Nearly 100 years after Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí unveiled their famous lobster dress, surrealism is back in style. At Paris Couture Fashion Week, the bizarre ruled supreme, and clothing seemed to exist on the periphery of reality.

The most famous example came, unsurprisingly, from Schiaparelli, where designer Daniel Roseberry sent out supermodels Irina Shayk, Naomi Campbell and Shalom Harlow in dresses adorned with the heads of beasts: a lion, a wolf and a leopard. The animals, sculpted from foam, resin and faux fur, were a nod to Dante’s Inferno, and represented what Roseberry described as a “photorealistic approach of surrealism.”

Indeed, it does take more than a strategically positioned lobster print to shock and surprise couture clients today. Something like the technical feats we saw at Viktor & Rolf, where ballgowns fit for a Disney princess followed the rules of dream logic, not gravity. Some models came down the runway with their dresses seemingly floating right through them. The collection may have turned into meme fodder for Instagram, but the skills behind it are nothing to laugh about. Those skills are the very thing that distinguishes haute couture from all other forms of fashion.

At Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli played with what he called “couture tropes”, offering a collection bursting with colour, patterns and joy. A ruffled blouse resembled a blooming flower on a model with stem-like legs. And, in a look that would have excited Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, another model wore a dress with perfectly circular cut-outs—Piccioli’s three-dimensional interpretation of polka dots.

Surrealism may have had its roots in Paris, but it has nonetheless seeped into the works of the Asian designers who presented their haute couture collections this season. Consumed by the cosmos and ancient Indian philosophy, Rahul Mishra depicted the oneness of the universe by bringing together jellyfish and birds, planets and oceans all atop his voluminous and heavily embellished dresses. “Dreams can be bigger than anything,” he said in an interview with WWD.

Sohee Park, the woman behind Miss Sohee, was similarly occupied with nature, and the London-based Korean designer made her Paris Couture Week debut with red-carpet-ready looks featuring seashells and petals crafted from silk and satin. Hong Kong-born designer Robert Wun, another addition to this season’s calendar, considered the preciousness of couture, and all the things that could ruin the clothes. In his collection, dubbed “Fear”, he turned spills, stains and burns into details that add to—not diminish—the beauty of his first haute couture designs.

Inspired by dreams and nightmares alike, this season’s haute couture collections were a brilliant reminder that even in an age jaded by the possibilities of technology, our ideas of fashion and reality can still be challenged—simply by the magic of our hands.

Read more: The most stylish Asian stars at Paris Couture Fashion Week, from Michelle Yeoh to BTS’ Suga