The recap season four: Emily Cooper could be looking at a whole new life in Rome, swapping the City of Light for the City of Seven Hills, and also has decisions, decisions, decisions galore because she has to face pursuing a newfound romance with Marcello or reuniting with Gabriel. (I mean: Nice work if you can get it.) Meanwhile…. Uh-oh. Oops. Sorry! Wrong season four I am talking about here. I do of course mean Harris Reed’s fourth outing for the house of Nina Ricci. It’s Harris in Paris that we should be discussing.
So, another recap then: Season number four sees Reed growing into his role really rather nicely. Backstage, he acknowledged that a lot has happened personally—his 2023 marriage, more time than he ever dreamed of spending in Paris, as well as a new home in London—and professionally and that time has given him a greater affinity with the city and what it means to be designing for it and, to some degree, in its image.
“There’s still the black, the white, the bows, and the polka dots,” Reed said, “I liked the idea of not letting go where I started. Yet when it comes to doing this collection, I really think I was starting to understand who the woman was and where she was going. As someone who is between Paris and London and is always traveling, I realized it was about intention.”
What that meant collection-wise is that Reed retained his love of a statement-making suit but allowed it to sigh and soften, which was a smart move; where once were super-dramatic shoulders (now they’re simply dramatic), he brought a fresh and light fluidity, adding a back-baring cowl drape to the rear of his jackets. As for his equally statement-making exuberant evening looks, where he used his much-loved polka dots on a stretch-jersey lace, he embraced greater body diversity in sizing. (Reed remains one of the very few designers in Paris willing to have that conversation—and act upon it.)
He still loves the idea of clothes making an entrance. But perhaps as a sign of his increasing comfort with Nina Ricci, he rethought the pyrotechnics. Instead it might mean one trick—for instance, a plissé panel of organza that moved upward to veil the face or fanned out at the back from an otherwise svelte black evening dress.
To tell the story of his season four, Reed was, he said, revisiting the era of the house from around 1962 to 1965. This resulted in the snappy belted short trenches and the equally snappy safari jackets shown, in 2025 and not 1965 style, with teeny-tiny, blink-and-you’d-miss-them shorts. Yet that’s an intriguing era to be drawn to, the period when a very done formality was about to ebb away into the freewheelin’ fluidity of the late 1960s, then ’70s, and beyond. This coming spring is coincidentally offering similar choices: liberated gauzy softness or dressed to the hilt. As for Reed, he sees no reason why you can’t have both.