Ester Manas

Ester Manas

ESTER MANAS opens Tuesday’s runway as the label most singularly responsible for bringing body diversity to the Paris schedule. Founded in 2019 by designer Ester Manas and her partner Balthazar Delepierre — who met and studied together at La Cambre in Brussels and both trained at Balenciaga, Paco Rabanne, and Acne Studios – the house builds every garment around a radical premise: no standard sizing. Manas’s signature stretchy, gathered pieces, including a sheer ruffled tulle dress inducted into the collection of The Met, are engineered to flex across a wide range of bodies, from roughly FR 34 to 46 and beyond, using materials themselves to determine how a garment expands.

The label’s origin traces to Manas’s own frustration as a size 44–46 woman shopping in luxury fashion, a search that led her, during her graduate collection, to swimwear and lingerie construction techniques for inspiration. Ester Manas and Delepierre won the Galeries Lafayette Prize at the 2018 Hyères Festival for their “Big Again” collection and have since been finalists for both the LVMH Prize and the ANDAM Prize, building a runway reputation for models of all sizes walking together in bright, poppy, Y2K-inflected pieces with cutouts and ruffles, roughly 80% of it made from recycled materials or deadstock.

For S/S 2027, ESTER MANAS continues its mission of dressing “every body, for every moment of the day” – a collection built, as ever, on the idea that inclusivity and sensuality were never in conflict in the first place, opening a day of shows that spans from body-positive activism to some of fashion’s grandest heritage names.

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