Arthur Arbesser has always built his collections around what he calls “small stories” — not grand concepts, but intimate, personal ones. For spring 2026, the story belonged to his childhood neighbour in Vienna.

Maria Lassnig, born in 1919, was one of the most significant Austrian artists of the twentieth century. She lived next door to Arbesser as he grew up, and he often ran errands for her carrying bags of green apples and lemons from the supermarket. Those bags became a print. It’s the kind of detail that tells you everything about how Arbesser works: attentive, affectionate, rooted in lived experience rather than abstract research.

Lassnig came of age at a time when women had to fight simply to be recognised as painters, and Arbesser was struck from boyhood by the way her clothing set her apart from the everyday texture of Viennese life. In the 1970s she made a series of short films exploring identity, frequently using clowns as a recurring motif — and that thread ran through the collection in the form of circus references: diamond-pattern collars, stripes, oversized polka dots, checkerboard jersey sets, and acidic colour palettes that had a performative brightness to them.

Her paintings carried a faded, green-tinged patina that Arbesser translated into bold, instinctive brushstrokes applied to white canvas, which became another print. Her 1975 work Sleeping With a Tiger inspired the collection’s animalier motifs — a first for the designer — executed in cotton drill, poplin and stretch tulle.

Lassnig’s lifelong subject was her own body, examined through relentless self-portraiture. Arbesser isn’t making self-portraits exactly, but there’s something similarly exposed in how he works — using clothes to express something personal while reaching outward toward connection. “Clothes remain on the surface,” he said, “but I wanted to convey a personality that had left a mark on me.” That tension — between the surface of a garment and the depth of the person it evokes — is what gives this collection its quiet charge.