what is necessary. And in that question it confirms itself: a house reborn, a legend sharpened, a new chapter written in stardust and flesh.