Collina Strada Walks Out: Hillary Taymour Indicted Fashion
And then there is what Hillary Taymour did with her Collina Strada spring-summer 2027 collection: she drove everyone two hours north of Manhattan to Storm King Art Center, set her show against sculpture fields and open sky, and quietly dared the industry to decide whether it believed in anything at all.
Collina Strada Walks Out: Hillary Taymour Indicted Fashion
There is a version of fashion week that happens inside — climate-controlled, front-row-assigned, catered, and entirely predictable in its unpredictability. And then there is what Hillary Taymour did with her Collina Strada spring-summer 2027 collection: she drove everyone two hours north of Manhattan to Storm King Art Center, set her show against sculpture fields and open sky, and quietly dared the industry to decide whether it believed in anything at all.
The industry split. Of course it did.
Half the room arrived converted — the journey itself as editorial, the landscape as set design that no budget could replicate, the whole thing reading as a rebuke to the compressed, airless circuit of showroom and tent and after-party that NYFW has become. The other half arrived irritated, calculating the hours lost, the shows missed, the logistics of upstate New York versus a Midtown hotel ballroom. Fashion criticism is rarely about clothes. It is almost always about whether you were willing to be inconvenienced for someone's vision.
This is the question Taymour has always been asking, quietly, from the edges. Collina Strada has never played for the centre — the brand's identity is built on a kind of cheerful ecological sincerity that the industry finds charming when it is palatable and threatening when it is inconvenient. Driving your audience to a sculpture park in September is not palatable. It is a statement about what fashion week is actually for, delivered without a press release.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the week's slipstream, Vogue World: Milano looms with its own mythology — the Italian supermodel as cultural monument, decades of Versace and Valentino and the specific kind of beauty that made the nineties feel like an empire. Those images exist as a kind of collective inheritance now, the grammar of what fashion decided it was in its most confident era. Taymour's Storm King intervention sits in interesting tension with that inheritance: one version of fashion that knows exactly what it is, and another that is still asking the question out loud.
The people who drove to Storm King and came back talking about the grass and the light and the way the clothes moved against open space — they will remember this show longer than almost anything they saw inside a tent this season.
That is either the point, or the problem. Depending on who you ask.
