When the Isabel Marant show comes to a close tomorrow night, there’s one person you won’t be seeing on the runway: Isabel Marant herself. For the first time in 30 years, ever since Marant founded her label in 1995, she won’t be taking a bow—though she will be backstage, supporting and cheering on the team. Perhaps most of all, she will be rooting for the person who will be stepping onto the runway from the wings: Kim Bekker, now the label’s creative director and Marant’s foil, mirror, and sparring partner for the past four years (though her work for the brand goes back much longer). The Isabel Marant Spring 2026 show is, in other words, a moment of succession. The only sensible question to ask, then, is: Why now?

Which is why Marant and Bekker are on a Zoom call one recent morning to chat about the passing of the baton. (Or, given this is Isabel Marant that we’re talking about, the passing of the baton in the form of a fabulous, pointy, triangle-heeled, madly fringed boot.) “I’ve been working with Kim for a while,” Marant tells me, “and I always knew that I didn’t want to live my whole life to the crazy rhythm of fashion; that at a certain point I’d want to step back, still have some overview in what’s going on, but not the role I have now. Kim took over the design completely last season, yet I was still on the catwalk [at the end of the show], pushing her forward to say, ‘This is her work.’ But now I won’t come out.”

In that characteristically generous way of Marant’s, she has wanted Bekker there with her at the end of a show, sharing the applause and the limelight, for a few seasons now—an acknowledgement of all of her hard work for the brand. In fact, last season, when I went to preview the Isabel Marant collection for my runway review and was about to ask Marant about it, she simply laughed and told me to speak to Bekker instead, as she (Marant) had been on a retreat in India for quite a while, and it was really Bekker’s collection to speak about.