Story by Editor-inChief Carolina Ogliaro
Photos Courtesy of Company
Aje’s Summer 27 collection, Unfurled, takes Australian botanicals underwater and then onto the body, in organza, beading and crackled leather.
Florals for spring have long been fashion’s most reliable shrug. Every feed has its ditsy repeat, its pastel bouquet, its coquette bow tied around a petal. So when Edwina Forest says she and Adrian Norris wanted their own way of doing a floral print, one that wasn’t a pretty repeat, it is worth leaning in.
The setting suggests they meant it. Aje’s Summer 27 show took place during Paris Fashion Week at the Collège des Bernardins, a 13th-century former Cistercian monastery that has also served as a prison, a storage space and a fire station. A building with that many past lives is a fitting host for a collection about beginnings. It is also the label’s second Paris season: Aje made its Paris debut last year with an off-schedule show at the Palais de Tokyo, and opened its first international concession at Printemps’ Paris flagship in February 2026.
Aje, established in Sydney in 2008 by Norris and Forest, is known for a beach-goth uniform of leather and sharp tailoring alongside floaty dresses. It has previously collaborated with the estates of Brett Whiteley and Minnie Pwerle. This season the founders took a more hands-on route and enlisted their good friend, the multimedia artist Vicki Lee.
Lee’s practice moves across painting, mixed media and immersive installation, and she now runs a gallery in Sydney’s Potts Point. For Unfurled, she revisited a process first explored in a 2017 photo series with photographer Ted O’Donnell: suspending flowers in water, adding drops of paint, and photographing the pigment as it disperses. The subjects this time are banksia, bottlebrush, grevillea and milk thistle, which Lee injected with paint inside tanks of water. She says the flowers were never really about flowers, but about life force, the energy that drives us.
Native Australian blooms are not an obvious choice for a romantic mood board, which is the appeal. Forest describes them as strange, sculptural, and a little aggressive, and Norris adds that they have to be, to survive the heat.
The clothes take that logic off the surface. The hyperreal prints dissolve into dimensional adornment: cascading beaded fringing, tactile petal appliqué, silhouettes that unfurl through floating organza. Sheer chiffon and sweeping georgette drift around the body, with flashes of grid embellishment, reflective finishes, and crackled leather catching the light. It is a smart answer to the print problem. Rather than asking a flower to sit flat on fabric, the collection lets it grow into the garment, and the texture reads in a still image and in motion, which is the double test every look now has to pass.
The palette starts softly with black, ivory and champagne, then lights up with pistachio, emerald, shaded khaki and silver. It settles into rich earth tones, delicate pinks and sun-warmed sand. Distressed jacquards take their cue from the coastline, hems are raw-edged, and industrial buckles sit alongside denim and printed vegan leather. The brief the brand gives itself is an undone Australian ease, and the collection carries it through every layer.
What stays with you about Unfurled is its patience. Nothing here is announced all at once. The collection follows a bloom through its first stages, and it asks to be looked at for a while: a second glance, a third scroll, a longer look in the mirror. For a season that begins in a former monastery and ends on the beach, that seems the right pace.
