Mikio Sakabe returns to fashion week with a new project called Grounds. Grounds Spring Summer 2027 reflects his avant-garde approach—pushing boundaries with futuristic materials and a deep connection to Japanese subcultures
What would you wear if you had no idea who was waiting for you?
We recognise references before they have time to become strange. We identify a subculture, name an aesthetic, save an image, reproduce it, sell it. Fashion has become an extraordinarily efficient machine for turning the unknown into something familiar.
Grounds Spring Summer 2027 begins with a refusal of that logic.
An Invitation.
An invitation from somewhere beyond common sense. Beyond what we already know. Perhaps from the distant past. Perhaps from a future that has not yet happened. Perhaps from a community that has never been documented.
The question is beautifully simple:
What do you wear when you are dressing for the unknown?
For Mikio Sakabe, this is not an abstract question. grounds has always started from the feet.
Founded in 2019 as a footwear project, the label took one of the most ordinary objects in fashion – the shoe – and turned it into a distortion of gravity. Its inflated, sculptural soles became instantly recognisable, drawing from Japanese youth culture, animation, underground aesthetics and the visual logic of exaggeration. Grounds Spring Summer 2027 brings you in a different dimension.
Change the ground and you change the body. Change the balance and you change the way a person moves through the world.
grounds began as footwear, but its ambition was always larger: not simply to design what people wear, but to imagine what kind of human might wear it.
That ambition has gradually pushed the brand into ready-to-wear. For Grounds Spring Summer 2027 the clothes are no longer supporting characters beneath the shoes. They have become part of the same speculative ecosystem: a wardrobe for bodies that seem to have arrived from somewhere slightly outside our reality.
And this is where An Invitation becomes particularly sharp.
The future, in fashion, has become almost embarrassingly familiar.
Grounds Spring Summer 2027 is all about: metallics, technology, cyber references, artificial surfaces and dystopian silhouettes. We have seen so many versions of “the future” that futurism itself has started to look archival.
Grounds Spring Summer 2027 proposes something stranger.
Do not dress as the future. Dress for an encounter with it.
There is a crucial difference in understanding Grounds Spring Summer 2027.
One is an image.
The other is a condition.
The body is not transformed into an alien. It is prepared to meet one.
That is why the evolution in Grounds Spring Summer 2027, from footwear to ready-to-wear, matters. The shoe was already an instrument of disorientation: an object that altered height, balance and proportion. Now the entire body can participate in that displacement.
Sakabe’s background – Antwerp-trained, rooted in Japanese subcultures, simultaneously designer, educator and world-builder – gives the project an unusual position between fashion, art and popular culture. He has never seemed particularly interested in making clothes that simply belong to the present.
He is interested in making clothes for people who might not belong entirely to it.
And perhaps this is the most contemporary thing about Grounds Spring Summer 2027.
We live in a culture with unprecedented access to information and an increasingly weak relationship with mystery. Everything can be searched, classified, explained, indexed.
The unknown has become almost intolerable.
grounds makes an aesthetic proposition out of resisting that intolerance.
Not knowing becomes desirable.
Mystery becomes a form of resistance.
And the invitation remains unanswered.
Which is exactly why Grounds Spring Summer 2027 it works.