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 

Between Utility and Refinement: Uma Wang’s Menswear Reflects a Changing Masculine Ideal

Voluminous silhouettes and beautiful tailoring were highlights of Uma Wang's latest menswear collection. 

Set in the context of Shanghai’s rapid transformation in the first quarter of the 20th century, Uma Wang’s Autumn/Winter 2026 menswear collection examines a period when the city became a crossroads of global influence and local tradition. Drawing on this moment of cultural exchange, the designer presents a wardrobe that reflects how shifts in urban life, work, and leisure reshaped the way men dressed, then and now, through a balance of tailoring, volume, and material innovation, writes Antonio Visconti. Photographs by Francesco Brigida

Jackets are softened with

relaxed construction.

UMA WANG anchors her menswear collection in a defining moment of cultural convergence: Shanghai in the early 1930s. It was a period marked by accelerated exchange, when Western modernity entered daily life alongside deeply rooted Chinese traditions. 

Rather than treating this era as nostalgia, Wang approaches it as a framework for examining how clothing reflects social change, cultural adaptation, and evolving modes of masculinity.

The collection presents a renewed menswear vocabulary shaped by the lifestyle shifts of the time. As urban life expanded to include new forms of entertainment, leisure, and work, dress became more fluid and multifunctional. Wang translates this historical shift into garments that move confidently between formality and utility, reflecting a modern wardrobe built for varied contexts rather than fixed occasions.

Silhouettes span the full range of classic menswear, from tailored shirting and structured jackets to pragmatic workwear and protective outer layers. However, traditional tailoring is consistently challenged. Jackets are softened through padding and relaxed construction, while linear graphic elements disrupt expected proportions. Cotton fabrics, typically associated with rigidity, are manipulated into more fluid forms, introducing movement and tactility into otherwise disciplined shapes.

By using a pivotal historical moment to examine contemporary dress, Uma Wang delivers a collection that is both intellectually grounded and practically relevant

With minimal decorative elements, 

cut, fabric and proportion were key. 

Material development plays a central role in grounding the collection. The interaction between texture and construction recalls the tactile memory of historic Chinese textiles, not through replication but through reinterpretation. Surfaces appear worn, layered, or subtly distorted, suggesting time, use, and transformation. This treatment reinforces the collection’s central theme: clothing as a record of cultural and personal evolution.

Wang’s approach to design remains deliberately restrained. Decorative elements are minimal, allowing cut, fabric, and proportion to carry the narrative. The garments resist closure, with finishes that appear intentionally unresolved. This sense of incompletion is not accidental but conceptual, reinforcing the idea of history as an ongoing process rather than a fixed reference point.

The result is a menswear collection defined by controlled tension. Strength is present, but it is not rigid or monumental; instead, it is adaptive, thoughtful, and understated. Wang positions masculinity here as responsive rather than dominant, shaped by environment and experience.

Uma Wang offers a clear and disciplined statement in this collection. By using a pivotal historical moment to examine contemporary dress, she delivers a collection that is both intellectually grounded and practically relevant, placed between tradition and modernity, without leaning too heavily on either.

Scroll down to see highlights from the Autumn/Winter 2026 menswear collection