These days, fashion too often confuses visibility with action. Metaphors are veiled, and emblems stay mired in their own ambiguous symbolism, yet the latest collection from the gender-neutral French label, Jeanne Friot, offers no such illusion. Introducing Resistance, a new addition to the Idols series (the label’s response to an ever-growing rise in transphobia and authoritarianism), Friot abandons metaphor altogether, so that symbols no longer suggest, but unabashedly scream. 

Courtesy of Jeanne Friot

Resistance wears its politics—and quite literally so. Pastel blue, baby pink, and white, the colors of the trans pride flag, make up the line’s primary palette, accompanied by black, a reference to the stripe introduced by activist Raquel Willis in 2015, several years before the Black Lives Matter movement would reach its crest. Where Siren, Jeanne Friot’s previous collection, sounded the alarm, Resistance demands complete and committed presence.

Courtesy of Jeanne Friot

Clarity is the medium, with T-shirts declaring Trans Lives Matter in truck-stop lettering and Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity (the latter, a 1970s pacifist slogan, is simply poetry). Elsewhere, broad-shouldered silhouettes echo armor, as leather biker jackets and restructured tartan kilts metamorphosize into wearable emblems of defiance.

Courtesy of Jeanne Friot

With MAC Cosmetics leading beauty direction and music by ELOI, the show seemingly builds to a seeming finale, before detonating with a deftly apt prologue written by Claude-Emmanuelle, titled Offer a Riot Before It’s Too Late. In short, her words eulogize the collapse of corporate pride (“as soon as the political climate turned unfavorable, the flags vanished, inclusive campaigns stopped, and so-called goodwill evaporated”) and the co-optation of struggle (“support for LGBTQIA+ struggles was never more than a marketing calculation”), ending with a clear demand to recenter tangible, trans-led liberation. What remains, finally, is the body, dressed not for spectacle, but for revolt.

Courtesy of Jeanne Friot

“It is time to reclaim the streets, public space, and political discourse — with clarity and rage. The aim is no longer to be heard, but to demand listening. Uprising is a moral imperative. A riot must rise. Not tomorrow. Now.”

Courtesy of Jeanne Friot