Paris Fashion Week: Between Poetry and Protest ~The Emotional Mechanics of Walter Van Beirendonck

The vivid designs and motifs of Walter Van Beirendonck's new collection evoked his ideas about youth and creativity on the runway during AW26/27 Menswear at Paris Fashion Week. 

Walter Van Beirendonck delivered a collection that felt less like a runway show and more like a coded message from the cultural cutting edge: restless, emotional, and defiant. Moving between poetry and protest, innocence and unease, the Belgian iconoclast presented a vision of youth that is fragmented and expressive. A world built from contradiction and instinct, where fashion becomes a language for those who don’t fit neatly anywhere and have no desire to. Story by Antonio Visconti

Walter Van Beirendonck after

his runway show in Paris.

AVANT-GARDE ideas have been central to Walter Van Beirendonck's work his entire career. For his new collection, he turns that long-held sense of outsiderness into both a manifesto and a mirror. Titled Scare the Crow/Scarecrow, the collection feels less like a seasonal offering and more like a dispatch from someone still looking at the industry from the edge and enjoying the clarity that distance affords.

"I have always felt like an outsider in this industry," he says. "I’m not complaining. It’s a place from which you can look at things differently."

The designer has an enduring fascination with Art Brut and Outsider Art, and this filtered through the work of André Robillard. Robillard’s handmade guns, cobbled together from discarded materials are not referenced as shock objects but as symbols of unfiltered expression: creative acts born from necessity, instinct, and a refusal to comply with expectation. 

"I turned to the work of André Robillard, who has spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals making guns out of scraps: wood, tape, found objects," explains Van Beirendonck. "Something about that moves me deeply. An urgency and a complete disregard for what is expected or accepted."

"I have always felt like an outsider in this industry. I’m not complaining. It’s a place from which you can look at things differently"

3D modular blossoms on designs

were a feature of the collection.

That same instinct runs through the collection, which channels the unguarded logic of childhood, before self-consciousness, before rules calcify into taste. This is menswear driven by contradiction where plastic artillery blooms into flowers. 

Three-dimensional birds, and blossoms perch on garments but can be removed, rearranged, or recombined, turning clothing into a modular language rather than a fixed statement. It is fashion as play, but play sharpened by intent. Van Beirendonck isn’t chasing nostalgia; he is defending the potential of youth.

The visual vocabulary pulls from unlikely archives. Textiles woven with motifs about conflict and memory, suggest stories carried forward rather than erased. Tape appears not just as surface detail but as a statement, evoking repair, censorship, and the act of holding things together.

Protective sheets draped over sculptures or furniture become garments themselves, hovering over bodies in motion, simultaneously concealing and revealing. Utilitarian smocks outline Eastpak backpacks, blurring the line between clothing, armour, and storage.

"I was captivated by war carpets that are keepsakes of stories that need retelling, I knitted memories into patterns," says Van Beirendonck. "Tape is used as material, as a marker. I became fascinated by covers: the protective sheets placed over sculptures, over furniture, over things we want to preserve."

"In childhood there is that unfiltered way of thinking. Youth, in its truest form, is something I want to hold onto forever. As pure hope, raw energy"

Fine tailoring anchored the

more avant-garde designs 

Technically, the collection is surprisingly disciplined. Tailoring anchors the experimentation, with British wools offset by nylon and plastic. The palette mixes vibrant, fluorescent hues with more subtle colours, pale browns and greens. It’s less about contrast, more about choice, though the invitation to combine them at will remains. Sleeves detach, belts alter volume, and t-shirts are emblazoned with provocations.

"British wools combined with nylon and plastic and the colours are more restrained than before, a palette pulled through, ton sur ton," comments the designer. "Less clash, more intention: but you can go crazy with combinations."

Using recurring motifs and themes, Walter Van Beirendonck reminds us that continuity still matters even as subcultures dissolve. The designer is acutely aware that the tribes that once defined fashion identity have fractured and that youth is often dismissed or commodified.

"In childhood there is that unfiltered way of thinking," explains Van Beirendonck. "Morphing your feelings into drawings, words, objects, clothes. The freedom before self-consciousness sets in. Youth, in its truest form, is something I want to hold onto forever. As pure hope, raw energy. My new collection reflects this."

Scroll down to see more highlights from the Autumn/Winter 2026-27 collection in Paris