Casablanca isn’t for everyone. But the ones who get it? They fucking love it. And not in a polite, nod-along-to-the-fashion-crowd kind of way, but in a full-throttle, heart-pounding, dopamine-surge devotion. It’s a brand that operates in an orbit of its own—somewhere between luxury and leisure, sport and sensuality, modernity and nostalgia. It’s a fantasy wardrobe for the impossibly well-traveled, the ones who summer in Capri, winter in Aspen, and somehow still manage to end up at a Tokyo rave at 3 a.m.
No one embodies this hypnotic, high-low, indulgently paradoxical energy more than Casablanca’s creative director and founder, Charaf Tajer. When I visited the label’s Parisian studio on Avenue Hoche the day before its Fall 2025 show, it was peak pre-show mania: fittings in multiple rooms, garments swishing past, assistants darting between racks with military precision. (There were even mascots dressed as a giant tennis ball and a gigantic orange, with ultra-cutesy faces, all decked out in Casablanca shades and sneakers. More on that later.) Charaf himself was stressed but gracious, a man caught between his meticulous vision and the pandemonium of bringing it to life.
“So basically, I’m a huge Japan fan,” Tajer told me. “I’ve been going for almost 20 years. And I feel like I can do 25 collections about Japan—easily. It’s like the multiverse of the universe in one country.”
This season, the Casablanca cosmos is orbiting around Kaizen—the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. “It’s something I apply in my personal life, but also in the company, in the design, in everything,” Charaf explained. “Also, the duality. Japan has that—this ability to exist in two opposing states at once. You can have the colorful Harajuku girl and the dark Yakuza boss in the same city, and somehow, it makes sense. I feel like we all have that duality inside us.”
That push and pull, chaos and control, was everywhere in the collection. Menswear took a starkly structured approach, looking at traditional Japanese dressing—sharp, ceremonial tailoring layered over knitwear, poplin, and technical fabrics. Silk-wool suits, rigid yet fluid, evoked the stiff grandeur of kimono dressing, but then—bang—smashed up against biker youth culture, with boiler suits printed in Japanese text and block-printed tailoring that felt both rebellious and reverential.
The contrasts kept stacking. Brushed mohair was torched with flame motifs, delicate cherry blossom embroidery appeared on structured tailoring, and the clothes themselves felt like an elegant battle between softness and severity. “The contrast is key,” Charaf nodded, showing me the sharp, embroidered borders of a piece. “As a person, I am that. I’m a contradiction.”
Womenswear danced in its own delightful contradictions. The sweet and the subversive played off each other—rave tops with hyper-feminine kawaii skirts, plastic Perspex elements colliding with hand-dyed sequins, layered transparencies creating a kind of peekaboo effect that was simultaneously demure and daring. There were elements pulled from Japanese uniform culture—taxi drivers, 7-Eleven clerks, concierges—reworked into something effortlessly cool. A polo-shirt-inspired knit in merino and lurex had the crispness of a uniform but the fluidity of evening wear.
And then there were the florals. Not your delicate, predictable, springtime florals, but something richer—each sequin cut and heated into organic, unique shapes, hand-dyed to create a ghostly, semi-transparent glow. On suiting, floral jacquards had an almost architectural weight, like the structure of a temple meeting the softness of falling petals. Even the black-and-white palette, inspired by Japan’s legendary love hotels, had an erotic, slightly sinister edge—romance with a side of mystery.
The show took place at the Louvre—yes, the motherfucking Louvre! A flex? Undoubtedly. The venue itself was a dreamscape: a canopy ceiling enclosed the space, a serene escape from the chaos of Paris Fashion Week. VIPs, VICs, and moody critics (no chat, no problem) filled the seats, phones at the ready. Meanwhile, we all snapped pics with the mascots—half in awe, half wondering if the people inside were slowly suffocating. The show was as sleek, surreal, and completely unhinged as the collection itself.
Charaf was still beaming when I caught him after the show. “This is my best collection so far,” he told me, and honestly, he might be right.
Casablanca has always thrived in a space of its own, a brand that refuses to be just one thing. This season, it was Tokyo at its most poetic and paradoxical. And like Japan itself, Casablanca is a world you don’t just visit. You get lost in it, willingly, obsessively.
If you get it? You’ll never want to leave.
