Is 'Perfect' A Little Embarrassing?
Undone is in.
Fashion month got noticeably messier this season, and it is saying a lot about where taste and culture are headed.
Something felt slightly off-center on the Spring/Summer 2027 runways, in the best possible way.
For an industry that obsesses over every detail, it was interesting to see so much effort go into making things look a little messy and undone. And we loved it.
We have spent the last several years looking at increasingly polished everything. Perfect skin, perfect homes, perfect outfits, perfect feeds, perfect branding. Even casual has become its own highly managed aesthetic, where looking effortless often requires a lot of effort.
At a certain point, all of that polish starts to lose its appeal, and the pendulum inevitably swings the other way. Which is exactly what we saw this year.
Fashion got a little less precious this season
Paris Fashion Week made the shift especially easy to see.
At Dior, Jonathan Anderson took some of the house’s most precise, traditionally ladylike shapes and loosened them up. Bar jackets became soft and semitransparent, skirts moved instead of holding a perfect silhouette, and the collection played with asymmetry and irregularity instead of trying to correct it. Even the beauty followed the same idea, with hair styled into slightly salty, mussed waves that looked like the models might have actually been outside before arriving at Dior.
Chanel had a similar looseness, just in a very Chanel way. Matthieu Blazy mixed decades, prints and references together, showed exposed underpinnings, softened the house’s tweeds and put suit jackets directly against bare skin. He described the idea as wearing a Chanel suit “like a T-shirt,” which is probably the best explanation for why the whole thing worked. These are clothes with an enormous amount of history and craftsmanship behind them, but they did not feel like they needed to be handled with white gloves.
And once you noticed it, the idea was everywhere across Fashion Month. Altuzarra had misbuttoned shirts and open belts. Simone Rocha let satin dresses sit partially undone. Prada sent out windblown hair and slightly unsettling layers.
The choices were very deliberate. The amount of work required to make something look this casually, cohesively messy is actually enormous.
What feels different is the level of preciousness. The clothes are still beautifully made and the styling is clearly intentional, but there is more room now for the part that feels accidental, personal or a little weird. A jacket slipping off the shoulder, a shirt buttoned slightly wrong, or two pieces worn together that technically should not work can make an outfit feel more like it belongs to an actual person than a perfectly styled image.
Maybe we are just tired of looking polished
For the last few years, everything has been very clean. Slicked-back hair, matching sets, barely-there makeup, neutral interiors, outfits where every piece makes perfect sense next to the one before it. Now that all feels a little predictable.
What is more interesting lately is when something interrupts the polish. Hair with a little movement, makeup that looks like it has actually been worn for a few hours, wrong shoe theory, or an outfit where one piece feels slightly more colorful than the rest (yes, we see the purple trend happening).
Part of it is probably just where the trend cycle has landed, but it is also hard to ignore how much perfect imagery we see now and how tired we are of consuming that. Between heavily edited content, hyper-curated feeds, and increasingly convincing computer-generated images, flawless has become very easy to come by.
Which may be exactly why the things that feel a little more specific to the person wearing them are suddenly more compelling.
Taste is getting harder to fake
Everyone has access to the same references now, the internet being the great equalizer. The same runway images, the same saved posts, the same trends, the same shopping links. It is easier than ever to recreate a look almost exactly.
What is harder to copy is the part that makes it feel like yours.
The people with the best style are usually doing something slightly unexpected with all of that information. Maybe the proportions are a little strange, the layers do not technically make sense, or one piece feels completely out of place until you see the whole thing together. Or maybe it is simply the visual expression of their personality, which is probably why trying to replicate it exactly never quite works.
That is where taste starts to matter more. It is the thing that separates wearing the right pieces from actually having a point of view.
You can buy every piece someone is wearing and still not get the same effect, because the thing making it work is often the part you would have edited out.
And maybe the runways are telling us to stop trying to be so perfect, and lean into our humanity. Because being human and owning your own vibe is simply never embarrassing.
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