There is a recurring fantasy in fashion that the clothes might actually touch the world they claim to care about, rather than merely gesturing towards it from a showroom in the Meatpacking District. The Collina Strada SS27 collection, shown under the open sky of Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, came closer to that fantasy than most. The show was called Detour, and the name was literal: guests left Manhattan behind and travelled 58 miles north to a 500-acre outdoor museum that holds one of the largest outdoor sculpture collections in the United States.
Creative director Hillary Taymour framed the decision in the show notes with unusual directness. ‘We wanted to make a show that wasn’t just hosted by a museum, but inspired by the way you experience one,’ she wrote. ‘Detour is about immersing the clothes into the landscape. Bodies move through grass, steel, sky, sculpture, and each other. It’s about the paths we take, the paths we’re told to take, and what happens when you decide to go somewhere else.’ The language is almost manifesto-like, but the setting earned it: models moving through Storm King Art Center sculpture fields, grass underfoot, sun overhead, is a different kind of proposition from the conventional black box runway.
What the Collina Strada SS27 collection actually showed
According to Surface Magazine, Detour comprised 33 looks, a tight edit by the standards of a brand making a large spatial argument. The design vocabulary was, by any fair account, exuberant: exaggerated silhouettes, ample ruffles, soft pastels, sequins catching the afternoon light with a candour that indoor lighting would have muted. The pastoral setting and the theatrical garments entered into a dialogue that felt, at its best, genuinely thought through rather than merely decorative. Ruffles in a field read differently from ruffles on a runway riser; there is something about the grounding of landscape that either exposes a garment as absurd or elevates it into something closer to costume in the best, most committed sense of the word.
Taymour has consistently built Collina Strada around an ethos that takes environmental concern seriously as a design constraint rather than a brand footnote. Choosing Storm King, a site where art and land coexist on something like equal terms, extended that logic into the staging itself. An eyebrow or two were raised, as the report of collective fashion-week opinion always registers when a designer asks guests to travel, but the consensus on arrival was that the journey was warranted.
Carly Rae Jepsen and the show’s final movement
The show concluded with a surprise performance by Carly Rae Jepsen, who appeared in a flowing pink Collina cape. Fashion shows have a long history of closing musical acts deployed as punctuation, a signal that the brand’s world extends beyond the garments into a curated sensibility. What made this one different was what followed: the finale proper had models sprinting back down the grass to join Jepsen in a post-show dance party. It is a choreographic choice that undermines the usual hierarchy of runway presentations, in which models are ciphers moving through a director’s vision and the audience remains a passive witness. Here, the field became a shared space rather than a stage.
There is a word that keeps appearing in coverage of collections like this one, and the word is ‘whimsy’, which by now carries the faint exhaustion of overuse. But whimsy as a critical category tends to flatten what is actually a range of very different impulses: the escapist, the ecological, the theatrical, the communal. The Collina Strada SS27 collection contained all of these in varying proportions. The sequins and pastels were the surface; the decision to stage Detour at Storm King, to let the 500-acre landscape be a collaborator rather than a backdrop, was the argument underneath.
What Detour‘s 33 looks ultimately proposed is a version of fashion that is willing to be inconvenient, to ask something of its audience beyond attendance. The grassy runway, the sculpture fields, the sprint towards Jepsen at the end: all of it suggested that Collina Strada is less interested in the ceremony of the runway than in what happens when you abandon the ceremony entirely and see what the clothes do in actual light, against actual ground.
