For Spring/Summer 2027, the collection was conceived as a direct response to the duo’s Fall 2026 show, The 1%, which examined and mocked the visual codes of extreme wealth. This time, Steven Raj Bhaskaran shifted the focus in the opposite direction, describing the new season as being “for the 99%.”
That idea shaped both the casting and the setting. The show featured 99 models, all people of colour, and unfolded beneath Paris’s Monument à la République, a public space closely associated with protest, civic identity and collective expression.
Rather than looking at privilege from the outside, SS27 turned its attention to the people who are so often left outside fashion’s traditional image of power.
What made the collection compelling, though, was not just the message. It was the way the runway moved through birth, religion, family, rebellion, death and couture, almost like different chapters of one life.
It Starts With Birth
The opening images were unexpectedly tender.
Models carried swaddled babies, setting up birth as the first symbol in the story. Before there were punks, protest signs or darker imagery, there was arrival.
Seen this way, the babies can be read as a symbol of possibility. Everyone enters the world before society assigns class, religion, status or power.
That idea became important later, because the show kept asking what happens to identity once all those systems begin to shape us.
Religion, Family and the Identities We Inherit
The first major section drew heavily from Bhaskaran’s own background.
He grew up around Hindu, Christian, Mormon and Muslim traditions, and those memories appeared through veiled heads, cross motifs, kurta-like shapes and more restrained tailoring.
There were also figures that read visually as nuns and religious women, bringing a sense of discipline, devotion and ritual into the collection.
Male faces were partly veiled too, reversing an image more commonly associated with women. Bhaskaran has connected that gesture to ideas around masculinity, suggesting that hypermasculinity can itself become a kind of mask.
Rather than treating religion as costume, the runway seemed interested in what faith can represent more broadly: rules, belonging, identity, protection and sometimes restriction.
The personal nature of this chapter became even clearer when Bhaskaran appeared alongside his mother, sister and niece, turning the runway into something autobiographical rather than purely symbolic.
Pregnant figures added another layer to this section. Alongside the babies seen earlier, they brought ideas of creation, inheritance and continuation directly into the story.
Then the Rebels Arrived
The mood did not stay quiet for long.
The second part moved into punk, metal and protest. Leather, distressed denim, balaclavas, facial spikes, body modification and aggressive graphics replaced the more ceremonial feeling of the opening.
Bhaskaran has described punk and metal scenes as places where he found community after leaving home, and that history gives this section more meaning than simply rebellious styling.
These were the outsiders finding one another.
One look carried the French tricolour marked with RESIST, while Marianne appeared through death-metal imagery.
The symbols of France were no longer polite or official. They had been taken over by people demanding to be seen.
The punks, veiled figures, rebels and unconventional bodies all seemed to ask the same thing: who gets to decide what belonging is supposed to look like?
Birth and Death Share the Same Runway
This was perhaps the strongest visual idea in the show.
Matières Fécales placed images associated with life and death in the same narrative. Babies, pregnancy, religious figures, face coverings, aggressive body modification and gothic styling existed together rather than in separate worlds.
That makes the collection feel less like a simple political statement and more like a cycle.
You are born. You inherit systems. You resist some of them. You create new identities. You age. You die.
Fashion becomes the costume for all those stages.
That may also explain why the collection never settled into one mood. Tenderness and menace constantly interrupted each other.
Couture Enters the Story
The final section moved into something more recognisably grand.
Sari textiles woven in Varanasi were transformed into dramatic couture volumes, while handwoven cotton from Burkina Faso was worked into corseted eveningwear. One look used more than 300 metres of tulle.
This part widened the idea of what couture can draw from.
Instead of treating Parisian couture as an isolated European tradition, the designers brought South Asian and African textile practices directly into the conversation.
Veteran Martinican model Mounia, an important figure in Yves Saint Laurent’s couture history, appeared in a sweeping tulle look, connecting past representation with the show’s larger conversation about visibility.
The Ending Flips the Power Dynamic
The final image completed the story.
Young Black models carried hyper-realistic sculptures of older wealthy white men, their eyes covered with dollar-bill blindfolds. The figures were created by artist Sarah Sitkin.
Placed against the babies seen at the beginning, the meaning becomes hard to ignore.
The show starts with people being carried into the world.
It ends with symbols of wealth and old power being carried by the very people fashion has historically pushed to the margins.
That reversal gives the collection its final punch.
Matières Fécales SS27 was theatrical, confrontational and intentionally uncomfortable, but beneath the spectacle was a surprisingly clear story.
It was about who is born into power, who is excluded from it, who rebels against it and who gets to imagine something beyond it.
And in between came nuns, mothers, punks, protesters, couture gowns, babies and death.
Not because they belong neatly together. Because real life does not either.
