Why This Once-Edgy Texas Brand Is Bringing the "Maybach" of Shirts to Paris (EXCLUSIVE)
There’s one word Saber Ahmed hasn’t been able to shake off his mind. He’s been ruminating on it daily, and it’s even started to infiltrate the minds of those around him. “We've all been saying and repeating the word ‘restraint’ in the design team,” says the co-founder of Houston slow fashion label Glass Cypress, before going on to use the word “restraint” a further four times in our twenty-minute chat. “We want to make products emotional, so when you wear it or see it on someone close up, there’s a feeling that you get,” Ahmed continues. “And that comes from stripping away any excess.”
Glass Cypress’ Fall/Winter 2026 collection, shared exclusively with Highsnobiety before it premieres in Paris at the brand’s first-ever runway show, will be the first manifestation of Ahmed’s “restrained” Glass Cypress. Inside the Japanese restaurant Ogata — a fitting location, since Glass Cypress’ founders also own three similarly upscale Japanese eateries in Texas — the brand will unveil a vast transformation.
Just by flicking through the FW26 lookbook, the shift becomes clear. Eight months ago, when I last spoke with Saber and his brother Samee Ahmed, with whom he runs the brand, they were walking me through their grungy oversized denim and sardonic graphic hoodies, an eclectic mix of artisanal craft and punkish streetwear flair. Now, they’ve matured to avant eveningwear in a Michelin Guide-approved Paris eatery.
Founded in 2016 as a line of screen-printed tees, Glass Cypress evolved significantly over the past 10 years, becoming an expansive offering of hand-embroidered, naturally dyed clothes with traditional techniques informed by Saber and Samee’s Bangladeshi heritage. Drake and Justin Bieber soon took notice, as did famed couturier John Galliano who was spotted in one of the brand’s oversized hoodies.
Every Glass Cypress item is brought to life by Bangladeshi craftspeople, a factor that will remain the same even as the brand changes. “We're still working with the same factory, the same artisans, everything's done by hand,” Ahmed assures me. “The more hands that are used [when making] an item, it doesn't matter if you objectively understand it, you can emotionally or subconsciously feel it.”
The difference is that Glass Cypress’ meticulous workmanship was once used to embroider naked dancing figures across the front of a cashmere polo shirt and hand-embellish “stop thinking you narcissist” and “adderall” across the front of boxy T-shirts. Today, you won’t find any provocative gags in its FW26 collection nor on the brand’s Instagram page, which was wiped in preparation for this fresh perspective. That distinctly human touch is instead visible in the intentionally rough edges of an otherwise elderly argyle knit and the traditional Bangladeshi Nakshi kantha embroidery that dots complex patterns inside luxurious dark-wash jeans.
“We have been a more expressive brand, but now [we’re] internalizing, going inside, and trying to evoke that same curiosity in people without saying [things] straight up,” says Ahmed, which has resulted in a noted lack of edgy slogan tees. As Ahmed puts it, “You can't explain the wordless with words, and this [collection] comes from a feeling and an experience.
While he recognizes this quieter approach is a marked change, Ahmed is insistent on not calling it an evolution. He prefers to call it “a different expression.” This is still the same Glass Cypress that once made those half-joking tees, and you can still pick up on traces of its subversive tastes in the FW26 collection. Ragged threads hang from the pockets and raw-hemmed patchwork panels of one clean white dress shirt, for instance, a grungy Glass Cypress motif brought onto the most formal of shirts.
Intricate smocking creates a tactile and voluminous criss-crossed texture across the collar of another such white formal shirt, which is Ahmed’s pick of the bunch. “A collar generally consumes less than half a yard of fabric, whereas this collar is many, many yards and you feel it in the weight,” says Ahmed. “When you sit in a Maybach, what differentiates it from an S-Class is the weight of the seats, the plushness when you sit down, you kind of sink into it. This collar is the same thing. Adding that weight to the collar felt like we're doing justice to the idea of comfort through the lens of luxury.”
These kinds of artfully gathered fabrics appear frequently throughout FW26, on the collars of formal trench coats, in the shape of a contourted brown tie, and on the shoulder of an Italian wool blazer that Ahmed is especially fond of — “all of the elements of the collection [are] kind of summarized into that blazer,” he says. Pleats are formed by buttons that create both a ruffled shoulder and the opportunity for this otherwise dressy black blazer, featuring hand-carved turquoise front buttons, to be worn as a vest.
It’s these hands-on details that Glass Cypress aims to highlight in Paris, where guests at its debut runway show will see firsthand all the handwrought nuances that give Glass Cypress’ creations a palpable character. “We're doing this show to express the multi-sensorial version of Glass Cypress… I think it's going to be very different from what people know the brand to be,” says Samee Ahmed. “The layers behind the product kind of peel back [in the show] and you get to see a little bit of that thought process behind them. The product is the core of all of it all.”
