Before the first model appeared at Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood, a dead woman told the room to wake up.

Vivienne Westwood’s recorded voice was cut, looped and thrown through the venue like a scratched manifesto. Then came leopard print, a graphic T-shirt, an oversized jacket and hips padded so violently they looked ready to shoulder fashion out of its own building. Good taste had not arrived. It had been mugged outside.

Kronthaler called the Spring 2027 collection Body & Soul. The name sounded almost tender. The clothes were not. Corsets fought with balloon trousers. Gingham picked a fight with leopard. Men wore blouses, silk dresses and Mary Janes. Underwear escaped its assigned department. Natasha Lyonne walked as if she had come to collect a debt. This was not chaos for content. It was Westwood’s oldest argument sharpened for now: the body is political precisely because polite society keeps trying to correct it.

Taste gets a body blow

The opening silhouette told you everything. Those swollen hips were not trying to flatter the model into algorithmic agreement. They interrupted the body. They turned it into architecture, joke and threat. In a season still addicted to whispering wealth, Westwood showed up screaming in animal print with its pelvis first.

What looked unruly was tightly controlled. Pencil skirts stayed severe while jackets expanded. Tiny tops exposed the torso while tailoring slouched around it. Checks, florals and leopard were made to share the same visual oxygen until the idea of a tasteful match became ridiculous. Kronthaler did not resolve the clashes. He made the clashes the point.

That refusal is the house’s real inheritance. Westwood never treated clothes as neutral objects waiting to make a person look correct. Clothes were arguments with class, gender, history and whoever had appointed themselves the adult in the room. Body & Soul did not quote that rebellion like a museum label. It used it.

Corsetry on one side, a walking flower on the other: the house still understands that romance needs teeth. Photos: Daniele Oberrauch / Gorunway.com

Gender lost the dressing-room key

The runway kept swapping the locks. Men appeared in blouses, silk dresses, Mary Janes and trousers inflated to comic-book scale. Elsewhere, visible underwear cut through the formality of tailoring like a leaked secret. The point was not that one gender had borrowed from another. The point was that the clothes looked bored by the distinction.

That matters because genderless fashion has become one of luxury’s most bloodless marketing phrases. Too often it means a grey sweatshirt photographed on two bodies. Westwood’s version is messier and therefore more convincing. It allows ornament, perversity, exposure, bulk and camp. It does not make everybody dress the same in the name of freedom. It gives everybody access to the whole wardrobe.

A tiny hat marked “Chaos” landed on one nearly undressed look, but the label was almost redundant. This was organised disobedience: the kind that knows exactly where the seam sits before pulling the social rule apart.

The casting had faces, not mannequins

Then Natasha Lyonne came through in a cropped patterned jacket and leopard miniskirt, less celebrity cameo than natural habitat. Her walk carried the expression of a woman who had already heard every bad idea in the room and was deciding which one to set on fire. She did not disappear into the clothes. The clothes gained an accomplice.

That distinction is essential. Much contemporary runway casting asks personality to enter, pose and leave before it stains the brand. Westwood has always needed characters: faces with biographies, bodies that resist blankness, people who appear to have somewhere more dangerous to go after the finale. Here, age, attitude and irregular beauty were not diversity decoration. They were the show’s voltage.

The result made conventional polish look strangely unfinished. Perfection may sell a product, but character sells the fantasy that wearing it could alter your life. Lyonne understood the assignment because she looked incapable of asking permission.

The joke is built like couture

There were grapes spilling from a handbag, enormous slouching bags, gladiator sandals, lace-up ballet shoes and a lilo treated with the solemnity of an heirloom. The temptation is to call all of it mad, which is how fashion dismisses intelligence when it arrives laughing.

Westwood humour has never been an escape from technique. It depends on technique. A warped jacket only reads as deliciously wrong when its maker understands how right is constructed. A corset can distort the body because it first knows how to hold it. Kronthaler’s excess worked because the joke had pattern-cutting underneath it.

That is why the props never reduced the show to theatre. They exposed how theatrical ordinary luxury already is. A logo bag is supposedly serious; grapes falling out of one are supposedly absurd. Body & Soul simply admitted that both are costumes, then chose the version with better timing.

Exposure and construction kept changing places. Nothing stayed in its respectable lane. Photos: Daniele Oberrauch / Gorunway.com

A ghost is not a creative director

Using Westwood’s voice could have tipped into séance merchandising. Instead, the recording made the succession problem impossible to ignore. Kronthaler is continuing a house whose founder was also his partner, teacher, collaborator and wife. Fashion loves an archive because an archive cannot object. A voice can.

One fragment cut through the room: “If it’s popular it’s not culture.” It is a dangerous sentence for a global luxury business to play at its own show, which is precisely why it worked. The house cannot preserve Westwood by turning rebellion into a dependable print. It can only preserve her by remaining willing to embarrass itself, contradict itself and risk producing something people hate.

Kronthaler’s authority did not begin after Westwood died in 2022. They met in 1988, married in 1993 and designed together for decades; his name was added to the Gold Label title in 2016 to acknowledge work already being done. Body & Soul also looked outward. Its title came through the charity Westwood first connected with more than twenty years ago, with limited T-shirts created to raise money. Legacy here was not a glass box. It was a responsibility with a pulse.

The yellow gown shuts the argument up

After all the leopard, exposed flesh and prop comedy, Yasmin Wijnaldum closed the show in butter-yellow satin. The corseted bodice rose into enormous sculptural folds at the shoulders, then collapsed into an asymmetric skirt and train. It was romantic, ridiculous and expertly controlled—the entire collection distilled into one gorgeous refusal to calm down.

The gown mattered because it proved the disorder had discipline. Anyone can pile references onto a runway. It takes a designer to make excess land with the clarity of a slap. The silhouette carried history without behaving historically. It looked like a bride had eaten the drawing room and was now coming for the church.

That is the sharpest thing about Body & Soul. It did not ask whether Westwood can survive without Vivienne. Survival is too passive a target. The show asked whether the house can remain impolite, technically brilliant and alive enough to cause trouble. For one afternoon in Paris, the answer wore padded hips, visible underwear and a yellow train. Good taste never stood a chance.