After a two-year absence, Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre returned to Paris with a PrimaDonna collaboration and a governing premise: that the slight dishevelment of getting dressed in real life is more interesting, and more sensual, than the immaculate version
PARIS — Somehow I Manage is the title Michael Scott, the fictional regional manager of The Office, attributed to his own unpublished self-help book. As a collection title for Ester Manas Spring 2027 – the Belgian label’s first runway in two years – the reference is precise in a way the designers almost certainly intended. Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre had a baby, switched the business to direct-to-consumer, and sat out two Paris seasons while watching the runway’s plus-size representation shrink to a fraction of what it had been. They came back Sept. 29 with 34 looks drawn from PrimaDonna’s 161-year archive, a Belgian lingerie specialist, and a thesis about what good dressing looks like when life stops cooperating.
The thesis is as follows. The immaculate wardrobe – everything ironed, nothing slipping out of place – is a fantasy, and not a particularly useful one. The more honest wardrobe is slightly undone: a shirt collar left open, colors that almost match, lingerie visible where it technically shouldn’t be. The house proposition has always been that clothes should accommodate bodies rather than the reverse; this collection extends that argument to accommodate the circumstances of daily life.
PrimaDonna’s archive gave the collection its structural vocabulary. The collaboration was not about surface – not about reproducing a lingerie aesthetic on outerwear – but about porting construction technique into a broader wardrobe. The result: sheer body stockings built from structured panels finished with delicate lace, taffeta moved from the ballroom into a technical jacket, a boxy bomber sharing a runway with corsets, bodysuits and beaded skirts. The most extreme gesture was a hand-knitted dress covered in 22,000 miniature bows retrieved from PrimaDonna’s dormant stock. The bow, ordinarily a small declarative flourish on a bra strap, was multiplied until it became material itself.
The taffeta pieces made the strongest argument. Taffeta arrives carrying a century of occasion-dressing precedent; cutting it into an everyday jacket or a utility skirt doesn’t neutralize that precedent so much as reroute it. What could read as incongruous becomes, in the context of the collection’s governing logic, exactly the point. The deliberate dishevelment worked similarly well when it operated as a structural decision rather than a styling afterthought – the crumpled surface, the undone button, the bra visible through a sheer blouse were most convincing where they were built in and lost some of their argument where they appeared improvised.
“It’s really about poking a bit of fun at my new wardrobe, where nothing is ever ironed,” Manas said in a preview. That honesty is the collection’s most useful quality. The piece faltered in translating the expanded wardrobe into silhouettes that hadn’t yet absorbed the house’s structural logic with the same conviction as its signature stretch fabrications. Some of the outerwear shapes looked layered rather than constructed – a distinction that matters for a label whose entire proposition rests on building accommodation into the clothes from the seam outward, not adding it from the outside in.
The return to Paris carries weight the collection alone can’t fully carry. Plus-size representation on the runway dropped from 0.8 percent to 0.3 percent in the seasons Ester Manas was absent, according to the Vogue Business Size Inclusivity Report. Delepierre, in a preview, was candid about the drift in how the label is now perceived: “We started out with a really welcoming, positive message that aligned with a broader trend – as terrible as that sounds. And now, somehow, we’re seen almost as an activist brand, even though that’s not what we’re about at all.”
That is a useful tension for the label to hold. Somehow I Manage works best when it isn’t performing either pole – neither defiant activist statement nor warmly inclusive lifestyle brand – and simply makes clothes that do their job on the widest possible range of bodies. The wardrobe is expanding in the right direction. The next collection will need to answer how far that expansion can go, and how much of the house’s constructive precision travels with it.
See the complete collection below:
Images courtesy of Ester Manas
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