The Rohan Mirza Paris designer conversation begins, almost inevitably, with a zipper. Not a discreet, functional one (the kind that disappears into a seam) but an oversized, cartoonish thing that runs the length of a hoodie and has sent Instagram commenters into a quiet frenzy of restock demands. It is the sort of object that announces itself before the person wearing it does, and that is, more or less, the point.
Mirza, who grew up in the Paris suburbs, traces the design to a specific source: ‘The idea for the big zipper came directly from King Mickey’s outfit in Kingdom Hearts, the goth Mickey who wears a hoodie with a huge zip. There’s also Sackboy from LittleBigPlanet, who has a big zip too.’ This is how Mirza thinks, not in trends or market positioning, but in characters. ‘My work is very inspired by video games, and I’m almost always influenced by characters,’ he explains. The hoodie is not a garment that references gaming culture from a safe critical distance. It is gaming culture rendered in fabric, worn on a body, walked into the world.
From the Paris suburbs to the runway: how gaming built a fashion language
The backstory is familiar enough in its broad outline, a suburban kid, a lot of screen time, a pixelated imagination shaped by things the wider culture hadn’t yet decided were serious. ‘I spent a lot of time at home in front of my computer or TV,’ Mirza says. What he absorbed there (cartoon graphics, video game aesthetics, the visual language of pop culture) became the foundation of a design practice that has, by now, produced handgun-strapped belts, blood-stained garments, and a ‘HARDCORE’ hoodie that wears its references without apology.
His runway shows have developed this universe with increasing ambition. His 2024 show, Nuketown, explored the collision between online and offline worlds: models appeared in bullet leather trousers, distressed dollar-sprouting jeans, and carrying a translucent 3D-printed sword. The 2025 show, Stonehaven, drew from the Call of Duty battlefield of the same name and dressed models in badge-covered blazers and skin-deep SFX racks of ammunition, with rifles spouting blood-splattered umbrellas. Both shows operated in that register where fashion and game design become genuinely difficult to tell apart, where the question of whether something is clothing or a costume or a prop has no clean answer, and the ambiguity is the work.
The entry point into fashion, when Mirza is asked, is characteristically blunt: ‘Supreme.’ One word, no elaboration needed. His Fashion Mount Rushmore (Alessandro Michele, Jeremy Scott, Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs) describes a lineage of designers for whom fashion has always been, at least partly, theatre. Characters, again. The self as something to be designed rather than merely dressed.
Rohan Mirza in 2026: micro-collections, free parties, and testing new ideas
For 2026, the Rohan Mirza approach has shifted scale. Rather than a full collection, he is working on a micro-collection, ‘just a few looks,’ as he puts it, ‘to develop new ideas and test things.’ There will be no runway show this year. Instead, the focus is on events: ‘Free parties everywhere in the world. We need to be together.’ It reads as a conscious decompression after the maximalism of Nuketown and Stonehaven, a pause in which the ideas can be examined at closer range before being scaled back up.
The quickfire Q&A he sits down for reveals the edges of a sensibility that is, underneath its weapon-spawned SFX and oversized hardware, quietly warm. The mantra he lives by: ‘Be grateful for what I have and for the way everything is going. Stay positive in every situation, and bring people together.’ The fictional character he most relates to is Kirby, ‘we’re both connected.’ The tracks he plays while working are by PNL, the French group, his favourite being ‘Sur Paname’. If the fashion industry disappeared tomorrow, he would retrain as a manager for young rappers. ‘That’s my dream.’
The celebrity he’d want to be trapped in a lift with is Kylie Jenner, and he would be wearing, as on every other day, a black hoodie, black trousers and Supreme-adjacent Air Force 1s. The designer whose grail item remains out of reach is a Cartier Santos full VVS. The person he most wants to see in his clothes is SpongeBob. When a designer whose work draws on video game characters names a cartoon sponge as his ideal client, something has been said about the nature of the project, its refusal of the separation between high culture and the saturated, pixelated, joyfully low one. The micro-collection, when it arrives, will test which new ideas survive contact with that logic.
