Whether it’s down to the state of the world or whatever the hell’s happening in the skies above it, we don’t blame you if you’ve recently felt like you’re coming apart at the seams. We certainly have, and it would seem that a good number of our favourite designers have, too: surveying the spring/summer 2027 shows, a red thread that’s been insistently tugged at is the trope of the woman coming undone.

Now, undone-ness is almost anathema to fashion. This, after all, is a world typically preoccupied – at least on the surface – with obsessive done-up-ness: with haughty deportment, with chic! To some, deliberately dressing in disarray might seem both uncouth and navel-gazingly pretentious. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll see this is less a glamourisation of falling apart à la Mugatu’s “Derelicte” than a reclamation of feminine agency – a perversion of the expectation that femininity should always present itself as primped and perfect, leaning into the messiness, complexity and exhaustion of being a woman today.

KNWLS spring/summer 2027.

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August Barron spring/summer 2027.

It was at London label KNWLS that we saw one of the clearest distillations of the trend. In place of its usual battle-hardy leathers, architectural corsetry and svelte, slinky underpinnings, models stormed a circular runway in slashed and spliced dresses. Skirts were hastily wrapped from the bottom halves of gabardine trench coats, while dresses were constructed with tank tops floating beneath skirt hems, as though their wearers had stormed out from backstage before the dressers could finish pulling their looks on. There was even a necklace strung with 27.33 carats of diamonds, seemingly snipped, the precious stones threatening to tumble to the ground.

These were, of course, cunning sleights of construction, the garments held together by invisible scaffolds of fishing wire and phantom tulle. Rather than a performative dishevelment, the collection found power in those moments of slippage, turning moments of ostensible vulnerability – of falling short of the mark – into an expression of self-possession and control.

Simone Rocha spring/summer 2027.

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Julie Kegels spring/summer 2027.

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It’s a theme we saw unravel across the runways from then on. At Jil Sander, Simone Bellotti delivered the latest chapter of his deliciously tweaked riff on the brand’s clipped minimalism, which was also front and centre in the brand’s Edie Campbell starring autumn/winter 2026 campaign. Simone Rocha, a master of materialising and creating space for the contradictions of modern femininity, showed satin-y camisole gowns with snipped straps and layered skirts with tumbled-up hems. Gui Rosa’s rollicking debut fielded a clique of self-professedly “deranged” debutantes, while LVMH Prize-winner Julie Kegels sent out models in drop-crotch hosiery that threatened to slip further with every step. August Barron turned its prissily perverse lense to Hollywood archetypes, and at Miu Miu, Mrs Prada’s message seemed to be that, when it all starts to fall apart, lace it back up and carry on…

Of course, these clothes won’t hit the rails until the other side of winter – which, take it from a fellow spiral queen, is far too long to wait. Mercifully, there’s plenty available now that will allow you to transfigure your inner chaos into the height of chic. Here are some of our favourites.