Mugler’s Spring Summer 2027 collection arrives with its claws out.
Presented at Paris Fashion Week, Naturalia X marks the final chapter in Miguel Castro Freitas’s three-part runway cycle, A Trilogy of Glorified Clichés.
Where nature often becomes softness in fashion, Freitas made it strange, physical and slightly dangerous.
At a glance
- Mugler presented Naturalia X, its Spring Summer 2027 collection, at Paris Fashion Week.
- Miguel Castro Freitas pushed Mugler’s sculpted silhouette into a feral world of feathers, insect forms, synthetic hair, latex and underwater-inspired surfaces.
- The show closed Freitas’s three-part runway cycle and sharpened the ongoing conversation around Mugler’s archive and future direction.
Miguel Castro Freitas closes his Mugler trilogy
Freitas joined Mugler as creative director 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 moves in the opposite direction.
The body is still central, but the familiar Mugler ideals of the impossible waist and the exaggerated shoulder are pulled toward something more primal.
The collection imagines a woman less polished than transformed, as if glamour has started to evolve into another species.
Nature as mutation and surface tension
Freitas built the collection around tailoring elements he has been developing at Mugler, including basques and micro-pleats.
From there, the shapes became zoological.
Show accounts described feathers printed with cheetah spots and wrapped in organza, synthetic hair falling like a dress, and sequins that looked to the underwater world.
Necklines echoed insect anatomy, while oversized flowers were formed from plastic bottles.
Burgundy and black latex, snake print and fur reinforced Mugler’s longstanding interest in the body as architecture.
Several looks exposed the back with a directness that felt less like classic seduction and more like anatomy revealed.
The result was not pastoral and not decorative in the usual sense.
It treated the natural world as a force of distortion, where beauty comes from pressure, threat and adaptation.
The founder’s image enters the room
The show’s most talked-about moment was not only on 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 accounts stated that the clothes used for the appearance came from the designer’s own wardrobe and that Dziemaszkiewicz approved the project.
The gesture was read by some observers as tribute, while others found it more uneasy.
Either way, it made visible the question that continues to follow the house after Mugler’s death.
How does a label protect a founder’s mythology without letting it become static?
Björk links Naturalia X to Les Insectes
Naturalia X also reached beyond the Paris 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.
She completed the look with a fringed feather headpiece from Thierry Mugler’s Les Insectes Spring 1997 Haute Couture collection.
The styling joined two moments in Mugler’s history nearly three decades apart.
Freitas has described Björk as a longtime inspiration, and the connection felt especially pointed here.
Les Insectes is one of the house’s most potent archive references, and Naturalia X appears to approach that legacy as living material rather than museum evidence.
That may be the collection’s most convincing proposition.
Mugler has always depended on spectacle, but spectacle alone is not enough to carry a house forward.
Naturalia X works best when its surface drama is grounded by construction, turning archive memory into something that can still molt, harden and move.
For followers of Mugler, the collection doesn’t offer a quiet reset.
It offers a more provocative answer, suggesting the house can keep changing precisely because its codes were never natural in the first place.
