For the past few years, the fashion buzzword du jour has been craft. Brands are boasting the hidden hands of untraditional technique, texture, and textiles more than ever, sometimes emphasizing it over their take on the trending silhouette or hot new hue. If during couture—fashion’s summer runway outing—that unconventional choice was rubber, the spring 2027 collections’ common denominator is even more unexpected: airbrushing. More closely associated with its long history with music, streetwear, or chintzy souvenir T-shirts tinged with childhood family vacation memories, this DIY technique is popping up across the major runways from Margiela to Dries Van Noten and beyond.
As fashion cycles through infinite stages of nostalgia—particularly the brashness of the ’80s and the sleek, techy sportiness of the ’90s—there’s something about airbrushing that feels less overt and slightly irreverent. The technique doesn’t necessarily harken back to one specific era, though it certainly reached peak popularity at the turn of the millennium. Instead, it’s familiarly fun. There’s a guilty pleasure in subverting a cheesy tourist tee. Over at Torishéju, the designer used it to give classic trompe l’oeil a simple twist. Plus, over the two centuries since the tool’s invention as a photo retouching applicator, the style has evolved countless times and become a refined art form in its own right.
In the true DIY spirit, Neverworns host Liana Satenstein took matters into her own hands while partnering with Tory Burch for this season’s show. “I was on a FaceTime call with the girls from Tory Burch about the upcoming show and in it I was wearing a spring 1999 Stella McCartney-era Chloè tank top that shows this yummy sand-strewn island scene—it’s a very iconic shirt,” says Satenstein. Stella McCartney, coincidentally, returned to airbrushing on her own runway this season in the form of similar vacation scenery-printed white jeans. The Tory Burch team encouraged Satenstein to make her own airbrushed merch for the show, so she went on Etsy, found an artist, and had a white tank with a hot pink Tory Burch logo whipped up for the occasion. “I love airbrush so much because it's a very much hot girl hangout, let’s go and do something fun, perpetual vacation vibes.”
At Margiela, the technique was a relevant reminder of the importance of handmade craft when something could so easily be digitally rendered or replaced by AI, a relationship between humans and technology that Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière explored with airbrushed leather jackets in his spring 2016 collection a decade ago. The house partnered with designer Gerrit Jacob, whose airbrushed dragon and animal illustrations have become a signature of his own eponymous Berlin-based brand. The collaboration was inspired by creative director Glenn Martens’s own fascination with avian imagery. During the early stages of the production process, the hawk illustrations were sprayed directly onto the white fabric bases with the draping taped shut before releasing the fabric and revealing the distorted results. Where Jacob’s process worked with the natural spontaneity (and trial and error) of human handiwork and fabric, AI probably would have just given the birds a warped beak or extra foot. Fashion is more fun with a human touch.