Abigail Smiley-Smith

Abigail Smiley-Smith is a British fashion designer whose career includes design work for Calvin Klein, Stella McCartney and Victoria Beckham before she took charge of Maison Kitsuné. Her background spans womenswear and menswear development and places her within the generation of designers formed inside established international studios through established international studios before taking on a house-wide creative-director role.

Maison Kitsuné appointed Smiley-Smith creative director on 25 September 2025, ending a studio-led period of roughly three years without a formal design head. Her debut, Spring/Summer 2026’s Voyage Vestiaire, rebuilt the Paris–Tokyo wardrobe through fluid tailoring, Japanese cottons, denim, technical seersucker and a new premium Savoir-Faire capsule. Autumn/Winter 2026, Parisian Adventurer, was her second collection and returned the house to the official Paris Fashion Week schedule after seven years.

Spring/Summer 2027, Urban Glide – Surfing through the city, was Smiley-Smith’s third collection and the first full runway show of the new phase, presented in the gardens of Hôtel de Rohan in Paris on 27 June 2026. Her appointment has therefore combined product development with a change in presentation strategy: Maison Kitsuné is again using the fashion calendar as a central public platform while retaining the music, hospitality and everyday-wardrobe identity that predates its formal creative-director system.

Smiley-Smith’s Maison Kitsuné work starts from movement and the idea of a complete urban wardrobe. She uses fluid trousers, practical outerwear, compact tailoring, knitwear and layered separates to keep the clothes adaptable across work, travel and leisure. The Paris–Tokyo relationship is expressed through construction and material—particularly Japanese denim and cotton, technical seersucker and specialist finishing—while Parisian references appear through proportion, graphics and familiar dress codes.

Her approach places material quality at the centre of the house’s current elevation. Savoir-Faire isolates leather, crochet, artisanal denim and other labour-intensive techniques in a smaller premium programme, while the main collections carry those ambitions into more accessible garments. The contrast allows craft to become visible without turning the whole brand into occasionwear, and it gives the fox identity room to coexist with pieces whose value is carried by fabric and construction.

The runway strategy follows the same principle of controlled expansion. Voyage Vestiaire was introduced through a presentation, Parisian Adventurer deepened the fashion-week presence, and Urban Glide moved into a full runway format. Smiley-Smith keeps Maison Kitsuné’s everyday character intact while sharpening its fashion authorship: the wardrobe remains easy to wear, but silhouette, textile research and presentation now carry more of the identity once concentrated in graphics and cultural context.