Cool cannot be manufactured. A House can buy craft, hire talent and stage a spectacle, but that quality either walks into the room or it does not. Egonlab has it. In the courtyard of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, for Spring Summer 2027, a water pistol waited on every seat, and the show was cool before a single look appeared.
Founders and creative directors Florentin Glémarec and Kevin Nompeix had set the register, the sweet anarchy of childhood, the kind that arrives with the last bell of the school year. The collection answered the giddiness of that gesture with a lighter reading of their urban punk tailoring. Blazers were pared back and emptied of their linings so the jacket sat against the body like a second skin, then tucked high into trousers and into shorts cut very short. The bulk was gone, the line clean, and the cut stayed impeccable throughout, the real feat of the House, rigour worn as though it weighed nothing.
The wit lived in the trompe l’oeil. A tie flattened into the striped placket of a shirt. A poplin collar folded itself into a denim jacket. A phantom tee dissolved into a blouson. A collaboration with Eastpak added generous totes and belt bags, streetwear ballast for all that precision.
The duo leaned into handwork too, embroidery, sequins and pearls scattered across translucent cloth, and a wave like pleating that bowed quietly to Magritte and the veiled faces of Les Amants. This softer, almost coquettish turn let the masculine and the feminine share a single wardrobe, as the House always intends. The two directions, the stripped and the adorned, could each have carried a show alone. Their meeting is where the label suddenly looked full of road ahead.
None of this is beginner’s luck. Egonlab has sat on the Paris calendar since 2021, the year it took the ANDAM Pierre Bergé Prize, and it was trusted soon after to design the ANDAM trophies themselves. It stands once again among this year’s ANDAM finalists. Seven years in, the House has turned its punk tailoring into a language fluent enough to dress every body and every gender without distorting any of them.
The finale said it best. The whole studio took the runway at a run, water pistols raised, drenching the air in sheer joy. It was the last day of term made flesh, an entire School spilling out of its gates and bolting straight for the summer holidays.
That is the Egonlab paradox, discipline and abandon breathing together, tailoring that behaves like freedom. Cool, as they keep proving, is not bought. It is cut.
