Mugler’s Spring Summer 2027 collection, Naturalia X, didn’t approach nature as something soft, serene or decorative.
Presented at Paris Fashion Week, Miguel Castro Freitas’s latest runway chapter pushed the house into a more primal register, where feathers, latex, synthetic hair and sculptural tailoring made the body feel part creature, part construction.
It also closed the creative director’s three-part cycle for Mugler, titled A Trilogy of Glorified Clichés, with the archive very much alive in the room.
At a glance
- Mugler presented its Spring Summer 2027 collection, Naturalia X, at Paris Fashion Week under creative director Miguel Castro Freitas.
- The collection translated nature through feral silhouettes, animalistic textures, synthetic hair, latex, feathers and exaggerated construction.
- It closed Freitas’s three-part runway cycle for the house and reignited discussion around Mugler’s archive and post-founder identity.
Miguel Castro Freitas takes Mugler into wilder territory
Freitas was appointed creative director of Mugler in March 2025, succeeding Casey Cadwallader.
His first collection for the house, Stardust Aphrodite for Spring Summer 2026, was read by critics as a calmer and more grown-up interpretation of Mugler’s hyper-feminine codes.
Naturalia X moved in the opposite direction.
Rather than polishing the house into sleek restraint, Freitas leaned into mutation, fantasy and the slightly threatening glamour that has long sat under Mugler’s most memorable work.
The collection’s stated theme was nature, but not the decorative garden variety.
Here, nature became feral, synthetic and theatrical, less landscape than life form.
Classic Mugler ideas such as the narrowed waist and amplified shoulder appeared to shift shape, giving way to exotic textures, creaturely surfaces and silhouettes that seemed to be growing out of the body.
Feathers, latex and the body as architecture
Freitas built the collection around tailoring codes he has been developing at Mugler, including basques and micro-pleats.
Those foundations gave the more extravagant gestures a sense of control, which matters in a house where spectacle only works when the construction is sharp.
Feathers appeared with cheetah-like markings and were wrapped in organza, while synthetic hair fell with the drama of a dress.
Sequins drew on an underwater vocabulary, necklines echoed insect anatomy and oversized flowers were formed from plastic bottles.
The material mix made the collection feel deliberately unstable, as if the organic and the artificial had fused into one surface.
Burgundy and black latex, snake print and fur reinforced Mugler’s enduring interest in the body as architecture.
Several looks also exposed the back with unusual directness, shifting the sensual focus away from the expected frontal impact.
That tension between exposure and armour is familiar Mugler territory, but Naturalia X gave it a more zoological charge.
Alexis Stone brings the founder back into view
The most discussed appearance at the show happened off the runway.
British artist Alexis Stone attended as Manfred Thierry Mugler, using prosthetics and make-up to recreate the late founder, who died on 23 January 2022 at the age of 73.
Stone sat beside Krzysztof Leon Dziemaszkiewicz, Mugler’s longtime partner.
French fashion outlets stated that the clothes used for the appearance came from the designer’s own wardrobe and that the project had Dziemaszkiewicz’s approval.
The gesture divided attention in the way provocative fashion moments often do.
For some observers, it read as tribute; for others, it raised more uneasy questions about memory, likeness and spectacle.
Either way, it made visible the central tension surrounding Mugler now.
The house is still negotiating how to carry the weight of Thierry Mugler’s image without becoming trapped by it.
Björk links Naturalia X to Les Insectes
Naturalia X also travelled beyond the runway on the day of the show.
Björk wore a custom Mugler look for a DJ performance in Poland, pairing a purple butterfly-print second-skin top with a black leather corseted skirt.
Her headpiece came from Thierry Mugler’s Les Insectes Spring 1997 Haute Couture collection, a fringed feather creation that connected the new Mugler language to one of the house’s defining archival worlds.
The pairing placed nearly three decades of Mugler in direct conversation.
It also carried personal resonance, as Castro Freitas has described Björk as a longtime inspiration.
That moment helped clarify what Naturalia X was really doing.
The collection wasn’t simply quoting insects, animals or aquatic life for visual effect; it was treating Mugler history as something that can be crossbred, re-staged and made strange again.
The archive as living material
The strongest reading of Naturalia X is that its true subject is not nature, but the archive.
Freitas seems less interested in placing Thierry Mugler’s codes behind glass than in testing how far they can bend before they break.
That approach won’t please everyone, particularly at a house so closely associated with one founder’s unmistakable imagination.
But Mugler has never been a quiet proposition, and Naturalia X understands that shock alone isn’t enough.
The collection’s most persuasive moments came when the surface drama was held in place by disciplined cut and structure.
In that sense, Freitas made a clear argument for the next Mugler.
It can remain extravagant, theatrical and body-conscious without merely repeating the past.
Naturalia X didn’t ask whether Mugler still has presence, because the answer in Paris was obvious.
It asked whether the house can keep mutating, and Freitas’s answer was feral, deliberate and hard to ignore.
