On March 5, 2026, at the Hilton Paris Opéra, Fashion Week was also playing out on its periphery. With NYC Live! @ Fashion Week in Paris, it wasn’t about imitating the big names on the official schedule. The event showed something else: fashion from the margins, satellite events, houses on the rise. It also revealed producers who circulate talent, and designers who came to Paris seeking a unique spotlight.
Presentation
Announced on Fashion Week Online and promoted by the NYC Live! site, the event took place in the heart of Fall-Winter 2026 Women’s Fashion Week. For the exacting William Michael Reid, it’s a milestone. For the first time, his initiative no longer orbits solely around the Paris week: it is included in an official online narrative. A discreet but real consecration for a producer who has imposed himself season after season through rare energy and an almost obsessive discipline.
The venue matters. The Hilton Paris Opéra offers exactly what William Michael Reid says he looks for in the interview he gave to Fashion Week Online. An elegant setting, intimate enough to maintain tension, clear enough to give each show its visual sharpness.
William Michael Reid, founder and director of NYC Live!, visible on his personal Instagram as well as via the event account, is the linchpin. Producer, publicist, conductor, he doesn’t just stage a fashion show. He builds its ecosystem, from venue to casting, production to communication. He also controls the circulation of images and the promise of international exposure. The portrait that emerges is of a demanding, hardworking man who pushes himself to exhaustion, for whom excellence becomes a trademark.
The show was presented by Dabo Kadima, producer, director and TV host. His presence provided a clear through-line, between stage command and sense of rhythm. In a format where young brands, independent production and international ambition intersect, his presence helped give unity to the whole.
Ecostylia is following an event from his production for the third time, after our report on NYC Live! @ Fashion Week Paris 2025 and our coverage of An Olympic Night of Fashion Paris 2024. This loyalty is no accident. Our DNA was first closely linked to fashion. It also pushes us off the beaten path to spotlight emerging designers. That’s exactly what this show allows season after season, with stubborn consistency.
The flyer listed nine names, but the runway reminded us that a live show never fully obeys the printed program. Luis Machicao, whom we interviewed for Ecostylia, did not walk this time. Manish Vaid, whom we also interviewed, was present but backstage, without a walk. The final block unfolded in two distinct phases. Reconstructing the images and running order, we still count nine observed sequences, despite the absence of one name from the announced line-up.
Compared to the official calendar relayed by Vogue Business, NYC Live! remains a parallel format. That’s precisely what makes it interesting. The event says something about an expanded Fashion Week. Paris also acts as an amplifier for smaller, more mobile brands, sometimes still finding their place.
Collections And Designers
Alve’ Alexander / Black Pearl Collection
First walk, first statement. The feminine silhouette is sharp, frontal, conceived like a curtain-raiser. Alve’ Alexander, associated with Black Pearl Collection and best seen via Instagram @2cmelook, opens the show with an immediate presence. Nothing is excessive. The aim is to set a tone without overload. His strongest public anchor for now remains his Instagram, more so than a truly stabilized brand website. In 2025, Luxury Place already saw Black Pearl Collection as an emerging signature. The magazine emphasized a vivid, chic, unapologetic palette.
Mokodu Fall
Mokodu Fall (Instagram @fallmokodu ; Mokodu Fall Design) delivers the most graphic moment of the evening. This multi-disciplinary artist’s site claims "painting on clothing." In front of the runway, the formula takes shape. The material is treated as an expressive surface, almost like a wearable canvas. The garment doesn’t only seek the correctness of cut. It wants to show the painter’s hand, motifs, gesture. It also carries an energy stamped with the seal of eternal Africa. Fashion Police Nigeria links the brand to Pape Macodou Fall, Senegalese artist. The site also recalls his exhibitions in France, Italy and Senegal.
Enoka Fonseka Paris
Enoka Fonseka Paris (Instagram @enokafonseka_fashion_designer_) signs the third walk with a floral, enveloping proposition attentive to the silhouette as a whole. It’s not just a dress advancing but an apparition. Everything reflects a total look approach: garment, hair, ornament respond in the same breath. The choice is to dazzle, unapologetically. That gives this passage its singularity. We want more. In an interview with Life.lk, Enoka Fonseka recalls being born in Negombo, Sri Lanka, before settling in Paris. Keri-Lise Anderson’s profile also shows her as attentive to hair as to clothing.
Amy Chiew / Nottingheels
With Nottingheels (Instagram @nottingheels.my, Instagram @amychiew2020 ; Nottingheels), the show shifts from look to function. The brand’s site champions an elegant yet comfortable fit, designed to meet practical needs. On the runway, that philosophy appears less decorative than it seems. The shoe is not a final detail: it’s the foundation around which the rest organizes. In the brand presentation, Amy Chiew, Malaysian designer, presents herself as founder and creative director of Nottingheels, launched in 2017. The brand claims a handmade shoe, conceived for style, comfort and foot support.
Ivan Hoyos / Hoyos Paris
Ivan Hoyos (Instagram @maisonhoyos, Instagram @ivan_hoyos30 ; Maison Hoyos) places the bag at the center of the show’s vocabulary. At HOYOS, the accessory doesn’t merely accompany a deliberately sober silhouette for the occasion: it gives it its axis. In Between Two Worlds, a Look, Ivan Hoyos explicitly links the house to his Colombian roots and life in France. He defends an anchored, sincere luxury carried by leather goods. That tension surfaces on the runway, where the object almost attains manifesto value. Identity, material, image desire: everything condenses into a bag.
Jelena Zoric / Lovely Apple
Jelena Zoric (Instagram @lovelyapple.official, Instagram @misslovelyapple ; Lovely Apple) delivers one of the most recognizable looks of the evening. The motifs evoking QR Codes are not a simple print: they already belong to Lovely Apple’s visual language. The brand site and collection pages outline a fashion based on the dialogue between surface, signal and visual recognition. On the runway, the effect is immediate. The eye locks on and refuses to let go. The Lovely Apple Collection page presents Jelena Zoric as one of the most noticed new designers thanks to her QR Code fashion. Mutrea also stresses the meeting between Lovely Apple and Marcel Munz’s universe.
Waldy Lorot And Marine Blondel / MBC Paris
MBC Paris (Instagram @mbcparis, Instagram @mbcparisorganisation) diverts the show toward floral, couture, near-ceremonial. It’s neither the most minimal nor the most discreet moment, and that’s precisely what makes it identifiable. Material, ornament, overall composition: everything seeks visual density. We leave dry tailoring to enter a dramaturgy of the garment. In 2024, AdL Mag already described the MBC world as bold, sensual and graceful. This lineage helps read this very floral passage.
Stand Tall : Diana Massiera / Tallents Models
The Stand Tall block opens the finale. Led by Diana Massiera and Tallents Models (Instagram @mannequinmystic, Instagram @tallents_models), it almost literally redraws the runway’s scale. The silhouettes, very tall, change the show’s rhythm and the reading of space. But this finale is not a homogeneous block: it unfolds in two parts, with LLOSA for the agency’s male models, then Adina Couture for the female models. The Tallents Models account presents itself as an agency dedicated to the very tall. At NYC Live!, Diana Massiera appears responsible for casting and marketing, with a production coordination role that clearly goes beyond her initial brief.
LLOSA
In the first part of the finale, LLOSA dresses Tallents Models’ male models. The proposal extends the verticality effect inherent to Stand Tall, but also gives it a clearer stylistic direction. The line remains taut, readable, designed to make this final ascent more than a simple succession of silhouettes.
Adina Couture
In the second part of the Stand Tall finale, Adina Couture (Instagram @adina_couture_.fr_, Instagram @by_adina_couture_ ; Adina Couture) dresses Tallents Models’ female models. The wardrobe advances with a clear idea of identity. On her site, Adina Ntankeu describes fashion of unique pieces, nourished by an Afro-Western dialogue and uncompromising material work. That is felt in this final passage. The silhouettes are more assertive, less floating, as if the show wanted to end not on an impression, but on a signature.
On Upcyclinarium, Adina Ntankeu presents herself as a stylist-designer and indicates she has already released four collections. The profile also lists several 2025 exhibitions, from Paris to Liège.
Happy Surprises To Come
NYC Live! in Paris is not just another show in an overcrowded week. It’s a way to exist alongside the main schedule. Paris becomes a symbolic filter, a testing stage, a machine to make visible what would otherwise remain in the shadows.
William Michael Reid plays a decisive role. Not that he anoints these designers with an authoritative gesture: he builds them a context, a place, a narrative, an order, a production, an audience. It is this patient, precise architecture that gives the whole its coherence.
It reads back through our report on NYC Live! @ Fashion Week Paris 2025. And our coverage of An Olympic Night of Fashion Paris 2024. It also continues our interview with Manish Vaid and our profile of Luis Machicao. This new chapter is not isolated. It’s another variation on the same stage, one more act in a play written season after season.
In a Fashion Week dominated by established houses, this kind of event reminds us of a simple truth. Parisian fashion isn’t only played out on central runways. It’s also played in these more mobile, more avant-garde evenings, sometimes uneven, but often more revealing of what might matter tomorrow.
Photo credit: Felipe Vasquez, of Flipz Photography, @flipzphotography, (Washington, DC, United States)