Erdem Spring/Summer 2027 at London Fashion Week

Erdem Spring/Summer 2027 / SS27 at London Fashion Week

“The privileges of beauty are immense. It influences even those who fail to notice it.” Jean Cocteau

In 1920s Paris, the American aerialist Barbette ascended the trapeze as a woman and descended as a man. Born Vander Clyde Broadway in Texas (1899–1973), he transformed technical daring into an act of illusion: femininity was conjured, while the strength that kept him aloft remained almost invisible.

A defining turn came when Barbette moved to Paris, where he found fame and became a sensation of the 1920s avant-garde. It was there that he became a muse to Jean Cocteau, who recognised in his act something beyond disguise.

In his 1926 essay, Le Numéro Barbette, Cocteau described a performer moving between masculine and feminine with such conviction that neither could claim the final truth. At the curtain call, the removal of a wig did not reveal the ‘real’ Barbette; masculinity, too, became a role, consciously performed. His beauty lived in the charged space between identities – what Cocteau called the “supernatural sex of beauty”.

For Erdem SS27 / Spring/Summer 2027, Barbette’s suspended world becomes a study in transformation. The architecture of masculine and feminine forms is pushed and pulled.

A century later, Barbette remains urgently modern: a reminder that identity can be authored, beauty need not resolve, and gender may be less a fixed destination than a high wire – tense, luminous and alive with possibility.