Paris Haute Couture Week just wrapped, and the two collections everyone’s still talking about happen to make the exact argument I’ve been making since we started ETĀPE: that structure, not stretch, is what makes a garment interesting. Neither Dior nor Chanel was dressing pregnant bodies. But the design thinking behind both collections translates more directly into maternity dressing than almost anything actually marketed as maternity wear.

Dior: fabric as something you shape, not something that gives

Jonathan Anderson’s second Haute Couture collection for Dior drew on sculptor Lynda Benglis, treating fabric the way she treats clay or metal — twisted, pleated, knotted, moulded into new forms. Hand-plissé, draping, and intricate knotting ran through the whole collection, giving every garment an unmistakably sculptural quality, and tailoring did the heavy lifting throughout — coats closing the body with controlled precision, jackets cinching and releasing into sculptural peplums.

Read that again, and it’s the design brief for maternity dressing that actually works. A growing body doesn’t need fabric that surrenders. It needs fabric that’s been deliberately shaped to expand and contract with intention — pleating that’s engineered to move, not elastic that’s just hoping to keep up.

This is precisely the thinking behind the Drawstring Tailored Pant. The waistband isn’t hidden give — it’s visible, oversized hardware doing a job, the same way Anderson used knotting and pleating as a visible technique rather than something to conceal. Couture and maternity wear rarely get mentioned in the same sentence, but the underlying problem — how does a garment hold its shape while accommodating change — is identical.

Chanel: fantasy that still has to function

Matthieu Blazy’s second Chanel Haute Couture collection took fairy tales as its framing, built around a narrative he called “Gaby and the Beanstalk.” But the detail worth sitting with is how he described the brief to himself: couture at Chanel isn’t just fantasy — it’s “for women, their realities and their adventures of the everyday,” fantasy as a lens on daily life rather than an escape from it.

That’s a useful corrective for how maternity fashion usually gets framed. The industry tends to treat pregnancy dressing as purely functional — solve the practical problem, and the styling can wait. Blazy’s version of Chanel argues the opposite: the story and the function should never have been separated in the first place. A garment can carry meaning and still work for the life you’re actually living.

That’s the same logic behind why every ETĀPE piece has to pass a simple test: would you wear it if you weren’t pregnant. Blazy paired fantasy with function throughout the collection — precisely the standard maternity wear should be held to, and rarely is.

What this actually means for how you dress

You’re not going to wear couture through your third trimester, and neither am I. But the principles scale down perfectly well:

Look for visible construction, not hidden accommodation. If a design choice is doing real work — a drawstring, a pleat, a seam — let it show. Concealment is what makes maternity wear look like maternity wear.

Structure earns you range.

A well-built waistband or panel doesn’t just expand — it holds its shape when it’s not expanding, which is what makes a piece wearable long after the reason for buying it has passed.

Don’t separate the story from the function.

A garment can be about something — confidence, identity, the version of you that hasn’t gone anywhere — without sacrificing an ounce of practicality. That was true on the Chanel runway, and it’s true in your wardrobe.

Couture exists to push an idea to its most extreme, uncompromised form. Maternity dressing has spent decades doing the opposite — compromising by default. Watching Paris this season, it’s hard not to notice how much of what’s being celebrated as visionary is just good, honest construction. Which is, at a much smaller and more wearable scale, exactly what we’ve been building.