NARANJO Spring/Summer 2027
Thirty-seven looks and barely a print in sight.
Ernesto Naranjo’s ONDINE understood that when construction is interesting enough, fabric does not need an image printed on top of it to stimulate attention. Lime dissolved into lilac, pale teal into silver-blue, apricot into powdered pink. Colour seemed suspended inside the material rather than applied to its surface. Even the models’ slicked hair carried stains of pigment against a bright red mouth. Pear. Lychee. Sour candy melted into something considerably softer. The collection looked edible.
The name explains the liquidity. ONDINE is conceived around matter in motion: silk satin, organza and tulle twisting, accumulating and slipping around the body while gravity completes part of the design. Naranjo cites Ann Veronica Janssens, Rachel Whiteread and Franz Erhard Walther—artists concerned, in very different ways, with perception, absence, material and the body’s relationship to space. It would be easy to bury a collection beneath references like those. Ernesto makes them breathe.
Fabric rarely sat where one expected it to.
It gathers at a hip. Slides from a shoulder. Suspends itself away from the body. Collapses somewhere else. Several skirts appeared to rely on concealed structure to hold quantities of material outward before allowing them to fall, producing draping and volume. Narrow strands of tulle crossed torsos. Fringe moved before the body. Fishnet disturbed the sweetness of otherwise delicate spring dresses.
The clothes required movement because movement was part of the design.
Draping can become an extremely sophisticated way of doing very little. Wrap enough beautiful silk around a thin body and the fabric will often flatter the designer on his behalf. Ernesto earns more than that. The eye can trace why the material falls where it does, where tension has been introduced, which knot redirects the cloth, and why one volume collapses while another remains suspended.
Looks 4, 30, and 32 triggered a much less intellectual memory. Almost anyone—whether they care or not about clothes—has at some point wrapped a blanket around their body, knotted it in a vague place, and called it a dress. Underneath all that fabric, one can feel the nostalgia-provoking thought derived from childhood memories. Ernesto has retained something from that instinct.
It is perhaps the most charming thing about the collection.
Blankets belong to sleep, privacy, laziness, childhood. Spring/Summer ready-to-wear belongs to exposure, movement, heat. ONDINE allows those sensations to coexist in the same garment.
The eccentricity of the hats intensifies that argument. They resemble pillows that have somehow migrated upward and settled on the head. Elsewhere, sculptural ornaments inspired by jellyfish, sea anemones and other marine organisms appear to grow from shoulders and torsos rather than being attached only decoratively to them. The clothes look lived in before anyone has done so.
That is where the collection becomes considerably more sophisticated than its prettiness initially suggests.
The palette could easily have pushed toward sweetness. Instead, construction kept interfering. Lilac was knotted rather than plainly worn. Pale green was dragged diagonally. Fishnet appeared underneath silk. Fringe made immaculate surfaces read slightly experimental. For a moment I thought of Maison Margiela Spring 2012—the loose silks, displaced fabric, the sense that dressing might still be happening while the model is already walking. These collections feel like two women from the same family.
His education makes his technical ability unsurprising. Central Saint Martins for both BA and MA; Alexander McQueen Scholarship; Maison Margiela’s Artisanal and ready-to-wear teams under John Galliano; then Balmain with Olivier Rousteing. His formation can be felt in the conviction that construction itself is the main attraction. Margiela perhaps survives in the willingness to displace and reconfigure cloth. But the colour, softness and almost cheerful sensuality are Ernesto’s own.
Ann Demeulemeester Spring 2007 and Rick Owens Spring 2004 flickered through my mind occasionally—the former in the lived-in sophistication, the latter in the gauzy wrapping and unexpected sweetness of the colours. References are useful only until the clothes establish independence from them.
ONDINE certainly does.
Tambours, trumpets, rhythm with actual soul in it. Nothing mellow. Nothing dull. Nothing but fun. And isn't that desperately essential in such a miserable time and age? The word “fun” is routinely treated as though it reduces serious design. Fun is difficult when the clothes are technically ambitious; one wrong decision and exuberance turns childish. Ernesto knew how to walk that fine line.
There is also a business reason to pay attention to what happened here.
Ernesto founded the label in 2018 and still operates at a scale considerably smaller than the recognition surrounding his work. Production remains rooted in southern Spain and the business has relied heavily on made-to-order and private clients. Meanwhile, institutional approval keeps accumulating: four Vogue Fashion Fund finalist placements, Fashion Trust Arabia recognition, and clothes worn by women with enough visibility to turn an emerging designer into an international image overnight.
The artistry has scaled faster—much faster—than the company.
That scale may eventually extend beyond fashion altogether. Ernesto is already imagining a house capable of moving into interiors, architecture and other creative disciplines—even one that could eventually speak without its founder. A Naranjo ecosystem is surprisingly easy to picture: the same instinct currently arranging colour, material and volume around a body could just as convincingly arrange objects, rooms and environments.
That gives this collection particular importance. Ernesto has previously spoken about moving beyond the perception of himself as an event designer, and ONDINE makes that progression visible. There are dresses, yes, but also tops, skirts, separates and pieces whose identity survives outside a red carpet. He is not flattening the language to make it commercially legible. He is expanding the number of situations in which that language can exist.
That is the right direction.
Young labels are often advised to become easier when what they actually need is to become bolder. Ease frequently destroys the reason anyone cares. Personality gives the idea somewhere to go. Ernesto’s work has somewhere to go. The strongest evidence is how little the collection depended on surface gimmicks. Remove the show. Remove the music. Remove everything. And we’re left with commercial-forward items. Fashion has become exceptionally good at placing an interesting graphic on an uninteresting garment. Ernesto largely refuses to do that.
Let the sweat and tears behind dressmaking be the interesting thing about fashion again.
Perhaps that is why I left feeling unexpectedly moved. Criticism spends—or used to spend—plenty of time diagnosing mediocrity, laziness and cowardice. Great clothes can have another effect entirely. They can return you to one of the first reasons fashion matters: the pleasure of wrapping fabric around the body and discovering that a knot, a fold or a colour can change how you feel.
ONDINE proves to understand that basic human need.
Ernesto is already too accomplished for the word promising. What remains is the fogged condensation between recognition and scale: the trials and tribulations the artist’s language goes through before being understood by the masses.
I am eager to witness that.
Something about this collection makes that phase seem ephemeral.
WRITTEN BY FREDDY ESPINAL
