For Spring/Summer 2027 presented at Paris Fashion Week, Ester Manas embraces the happy accident. Lingerie meets outerwear, taffeta slips into the everyday and imperfection becomes a design language, shaping a playfully messy wardrobe that finds sensuality in the chaos of real life.
For its twelfth collection, Belgian label Ester Manas turns to an unlikely literary reference: Somehow I Manage, the fictional management book penned by Michael G. Scott, The Office’s spectacularly inept executive. It is an appropriately self-deprecating title for a collection that finds humour in keeping things together, or, more precisely, in what happens when they begin to come undone.
Sensuality and playfulness remain unmistakably Ester Manas, but this season they spill into a broader wardrobe, one where lingerie and outerwear meet somewhere between intimacy, practicality and a well-timed joke.
Created in partnership with PrimaDonna, the collection brings Ester Manas back to the runway after a two-year hiatus. In the meantime, its founders and creative directors, Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre, have become parents. Suddenly, Somehow I Manage feels less like a borrowed punchline than an apt description of their current reality: raising a newborn while keeping a young independent fashion house in motion.
Since launching the label in 2019, Manas and Delepierre have built its identity around a deceptively simple proposition: clothes should adapt to bodies, not the other way around. Their flexible sizing system distils a conventional size range into two or four sizes, depending on the garment, with stretch fabrics, ruching, elastic and adjustable constructions doing much of the work. Size inclusivity, in other words, is not something applied to the collection after the fact. It is built into the clothes from the outset.
There is an environmental logic to the system, too. Fewer sizes mean fewer SKUs and, potentially, less excess stock. The clothes themselves are handcrafted in Brussels from European-made fabrics and deadstock sourced by the designers, an economy of means that feels consistent with the way Ester Manas approaches both bodies and materials.
This season, however, another kind of imperfection takes centre stage. Manas and Delepierre call it the “happy accident”: the moment when an outfit goes slightly wrong and becomes more interesting because of it. A shirt sits awkwardly, a fabric crumples, colours collide unexpectedly, a bra slips into view. Rather than correcting these small disruptions, the designers lean into them. The messiness of getting dressed becomes seductive in its own right.
Parenthood has sharpened that instinct. The body changes, time contracts and the fantasy of immaculate dressing inevitably comes up against the logistics of everyday life. Accordingly, the Ester Manas wardrobe has shifted. The sheer, body-conscious eveningwear that established the label has not disappeared, but it now shares space with something more pragmatic: shirting, outerwear, technical jackets and easy skirts.
Taffeta makes the point particularly well. A fabric burdened with associations of ball gowns, occasion dressing and princess fantasies is deliberately brought down to earth, cut into technical jackets and everyday skirts. Elsewhere, shirts appear slightly undone, surfaces deliberately crumpled and colours almost accidentally mismatched. Lingerie peeks out where it perhaps should not. What might conventionally be read as unfinished or improperly styled becomes the styling itself.
PrimaDonna provides the collection with both an archive and a technical vocabulary. Manas and Delepierre went back through the Belgian lingerie specialist’s history, stretching to 1865, mining not only its materials and motifs but the construction techniques behind them. The result avoids the more obvious lingerie-as-outerwear proposition. Instead, lingerie becomes structural: its know-how migrates into dresses, jackets and the wider wardrobe, allowing something traditionally hidden beneath clothing to quietly determine how that clothing is built.
The collaboration also produced the collection’s most obsessive gesture: a hand-knitted dress covered in 22,000 bows retrieved from PrimaDonna’s dormant stock. A tiny, almost clichéd signifier of lingerie is multiplied until it becomes material in its own right.
That tension between control and accident is where Somehow I Manage is at its most convincing. Lingerie meets outerwear; taffeta leaves the ballroom for the everyday; meticulous handwork coexists with clothes designed to look slightly dishevelled. Even the collection’s humour operates through contradiction: everything may appear as though it has just happened, but making an accident look this precise takes work.
Perhaps that is the real proposition behind Somehow I Manage. Ester Manas is no longer interested in dressing a fantasy of life in which everything remains perfectly in place. Andn the wardrobe adapts accordingly.
Ester Manas SS27 Images
