The story of how Matières Fécales entered the fashion establishment is, at its core, a story about the patience required to make strangeness legible. Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, the Canadian duo who built their reputation on alienoid DIY garments posted to Instagram and sold through a Depop page, are now dressing Zendaya for film premieres and outfitting the Met Gala’s most pointed political gestures. The distance between those two facts is what makes their trajectory worth examining.
The pivot point, if you had to name one, was the Non-Human show in October 2018 at the Mandrake Hotel in London. Bare, mutant feet on ten-inch spears of flesh; a silicone heel moulded to Dalton’s foot, actualising the digitally distorted illusion she had been staging on social media for years. It was the moment the pair stepped from screen into space, and Law Roach, who was watching, noticed the wedding dress Dalton wore to close the show. He sent Bhaskaran a message: ‘Can you save this? There’s something special we have to do with it.’
Matières Fécales and the fashion establishment: the Zendaya commission
That something special turned out to be an 18-month process. The pair had been in and out of fittings with Zendaya since March 2025, when Roach decided the look should close the press tour for The Odyssey. When I meet Dalton and Bhaskaran in Rose Bakery, the ground-floor café at Dover Street Market Paris where their studio has been based since early 2025, Dalton slips away from the table mid-conversation to arrange shipping to New York. The call is the final logistical hurdle.
Five days later, Zendaya arrives at the New York premiere of The Odyssey in the pleated white gown with floor-length angel wings that closed their A/W25 show. WWD described the look as channelling the Nike of Samothrace, the headless, winged marble figure whose drama has defined ideas of triumphant drapery for two millennia. For a brand that has always been interested in mythology, bodily transformation and the uncanny, the comparison lands precisely. It is one of the more culturally loaded red-carpet moments of the year.
Before Zendaya, there had already been collaborations with Demi Moore, Chappell Roan and Lady Gaga. They also designed Gabbriette’s dress for her wedding to Matty Healy in July, their first foray into bridal wear, which Bhaskaran describes as a ‘distorted Cinderella’ silhouette. ‘Anything custom goes through us,’ he says. ‘We start by asking, “Would this person protect us on the street if we were being harassed?”‘
The One Percent and the question of fashion as critique
The more complex territory, and the one that has generated the most friction, is the A/W26 collection, The One Percent. Staged as their third show on the official Paris Fashion Week schedule, it was a send-up of the very wealthy: crimson-palmed leather gloves standing in for blood-stained hands, money masks blinding cadaverous socialites, Alexis Stone transformed into ‘Catwoman’ Jocelyn Wildenstein as a parody of plastic surgery, and longevity advocate Bryan Johnson appearing in the final section as a symbol of the hunt for eternal youth. Dior’s New Look silhouette was, as Dalton and Bhaskaran put it, ‘fecalised’ with jutting shoulders and frayed hems, while vast shaggy greatcoats confirmed their credentials as couturiers rather than provocateurs who happen to sew.
The detractors were predictable: fashion designers, operating inside an elitist industry, critiquing wealth inequality. Dalton’s response draws on the logic of the art world. ‘It relates back to, “Do you see fashion as art?” In art you can make a statement like that, but in fashion it’s like, “Oh, you can’t do that,”‘ she says. ‘A painting is worth more than a dress. Art is a business, too.’
The Met Gala produced a variant of the same argument. Sarah Paulson wore a shredded ball gown and dollar bill mask from The One Percent collection, a thinly veiled commentary on the Gala’s billionaire backers. Critics noted that she was attending the same event. ‘The only way to deconstruct and reconstruct dynamics is from within,’ says Bhaskaran. Dalton clarifies that the dress was a loan, not a purchase, and that the dress was taking direct aim at Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s involvement in the Gala: ‘Of course!’ they say in unison.
The origin of all this is a fashion illustration class at LaSalle College in Montreal, where Bhaskaran arrived late and noticed Dalton, then long-haired and wearing a pussy-bow blouse and Tory Burch flats, sandwiched between two other girls. ‘There was a little bit of bitterness,’ he says. ‘Seeing someone like Hannah physically represent a symbol of privilege, of acceptance and normality, it was a confrontational feeling.’ The friendship they struck up, partly tactical on Bhaskaran’s part (a teacher’s pet whose notes he could copy), became a creative and romantic partnership.
The infrastructure around that partnership has been built carefully. Rick Owens cold-emailed them in 2018 after reading an interview in The New York Times, took on a mentor’s role and folded them into his world. Adrian Joffe, Dover Street Market and Comme des Garçons president, was encountered backstage at a Madonna concert, pitched to, and then ignored for four months before texting ‘let’s do this’ while the pair were DJing at Michèle Lamy’s 80th birthday in Venice. Their studio has been inside Dover Street Market Paris since early 2025. On the day we meet, Lady Amanda Harlech approaches the table to say she has pulled one of their pieces for a shoot, and Konstantinos Katalakinos arrives to bemoan their absence from a couture show the previous day. ‘We’re, like, popular today,’ laughs Bhaskaran. The establishment, it turns out, came to them.
