Camiel Fortgens S/S 2027 Runway

Camiel Fortgens Sends Imperfect Clothes Down a Supermarket Aisle

Camiel Fortgens took Spring/Summer 2027 somewhere fashion does not usually bother to glamorize: the supermarket after closing. Returning to Amsterdam Fashion Week, the Dutch designer staged his latest show inside an Albert Heijn, sending models through the aisles while shelf stackers kept working around them.

It is exactly the kind of ordinary-meets-offbeat setup that makes sense for Fortgens. Models moved past produce and canned goods like people doing a late grocery run, while the clothes played their own game of exposing what fashion usually tries to finish, conceal or tidy away. The setting was familiar. The construction was anything but.

Inside Out, Unfinished and Very Much on Purpose

For SS27, Fortgens turns garments inside out, moves prints to the reverse side of fabrics and leaves linings and facings visible instead of hiding them away. Contrast stitching, raw hems and visible repairs make the process of constructing the clothes part of the final look. Nothing is pretending to have emerged untouched from some pristine fashion laboratory.

That slightly undone language has long been central to Fortgens, but here it gets an especially playful backdrop. There is something satisfying about clothes that expose their own making being shown in a space built around perfectly stacked shelves, labels and order. The collection refuses that kind of neatness.

Color gets its own imperfect treatment. Light pink, forest green and deep burgundy appear alongside washes and overdyes that make tones look as though they have bled into one another — the fashion equivalent of accidentally letting one red sock loose in the laundry and deciding the result is better anyway.

References to farmer’s wear and functional outdoor clothing run through the collection as well, with loose linen trousers and woven straw bags bringing a rural practicality into Fortgens’ deliberately exposed construction. The pieces are made in Europe from high-quality fabrics, but the luxury is in the material and handwork rather than a demand for everything to look overly polished.

The supermarket setting could easily have become the gimmick, but it does not. What sticks is the way Fortgens keeps pushing against the assumption that expensive clothing has to erase evidence of the hands that made it. The seams, repairs, linings and rough edges are not flaws to clean up later. They are the point.

And in the middle of a working Albert Heijn, with everyday life continuing around the runway, that idea feels particularly clear: clothes do not become interesting because they are separated from reality. Sometimes they get better when you put them right back into it.

Sources: FY Magazine!; Camiel Fortgens.