The Palais de Tokyo has a way of raising the stakes. Rick Owens has made its courtyard a recurring home on the Paris Fashion Week calendar for a reason. The crowd gathering outside before the show was already part of it. Jeanne Friot’s audience tends to arrive dressed with a point of view: unapologetically, as people who have decided exactly who they are and dressed accordingly. It set the tone before a single look had appeared.

Jeanne Friot is 30, Parisian, and has founded her label in 2020 on a clear set of principles: sustainable production, genderless design, and no apologies for either. She studied at the Duperré school and later the Institut Français de la Mode, and worked at A.P.C., Maison Kitsuné, and the Balenciaga studio before launching under her own name. She has since designed the silver horsewoman costume for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games opening ceremony. HYSTERIA is the ninth collection and her second on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar. The expectations walking in were not small.

The show opens in white. Not soft white: clinical white, the white of asylum walls, medical smocks, the institution. Friot has built the entire collection around the history of the word “hysteria” and what it was used for: at the Salpêtrière, Charcot organized weekly viewings of interned women before a Parisian bourgeoisie that came to watch. Diagnosis was preferred over listening. The asylum over truth. Niki de Saint Phalle, Yayoi Kusama, Marilyn Monroe, the Italian poet Alda Merini, who wrote on hospital walls in lipstick: these are the women the collection is for. The slogan is printed in lipstick directly onto garments, a direct echo of Merini. Stains on the fabric evoke de Saint Phalle’s shooting works, where paint exploded from canvases like something finally let go. None of this is subtle, but all of it is precise.

The color arc moves from white through spotted ensembles into deep black, tracing the journey from confinement to something that looks like freedom. Belt’s are worn sometimes as restraints, sometimes as armour. Trench coats rise above the nose, concealing the face while releasing hair, long coded as seduction, deliberately let spill. A crinoline dress opens the show: theatrical, tipping into camp, a direct nod to Galliano, McQueen, and Westwood. Set against it: pieces drawn from the worlds of boxing, motorcycle, and racing, clothes built for movement and for getting somewhere. The collaboration with Domestique produces carabiner belts, lipstick holders, cigarette cases: a functional wardrobe for women who are not planning to stay.

The show closes with Claude Emmanuelle, house muse, in a mini-dress with accentuated hips and shoulders covered in latex feathers crafted by Matisse Di Maggio. It earns every bit of its drama.

Foucault once called the hysterics of the Salpêtrière “the first true militants of anti-psychiatry.” At the Palais de Tokyo, Friot made the same argument in fabric. The show belongs to them now.