The Matières Fécales show at Place de la République on 28 September 2026 was, according to WWD, the first fashion show ever staged on the communal square, and it arrived carrying the weight of that ambition fully: ninety-nine models, every one a person of colour, three chapters, and a pointed title. Paris Fashion Week SS27 has offered a great deal, but this was the production that will define the season in memory.
Matières Fécales Bring The 99 Percent to Place de la République
Design duo Steven Raj Bhaskaran and Hannah Rose Dalton titled their show The 99 Percent, framing it as chapter two of a narrative begun last season with The One Percent, a collection about the world’s wealthiest percentile. The inversion was structural as much as political: where last season looked inward at concentrated power, this one spread outward across the square, filling it with bodies, fabric and noise.
The show moved through three chapters: Family, Tribe and Gods. The opening, in white, drew on Bhaskaran’s multi-faith childhood (wrapped draping, sculpted tailoring, cross-marked kurtas, modest headscarves) and closed, with disarming intimacy, on the designer standing beside his mother, sister and niece. In the audience: Rihanna, Rick Owens, Michèle Lamy, Daphne Guinness and Gigi Goode. The square held them all without feeling crowded by them.
The second chapter hardened. Distressed leather, military tulle, unravelled knits, metal spikes: the visual language of punk and protest. Christian Louboutin’s curved flip-flop heels introduced a note of irreverence, and a French tricolore reading “Resist” made the politics explicit without being laboured. Then the third act widened the frame entirely: handwoven Burkina Faso cotton and embroidered Varanasi silks swelled into grand evening wear, one gown constructed from 300 metres of tulle. For the finale, hyper-real statues of blindfolded billionaires were carried around the plinth, a direct echo of last season’s provocation. It was enormous, occasionally chaotic, and its most affecting passages were its most personal ones.
Hodakova and Julie Kegels Round Out a Rich Week
Ellen Hodakova Larsson took her SS27 practice to sea. Hodakova‘s collection moved through waxed cloth, sails, fishing net and rope, transforming utilitarian remnants into dresses, tailoring and sculptural layers. Wet-look pieces revealed the body beneath; leftover leather was worked painstakingly into a crocodile-like finish. Sea salt underfoot on the runway sharpened the collection’s aquatic mood, and the beauty leaned into illusion, with painted eyes appearing on closed lids.
There is a consistency to Hodakova’s method (finding new purpose in what already exists) but this season pushed that instinct into more elemental territory. Salt-stung, slightly strange, beautifully undone. Old materials rendered newly seductive, without any of their history being sanded away.
Julie Kegels began, unexpectedly, with an apple. Specifically the Jonagold apple: one she eats each evening before bed, and the apple that famously fell on Isaac Newton’s head. The collection that followed, titled Apple of the Day, explored the duality of light and heavy through the lens of gravity, not as simple downward weight, but as a force, almost mystical, that grounds and gives matter to things.
The thought ran through every garment. Leggings and low-slung nylon tights hung beneath the crotch, giving familiar silhouettes an off-kilter quality. Denim, jersey and suiting followed the same downward pull, shoulders appearing to slip from their intended position. Dainty sequin bras were reduced to their bare outline over skintight bodysuits. The palette was correspondingly grounded: nude tones and soft beiges alongside chocolate brown, white, black, sherbet pinks and muted greys. Even the Edelweiss embroidery played along, its flowers designed to look as though they were being pulled towards the hem. The apple was the simplest idea in the collection. It gave everything else a place to fall.
Three shows, three very different propositions, and Paris Fashion Week SS27 the richer for it. The Matières Fécales show at Place de la République, in particular, is one that the season will be measured against for some time.
