Enfants Riches Déprimés. Spring/Summer 2026 - Paris Fashon Week

 

How can you not admire Henri Alexander Levy and his brand Enfants Riches Déprimés?  There is absolutely no doubt that Levy is casting his own niche in the fashion world, despite his own nostalgic overview of punk-esque aesthetics that have been on and off on the runway of the last 40 years, considering the American designer is in his mid 30s.  Levy has been able to invigorate and reinvigorate this niche with a dedication, and as mentioned, in a very admiring way.

Yet, there is an indulgence here, that Levy has been fortunate enough to encapsulate himself within, that being his own counterculture branding, without it representing any tangible counterculture externally.    As the ethos, which challenged norms aesthetically, is literally being smothered by cologomatratres, corporatism and global Fascism on the rise, the need to a counterculture to offset this is more urgent than ever, yet remains still elusive apart from Gen Z throwing down the gauntlet or vanguard against the Far Right (on the streets), without the rebellious dress sense thereafter.

And it must be reminded that the counterculture years continued on throughout 1980s, ending pretty much when Gen X turn 20 in the early 1990s, and started trying to capitalize everything with wayward ambitious, and then got sucked back into the Middle Class in the 2000s, disappearing with mortgages into suburbia.  And while the late born "Boomers" may now be in their 60s and 70s, the ones that are still alive,  still have a some fascinating stories to tell, more so, if they attended the famed New York City "Area" nightclub of the early to mid 1980s.

Levy's Spring/Summer 2026 collection very much does have that tailored Area nightclub feel to it, please refer to an amazing book called "Area: 1983–1987" (2015) by Eric Goode and Jennifer Goode, and you'll see why.  Levy's post punk, new romantic, gothic fusion is so beautifully defined, inside a Rive Gauche apartment, where Parisian Bohemianism thrived, and the merging of accentuated hedonism, only magnified levy's romanticism.  Or can we call it an aesthetical conjuring? 

If so, we should be gentle in releasing the spirits of the past, may they offer us some prophetic inspiration.  Maybe even some meaning, in our soon-to-be post digital world.

___

(A.Glass 2025)