EASE AS A RADICAL ACT

 

          image and video courtesy of ©Fforme

The first sound was not applause but the faint slap of rubber against floor, jandals, flip-flops, walking into New York light as if the runway were a strip of black sand by the sea. Frances Howie’s FFORME Spring/Summer 2026 collection opened with this disarming gesture, setting the mood: a refusal of hauteur, a declaration of intimacy with the everyday, an insistence that luxury can arrive barefoot. 

From there, the clothes unfolded with a dual discipline: the strict clarity of construction and the looseness of garments designed for ease. Black, camel, and white grounded the palette in elemental calm, but were pierced by eruptions, a linen-silk suit in grass-green with a saturation that seemed almost alive; hammered gold draped across a halter dress; silver and royal blue satin dresses gleaming with liquid reflections. These colours did not decorate so much as strike, like sudden sunlit interruptions of cloud. 

Materials extended the dialogue between utility and elegance. Bonded seams, recalling the functional logic of wetsuits, erased distraction and let the eye travel unbroken along the body. Silk satin carried a mirror’s liquidity; washed metallic cotton satin gave black dresses a velvet-like depth; airy knits were hand-embroidered with feathers so light they seemed always on the verge of departure. There were frayed fringes, lace, and woven linens that remembered touch, that carried the mark of weather as much as the discipline of tailoring. 

Silhouettes carried the ease of water and the precision of stone. Dresses fell just above the ankle, hemmed for movement; parkas inflated slightly, ballooning with volume yet never drowning the figure; stovepipe trousers sharpened the line, while utilitarian shorts relaxed it. Curved seams swept from shoulder to hip, batwing sleeves stretched into a gesture, shell tops with asymmetric zippers paired with high skirts, each cut suggesting that clothing need not sit still, that form and movement could speak together. One dress, cut from a single piece of fabric and frayed by hand at the edges, felt more like it was made than released. 

The atmosphere was not borrowed from New York but from elsewhere, from the volcanic beaches of Howie’s New Zealand childhood, where summers were measured in salt, surf, and the weightless freedom of swimming. You could sense it in the ease of construction, in the silhouettes shaped by wind, in the fabrics that seemed always in dialogue with light and erosion. 

If there was a risk, it lay in understatement: in garments that sometimes leaned so far toward discretion that they threatened to disappear against the magnitude of fashion week. But then, that might be the argument at the heart of FFORME, that true luxury is not spectacle but precision, not invention for its own sake but the perfect calibration of cut, texture, and ease. In a season filled with noise, Howie answered with a collection that breathed like an open window, air moving through it, the quiet insistence that freedom is also a form.