A heat wave gripped Paris when Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran presented their Spring 2027 collection on Thursday. The venue, an unfinished concert hall inside the Opéra Bastille, offered some relief. It had bare concrete and an unadorned ceiling, and the air was pushed through the space by industrial fans. It wasn’t so much quiet luxury as the luxury of a quiet moment to watch the world go by. As it turns out, that was exactly the point.
The setting worked. Lemaire shows have long operated on the principle that atmosphere is not decoration; it is the argument. This season, the duo made that case more sharply than ever.
The soundtrack opened with birdsong, slowly dissolving into the sounds of distant traffic and pattering rain. Midway through the show, giant fans sent a breeze through the hall. A male model wearing a windbreaker instinctively pulled his hood up. Another model, wearing something more delicate, quickened his pace as if seeking shelter. It was a small piece of theater, but it worked. That is how Lemaire and Tran work: They find the precise detail that evokes an emotion without dictating it.
The clothes themselves were built around a similar logic. Volumes floated off the body – partly in response to the heat and partly by design – resulting in pointy-collar shirts from the 1970s, trousers with three pleats that created roomy legs, and slip dresses with a distinctly ’90s quality. There was no austerity, though. The collection had sensuality running through it, quiet but present.
Some of the strongest pieces played with weight and surface. There was lacquered denim with a wet sheen, paper-thin, crinkled leather, and a print that looked like a shirt caught in the rain. Super light, occasionally translucent, and loosely put together, cotton voile and mesh constructions opened the lineup before giving way to deeper, wood-like tones and more substantial fabrics. A sculpted brown dress appeared to shift in silhouette as the model moved, as if wind were passing through the fabric itself.
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The most talked-about element was the print collaboration with the estate of Claudine Wick, a French illustrator whose work appeared in the surrealist-erotic magazine Plexus in the 1960s. Lemaire explained the concept: “It’s eroticism, but in a dreamy way and from a woman’s point of view, which is always interesting.” He’s right that it wasn’t gratuitous. The prints suggested more than they showed. Tran added that the season was guided by a desire for calm – “to take more time and be sensitive to things that don’t shout,” she said. “To be more present to the things you see and feel.“
This is an excellent description of Lemaire’s menswear brand. Lemaire founded the label in 1991 after working at Christian Lacroix. Over the decades, the house has developed a consistent position, accelerated considerably since Tran joined as co-artistic director in 2010: clothes that are modest in gesture but precise in construction. They are made to be worn and re-worn, layered and reinterpreted. The Spring 2027 collection does nothing to abandon that. It deepens it.
What stood out was the casting. The models were chosen for a specific quality: they looked like people who actually live in clothes. Several wore flip-flops with otherwise elevated looks. This could have come off as affectation, but here it felt like a genuine signal of ease. The crimson racer-back dress in vermillion knit, which appeared early in the lineup and returned as the finale look, was the only piece with heat. Not loud heat. The kind that stays with you.
