Texworld Apparel Sourcing Paris has unveiled the conceptual framework shaping Spring-Summer 2027 with its latest Trend Book, titled Very Middle Ages. Scheduled for presentation from February 2 to 4, 2026, at the Paris-Le Bourget Exhibition Center, the book responds to a world marked by geopolitical strain, digital acceleration, and social uncertainty.
Rather than retreating into nostalgia, Very Middle Ages reinterprets the medieval era as a contemporary metaphor. It reflects today’s tensions through a future-facing lens, using a digitally reworked Middle Ages to question protection, power, identity, and imagination.
Fashion as a Mirror of Global Instability
As fashion navigates economic pressure, technological disruption, and shifting consumer values, Very Middle Ages positions clothing as both shield and signal. The Trend Book proposes a creative language rooted in contradiction: conflict and comfort, control and illusion, past and future.
The approach encourages designers to rethink Spring-Summer 2027 not as an optimistic escape, but as a season of adaptive resilience. Garments become tools for protection, affirmation, and transformation in a reality where boundaries between the virtual and physical continue to dissolve.
Four Creative Universes That “Rearm” Imagination
Curated by Louis Gérin and Grégory Lamaud, artistic directors of Texworld Apparel Sourcing Paris, the Trend Book emerges from a collective reflection involving stylists, designers, writers, and artists. The central question driving the project is direct and urgent: how can creativity survive in a world that doubts its own capacity to imagine?
The answer takes shape through four distinct yet interconnected creative universes. Each explores a friction point between expectation and reality, offering designers conceptual and material direction for SS27.
Digital Lordship: Power, Protection, and Control
The first universe envisions technology giants as modern-day overlords. Individuals willingly surrender privacy and autonomy in exchange for perceived security within vast digital empires.
Fashion responds with protective, layered silhouettes. Heavy textiles act as symbolic armor, enhanced by metal-coated finishes and rigid ribbed knits. The color story leans toward steel gray, charcoal black, and silver holographic highlights, reinforcing themes of surveillance and controlled protection.
Nuclear Sorcery: Artificial Comfort and Techno Illusion
This universe introduces a deceptive sense of enchantment. Technology, particularly artificial intelligence, appears as both reassurance and threat, offering comfort while dulling critical thought.
Silhouettes feel soft and enveloping. Materials include iridescent organza, translucent fabrics, foamy knits, lightweight mohair, and second-skin jerseys. The palette moves through spectral purples, carmine reds, opaline tones, and radioactive greens, creating a techno-magical atmosphere between cocooning warmth and digital aura.
Speculative Crusade: Conflict as Creative Tension
Speculative Crusade draws on humanity’s historical obsession with conquest and dominance. This direction is darker, more visceral, and overtly martial.
Garments take on armored forms inspired by combat and technical wear. Hybrid materials and textured surfaces dominate, supported by an organic yet aggressive palette of deep reds, earthy browns, textured blacks, military khaki, and burnt chrome. The result is fashion shaped by resistance, confrontation, and raw physicality.
Data Inquisition: Identity Under Surveillance
The final universe imagines a society governed by constant scrutiny. Individual expression becomes suspect, while personal identity dissolves into collective systems.
Clothing functions as an interface rather than ornament. Modular garments adapt through interchangeable components, acting as extensions of the digital self. The visual language is cold and algorithmic, defined by icy blues and clean, data-driven aesthetics that echo surveillance and conformity.
Immersive Trend Forums at Texworld Paris
Each of the four universes is supported by curated moodboards and color stories built around three key shades and six supporting tones. These narratives will be physically showcased at Texworld Apparel Sourcing Paris within the Trend Forums in Hall 2.
Visitors will experience immersive installations featuring looks created by the artistic directors using selected fabrics and finished products. The aim is to translate abstract concepts into tangible design direction.
Guiding Designers Toward Spring-Summer 2027
Louis Gérin will further elaborate on the Trend Book during a dedicated conference at the fair. The session will provide designers and sourcing professionals with structured creative insights, helping them translate the Very Middle Ages vision into commercially relevant Spring-Summer 2027 collections.
Rather than offering rigid forecasts, the Trend Book delivers an instinctive and sometimes unsettling reading of the season. It positions fashion as a response mechanism, shaped by uncertainty, technology, and the evolving nature of identity.
