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It’s moments after Lou de Betoly showed her terrific fall 2026 collection—another of her odes to the body and what happens to it when you let it interact with lingerie, embellishment, and yarn, all rendered with couture-esque technique—and she’s pondering the question of what inspired her to make it. “I have to say something,” said de Betoly, laughing, “and it’s that sometimes I feel like I am repeating myself. Do you know that book, Exercises de Style, by Raymond Queneau?” I tell her I sadly do not. De Betoly fills me in. “It’s a very small book, and it has one short story, and he repeats that story 99 times, but always from a different perspective. And I felt better when I remembered reading it, because I had been thinking to myself, actually”—she started laughing again—“that, yeah, I do just repeat myself.”
Let’s say here that de Betoly is as modest as she is talented. It is certainly true that she has chosen to work within one specific idiom—the bare, the spangled, the corseted, and the bra-strapped—something heightened by the fact she has also chosen to show only once a year. And yet, out of those self-imposed limitations, she has been able to create magic—humorous, cool, hard-core, glamorous, and unapologetically sexy, magic. This latest collection of hers, a sublimely perverse—or perversely sublime, if you prefer—mix of lace bodysuits, moulded second skin dresses, and hose adorned with beading, came from de Betoly setting herself a strict challenge: She would only work with three things that she had collected over the years. That meant the boxes of buttons she has been hoarding since she was a kid in the 1990s, piles of yarn, and a mountain of vintage bras.
It’s a testament to her talent that she could make out of that trio of elements a collection brimming with ideas and plenty of brio: The bra cups were wittily deconstructed to become knee pads on skinny pants or hip panniers and shoulder pads on a jacket; the buttons were mounted onto teeny-tiny dresses with Lesage-like precision; and the threads of the yarn were combined with what started life as lacy underwear into the hottest, and chicest, of suits. That the French-born de Betoly once worked for Jean Paul Gaultier’s couture house in Paris is entirely evident; she knows her shit, if I may say. Another thing I may be so bold to say is that when stylists up and down the land start scouring for looks for their A-List clients to wear on the stairs of the Met in New York come the first Monday in May, when the curtain raiser for the Costume Institute’s new bodies-centric Costume Art exhibition happens, they should be sliding into de Betoly’s DMs, and seeing if she can make magic happen all over again.
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