Felloni Turns Up the Volume
At Roger Vivier’s Spring 2027 presentation during Paris Fashion Week, creative director Gherardo Felloni made one thing clear: subtlety was not on the agenda. The collection arrived loaded with ornamentation, shaped motifs, and structural heel choices that tracked a deliberate shift toward maximalist territory – a direction echoing loudly across runways this season.
The presentation covered significant ground between daytime wearability and full evening drama, with each category receiving its own distinct visual language. Felloni didn’t try to blur those lines – he drew them sharply, letting each moment in the collection breathe on its own terms.
Daytime Gets Structural
For daytime offerings, the collection leaned into chunkier heels – a silhouette that reads both grounded and deliberate against the finer, more tapered proportions that dominated previous seasons at the house. The weight of the heel changes the posture of the entire shoe, and Felloni used that shift to anchor looks intended for daylight hours. There’s something almost architectural about the choice: the heel as load-bearing element rather than decorative afterthought.
Chunky heels have been cycling back through footwear for several seasons now, but Roger Vivier’s version carries the house’s signature refinement into that silhouette rather than treating it as a purely casual gesture. The result is a daytime shoe with some authority behind it – dressed-up weight, if that reads as a category.
The progression from day into evening at Roger Vivier has always been one of the house’s more interesting design problems. Felloni addressed it here not by softening the daytime pieces but by pivoting sharply into a different visual register once the sun metaphorically sets – keeping the two worlds distinct rather than blending them into a single ambiguous aesthetic.
Butterflies After Dark
Evening looks in the Spring 2027 collection centered on butterfly-shaped motifs, a choice that reads simultaneously romantic and slightly theatrical. Butterflies as a decorative form bring a particular kind of visual energy – bilateral symmetry, implied movement, a shape that the eye keeps trying to animate. On footwear, especially evening footwear, that animation works in the wearer’s favor.
Felloni positioned these motifs for night specifically, which matters. Butterfly ornamentation at Roger Vivier isn’t a daytime whimsy – it becomes something more considered, more staged, when it appears at an evening hour. The distinction signals intention rather than decoration applied broadly across the collection without context.
Embellishment as the Connective Thread
Between the structural daytime heels and the butterfly evening pieces, embellishment ran through the collection as the continuous element holding everything together. Not selective, restrained embellishment – but the kind that commits. Galore is the word Felloni’s presentation earned, and it’s worth sitting with: that word implies volume, accumulation, a refusal to edit down to a single focal point.
This approach aligns with a broader maximalist wave currently moving through Paris runways, where ornamentation is being treated not as excess but as the point. Roger Vivier has historical capital in this space – the house built its reputation on decorative footwear at a time when that was considered elevated craft. Felloni is drawing on that lineage without simply restaging it.
The Spring 2027 collection doesn’t read as nostalgia, even when it pulls from recognizable Roger Vivier vocabulary. Butterfly motifs and heavy embellishment have appeared in the house’s archives before, but the specific combination Felloni assembled – chunky heel grounding the daytime, layered surface decoration bridging the collection, butterfly shapes landing at night – creates a sequencing that feels current rather than retrospective.
What Felloni has built across these pieces is essentially a philosophy about when a shoe should demand attention and when it should carry attention without demanding it. The chunkier daytime heels ask less of the eye and more of the silhouette. The embellished middle ground rewards close looking. The butterfly evening pieces perform – openly, knowingly, without apology. Whether that reading lands with buyers placing orders for Spring 2027 depends on how far the maximalist appetite actually extends beyond the runway.
