Pierpaolo Piccioli Brings Couture Down to Earth for the Balenciaga Summer 2027 Collection

Pierpaolo Piccioli wants couture to live in the closet, not behind glass. On October 1, 2026, at Paris Fashion Week, he presented Balenciaga Summer 2027, titled Les Coraux de la Liberté, inside the Tennis Club de Paris, applying techniques from the house’s 55th Couture Collection to ready-to-wear for both women and men.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Balenciaga

It is Piccioli’s third ready-to-wear collection for Balenciaga. Kering named him creative director on May 19, 2025, effective July 10, after 25 years at Valentino, the last eight as sole creative director. His debut followed in October 2025, and his first couture collection for the house, the 55th, arrived on July 8, 2026.

The collection treats couture as a laboratory rather than something unobtainable. The clearest proof is a stitching technique borrowed from the internal structures of tailoring and first used in the 55th Couture Collection. Here it brings new volume to leathers and cottons, creating basque shapes that recall archival Balenciaga silhouettes on t-shirts and leather jackets.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Balenciaga

Bias cutting does similar work on familiar pieces, from evening dresses to jeans, shirts and men’s suiting. The garments keep their authenticity, but their relationship with the body changes. Each piece begins in the house’s ateliers, where draping and forming set its architecture, so jeans get the attention usually saved for a gown.

Accessories stay soft, too. Shoes are pliant, among them the Wave Thong Sandal, a flat in toile canvas, the heeled Dahlia Mule and the new unstructured Lounge Sneaker. Supple bags like the Nodo and the Silhou Tote are shaped and draped by hand, Bow Mask Sunglasses have artisan-braided arms, and Getaria jewelry takes its cue from seashells.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Balenciaga

Everything circles back to Cristóbal Balenciaga’s primary philosophy of the body as the basis. Calais lace insertions and cutwork open windows onto the body as structure, not decoration. Lightness and softness run throughout, and the focus on how clothes move and feel puts comfort first, “as if in your own skin,” the collection notes said.

Decoration, meanwhile, has a job to do. Abstracted, imaginary flowers in organza are filled with compressed air to echo volumes with a mathematical rhythm, while drawstrings and buttoned collars recall Balenciaga silhouettes through practical means. “Freedom of gesture, freedom of movement, freedom of choice,” the notes said, and the clothes make good on that line.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Balenciaga

At the center of the set stood Les Coraux de la Liberté (2025), the wrapped-linen work by French artist Aude Franjou that gives the collection its title. It explores a free interplay of art and craft and doubles as an analogy for a couture house as an entire ecosystem rather than a mere physical structure.

This is Piccioli at his most persuasive. Instead of staging couture as spectacle, he has built a system that carries the atelier’s thinking into a t-shirt or a pair of jeans, a more useful idea for Balenciaga’s future than any single showpiece. The hand is visible everywhere, and so is the ease.

For more of Haute Living’s Paris Fashion Week coverage, see Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Spring 2027 show at the Tuileries and Anthony Vaccarello’s gilded Saint Laurent Summer 2027 collection.