“The idea for the collection began with diving deep into what beauty means to us. Hannah’s expression of her individuality was the starting point. Now, it’s exciting to have our singular dialogue expand into a full conversation with our close community who channels our visual ethos. Our identity, something so personal and intimate can be shared through the pieces of this collection and hopefully help those around us feel beautiful.”
Dear Shaded Viewers,
Founded in 2025 by Canadian duo Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, Matières Fécales grew out of a decade-long artistic collaboration that began in Montréal in 2014, when the two met in fashion school and quickly discovered a shared disdain for conventional beauty. First known globally under the name Fecal Matter, they cultivated a cult following online for their “alien glamour” – shaved heads, elongated silhouettes, extreme makeup and prosthetics that recast the body as a site of resistance and fantasy rather than conformity. Their work has always existed between fashion, performance and image-making, with Steven’s photography playing a central role in crystallising their universe long before the runway took notice.
In just three seasons on the official Paris calendar, the pair have transformed that digital mythology into a fully-fledged maison, Matières Fécales, backed by Dover Street Market and embraced by a fiercely loyal community who see themselves reflected in the duo’s uncompromising vision. Since their Paris debut in 2025, they have been repeatedly described as a “cult brand”, not as a marketing gimmick but because friends, muses and followers quite literally inhabit the clothes, the shows and the imagery. Each collection has functioned as a chapter in an ongoing narrative about power, identity and the right to exist visibly outside mainstream norms.
For Fall/Winter 2026, their third collection in Paris, “The One Percent”, Hannah and Steven turned their gaze to power – who holds it, who is denied it, and how luxury can both seduce and brutalise. Drawing on their own radically different upbringings – Hannah in affluent Westmount, Steven in one of Montréal’s poorest districts – the collection dissects the codes of wealth with both surgical precision and wicked humour. The show unfolded in three tableaux: the power of archetypes, the power of community and the power of the future, each look telling fragments of a story about privilege, exclusion and the fragile humanity that can be eclipsed by too much power.
On the runway, bourgeois “perfect” families appeared in distorted New Look silhouettes, their elegance poisoned by the coldness of elitism; opera-length “Guilt Gloves” in white lamb leather with blood-red palms underlined the violence hidden beneath immaculate surfaces. Faces altered with uncanny prosthetics and “botched” surgery effects, created with long-time collaborator Alexis Stone, pushed beauty into a realm that was both glamorous and deeply uncomfortable – a reminder that the quest for perfection often borders on body horror. Elsewhere, enormous bow-backed ball gowns wrapped women mid-healing, celebrating the bruised, stitched and swelling realities that usually remain offstage in fashion’s fantasy of effortless luxury.
If the first tableau interrogated the elite, the second insisted on the power of the crowd around them. Jersey hoodie capes with elongated kangaroo pockets, worn by friends and family, paid homage to the community that has grown around Matières Fécales – a constellation of queer, trans and nonconforming bodies who often feel powerless in increasingly conservative times yet find strength in this shared, radical aesthetic. This is the same extended family that animates their campaigns: for SS26’s “Hannah”, for example, the images – shot by Steven – foreground the people who work with them daily, from Paris cabaret performers to studio collaborators who co-develop the collections and act as living muses.
The final tableau, “The Immortals”, contemplated the future of power, from tech billionaires chasing biological eternity to icons like Michèle Lamy, whose refusal to smooth or erase time becomes its own act of defiance. Hannah led the procession in an albino python cocoon skirt suit and seamless heelless boots, a post-human reinterpretation of haute couture’s most authoritative silhouettes, and the show closed with Debra Shaw as an Elizabethan queen – the same figure Steven first sketched twelve years ago for a speculative 2026 project in fashion school. That long arc, from classroom drawing to Paris runway, underscores how carefully considered and emotionally layered the brand’s theatrics are; the provocation is always anchored in craft, storytelling and lived experience.
Crucially, the world of Matières Fécales does not end when the show lights dim. Hannah and Steven have built, in a remarkably short time, a transnational community that treats their work less as mere fashion than as a shared language: fans arrive in full look long before call time, muses return season after season, and those who once followed the duo on social media now inhabit the front row and runway. This porous boundary between designer, subject and spectator is what makes their universe so potent; everyone is implicated, everyone is invited to step a little further away from the safe centre.
As a third statement on the Paris schedule, “The One Percent” feels like a consolidation of everything that makes Matières Fécales one of the most essential young houses in the city: obsessive construction, fearless casting, and a willingness to stare directly at the ugliness of contemporary power structures while still insisting on the possibility of beauty. It is a collection that lingers not simply because of its shock value, but because it articulates, with rare clarity, what it means to dress for a world where the stakes of visibility, body autonomy and belonging have never been higher.
Later,
Diane
