Paris Fashion Week is no stranger to spectacle, but few shows this season felt as ideologically pointed as Matières Fécales’ Fall/Winter 2026 presentation, The One Percent. The Montreal-born duo Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran staged a runway that read like a sociological allegory. At a time when global wealth inequality continues to widen and geopolitical tensions dominate public discourse, the show examined the aesthetics of power itself: how it is performed, fetishized, and ultimately rendered grotesque.
The title The One Percent immediately situates the collection within the lexicon of contemporary political economy. In recent years, the language of class antagonism, once confined to academic discourse, has re-entered popular consciousness as economic disparity accelerates across the Western world. The ultra-wealthy increasingly appear not simply as economic actors but as a distinct cultural class whose lifestyles, bodies, and visual codes form a symbolic regime of power. Matières Fécales’ runway sought to dissect, precisely, this regime.
Rather than depicting wealth through the polished language of traditionally bourgeois aesthetics and luxury fashion, the designers rendered it through a lens of abjection. The figures that opened the show appeared as distorted caricatures of elite glamour: opera-length lamb leather gloves stained with red palms, masks obscuring faces with American dollar imagery, and exaggerated couture silhouettes that evoked both Dior’s New Look and its grotesque mutation. What might once have signified refinement now appeared unsettling, almost pathological. The body of the elite, here, became something surgically enhanced, prosthetically extended, and emotionally estranged from itself.
In this sense, the collection operated within a tradition of fashion that treats luxury not as aspiration but as critical theatre. If classic couture historically celebrated aristocratic power, Matières Fécales inverted that logic, exposing the psychic and corporeal anxieties that accompany it. Their “Guilt Gloves,” paired with towering Louboutin heels designed for the show, symbolized this paradox. Wealth here is not freedom but confinement, trapping its wearer inside an armour of excess.x
This grotesque portrayal resonates strongly with the contemporary cultural moment. In an era defined by oligarchic tech fortunes, speculative finance, and increasingly visible billionaire spectacle, from luxury bunkers to longevity experiments, the ruling class has begun to resemble something mythological, even monstrous. The show’s prosthetic footwear, merging boot and limb into a single hybrid form, captured this transformation perfectly: bodies engineered to transcend the limits of ordinary life. Posthuman aesthetics as political praxis.
Yet the show was not purely satirical. It also explored power as community, shifting the narrative away from the isolated elite toward the collective networks that sustain subcultural identity. The second tableau introduced jersey hoodie capes with exaggerated kangaroo pockets, garments that echoed streetwear but were transformed into ritualistic robes. Here the designers acknowledged the community that built their brand over the past decade. Often labelled a “cult label,” Matières Fécales reframed that term as a sign of solidarity rather than alienation.
What makes this collection particularly compelling, however, is its Canadian origin story. Before the Paris runway and global acclaim, the conceptual seed of The One Percent was planted in Montreal over a decade ago. The designers revealed that the collection traces back to a speculative assignment given by their fashion school mentor Milan Tanedjkov of Montreal-based incubator Lignes de Fuite, who asked students to imagine what fashion might look like in the year 2026. The idea of exploring wealth and power began there, long before the phrase “eat the rich” returned to mainstream cultural discourse.
That origin is significant. Montreal’s creative scene has long existed at the intersection of European cultural heritage and North American economic realities. Unlike the polished luxury capitals of Paris or Milan, the city nurtures a fashion culture that is simultaneously intellectual, subcultural, and politically aware. It exists on the periphery and as such, its creatives hold a uniquely singular cultural point of reference. The tension between Dalton’s upbringing in affluent Westmount and Bhaskaran’s childhood in Cartierville, one of Montreal’s more modest neighborhoods, forms the emotional backbone of the show. Their collaboration embodies the collision of two social worlds that rarely intersect.
The final tableau, titled “The Immortals,” pushed the critique into even more speculative territory. Here the runway invoked figures who seek not merely wealth but transcendence itself. References to contemporary longevity movements, embodied by tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s widely publicized anti-aging experiments, suggested a new frontier of elite aspiration: the pursuit of biological immortality. The garments in this section, including an albino python cocoon suit paired with heel-less skin boots morphing into the body, felt almost post-human.
In contrast stood Michèle Lamy, whose presence introduced a counterpoint. Rather than resisting time, Lamy embodies its accumulation, presenting age not as decay but as a form of aesthetic authority. Her appearance reframed the question at the heart of the collection: whether power ultimately lies in dominating nature or in accepting its limits.
The show concluded with Debra Shaw in a monumental Elizabethan-inspired silhouette, echoing one of the original sketches Bhaskaran created for that Montreal classroom project twelve years earlier. The image was unmistakably regal yet subtly unsettling, a reminder that power, whether monarchic or corporate, has always relied on visual spectacle.
Seen in its entirety, The One Percent functions as a meditation on the strange aesthetics of contemporary capitalism. In an age when wealth inequality grows ever more visible, luxury fashion increasingly finds itself in a paradoxical position. It remains one of the most visible expressions of economic privilege while simultaneously serving as a platform capable of critiquing that privilege.
Matières Fécales lean fully into this contradiction. Their runway suggests that the visual language of the elite has already crossed into the realm of the grotesque. The exaggerated bodies, surgical glamour, and ritualistic garments we associate with wealth no longer symbolize aspiration but alienation. Perhaps that is the ultimate message of The One Percent. Power, taken to its extreme, ceases to look human. And fashion, at its most incisive, has the capacity to reveal exactly when that transformation occurs.
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.