Negris LeBrum showed Collection Negris, its Spring/Summer 2027 line, on September 11, on the rooftop of Rockefeller Center for New York Fashion Week, a landscaped terrace with a turquoise reflecting pool standing in for the usual runway. The whole thing was built around one color. Burnt orange, drawn from the red clay hills of northwest Louisiana where designer Travis Hamilton grew up. He frames it as heritage rather than trend, and the collection reads that way: this is a personal story told in clothes, not a seasonal mood board.
The sensibility is western luxury. A western belt buckle recurs as a signature, gold embellished trims run through the line, and the jewelry is a collaboration with the gospel icon Yolanda Adams, matched piece by piece to each look. The clothes move between tailoring and eveningwear, cut from brocade, lace, and silk chiffon.
The standout is a marbled brocade suit in swirling copper and gold, a fabric that looks like it cannot decide which decade it belongs to. Around it the collection works the same warm register: an orange jacquard shift trimmed in pearls, a sheer paneled set banded in copper satin, a burnt orange tweed zip dress, a floor-length pleated gown finished with a sculpted gold clasp at the neck that closed the tailoring portion of the show.
The other half of the show was sound. The runway ran to an original score written and arranged by Travis Hamilton with the help of AI, carrying two love stories at once: the enduring romance of Negris LeBrum on the surface, and underneath, Hamilton’s own complicated relationship with the fashion industry.
“Music is very important, it helps set the stage. I wanted something that would test the psyche as we told the love story,” Hamilton said. Of the collection itself: “This collection is a love letter, to Negris LeBrum, to Louisiana, and to New York. Eighty-six years of this story live in every stitch, and today it found its home on a rooftop overlooking the city that gave fashion its stage.”
That number is the point. Hamilton founded Negris LeBrum in 1999 as a student at Texas Southern University, building the label around the eighty-six-year love story of its namesake, a story of passion and heartbreak rooted in Louisiana that begins in 1940. The show was produced in partnership with Planet Fashion, led by CEO and executive producer Celia Evans, with support from Wella Education, Aubrey Loots, and Mark Harvey Beauty.
The FVM read: an AI-composed runway score is the kind of thing that usually arrives as a gimmick, a press-release line with nothing behind it. Here it is load-bearing, a second narrator running under the clothes, and it works because Hamilton tied it to something real. Twenty-six years in, this is a label that treats a collection as autobiography, and the burnt orange running end to end is the throughline. A rooftop terrace, a pool, an original score, and a Louisiana love story that predates everyone in the audience. It held together.
Negris LeBrum is at negrislebrum.com and @negris_lebrum on Instagram.
Images courtesy of Negris LeBrum and PR Runway.
