If Thom Browne is a house set to define a new generation of American tailoring and playfulness in wool, then perhaps Enfant Riches Déprimés is an antithetical edge, willing to cut out the viscera and bleed it dry. Literally translated into “Depressed Rich Kids,” ERD has undeniably leaned into its namesake with Henri Alexander Levy’s canon of work since he founded the brand in 2012, curating an adeptly nihilistic portrayal of the future’s youth.
Their Spring/Summer 2026 collection was presented alongside a series of sculptures made as a collaboration between Levy and Rick Owens industrial designer Connor Lawrence Hickey: “Crypt,” a glass coffin entombing a sleeping boy in a cold steel blue satin suit, “Only Child Swingset,” a singular metal belt swing where a small girl in a black-belted golden babydoll dress swayed akin to a pendulum throughout the show, and “Sans Titre 111 (Bronze Armless Dickman),” the only solo venture by Levy, a bronze Alberto Giacometti-esque figure extending from a wishbone torso and suspended within a larger metal frame. Models maneuvered around these totems, adorning garments that spoke to Levy’s larger vision of ecosystems of violence in which we are both perpetrators and victims alike.
ERD is notorious for their military uniformity which continued to reign supreme in Spring/Summer 2026, in some ways more casual than others: International school girl après-smoke break in lolled biker leather, the diplomat’s son in an undone tie, the diligent literature student draped in hydrangea crochet and a pure white bow hung as if it were a medal– all characters in Levy’s diorama. If there is anything to know, however, about the tableaus Levy is carving, it is that we cannot simply stop at citizens; we must see the systems.
ERD has built a reputation for a borderline fetishistic use of leather within their collections, but Spring/Summer 2026 instilled a uniquely intrinsic sadism within the textile– a cloth born from violence can only ever emanate it. Just as olive wool is a military motif, leather becomes the form of choice for Levy’s fictional regime. Head-to-toe leather shirts and trousers cascaded into matching rain boots, oversized house-code jackets accompanied belts with fastened safety pins and recurring conductor’s caps. Bounty hunters wore leather pieces as if they were tally marks on a rifle stock. Another motif omnipresent across ERD collections is Levy’s use of silver– in Spring/Summer 2025 as button hooks and spoon pendants(a playful and simultaneously grim nod to Levy’s previous struggles with opiate addiction), and now, in Spring/Summer 2026, as logo-script engraved emblem belts, insignias that are equal parts police badge and championship cumberbunds: indicators as to who’s calling the shots.
Setting their Autumn/Winter 2025 collection in Serbia, a Slavic temperament has undeniably haunted Levy; oligarchs sloth about in two-piece double-breasted suits the color of the blood moon, their wives in white gowns with lapels and buttons akin to a colonel’s jacket, tailored for a meeting with the magistrate. Other characters (or “junkies” as Levy prefers to refer to them) in the show illustrate a world ravaged by infinite winters and broadband intellectualism: pinstripe academy uniforms, an executioner in a custom coat, an officer whose cape flaunts his presence to timid prey, princes inceremonial belts and naval jackets that circle the throne like vultures. It’s a group tortured by their philosophy and the equinox. With the final two looks we see the cornerstones of this world: The omnipresent widow, draped in ink-black silk that frays at the edges. She’s no longer sure of what she mourns– her past, her people, her fate. She will weep in her tower endlessly. The emperor, in pure white general’s garb. An indulgence of innocence he knows is not true, and an assurance that he’ll never be stained by the violence he orchestrates.
ERD’s scaled-production catalogues accessible through online retail and stockists often fall flat in their pandering to a market of drooling streetwear hyenas who pine for the comfortable security of graphic hoodies and status-quo denim in a capitalist-punk contradiction. Occasionally, the crossing of these ideals clouds the temper of ERD’s runway presentations in piecemeal graphic placements or mischaracterized castoff denim, but for the most part, Levy mutates the momentum of this bandmate-Bruce-Wayne movement into pure rocket fuel for ERD’s runways, as exemplified by Spring/Summer 2026, to craft some of the most cohesive fables in Paris fashion week.
Levy serves a fantasy for those craving something darker and dirtier: a wasteland of aristocracy where he sells the wardrobe required to traverse it. Steel-toed boots vying to be scuffed and neckties begging to be too tight. ERD’s dollhouse is pay-to-play, but for those itching to draw some blood, it’s worth every penny.
Words by Coulter Clifford
Graphic by Aubrey Lauer and Emma Sellner