New York Fashion Week SS27 has delivered its first full week of shows, and the city has been, as ever, generous with its opinions. From a debut on the High Line to a milestone anniversary at MoMA, the range of what fashion means to different designers (and different audiences) has rarely felt so usefully wide.
New York Fashion Week SS27 Opens With a Debut Worth the Journey
Henry Zankov’s first collection for Wallpaper‘s covered Diane von Furstenberg outing was staged on the High Line, which felt apt: a collection about a woman in motion, shown above the streets she moves through. Zankov held fast to the founding mythology of the house (sensuality, practicality, clothes that work with the body rather than against it) and translated it through his own palette of bold colours and flowing fabrics.
Notably, according to WWD, the wrap dress appeared only twice in the runway lineup. For a house whose entire mythology is built around that silhouette, that restraint reads less as an oversight and more as a deliberate repositioning: Zankov nodding to the archive without being consumed by it. The movement of a dress with the body at its centre, as he framed it, is a seduction that does not require repetition to make its point.
At Proenza Schouler, Rachel Scott’s sophomore outing continued to press on the question of what women actually want to wear versus what they are told to wear. A casual gown alongside a sequinned tiger-print dress alongside a slim trouser with a sheer top: the answer, in Scott’s world, is everything and anything. The rose print, the collection’s only pattern, carried a political and feminist charge. A new iteration of the PS1 (the PS1 Walker) revived the classic handbag in a form more suited to modern use. The room’s response was unambiguous.
A Club-Kid Sensibility, a Meditative Garden and Forty-Five Years of Kors
Away from the main circuit, the New York-based duo An Nguyen and Pablo Correa of Catalogue, both Peter Do alums, showed their first collection in a studio in East Williamsburg. The premise (vintage lingerie meeting chic suiting with a club-kid sensibility) was described at the presentation as: ‘It’s as if Tom Ford had a younger daughter who liked to go out.’ Worth the trek, by any measure.
Tory Burch staged her collection around Isamu Noguchi’s meditative Sunken Garden, which provided the right kind of quiet against which to consider flocked pie-crust cardigans, low-slung hip-hugging skirts and opera coats in buttery yellow and violet. The show notes described the collection as designed with collectors in mind. The opera coats made that case without assistance.
Eckhaus Latta has long understood getting dressed as a form of negotiation, between ease and awkwardness, exposure and protection, the ordinary and the slightly offbeat. For SS27, Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta pushed that friction further: tank tops, trousers, slips and tailoring, each altered just enough to demand a second look. A palette of black, white and cream punctuated by acidic chartreuse, plum and flashes of red. Some pieces drew from a newly announced collaboration with J.Crew. Then, at the close, confetti: a small, deliberate eruption of celebration in a collection otherwise occupied with the complications of everyday life. Their clothes have never asked for perfection. That is precisely the point.
Michael Kors closed out the week on Friday morning, presenting 65 looks in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden to an audience that included Rachel Zoe, Nicky Hilton and a number of Broadway figures. The collection opened with three all-black looks, a quiet acknowledgement of the proceedings downtown marking the 25th anniversary of September 11th, before pivoting to the Kors signatures: bias-cut dresses with long flowing tails, bubble-shaped skirts cinched at the waist, skirt sets with cropped jackets, dangly geometric earrings and striped handbags. Kors attributed the collection to people-watching at museums, galleries and openings, those places where, in his words, ‘different style sets converge.’
This year marks Kors’ 45th anniversary, a milestone that landed alongside Coach’s 85th and Bergdorf’s 125th in what has been, by any count, a season of institutional anniversaries. He jogged down the runway at the close. The New York-born and bred designer, it is clear, has no intention of slowing down.
