Six years after launching her namesake label, Fidan Novruzova is thinking about vanity. Not, however, as one of the less attractive human impulses, but as something more gentle and liberating—the pleasure of looking, dressing, and indulging oneself. “There’s a way of thinking about your desires and your ego,” the Azerbaijani-Moldovan designer says from Paris the day before she makes her official Paris Fashion Week calendar debut, “in a way that it celebrates you.”
Her spring 2027 collection is fittingly titled La Vanité. But for a designer whose work has steadily accrued its own unmistakable codes—exaggerated square-toed boots, interesting collars, and rigorously sculpted outerwear—this season represents a moment of newfound confidence.
“I’m trusting that whatever I’m going to do is going to be me,” says Novruzova. Earlier in her career, she remembers questioning whether each experiment looked sufficiently “on brand.” Now, “I feel like I’ve been doing things that I would’ve not done five seasons ago, and I’m totally at peace doing and trying and loving something … or hating something that I’m doing.”
That freedom is immediately apparent in La Vanité. The collection began with the soft sculptures of artist Mara Goldberg: voluptuous assemblages whose unexpected color relationships and combinations of organic and synthetic materials offered a productive counterpoint to Novruzova’s instinct for structure. Their influence encouraged her into unfamiliar territory, exploring silks and sheers, softer constructions, flashes of purple against red—without abandoning the architectural precision that has made her work recognizable.
Fabric, she says, remains one of the most intimate parts of her practice. Novruzova travels between warehouses, sourcing much of it personally.
(Several yards have come from deadstock of PFW’s biggest on-schedule houses.) Sometimes she arrives with a sketch and sometimes only a mood board. “I walk around with scissors, chop pieces, and make a collage,” she says.
Even as the business grows, it is one responsibility she has no intention of relinquishing. “It’s just me in my bubble with my scissors, sitting there in my headphones.
That’s how a collection comes to life.”
The resulting clothes engage in what Novruzova calls “constructive deconstruction.” A skirt becomes dramatically long at the front and mini at the back, waistbands appear like big bows, and shirt collars are mismatched. A chocolate-brown leather jacket can be zipped almost entirely closed—“a good introvert jacket,” she jokes—while a waxy car coat sprouts an enormous funnel-like neckline that can be manipulated several ways.
“It gives you a dressy feeling to an everyday item,” she says. Her own summary is more succinct: “I love party on the top.”
That collision between strangeness and functionality has become central to Novruzova’s design vocabulary, taking the most ordinary identifying feature of a garment—the waistband, collar, neckline—and stretching it beyond its expected proportions, until a basic starts behaving like something more off-beat. She likes humor, but distrusts gimmick.
“Even if it’s a bag that consists of four bags, I will preserve the function of it,” she says. This season’s new vanity bag follows the same logic, which is structured around a mirror concealed inside; its elongated shape evolves the label’s existing boa bag.
There’s playful jewelry and embossed objects that spell Novruzova’s name.
Even her footwear is loosening up. Long associated with angular shoes, Novruzova has softened the familiar square of her shoe into a lighter sandal for spring. “I love outerwear and jackets and boots,” she admits. “It’s interesting to really truly explore the idea of summer dressing.” Adidas, meanwhile, has supported the season with customized Stan Smiths, a familiar piece transmutated in Novruzova’s universe.
If La Vanité looks forward, its fascination with dressing up also draws Novruzova back to two eras that have repeatedly surfaced in her collections: the 1920s and the 1980s. Rather than getting too nitty-gritty with historical references, it’s about what clothing in these eras revealed about women’s changing relationship to power.
“Those were really important times for women and women’s fashion, reflecting where we were at as a society.” In the former, she points to corsets giving way to freer silhouettes and in the latter, the assertion of power dressing and high glamour. “Those are just quite exciting times for women, so I wonder what that could look like today.”
It makes sense, then, that Novruzova has chosen not to mark her Paris Fashion Week on-schedule arrival with a conventional runway. Instead, La Vanité is conceived as an exhibition, unfolding with mannequins, dioramas, and flat lays that draw on a century of visual-merchandising traditions. (The invite is particularly charming, a silver-edged clasped compact in ruby red or royal purple, engraved with the invitee’s initials.)
The setting itself participates in the fantasy, with mirrors, black lacquer, and a mirrored elevator that turns the display into both subject and scenery. It extends the idea of a collection, considering vanity as the rituals and objects through which identity is projected.
For Novruzova, it also offers the space to ask viewers to look harder at clothes whose eccentricities often reveal themselves through construction rather than spectacle. “I love exhibitions.
I love the fact that it’s not eight minutes,” she says. “We can all take the time to fully merge into the universe.”
That perspective has sharpened since the designer moved to Paris two and a half years ago. Born in Chișinău, Moldova, with Azerbaijani roots, Novruzova studied at Central Saint Martins before founding her label in 2020.
Her synthesis of Eastern European, West Asian, and post-Soviet references with a fascination for European glamour quickly found an audience: Chloë Sevigny, Charli XCX, Bella Hadid, Solange, and Paloma Elsesser have all worn her designs. A 2024 LVMH Prize semi-finalist, she was named an ANDAM finalist in 2026.
Paris, though, has brought her physically closer to the community forming around the brand. “It all just got very organic, the whole idea of myself in Paris and the brand being in Paris,” she says.
Tweeds and Duchess satins appearing in the collections might be evidence of the city getting under her skin. A more recent move to the Left Bank has proved still more potent.
“The energy is just so different,” she says. “I feel very, very aligned, and it’s done something to me.” What exactly?
“I need another season to tell you.”
For now, evolution is exciting. The Fidan Novruzova woman is someone the designer feels she has grown up alongside.
“I grew up alongside the brand as a woman,” she says. Where early collections were focused on laying out her codes, today, she is thinking more instinctively about how the clothes answer her own desires and those of the women wearing them.
That’s maybe why La Vanité reflects a designer becoming comfortable enough to complicate herself. “There’s just a lot of peace,” Novruzova says.
“Inner peace.”