Isabel Marant SS27: The Wind Still Has Bite

Sand spreads across Place Colette, light hangs warm over lace and faded print, skin appears between layers, and fabric keeps finding ways to lift, loosen, skim, flutter. Kim Bekker takes Sam Haskins’s 1960s photographs as a starting point, especially their hazy Los Angeles light and the physical confidence of women caught between dress and undress. The reference becomes atmosphere before it becomes image.

That is where the collection finds its rhythm.

Isabel Marant has always understood wind as an invisible material. SS27 gives that instinct a clearer shape, pairing antique craft with clean silhouettes and allowing decoration to move as lightly as the body wearing it.

Isabel Marant Lets the Light In

Bekker describes the collection through sensuality and decisiveness, two qualities that meet naturally in the work of Sam Haskins.

His women carry ease with a certain self-possession. Light moves across them freely. Clothing reveals enough to make the body part of the composition, and the image still holds its structure.

Sun-faded florals drift across silk. Lace opens the surface. Skin appears around narrow tops, swimsuits and abbreviated shorts. Tailoring stays precise enough to anchor everything around it. The palette has the softness of clothes left near a window all summer, with color appearing washed, rubbed and touched by time.

California enters through sensation: heat, air, brightness, dry texture, the feeling of fabric already softened through wear.

The house describes the season through the meeting of the adorned and the unadorned, and that idea gives Isabel Marant SS27 its strongest material language.

Embroidery, rhinestones, beads, lace and macramé arrive on shapes that remain clear and direct. Silk gathers weight from beadwork while still moving freely. Antique-effect linen carries the memory of domestic textiles into summer pieces. Leather is worked until it feels almost papery. Crochet and lace bring handwork close to bare skin.

A decorated surface can still look as though it belongs to a morning near the sea. A jacket with sculptural shape can still sit loosely on the shoulders. A macramé skirt can hold hours of handwork and still move with the simplicity of something tied around the waist before walking outside.

Khaki gives the collection its dry, sun-baked grounding, while capris bring a sharper line into the softer boho-chic vocabulary.

The Silhouette Has Learned to Exhale

Among the most persuasive pieces are the lace boardshorts. They contain the season’s logic in a remarkably compact form. Antique craft meets beachwear. Delicacy meets speed. A fabric associated with domestic memory is cut into something casual, youthful and physical. The silhouette carries almost no ceremony, which gives the lace space to feel fresh again.

Nearby, brooch-pinned swimwear brings jewelry into the construction itself. Macramé tubular skirts follow the body in long vertical lines. Rounded cotton blazers add sculptural volume above lighter pieces. Paper-thin leather blousons keep a trace of Marant toughness while allowing the material to move with surprising delicacy.

Bekker has spoken about making the Isabel Marant woman more grown-up, and SS27 gives that idea a physical form.

Shoulders become rounded and controlled. Skirts stay tubular or lightly elongated. Shorts sit low and loose. Narrow tops expose the torso while outerwear brings volume around them. Blazers keep their authority through cut, then lose the stiffness through fabric and proportion.

The entire silhouette seems to breathe in sections. This rhythm gives the collection its sense of motion. The house once built much of its appeal around boots, leather, layered knits and the residue of a long night. SS27 carries that memory into daylight. The attitude remains inside the posture, while the materials become lighter and the line gains more air.

The Archive Is Becoming a Working Studio

Material transformation gives the collection another layer of pleasure. Silk carries beads and still reads with ease. Linen looks inherited. Leather approaches the weight of paper. Washed prints feel as though sunlight has been removing their color slowly for years. Macramé sits close to the body while keeping its handmade irregularity visible.

Bekker also returns to older Isabel Marant prints, including references from Spring 2013, then redraws and softens them until the archive feels filtered through memory. The technique matters because the archive enters through texture instead of quotation.

A print comes back faded. An old proportion returns with cleaner structure. A familiar idea loses some of its historical weight and starts moving again. That approach suits a house whose strongest clothes have always felt lived in before the wearer arrives.

Recent Isabel Marant seasons have spent time revisiting the house’s own past. Bekker has looked back toward 2010, 2013 and the pieces she herself once wore, treating them as active material for development. That choice carries special meaning because she has worked inside the house for years and helped shape much of the language she now leads.

Her relationship with the archive is intimate. SS27 takes that familiarity and loosens it. The archive becomes less like a museum and more like a wardrobe rail in a studio, where an old piece can be pulled down, altered, washed, redrawn and sent back into circulation.

Isabel Marant Listens to the Shop Floor

Bekker has spoken openly about watching what women actually buy and wear, using store-level intelligence as part of the creative process. That operational instinct runs quietly through SS27.

Lace boardshorts can move easily into a summer wardrobe. Lightweight blousons answer climate and travel. Sandals, bags and easy separates carry enough house identity for everyday use. Tailoring stays distinctive while keeping a level of flexibility that makes it useful beyond the runway.

The clothes are designed to become favorites quickly. Bekker is expanding that idea by opening the house toward several types of woman at once. Tailoring, beachwear, handcraft, evening pieces and soft leather can all sit inside the same system.

SS27 is beautifully controlled. That control creates the collection’s most interesting challenge. Isabel Marant has always carried a little abrasion inside its ease: a boot kicked against pavement, hair after a long night, leather softened through wear, a jacket pulled on over something delicate, a trace of dust left on the hem.

Bekker understands the house with such precision that refinement itself now becomes the area to watch. The collection glides easily. The craft is polished. The silhouettes resolve cleanly. The California light is persuasive.

A little more disruption could make that beauty travel even further. SS27 keeps that spirit in the wind. The next step may be letting the wind pick up a little more dirt.

Kim Bekker has already completed the first part of succession with remarkable fluency. The house language is intact. The customer remains visible. The archive feels active. The silhouettes carry maturity. The product logic connects directly with the way women shop and dress. Preservation has done its job. Now authorship begins.

SS27 feels like the moment just before that shift. Everything is moving. And somewhere through all of it, the wind keeps pushing Isabel Marant forward.