It can happen to any fashion week attendee: You arrive to your assigned seat only to find that someone else is already sitting in it. “Um, excuse me, I think this is my seat?” you awkwardly announce. From there, anything can happen: profuse apologies, defensiveness, squeezing onto a backless bench because you’ve been double booked. Now imagine you get to your seat and, instead of another editor, it’s an enormous whale plushie.
As Vogue reports, at the Loewe’s fall 2026 show at Paris Fashion Week, front row guests including Sarah Pidgeon, Emily Ratajkowski, Sissy Spacek, and Metro Boomin filed into the Château de Vincennes, only to discover that several of the seats were already filled—not with people, but larger-than-life stuffed animals. Designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez tapped Mombasa-born, Cologne-based contemporary artist Cosima von Bonin to create outsized textile sculptures that sat alongside guests on the shoebox platforms that lined the runway.
Von Bonin filled the space with critters aplenty. Among them, an elegant black octopus, a pair of clams peeping out of their shells, and a regal Orca. But perhaps the biggest star of the show was a sleepy-eyed blue whale lounging louchely on the bench. His lucky seatmate? Actor Hari Nef, who christened him “Humberto.” “I think I summoned ‘Humberto’ out of the ether,” Nef said in an interview with Vogue of her naming inspiration. But she eventually had a change of heart. “I switched to ‘Antonio’ which is more popular in Andalusia,” she says, referring to Loewe’s Spanish roots. “I wanted to be authentic!”
Von Bonin’s work served as a point of inspiration for McCollough and Hernandez’s second Loewe collection, both of which share a sense of humor and playfulness. “Through our conversations [with von Bonin], the idea emerged for her to create unique art works for the show space,” the design duo wrote in their show notes. “For the fall winter 2026 show, these emblematic sea creatures and canines appear in a spectrum of fabrics and dark hues, simultaneously invading the space and sharing their seats as companionable onlookers.” We’d venture to say that their seatmates didn’t mind.
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Photo Credit: Ivan Marc / Shutterstock.com