Kim Petras brought a dose of fetish romanticism to Paris on Saturday, arriving at Ann Demeulemeester’s spring 2026 show in the house’s Hilla boots — a silver lace-up ankle style set on a tapered stiletto heel.

The metallic pair featured a peep toe, open lacing through metal eyelets, and a sharply contoured heel. Layered over ribbed white leg warmers, the boots added edge to Petras’ deconstructed white look. Sheer cotton layers and loose ribbons broke up the structure. The white-on-white palette pointed to Demeulemeester’s early focus on shape and material — ideas she’s explored since her first collections in the late 1980s.

The Hilla stands among the house’s defining modern boot shapes. Its taut construction and metal hardware trace directly back to Demeulemeester’s early experiments with tension and release — the interplay that shaped her gothic romanticism and cemented her place in Antwerp’s avant-garde.

Petras keeps coming back to lace-up boots. She wore a Victorian pair with a vintage Dolce & Gabbana dress in August, a look that played up her usual preference for fitted, corseted shapes. Even when she switches codes — as with the split-toe Tabis she performed in earlier this year — the impulse is the same: shoes that suggest delicate structure with tough textured accents.

That mix has carried across her projects, from her MAC Viva Glam campaign last year to her second Ed Hardy capsule photographed by The Cobrasnake, both styled with similarly referential footwear. At the Outloud Music Festival in June, she even turned a rhinestone medical cast into a stage accessory, underscoring her instinct to treat constraint as decoration.

Saturday’s look aligned her with a brand known for its romantic defiance. By pairing the metallic Hilla boots with raw, layered whites, Petras underscored what Ann Demeulemeester built her reputation on: clothes (and shoes) that invite contrast.