Lucila Safdie Builds Dreamscapes with Tristesse Impériale

Lucila Safdie does not design clothes so much as she builds dreamscapes. For Spring/Summer 2026, that dreamscape is “tristesse impériale”: a moodboard of obsession, inheritance, and the fragile fever of girlhood, refracted through both history and the pixelated glare of the present.

Photography by Carina Kehlet Schou

Safdie’s muses are none other than the Romanov sisters, recast not as tragic imperial daughters but as spectral adolescents, halfway between diary entries and browser tabs, still in the process of becoming. In her hands, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia drift into the twenty-first century: four phantoms of girlhood scrolling through blue light, looping endlessly in the algorithms of adolescence.

Their wardrobes, accordingly, play between the heirloom and the everyday. Princess sleeves and ruffled trims are not relics here; they are carried forward into jersey bodysuits, chiffon skirts, and pointelle knits. 

Jewellery by Elza White reinforces this act of becoming: pearls are tried on, cast off, tried on again, the borrowed ritual of identity-making. A teenager doesn’t yet know what they want; Safdie insists they must therefore want everything.

Spanish painter Chechu Álava’s work is embedded into the collection like pressed flowers in a diary, bringing a painterly haze to the sharp pangs of youth. Álava’s fragile portraits echo the colour story: white grounds punctuated with pink jolts and striped interruptions, the way obsessions flare and fade without warning. They sit easily alongside Safdie’s silhouettes, each one a study in contrasts: between inheritance and reinvention, tragedy and play.

The show itself, created in collaboration with movement director Daria Blum, translated this liminality into motion. The models did not stride so much as drift, rehearsing small, ritualised gestures of girlhood. These subtleties underscored Safdie’s vision, that fashion, at its most intimate, is not performance for others, but rehearsal for oneself.

Safdie’s “tristesse impériale” feels haunted - by inheritance, by expectation, by the constant negotiation of who one is allowed to be. Yet it is also, crucially, about reinvention. The collection recognises the compulsive churn of identity in a digital age, when the question “Who do you want to be tomorrow?” must be answered again and again, as if under the glare of endless tabs left open.

Safdie offers no closure, and she doesn’t need to. Instead, she stages girlhood as an ongoing gamble: every outfit a card turned over, every silhouette a chance taken. Nostalgia, obsession, performance - it is all still in play.