[Issue 02] NYFW SS27 - The Venue Is the Collection

This season New York designers spent spring-summer 2027 in museums, sculpture gardens and a converted Navy Yard warehouse. Collina Strada took the industry 58 miles north of the city to Storm King. Tory Burch showed in Isamu Noguchi's Sunken Garden, a circular Japanese rock garden 16 feet below the plaza at 28 Liberty Street. Cult Gaia moved into Studio Gang's Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History. Proenza Schouler sent models down the staircase of a former museum on West 17th Street. Michael Kors ran an outdoor runway through MoMA's Sculpture Garden.

A runway is normally built to stay out of the way of the clothes. These rooms don't, which means the clothes have to be read against them. So this issue sorts the shows by what the clothes did to their buildings. Collina Strada echoed its landscape. Tory Burch set her clothes against a garden. Cult Gaia inverted a building. Proenza Schouler returned to one. Thom Browne built his own. The tailoring is where it shows: a shoulder, a seam, a hem, the point where a body meets space.

Collina Strada staged its show at Storm King, a 500-acre outdoor museum 58 miles north of the city, and Hillary Taymour's show was the first fashion show the park had hosted. Models walked between monumental works including Tal Streeter's Endless Column, Alexander Liberman's Adonai and Calder's The Arch. The collection, Detour, ran to 33 looks of organza feathers, recycled sequins, ruffles and draping. The colors, dusty rose, olive, cocoa and sky blue, picked up the landscape around them (Hypebae).

The sculptures are steel and hold their shape against the wind. The clothes were built to do the opposite. Oversized bloom pants and draped gowns caught the breeze, while fitted corsetry kept the body contained. Steel around the models, fabric moving through them. Taymour has said she thinks of clothing as a sculptural practice, and this was where that idea got tested. The garments added weather to the art. The venue was the collection's central argument: fashion, like sculpture, belongs to the landscape it stands in.

Tory Burch staged her show in the Isamu Noguchi Sunken Garden. The garden sits beneath Gordon Bunshaft's tower at 28 Liberty, formerly One Chase Manhattan Plaza, and Noguchi completed it in 1964. It is circular and sunk below ground, with seven basalt stones from Japan's Uji River, and it is modeled on Kyoto's Ryōan-ji. The design pulls the eye downward, away from the towers. Burch came here after last season's visit to the Breuer Building, so she is working through New York's midcentury landmarks one venue at a time.

The garden is about restraint. Her collection argued against restraint, opening on an acid-green sweater embroidered so densely it could pass for wallpaper. The palette was coral, turquoise, mint and butter yellow against deep browns (Hypebae). But the two share a subject, which is arrangement. A rock garden is a few objects placed with total intention. Burch's collection was about how women pull an outfit together, and it read like a collector's shelf. The tailoring made the same point at the level of the garment: opera coats loosened to the ease of a trench, and sharp tailoring pushed gently off-kilter. Off-kilter by design, like stones that look casually placed. The show closed on a deliberately plain black coat. After all that color, it reads as the last stone.

Cult Gaia staged its show at the Gilder Center, designed by Studio Gang and opened in 2023, 230,000 square feet of flowing curves that connect ten museum buildings in 33 places. Jasmin Larian Hekmat described it backstage as Jeanne Gang taking concrete, something hard, and making it look soft. Hekmat's own work runs the other way. Her Behesht (Paradise) collection used architectural woven cotton, silk jacquard, and petals of hand-painted silk and organza built up into sculptural forms, with sheer organza layered so the shapes reformed as the models walked. Soft materials given a hard, built presence.

It showed from the first look: a deep-olive tailored opening with a puffed, built-out shoulder that WWD described as a tailcoat extending into leg-of-mutton sleeves. The shoulder projects from the body the way a cantilever does, though that's my reading, not hers. The concept underneath was grief for her late grandmother, and the palette moved from charcoal through green, sky blue and red to a soft pink. The building supplied its own version of the idea: a wall of moss growing out of the concrete.

Proenza Schouler showed in the former Rubin Museum on West 17th Street, and models came down its spiraling central staircase. The building has layers. Before it was a museum it housed Barneys' women's store, the first retailer to stock Proenza Schouler. Rachel Scott, now on her second collection as creative director, with the founders having moved on to Loewe, was showing the house its own origin.

The clothes worked the same way, one silhouette over another. Seaming traced the female form across dresses, a silhouette laid over a silhouette. Stripes twisted around the body, and sunburst pointelle opened into angular flanges at the hip (Luxferity). The house's precision was still there, but allowed to curve. Set that beside the staircase, a curve inside a rectangular building, and the two are doing the same thing: taking a rigorous structure and letting it turn. Scott's stated aim was that the body does not adapt to the clothes, and here the clothes moved through a building that had already been reshaped for other uses.

Joseph Altuzarra has worked out of the Woolworth Building since 2017. Cass Gilbert built it in 1913 as the tallest building in the world, a limestone-and-terracotta tower modeled on Gothic cathedrals. At its opening a reverend dubbed it the "Cathedral of Commerce," the lobby's vaulted ceiling and gold mosaics built to read as church, not office (History; Smarthistory).

Altuzarra's spring show ran through that lobby, lit to show off the vaulting (WWD). The collection drew from a book of photographs of Casa Susanna, a 1950s retreat in the Catskills, and Altuzarra described the clothes as menswear "twisted into something that felt really feminine".

Thom Browne is the one designer who didn't borrow a building. He closed the season on September 15 at The Shed, Diller Scofidio + Renfro's shape-shifting cultural building at Hudson Yards, and turned it into a garden of giant leaves, huge daffodils and a cocoon at the center. The inspiration was A Bug's Life and the subject was metamorphosis. The early gray suits stood as the moths, and by the end the models had turned into butterflies in color.

His tailoring has always worked as an exoskeleton, structure worn on the outside, and this season the insects made that literal. He talked about conceptual shapes drawn from the shells of beetles and ladybugs (New York Style Guide). The tailoring grew more armored, and the pleats suggested segmentation. A pleat is a repeated module, the same logic as a facade. The Shed was designed to be transformed, and Browne transformed it. He closes New York Fashion Week the way a period closes a sentence.