The starting point was a book. Mona Chollet’s 2022 work In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial sent Pauline Dujancourt down a particular path — not toward the familiar visual clichés of witchcraft, but toward something more specific and more moving: the sisterhood at the centre of it. Many of the women killed as witches throughout history, she discovered, were targeted essentially for being part of all-female communities — women who lived close to one another, shared knowledge, shared craft.

“I started looking at these old images of elderly women making lace by hand using wooden bobbins,” the Paris-born, London-based designer said after the show, “and it reminded me of me and the team. We don’t outsource a lot — we hand-make everything, and we’re like a kind of sisterhood, all working next to each other. I started thinking what would have happened to us, basically, if we’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The show reflected that thinking with care and intention. Crepuscular lighting and an eerie dream-pop soundtrack set the tone. An enormous sculpture of eggshells was pinned against the walls, inspired by the late artist Maria Bartuszová. Fragments of broken plaster eggshells were scattered along the runway — and audibly cracked under the models’ feet as they walked.

The collection opened in all black, which felt right: an opulent skirt cut from swirling pleated silk; a dress combining a lace front with knitted bell sleeves; separates made from a tulle macramé that was the technical highlight of the opening section — an ingenious construction that made what should have been the heaviest of knits appear almost weightless. But by look seven, Dujancourt began letting the light in. What followed was a stream of delicate lavenders, duck-egg blues and misty greens. “I wanted to pay tribute to these women who don’t have monuments made in their honor,” she said. “I wanted the colors to bring a bit of beauty and magic to their story.”

Dujancourt’s knitwear has always been the signature of the brand, but what makes it distinctive is that it never reads as technical showing-off. It carries feeling. “I love going back to the way people used to hand-knit and discovering very complicated stitches that you can only find in books or read with a specific diagram, that you have to understand like sheet music,” she said. The history of knitting stretches back millennia — and it’s genuinely thrilling to watch a designer still finding new territory within it.