Nadav Perlman's ROOTS: an act of longing

Photographer: Chiara Steemans

Staged as a performative experience rather than a traditional runway, Nadav Perlman's ROOTS arrived as something closer to a ceremony — figures standing still in candlelit space, wearing garments that feel less like fashion decisions and more like inherited objects. Black leather, sheer fabrics, fur, floral embroidery, kilim-textured wraps. Things that look as though they have histories.

The emotional core is displacement — specifically the mysticism that settles over a place once you've left it. "When I left my childhood home to live abroad, the idea of that place became mystical," Perlman writes. "It became a sacred place." The collection sits in the tension between rootedness and wandering, between who you were and who you are becoming — and finds it not as a problem to resolve, but as a place to live.

CREDITS SS27 LOOKBOOK

Photographer: Luc Gommers
Styling: Jaimy Aris
Make-up: Camilla Catalano
Models: Jens Roothoofd, Nikol Mlinova, Sem Beerens, Omer Brams