The Simkhai Spring 2027 collection, shown at New York Fashion Week on 11 September 2026, arrived with a quietly provocative question: what if a spring collection didn’t particularly care about spring?
Jonathan Simkhai’s answer was leather. Lots of it. And heavy knits, fringing, and a jelly-shine coating that looks convincingly like rubber until you actually put it on. The seasonal calendar, as Simkhai sees it, is largely a retail fiction anyway, and he used that freedom to push his signature materials somewhere unexpected.
Leather, Knits, and a Deliberate Disregard for the Season
The collection opened with a black leather T-shirt dress, a peekaboo hem of white hand-rolled chiffon fringe visible underneath. Simple, considered, and immediately clear about its intentions. From there, the leather kept coming: cream and black two-piece leather suits for men with a strong 1990s pull, and fully fringed leather maxi dresses for women that moved well as the models walked.
Simkhai was candid about the thinking. ‘I just wanted to try new things,’ he said. ‘I wanted to challenge myself. It was quite simple in a way.’ That simplicity of intention produced some of the strongest pieces in the show.
Not every leather moment landed with equal conviction. The boxier, colourful brushed-suede jackets, styled with high-collared shirts, ventured into territory already claimed by Loewe and Celine, and felt less like Simkhai finding a new direction and more like him following one. When a designer’s most distinctive voice is in fabric experimentation, borrowing an aesthetic from a house already known for it is a risk that doesn’t always pay off.
WWD described the collection as one that ‘manipulated leather, lace and denim in a collection that moved from precise daywear to tactile evening flourishes.’ That arc was visible across the runway, even if a few mid-collection pieces muddied it.
The Simkhai Spring 2027 Collection’s Most Inventive Moments
The Simkhai Spring 2027 collection found its clearest voice in two places: the knitwear and the finale.
The knitwear introduced a jelly-coated finish applied to tank dresses, denim jackets, and denim trousers. Visually, the effect reads as rubber or latex. In practice, it is neither. ‘It’s languid and not stiff at all,’ Simkhai said of the coating, and the point is the contrast: all the visual drama of vacuum-sealed dressing, none of the structural ordeal that comes with actual latex. For anyone who has ever tried to wrestle themselves into a latex dress before an event, this is, practically speaking, a genuine innovation.
Fringing carried through from the leather pieces into sculptural, tiered knit tank dresses, giving the collection a throughline that stopped it from feeling like two separate shows in one.
The finale pieces were the most technically ambitious. Simkhai’s moodboard this season included pincushion flowers, prickly and architectural, and he translated that reference into shaggy white tops and skirts built from strips of organza, chiffon, and paillettes. Cut on asymmetrical hemlines and paired with satin tuxedo coats, these pieces occupied the right space between occasion dressing and something more playful.
For a designer whose instinct is clearly more autumnal, working against the seasonal grain produced a collection with more to say than most spring shows that play it straight. The SIMKHAI brand has always been built on material exploration, and in the stronger pieces here, that exploration had a point of view. The weaker moments, where the references were legible and the territory already occupied, were a reminder that experimentation works best when it’s genuinely going somewhere new.
The next question is whether the jelly-coated denim and the organza-paillette finale pieces translate from the runway to preorder, where SIMKHAI’s official runway pages have previously offered both immediate and made-to-order options. If the more technically demanding finishes arrive in stores intact, that will tell you more about the collection’s actual ambition than any amount of moodboard talk. Keep an eye on the Spring 2027 delivery window: that’s where the fabric innovation either proves itself or quietly disappears into a simpler ready-to-ship version. Vogue and the wider fashion press will be watching the same thing.
