Marques’Almeida SS27 Makes a Case for Imperfect Elegance
For Spring/Summer 2027, Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida push refinement into unfamiliar territory, where occasion dressing, raw denim and deliberately unresolved silhouettes coexist.
There has always been something slightly unfinished about Marques’Almeida. Not unfinished through lack of intention, but unfinished as an attitude: the raw hem, the distorted proportion, the dress that seems to resist behaving like a dress should.
For Spring/Summer 2027, that instinct becomes particularly interesting because the starting point is increasingly refined.
Elegance, then disruption
This tension has long been central to the language of M’A. Distressed denim, asymmetric construction, deconstructed silhouettes and exposed edges return for SS27, but this time they are placed against satin, lace, transparency, brocade and richly worked surfaces.
The contrast matters. Rather than abandoning the rawness associated with the brand’s earlier collections, Marques’Almeida appears increasingly interested in what happens when that rawness is brought into a more sophisticated wardrobe.
A dress can be excessive without becoming precious. A peplum can feel sculptural while remaining strangely casual. A train can sweep across the floor while the rest of the look refuses the ceremony normally associated with it.
It creates a kind of anti-perfection. Even the palette avoids settling into a single mood. Deep black and indigo move through burgundy, beige, lavender and sky blue, while prints and textures accumulate rather than politely coordinate. The clothes feel collected and layered over time rather than assembled as a perfectly resolved total look.
That sense of friction is perhaps where the collection feels most contemporary. In a fashion landscape often built around immediately recognisable images, SS27 seems less interested in producing a perfectly contained character. Instead, it leaves room for contradiction.
The M’A person was never meant to be one person
That idea extends beyond the clothes. Marques’Almeida describes the M’A person not as one woman or one man, but as something far less fixed. Individuality remains central to the label, with femininity appearing throughout SS27 only to be exaggerated, interrupted or shifted into another register. It is a philosophy that makes sense within the wider history of the brand.
Marques and Almeida met while studying for their MA at Central Saint Martins, later launching the label in 2011 and showing their first collections through Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East. NEWGEN support followed, as did London Fashion Week, and in 2015 the pair won the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers alongside the British Fashion Council award for Best Emerging Designer.
From the beginning, their work has existed somewhere between impulse and technical control. More than fifteen years later, that tension remains. The difference is that the vocabulary has expanded.
Refinement without obedience
SS27 does not read as an attempt to leave the past behind. Denim remains. Raw edges remain. The instinct to disturb a silhouette before it becomes too polite remains firmly intact.
What has changed is the territory around those ideas.
Marques’Almeida can now move comfortably between workwear and occasionwear, between something deliberately distressed and something almost opulent, without needing to choose one identity over the other.
For an independent label, evolution can easily become confused with reinvention. Here, the shift feels subtler. The house is not attempting to become something else. It is simply allowing itself to become more complicated.
Perhaps that is why the collection's most convincing moments are the ones that refuse a clean resolution. Something elegant becomes oversized. Something feminine becomes awkward. Something polished is deliberately roughed up. Perfection would close the conversation.
Marques’Almeida would rather leave a few edges exposed.
