Paris Fashion Week has always been about the moments that happen off-stage. Shuffling between venues, shared whispers before the start of a show, or gossiping at the dinner table. Those fragments tell us more about how fashion will live in real life than any carefully produced runway. And this season, H&M has seized on that idea and made it the centerpiece of its A/W 2025 presence.
Rather than staging a show in one of the city’s vast salons, H&M launches In Betweens. The concept is straightforward: the runway moves outside. It happens in real time, on Paris streets, with a cast of the industry’s most recognizable models picking their favorite looks from H&M collections.
The roster is formidable. Big names include Maria Carla Boscono, Paloma Elsesser, Maty Fall, Alex Consani, Mona Tougaard, Sora Choi, Vittoria Ceretti, Diane Chu, Jacqui Hooper, and Awar Odhiang. Each already commands attention between shows, trailed by street-style photographers and fans. But this time, they aren’t caught in borrowed looks or head-to-toe runway samples—they’re wearing looks that express their own individual style, mixing H&M mainline with directional Studio pieces, denim, and accessories.
It’s a shift that underlines what street style has represented for nearly two decades: the democratization of fashion. The spectacle that happens outside shows has long rivaled the ones inside, a reality accelerated by social media. H&M builds on that energy and gives the models full autonomy, producing less a campaign and more a celebration of personal expression.
H&M positions the project as a rethinking of what it means to participate in Fashion Week. Instead of adding another show to an already crowded schedule, In Betweens shifts the focus to what people already watch most closely: the streets, the doorways, the seconds between. By acknowledging that truth, the brand not only disrupts tradition but also opens up space for accessibility. Fashion, here, isn’t an elite performance behind barriers. It’s on the pavement, visible to everyone.
This move ties into a larger strategy H&M has been testing across cities. At London Fashion Week earlier this year, the brand staged a hybrid format, part runway, part performance. Los Angeles hosted a spring festival merging music and style. New York and London saw one-off collaborations with musicians. Each activation has leaned into the idea of dissolving the traditional show format and creating touchpoints that feel more immediate.
The project also underscores a shift in how models are positioned. For years, they’ve been reduced to canvases for designer vision. Here, they shape their own image—a kind of autonomy that really matters.
There’s also a commercial reality beneath the experiment. Fashion Week is a spectacle, but one largely inaccessible to the consumer who follows along through streams and posts. By putting the focus on clothing available in real time, H&M narrows the gap between runway fantasy and wardrobe reality; the immediacy is deliberate.
"Paris is the perfect backdrop. Its streets function as ready-made stages, its architecture inherently theatrical. Editors pile into cars, tourists weave through crowds, scooters cut through traffic as photographers cluster at doorways. The message is clear: fashion doesn’t need palaces or monumental halls. It can unfold anywhere—between jobs, between shows, between one arrondissement and the next. In Betweens argues that daily life isn’t a distraction from fashion but the very arena where fashion proves itself.
Follow our channels to see how the series unfolds, and check back soon to learn more about what H&M is bringing to the table.
