WWD’s Ones to Watch for Men’s Spring 2027 at Paris Fashion Week

PARIS — Whether the story starts in Sydney when two 10-year-olds ended up next to each other alphabetically; in locked down New York during the pandemic; in direct contact with one’s source material; in absolute secret, or in the bountiful territory created by a dual culture, the brands making their debut during Paris Men’s Fashion Week are all about blooming where you’re planted.

Hyacyn

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, some reached for sourdough starters.

Not Tobias Ulmer, a fresh transplant to New York whose original plan was a six-month break, having sold in 2019 the marketing agency he had founded at the age of 22 that grew to a 100-plus-person company.

Lockdown had him reaching for needle-and-thread to alter sneakers out of his New York pad, a project that went viral and led to the launch of Hyacyn, a brand that takes after a childhood nickname.

Its roots lie in club culture. A child of the ’70s, Ulmer came of age with early electro, an era that spawned Kraftwerk and the crossover with punk.

Between Berlin clubs and the Detroit music scene took shape his idea of a community that is “really diverse and stands for [its] rights and human rights,” where individual experience and freedom matter more than being seen. That sense of personal freedom and intensity is what the now-designer wants to telegraph through his work at Hyacyn.

His work is all about cut and volume. “I’m a big fan of silhouettes,” he told WWD. “It’s not about changing the body, but giving the body interesting, maybe new proportions that you can play with,” often by letting a single idea carry each item, be it through form, fabric or even fastenings.

For spring 2027, Ulmer circled back to the “punk electro avant garde” universe that runs from his youth through Berlin and to New York today, a city whose energy constantly piques his interest. In addition to a greater focus on suiting, there will be a collaboration with a shoe brand from London and the introduction of a bag as the brand expands into accessories.

The brand’s Paris debut is set for “June 26 at 6:26 p.m.,” a mirrored date and time that nods to Ulmer’s taste for visual play, expressed in garment names used backward and the word “Magic” tattooed in reverse on his arm.

Now on its third season, the brand has garnered a cadre of stockists that skew heavily toward Asia, with the likes of Nubian and Gr8 in Tokyo, Addicted in Seoul and Treff in Hangzhou. It is also sold at Ssense.

Production is split between the U.S. and Turkey, using American denim and canvas alongside European-made outerwear. Prices run from about $200 for T-shirts to $2,000 for parkas.

LAD/

“I cannot tell a story if I’m not connected,” said Ladislas Mande, the founder of LAD/, fresh off a six-month stay in the Democratic Republic of Congo to prepare his spring 2027 collection.

His Sunday presentation marks his label’s debut on the official Paris calendar.

Based between the U.S. and Paris, the founder headed to Kinshasa to immerse himself in old photo albums and conversations with elders in a bid to reconnect with the city’s sartorial pride of the 1980s, when Congo’s capital was one of Africa’s most cosmopolitan hubs.

The spring 2027 collection, titled “Kin La Belle” after the city’s nickname, is conceived as a love letter to the scene and its suave dressers: soft tailoring, travel-ready silhouettes and a palette inspired by coffee beans and fresh greens, worked into jacquards and graphic motifs.

LAD/ is a fresh chapter in Mande’s wider fashion career. In 2017, he opened the Blank Canvas multibrand store in Texas, a niche address devoted to Japanese labels such as Comme des Garçons and the other labels under its umbrella, reflecting Mande’s obsession with Japanese craftsmanship.

During that period he formed a deep relationship with Sam Lambert and Shaka Maidoh of sartorially inclined and multihyphenated project Art Comes First.

But a series of setbacks, including the passing of his father, had Mande stepping away from fashion and retail.

He returned in 2024 with LAD/, a label built on soft tailoring and today’s must-haves, cut from Japanese deadstock textiles, Italian fabrics and the occasional unusual choice, like a striking fish leather.

Prices start around the mid-hundreds for jersey pieces and go up to the 1,800- to 2,000-euro range for tailoring, with the most technical outerwear pieces topping the 3,000-euro mark.

The name is a play on his own, with a nod to the informal term in British English for youths. But the slash that follows it isn’t just graphic adornment — it’s an overture onto a broader approach that could, in the short term, include womenswear. Mande said there are plans for the first LAD/ flagship in early 2027, likely in Paris.

Paz

The invitation from newly minted Los Angeles-based label Paz, which will make its debut on Saturday with a 4:30 p.m. show at the Collège des Bernardins, said there would be “no post-show access” and “no interview.”

It promised a brand “built in silence over two years,” with “no social media, no archive.” Its aim is to offer “garments made to be lived in, fought in, passed down,” and cut from “materials chosen to outlast the people who wear them.”

“[Still] the intention isn’t mystery for the sake of mystery,” the designer, rumored to be an alum of Vetements under Guram Gvasalia as well as KidSuper, told WWD in an email exchange.

Today’s expectations that founders become public personalities risk overshadowing the work itself, they continued. “I wanted the work to have the opportunity to stand on its own before people formed an opinion about the person behind it.”

In the meantime, expect an inaugural collection produced entirely in Milan that sits “somewhere between tailoring, utility and protective forms,” aimed at a customer who keeps pieces “for years rather than seasons.”

Coming from outside traditional fashion training, the founder was shaped instead by observing “what [people] wore repeatedly, what they protected, what they eventually stopped caring about [and questioning] why do some objects become more meaningful with age while others lose their value almost immediately?”

From this question sprang Paz, named for the Spanish word for peace. “I’ve never thought of peace as something permanent or easily attained,” the founder noted. “The search for refinement, meaning and permanence is never really finished.”

The venue, a 13th-century abbey that has “survived centuries of transformation while remaining unmistakably itself,” mirrors the brand’s interest in pieces that “evolve through wear and experience rather than remaining fixed.”

For the launch, distribution will be kept to a tightly controlled mix of made-to-order and limited production, to foster a direct relationship with its clientele. Prices are expected to start around $1,000, with shirts at $1,200, trousers at $6,000, leather jackets at $8,000 and the most expensive piece at $120,000, “designed to remain relevant and desirable long after purchase.”

Song for the Mute

“It feels like free falling,” said Melvin Tanaya, who founded Australian fashion brand Song for the Mute with Lyna Ty in 2010. “We tell each other to just try to enjoy it — whatever happens, just try to enjoy it.”

There’s no denying it’s been an exhilarating ride for the duo, who met at the age of 10 in primary school when they ended up seated next to each other by virtue of their surnames.

Both were new kids in town: Ty, who is of Cambodian Chinese descent, was born and raised in Paris while Chinese Indonesian Tanaya had grown up in Surabaya, the second-largest city in Indonesia. From then on they formed a sibling-like bond that was further nourished by their creative tracks that took her to fashion design and him to study visual communications.

Song for the Mute began to take form when the two friends decided to come together “and just wanted to do something as a hobby, like graphic T-shirts,” Ty said.

“Funnily enough, the [initial] idea was a graphic T-shirt, but we didn’t do any prints for the first six years,” Tanaya added.

Although both would continue doing double-shift with their then-day jobs for a while, their nascent fashion label was already making waves, such as scooping up Australia’s National Designer of the Year gong in 2011.

What caught the eye was the mix of classicism, here in fabrics, elsewhere in silhouettes that becomes skewed by the duo’s impish eye for finishings, textures and a quasi-punk approach.

Long-term relationships with Japanese mills and a tight creative team that now includes Ty’s partner in life Karim Gaaloul as design director underpin a tactile wardrobe that now counts some 90 global stockists including Selfridges, Harrods, H.Lorenzo, Nordstrom, SKP and Boon the Shop. Europe and the U.S. are currently the brand’s fastest-growing markets.

T-shirts run from about 195 to 345 Australian dollars, shirts from 395 to 645 Australian dollars, pants from 595 to 1,195 Australian dollars, and jackets from roughly 895 up to around 2,000 Australian dollars for leather pieces, a key novelty of the season.

Collaborations have also helped broaden the Song for the Mute universe, particularly with footwear. First came a hookup with Adidas Originals, yielding an inaugural sneaker that is still a firm favorite, then a long-growing affinity with Birkenstock that was cemented by a collaboration released earlier this year.

Rescha

Rescha is less about choosing between worlds than about learning to live — and dress — in the fertile space in between.

Founded in 2022 by Paris-born designer Charlotte Chowdhury, of French and Indian descent, the brand grew out of her experience of feeling suspended between two cultures.

“I really evolved in this in-between world,” she told WWD. “It was very tricky for me to understand that I didn’t have to choose between those two worlds, but I could create my own one, and it’s what I’ve been trying to do with Rescha.

“At the end of the day I make clothes, but the idea behind this brand is really to have a voice as a mixed woman living in Paris,” she added.

Deciding that this in‑between state could be a place of power and expression rather than strife led her to embrace the notion that fabric was her first language.

Childhood memories of her French mother and grandmother, both keen seamstresses, come interlaced with parcels of vividly colored Indian textiles sent by paternal relatives she wouldn’t meet in person until her teens.

“When I start my collection, I always try to combine fabrics that you don’t usually see together, colors as well that are not seen together, but that could really reflect something and give a special feeling,” Chowdhury said.

That dialogue between underpins Rescha’s hybrid aesthetic, where unexpected fabric pairings, rich craft techniques and fluid styling proposals blur the lines between East and West — as well as masculine and feminine.

Art and textile research are the starting points for each collection. For spring 2027, the designer continues her ongoing narrative inspired by figures such as fabric historian Krishna Riboud, who also inspired the fall collection.

Tuesday’s show at Musée Guimet, which Chowdhury described as temple‑like for its architectural features and ambience, is meant to feel almost spiritual, a contemplative interlude in the fashion week rush.

Although womenswear currently leads the offer, men already account for roughly 40 percent of Chowdhury’s clientele. The designer said her male clientele was drawn in particular to embroidered skirts and ornate pieces that are still rare in the menswear landscape.

Prices start at 140 euros for a silk embroidered scarf, and go up to 800 euros for a hand-embroidered skirt and 1,700 euros for a leather jacket.

Retailers include Ssense, South Korea’s A Momento, Colom in Spain, Jihan and Fallon in Paris as well as U.S.-based Forecast.