Ahluwalia Spring 2027 Ready-to-Wear Collection
“I’m going to hustle as much as I can to make my dreams come true. Basically, I think that’s all you can do.” Priya Ahluwalia was speaking after a show whose collection notes ran to two pages and sponsor notes to four: her hustle is real. Thankfully, alongside the Puma collab (nice), shown against a runway backdrop of Ahluwalia-designed wallpaper by Calico (dreamy), in the basement of the Rosewood London (luxe), with complimentary low-sugar sodas by Poppi (fruity), there was a fashion collection substantial enough to carry all that spon-con: her talent is real, too.
An abstract red-and-green-on-white print, used on an off-the-shoulder wiggle dress, a sectioned soccer shirt, and a Bermuda-shorts-and-shirt set was derived, Ahluwalia said, from aerial photography and floor plans of the venue built for Festac ’77. That month-long festival of culture saw around 16,000 artists and thinkers from across the Black diaspora gather in Lagos for one of the greatest-ever coalescences of Pan-African expression. Photos from the event show it was a great time, too. This was Ahluwalia’s imagined context for a collection that considered the intermingling of revelry and resistance.
Her research included photographs of Black Panther members off duty, hence the angled berets over swish, surprising double-layered, suiting and slouchy top-stitched denim. She further metabolized political position into wearable postures of pleasure through fringed dresses and more soccer tops, tuxedo-hemmed tunics for men and minidresses for women, and loosely attractive casualized military shirting. Dresses in silk organza were shaped into sculptural, silhouettes or divided at the midriff to suggest formal uniforms of celebration: occasion wear.
The designer said: “Sometimes people say to me, “Who is the Ahluwalia girl?” And I’m like, well, it’s a myriad of people and their own experiences.” That philosophy of plurality was reflected in a collection that was at once broad in content and specific in voice.
