Threeasfour Spring 2027 Ready-to-Wear Collection
If asked to predict in 2000 which brands would still be on the fashion calendar 25 years later, indie labels like Threeasfour (then Asfour), Imitation of Christ, and Libertine, with their emphasis on social issues and upcycling, likely wouldn’t have made it to the top of the list. Yet each of them presented spring 2027 collections. Adi Gil, Angela Donhauser, and Gabriel Asfour’s show was three years in the making. To mark their return to the runway after a five-year absence, they went all out with a 50-ish-look show at Mana Contemporary in New Jersey, where they have their atelier, followed by a party and the screening of Sean Ono Lennon’s documentary, Threeasfour: Full Circle, which will arrive in theaters this fall.
“Together, the film and the collection create a moment of reflection on our history while opening a new chapter for the brand,” said Asfour in an email exchange.
Their new spring collection was both a comeback and a debut; the trio is launching denim (with several styles available for pre-order now). They’ve worked with the material before, notably for spring 2006, fall 2015, and pre-fall 2019. This time around, they are hoping to extend their reach; jeans are, after all, the most worn garment in the world. The designers think of denim as “the uniform of humanity.”
What came down the runway was a mix of the new denim line and one-offs of pieces in the brand archive reimagined in indigo-dyed cotton, including many vintage pairs of jeans. (Material) circularity is a core value of the label and, in a more abstract sense, the theme of Lennon’s documentary.
There were several notable show pieces, such as the tetrahedron and the icosahedron cells (geometric structures surrounding the model), the latter of which lit up. Some models wore futuristic bubble helmets. A 3D-printed dress resembled a butterfly wing, and a Möbius dress looked like it might take flight. Elsewhere, there was something called a “frozen cloud puffer in denim potpourri,” and much play with the variegation of colors and washes. As out there as some of the garments were, there was no denying the artisanship that went into the making of “topographic,” or quilted, designs. Some of the bleaching was done by hand, and the Eternity dress in Look 42 was described as being “made from the repurposed seams of vintage Levi’s.”
The idea for the denim line is to focus on “archetypes”: a trench, a top, a jacket, boot-cut (Charro) and elephant-leg (Ganesha) jeans, yet there is nothing ordinary about the make of these pieces. Threeasfour described their spiral-cut technique used for jeans online better than this writer can. “Each leg is cut from a single pattern piece, joined through a continuous seam that begins at the back crotch, travels through the knee, and ends at the front hem—creating a clean, elongating line along the leg. A holster-shaped pocket frames and lifts the glutes, drawing a fluid pathway from backbone to hip to thigh.” And as Gil stressed postshow, the jeans are reversible.
This trio, once a quartet, has always emphasized the “we are the world” aspect of their partnership, often referring to themselves as the “United Nations of Fashion.” (Asfour was born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents; Donhauser is Russian; Gil Israeli; and their former partner, Kai Kühne, German.) They all came together in New York City—a world within the world—where they became ambassadors of the downtown art/fashion scene. Despite the trend toward digital flattening, Threeasfour continues to evade being fit into a template; at the same time, they want to reach more people. As Asfour put it, this is about “taking something already shared and familiar to the world and reshaping it through the Threeasfour point of view. A view that can best be described as kaleidoscopic.”
