In a first, the fashion jury featured an all-designer lineup counting Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Julien Dossena—who in 2006, while still a student, won the Special Jury and 1-2-3 prizes and returned as fashion jury president a decade later—Alexandre Mattiussi, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren (who scooped three prizes here in 1993), Christelle Kocher, Pelagia Kolotouros, and Louis Gabriel Nouchi (winner of the Galeries Lafayette prize in 2014).

“We’re all co-presidents,” offered de Castelbajac, who designed the motif for this year’s edition, a multicolored sun that was reprised on a flag, totes, and Supima tees. “I’m a child of transmission,” he added, citing friends and mentors like Warhol, Basquiat, and Mapplethorpe. The designer, who is readying a major retrospective at the Frac museum of contemporary art in Toulouse in December, added, “it’s important to be here for the new generation, who is forced to make do with history, but fashion is always a mashup between heritage and modernity, lived experience and divergence.”

For Mattiussi, this was a maiden journey to the Villa Noailles. “I’d always heard a lot about it from friends, and after four days they’d come back wrecked,” he said. “This year, I felt like I have the experience, and maybe the maturity, to help and share with the next generation.”

Likening fashion’s current popularity to PSG soccer or Hollywood, Dossena added, “I’m not sure that, today, I would have had the courage to try to break into fashion. As a student, Hyères was foundational for me, so it was important to me to give back what I received and help open up new possibilities for them.” Horsting and Snoeren, who recalled cutting patterns as big as the floor of their first apartment in Paris, reflected on how a desire to be in fashion crystallized when they came to Hyères. “It was a one-off experiment because we wanted to work together; we had no intention of launching a label then—we didn’t even have a name and we felt very small—but we wanted to be designers,” Horsting recalled. “We wanted to turn our feelings into clothes, and Hyères gave us the confidence to start.” Added Snoeren: “Hyères brought us closer to the dream.”

The fashion, accessories and photography exhibitions from the 2025 Hyères International Festival will remain open at the Villa Noailles through Jan 11, 2026.