For the third June running, Berluti took over the Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca and invited Paris to walk through its head. This year the walk led into a garden, with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince as the guide. The scent of shoe wax reached visitors before the shoes did.
While the rest of men's week raced between runways, Berluti held its ground with a presentation, staged room by room through the Del Duca mansion off the Parc Monceau. The path traced the house's métiers in order: shoes first, then leather goods, then the wardrobe. It is a slower way to show clothes, and it suits a house that thinks in decades.
The timing sharpened the contrast. The men's season had opened with Louis Vuitton's spectacle and pushed through Dior and Givenchy before Celine closed the calendar at the Tennis Club de Paris. Berluti sat inside that same week and refused its tempo. No front row, no finale, just rooms that asked for twenty unhurried minutes.
The opening room worked on the senses before the eyes. Wax hung in the air, and a soundtrack of footsteps carried the visitor in, an echo of the fox's promise in Saint-Exupéry's book to know one tread from every other. Berluti has been listening to footsteps since Alessandro Berluti began making shoes in Paris in 1895. The conceit fit like a last.
The rose
The Little Prince ran through the rooms as a thread rather than a costume. In the Salon Monceau, the fox's secret appeared on the wall: only the heart sees clearly, and the essential stays invisible to the eye. The house read that as a definition of elegance, one that lives in movement and attitude before it lives in cloth.
The rose itself, the book's vain and beloved flower, settled on the Alessandro, the lace-up that carries the founder's name. A children's fable and a 130-year-old oxford turn out to share a moral. Objects earn their meaning from the time spent tending them.
Berluti reads a children's book the way it should be read, slowly, and by heart.
The Splendid EditThe garden
A garden supplied the season's second thread, and the wardrobe grew accordingly. The Forestière, the gardener's jacket that entered house lore by way of Le Corbusier's tailor, sprouted a narcissus from its pocket, stitched as if mid-bloom. The Galet Bloom shoe borrowed the line of an arum lily, its sculptural curves finished in a patina the workshop had never mixed before.
The lookbook put the flowers on the men. A golden suede blouson arrived engraved edge to edge with blossoms, worn over a printed scarf in the same faded tobacco tones. A cream knit polo carried a single embroidered stem at the chest, above wide tailored shorts and bare ankles. The gardening was literal, and it looked easy in the heat.
Courtesy of Berluti — Berluti Spring-Summer 2027, Paris
The light
Berluti's leather has always behaved like paint, and this season the house said so out loud. The bags paid tribute to the Impressionists, their Venezia leather built up in layered nuances the way Monet built a haystack, stroke over stroke, until transparency turned into depth. Patina, the house's oldest trick, was recast as brushwork.
The lineup told the hours of a single day in the garden. The Un Jour, the Luti, the Un Jour de Poche and the Toujours moved from first light to nightfall, each carrying its own weather in the hide. A tote in near-black glossed leather, spotted in the lookbook against a burnt-orange daybed, held the dusk end of the scale.
The repair
The final room belonged to an artisan seated among restored pieces, mending in public. The house says 97 percent of everything it makes can come back to the workshop for repair, and it treats that figure as a boast worth staging. A shoe that can be resoled for thirty years makes a quiet case against the season that produced it. The house has spent recent seasons arguing that a wardrobe should age like its shoes, gathering character instead of losing it, and the mended pieces on the tables made the argument better than any manifesto.
Saint-Exupéry's pilot fixed his own engine in the desert while the Little Prince asked him questions. Berluti has landed on the same idea and built a business on it. A limited edition drawn from the book arrives later this year; the philosophy is already in the window.
The Splendid Edit on the Berluti Spring-Summer 2027 presentation at the Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca, Paris. Details from Berluti and LVMH.
Photography courtesy of Berluti — Spring-Summer 2027, Paris