Adolfo Domínguez Spring/Summer 2027
Adolfo Domínguez’s SS27, also baptized as Croma, began with a scarf dress and, for a few minutes, with considerably more promise than the collection would eventually sustain. Tiziana Domínguez describes it as an investigation into colour through science, matter and emotion: natural-dye experiments, childhood kaleidoscopes, industrial objects remembered through colour, and fabrics selected for the way they filter and alter light. The house turned scarves into dresses, shirts and skirts; organza, gauze, taffeta and crinkled surfaces were layered to make colour supposedly change according to what sat beneath it. The opening look understood the premise particularly well. Fabric crossed, folded and hung around the body rather than simply covering it, giving the impression that a square of material had been persuaded into becoming a dress.
Unfortunately, Croma was considerably more exciting in its press notes than it often was on the body.
What followed was an awful lot of clothing I feel I have already seen. Pale yellows returned. Relaxed tailoring returned. Oversized blazers returned. Masculine waistcoats returned, sometimes with fabric pulled diagonally across them as though moving one panel fifteen degrees had suddenly rescued the waistcoat from the last five summers. Linen, crinkle, transparency, loose shirting, asymmetrical skirts: all perfectly reasonable things to sell when the temperature reaches thirty degrees, but reasonableness eventually becomes an aesthetic problem. The pleated and crinkled surfaces wandered into a territory that Issey Miyake turned into an entire technological language decades ago; here they too often felt like seasonal texture. There were clothes that could move directly from runway to shop floor without alteration.
Commercially, that is useful. Creatively, it is not necessarily a compliment.
At several points, the distance between “designer ready-to-wear” and expensive fast fashion became uncomfortably short.
Curiously, the menswear handled this restraint much better. Menswear can benefit from a certain absence of intervention: a trouser can simply be an excellent trouser; a loose jacket can earn its place through proportion. At its best, Croma dressed the sort of man whose occupation you might guess before knowing his name. A painter. An architect. Someone who owns excellent pencils. There was a functional creativity to the better looks—slack silhouettes, translucent layers, practical volumes—that suggested a wardrobe built for making things rather than displaying oneself making them. One dark navy transparent outer layer was particularly strong: sheer enough to expose the body underneath, marked with a graphic “44”, one four inverted. It had the edge much of Croma was missing. Suddenly transparency was not merely a summer fabric choice; it did something to the person wearing it. That look felt designed. I wanted considerably more of that.
Colour, allegedly the protagonist, produced a stranger disappointment.
Butter yellow, mint, orange, lilac, beige, brown and softened primaries moved through the collection, and the house’s research into pigment and reflected light is genuine. The design team conducted natural-dye workshops; kaleidoscopic geometry informed patchworks and embellishment; even familiar industrial colours—a traffic cone, a tennis ball, a scouring pad—entered the research as examples of collective chromatic memory. Yet the runway rarely made that intellectual machinery feel necessary. Colour combinations repeated rather than accumulated meaning. If your thesis is that colour does not exist independently but is constructed by light, material and perception, I want the clothes to make me reconsider what I am seeing. Too often I was simply seeing yellow again. The age-diverse casting helped: these garments plausibly belonged to different generations, which reinforced the house’s real-world usefulness. But usefulness cannot be asked to perform the work of invention.
The womenswear suffered most from that caution.
There was not a heel in sight—not even the suggestion of one—and I understand the argument. Ease, movement and a life lived inside clothes belong to Adolfo Domínguez’s ethos. The company that taught Spain that la arruga es bella does not need to suddenly become Mugler. But there is a difference between rejecting unnecessary artifice and refusing to disturb anything. When oversized suits, flat shoes, loose vests and lightweight layers appear collection after collection, “less is more” starts requiring an uncomfortable question: how much less before there is simply less? Adolfo Domínguez still possesses a philosophy—naturalness, comfort, relaxed tailoring, material honesty—but philosophy and visual identity are not always the same thing. I can recognize what the brand believes considerably faster than I can recognize one of its silhouettes.
Then Pablo Alborán walked out. His presence immediately became one of the most reportable elements of the show; contemporary coverage duly singled out his runway appearance. Celebrity casting is hardly a crime, and Alborán looked perfectly comfortable inside the clothes. My problem is what happens when celebrity traffic provides a collection with the charge the design itself should be generating. A runway should survive the removal of the famous person walking through it. Croma would survive, certainly. I am simply not sure if everyone would continue looking. That distinction matters for a fifty-year-old house positioning itself as moda de autor, particularly one whose current business is hardly in a state requiring creative panic: Adolfo Domínguez closed 2025/26 with €139 million in sales, its fourth consecutive profitable year, an 81% increase in net profit and a network spanning 54 countries.
Taking risks is a luxury not every brand can afford. That is precisely why it is such a pity when one that has earned a degree of commercial stability repeatedly chooses not to spend any of it on danger. I am not asking Adolfo Domínguez to abandon the customer who buys the smart linen jacket, the loose trousers, or the useful summer dress. I am asking why that customer cannot occasionally be surprised. Croma contains evidence that the team is capable of it: the scarfed opening, the transparent navy menswear, the odd accessory, the moments when organza genuinely changes the body. Those ephemeral glimpses make the rest more frustrating, not less. The collection asks, rather beautifully, what is colour?
After watching it, I left with another question:
How successful does Adolfo Domínguez have to become before it allows itself the luxury of taking a risk?
WRITTEN BY FREDDY ESPINAL
