FILM THEORY

Drawing on a cultural tradition that has launched a thousand icons, AHLEM Fall–Winter 2025 explores the enduring legacy of French cinema. Featuring uncompromising direction, character-driven stories, poetic gestures and precise editing, this collection celebrates the human capacity for transforming raw experience into art.

Ever since the Lumière brothers introduced film projection to the world in 1895, Paris has been a cradle of cinematic innovation. Against the city’s dramatic backdrops, generations of French film artists—poetic realists, cinéma vérité documentarians, Nouvelle Vague revolutionaries, pioneering female directors—have shown how style can amplify meaning. Along the way, eyewear has played a crucial part in the imagemaking. Think of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg’s cat-eyes in Breathless, Catherine Deneuve’s mod goggles in Belle de Jour, or Alain Delon’s tortoiseshells in La Piscine —each an indelible collision of object and identity.

Channeling Paris’s rich filmmaking heritage, AHLEM Fall–Winter 2025 applies directorial perspective and discipline to a new cast of timeless icons. Through bold forms, innovative techniques and nuanced storytelling, these focused styles invite cinematic self-expression. Any one of these silhouettes can be the narrative hero. It only depends whose story is being told."