In 1931, during the famed Beaux-Arts Ball in New York, some of the most prominent architects of the time dressed up in costumes that replicated their own buildings: William Van Alen appeared as the Chrysler Building, Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf-Astoria, and other American designers joined in a collective performance. It was a symbolic gesture—on the one hand, a self-referential manifesto, and on the other, a striking example of the deep connection and continuity between human beings and architecture.

Today, nearly a century later, the architecture and landscape studio Fabulism revives the idea of wearable architecture—but with an entirely different purpose. No longer a celebration of architectural ego, it becomes a design and political response to climate change. With Chaude Couture, a project unveiled at the 2025 Biennale d’Architecture et de Paysage d’Île-de-France, Fabulism presents a micro-architecture: a mobile refuge, a device born out of environmental crisis.

Chaude Couture is a collection of garments made from rice straw—though only one prototype has been created so far—that reimagines the classic raincoat. Inspired by the natural, lightweight shapes of traditional Asian hats and cloaks, the design features a distinctive dome-like silhouette evoking the idea of shelter and protection.

“We started this project with a problem, as we always do,” the founders of Fabulism told Domus. “In this case, the issue at hand was the increasing intensity of rainfall that Paris will face in the coming years, raising the risk of flooding along the Seine”—as evidenced by the record precipitation in 2024. These observations formed the foundation of the project: How will people adapt to the new climate? How will their behaviors change? “We tried to offer an answer—provocative, certainly, but also reflective,” Fabulism explains.

This “landscape device” is designed to move through the city and interact with it—an architecture in motion, traveling along streets and public spaces. It draws on distant cultural traditions, partially in response to the Biennale’s call for entries inspired by tropical regions: from the straw capes of Vietnam and China to Mexican shawls woven with palm leaves, to early experiments in waterproofing with latex in the Amazon rainforest. These ancestral forms of knowledge are revived in Fabulism’s rice-straw garments—a naturally water-resistant material, which the Barbisio hatmakers shaped as if it were an oversized hat.

Chaude Couture was thus born to escape the paradox of plastic, a material that, with traditional raincoats, we use every day to protect ourselves from the disastrous results of climate change, but which contributes to increasing it.