JULIE KEGELS

JULIE KEGELS

Julie Kegels opens Paris Fashion Week’s Spring/Summer 2027 season with her eponymous label, one of the most closely watched young houses to have joined the official calendar in recent seasons. A graduate of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Belgian designer sharpened her craft during formative stints at Meryll Rogge — the fellow Belgian recently named creative director of Marni — and at Alaïa, before launching her own womenswear line in 2024 with a debut collection titled “50/50,” staged as a tableau vivant in a Paris shop window.

Kegels builds each collection around female archetypes in contradiction: a chronically busy businesswoman who loves to party, a whip-smart city lawyer with a taste for extreme adventure. Her clothes are designed to hold two opposing energies at once — structure and fragility, precision and spontaneity — translated into Jekyll-and-Hyde silhouettes like a tailored suit with a conventional front and shorts at the back, or hybrid knit-and-denim skirts. She has described her work as treating imperfection not as a flaw but as identity, and her recent collections have explored the idea of “quick change” — the rapid transformations women move through across a single day, shifting between professional, intimate, public, and private selves.

For S/S 2027, Julie Kegels continues that diary-like approach to design, in which memories are translated into form and fabrics are chosen as much for tactile honesty as for beauty — opening the nine-day Paris calendar with a voice the industry has flagged as one of the city’s most distinctive new arrivals.

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