Spring & Summer Fashion
THE SEASONAL EDIT 2027
H1-KEY at Seoul Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2027 at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul
A considered guide to the season ahead—its ideas, its pleasures, and the details worth carrying into everyday life.
Spring and summer invite a different way of dressing: lighter layers, considered colour and pieces that move with the body. Here, we follow the ideas emerging from the collections and their early appearances on the red carpet—without mistaking a month of looks for a forecast.
SEASON IN fOCUS
spring & Summer 2027
The Season That Dressed Early
By Elizabeth Morgenfeld
From a steel-and-crystal gown in New York to Spring 2027 pieces on the London and Los Angeles red carpets, the month offered a preview of fashion’s next season. Not a forecast, exactly: more a conversation about movement, craft and the way clothes gather meaning in public.
At a New York screening of Klara and the Sun on 19 October, Jenna Ortega wore a dress made from steel boning and thousands of crystals. Its designer, Elias Matso, created it as the final look for his fashion-school thesis collection. He told Marie Claire that the work took around 300 hours. Ortega described it to People as “handmade, human-made, a lot of effort.”
The dress was not a Spring 2027 runway look. It was one young designer’s singular piece, made for one actor and one film. That distinction matters. A red carpet is not a neat preview of the season to come; it is a meeting place for runway clothes, custom work, film promotion and the person wearing them.
Before the season begins
Jenna Ortega wearing Elias Matso's Steel Gown at a New York screening of Klara and the Sun Image credit Getty Images
Still, new-season clothes arrived unusually quickly this month. At the sixth annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles, Cailee Spaeny wore Valentino Spring 2027. Amandla Stenberg wore Zimmermann Spring 2027, while Cara Delevingne appeared in Givenchy by Sarah Burton. At the BFI London Film Festival, Carey Mulligan chose a silver, pleated Celine Spring 2027 tunic and matching skirt.
The gala came just after fashion month, when designers’ new collections were still fresh in people’s minds. The moment a runway piece reaches a red carpet, it meets different conditions: the camera, the flash, the movement of a body, the practical business of walking and sitting. It is an early public appearance, not a verdict on whether the look will last.
The labels also tell different stories. Brittany Snow’s Max Mara look at the gala was from Resort 2027; Ayo Edebiri wore Chanel Spring 2026 Couture in London; and Penélope Cruz brought an archival Ralph Lauren design from Spring 2014 to a separate festival appearance. One month’s red carpets can hold several fashion calendars at once.
What appeared more than once
Movement was one recurring idea. Mulligan’s Celine pleats gave the silver fabric shape while allowing it to shift. Taylor Swift’s pale-blue custom Dior at the Academy Museum Gala also featured delicate pleating. These are different kinds of eveningwear, but both draw attention to how fabric moves rather than simply how it looks in a still photograph.
Silver appeared in another, less literal way on Ortega: not as a soft metallic surface, but as the visible structure beneath her dress. It would be a stretch to call that a trend. The contrast is interesting in itself. In Mulligan’s look, pleats softened the form; in Matso’s, metal became part of the form.
Colour offered another set of observations. Cynthia Erivo wore a yellow Prada gown to the Prima Facie premiere at the BFI festival; Cruz wore a separate, pale-yellow Chanel gown for Bunker. They were different shades, designs and occasions. Taken together, they make yellow worth noticing—but two examples do not make it the season’s defining colour.
Surface mattered too: fringe, lace, flowers and other details that reveal the work in a garment. Edebiri’s Chanel look paired an ivory fringed bodice with a black skirt. Cruz’s Chanel gown carried floral appliqués. At the VMAs, Teyana Taylor wore Zuhair Murad Couture; at the Academy Museum Gala, Swift’s Dior was a different sort of spectacle, its pale colour and embellished bow giving a familiar evening silhouette a particular focus.
Newness, memory and a little theatre
Some appearances drew meaning from what came before. During one of her Paris residency performances this month,
Cailee Spaeny with vivid pink Valentino Spring 2027 gown at the 2026 Academy Museum Gala credit to: Kevin Winter/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images
Céline Dion wore custom Chanel couture by Matthieu Blazy, reworking the silver Chanel look she wore to the 1997 Oscars. W reported that the new gown took 1,380 hours to make. Its significance came from construction, certainly, but also from memory: a past public image revisited in a new setting.
Elsewhere, fashion was less solemn. At the Los Angeles premiere of Wicker, Alexander Skarsgård wore a custom Chopova Lowena skirt and a shirt printed with a framed image of his co-star Olivia Colman. The look played with the film’s story and with the conventions of men’s red-carpet dressing. It was a public joke with a designer’s hand behind it—not a claim about what everyone will wear next spring.
The month also held events with their own distinct fashion languages. Vogue World: Milano brought Italian houses and a theatrical runway to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. The VMAs offered music-industry spectacle. The Victoria’s Secret show returned to Los Angeles, with performers and runway looks in a different frame from its pink-carpet arrivals. At El Gouna, Mona Zaki wore Carolina Herrera, Salma Abu Deif wore custom Miu Miu, and Huda El Mufti wore archival Dolce & Gabbana. At the Pride of Britain Awards, Laura Whitmore wore a navy suit with white lace appliqué, while Iain Stirling paired a blazer with a blue-and-green kilt.
These events are not interchangeable, and none is a wardrobe plan. A film premiere, a gala, a concert stage and a fashion show ask different things of clothes. The useful question is what each setting brings into view.
What might come with us
The month’s strongest evidence is not one silhouette or a single colour. It is a collection of ideas: pleats that move, details that reward a closer look, considered colour, and garments where the making is visible. Some belong to couture or a one-off commission; others are easier to imagine at a dinner, a wedding or an evening out.
A red-carpet image is not a prescription. Most of us do not need a steel corset, a train or a custom couture gown to respond to what we see. We might simply notice whether a fabric moves well, whether a colour feels considered, or whether a detail makes us want to look twice.
That is what this month’s appearances leave behind: not a list of rules for Spring 2027, but a reminder that clothes can carry more than one idea at once. A new design can borrow from memory. A formal look can have a sense of humour. And craftsmanship can be visible without needing to announce itself.
Carey Mulligan wears a silver pleated Celine Spring 2027 look at the BFI London Film Festival. Credit: Joe Maher/Getty Images
Sources & further reading;
Ayo Edebiri, actress, at the 63rd annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center in 2025 for the film After The Hunt Credit: Bryan Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.