ICS Paris earns finalist spot at the Junk Kouture Paris City Final 2026

A milestone for our school community

Junk Kouture is far more than a competition — it is a global platform empowering the next generation of designers to reimagine waste as raw material. To be represented on that stage is a tremendous honour for the entire ICS Paris community.

Congratulations to our finalists

A very special congratulations goes to Ms Desaint, our dedicated Art Teacher, and to our DP2 students Alix and Emmanuelle, whose collaborative hard work, artistic vision, and shared passion for sustainability brought this entry to life. Their ability to transform recycled and discarded materials into high-fashion art is a testament to the extraordinary talent nurtured here at ICS Paris — and to the quality of mentorship that makes it possible.

The concept: a dress that speaks

Bride Unbuilt is not simply a garment — it is a statement. At its heart, the piece confronts the reality of forced and child marriage, responding directly to two United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). The traditional bridal silhouette — a symbol of celebration and choice — is deliberately deconstructed and reimagined as something fragile, unfinished, and imposed. The title itself carries a double meaning: a bride who was never given the chance to choose, and a structure still being built, still capable of change.

The visual references drawn upon by Emmanuelle and Alix speak to this tension beautifully. The dramatic sculptural volumes of Jean Louis Sabaji and the otherworldly couture of Sohee Park informed the silhouette's ambition, while the haunting imagery of The Handmaid's Tale shaped the hood and headpiece — a nod to the erasure of identity and autonomy that forced marriage can represent. The palette, a stark and deliberate white and grey, echoes both a wedding gown and the raw dusty surfaces of a construction site.

The concept: two paradoxes, one powerful dress

Bride Unbuilt is anchored in two striking conceptual paradoxes that give the work its intellectual and emotional depth.

These two paradoxes — one ecological, one social — shaped every artistic, technical, and symbolic decision made throughout the creative process, tying the work to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals 5 (Gender Equality) and 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). The visual language reinforces the message: inspired by the sculptural couture of Jean Louis Sabaji and Sohee Park, and the haunting imagery of The Handmaid's Tale for the hood and headpiece, the piece is rendered entirely in white and grey — the colour of both a wedding dress and a construction site.

Building the dress: from rubble to runway

With the school undergoing major renovations, Emmanuelle and Alix showed remarkable initiative by asking whether they could salvage the discarded tarpaulins and rubble bags being generated by the building works. The answer was yes — and with that, a construction site became a couture supply room.

But working with industrial plastic presented entirely new challenges that no tutorial could fully prepare them for. How do you join tarpaulins together cleanly? How do you construct a rigid plastic corset that can actually conform to a human body? There were no ready answers. The students had to research, experiment, fail, and try again — a process that, as Ms Desaint reflects, is precisely what makes the project so valuable.

Learning alongside students

What makes this project particularly special is the candid and courageous pedagogical approach taken by Ms Lucie Desaint. An artist and experienced Visual Arts teacher, she came into this project having never sewn before and with no prior knowledge of the fashion industry — starting, as she puts it, at exactly the same level as her students.

Rather than seeing this as a disadvantage, Ms Desaint embraced it as a deliberate pedagogical stance — one that demonstrated powerfully to her students that a lack of initial expertise is no barrier to achievement, provided the work is grounded in structured experimentation, problem-solving, collaboration, and the willingness to seek out new knowledge. She drew on her professional network to connect with people working in the fashion and haute couture industries, modelling exactly the kind of resourcefulness she hoped to inspire in her students.

From our school corridors to the runway

What makes Bride Unbuilt especially remarkable is where its materials came from. ICS Paris is currently undergoing building renovations, and rather than seeing the surrounding construction as a disruption, Emmanuelle, Alix, and Ms Desaint saw an opportunity. The school's own renovation site became their atelier's supply room.

Heavy-duty construction tarps and plastic bags collected from the building works were cleaned, cut, layered, and shaped into the sweeping skirt and voluminous body of the gown. The translucent, crinkled quality of the plastic — so often destined for landfill — transforms under the hand of these young designers into something that catches light and moves with surprising grace. Photographs taken directly on-site during the renovations served as reference points throughout the process, grounding the design in the physical reality of the school's transformation.

This is the essence of Junk Kouture's philosophy made real: waste not as a limitation, but as a medium. The renovation materials that would otherwise have been discarded now carry meaning, message, and artistry.

The creative team behind the work

A very special congratulations goes to Ms Lucie Desaint, our Art Teacher, whose mentorship guided the project from its earliest sketches to the final piece. And to our DP2 students Emmanuelle Yap and Alix Nicolas Grau — your artistic vision, your commitment to the message, and your willingness to build something genuinely new from what others discard is a source of enormous pride for everyone at ICS Paris.