Paris Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2027: Anrealage Moves Beyond Skin Deep

The digital glow of the finale at the Anrealage show in Paris, inspired by the firebird that designer Kunihiko Morinaga made a theme of his new conceptual work. Cover picture of McQueen by Sean McGirr SS27. 

There are fashion shows that present clothes then there are those that make you question what a garment can actually be. At Anrealage, Kunihiko Morinaga has spent years exploring the pioneering boundaries of fashion, and for Spring/Summer 2027 he pushed that experimentation even further. At the Maison de la Radio, his 25th Paris presentation became an encounter between mythology, advanced technology and the changing surface of the body. Story by Franco Di Chiera and Steven Choo

The eye-popping colours

and changing patterns of

the Anrealage collection.

FOR his new collection called Skin, launched during Paris Fashion Week, Japanese designer Kunihiko Morinaga imagined his latest designs not as static forms but as transformative objects. A design could change its surface, alter its colour, acquire another identity and begin again. His inspiration moved between the biological world and the digital one, from the skins of living creatures to the interchangeable skins of videogame avatars.

“Living things shed their skin, again and again,” the designer says. “They slip out of the old skin and live on in the new.”

From this idea, Morinaga built a collection caught between organism and machine. Second-skin bodysuits carried patterns of scales, pixels, robots and fantastical creatures. Ultrasuede was cut into individual scales, while Japanese washi, reflective sequins and digitally printed textiles collided across the silhouettes. 

Familiar garments became optical illusions: denim, tailoring and videogame costumes appeared not as conventional clothes, but as images constructed across another surface. Three-dimensional scales changed their appearance according to the angle of light and the movement of the wearer. What looked like a particular colour from one side could become another from the next. The effect was subtle, but uncanny as though the clothes had developed their own visual metabolism.

The transformation reached its extraordinary climax with armour-like cocktail and evening dresses covered in thousands of individually controlled 'e-ink' electronic-paper scales. Unlike an LED display, the garments did not project light onto the body. The electronic paper itself changed colour, allowing vivid patterns to appear, dissolve into ash grey and reform in entirely new configurations.

As the three-dimensional scales changed their appearance, the effect was uncanny as though the clothes had developed their own visual metabolism

Scales along the design's surface

altered with light and movement. 

Beneath the surfaces, an intricate network of wires connected the individual scales, while AI was used to map the circuitry. The result was extraordinary: colour seemed to travel across the dresses like pigment moving through living skin, suggesting that the garments were not displaying an image so much as becoming one.

Morinaga found his central symbol in the firebird, inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix: “It burns out in the flames, and its life comes to an end. And yet, from the ashes, it rises again, and again.” 

As Igor Stravinsky’s 1919 The Firebird filled the Maison de la Radio with a live performance, the clothes entered their own cycle of death and rebirth. Colour disappeared. Then it returned. The garments seemed to burn without flame and regenerate without leaving the body.

Even the collection’s number carried meaning. “At Anrealage, A and Z overlap, and 25 makes one cycle,” Morinaga explains. His anniversary collection consequently became a meditation on endings that contain their own beginnings.

And then came the final apparition: a body clothed in digital light, glowing like the firebird that had inspired the collection (see main image). This last look returned to the LED technology of the previous season, creating a very different kind of transformation, one in which the body itself appeared to become a moving image.

It was a glimpse beyond the human, suggesting a future in which clothing might exist for forms of life capable of outlasting us. For Morinaga, this is where the idea of skin reaches its furthest point. “Perhaps those clothes will be called a third skin,” he says. At the Maison de la Radio, the designer made that idea visible: fashion transforming, rising from the ashes and becoming something new

After 25 presentations in Paris, this collection was not a look back. It was about what happens after an ending when the old surface has disappeared and there is nothing left but the possibility of beginning again.

See more highlights from the Anrealage Spring/Summer 2027 Collection below