A NEW fashion season begins as New York opens the door to Spring/ Summer 2027, setting the tone for what comes next. Across the city, familiar codes are loosened, sharpened and reimagined: from American prep and heritage tailoring to unabashed romance and downtown rebellion. Four collections, four distinct visions, united by one feeling: SS27 is already looking forward.
Ralph Lauren’s Spring/ Summer 2027 collection takes the idea of chic and loosens its tie. Traditional references remain, but they arrive with an idiosyncratic swagger: historical dress codes are remixed until they feel personal, sensual and slightly unruly.
The silhouette is the main story: voluminous trousers dominate, from low-slung shapes buttoned from mid-calf to hem to sweeping pants paired with slim jackets and waistcoats. Even seersucker gets a theatrical twist, transformed into a dramatic suit.
The brand’s familiar rugged-meets-refined tension is turned up: a utilitarian denim workwear jacket is feather-trimmed, distressed jeans are elevated into evening territory, and a brocade vest comes with a matching shirt and wide necktie, nodding to the piece that launched his career. Tailoring splits the difference between softness and structure, with precise women’s construction set against sharply defined pantsuits made in an Italian menswear facility.
Evening gets equally playful: single-seam wrap dresses, micro-sequinned navy with fringe, embroidered velvet robes and gesso-painted floral jeans. Artisanal treatments give everything a sense of lived-in history: rumpled laundering, hand-painting, burnout and dulled sequins. The result is polished, but never precious.
At The Plaza, Tommy Hilfiger turned a New York institution into a playground for a new kind of American prep. The setting was personal – the designer once lived in the hotel with his family – and the collection mined that history without getting trapped by it.
Spring/ Summer 2027 takes the familiar Ivy League lexicon and gives it a sharper, more mischievous charge: rugby dresses arrive colour-blocked, Oxford shirts flash Ithaca stripes, tartan blazers and Ivy jackets lean into collegiate nostalgia, while polos swing from shrunken to oversized. Chinos are cut into high-waisted hot shorts, their denim-like twists making a classic suddenly feel downtown.
Even the Tommy Flag gets a little lived-in, washed across superfine suede, silk-cashmere and oversized totes. Red, white and blue are jolted awake by vivid yellow and green, while rounded 90s skater trainers, boat shoes and penny loafers ground the fantasy in today’s wish for functionality. Prep with the polish deliberately knocked sideways: a wardrobe for New Yorkers who know the fastest way to make a classic feel current is to make it their own.
Coach’s 85th anniversary arrived less like a retrospective than a fashion séance: familiar house codes were turned inside out, softened, distressed and sent back into the world with their seams showing. Stuart Vevers builds Spring/ Summer 2027 around a very particular look composed of trench, leather jacket, tuxedo, bias-cut dress, and Western boot – but nothing stays perfectly preserved.
Slim tailoring pools at the ankle; overcoats and trenches expose their linings and internal architecture; garment-dyed jersey gives traditional suiting the slouch of a beloved hoodie. Bias-cut dresses glide through repurposed lining fabrics, denim, georgette, lamé and sequins, with cut edges and catch stitching making the act of construction part of the look.
Then comes the party, just after the balloons have dropped. Leather is rubbed with metallic foil, confetti and glitter; birthday cards, bows, crowns and wrapped gifts become sculptural leather accessories. Vintage Coach pouches are collaged into new bags, while secondhand leather and denim are reworked throughout.
The finale, set to the tune of “Love Is the Message,” brought musicians and voguing dancers into a shower of confetti. Eighty-five years in, Coach makes memory feel less like nostalgia than raw material.
For her debut New York runway, Magda Butrym sent out a woman who appears to have stopped dressing for anyone but herself. Titled Natalia, the Spring/ Summer 2027 collection lives in the delicious friction between opposites: masculine tailoring against lingerie transparency, leather blousons beside siren slips, broad-shouldered trenches framing lace and skin. It is glamour with its hair slightly undone.
Butrym’s childhood memory of women dressing “to the nines” at home becomes a recurring mood, expressed through wallpaper florals, crochet trims and bedroom whites and tea beiges. The designer calls the instinct ‘Slavic Marilyn ’-a phrase that neatly captures the collection’s mix of bombshell sensuality, cultural memory and sly humour.
Polish references run deeper: Warsaw’s syrenka informs the fluid, mermaid-like silhouettes, while Spycimierz’s Corpus Christi flower carpets inspire petal details and a runway scattered with roses, the house’s signature bloom. Pearls, worn around the neck, wrists and ankles, quietly echo a rosary. At its core, the collection poses a confrontation with femininity, desire and the gaze. Butrym’s response is simple: the woman is not the object in the picture. Rather, she owns the image.
by Imogen Clark