The dictates of etiquette. The handbook said: Never wear red before noon, a lady’s blouse mustn’t swoon, a skirt too short is sin, a hem too long—unfeminine. The handbook whispered: Match your pearls to your patience, your gloves to your silence, and starch every thought until it folds neatly at the edges. But imagine— a woman asking her closet: What if my apron is armor? This season August Barron unveils its Spring/Summer 2026 collection, “What Shall I Wear?”, a satirical ode to the rigid style codes of the 1950s and their paradoxical prescriptions for femininity. Inspired by vintage etiquette manuals and fashion guides, the collection transforms these once-prescriptive rules into a playful act of emancipation.
Life is put at risk again – the PR team, in its wisdom, selects the ‘friendly’ Porte d’Aubervilliers, where the runway is rivaled by the spectacle of dodging crackheads in hot pursuit. The creative duo, Bror August Vestbø and Benjamin Barron, interrogate the tension between material restriction and radical self-expression. Starched blouses and strict gingham silhouettes are reimagined into exaggerated volumes; crepe and organdy are cut into unexpected forms that defy their original etiquette; “perfectly laundered” garments become symbols of constraint and release. The archive of domestic womanhood is reinvented as a manifesto of autonomy.
The color palette fuses pastel cottons and prim whites with lacquered blacks and liquid silks, while embroidered slogans, fractured prints, and deliberately “mis-matched” pairings highlight the irony of being told how to dress while reclaiming the freedom to choose. Silhouettes riff on mid-century domestic uniforms: cinched waists are exaggerated to distortion, collars are stretched to theatrical lengths, and skirts unravel in asymmetric cascades. An Everyday “housewife” kit as a motto — gloves elongate into sculptural sleeves, and pearls swell into satirical exaggeration.
The runway celebrates those who write their own codes, with trans women embodying emancipation, wielding the very rules once designed to confine as instruments of spectacle and liberation. Each look is a playful rebellion, a laugh at history, and a reclaiming of the right to appear, exaggerate, and defy. “What Shall I Wear?” is no longer a question — it is a refusal, a celebration of ungoverned bodies, re-coded femininity, and the joyful chaos of dressing as truth. August Barron declares fashion not as obedience, but as satire, and survival made to cut the past wide open.
