I have a weakness for fashion that looks like it is having fun.

Not “fun” in the desperate, please look at me, I am colourful kind of way. I mean clothes that seem genuinely pleased to be alive. Clothes that make you want to get dressed, leave the house and see what happens.

And that was my first reaction to Henry Zankov’s Spring 2027 collection.

We’re having a good time.

Zankov began with the 1960s — specifically that strange moment when the future still felt like something you could actually imagine. Space travel. Moon landings. New technology. New silhouettes. New women. New everything. The collection was inspired partly by Zankov’s memories of his mother in Soviet Russia, wearing purple corduroy, mohair and metallic platforms, while the show opened with Jeanne Moreau singing “Le Tourbillon”. 

But this isn’t really a nostalgia exercise.

And that distinction matters.

Because nostalgia usually wants to take you backwards. Zankov seems much more interested in asking what happens when the past tries to imagine tomorrow.

The answer, apparently, involves acid yellow trousers.

And emerald green.

And shocking pink.

And purple.

And black.

And somehow — somehow — all of it works.

The colour blocking is almost mischievous. A sheer green-and-purple tunic over tiny shorts. A black knit with graphic yellow and burgundy chevrons. A red-and-yellow cardigan that looks like someone took a psychedelic painting, folded it into knitwear and decided that, yes, obviously, this should be worn with green.

Then there are the trousers.

Huge, fluid, almost balloon-like trousers that move around the body rather than trying to discipline it. They give the collection an ease that stops all that colour and pattern from becoming frantic. Zankov understands something important here: maximal colour doesn’t necessarily require maximal silhouette.

Sometimes you just need room to breathe.

The knitwear is where the collection feels most distinctly Zankov. Graphic, tactile and playful, but never childish. There is a real sense of construction underneath the exuberance — ribbed surfaces, translucent layers, colour-blocked panels and geometric patterns that feel almost architectural.

And then, suddenly, the collection changes temperature.

That pink slip dress.

A liquid column of satin, cut close to the body, with a pale chartreuse drape slipping across the neckline and gathering dramatically around the hem.

It is sexy.

But not in the aggressively engineered way we have become accustomed to seeing on runways. There is something softer here. More spontaneous. The dress moves like it has somewhere to go.

And perhaps that is the real thread running through the collection: movement.

Everything seems to be moving.

The sheer fabrics. The oversized trousers. The scarves. The long knitted pieces. The draped dresses. Even the colour combinations seem to move from one shade into another rather than sitting politely in their assigned places.

Zankov’s Spring 2027 collection was described as looking towards the future rather than simply repeating the past, using the space-age imagination of the 1960s as a starting point. 

And I think that is why the collection feels so alive.

Because it doesn’t try to make the future look futuristic.

There are no obvious technological tricks. No cold, clinical sci-fi fantasy. Instead, the future looks tactile. Human. Slightly eccentric.

It looks like your mother wearing silver platforms.

It looks like a woman walking through New York in enormous trousers because she simply doesn’t see why trousers should have to behave themselves.

It looks like someone finding an old photograph and thinking, wait… what if they were actually right about the future?

And then there are the sunglasses.

Those tiny, dark, almost alien frames that appear repeatedly across the collection.

They should make everything feel colder.

Instead, they make the clothes feel even more playful.

That contradiction is what I kept coming back to.

Zankov is dealing with memory, but the collection never feels trapped inside it. He is looking backwards without becoming sentimental. He is referencing the 1960s without turning the runway into a costume party. And he is imagining the future without resorting to the usual visual vocabulary of “future”.

Honestly?

That’s harder than it sounds.

There is also something wonderfully democratic about the clothes. The collection doesn’t seem to demand that the woman wearing it become a character. She can be glamorous. Strange. Sexy. Comfortable. A little eccentric. Maybe all four before lunch.

And perhaps that is the most convincing thing about it.

Fashion has spent so much time lately telling us what the future should look like that it was refreshing to see a designer simply ask what it might feel like.

Zankov’s answer is colour.

Texture.

Movement.

A little sex.

And, thankfully, absolutely no fear of having fun.

Maybe the future doesn’t need to look futuristic after all.

Maybe it just needs to make us want to walk towards it.