MAM Debuts Under Pont Alexandre III With CUPRA in Tow

The clothes were the least interesting thing MAM sent down it’s first runway and I’m fairly sure that was deliberate.

Look at what actually walked at SOLUM Paris in June. A camel crop top and a floor-length camel skirt. A black column skirt with a cropped leather bodice. A navy floor-length vest, sharp square shoulders, nothing else going on. Flat panels of cloth in six or seven colors, cut architecturally, almost entirely unadorned. For a debut collection from a house announcing itself as multidisciplinary, that’s a strange amount of restraint, until you notice what’s wrapped around the bodies. Liquid silver coiling across a gray-blue bodice like something poured. Gold forms crawling up a black catsuit. A chrome collar that reads more like armor plating than jewelry.

The garments are a canvas. That’s the whole design logic and no press release will tell you so, because saying it out loud sounds like an admission that the clothes are secondary. They are secondary. They’re also correctly designed for the job.

Ten years from wooden watches to this

Worth knowing where this brand came from, because it recontextualizes the ambition. Jordi Enrique Albert and Anthya Tirado founded MAM in Barcelona around 2014 and they started by making watches out of wood. Within a year they had engineered the thinnest wooden watch on the market. That’s the origin story: a small ethical accessories label obsessed with pushing a difficult material further than it wants to go.

Twelve years later they’ve taken over the vaults beneath the Pont Alexandre III for a debut runway show with a car manufacturer attached. The material obsession is still the through-line, it just moved from wood to metal.

The head is the set and the set is six sets

GAIA anchored the runway, a monumental chrome-finished avatar sculpture, a serene oversized face rendered in mirror polish. The performance moved through six civilizations expanding from that single origin: Andromedans for grounding and life force, Felines for desire and instinct, Carians for movement and personal power, Arcturians for connection and collective energy, Atlantis for expression and truth, Pleiadians for intuition and expansion, ending in a nuclear-white silhouette.

Here’s the thing the photographs reveal that the concept notes don’t. GAIA gets lit a different color for each segment. Copper-rose for one passage, deep violet for another, glacial teal for a third, then back toward silver. Same sculpture, six rooms. It’s an efficient piece of staging and a genuinely good one, since a mirror-polished surface will take any color you throw at it and the chrome reads completely differently under each. An original score ran underneath, built to move from low primal pulses upward into higher frequencies.

Whether the audience followed the cosmology is another question. Watching the crowd in these images, phones up in near-unison down both sides of the runway, what got captured was the head and the metal. The six-civilization structure is scaffolding for the designers more than it is a narrative the room absorbed in real time. That’s not a criticism exactly. Most shows have private architecture.

The CUPRA part and what it actually bought them

CUPRA embodied the Carians within the show’s structure, which is a tidy way of saying the car brand got the civilization about power and forward momentum. The partnership goes back to 2024, starting with a bracelet in CUPRA’s member welcome box and growing through a second run of jewelry, keychains and bags. This was the largest chapter, 37 pieces across five collections and MAM’s first men’s jewelry line.

That last detail is where I’d push back slightly on the framing. MAM has built it’s identity on genderless design since the beginning, so a dedicated men’s line is less a new frontier than a marketing category. What’s genuinely new is the scale of the pieces and the fact that some of them are now closer to garments than accessories.

The five collections, briefly, because the names carry the ideas:

• FROM DATA – VORONOI, skeletal lattice structures built through parametric data and additive manufacturing, geometries you cannot make by hand
• EVOLUTION – THE ESSENCE OF RAW, one geometric module repeated across the body until complexity emerges from repetition
• CYBORG – WHO DRIVES WHO, aerodynamics translated into fluid forms fusing body and machine
• FRAGMENT – STRONGEST OF THE STRANGE, fractured faceted surfaces built to catch light
• REPETITION – RAVAL, the loudest of them, turning the CUPRA Raval’s character into a structure built from a repeating letter R

RAVAL went on sale at MAM’s stores immediately after the show, which is the most modern thing about the whole evening.

ULTRALIGHT CORE and why the volume is possible at all

None of this works without the engineering and the engineering is the part I find most interesting. MAM’s proprietary ULTRALIGHT CORE is a hollow construction system, metal pieces built with the visual mass of solid metal and a fraction of the weight.

That constraint explains everything on the runway. Solid metal at these volumes would be unwearable, a collar the size of the one in these images would sit on a collarbone like a yoke. Hollow it out and a model can walk in it and more to the point, a customer can wear it to dinner. Bold volume, minimal weight, in the brand’s own phrasing and the engineering premise happens to match how CUPRA talks about cars, which is presumably why the partnership works better than most fashion-automotive pairings.

After the show, CUPRA Pulse ran the afterparty with sets from Chloé Caillet and Sita Abellán, a CUPRA Raval parked at the entrance.

What I’d watch next

The debut worked and the reason it worked is that MAM knew exactly what it was good at and built a show around that rather than around what a fashion house is supposed to present. Restraint in the clothing, maximalism in the metal, one enormous sculptural object doing the work of an entire production budget.

The open question is whether the clothes stay quiet. There’s a version of the next collection where the garments start competing with the jewelry and that would be the wrong move, though I suspect it’s the tempting one now that the runway exists. The jewelry is genuinely unusual. The camel skirt is a camel skirt. Knowing the difference is the skills.