This French brand is selling a mermaid tail for its Summer 26 collection A deep dive into the world of Algieri Paris

Far from sunny imagery and Riviera clichés, the Parisian brand Algieri reinvents summer under the glare of underground spotlights. For his Summer 26 capsule collection, darkly and soberly entitled "Les Abysses" (The Abysses), Raphaël Algieri fuses fashion, artifice, and queer culture, going so far as to offer a spectacular handcrafted mermaid tail.

The body in transition

The figure of the mermaid is the central element of Raphaël Algieri’s reflection. Neither entirely human nor entirely mythological, she embodies a body in transition: constructed, observed, transformed. Through her, the campaign questions notions of gender, visibility, and the way bodies are shaped by society and liberated through performance.

Here, the symbols of summer remain present but are no longer quite in their proper place: water, rest, and the body appear in an altered form, transposed into Algieri Paris's usual yet somewhat unusual universe. To complete the panoply, the Algieri mermaid features a towel—the leisure piece par excellence—a bag, and a bag holder. These are more commercial pieces that nonetheless support the narrative of this summer capsule collection.

When night metamorphoses the myth

At the heart of this collection lies a hybrid piece on the borderline between fashion and art: a mermaid tail created in collaboration with Belgian artisan Mermethyste. For the campaign, drag queen and DJ Kirara takes it over, metamorphosing into a creature that is both unsettling and inspiring.

During the launch party, this aesthetic of mutation shifted from image to reality. A true profane altar, a glass table served as a pedestal for a model frozen in her mermaid tail, whose gaze, erased by white contact lenses, stared into the void with a spectral coldness. Not far from this apparition, a second figure of the night completed the picture, wearing briefs entirely embroidered with stones, like a fossilized second skin. By orchestrating this confrontation of hybrid creatures, Algieri lays the foundations of a theater of the strange where beauty is conjugated in the plural and the radical.

A fashion connected to the Parisian underground

Beyond the garment itself, Algieri is inseparable from the Parisian queer scene. The brand regularly collaborates with artists, creators, and performers from the techno, drag, and underground scenes, affirming its unwavering commitment to alternative cultures. By blurring the boundaries between fashion, music, and performance, Algieri offers an expressive platform for emerging talents and contributes, collection after collection, to keeping a free and radical aesthetic alive.

Founded in 2022 after studies at LISAA and HEC Paris, the brand carries a name steeped in history. Algieri is the name of the designer's great-grandmother, who chose to keep and pass it down in the 1940s. A form of perpetuation, but also of divergence, which can be found today in the creative director's work. The brand is part of a committed, local approach: the creations come to life from deadstock and recycled materials, through essentially artisanal manufacturing within a Parisian workshop.

In capturing the myth of the mermaid to drag it into the sweat and humidity of techno clubs, Algieri delivers much more than a summer collection. "Les Abysses" stands out as the manifesto of a fashion that refuses to smooth over its rough edges, reminding us that it is precisely in the darkness and on the margins that tomorrow's silhouettes are invented.