Matières Fécales: Political and Uncomfortable High Couture

 

There are designers who want to dress you. And there are designers who want to disturb you. Hanna Rose Dalton and Steven Rej Bhaskaran undoubtedly belong to the second group.

Their new collection, "1% (The One Percent)", arrived at Paris Fashion Week without asking permission and without offering apologies. It wasn't a runway show. It was a brutal accusation delivered with impeccable seams.

The name of their brand says it all. Matières Fécales. In French, everything sounds elegant. In English, it means fecal matter, something that could be a fitting name for a hardcore punk band. That distance between what it sounds like and what it means is exactly the name of the game. They've been playing it for years with a consistency that few in the industry have the stomach to sustain.

"1%" needs no further explanation. It points directly at those who accumulate power while the world disintegrates around them. At those who hire scientists to avoid aging while others lack access to basic medicines. At those who treat immortality as a financial logistics problem.

That's why they had Michèle Lamy and Bryan Johnson walk the runway together. Lamy is 82 years old, the wife of designer Rick Owens, and embodies a way of existing in the body that owes nothing to anyone. Johnson is the billionaire who spends millions a year trying to reverse his biology. Two people on the same runway. Two completely opposing philosophies about what it means to live in a body. The tension between them was one of the smartest and most transcendent comments of the entire fashion week.

The space where it all happened stopped being a fashion venue and became something akin to an occult ceremony that several conservative attendees clearly weren't expecting. The atmosphere made people uncomfortable. And that discomfort wasn't an accident, it was the goal.

The pieces blended body horror, gothic subculture, bondage and fetish elements inherited from punk, brutalism, and prosthetics that distort the human silhouette to an almost extraterrestrial point. If David Cronenberg had designed clothes instead of films, he would have recognized his own language in every look. John Waters, who has spent years declaring his admiration for Comme des Garçons, would have applauded and gone wild without reservation.

Matières Fécales are direct heirs to Rei Kawakubo, Alexander McQueen, Rick Owens, and Demna Gvasalia. All of them unsettled the industry from within. But Hanna and Steven take that discourse into a more visceral, more explicit, harder to ignore or reduce to aesthetics territory.

What sets this collection apart from others that also claim to be provocative is the execution. Behind the visual impact lies top tier craftsmanship. The provocation doesn't replace technique, it sustains and elevates it. That's what makes it impossible to dismiss despite its ability to unsettle in such an unconventional way. Some will celebrate it, others will be scandalized, but scandal was always part of the original design. Hanna and Steven truly risked everything with this collection, and they left a mark like the great legends do.