Zoe Saldaña Leans Into Orange Velvet Asymmetry in Alaïa

Zoe Saldaña brought one of Pieter Mulier’s clearest final Alaïa ideas onto the red carpet Saturday night, wearing an orange velvet look from the house’s summer-fall 2026 collection to the 12th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, Calif. The annual event honors achievements in life sciences, physics and mathematics, pulling Hollywood names into a room built around scientific prestige.

Saldaña wore the look with the kind of control that has defined much of her recent evening dressing, but this one had more interruption in it than her Oscars Saint Laurent or the sharply engineered Balmain she wore during the “Avatar: Fire and Ash” run. A clean, strapless bodice held close through the torso in saturated orange velvet, with a straight neckline that kept the upper half almost severe. From there, the line shifted.

Instead of dropping into a standard column or full skirt, Saldaña wore a lower half cut into asymmetrical layers and split panels that read somewhere between a draped overskirt and exposed tapered trousers. From the back, the shorter overskirt sat high and flared away from the body, leaving the longer underlayer visible through the center.

From the front, the velvet opened into cascading folds and uneven points that exposed one leg and then closed again around the other, giving the look more movement and visual tension than a traditional evening gown. She finished it with sheer black tights, black mesh pumps with pointed opaque toes and slim ankle straps, plus Cartier Geometrie & Contrastes jewelry. The look was styled by Petra Flannery.

That tension between discipline and release sat at the center of Mulier’s final Alaïa outing. In his review of the collection for WWD, Miles Socha described a fall 2026 lineup built around a “slender line,” with Mulier stripping things back to a more reduced expression of the house before his planned move to Versace on July 1.