Hed Mayner SS26

It must have been about 100° in that concrete parking garage, the kind of heat that makes you hyper-aware of your body, your breath, the faint flutter of air when someone’s handheld fan passes too close. We waited, patiently and glistening, for the show to begin. This was my very first Hed Mayner presentation, and from the moment the first look emerged, I knew I was about to witness something extraordinary, a collection that pressed gently, yet powerfully, against the structures of modern dressing. What unfolded was a dialogue between urban professionalism and timeless elegance, a dismantling of old archetypes in favor of softness, humanity, and invitation.

Four months ago, Mayner began reshaping his practice, slicing through tradition as he would a second-hand tailored jacket. The result is SS26, a collection that feels raw, immediate, and alive. Once upon a time, his designs stood like monuments, architectural fortresses removed from the body, protective in their sheer scale and heft. But here, the mood was strikingly different. Gone were the rigid structures. In their place floated handkerchief shorts and trousers that seemed to descend from the body without anchoring themselves. Jackets and shirts had shoulders erased, fabric wrapping around the torso as if a single piece had been unfurled and refolded in one breath. The result was an intimacy, a sense of skin meeting air. These were not clothes as walls, they were clothes as atmosphere.

Mayner leaned into contrast, the alien and the familiar, couture and the domestic. A pillbox hat paired with collapsing layers gave a strange, cinematic otherworldliness. Crunchy cottons and wools carried a wrinkle of life, like hidden traces of a lived-in sofa or an inherited dining chair. Florals appeared not as mere decoration but as a memory, valorous and romantic, flirting between nostalgia and the sublime.

At moments, the collection tugged at couture, the 1950s echoed faintly in the ruffling of ginghams that plume like feathers, in cotton so draped it transformed into opulence. Yet the grandeur was undercut with deliberate humility. A blazer in stretch fabric fitted over foam, closed with nothing more than a safety pin. Knitwear stitched over foam whispered of experimentation, both fragile and grounded.

Fluidity was everywhere. In the drop of fabric, in the swing of hems, in the gestures of collapse. A hooded parka elongated and ruched, sleeves open to the air, fabric breathing. The movement spoke of softness, but also of confidence. Not the confidence to defend with structure, but to show clarity. As Mayner’s SS26 unfolded, I felt not only the sublime but also the human. Clothes that move like skin, clothes that remind us of the space around us as much as the material that touches us. They asked us not to wear for armor, but to wear for connection.

And it worked.