“I’m a put-on-a-show kind of girl”: the sentence that opens Vaquera’s press kit for Spring-Summer 2027 already says almost everything. The woman who speaks does not merely dress; she stages. Forty-one looks, a casting entrusted to the Midland agency, a choreography, a score by Michel Gaubert: the collection presents itself as a show whose garments are at once the costumes and the props.
Service in gala dress
What strikes you on reading the list of silhouettes is the pairing of registers the house embraces. On one side, the wardrobe of the uniform: military jacket, uniform shirt, uniform shorts, jodhpurs, short trench coat, trucker jacket. On the other, that of domestic service, pushed to literal quotation, with a chef’s toque, a maid’s headband, an apron, a waiter’s shirt front. Between the two, the boater, repeated across many looks, which tops a shawl dress as readily as city outfits.
There is a way here of looking at invisible labour, that of kitchens, upper floors, dining rooms, and of giving it the honours of the runway. The press release does not comment on it; it merely names the pieces. But the juxtaposition speaks for itself: the same stage welcomes the woman who serves and the woman who receives, and nothing indicates which is which.
The boudoir and the ball
The collection’s second side is more intimate. Négligé dresses and babydoll dresses, sheer bras, a skirt with sheer piping: lingerie leaves the bedroom without changing its name. At the other end of the show, ball gowns, fishtail sheath dresses, gathered dresses and bow dresses, worn with wedge pumps christened “boudoir” and bow clutches. The bow is, moreover, the most constant motif: headband, top, dress, bra, clutch.
This collision of underneath and above, of nightwear and reception dress, sets up an ambiguity the house has cultivated season after season: where does the stage begin, where does the backstage end? The fact that the collection opens and closes on the same combination, boater, shawl dress and boudoir wedge, gives the whole a form of cycle, almost a curtain rising and falling.
Two collaborations, the same distortion
This season introduces two partnerships. With Mykita, Vaquera reworks two classics of American eyewear, the aviator and the cat-eye, in elongated, almost melted silhouettes. The models, presented here for the first time, are announced for release in Spring-Summer 2027. With Crocs, the house redraws the clog that has become a cult item through its signature distortion of the everyday; it appears on the feet of some looks under the name “Retro Runners”.
In both cases the gesture is identical: take an object everyone recognises and deform it just enough that it ceases to be neutral. This is, at bottom, the method of the entire collection, applied at the scale of the accessory.
A full team
The press kit takes care to name those who made the show: styling by Emma Wyman, creative direction by Laura Spence as senior designer, scenography by Christian Feltham, music by Michel Gaubert, choreography by Eric Christison, hair by Claire Grech, make-up by Daniel Sallstrom, production by Western Promises. The long list of acknowledgements includes the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode. Press relations are handled by Lucien Pagès. This care in crediting everyone, from studio assistants to styling assistants, reflects the logic of a troupe more than that of a classic house.
It remains to be seen what this wardrobe of a maid in a ball gown, of a soldier in a nightgown, will become on the street. Vaquera has never sought to dress demurely; the question is rather who, next spring, will agree to step onto the stage it is setting up.
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