The 6 Brands to Watch at New York Fashion Week Spring 2027

This season, the new designers joining New York Fashion Week are, at their core, storytellers. Take Ben Doctor, whose design process always begins with a tale (this time, the narrative centers a party girl-turned-trophy wife). Patrick Taylor’s entire brand tells the story of his childhood, growing up sailing and skiing. And then there’s Emily Grey, who opens up her memory box and puts those experiences on full display via her designs.

These are just three of the fledgling designers W has its eye on for the spring/summer 2027 season. There’s also Ella Mae and her sartorial love letter to mother nature; Allina Liu’s third act at NYFW; and Max Esmail, the man determined to create the best menswear line of all time. There’s something for feminine dressers, minimalists, retro lovers, and the sustainably minded—and there are also brands who have already placed designs on Olivia Rodrigo, Barbara Palvin, Addison Rae, and Pat Cleveland. For the most part, these designers are just getting started, and this season marks a pivotal turning point in their trajectories. If you haven’t heard of them yet, now is a good time to familiarize yourself with the six brands we’ve dubbed Ones to Watch ahead of their presentations and shows.

Ben Doctor

Ben Doctor can’t stop thinking about money. Who can blame him? The 27-year-old not only lives in one of the most expensive cities in the world, he’s trying to run an independent fashion brand there. “How much money do I have? Am I going to pay my rent this month? What would success look like?” he says of the thoughts that race through his head. Those questions—and their answers—ended up inspiring his spring/summer 2027 collection, “Ivory Tower.” “What’s something that could free me from those money obligations?” he wonders. “It would be marrying rich.”

While designing, he thought about the textiles first (he has a background in fabrication, having graduated with a degree in textile design from the Rhode Island School of Design; he also still works for a textile artist on the side). He considers the party girl and what she wears. “How daring is she?” he asks himself. He decides she’s in sequins and youthful prints—“something colorful and expressive.”

So what would her uptown transformation look like? “These are two completely different worlds,” Doctor says. “What would happen if they came together and had a conversation on one garment, or even one look?”

Doctor has been telling stories since he started his self-named brand in 2023. His first collection, “Rotten Goodbye,” explored the realities of living in New York City, mourning the loss of fantasy in the face of harsh realities. There were shades of pop art in graphic tights, and an undeniable ’60s influence, made more obvious by the beehive hairstyle boasted by a majority of the models. While Doctor changes his story every season, the era remains consistent.

“I love the uniformity and the silhouettes of the ’60s,” he says. “I’m always going back to that, remixing it with different contemporary references and fabrics.” He also returns to his mother, a former flight attendant, whose uniform—and sense of financial stability—inspires him.

“When she worked as a flight attendant, her benefits were so much better,” he says, pointing to her early retirement package and lifelong healthcare coverage. “It exemplifies the midcentury boom in America. The clothes were amazing back then.”

Doctor insists on putting on a show every season, despite the high costs. “There’s something so powerful about seeing a show in person,” he says. “It feels larger than life. It does something to your emotions.” It’s all a central theme for the brand, which Doctor describes as “a storytelling device for trying to make it work in New York City and be as confident and free as you can while the world gets increasingly more difficult to live in.” Through it all, the designer constantly finds silver linings. “There’s something beautiful about that contradiction and tension,” he says.

Grey’s

“It’s a clothing brand that is not fully about clothes,” Emily Grey says about her line, Grey’s. That might seem like a confusing idea, but as the 31-year-old designer expands on this thought, her view of Grey’s takes shape.

She started the brand in 2024, kicking things off in London, where she attended Central Saint Martins, before moving the operation to New York after her third season. The ethos of the brand is centered in Los Angeles, where Grey grew up among “a lot of creative masculinity,” as she puts it. As a result, Grey’s now picks up on late ’90s and early 2000s Californian style, specifically menswear. “It’s this mix of casual and occasion wear,” she says of the brand’s aesthetic. “It’s very easy and effortless. There isn’t a lot of thought.”

At Central Saint Martins, Grey studied fashion design and marketing, a path that forced her to consider her brand beyond the clothes. “I wasn’t a typical St. Martin student,” she says. “I was thinking about everything more pragmatically, not necessarily creativity just for creativity’s sake.” Grey’s began with a 12-piece collection of full fashion knitwear, mostly outerwear. It was a display of traditional silhouettes constructed in very nontraditional ways. Over the next four seasons, Grey expanded her offerings—introducing moleskin and leather—but the central principles have stuck.

“Clothes should be worn,” she says. Grey’s interest in menswear, as well as couture construction, is evident in her work. That’s likely why, with just five collections under her belt, she’s already gained a cult following among the fashion set. There is a demand for well-made clothes, the kind you grab for everyday, which you’re drawn to not because of design gimmicks or shock value, but because of technique.

That growing popularity makes it the perfect time for Grey’s debut at NYFW. Perhaps her instruction in marketing is taking over, but Grey feels it’s necessary to build out the brand’s world. “I want to invite people into a space that feels personal and specific to the collection,” she says. That’s the plan for spring 2027, which was inspired by her childhood, specifically the stores she would visit on shopping trips with her dad. “These menswear spaces had warm woods and very plush carpets,” she recalls. With Grey’s, she’s bringing it back, opening the doors to a high-end men’s boutique for all.

Ella Mae

Ella Mae Jepsen grew up in a Colorado town of about 250 people. She lived off the grid, in “sustainable earth ships,” houses built by her parents. Her family didn’t get the Internet until she was about ten years old. Despite all that, Jepsen, 27, still found her way to fashion.

“The nearest clothing store was a Walmart an hour away. I remember going and being drawn to whatever glittery pink tank top was for sale there,” the designer, who now resides in Los Angeles, tells W. Her grandmother, whom she would occasionally visit in Vermont, introduced her to Betsey Johnson. At home, her quilt-making mother taught her to sew, and she created clothing for her dolls. “I was always playing with unconventional combinations,” she says. “When you live off the grid, there’s nothing to do. Boredom leads to exploration.”

That unique childhood inspired Ella Mae, Jepsen’s sustainable fashion brand. “I like to say that everything we make is our offering,” she explains. “It’s from the earth to the earth.” Many of her pieces are hand-dyed—one, specifically, sees this technique only at the hem, as if the wearer were dragging her skirt through the muddy riverbank were Jepsen herself played. “There’s an intersection between the desire to dress up and nature having its own say in the matter.”

There are feelings of femininity and utilitarianism in the clothes. One of her pieces, called the Monday dress, features a large, gathered skirt and slightly puffed sleeves. Ties that wrap around the waist are both ornamental and functional, according to Jepsen. “I’m always putting my sunglasses in my ties or hooking my keys,” she says. “I want to take something super feminine and grounding it in function.”

Jepsen began designing for Ella Mae when she was still studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. She continued her work during her post-grad internship at Simkhai before officially starting her brand in 2021. Thus far, she has produced four runway shows, but spring/summer 2027 will be the first collection to show in New York. She has found that her biggest customer base is in the city, which doesn’t surprise her. “I spent a bit of time in New York in high school, and I just remember feeling like I needed some essence of nature while I was there.” Jepsen believes her customers find that in her clothes.

Perhaps Barbara Palvin found it when she wore one of Jepsen’s dresses to the Cannes Film Festival this past spring. The model walked the beachside red carpet in an off-white, off-the-shoulder gown from Jepsen’s spring 2026 collection, cradling her pregnant belly, which was framed by a burgundy ribbon. “That was a major milestone for us,” Jepsen says of the placement. Palvin’s stylist, Marc Eram, was inspired by the goddess of birth, Ilithyia, much to Jepsen’s glee. “That’s just so us.”

Patrick Taylor

Envision, if you will, a Slim Aarons photograph, taken at the top of the Alps in the ’70s. Those in the foreground are dressed in form-fitting knits, lounging in chairs under winter’s strong sun. Now, consider those in the distance, the people you can barely see because they’re off skiing. Those elusive athletes, still just as stylish in their own brightly colored jumpsuits, are the people Patrick Taylor wants to capture through fashion.

“I want to represent skiing in quite an authentic way,” he tells W. “Not après, but the real side.” Taylor, a 27-year-old London native, grew up on the slopes. When he wasn’t skiing, he was sailing, ditching one luxe sport for another. The designer entered Parsons to receive his master’s degree, but he already had an idea of the path he’d take. (Or, at least, he had a logo: A heart encircled by a cross, pixelated to resemble stitching.) He calls Patrick Taylor “a playful take on English heritage based around the performance and lifestyle of skiing and sailing.” But this isn’t a performancewear brand—in fact, knitwear is key. He manipulates the fabric to evoke “the movement and energy” of the sports that inspire him.

His first collection, “No Easy Way Down,” which also acted as his graduate collection from Parsons, is bold and colorful. There’s a humor to it, most obvious in a padded “life preserver” attached to one top, or a pair of pants constructed to make the wearer take on the bent-knees pose of a skier gliding down a mountain. The collection won him the Fashion Trust U.S. Graduate Award and the ITS Creative Excellence Award 2025, among others. It also led to a collaboration with J. Crew on their recently relaunched rollneck sweater. Most importantly, it gave Taylor the courage to leave his day job at Thom Browne and strike out on his own.

He has continued to build on what was established in that initial collection. In his second season, he released Run Two, which took much of what was introduced in “No Easy Way Down” and simplified it to be more wearable. But it is hardly a dumbed-down version of Patrick Taylor. Impressive knitwear techniques remain at play, as does that childlike essence of his original offerings. He is leaning further into his signature, a depiction of a classic British guardsman, playfully holding up a pair of skis. “It represents the energy of my brand,” he says.

Allina Liu

In the past year, Allina Liu discovered she had a problem. She realized there was a disconnect between her brand and her own personal style. “I wasn’t reaching for my stuff,” she tells W. “I loved my work from an aspirational standpoint, but I want to make clothing that feels personal to me.”

The 34-year-old designer has made many changes since starting her eponymous brand in 2015. She defines that first run as successful “press-wise,” citing a placement on Cardi B for a Fader cover. “But the sales were nonexistent,” she says. “I had an ego, as we all do when we are 23. I was charging $1,300 for a dress.” Liu put a pause on the brand and took jobs elsewhere. But in 2021, she decided to try again.

If 2015 marked the first iteration of Allina Liu and 2021 marked the second, in some ways, 2026 is the third; she describes the upcoming collection as “my personal project that resonates with people, too.” The second iteration of Allina Liu was characterized by juxtaposition between femininity and sexuality. Liu’s longtime inspiration has been Nobuyoshi Araki, a Japanese photographer known for incorporating shibari rope bondage into his images. “It's sexually explicit, but there’s so much power in owning your sexuality,” Liu says. Liu was never taught about sex, and she admits that repression made her even more curious. “When I discovered Araki’s work at about 15, I was absolutely smitten. But I couldn’t understand, why are we ashamed of sex? Why do we turn our eyes away from it, while we still profit from it so aggressively?”

Growing up with immigrant parents, Liu largely rejected her Chinese culture. Even now, she avoids the use of Mandarin collars or dragon motifs. “My designs often happen despite my culture,” she says. Still, this season, Liu is incorporating Chinese knots—but “in a different way,” she clarifies.

Liu’s work isn’t overtly sexual. If anything, it’s more feminine, with the shibari influence coming through in straps that decorate almost all of her designs. Even with that bondage nod, Liu still felt a fracture with her work.

“This brand is my art. It wasn’t in alignment with what I wanted, and at this point, I want to go back to things that give me actual dopamine.” Spring 2027 marks a turning point, but “the romance is still there,” she says. “I’m just letting it rot a little bit.”

She’s has grown up, and is more outdoorsy these days, inspired by recent trips to Denver to boulder and hike. “It’s still the same person at the core of it,” she says. “I just want to bring people a bit closer and show them I’m growing with them. We can grow together, and this can be personal for everyone.”

Max Esmail

Maxwell Amadeus Kamal Coombs Esmail had a simple goal: “To create the best menswear company on the planet.” The 37-year-old is taking it seriously. He launched his eponymous brand about a year ago and has presented two collections. Thus far, he has yet to produce or sell anything. “I want to make sure everything is dialed in perfectly, and when I launch, it’s with a product I’m completely satisfied with and that I feel is ready to sit next to a high caliber of designers,” he says.

That time has come. Max Esmail will do a small run of production to launch this winter, with the hope of also producing his spring 2027 collection. The upcoming presentation, which marks his first time on the CFDA calendar, is titled “God Would See It.” It’s a reference to a quote architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe told Phyllis Lambert when designing the Seagram Building in Manhattan. When Lambert questioned the use of expensive materials on details no one would spy, Mies van der Rohe responded with the phrase.

“I thought that was an incredible way of saying, anything I do is going to be great quality,” Esmail says. “We’re not going to cut any corners or skip any steps because at the end of the day, that’s what great design is.”

Esmail grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, as a competitive snowboarder. When injuries forced him to leave the sport, he began thinking about the next chapter of his life. “My initial goal was to start a snowboarding clothing company so I could sponsor all my friends who became professional snowboarders.” After taking a fashion folio course at Central Saint Martins, he attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “Before that, I was just making baggy pants for snowboarders,” he says, but studying the craft opened up his design world.

Still, Esmail did eventually start that streetwear brand with some of his friends. Called Control Sector, he describes that chapter as “a pretty incredible journey.” When the label went bankrupt, Esmail founded a production and design studio, Chance NYC, which he still runs to this day. But it’s all to fund his true dream, Max Esmail, a contemporary men’s brand based in craftsmanship.

“I look at things from an engineering perspective,” Esmail says. “The interior of a garment is important, the way the pieces are put together, how long it’s going to last. I don’t like to make anything that could fall apart over time.” His pieces are not trend-focused, but instead inspired by his own desires. “If I wouldn’t wear something, then why am I making it?” he asks. “I’m the final boss.”