Paolina Russo SS27
Building a World to Belong To
Paolina Russo and Lucile Guilmard are making clothes for people who don’t seem particularly interested in looking like everyone else.
The Canadian and French designers met at Central Saint Martins and built their label around the things that shaped them growing up: sport, video games, DIY craft, suburban boredom and the peculiar magic of making something out of whatever happens to be around. Their collections have earned LVMH Prize and International Woolmark Prize recognition, along with the inaugural Zalando Visionary Award.
But awards aren’t really the story.
Paolina Russo has a point of view. And, increasingly, it has followers.
The clothes have always occupied an interesting space between sporty and strange, handmade and futuristic, familiar and slightly off. That language hasn’t changed dramatically from season to season. It is becoming more confident.
For SS27, the designers imagine a young woman moving between the chintz-and-quilted world of her grandmother’s house and the freedom of the skate park. The skateboard is there, but it is really another piece of the Paolina Russo vocabulary — sport, nostalgia, DIY, rebellion and the pleasure of making something unexpected out of something ordinary.
A cargo-green pea coat gets clashing ditsy florals and psychedelic embroidery. Laser-printed denim borrows the geometry of traditional quilting. Signature illusion knits return. Skateboard wheels become chunky jewelry. Childhood Beyblade toys become melted-plastic earrings. Even the classic Ecco Joke shoe gets covered in rhinestone-laced excess.
It is a little bit suburban childhood, a little bit skate park, a little bit craft project gone beautifully wrong.
And that is the charm.
Paolina Russo has never seemed particularly interested in conventional prettiness. There is femininity here, but it is filtered through sport, humor, craft and attitude rather than simply decoration.
What is more interesting this season is what is happening around the clothes.
At the SS27 show, hundreds of fans were invited inside. After the industry audience left, the show was staged again for them, followed by a party and a battle of the bands. It felt less like a runway presentation and more like an invitation: come in, this is your world too.
That feels significant.
Fashion talks endlessly about community. Paolina Russo seems to be building one.
The idea has been there from the beginning. The designers describe their clothes as a kind of uniform for people connected by shared memories and experiences. Now that idea is becoming visible in the audience as much as in the collection.
Even the technical work is evolving. Their signature lenticular knitwear returns in optical-illusion pieces, while the brand reached roughly 77 percent mono-material garments this season.
But the real evolution isn’t a new silhouette or a dramatic change of direction.
It’s confidence.
Paolina Russo knows what its world looks like now. It knows who wants to be inside it.
And judging by the people who showed up for the second show, they want in.
