The final round of the spring/summer 2027 fashion season is under way in the French capital. Paris has long been regarded as the spiritual and metaphorical home of all things sartorial and as such draws the highest concentration of shows and often the biggest fashion statements.
Here are some of the highlights.
Maison Margiela
Having just given his final show for Diesel, creative director Glen Martens is now focused solely on Maison Margiela, and for this latest collection, took a more commercial turn.
While earlier shows established just how far he was willing to push the house’s theatrical codes, this time, the exercise was more forensic, and about stripping Margiela back to the contradictions it was founded on in the 1980s.
The result was familiar yet disrupted. Contrasting hard and soft, 1960s-style brocades became column skirts tied with Margiela’s signature cotton ribbon, and tailoring arrived with concertina-like construction, with knife-edge lapels folding inward or out for a more conventional silhouette. Trenches, T-shirts and jersey dresses meanwhile were given rigid, balcony-like inserts.
There was an appealing return to Margiela’s secret language of quietly intelligent clothes as well. A stiff-fronted white coat, checked shirt and high-waisted tailored ski trousers. But opulence remains his instinct, seen as elaborate, metal-fronted gowns, crushed silver and baroque draping.
Dior
For spring/summer 2027, Jonathan Anderson looked to something lighter at Dior – quite literally. Air became a material in its own right, worked through lace, silk mousseline and organza, while tailoring softened into fluid, almost weightless forms. Transparency drifted between sheer and opaque, giving the collection a sense of constant movement.
The Dior ateliers supplied the technical virtuosity with pleats layered upon pleats, asymmetric florals, voluminous hems and a softer evolution of last season’s Marie Antoinette-inspired tutus. Anderson’s signatures were becoming clearer, too, via flowerlike silhouettes, iridescence, cropped proportions and deliberately off-kilter details. Long scarves, cascading earrings and draped fabrics reinforced the collection’s interest in asymmetry.
Accessories supplied the wit. Flower photographs appeared on square-toe heels; the new Dior Bow Sandal and petal-soled Cigale played with familiar codes, while bags moved from updated Double and Initial Hobo shapes to a biker-inspired Cannage style. Most playful was a silver minaudiere shaped like the wenwan walnut featured on the invitation. After a year of historical references, Anderson’s Dior is beginning to speak in its own unmistakable language.
Saint Laurent
It seems the rumours swirling around Saint Laurent are, in fact, true and that after a decade leading the brand, Anthony Vaccarello is leaving.
He presented an extraordinary, gilded collection, steeped in the house’s history and charged with the atmosphere of a finale, where Charlotte Gainsbourg performed, the song chorused with the words “You are so much, Yves Saint Laurent.”
If this was a farewell, it was impeccably orchestrated. Under giant golden chandeliers, most looks were gilt, a deliberate reference to Yves Saint Laurent’s 1991 Rive Gauche collection, whose finale was entirely gilded.
Metallic trenches, cocktail dresses, gilt brocades and metal-thread lace caught the light, while mousseline scarves in absinthe, amber and cognac added colour. There were enormous earrings, vertiginous stilettos and snake-shaped heels, but interestingly, not a single handbag.
The Eiffel Tower glittered as the show began and ended, reinforcing the sense of occasion. Vaccarello has always resisted fashion’s drift towards accessibility and trend-chasing. Here, he made a case for something rarer, for glamour with no interest in apology.
Matieres Fecales
Designers Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran staged a deeply political outing. For their biggest show to date, the Matieres Fecales founders took over Place de la Republique – a symbolic site of protest – for a show called The 99 Per Cent, and the second chapter of a story that began last season with a collection focused on the world’s wealthiest one per cent.
The Canadian duo has since moved further into the mainstream, dressing the likes of Demi Moore and Zendaya on the red carpet, and attracting Rihanna to the show, who held up proceedings by arriving over an hour late.
This season, Dalton and Bhaskaran sent out 99 looks on 99 models of colour, drawing on Bhaskaran’s journey from poverty to the upper reaches of Paris fashion. The message was explicit: if the one per cent represented the villains of the previous chapter, the 99 per cent were now its heroes.
It was activism translated into fashion spectacle – provocative, theatrical and deliberately difficult to ignore. The question is no longer whether Matieres Fecales can attract attention, but what it chooses to do with it.
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