Paolo Carzana’s Baptism of Fire

For Spring/Summer 2027, Paolo Carzana filled a London church with calico, masks, muddy golds and clothes that pushed his singular vision somewhere new

Early in my preview of Paolo Carzana’s latest collection, on the morning of his Spring/Summer 2027 runway show, I ask what the painted masks covering some of his models’ faces represent. “I don’t want to explain what things mean,” he says. “I want you to decide what they mean to you.”

Carzana will however talk expansively about cloth, the sun or a daffodil, but retreat when asked to force any of it into a quotable metaphor. He is doing all this while clutching a broken rib, sustained two weeks earlier in an accident apparently too boring to recount, and running on around ten minutes’ sleep. Yet he recites the show’s not-very-catchy title without hesitation: Why Wait Until Wednesday, the Holy Wine Is Bleeding and the Colours of the Carrots Are Changing, I’ll Still Be Your Prince of Pain, Until Man Colours the Rain. “I had that title right at the beginning,” he says with a strained laugh, “so I pre-empted all this pain.”

The Welsh designer is the son of a builder, which feeds directly into how he thinks about making. “Creativity exists in people’s hands far beyond what we call the creative world,” he says. Builders, carpenters and blacksmiths became touchstones for the collection, alongside the women in his life who, he says, have “lit a path” for him.

This season, Carzana is challenging himself and the expectations people have of his brand. He chuckles to himself when he uses a technical term: “This is the first time I’m introducing … eveningwear.” There is eveningwear, but also, newly, knitwear, jersey and detailed embroidery; silk bras against hemp jersey; bias-cut dresses; skirts swelling with godets; chiffon draped around the body; bamboo satin worked through with a near-ridiculous number of darts. Carzana talks about translucency and “a ghost-like quality”, boiling peace silk until it appears weightless. A dried narcissus – the daffodil, emblem of Wales – appears in appliqué and waistbands that open like flowers. 

Wine tannins warm the palette; yellows sit beneath other dyes; turmeric and marigold turn cloth into muddy golds. Some pieces remain undyed so, Carzana says, “the colours can sing,” and others are left in sunlight after dyeing. “The sun is magical and powerful,” he says. “It’s mesmerising to understand how dangerous it is to us and to the earth […] Everything within this box will have been created through the power of the sun: the dyes, the fabrics, the fibres, the shadows that we’re creating around.”

That box he’s referring to is quite literal. Carzana chose the spectacularly stunning St Cuthbert’s Church in Earls Court, then hid its carved tiles and stained glass behind raw calico. “As a designer, you often use a world that has been created by hundreds of other people’s hands and benefit from that space,” he says. “So we are building a calico box to put everyone inside and hide the architecture of the church, because that reflects today – not seeing or appreciating the beauty around you.” Light from outside throws grand shadows across the cloth, while a soundtrack glitches and cuts intermittently, as though playing through a faulty aux cord.

Carzana calls the collection “a baptism of the label” and “a starting point”. And more revealingly, he sounds newly sure of the clothes themselves. “I do feel like I’ve grown,” he says. “My ability is growing and my vision is becoming stronger because I’m challenging it.” A Paolo Carzana show is difficult to explain, which makes his reluctance to do so feel understandable. A church is hardly an unfamiliar setting for a fashion show, but it felt right here – offering room for interpretation and introspection, to begin to unknot all the things impossible to explain.