Some shows begin when the lights go down. This one started when Rihanna arrived. Until then, the crowd around the Place de la République simply waited beneath Marianne, her bronze frame nearly ten meters tall, while spectators watched from every window and barricade. The Parisian pavement was doing its usual double duty as stage and soapbox. Then Rihanna took her seat, and 'The Ninety-Nine Percent' could start.
This is not a Matières Fécales show for the faint-hearted. Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran started out as students in Montreal selling their designs on Depop, and their early image was all alien makeup and shaved brows. But what they staged here was less a spectacle of the strange than a rallying cry, and it was the most humane thing they have done.
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Last season's The One Percent took place in a former stock exchange and mocked the yacht-and-private-jet clientele that luxury chases. The Ninety-Nine Percent turns the mirror around. All 99 models were people of color, and that is the collection's thesis in its plainest form, as close to a manifesto as a casting sheet gets.
The show opened with models cradling swaddled infants, which felt tender and slightly ominous. It closed with two young Black models carrying Sarah Sitkin's hyper-real sculptures of plump old white men, their eyes covered with dollar bills. You don't need a program note for that image. It is the kind of picture that will circulate for years, blunt as a punch, and it is how a runway can stop being a catwalk and start being an argument.
Between those bookends came three acts
The first was a family album. Bhaskaran built it from the religious mixtures of his childhood, which moved among Hindu, Christian, Mormon and Muslim households.
Cross-stitched kurtas and softened tailoring sat beside the humble linens his mother wore around the apartment building.
Male heads were covered, a quiet inversion of who is usually asked to hide. Then came the emotional peak: a tableau of Bhaskaran with his mother, sister and niece at look 40. It was the most intimate moment in a show that could have been all volume.
Act II was volume. The lights strobed until your eyes ached, and dry ice swallowed half the clothes. It was frustrating, and it was also thrilling. Beneath the haze were leather-clad punks, balaclavas, body mods and death-metal T-shirts with Marianne's face on them, a cast Bhaskaran built from the subcultures that gave him his people after he left home. “This is what France looks like today,” he said, and the room believed him.
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The loudest cheers went to a model in denim and spiked cheekbones balanced on thigh-high Louboutin slingbacks, and to another draped in a tricolor printed with the word RESIST.
Then the third act slowed everything down. Mounia, the Martinican model who became a Yves Saint Laurent muse in 1978, walked in a tulle-trained gown at Look 77, a wink to couture history and a gesture of respect. Around her, silhouettes swelled into 1950s volumes cut from saris woven in Varanasi, one dress swallowing 300 meters of tulle. Handwoven cotton from Burkina Faso was corseted into evening wear. Couture likes to imagine itself as European, and this collection said it never was.
Does it borrow? Of course. You can trace McQueen's theatrical cruelty, Rick Owens' monastic gloom (Owens himself sat in the audience) and the deliberate wrongness of Vetements. Their pedigree was already known: they have counted Owens and Michèle Lamy among their long-time mentors.
But borrowing isn't copying, and the sum here is more than its parts. The lighting hid too much and the message was never subtle, but subtlety is overrated when the subject is who gets to be seen.
Bhaskaran described the goal as making fashion soulful, and this was as soulful as a show can be when a monument is your backdrop. Everyone, he suggested, is chasing belonging, and what separates the One Percent from the Ninety-Nine Percent is opportunity.
France has liberty, equality and fraternity carved into stone. Matières Fécales added a fourth word in bronze light: visibility.
Published: 30 Sept 2026, 07:18 pm IST
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