Banner image: Steven Passaro, Spring/Summer 2027
Between 120 and 300 hours—that is how long a single Steven Passaro piece takes to make. 300 hours is seven and a half working weeks on one garment, and from the outside you wouldn’t be able to tell.
“That is exactly the point,” Passaro told me. “The hours are all underneath. And when you’re making it, you forget the time completely.”
This summer, after his SS27 presentation A Glimpse at Paris Fashion Week, the young French designer answered a long set of my questions in writing. What came back was less an interview than a philosophy, about time, restraint, and why the most important part of a garment is the part you cannot see.
Coming Back Down
A Glimpse was built on a return. For SS27, Passaro wanted to return to handcrafting and traditional techniques, including the use of a godet.
A godet is a triangular panel set into a seam that gives a garment movement and flare. Tailoring students meet it early, usually in a skirt block, and most designers leave it there as more of a tool that works under the radar.
Passaro treats the godet as a language. He enlarges it, relocates it, lets it open a jacket at the hip like a door. Up close, the gestures feel inevitable, as if the garment was always meant to move that way.
“That kind of play only exists against a person’s body,” he said.
The Hours Underneath
For anyone studying fashion, the number of hours dedicated to creating a garment reframes what a garment is. Passaro’s garments are not products that are manufactured, but intentional pieces that are carefully planned and handcrafted.
Once you understand that concept, other things start making sense, like why a piece costs what it costs; why a small atelier moves at the pace it does; why work like this cannot be imitated at scale, no matter how good the copy is.
The pressure to go faster is real, Passaro admits, from deadlines, clients, and the reality of creating good reputation as a young house.
His defense is structural. He’s efficient in 3D pattern cutting, which saves time early in the process so he can spend it where it cannot be negotiated. “The making is where the time has to stay.”
Expensive and Valuable
“People should understand that expensive and valuable are not the same thing,” Passaro told me.
“Price can be high for no reason. Value consists of the craft, the corrections, the hours of work. With value, you’re not paying a markup, you’re paying for attention to detail. With speedy production, the product would lose the one thing worth paying for.”
I have thought about this every day since we spoke. The confusion between those two words might be the quiet crisis of contemporary fashion.
Plenty of garments are expensive—far fewer are valuable. Passaro is not really selling clothes. He is selling what happened during the making of the clothes.
On the runway, that conviction looks like restraint. One detail from A Glimpse has stayed with me: a single crystal, placed exactly where a seam gives way.
The idea, he said, was a kind of poetry, “something left over from rain, dust, or water that has been poured.” The crystal marks the opening, the threshold.
A full crystal look would say everything at once. “My work is about what is only half seen. So I keep it restrained. That restraint is the essence.”
Steven Passaro Spring/Summer 2027
Fabrics That Were Waiting
Then there is the material itself. Passaro rarely invents new fabrics. He searches for special ones, “a hand you can’t find anymore; a weave a house has stopped producing.”
Some of them can no longer be made at all. He chooses fabrics with real sensory pull, “the ones that make you stop and touch them before you have decided anything. That is the one worth a second life.”
Then came the most practical sentence in our whole exchange: “It has to reach the body first, and it can never be itchy.”
There is a lesson folded inside this philosophy for anyone in a creative program. School trains the instinct to make everything new, to begin from a blank page. Passaro is a reminder that some of the strongest creative acts are acts of retrieval.
Finding what already exists, understanding why it was made, and giving it a second life is a form of authorship too—possibly the harder form.
The Room with the Tears
I asked what moment reshaped Passaro’s thinking. His answer was not a runway show but an exhibition—the Schiaparelli retrospective, currently at the Victoria & Albert Museum—and specifically the room displaying Daniel Roseberry’s couture.
“I stood there with tears in my eyes, and I couldn’t see anything at first. Then I took a long moment and looked at the room piece by piece. I felt it before I could see it.” He calls it the most surprising work in couture today.
I keep returning to the order of those events. He felt it before he could see it, which might be the truest description of what craft at that level does. It arrives in the body before the eye has had a chance to catch up.
Behind the Work
There is a tension in Passaro that many fashion students will recognize. His work asks to be seen.
A young house has to be seen, and yet his instinct is to stay behind it. He has built the visible part—the shows and the image—as a door to something private: the client, the fitting, the workroom.
“I am more comfortable in that room than on the stage,” he told me. “I’ve felt this tension in the past, and I still feel it now.”
Even the final decisions happen in the workroom. Designs are set in the fittings, on the body, with the team around him. “You reach the point where an opening stops being elegant and starts becoming exposure, and you stop there. We decide it together.”
His tools reflect the same balance. Six years of working in 3D have given him control and speed in flat cutting, or creating the original iteration of a garment.
The hand and the mannequin bring in “what the software would never suggest, the accident, the drape that decides itself.” Lately, he says, he is drawn back to draping for exactly that reason.
Slowness
The industry talks about slow fashion mostly in ecological terms, and that conversation matters. But Passaro is using the word “slow” in a different register. Slow as attention. Slow as decision. Slow as the refusal to hand the choice to someone else, or to the speed of the calendar.
The godet in A Glimpse is a small thing. Triangular, hidden in a seam. But once you know how long it took to create, and why it sits where it sits, it stops being small. It becomes an argument.
Ahmad Abdallah is a creative media director and an alumnus of Vogue College of Fashion.
