Campillo Lets Science Join the Conversation at New York Fashion Week

Fashion has always borrowed from nature. Patricio Campillo’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection goes a little further: it asks what happens when nature helps make the garment itself.

At New York Fashion Week, Campillo worked with Polybion’s cultivated-cellulose material, Celium, across three looks. The resulting pieces did not feel like a science-fair trick pushed down a runway. They belonged in the collection’s larger conversation about the body, tailoring and the way clothing can change how a person carries themselves.

That is what made us stop. Sustainable-material headlines can sound like homework if there is no beauty attached. Here, the texture is part of the point. Cellulose is created by bacteria in a controlled process; Polybion then develops the material into a leather-like textile. The result carries its own surface, irregularity and quiet evidence that a garment can come from a different kind of imagination.

Campillo’s work has consistently played with proportion, masculinity and the soft tension between structure and movement. Bringing cultivated cellulose into that language makes the experiment feel more human than futuristic. It is a designer asking material to do more than behave.

Read Polybion’s account of the collaboration here, and see more runway context in Fashionista’s review.

Campillo Spring/Summer 2027 runway photos: Vogue Runway / Umberto Fratini, via PAUSE.

Written by Chetuno