‘It was a stifling summer,’ wrote Andreas Kronthaler. ‘I lived in a nightshirt with nothing underneath.’ The admission, carried into his S/S 2027 collection for Vivienne Westwood, is a confession shared by much of the world, and it becomes the designer’s starting point for a question fashion rarely asks directly: what will we wear when the heat becomes the weather of every day?
There is also a deeper provocation at work. If the future is hotter, then the entire architecture of fashion commerce — the seasonal calendar, the layering, the fabric weights — must bend to meet it. Kronthaler’s collection is an early signal of what that accommodation might look like.
The pivot is timely in both directions. It answers a genuine consumer need as heatwaves become routine, and it carries the brand’s environmental message forward with practical force rather than slogans. Kronthaler gives his customers something they can actually wear through the worst of it.
The silhouettes that emerged began with the nightshirt’s elemental ease: loose bodies, minimal structure, cloth that floats rather than clings, pieces designed to be lived in when the temperature makes tailoring unbearable. It is fashion stripped back to its most honest purpose, clothing that shelters rather than constricts.
