Tokyo, Copenhagen, New York, London, Milan, Paris, Shanghai: The designer quotes here come from hundreds of spring 2027 collection reviews filed by the Vogue Runway team. We’ve organized their words into five categories representing the season’s through lines.
At the top of the list is a back-to-reality mindset; designers are prioritizing relatability and wearability over fantasy and character dressing. As Tokyo-based Viviano Sue noted: “Fashion is supposed to be something people can wear, no matter how crazy it is.”
To counter the steady stream of bad news, many big names adopted a glass-half-full mindset for spring 2027, including Chanel’s Matthieu Blazy. “I think there is a space for poetry, beauty, joy, and it’s a good remedy to the dark time,” he mused.
“I think fashion should give this to women.” Others noted our warming planet and set out to create lightness in their garments. Hermès’s Nadège Vanhée said her MO was “to walk around a very simple notion of air—a-i-r—and this idea of how the air can be perceptible but also imperceptible.” It was a pretty cool approach.
Celine’s Michael Rider leads a pack of creatives who seek spontaneous styling, embrace imperfection, and refuse to be bound by rules. This offbeat tendency doesn’t preclude a desire to make a big splash, of course. Dries Van Noten’s Julian Klausner spoke of “this very universal feeling of sometimes wanting to feel glamorous, sometimes wanting to feel like a star.” Shine on.
Realism
“It was the idea of being in the moment, in this time. What I was mainly interested in is working for people now.”—Miuccia Prada, Miu Miu
“The moment we’re living in calls not for fashion magic but for fashion realism.”—Loris Messina and Simone Rizzo, Moschino
“We’re really looking at how to translate all these ideas we’ve been having into a bit more reality and a way of dressing. We’ve been brand building for the last two seasons, creating a new universe that’s resonating…. Now, how do you bring clothes into that conversation?”—Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, Loewe
“Martin Margiela was about the anti when he began in the late 1980s, so we really worked with that—the hard and the soft, this kind of contradiction in fabric. I’m trying to really figure out how can we bring a strong concept in and be really consistent in the concept in every garment, but without being also scary.”—Glenn Martens, Maison Margiela
“I wanted to refine everything and let the clothes and shapes speak for themselves, and let the models transform into these real characters. I love shape. I love the human body. And I think me evolving as a woman, and thinking about what I actually want to wear, helped prompt this push.”—Mowalola Ogunlesi, Mowalola
“I felt a sense that high fashion has slipped out of reach for the average person, and so I wanted to figure out how to pass on the kind of fashion I had enjoyed to the next generation and to share that richness.”—Keisuke Yoshida, Keisukeyoshida
“We are making clothes—we’re not making art. Fashion is supposed to be something people can wear, no matter how crazy it is.”—Viviano Sue, Viviano
Joy
“Not to go too philosophical, but I think there is a space for poetry, beauty, joy, and it’s a good remedy to the dark time. I think fashion should give this to women.”—Matthieu Blazy, Chanel
“I wanted to have references to happiness and joy. It’s those kinds of moments that you want to freeze and make that moment into an object or idea that will romantically survive the creator and this container of it.”—Patricio Campillo, Campillo
“[Fashion is] serious work. But there is a type of fun, and I think there should be humor because when we are doing fittings, we’re having so much fun. But we do take it very seriously.”—Duran Lantink, Jean Paul Gaultier
“You know how I approach my universe and my designs—it’s always about this wonderful, beautiful, ideal society where everyone is glamorous and beautiful and we all live happily ever after in peace and everyone is welcome.”—Alejandro Gómez Palomo, Palomo Spain
Wabi-sabi
Accidental, spontaneous styling is “what turns me on. I think that’s how I am, and I don’t know how not to do that. That’s what I respond to when I see those things on other people in the world and when the studio and I are out living. I love when real clothes are worn spontaneously.”—Michael Rider, Celine
“We didn’t want the look of something factory made. We thought it was nice to leave in the sort of strange imperfections. We tried to sort of cling onto that, pattern-wise and fit-wise.”—Matt Empringham, A Letter
“Things don’t need to match. They need to attract.”—Aaron Esh
“I like when things don’t feel perfect. I like things to feel cool, youthful.”—Daniel Lee, Burberry
“I like memory as a source of inspiration because it’s not really fixed. It’s not exact.”—Stuart Vevers, Coach
“I like that moment of something being sensitive and brutal—highlighting the history of something broken but then adding additional value.”—Kozaburo Akasaka, Kozaburo
“It’s always a tension and a battle to me as a 25-year-old Chinese person trying to explore what a woman would really like, and I think that tension is quite interesting in a way. Maybe some things come out that might not be functional or might not be traditional womenswear in a lot of people’s eyes, but I enjoy that offness.”—Zane Li, Lii
“There is a lot of liberty in how women dress here [in New York]. We’re not following rules of, like, eveningwear is only eveningwear, with this type of bag, this type of shoe. I see women in the middle of the day with a gown on, and it’s totally normal and admissible, and I find that really inspiring.”—Rachel Scott, Proenza Schouler
“We’ve been describing this collection internally as up-down, east-west, here-there, then-now. The up-down is how she really dresses. Evening is not necessarily evening, and the day is not simply day.”—Sarah Staudinger, Staud
“I don’t want the normal way, the traditional way to cut. We prototype on the body, then take it off to see how everything is. There are so many mistakes. For example, the bottom should go this way, but we go that way.”—Uma Wang
Let There Be Lightness
“I think it’s about trying to remove the heaviness of heritage of a brand like Dior. It’s trying to work out what you like in the brand that is opposing to you and, at the same time, trying to find solutions.”—Jonathan Anderson, Christian Dior
“My idea was really to walk around a very simple notion of air—a-i-r—and this idea of how the air can be perceptible but also imperceptible.”—Nadège Vanhée, Hermès
“I wanted to return to something very light and colorful, like ice creams. In a way it’s my children, I think, who give me that strength and that desire to use yellow, red, stripes, polka dots, the little slippers that are easy to wear into the water and so on.”—Simon Porte Jacquemus, Jacquemus
“I wanted to express a sensation of simplicity, a feeling of purity. It’s an impression of minimalism, but the work behind this construction—the simplification, making things extremely light—is really complex.”—Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton
“We were thinking about solutions for intense weather, where you can still feel chic and live a real life. The reality of urban living in the summer is that you want an escape from it. But it’s also the busiest time of the year for a working woman.”—Lizzie Owens, 6397
“I added all the delicateness to be like, Well, here it is, in one vomit of delicateness.”—Hillary Taymour, Collina Strada
Glam
“When royal life and real life become one.”—Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçons
“I thought it was nice—this very universal feeling of sometimes wanting to feel glamorous, sometimes wanting to feel like a star.”—Julian Klausner, Dries Van Noten
“It’s sexy, but absolutely not sexy.”—Meryll Rogge, Marni
“It’s all about that hyper-glamour, kind of like the ’80s.”—Richard Quinn
“I want when the girls come out that you almost need sunglasses because it’s going to be shiny like a big glitter ball.”—Caroline Bille Brahe, Caro Editions
“I was thinking about how people need to escape and heal something. So I started with the concept of opulent femininity, always with the tension of the utilitarian and that contrast of sportswear.”—Tory Burch