If you cannot afford it, make it at home. That is the principle behind Via Francia, the SS27 collection from Simon Cracker, and it is not a new one. Since the brand’s founding in 2010, long before upcycling became a trend, Simon Cracker has built wearable, rescuable pieces into every show, not to generate sales, but to generate something harder to manufacture: genuine creative participation.
The new generation loves fashion. It is being priced out of it. The gap between the runway and everyday life has become absurd, and Via Francia is a direct response to that absurdity.
A Childhood Stage on a Country Street
The collection takes its name from a street in Romagna, Italy, where the designer spent summers as a child at his grandparents’ farm. Refusing the beach, he and his cousin Nicoletta built their own world instead — a variety show performed every July for the neighbours on Via Francia, staged entirely in costume made from what they found: granny skirts, tablecloths, curtains pulled from great-grandparents’ trunks. Patterns clashed. Proportions were wrong. The patchwork curtain sewn by Aunt Alberta felt, to two children, like luxury.
That feeling is what Via Francia is trying to recover.
Growing up conditions the eye. We learn to judge, to defer, to dress for the approval of people who probably are not paying attention. This collection asks what happens when you stop. When you dress only for yourself, show only what you want to show, and let the shape of your own body be something you decide.
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The Playroom-Wardrobe
SS27 introduces what the designer calls a playroom-wardrobe: ready-to-wear pieces designed to be played with, experimented on, and reshaped. The collection fuses Simon Cracker’s signature codes with a new chapter of Grunge — promotional t-shirts worn with elegant gowns, patchwork alongside plastic-coated leather, lunchboxes repurposed as bags, and deadstock fabrics used to reinterpret 18th-century silhouettes.
Nothing here was arrived at comfortably. The collection was made in intense heat, and that discomfort is visible in the work. The rawness is the point.
The Most Cracker Thing Possible
The brand’s truest measure of success has never been sales. It is the photograph of someone who studied a runway look, found something old in their wardrobe, rebuilt it at home, and tagged Simon Cracker. They did not spend money on impulse. They spent time. They learned something. They saved something from the bin.
That is what Via Francia is for. Rules about bodies belong to the people inside them. Fashion belongs to everyone willing to make it their own.
