Balenciaga Summer 2027: Les Coraux de la Liberté
Pierpaolo Piccioli starts from a branch of red coral for his third ready-to-wear show at Balenciaga
A branch of red coral. It is the starting point of the Balenciaga summer 2027 collection, Les Coraux de la Liberté, presented by Pierpaolo Piccioli on 1 October in Paris. Coral looks like a plant and behaves like stone: it is built by colonies of tiny animals, polyps, that secrete a skeleton of calcium carbonate layer after layer.
Red Mediterranean coral, Corallium rubrum, grows by millimetres a year. Every branch is different: it forks where the current and the light allow, and no two pieces repeat the same form. It is this growth without a plan that interests Piccioli, who carries it into the construction of the clothes.
Piccioli comes from the sea: he grew up in Nettuno, on the coast south of Rome. He spent twenty-five years at Valentino, the last eight as sole creative director, before arriving at Balenciaga in 2025. This is his third ready-to-wear show for the house, after his debut in October 2025 and the autumn-winter collection in March 2026; in between came Resort 2027 and, in July, his first haute couture collection.
The fabrics of Balenciaga spring-summer 2027
Piccioli works on construction to change the relationship between fabric and structure. Sheer fabrics and firmer materials alternate, with different techniques to control the silhouette. The wardrobe keeps the references to the house’s architectural cut and changes their weight, texture and behaviour.
Tailoring meets soft construction. A construction left on view makes the work harder: proportions and volumes must hold without the usual internal support.
Gazar is a stiff silk built to hold a shape on its own; in July Piccioli brought it back as Neo Gazar, using it both as outer fabric and as internal structure. The relationship with coral also passes through the surfaces.
From the July couture: Piccioli’s second year at Balenciaga
In July Piccioli presented his first haute couture collection for Balenciaga, the fifty-fifth in the house’s history. He brought back gazar as Neo Gazar and showed several looks twice, the second time entirely in black, so that the eye followed only silhouette, volume and construction.
Resort 2027 had introduced the idea of unsized garments: techno taffeta and cotton poplin standing away from the body, as much or as little as the wearer chooses, with featherlight fabrics and glove-weight napa.
Balenciaga SS27 silhouettes
The silhouette comes from the alternation of volumes, lengths and surfaces, and changes with the position of the body: the structure reads when still, while openings and swings alter its profile in movement.
Material has always been where Balenciaga invents. Cristóbal Balenciaga treated cloth as a building material, cutting it to stand away from the body: the semi-fitted suit, the tunic, the sack dress, the cocoon coat, the balloon skirt, and gazar, the stiff silk developed to hold volume on its own. Spring 2027 picks up that line of thought, carried across the full wardrobe.
A few thin layers of cloth fall, catch and lift against the body, and the architecture comes from that movement. The clothes take their shape from life as it happens, from walking, turning, reaching, and the layering quietly rewrites how a wardrobe is put together.
The jewellery completes the drawing. The necklace climbs to meet the earrings, joining neck, jaw and ear in one line, a vertical that answers the shoulder’s horizontal.
