Ocean Apocalypse 2026
Photoshoot captured by Eugène Riconneaus. Thanks to: ChangeNOW and Grand Palais Rmn
Eugène Riconneaus presents “Ocean Apocalypse”, a return to fashion centered on materials
Unveiled at ChangeNOW at the Grand Palais in Paris, the “Ocean Apocalypse” dress marks a new chapter for the French creative and material innovator, whose ER Ocean Recherche project is positioning design as a tool for translating marine-based material research into fashion form.
PARIS — Eugène Riconneaus is returning to fashion, though not in the conventional sense. Best known in the early 2010s for a women’s footwear line shaped by sensuality, rebellion and circular design, the French creative has spent the past several years moving upstream — away from the finished object and deeper into the materials that make fashion possible. That trajectory led to the creation of ER Ocean Recherche, a next-generation textiles initiative focused on marine-based biomaterials for the fashion and luxury industries.
The result is “Ocean Apocalypse,” a couture dress unveiled at ChangeNOW at the Grand Palais in Paris, where Riconneaus’ fashion return is presented in dialogue with his broader material research. The project brings together different dimensions of his practice — creative direction, photography, art, textile experimentation and couture — while also introducing a new public reading of his work: not as a shift from one category to another, but as an expansion from product to full silhouette. ChangeNOW 2026 is taking place place at the Grand Palais from March 30th to April 1st, 2026.
“I still carry the same obsessions: the body, femininity, tension, precision, allure.
But today they move through another language — one shaped by the ocean, by material research, by failure, by science, by image-making, and by the responsibility I feel as a designer.”
If shoes were his first language, the dress becomes the next scale of that vocabulary. Riconneaus first built his name through footwear, but his public trajectory already pointed toward material experimentation: his bio traces a path from his first shoes collection, made entirely from leftover-materials, to a studio transformed into a hybrid art lab and research atelier, and later to ER Ocean Recherche, which develops marine-derived textile propositions including SeiFibre™, SeiYarn™ and SeiShell™. Garments are used as immediate validation tools for new textiles — “Brands see the material in use. No abstraction.”
That positioning also reflects a broader argument about the changing role of the designer. For Riconneaus, the next generation of fashion design cannot stop at image, styling or product direction. It must move earlier in the chain, into fibers, surfaces, sourcing, scientific translation and industrial collaboration. ER Ocean Recherche stands as both a working thesis and a research platform for the industry: a place where marine biomass is transformed into materials, and where design is used not simply to market innovation, but to make it visible, desirable and legible to brands. This logic is embedded in the company’s own language, which frames innovation as a matter of translation.
With “Ocean Apocalypse,” Riconneaus is not announcing a departure from his past in footwear so much as a deepening of it. What began with the architecture of the body through shoes has expanded into a broader authorship of matter, silhouette and narrative. The dress, presented alongside ER Ocean Recherche’s material developments at ChangeNOW, signals a return to fashion in another form: less centered on category, more centered on what the designer can now be inside the system.