Cliché it may be, but Sander Lak really is a citizen of the world. Born in Brunei, the New York-based designer has lived in Malaysia, Africa, London, Paris, Belgium, and, now the US. His teenage years, however, were spent in Holland, and his memories of that time serve as the basis of his spring 2027 collection. “I am Dutch originally,” he said from his Paris showroom, “but it’s also like a foreign country to me in some ways.” Memory is a funny thing, and being both an insider and outsider to your own country helped him build a dreamy, almost wistful, portrait of his motherland.
Color is always going to serve as the throughline of Lak’s design world, and here he focused on various gradations of traffic cone orange, pale lilac, and a lush forest green. While he says that his feeling for color is ultimately an instinctual process, there were certain organizing principles at play: Orange happens to be Holland’s de facto hue, as the royal family’s last name translates to it, and it’s often seen on his countrymen at soccer games or national events; he liked the idea of embracing something “so obvious.” The blues and purples are a nod to the country’s vast skies and rainy springs, which yield a surfeit of flowers (though he admits that flowers have never been his thing because they’re too colorful—go figure). And green stood in for the wetness of the grass, plus the practical army surplus clothes popular with Holland’s citizens.
Shapes were cut with a loose, unconstrained informality, with some quirks throughout, like a twisted-front shirt that was a carryover from last season, a similarly cut skirt (for men or women, the line is unisex), and another button-up with a second pair of sleeves to tie around the waist. Rendered in a dry cotton with a slight puckering, the shirts were casual and everyday, but cut in a slippery viscose, they suddenly had a cool, glamorous sensuality. There was a leitmotif of plaids and stripes—a clashing coupling that’s another Dutch signature—as well as some light jackets and roomy trousers crafted from slightly iridescent textiles or ornate drapery. A wide-cut, cropped coat with a big patch pocket came in a sumptuous brown leather or an irreverent cow hide (“You know, like milk maids,” Lak grinned), and a long green leather trench and some candy-colored shearlings rounded out the outerwear selection.
The lookbook features his mother, a college friend, a neighbor’s young daughter, and a local designer, among others. It has an unmistakably casual, lived-in quality and feels intimate and informal, much like home.
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