That's a wrap: Paris Fashion Week edition

PARIS was burning this June, for two reasons: the heat, which, as Australians, we can only watch with extreme sympathy given how hot our own summers are becoming. And some temperature-raising Spring Summer ’27 collections that included enormous monster feet (courtesy Christian Louboutin); a debut menswear collection for Celine a la Michael Rider and an Hermès collection that provided calm relief.

Keep scrolling for our wrap up of Paris Fashion Week key collections and trends.

Hermès

Hermès sat out the Paris SS27 runway schedule this season, presenting its new menswear collection instead as an intimate studio showing during a fashion week that sweltered under some of the highest temperatures France has recorded.

The timing explains the format: with Véronique Nichanian departed after nearly four decades and Grace Wales Bonner not due to show her first collection until January 2027, the house is between designers, and its in-house studio team has been handed the pen.

What they produced is a sartorial comma – the moment between breaths where a house takes stock and sets its course – and no less sumptuously wearable for being a palate cleanser.

The collection stays close to the codes Nichanian spent her tenure refining. Leather, as ever, is front and centre throughout the collection: a lilac leather T-shirt with a perforated laser-print illustration, a grey leather aloha shirt, five-pocket leather pants, and a tan calfskin jacket whose polkadot perforations reference the house’s Mangeoire bag, itself modelled on a horse’s nosebag.

A shaved calfskin high-collared blouson looks built to improve with wear, developing unique character and becoming one with the owner akin to a much-loved Birkin.

Around the leather sits relaxed tailoring in serge, drill and gabardine – high-rise pants with deep pleating, occasionally cut with combat-style patch pockets – alongside softly structured knitwear, including handknitted cotton, in a palette of earthy tones and cold blues.

A thread of 1950s western wear runs through the lineup: high-waisted silk-linen shirt-jackets, naive rodeo-print shirting, sweater-vest cardigans in silk and linen knits, joined by printed scarves and decorative pins.

Words: Benjamen Judd

Celine

Closing out Paris Fashion Week was Michael Rider and Celine, with Rider’s first standalone menswear collection for the Paris house and shown at the Tennis Club de Paris. This marked Rider’s fourth outing for Celine but the first dedicated entirely to men. What is becoming clear is that, despite those early years of competitiveness (the infamous 1973 “Battle of Versailles”, when Halston and his fellow American designers flew to Paris to face off against French haute couture designers), American sportswear and Parisian chic are the perfect bed partners. 

Dare we say Celine’s Spring Summer 2027 collection is arguably the honeymoon? With its resort flourishes and city-ready adventurousness?

The pairing is written into his CV. Rider worked at Celine under Phoebe Philo before more than a decade at Ralph Lauren, and both inheritances were visible on the runway. Skinny trousers ran alongside ballooning, drawstring-waist volumes. Sharply cut blazers sat next to Fair Isle tanks and slouchy knits. 

A jabot-fronted shirt was worn with the nonchalance most men reserve for a T-shirt, while a jacket fastened with an oversized safety pin covered a plain cotton tank. Each look followed its own logic, styled as though its wearer had assembled it himself over years rather than received it whole.

Accessories were treated with similarly fun. Fringed headbands covered faces, gemstones were stuck directly to foreheads, and beaded necklaces hung over open collars. 

Bags were slung across the neck, sweaters knotted into scarves, a turquoise satin cummerbund cinched over a flowing tunic. Brooches with the look of flea-market finds landed on turtlenecks, and a single red leather glove appeared within an otherwise beige look. The beaten Reeboks, a collaboration between the French house and British footwear brand, became a viral sensation online.

Rider’s show notes read as a list of loose provocations – packing light, heirlooms and good time shirts, having guts – and the clothes followed suit. Although my fellow Millennials might be struggling at the thought we’ll soon be seeing V-neck tees, blazers and stovepipe denims back on the street sooner than we thought.

Words: Benjamen Judd

Song For The Mute

Proud Aussie moment incoming. Sydney-born Song for the Mute is only the fifth Australian fashion label to be accepted by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode in Paris and show on the official Paris Fashion Week schedule after Christopher Esber and Zimmermann and in earlier years Kym Ellery and Colette Dinnigan. 

Designers Melvin Tanaya and Lyna Ty, who was born in Paris, would have to have one of the most resolute brand visions coming out of Australia. Perhaps why when the now seventh generation of the successful SFTM x Adidas collaboration comes to life, the independent brand still remains squarely in focus. 

This morning’s show took us south of the Seine to an outdoor park of a local school, where Tanaya and Ty first met at age ten and a nod to the brand’s previous FW26 collection. Travel reference photographs were blown up and a clever clothes line installation with food crates and large melons on arrival let us know that we were entering Song for the Mute territory.  

Lined chairs and a pebble stone pathway swirled around an enchanted garden setting with shadows cast from the trees above. True to brand, the outdoor location was strikingly simple yet articulate of the tone. I sat with a Hong Kong buying team who reaffirmed that Song for the Mute was not only a hot commodity in their market, but a fever-pitch phenomenon.

The collection itself was in fact quite technical in nature, but presented with a simplicity of ease. The palate was khaki’s, browns, and ink blues with lashings of mustard and cumin. Some of the layered contrast plaids, look three, reminded me of a modern take on Vivienne Westwood. 

My footwear fetish was in full flight with a calfskin leather moccasin and the teasing of a new black and white ideation of the aforementioned Adidas franchise. With that, sportswear certainly took the lead and perhaps what made the collection feel super relevant for today. Outer layers played a central role in the dialogue with bombers, anoraks, pullovers, and running shells. 

The photography we had witnessed earlier looked to be digital printed onto an ecru-coloured soft tencel or rayon shirt and skirt combination, worn separately, and a personal high note was the inky blue-green buttery leather blouson.

There were also flashes of embroidered detail used sparingly on various garments to demonstrate yet another layer of brilliance and little pouches, I suspect for AirPods, were strewn through different looks in different fabrics. 

I think what Song for the Mute manage to do each season is look back with a lens, but then use that focus to push forward. Like, really forward. 

Regrettably, I had to run to my next appointment but would have loved to congratulate Melvin and Lyna in-person as they spoke with guests after the show. C’est bon. Vive la SFTM!

Words: Cameron Carter

Bassike

Off the runway, Australians were making their mark in Paris too.

Between shows, Australian label Bassike gave the country’s runway contingent a reason to exhale.

Founder and creative director Deborah Sams hosted aperitifs at Chateau Voltaire, gathering friends of the brand to toast summer mid-schedule, among them Archie Dowling, fresh from walking Armani and Dolce & Gabbana, and Raf Pincus who took his turn walking for Ralph Lauren. Also attending was Robbie Strawbridge, Cooper Foster and Josh Upshaw.

Negroni spritzes and margaritas circulated alongside radis au beurre, crab toasts and the hotel’s famous frites, before mini tartes aux pommes closed proceedings. Guests left with Bassike jersey t-shirts and caps, a gift that proved genuinely useful given Paris was nudging 40 degrees all week.

Christian Louboutin

Christian Louboutin’s Spring/Summer 2027 menswear presentation, staged in Paris on June 24 and conceived by Jaden Smith, built its own excavation site inside the show space. Guests entered through a pair of towering sculptural feet modelled on the Colossus of Rhodes, passing an engraved stone carrying an invented, undeciphered script before reaching the main room.

Inside, that room read as a dig site rather than a runway. Circular monoliths held the collection’s shoes and leather goods in carved niches, staged as artefacts rather than product. A meteorite-shaped structure anchored the centre of the space, and standing stones modelled on Carnac’s megaliths ringed the perimeter, doing double duty as both scenography and a nod to the mystery historians still can’t fully resolve about who built them and why.

The house’s signature red, usually confined to a sole, was extended across the entire set – stone, structure, light – functioning here as the material of an entire invented civilisation rather than a brand cue.

Smith has described the collection as an exploration of how achievement eventually calcifies into myth, and how legend outlasts the people who made it. That idea plays out literally in the staging: a kingdom already gone, its objects recovered rather than launched.

Pieces shown within the ruins included a multi-pocket tactical harness and matching messenger bag in black calf, the Corteo in both solid patent black and a dégradé patent finish, and a marbled calf piece titled The Stone Mason’s Feet – a title that folds the show’s central image directly into the product.

It’s Smith’s first outing for the house’s menswear line, and it arrives with a clear thesis: that Louboutin’s codes can be rebuilt as artefacts of an imagined past without losing their function as things people actually wear.

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