There is something inherently otherworldly about Barbicide. The electric-blue disinfectant, familiar from comb jars on salon counters and barbershop stations, is at once clinical and strangely luminous: an ordinary chemical that makes the tools submerged within it appear briefly suspended in another dimension. For Spring/Summer 2027, Camryn Renée McClain takes that image literally. In Blue 47, her latest collection for Renée, the salon staple becomes a speculative substance capable of transporting the body elsewhere.
The premise extends a language McClain has been developing since the label’s beginnings. Raised around the Washington, D.C. cosmetology school run by her mother and founded by her grandfather, the designer has consistently approached Black hair culture as more than a visual reference. Braids, knots and contouring lines recur throughout Renée’s work as structures in their own right, shaping garments and tracing the body rather than simply decorating it. The salon, in this context, is an inherited creative environment and a site where seeks to investigate the ever-shifting axes of identity.
In Blue 47, this history is pushed into science fiction. Inspired by Barbicide and the elastic, exaggerated figures of artist Robert Valley, McClain imagines a hallucinogenic universe in which clothing operates as a gateway to reinvention. Plunging necklines and body-conscious silhouettes stretch and expose the figure, while beading, braided details and cartoonish styling interrupt the familiar proportions and codes of ready-to-wear.
That tension between familiarity and estrangement gives the collection its charge. Barbicide is instantly recognizable, particularly within the social world of salons and barbershops, yet its chemical blue has always looked a little unreal. McClain isolates that quality and turns it into atmosphere. What is ordinarily used to clean and reset a tool becomes a metaphor for the reset of the self.
The idea is embedded in the name of the label itself. Renée, McClain’s middle name, carries the meaning of rebirth, becoming and evolution. Here, those ideas move beyond biography and into the collection’s visual logic. Identity appears as something produced through repetition, adornment and performance. The salon already understands this. It is a space in which the body can be altered without becoming unrecognizable, and where reinvention can be both deeply personal and culturally shared.
McClain’s futurism is compelling precisely because it emerges from that specific lineage. Rather than borrowing the generic codes of chrome, machinery or digital abstraction, Blue 47 locates the future inside a material and environment often treated as commonplace. Its portal is not discovered in a laboratory or aboard a spacecraft, but glowing from a vessel on the salon counter. The collection proposes that speculative design does not need to sever itself from memory. The future can be built from an object one has known since childhood, viewed again until its latent strangeness comes into focus.
For a brand grounded in sustainable, size-inclusive and unisex ready-to-wear, this approach also allows experimentation to remain tethered to lived bodies. Even at its most distorted, Blue 47 is concerned with the embodied pleasure of becoming visible on one’s own terms.
If fashion has always promised transformation, McClain is interested in the mechanics of that promise: the substances, rituals and inherited spaces through which a person becomes otherwise. In Blue 47, the blue jar is no longer waiting quietly beside the mirror. It has become the portal itself.
Photography: Bridget Yassme
Designer and Creative Director: Camryn Renée McClain
Collection: Renée Spring/Summer 2027, Blue 47
Cody Rooney is the Editor in Chief and senior contributor at liminul.
He is a PhD candidate, digital content specialist, writer, editor, multi-media artist, and photographer.