Banner image: Steven Passaro, Spring/Summer 2027
Paris was unbearably hot the week of the Spring/Summer 2027 men’s shows—the hottest stretch France had seen—and the industry felt it. Dior and Rick Owens moved their shows to the early morning to spare guests the worst of the afternoon.
I had come from the Netherlands to cover the week. As an alumnus of Vogue College of Fashion, I tend to watch shows the way I was trained to, less like a spectator and more like someone reading a building, looking for the load-bearing idea underneath.
Sweating through a black shirt outside the Institut du Monde Arabe, I realized the heat was doing me a favor. It stripped everything back. In weather like that, a collection either holds your attention or it doesn’t. There is no room for noise.
A Season That Lowered Its Voice
A wave of creative directors who arrived at their houses to enormous expectation have settled in. At Celine, Michael Rider showed his first dedicated menswear collection not as a debut but as a continuation, a designer building a wardrobe rather than chasing a theme.
He spoke about the desire of creating something with “legs, and roots”: ballooning trousers, metallic leather jeans, colorful cummerbunds, easy low shoes. It looked like the work of someone who no longer needs to prove he belongs and has started building something meant to last.
The bigger houses were pulled in two directions, and the heat made the split visible. Pharrell Williams staged Louis Vuitton on a man-made beach with an eight-meter wave pumping real water on the hottest day of the year, surf dandies in monogrammed wetsuits—a spectacle that drew as much criticism as applause.
Anthony Vaccarello opened the week with a leaner Saint Laurent, models moving through the cooling fog of a Fujiko Nakaya installation, while Jonathan Anderson’s Dior blended ceremonial tailoring with something looser.
One designer admitted aloud what the week kept circling: these clothes are made for customers who spend the hottest months in air conditioning, the malls of the Gulf, the towers of New York and Shanghai.
In the heat, the houses that felt most honest were the ones that stopped performing and simply created.
KML and a Door I Didn’t Know Was There
The show that stayed with me longest was KML, presented at the Institut du Monde Arabe. Founded by Ahmed and Razan Hassan, KML is the first Saudi ready-to-wear house to show on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar, and it arrived without any need to announce that fact.
We took our shoes off at the entrance. The show opened with a short film—the regional dances of Saudi Arabia performed by Bilal Allaf to music arranged by Firas Shurbaji—before a single garment appeared.
The order was deliberate. It asked the room to slow down and be present, to receive the clothes as the final note of a longer piece of music rather than the whole song.
The collection is built on research, the history of dress traced across civilizations, and the relationship between inherited forms and the way we dress now. The garments seem to remember something and reach for something at once.
The Saudi model and actor Bader Qabbani walked for the house. Coming off a year that included the Emerging Talent Award at the Arab Fashion Awards and a place as an LVMH Prize semi-finalist, KML could have come to Paris hungry to make noise. Instead, it came composed and certain, and that composure is the rarest thing on any runway.
To watch a brand carry an Arab cultural inquiry into the most tradition-bound fashion capital in the world, and to do it with subtlety rather than volume, felt like watching a door open that I did not know existed. It is exactly the kind of shift Vogue College taught me to read, not as a passing trend, but as a change in who gets to speak, and how.
KML Spring/Summer 2027
The Hidden Hour: Passaro, Kidill, and Ssstein
If KML worked through atmosphere, Steven Passaro worked through what he chose to hide. His collection, A Glimpse, made a case I haven’t stopped thinking about: that the highest form of craft is to give everything and reveal only a little.
A suit that reads as completely plain is built like couture underneath, hand-canvassed and shaped, given the same hours as an embroidered gown, none of it visible from the outside. Crystals are placed bead by bead only where a garment opens, at the rim of a hood, the flare of a hem, the precise points where the interior risks showing.
The one thing the house refuses to compromise is time. A piece takes the hours it takes, and those hours cannot be rushed or faked.
Kidill, Hiroaki Sueyasu’s label, reached the same idea from the opposite direction. After more than a decade of graphic prints and loud collaborations, Sueyasu turned inward to patternmaking and the hand.
Denim and sweatshirts were coated in crackle paint that fractures and peels with wear, slowly revealing badges hidden beneath—a garment designed to change over time rather than arrive finished. He titled it Chaotic Discord, saying he wanted the clothing to hold a mysterious and secretive quality.
At ssstein, Kiichiro Asakawa presents a quieter yet powerful perspective. The brand is known for precise, deconstructed tailoring and pieces whose intelligence only reveals itself to an observant eye.
Three very different designers shared one instinct: in a week defined by the heat outside, here were people insisting the real work happens in the cool and the dark, in the labor no one will ever see.
Steven Passaro Spring/Summer 2027
The Conversations Between the Shows
The surprise of the week, though, wasn’t on any runway. It was in the dinners and long conversations in between, hours spent with designers and founders.
What struck me was how at is best, this industry makes space for the people rising to meet it. I sat at tables where established names talked, without performance, about how to make real room for students, how to open the doors they once found shut. For someone who came into fashion through a program rather than a pedigree, that generosity was its own kind of collection.
That, more than any single garment, is what I am taking home. I came to read clothes through a designer’s eye, looking for the decision underneath the surface. I am leaving convinced the structure I found was not only in the garments. It was in the posture of the whole week: roots over noise, the hidden hour over the visible flourish, presence over spectacle.
The best of Spring/Summer 2027 understood that what you hold back is as considered as what you show, and that the discipline behind how something appears is, in the end, the thing itself.
Ahmad Abdallah is a creative media director and an alumnus of Vogue College of Fashion. He covered Paris Fashion Week Men’s Spring/Summer 2027 in Paris.
