Nicolas Ghesquière has spent more than a decade exploring what the future of fashion might look like at Louis Vuitton , consistently pairing forward-looking ideas with clothes that remain firmly wearable. Following his nature-oriented Autumn/Winter 2026 collection , Ghesquière now asks what garments could make you feel as though you are wearing a second skin.
For Spring/Summer 2027 , that vision takes a darker, more dystopian turn, with the designer looking to geometry, engineered forms and the mechanics of the moving body.
Even the setting at the Louvre’s Cour Carrée seemed to belong to another era, with 34 suspended cars hovering above the runway and creating an unlikely backdrop for a collection so concerned with movement. Ghesquière titled the collection ‘Ergonomie’, making the body the starting point for his investigation. The ergonomic, as he explains, is “a notion of design fundamentally shaped by the conditions, capabilities and movement of the human body.”
This season, clothes mould to the wearer and respond to every shift and gesture, creating a wardrobe that felt futuristic without tipping into costume. Airy composite chiffons, silk and cashmere scarf fabrics made up dresses and skirts that drifted around the body, while layered ruffles at collars and hems introduced movement to otherwise pared-back silhouettes.
Traditional tailoring was reworked through lighter construction, with internal layers removed to create coats and jackets that retained their presence without the usual weight.
Diamond-shaped panels appeared across dresses and separates, sometimes creating an almost optical effect, while sculptural cut-outs and curved seams mapped the body in unexpected directions. Metallic and reflective surfaces added a harder edge to the softer fabrics, keeping the collection connected to Ghesquière’s futuristic vocabulary.
Headpieces fell across the forehead in long, dangling strands that recalled 1920s flapper fringe, although the finish felt distinctly space-age. Cinching belts picked up similar linear details, resembling miniature watch straps wrapped around the waist and adding another layer of hardware to the silhouettes.
The bags offered some of the season’s most appealing pieces, spanning compact structured shapes, supple leather styles and new designs that incorporated Louis Vuitton’s Monogram Flower directly into the construction. One new bowling style replaces conventional hardware with silver-toned Monogram Flowers through which the shoulder straps are threaded, while another boxy design softens its outline with a curved flap and adjustable strap.
Footwear took the opposite approach to the clothes, grounding the more ethereal silhouettes with pointed pumps, lace-up shoes and snakeskin ankle boots. Sandals and elongated footwear shapes continued the collection’s conversation between delicacy and structure, adding weight at the foot while the garments seemed to float above it.
The palette stayed mostly muted — greys, browns, creams and soft neutrals — before flashes of yellow, pink, violet and blue broke through. The brighter shades stood out against the restrained base, much like the small Louis Vuitton flowers appearing on zips and bags throughout the collection.
Discover the Spring/Summer 2027 collection here .
photography. courtesy of Louis Vuitton words. Gennaro Costanzo
“How are you?” It’s a question we answer almost instinctively. Between meetings, over coffee, in a message exchanged with a friend, the response is often the same: “I’m fine.” Sometimes it’s true.
Other times, it’s a carefully rehearsed answer designed to keep the conversation moving, avoid worrying someone else or conceal feelings we haven’t quite found the words for. For women in particular, the distance between how we feel and how we present ourselves can be difficult to acknowledge.
We are encouraged to be ambitious yet accommodating, independent yet available, resilient yet endlessly giving. Somewhere between managing expectations and maintaining appearances, admitting that we’re not okay can feel like another thing we simply don’t have time to do.
That’s why Lancôme is launching its global “I’m Fine” initiative ahead of World Mental Health Day alongside new research which exposes the emotional cost of keeping up appearances — and why learning to speak honestly could change everything. The research, which was commissioned by Lancôme and conducted by Ipsos, puts this familiar contradiction into perspective.
Eighty per cent of women surveyed say they have said “I’m fine” when they weren’t, while 72 percent regret hiding how they truly felt. More than 60 percent also find it difficult to speak openly about their mental well-being, a greater barrier than those reported around fertility and menopause.
The findings raise a question that feels increasingly difficult to ignore: if so many women are struggling to be honest about how they feel, what would it take to make those conversations easier?
For Dr Helen Blair Simpson, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Director of the Center for OCD and Related Disorders, and ADAA Ambassador for Women’s Mental Health, the reasons are complex. A lack of awareness around the symptoms of anxiety and depression, stigma surrounding mental illness and barriers to accessing help can all make it harder to speak up.
The result, she explains, is “suffering in silence”. “Multiple reasons, including lack of knowledge and awareness about the symptoms of anxiety and depression, widespread stigma about mental illness, and barriers to getting help,” Dr.
Simpson says. “Yet social support is very powerful, and there are good treatments for anxiety and depressive disorders: the consequence of keeping feelings hidden is suffering in silence.”
Women’s mental health is shaped by a combination of biological, social and cultural influences, and those factors can shift throughout life. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, around one in three women will experience an anxiety or depressive disorder, approximately twice the rate of men.
Certain life stages may warrant particular attention, including the onset of menstruation, pregnancy, the postpartum period and menopause. But, as Dr Simpson emphasises, these experiences cannot be explained by hormones alone.
“Women should pay attention to their mental health throughout their lives because mental health is closely connected to physical health,” she explains. “Certain times of major change can increase the risk of mental health challenges, including the start of menstruation, pregnancy and the postpartum period, and menopause.
These risks are not caused by hormones alone. Social pressures and major life changes can also affect mental health.
For example, becoming a mother can bring new responsibilities, expectations, stress, and changes in relationships and daily life.”
Anxiety and sadness are part of being human. Feeling nervous before a significant event or grieving the loss of someone we love is not, in itself, a sign that something is wrong.
These emotions have a place in our lives. The distinction, Dr Simpson explains, comes when symptoms become persistent or begin to interfere with everyday functioning.
When anxiety becomes so intense that it affects our ability to function, or low mood persists alongside changes in sleep or appetite, it may be time to look outward. “When you find yourself so anxious that you are not functioning or are depressed day in and day out and not sleeping or under or overeating, these are signs of a possibly more serious mental health issues, and it is good to seek professional help.”
Ahead of World Mental Health Day on 10 October, Lancôme is officially launching “I’m Fine”, a global initiative developed with the Anxiety and Depression Association of America and local non-profit partners. Featuring Lancôme spokespeople including Demi Moore, Zoe Saldaña, Christy Turlington and Vanessa Kirby, the campaign aims to encourage more honest conversations about women’s mental health.
Alongside the campaign, its dedicated platform, IMFINE.COM , will provide free, confidential self-assessment tools, expert-led resources and personal stories from women around the world. These include the GAD-7 anxiety questionnaire and PHQ-8 depression questionnaire, two clinically validated screening tools designed to help identify potential symptoms and encourage appropriate follow-up.
They are not diagnostic tests, but can offer a starting point for understanding whether further support may be helpful.
For Dr Simpson, awareness is an important part of building the confidence to act. “Knowledge is power – if you start learning what causes you to become anxious or sad, you can also start developing tools that work for you to help you reduce your stress levels and recover your joy in life.
As you develop your toolkit, you develop resilience over time to the many ups and downs of life. Also, if you know what is regular anxiety and sadness, you will be able to notice when your symptoms are no longer typical for you, and you can seek professional help much earlier, so you don’t experience a crisis.”
It has taken Matthieu Blazy remarkably little time to make Chanel feel like his own. Just one year into the job, the designer has already sent the house’s desirability into overdrive, with his early collections prompting queues outside boutiques and a renewed appetite for the Chanel wardrobe.
Now, with Spring/Summer 2027 , Blazy appears ready to explain exactly where that instinct comes from. The latest instalment of his ongoing ‘La Conversation’ series travels through the life of Gabrielle Chanel herself, tracing the different women she became through the clothes she created — and finding freedom in every incarnation.
“Throughout their lives, women become multiple selves, different faces of the same coin,” Blazy writes. “It’s about the women within a woman.
And here, it’s about one woman, Gabrielle, who then became Chanel.” The collection consequently reads like a wardrobe autobiography: Edwardian tailoring gives way to liberated jersey, masculine codes turn into feminine suiting, and familiar Chanel signatures are pulled apart, softened and reassembled. The avian imagery hanging above the runway made the final idea almost impossible to miss.
Freedom, in Blazy’s Chanel, has wings — duck ones to be specific.
Tweed was firmly back on the agenda, appearing in jackets, skirts and separates, but Blazy kept pulling it into unfamiliar territory. The new “smocked tweed” was engineered with stretch so that the traditionally structured suit could behave almost like sportswear, while other tailoring was worn directly against bare skin.
Jersey, too, was pulled back into Chanel’s history, with references stretching from Gabrielle’s early relationship with jersey underwear to the tailored suit of her later years. Blazy paid special attention to the backs of the garments, incorporating trailing lines of shadow boning, splayed peplums and low rolls that subverted standard tailoring expectations.
Freedom was palpable everywhere in the clothes. Dresses and skirts appeared in fluid, sheer fabrics, while feather-light tailoring was offset by elaborate embroidery and beading. The house’s beloved silhouettes remained recognisable, but their surfaces were busier, brighter and gradually more playful. Swifts and swallows appeared as buttons, jewellery and embroidered details, while cloud-like layers of printed silk created soft, billowing shapes across the body.
The accessories were having a particularly good season, as previously teased by the designer. Bird earrings took flight from the ears, while cloud-shaped bags hinted at different moments of the day; there were also new takes on the classic flap, a fresh style with a watch-chain lock and, eventually, the pièce de résistance: a birdcage minaudière containing tiny birds making their escape.
Gabrielle Chanel’s own 2.55 handbag, borrowed from the Patrimoine archives, bookended the show in the opening and closing looks, turning one of the house’s most recognisable objects into a wonderfully personal archive reference.
Anok Yai appeared in a celestial, star-speckled gown that seemed to take its cues from the night sky, while Bhavitha Mandava returned to the runway following her appointment as a Chanel ambassador. Rachel Ojuromi, the Lagos model who went viral after recreating Chanel looks with her friend Debby Fasingha, also made her Paris debut for the house.
After all those birds, clouds and references to liberation, a remixed version of Britney Spears’ ‘Gimme More’ suddenly blasted through the Grand Palais, shortly after a soulful rendition of the eternal ‘You Don’t Own Me’, sending the final looks out to one of the least expected soundtracks of Fashion Week. “This is not a historical collection; it’s a collection about Gabrielle Chanel’s layered stories,” Blazy writes.
“Ultimately, Chanel took off, and each step she took led to her being free, like a bird.”
photography. courtesy of Chanel words. Gennaro Costanzo
Elevating the ordinary is an ambition that has always defined Miuccia Prada’s secondary line, but the latest Miu Miu presentation in Paris indicates that everyday dress gains a whole new perspective when classicism meets the running track. For Spring/Summer 2027, Miuccia turns its focus entirely towards a recontextualisation of the quotidian wardrobe, building a collection where sportswear, knitwear and leather collide.
Titled ‘Here and Now’, the collection approaches ordinary dressing with a lighter touch than Prada, opening with almost preppy combinations of menswear-inspired blazers, loafers and tailored separates before letting the eccentricities accumulate. Miu Miu describes the collection as “an ambition to do better”, with familiar garments heightened, transformed and placed into new combinations.
Staged as the physical base for ‘Geste de Consolation’, a major interdisciplinary project by filmmaker Alice Diop for Art Basel Paris, the runway became a setting for these clothes to interact in a series of nonconformist dialogues full of friction and contrast.
Sport became one of the collection’s main languages, but Miuccia refused to keep it in its own category. Performance jersey appeared as abbreviated tops, with sports bras and bralets worn over or beneath dresses and other pieces, while tiny sports shorts and track trousers collided with tailoring.
The mix gives the collection its distinctly Miu Miu tension: one part country-club wardrobe, another part changing-room scramble. Olivia Colman was among the models walking the show alongside Gigi Hadid, Emma Corrin, Jamie Bell and Liu Wen.
Skirts naturally had another starring role, following their more conceptual treatment at Prada but arriving here in a considerably more utilitarian mood. Some came in tartan, others in plain leather, while low-slung styles were paired with cropped tops and sneakers.
Dresses moved through multiple shapes, from neat mini silhouettes to deliberately crumpled forms, with strings and crossed lacing becoming the collection’s recurring detail. The latter functioned as fastenings, allowing denim, pleated skirts, cocktail dresses and even shoes to be altered.
The show also debuted the new Wrangler x Miu Miu Upcycled collection, which deconstructs vintage late-twentieth-century denim sourced by specialists before reconstructing it with Miu Miu’s signature crossed lacing. Among the pieces is Wrangler’s cowboy-cut jean, given a new front through hand-customised crisscross stitching.
Leather, knitwear, suede, satin, gauze and metal mixed throughout, with suede laminated in wax to encourage a cracked, aged appearance and evening fabrics crushed against metal hardware. The prints were every bit as memorable, bringing back geometric motifs in wonderfully kitsch combinations that nodded to Miu Miu’s own history and wider popular culture.
The footwear introduced the fifth chapter of the New Balance x Miu Miu collaboration, reworking New Balance’s late-Nineties RC150 racing shoe in technical mesh, with loose customisable laces threaded through external loops. Alongside it came worn-looking loafers, buckled thong sandals and snakeskin-effect pumps finished with sneaker-style laces. Bug-eye sunglasses appeared in a parade of colours, while reptilian finishes also surfaced across the accessories.
The bags deserve their own attention, with new shapes spanning snakeskin-effect clutches and messenger bags to oversized leather bowling styles, giving the collection some particularly covetable counterpoints to all the sportswear.
photography. courtesy of Miu Miu words. Gennaro Costanzo