We Told You About it Two Years Before It Showed Up on Schiaparelli's Runway

We Told You About it Two Years Before It Showed Up on Schiaparelli’s Runway

It's still fashion month, and with each passing day, designers and brands are presenting exceptional work that makes us excited, curious, or immediately want to add something to our collection.

This is what a good collection does.

And this season in particular has made something clear: fashion is getting better at understanding its consumer and creating for them. Of course, there will always be a place for fantasy, and it is one of the things that makes fashion so exciting. But the strongest collections understand the delicate relationship between fantasy and function.

Fantasy makes us want the piece. Function helps us justify buying it.

When a designer builds a beautiful story, the fantasy pulls us into their world. But function seals the deal. Can we wear it more than once? Can we interpret it in our own way? Does it work with the rest of our wardrobe? Does the cost per wear make sense? The designer creates the world. We decide how we want to live in it.

This idea is at the heart of our Designer Fabrics category at Ophir. We take great pride in it, because we believe our success and the success of our trade partners and designers are deeply connected.

We spend a lot of time watching fashion, culture and design: the materials designers are experimenting with, the techniques gaining attention, what consumers respond to, what's appearing in emerging collections and, importantly, what might happen next.

It is not a crystal ball. It is research, observation, conversations, data and a lot of educated guesses.

And sometimes, we get it right.

We saw this one coming.

In 2024, we introduced a line of plissé fabrics made with organza. We were drawn to it because of something we value enormously when developing fabrics: versatility. It was sheer, sculptural and moved beautifully, and it could be interpreted in many different ways.

At the time, designers were fascinated by spiral fabrics, particularly with the rise of Gaurav Gupta's success. We made spiral fabrics available too. But we were equally interested in something less obvious: a plissé (crinkled fabric) that could create a similar sculptural effect without the rigidity and boning.

We believed designers could do a lot with it. So we put it out there early.

Then fashion kept moving. Vintage fashion kept rising through pop culture, with celebrities, stylists and collectors hunting for rarer and rarer archival pieces. Attention returned to the designers who defined earlier eras, including Issey Miyake and his iconic relationship with pleating.

Pleating was having another moment.

Last year, Rowen Rose showed it in pink and white for SS26, with crisp pleats and sculpted sleeves.

And this week, at Schiaparelli SS27, finely crinkled plissé appeared in a one-shoulder dress edged in black and in a softly structured jacket with sculptural trim. It was also worn by guests outside the show, in sheer black and close to the body.

Two years after we introduced our own interpretation to our designers.

But this isn't really about being right.

That part is fun. But it isn't why we do this.

At Ophir, we believe that when we see a material, technique or texture with potential, we should put it in designers' hands early. Being early creates room. It gives a designer time to experiment with a fabric before it's everywhere, time to understand how it behaves, time to develop a signature interpretation, and time to build a collection around an idea while it still feels fresh.

That's why our Designer Fabrics category is not simply a collection of beautiful fabrics. There is research behind everything we choose to develop. We watch, we study, we compare, we look for patterns, and then we make our best educated guess about where fashion is heading.

Sometimes we see it on a runway a couple of years later, and when that happens, we are always a little delighted. Not because we want to say we told you so, but because it means we may have given our designers something worth discovering early.

Planning for SS28? Have a look at our plissé fabrics.