It is this strange space between what remains and what has already passed that sits at the heart of AFTERIMAGE, Luis Carvalho’s FW26 collection.
Presented during the latest edition of ModaLisboa, the collection moves between presence and absence, exploring clothes as though they could retain traces of another moment. Silhouettes carry a quiet sense of the past while simultaneously reshaping it for the present.
But perhaps the most fascinating expression of that idea doesn’t come through fabric at all.
It comes in silver.
For FW26, Luis Carvalho joins forces for the first time with Topázio, the emblematic Portuguese silversmith from Gondomar with more than a century of history behind its craft.
And together, they turn memory into jewellery.
How do you design the sensation of remembering something?
Not the memory itself, necessarily, but its residue.
The collection’s silhouettes exist within that tension, moving between something familiar and something newly imagined. And it is within the details that this concept becomes particularly intriguing.
Luis Carvalho and Topázio looked towards objects we already recognise: pieces with established functions, forms and associations, and reconsidered them through precious metal.
Suddenly, the everyday becomes extraordinary.
A collar is no longer simply a collar.
A tie doesn’t need fabric.
And an object can feel familiar even when everything about its materiality has changed.
The collaboration introduces a series of jewellery pieces handcrafted in silver using Topázio’s traditional expertise.
Among them are a Club style collar, a brooch, a set of cuffs and, perhaps most strikingly, a silver tie.
It’s the kind of object that makes you look twice.
The tie is so deeply embedded in the language of dressing that its shape is instantly recognisable. But remove the softness of textile and recreate it in silver, and suddenly the familiar becomes sculptural.
It exists somewhere between jewellery, fashion and object.
Exactly where AFTERIMAGE seems most comfortable.
There is another piece that takes the collection’s relationship with memory somewhere even more explicitly Portuguese.
A silver clutch inscribed with the word “Saudade.”
Few words could have been more appropriate.
Saudade is famously difficult to translate neatly. It can contain longing and nostalgia, affection and absence, the emotional presence of something that isn’t physically there.
In AFTERIMAGE, that feeling becomes an object.
Something solid. Something held in the hand.
There is a beautiful contradiction in taking an emotion associated with absence and giving it the permanence of silver.
You can’t hold a memory. But perhaps you can hold its afterimage.
The collaboration becomes even more compelling when you consider the two worlds meeting within it.
Luis Carvalho brings the contemporary language of fashion.
Topázio brings more than a century of Portuguese silversmithing tradition.
Based in Gondomar, a place intrinsically connected to Portugal’s jewellery and goldsmithing heritage, Topázio contributes traditional craftsmanship to pieces that deliberately challenge expectations of what jewellery can be.
Each object was sculpted by hand with precision, incorporating motifs and details that honour the house’s long history of craftsmanship.
And rather than allowing tradition to become something static, the collaboration uses it as material for experimentation.
That feels important.
Because preserving craft doesn’t necessarily mean reproducing the past exactly as it was.
Sometimes the most interesting way to honour a tradition is to ask what else it can become.
A silver tie.
A sculptural collar.
Cuffs.
A clutch carrying a single emotionally loaded Portuguese word.
These pieces don’t sit comfortably within the conventional definition of accessories.
And that’s precisely why they work.
They occupy the boundary between function and poetry, objects that reference something useful while simultaneously existing as expressions of an idea.
There is something familiar about each one.
And something slightly strange.
Much like memory itself.
We recognise its shape, but every time we return to it, something has changed.
Fashion is obsessed with what comes next.
The next season.
The next silhouette.
The next idea.
But AFTERIMAGE proposes something more interesting: perhaps moving forward doesn’t require forgetting what came before.
Luis Carvalho’s FW26 collection allows past and present to coexist rather than compete.
And through Topázio, that dialogue becomes particularly literal.
A century old Portuguese craft enters a contemporary fashion collection without being reduced to nostalgia. Traditional techniques aren’t displayed behind glass or treated as something untouchable.
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