The Ninety-Nine Percent
I dislike repeating myself, which makes sequels quite inconvenient.
Six months ago, in The One Percent, I already addressed the obvious contradiction of staging a critique of extreme wealth from inside Paris Fashion Week. The irony has not disappeared, nor has luxury developed a conscience. I said what I had to say then. I see little reason to prosecute the same case twice.
What has changed is the defendant.
For Fall 2026, Matières Fécales dressed the people who own the world. For Spring 2027, Hannah and Steven dressed everyone who has to live in it.
The One Percent depended on singularity: one social class, one grotesque archetype, one increasingly deformed portrait of power. The Ninety-Nine Percent leans toward plurality, and it behaves accordingly. Ninety-four looks walked the show in a procession of ages, bodies, races and characters, from tailoring to eveningwear, distressed separates and enormous bridal volumes. There were mothers, pregnant bodies, conventional beauties and people fashion once preferred to pretend did not exist. The point was not simply “diversity”—a word so industrially exhausted it now means almost nothing—but occupancy. Who is allowed inside the image? Who gets grandeur? Who gets fantasy?
Ninety-four looks is a lot of democracy.
At times, too much. The collection occasionally confused plurality with accumulation, and a more ruthless edit would have made certain ideas hit harder. Not every garment needed to survive the revolution. Yet this excess also revealed something that was less convincing last season: Matières Fécales is beginning to develop a silhouette that remains identifiable once the prosthetics and social critique are stripped away.
The hourglass kept mutating.
Waists were compressed almost to hostility, then released into sharpened shoulders, swollen hips, protruding peplums and skirts of almost architectural circumference. In white tailoring, black suiting, translucent blue ruffles and huge dresses, the same body kept reappearing in different states of deformation. The hourglass is obviously not theirs to claim; fashion has been fabulously torturing women into that shape for centuries. But this particular derangement of it—the elongated torso, strong waist and disproportionately inflated extremities—is increasingly Matières Fécales.
The collection was also considerably more beautiful than its premise required it to be. Strict jackets dissolved into frayed edges. Gauzy sheers were wrapped tightly around the body before breaking into ruffles. Tulle accumulated into almost ceremonial masses. Feathers alternated between something angelic and something freshly killed. White, ivory and black dominated much of the show before denim blues, yellows and increasingly violent reds disturbed that sobriety. Rather than simply changing color, the clothes seemed to change condition: immaculate, distressed, shredded, swollen, eventually combustible.
One ivory dress especially stayed with me. Its asymmetric bodice was controlled and almost classical before the skirt disintegrated into ragged layers, as though somebody had held a sheet of white paper to a flame for several seconds and extinguished it just before losing the whole thing. The edges looked eaten rather than cut. Later came actual fire—or its couture approximation—in a vast feathered gown burning from yellow through orange into arterial red.
It will certainly be the belle of the ball for the public. It is great. It is also the easiest dress in the collection to understand.
Anyone with a functioning fashion memory will instantly see McQueen. The fire, the red eyes, the brutalism of the silhouette: Joan is not exactly hiding in the bushes. Elsewhere, sculptural headpieces summon The Horn of Plenty; other moments invite VOSS. McQueen has long been an acknowledged reference for Dalton and Bhaskaran, and their work has been compared with his since their Paris runway debut. Pretending otherwise would be silly.
It also feels needless to dwell on it. My readers know what McQueen looks like.
The interesting question is whether Matières Fécales is capable of doing something with that inheritance beyond producing excellent reminders of it. Sometimes, the answer remains uncertain. The fire dress is possibly the most beautiful object in the collection and simultaneously one of the least revealing about where this house might eventually go. It is difficult to discover somebody while being reminded so vividly of somebody else.
But I think people are looking for the most important McQueen reference in the wrong place.
And before I go on, let me tell you… It was not on the runway.
Within minutes the show had people arguing—about wealth, class, hypocrisy, politics, whether it was sincere, whether sincerity even mattered, and whether fashion had any business entering the conversation at all. Some saw social criticism; others saw very expensive cosplay. The contradiction was immediate and apparently irresistible.
Good.
There is something quietly riotous about making the sequel even more explicit than the original. Whether rebellion was the intention or merely the effect, the gesture still feels defiantly so. McQueen's most enduring lesson was never simply how to make a grotesque dress or stage a jaw-dropping finale. He understood that clothes could provoke something far more uncomfortable than admiration. VOSS, after all, initially forced its audience to confront its own reflection before allowing them to look beyond. His shows did not always provide conclusions; frequently, they created problems and left everybody else to fight over them.
In that respect, this sequel may be Matières Fécales's most faithful McQueen reference yet.
This does not make the collection politically correct, politically useful or even politically coherent. I am a fashion critic, not a parliamentary committee. Nor does discourse automatically make good art; TikTok has demonstrated that sufficiently. But a show supposedly devoid of meaning rarely leaves so many people desperate to determine precisely what that meaning is.
There is also more autobiography underneath this collection than its spectacle initially suggests. Before the show, Dalton called Spring 2027 “a personal one,” while Bhaskaran described it as rooted in lived experience. He had already spoken about the collection as a return to his background; his childhood included years in Guyana before moving to Canada with his sister and single mother, who worked in a cake factory. Researching this collection, he selected an image of a young Guyanese mother carrying a child because she reminded him of his own.
That does not absolve the work of contradiction. It makes it personal.
Bhaskaran has now entered the luxury establishment whose disparities his work examines. Celebrities wear Matières Fécales. The clothes are expensive. The people who once stood outside the gates are being photographed inside them. Success is wonderfully inconvenient like that.
Then, through the soundtrack, came “Tomorrow Is My Turn.” Here, against a collection following The One Percent with The Ninety-Nine Percent, its appearance was only apt.
Tomorrow is my turn… There are louder ways to explain a collection. Yet this was perhaps its simplest and most touching one.
Last season was concerned with those who already possess power: their rituals, their disguises, their surgeries, and their absurdities. This season opened the frame. The beautiful became grotesque and the grotesque beautiful; pristine white slowly frayed, bodies multiplied, elegance became unstable, and eventually everything appeared to catch fire.
Matières Fécales still owes McQueen a considerable debt. It still occasionally allows spectacle to arrive before design, and at 94 looks, The Ninety-Nine Percent could have benefited from knowing when everyone had already gotten the point. But compared with The One Percent, the clothes have begun catching up with the size of the idea. There is more control, more beauty and, underneath all that theatrical damage, the beginnings of a vocabulary recognizably their own.
If The One Percent was a character, that makes The Ninety-Nine Percent a crowd.
And crowds have the predictable habit of talking back.
Then again, perhaps that is the point…
WRITTEN BY FREDDY ESPINAL
