Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood showed its Spring 2027 ready-to-wear collection at the Palais de la Femme, a historic social residence and shelter for vulnerable women and children in Paris run by the Salvation Army, now marking its 100th year. Farida Khelfa, the French-Algerian muse who helped define 1980s runway work, opened the show, while punk poet Stuart McKenzie performed live.
The venue landed on the same day Paris Pride threaded through the city, and the split between celebration outside and protection inside said as much about the house’s runway identity as anything that walked. Nearly four years after Vivienne Westwood’s death, Kronthaler is answering the question every legacy label eventually faces: who belongs on this catwalk now?
Farida Khelfa Opens the Vivienne Westwood Spring 2027 Show
Casting carried the sharpest message of the day. Khelfa’s opening walk put lived experience at the head of the lineup instead of a fresh face, and it framed everything that followed. Natasha Lyonne turned up mid-show in an oversize leopard-and-floral-print chore coat with bejeweled platform gladiator sandals, shaking her shoulders and working the runway like a character rather than a hanger.
The front row reinforced the same idea. Jaden Smith sat alongside Heidi Klum and her 16-year-old daughter Lou Sulola Samuel. Add McKenzie’s spoken-word performance and the lineup read less like a standard model call and more like a room full of personalities the house actually wants attached to its name.
A Cheat Jacket and a Nightshirt Built for Movement
The season’s color started with Bazin cottons that Kronthaler bought at fabric shops in Barbès, the multicultural neighborhood in northern Paris. He picked different lengths “very randomly” and began cutting from there. A late-17th-century cheat jacket, spotted through a London costume institute, gave him the collection’s central idea: expensive cloth at the front, scraps pieced together at the back.
That reverse became a directive for how the clothes behave. “The back is just as important as the front. The collection is all about movement,” Kronthaler said after the show. He has also described the back as the more honest side of a garment, the place where everyone looks the same. For models, that means a walk has to read from every angle, not just the one facing the photographers’ pit.
The lightness came from a real summer. After a heat wave, Kronthaler wore a nightshirt through full days of cycling and errands, and that ease shaped the lineup. “It’s about summer. It’s all about what you want to wear,” he said.
The New Westwood Man and a Deeper Message on the Runway
Menswear delivered the clearest casting brief of the day. Slouchy nightshirts and swimwear put male models in soft, unstructured silhouettes that demand presence rather than armor. “A man should be as sexy as women. I don’t see that difference,” Kronthaler said backstage.
The house also sent out a T-shirt collaboration supporting Body and Soul, a suicide-prevention charity, folding a message into the runway the way Vivienne Westwood once did with slogans. “It’s about honoring life and not destroying it, and that’s the simplest step,” Kronthaler said.
He has called this the first collection since his wife’s passing in which he felt he had properly found his own way into carrying her compulsion to use fashion as a message. Ten years after the main runway line was renamed to include his name, the rebel spirit is still present, just spoken in a different voice.
