THE CURATED EDITION.
Reportage / Paris
The newcomers are no longer new. In its Spring/Summer 2027 season, Paris began separating the designers who arrived from the ones who will stay, through gold, lightness and construction left in plain sight.
PARIS FASHION WEEK · SPRING/SUMMER 2027
Paris does not open the season. It closes it, and the close is where you learn who had something to say.
A year ago the city was a theatre of debuts. Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe. This time none of them was new. The second act asked for patience; the third one asks for proof. Over nine days at the turn of October, with an official calendar of 68 shows, the answers arrived in three forms: the spectacle, the body, and construction worn on the outside as an argument.
Anthony Vaccarello marked ten years at the house with the most single-minded show of his tenure. At the Trocadéro, monumental gilded chandeliers hung over a black runway, the Eiffel Tower lit behind them, in a set that recalled the ballrooms of Yves Saint Laurent’s own era. One colour carried the collection: pale gold, burnt gold, Byzantine gold, gold that leaned art deco and gold that leaned almost brutalist.
The house archetypes passed one by one, gilded. The saharienne and the trench of Monsieur Saint Laurent, the wrap blouse, then the codes Vaccarello wrote himself: hard-shouldered coats, voluminous blousons, short fur-trimmed suits. Lamé, brocade, guipure and jacquard. At the end the gold gave way to black. The house has confirmed nothing about his future, yet few collections have sounded so much like a goodbye.
Where Saint Laurent spoke loudly, Jonathan Anderson chose to whisper. At the Bassin Octogonal of the Jardin des Tuileries, camphor trees stood in mist over the water. The starting point was a small object: the wénwán walnut, turned in the hand for years in Chinese tradition until its surface acquires a patina. Guests received the walnuts as their invitation.
The collection worked in questions rather than statements. How light can tailoring become? Can lace hold air? The answers came as translucent chiffon jackets, pleated georgette, scalloped edges and raw hems, a deliberate asymmetry the house described as nature’s own. The best detail was offstage: the trees were replanted in the gardens after the show. For a collection about time and growth, no ending could have been more consistent.
Pierpaolo Piccioli showed in daylight at the Tennis Club de Paris, around Aude Franjou’s textile sculpture Les Coraux de la Liberté, a coral atoll rendered in rolled cloth. His argument was the most sober of the week. A stitch drawn from the house’s 55th couture collection, once hidden inside tailored lapels, was brought to the surface of leather jackets, shifts and T-shirts to shape shoulders and waists. Jeans and menswear were cut on the bias, a technique Cristóbal Balenciaga rarely applied, so they fell with a soft slouch.
Cristóbal has always been one of my heroes.
Pierpaolo Piccioli, to AnOther Magazine
At a moment when the market is questioning what a garment is worth, Piccioli offered the most elegant reply available: the difference has to be visible in the construction, not on the price tag.
At Loewe, McCollough and Hernandez folded the house’s Spanish baroque into their own New England adolescence, preppy codes turned inside out in pale blue, lemon and mint against black and brown leather. Polos worn back to front, glass-bead shirts that looked like wet beach towels and charm-laden sandals made the case that a heritage leather house can still be playful.
Nadège Vanhée took the weight out of Hermès without taking away its authority. Open knits revealed bandeau tops, jersey dresses were embroidered with fine strips of leather, and leather belts cinched sheer silk. At Hermès, sensuality is always a question of material.
At Maison Margiela, Glenn Martens sent models past walls of dried and dying flowers, a quiet reply to the fresh blooms of Raf Simons’ first Dior couture show in 2012. The collection blurred the old atelier divide between tailleur and flou: trench coats with rigid panels, fluid dresses held up by hardened bodices, and bags that kept their hardware but lost their inner structure, so that the rigid suddenly gave way in the hand.
The real first appearances were few. At Courrèges, Drew Henry went back to the years before the 1964 space-age collection and returned with soft archive hats and house codes deliberately crumpled: ribbed knits, patched vinyl, go-go boots. At Carven, Kai Nesselrath, after nearly a decade at Saint Laurent, offered a polite and youthful introduction in the house’s green and white stripe.
Elsewhere the body returned to the centre. Haider Ackermann built his Tom Ford show around mirrors, so that models paused before their own reflections and watched one another. Precise tailoring lived alongside fishnet, cut-out black leather and high-slit red dresses, a reminder that, for Ackermann, freedom always lives close to risk.
As is custom, Nicolas Ghesquière closed the week in the courtyard of the Louvre. Hovering, windowless vehicles marked with the Damier hung over a runway paved like a racetrack, the futurist staging his usual collision of eras. The clothes, by contrast, were among the lightest and simplest of his tenure. After days of gold, walnuts, coral and dried flowers, Paris ended the season floating.
Paris closes the season the way one turns off the lights in a large house, room by room. Vaccarello left the gold burning beneath the Tower. Anderson left a pair of walnuts in every guest’s hand, to be turned with patience. Piccioli left a white T-shirt. In the third act no one is new any more, and what remains is whatever someone had the time to sew.
Details and further reading: Paris Fashion Week Women’s Ready-to-Wear Spring/Summer 2027, organised by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode. fhcm.paris. The next women’s season in Paris runs in March 2027.
Instagram: @fhcm
GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.
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