LEVI’S COUTURE BY KOCHER

VALŪS Spoke with Couturier Christelle Kocher, the Designer Behind Levi's New Couture Capsule Collection

CHRISTELLE KOCHER

Christelle Kocher, the designer behind the high fashion brand KOCHÉ, presented her Levi's capsule in the Marais during Paris Haute Couture Week. The ten-look collection, in development since December 2025, reworks Levi's icons like the 501 jean and the Type II trucker jacket into couture pieces, using elements like embroidery, plissé, feather work, and hand-dyeing.

For Levi's, this collection marks a first for the 153-year-old denim brand: showing at Couture Week. "She [Kocher] brings a distinctly Parisian perspective with a modern edge that complements our denim heritage," said Mathilde Vaucheret, Levi’s VP of Europe Marketing & Brand Experience. "Her Couture-à-Porter vision is the perfect way to elevate the craftsmanship of denim."

Kocher is a graduate of Central Saint Martins who prior to founding her own line worked for years for Maison Margiela, as well as Bottega Veneta, Dries Van Noten, and CHLOÉ. She is currently the Director of both her own brand and Maison Lemarié, one of Chanel's Métiers d'Art. Utilizing both of these creative worlds, Kocher worked directly with Levi's design and innovation team at the Eureka Lab in San Francisco, testing colors and techniques, before returning to Paris, where the pieces were finished in her own workshop and at the ateliers of Maison Lemarié, particularly for embroidery and feather work.

Throughout our conversation, Kocher keeps returning to the concept of savoir-faire, the technical, hands-on knowledge passed down through craft training. It's the organizing idea behind what she calls her "Couture-à-Porter" approach: elevating a material with no inherent preciousness through the hours, technique and handwork usually reserved for silk or jacquard. "I just thought it's the way you treat it," she explains to VALŪS. "The hours you put in, the energy, the vision behind it. That becomes luxury.”

She's equally clear about what she wanted to avoid: the fusion of denim and couture being perceived as a gimmick. "I don't like when it's gimmicky," she says, distinguishing the project from collaborations that treat denim as a punchline. She points instead to the black bustier dress that debuted at Cannes to announce the partnership: black stretch denim with laser-cut detailing, paired with a matching Baby Brooklyn bag as her example of the alternative. Elsewhere in the collection, individual pieces run past two hundred hours of hand embroidery.

Kocher frames the collection as a dialogue between "US culture, which is very much this dream, this Americana," and Paris, where she sourced hand-painted feathers and worked with flower-makers and embroiderers local to the city. The references span decades. They invoke Levi's own utilitarian roots. For instance, she notes that the rivet was originally added to reinforce trousers built for miners, which, in this collection, sit alongside more refined details and design embellishments in a nod to old Hollywood glamour. 

"I've always been fascinated by the golden age," she says, citing "All About Eve" and the era of Ginger Rogers. In her hands, the rivet resurfaces throughout the collection as a couture detail rather than a structural necessity, and a standout look - a full feather-and-lace gown with a matching cape  takes its texture from fish scales.

The exchange, she insists, moves in both directions rather than forcing American denim into a Parisian mold. Asked whether pairing raw denim with couture technique risks feeling forced, she pushes back: "It goes very smoothly."

Kocher describes her process as rooted in textile manipulation before construction. "How can I get the shape? How can I cut it, manipulate it, turn it so it becomes couture?" she asks. Applied to a fabric built for miners rather than red carpets, that process is the entire premise of the collection; denim put through the same hours and handwork as silk or lamé, until it earns its place at Couture Week on its own terms.

All photos courtesy of Levi's