Afghan embroiderers on the Paris runway, and Valentino in corset tops

This is a NOT SCRIPTED summary of reporting published elsewhere. The underlying reports are by Reuters, listed with links at the foot of this article, and readers who want the full accounts should read them there.

Two shows from this Paris Fashion Week drew the kind of attention that goes beyond the trade: Gabriela Hearst's presentation of Afghan designs, and Valentino's return to the corset top alongside chunky jewellery. Both were reported by Reuters within a day of each other.

Hearst's Afghan designs

Reuters reported that Gabriela Hearst showed Afghan designs at her Paris show. The interest in the collection was not only about the clothes. A runway presentation of Afghan embroidery and dress by a Paris fashion house lands on a subject that carries a political charge far heavier than a garment, and that tension is part of what the coverage was written around.

• Gabriela Hearst presented Afghan designs at Paris Fashion Week, per Reuters.
• Valentino unveiled corset tops and chunky jewellery at its show, per Reuters.
• Both items are covered in Reuters' fashion reporting of 4 and 5 October 2026.

Why a garment becomes an argument

Fashion weeks work by making a body of work legible to an audience that mostly already knows the codes. When the reference is a living tradition from a country under sustained international attention, the audience cannot simply treat it as a motif. The designers involved are effectively making an argument about who owns a craft, who profits from it, and whether showing it is solidarity, tourism, or something more uncomfortable than both.

That is why the Hearst show reads as more than a collection review. It is an event in which the provenance of the work is the story, and in which the questions asked afterwards are usually about the supply chain and the artisans, not about the silhouettes.

Valentino and the corset

In the other report, Reuters described Valentino unveiling corset tops and chunky jewellery — a reference to a silhouette the house has revisited before. The corset is fashion's most literal quotation of a body, and its recurrences tend to track the same argument the industry is having about restriction, structure and who gets to decide the terms.

What the week actually signals

If a fashion week has a theme, this one appears to have been about the body and its history — corsetry as structure, and dress as a carrier of cultural claim. Neither reading is settled by a single show, and both would be premature after one week of coverage.

The useful thing to take from both reports is not a verdict but a pattern. The shows that generate argument are the ones that source something from outside the industry's own vocabulary, whether that is a national embroidery tradition or a silhouette from the house's own archive.