For Spring/Summer 2027, Guvanch transforms AJE's runway into a theatrical exploration of captivity, pain, anger, and reclamation. Structured in three acts, the show follows a body stripped of power before gradually reclaiming itself. Leather, feathers, fur, bone-like details, scars, and antennae-like forms create an unsettling vocabulary of animal instinct and restraint. The models intensify the narrative through expressive, almost herded movements, shivering, staring into the audience, and one dramatically collapsing with her hands tied behind her back. With Richie Shazam as show creative director, AJE becomes less a runway than a living performance.

At Guvanch's SS27 AJE show, the models did not simply walk.

They were herded.

Bodies moved at different speeds, some shivering, some appearing almost disoriented.

Their eyes met those of the audience with an expression that felt less like runway confidence than a plea: help me.

Then one model fell.

Her hands were tied behind her back as she collapsed onto the runway, turning what is usually fashion's most controlled movement into something startlingly human. It was one of the most arresting images of New York Fashion Week, not because it was beautiful in the conventional sense, but because it seemed to ask the audience to confront the body underneath the clothes.

For Spring/Summer 2027, designer and creative director Guvanch constructed AJE as a three-act performance: “The Forgetting,” “The Unravelling,” and “The Return.” The collection's accompanying poetry follows a woman moving through the stripping away of power, the emergence of something animalistic and angry, and finally a return to herself. “Something ancient underneath all of it, waiting to be remembered.” That line from “The Forgetting” feels particularly important to the collection. AJE does not begin with freedom. It begins with containment.

Leather is pulled tight against the body. Corseted silhouettes suggest restriction rather than decoration. Feathers and fur appear alongside scar-like details and structures that evoke bones.

The models appear plucked, shaved, stripped. Their bodies seem exposed even when covered. Their movements reinforce the sensation. Rather than the polished uniformity traditionally expected from a runway, the cast moves with dramatically different rhythms. Some appear to stagger. Others recoil. Some seem to resist the space around them.

The effect is closer to performance art than a conventional fashion show.

AJE's first act, “The Forgetting,” describes “a woman on her last legs,” with “structure where softness used to be.” It is a world in which power has not disappeared so much as been taken.

“Power, stolen quietly,” the poem reads.

The collection makes that theft physical.

Then comes “The Unravelling.”

“The chains break first.”

The clothes begin to change with them.

The severity of leather gives way to sheer fabric. What was once held tightly against the body begins to fall away. The silhouette becomes less armored, more exposed. The animal that appeared trapped in the first act begins to move forward.

“Something animal steps forward,” Guvanch writes.

Here, anger becomes part of the transformation. The woman is no longer simply enduring what is happening to her. She is moving through it.

That distinction is central to the show's drama. AJE does not depict empowerment as a clean transformation from victimhood into invincibility. Instead, it allows anger, pain and vulnerability to exist within the same body.

“She moves like she's done being quiet.” And then, just as quickly, the performance softens.

“She is not performing anymore. She is just here.”

The third act, “The Return,” completes the movement.

The language shifts toward cleansing, fire, gold and the body as a temple. Scars become emblems rather than evidence of damage. What was once a symbol of suffering becomes a record of survival.

“She wears her body like a temple now.”

The collection's most compelling idea may be that returning to yourself is not the same as returning to who you were.

The body has changed. The scars remain.

That makes the show's use of animal imagery particularly striking. Throughout AJE, the body seems caught somewhere between human and animal: antennae-like details, fur, feathers, bone structures and altered silhouettes create a vocabulary of instinct and captivity. The models appear less like passive mannequins and more like creatures attempting to escape containment.

Fashion has always had a complicated relationship with the body. AJE makes that relationship impossible to ignore.

The runway itself becomes a kind of enclosure.

And the audience becomes part of it.

We watch the bodies move toward us. We watch them fall. We watch them struggle, stare back, recover and eventually reclaim the space.

And then there is Richie Shazam.

As the show's creative director, Shazam's presence already exists within its architecture.

But closing the show gives her another kind of significance: after watching model after model move through captivity, pain and transformation, the final appearance feels less like a traditional finale and more like a punctuation mark.

The runway has spent the evening asking what happens when a body is stripped of its power.

The answer is not simply that it fights back.

It remembers.

And that is perhaps what makes AJE's SS27 collection so theatrical. The clothes are not merely telling a story about a woman becoming powerful. They are telling a story about what happens when power is taken, when the body remembers what the mind has forgotten, and when survival eventually becomes its own form of reclamation.

New York Fashion Week can sometimes make clothing feel like spectacle for spectacle's sake. AJE makes the spectacle feel uneasy. The models do not walk as if they are asking to be admired. They walk as if they are asking to be seen. And by the end, they are no longer asking for permission to take up space.

They have remembered that it belongs to them.