New York Fashion Week has spent the better part of a decade trying to convince us that it’s still a healthy fashion ecosystem. It isn’t.
The infrastructure underneath American fashion has continued to thin out: New York City apparel manufacturing employment fell from about 15,900 jobs in 2014 to just 5,900 in 2025, while the Garment District itself has lost more than four-fifths of its apparel-manufacturing jobs since 2000. A city can still have a full calendar and stage a runway show even after losing the people, workshops and technical networks that once made experimentation easier – it just becomes more expensive, more precarious and much more hostile for younger emerging designers.
So I’m reluctant to call S/S 2027 a ‘comeback’. A replenished calendar is the bare minimum of a functioning fashion week, not evidence that the underlying system has recovered. Still, S/S 2027 gave me something I have not felt toward New York in a while: cautious optimism. The best collections did not imitate Paris or apologize for being ‘too commercial’. They showed three different ways American fashion can still matter: identity, craft and actual point of view.
3. Monse S/S 2027
Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia’s first Monse runway since leaving Oscar de la Renta felt less like a relaunch and more like a designer duo finally being allowed to come home. For nearly a decade they’ve had to split their attention between two brands. S/S 2027, however, was the first season in years that all of their energy could be poured into Monse. And it’s made a difference.
Kim and Garcia started with tulips, specifically the streaked flowers with unnatural coloring often caused by a virus. Laura Kim called them “a broken beauty” and saw something of Monse in that imperfection. Thankfully this idea was pushed beyond simple florals prints: hand-dyed silk flowers climbed across dresses, lush fringe animated shirts and workwear jackets, and the reverse side of a specially developed Como textile created streaked pink-and-green surfaces. Even the tailoring resisted behaving properly. Lapels slipped off-center, lingerie flashed beneath sheer suiting, and the white shirt – the brand’s original victim – was once again pulled apart and reassembled. This is the kind of approach that NYFW needs.
What I liked most was that none of this needed a logo to tell me who made it. Monse’s vocabulary is now mature enough to be recognizable: subtle deconstruction without ugliness, femininity interrupted by men’s tailoring, and clothes that look slightly disobedient even while being technically polished. Kim and Garcia are technically confident enough to break the rules without losing control of the garments. At times, the tulip motif became a little too literal, and some of the embellishment flirted with prettiness for prettiness’s sake. But the optimist in me (apparently I have one) wants to choke that up to New York sensibility more than unoriginality. Because Monse looked is quickly maturing into a brand with actual grammar. That alone earns it third place.
2. Carolina Herrera S/S 2027
It’s very easy to underestimate a Carolina Herrera collection because its pleasures announce themselves immediately. It’s an ‘obvious’ beauty’. It is beautiful, polished, colorful and, in the most literal sense, pretty. But reducing Wes Gordon’s work to prettiness does him a disservice and misses what makes this collection so accomplished. Herrera has always been built on a serious design philosophy: that glamour can be disciplined, femininity can be authoritative, and dressing beautifully does not need to be ironic or ‘meta’ to justify itself. Gordon’s achievement is not inventing a new language for the house, but speaking that language with almost embarrassing fluency.
For the brand’s 45th anniversary, he returned to the codes without turning the show into a museum piece. Black-and-white polka dots, extravagant ruffles, the signature crisp white shirt, cigarette pants and sweeping evening silhouettes all reappeared, but as components of a complete character rather than regurgitated product. A white shirt tucked into a cummerbund and cigarette pants was veiled with a sheer ball skirt; elsewhere, the shirt itself was elongated into narrow shirtdresses. Even the references to Herrera’s early New York – Warhol, The New Yorker, the “ladies who lunch” – felt less like convenient nostalgia and more a reminder of the type of woman the house was built to dress.
That distinction matters. Gordon has said that Herrera’s real inheritance is not just a white shirt or a ball skirt, but an attitude: confidence, beauty, pleasure, and the conviction that dressing up is worthwhile. S/S 2027 pushed that philosophy close to its highest form. There is nothing especially radical about it. But there does not need to be. Innovation can also mean taking an established language and proving there is still more to say with it.
1. Lii S/S 2027
Zane Li is the least finished designer on this list, which is exactly why Lii is my number one. Born in Chongqing, Li moved to New York at 18, studied at FIT through Covid, graduated in 2023 and launched Lii almost immediately after failing to land the conventional industry job he expected. Barely a few years later, he has a Fashion Trust Ready-to-Wear Award, a place among the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalists and the Karl Lagerfeld Prize from LVMH. That trajectory would make me suspicious if the clothes did not justify the attention. They do.
What excites me is the method. Li starts with flatness – squares, panels, T-shirts, windbreakers – and forces familiar pieces into new dimensional relationships with the body. Off-center tanks, geometric skirts, square panels that kick away from the torso and asymmetrical flanges create the sensation of fabric being cleanly sliced, diced, shifted and reassembled. I am admittedly an easy mark for this kind of polished dicing; it reminds me of Prada at its most geometric and Versace F/W 2010, when Donatella sliced garments into sharp asymmetric planes. Those references are also Lii’s risk. There are definitely obvious parallels to Prada, Raf-era Jil Sander and JW Anderson, but with less impressive styling and finesse in execution.
But this is partly why I find Lii so promising. We’re not talking about an established brand here. If Li is already capable of creating something this relatively fresh, then his design process has plenty of room to grow in a very intriguing direction. If he can refine the finishing, make individual garments as compelling as the total look, and keep pushing this geometric language beyond its references, New York may have found a designer worth watching rather than merely hyping. I certainly will be.
Worst of S/S 2027: Magda Butrym
Yikes.
Magda Butrym chose New York for her runway debut at exactly the moment NYFW is trying to prove that it is more than a knock-off of the European fashion weeks. Then she opened with a collection so aggressively indebted to Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent (namely his S/S 2026 collection) that it practically arrived with a Paris postmark. And the resemblance was not confined to one coat or one styling trick. Nylon trenches, swollen shoulders, sheer skirts over exposed underwear, severe hosiery, glossy leather, narrow heels and that familiar collision of bourgeois polish with overt sexuality appeared in combinations that have become unmistakably Vaccarello’s. And I’m far from the only one who noticed it: The Blueprint already singled out the first five looks as uncannily close to recent Saint Laurent, while BURO. explicitly compared the opening trenches to Vaccarello’s.
That would be irritating anywhere. In New York, it is actively depressing. Not just because Vaccarello himself is effectively a one-trick-pony, but because it’s so damaging to NYFW’s reputation.
NYFW already carries the stigma of being fashion’s commercial understudy: too willing to import European prestige codes, too eager to prove that it can ‘approximate ‘look like’ Paris rather than articulate why New York should exist on its own terms. Butrym, who herself comes from a European background rich with cultural references, had the opportunity to challenge that stereotype. The United States is her biggest and fastest-growing market, she had just opened a SoHo store, and her stated references- Polish artist Natalia LL, domesticity, aprons, the tension between tradition and modernity – were far more interesting than what ultimately appeared on the runway. Instead, it was a poor man’s Vaccarello.
That is what makes this worse than a merely ugly collection. Butrym already has recognizable codes of her own – crochet, leather, cinched sensuality, a distinctly Slavic romanticism. Abandoning those in New York for a vocabulary this familiar does not flatter either her or the city hosting her.
If NYFW wants to recover its cultural authority, it cannot survive as Europe’s tribute act. It needs designers who come to New York because the city expands their language, not because the calendar offers another stage on which to rehearse someone else’s.
