Fashion month has finally closed its doors — Paris wrapped on October 6, the front row has flown home, and the industry has entered its traditional post-season state of “resting” (Champagne). So what did queer fashion do with its first quiet week? It moved the whole conversation somewhere more permanent. There’s a metaphor in there if you want it.
Fairyland, but make it national
Tim Walker — the fashion photographer who has pointed his lens at everyone from Madonna to Frank Ocean for Vogue, W, and Love — just opened Fairyland: Love and Legends at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Two hundred and fifty portraits of queer Britain: the activists, artists, and writers who built the culture everyone else appropriates from, plus Revd Andrew Dotchin, the “sandals vicar” who has spent decades gently scandalizing the Church of England one technicolor vestment at a time. Walker calls the portraits “erotic landscapes,” which is the most beautifully extra thing a photographer has said all year.
The show runs through the winter, and a national gallery hanging 250 queer portraits is either long-overdue progress or history’s most elaborate apology. Either way, the lesson stands: the season’s most powerful fashion images weren’t on a runway. They were in a museum, made by a queer man, of queer people, being taken seriously. Bold concept. Somebody should try it more often.
Sheer genius, mass-market edition
The gears of commerce grind slowly, but when they grind, they grind sheer. Ludovic de Saint Sernin — the Paris designer whose entire practice is lace, eyelet lacing, and the philosophical position that the body is material, not a wardrobe problem — has a new capsule out with SKIMS, the shapewear empire founded by a straight reality-television mogul we shall not be naming, because this is a queer publication and we have standards. The result: the avant-garde’s favorite questions (“what is a garment?”, “what is exposure?”, “what is a body?”) are now being asked at mass-retail scale, up to and including a bronze-gold micro minidress. There’s a version of this story where the sellout is the point — the queer gaze, industrialized, delivered to doorsteps in a poly mailer. Ludovic, for his part, seems entirely at peace with all of it, which is extremely French of him.
The season that was: workwear as scripture
A belated medal, while the month is still warm: Willy Chavarria. The Mexican-American designer — Ralph Lauren-trained, Fresno-forged — brought his Spring 2027 menswear collection to Paris and turned labor into liturgy: workwear uniforms, sacred elegance, proportions so theatrical the tailoring basically preached. Chicano workwear walked into the most prestigious fashion week in the world and was received like scripture. Somewhere, a very glamorous angel is saying “I told you so.”
And a farewell that deserves flowers: Harris Reed, who spent three and a half years making Nina Ricci do rococo — the fall collection was, per WWD, “Rococo Rock,” which is Marie Antoinette with a lyric change — before saying goodbye to the house in the spring to pour everything into their own gender-fluid label. A nonbinary designer walking away from a century-old Paris maison to bet on themselves: brave, insane, or the most Reed thing possible. Historically, for them, it’s been all three, and it’s worked.
The sovereign dandy
And then there’s Colman Domingo, who this month sat the front row at Valentino’s Spring 2027 show in Paris, took his rightful place on Vanity Fair’s Best Dressed List, and announced he’s producing a documentary about André Leon Talley — the man who proved a dandy could be the most powerful voice in the room. Some men attend fashion week. Colman Domingo convenes it. The man has, to our knowledge, never once worn a boring black suit, and at this point we should stop calling that a choice and start calling it policy.
Quick hits
Troye Sivan debuted a brand-new song, “Le Boy,” as a surprise mid-set at Austin City Limits — a new era of music and, knowing Troye, an impeccably edited new wardrobe to match. We’ll be watching. We always are.
That’s the landscape this week: museums, mesh, and dandies in power. Fashion month is over. The queers kept the receipts.
