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AW 27-28: Weak Signals of Creativity Guided by the Intelligence of Living Systems

July 1, 2026
Première Vision Paris

Following Matter of Time, the first chapter in our exploration of the value of long-term thinking, this second installment continues our analysis of the AW 27-28 season through another key scenario: Wild Matter. In response to the standardization of environments, images and aesthetics, the living world is emerging as a powerful source of inspiration. Its diversity, cycles, transformations and patterns of growth are nurturing a new kind of beauty: more instinctive, more expressive and in a constant state of becoming. Drawing on weak signals identified across art, music, textile research, color innovation and beauty, Wild Matter is highlighting an organic, shifting and undisciplined materiality. A creative approach that is no longer simply imitating nature, but is seeking to engage with its underlying principles: growth, transformation, adaptation and regeneration.

Credit: Jehnna Yang

Nature as Author

Some recent initiatives are redefining the role of nature within systems of creation and value. With the Sounds Right project, led by the Museum for the United Nations, nature is being credited as an official artist on streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music. Streams of natural sounds, or of tracks crediting “Nature,” are thereby generating royalties that are channeled into conservation projects. In a similar spirit, artists Eli Goldstein and Lola Villa have founded Future Sounds of Nature, a label that gives part of its revenue back to the natural habitats featured in its recordings. These initiatives are raising a question that extends far beyond the realm of music: if nature is generating cultural, emotional and economic value, then who should benefit from it? They are also reflecting a profound shift in our relationship with the living world.

Nature is no longer merely a backdrop, a resource or a source of inspiration. It is becoming an active presence, a subject, an author in its own right.

Coding the Organic

This desire to make the intelligence of living systems visible is also finding expression in the digital field. In Los Angeles, Dataland, under the artistic direction of Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, is exploring a new kind of museum in which data is becoming artistic material. Its inaugural exhibition is based on the Large Nature Model, an artificial intelligence model trained on data from the natural world. Within these immersive environments, images are never static. They are evolving in real time, generated from vast datasets linked to ecosystems, landscapes, sounds and forms of life. The organic is no longer simply represented: it is encoded, translated and amplified. This approach is revealing a contemporary desire to make the complexity of nature perceptible. It is also challenging the way we look at it: no longer as a repertoire of forms to be reproduced, but as a dynamic system shaped by flows, signals and invisible interactions.

Living Fibers and Intrinsic Colors

In textile research, this fascination with living systems is opening up new material pathways. Research carried out in Sweden by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, in collaboration with the Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University, is exploring the development of intrinsically colored and fluorescent artificial silk fibers that exhibit a stable red color without the need for dyeing, while retaining their mechanical properties. These advances are paving the way for fibers whose color is no longer applied after manufacture through dyeing processes, but integrated directly into the material itself. The fiber becomes inherently colored, through a process that is scalable, sustainable and entirely water-based.

Beyond its scientific performance, this research is reshaping our textile imagination. Color is no longer appearing only as a surface treatment, but as an intrinsic, almost metabolic quality. A material that generates its effect from within.

Structural Pigments and the Intelligence of Living Systems

This same principle is also reshaping color innovation. A spin-off from the University of Cambridge, Sparxell is developing cellulose-based reflective pigments inspired by the structural colors found in birds or butterflies. Here, color no longer depends on conventional pigment chemistry, but on the physical organization of the material itself, which captures, reflects and modulates light. As part of the ELUCENT project, carried out with PANGAIA and the Manufacturing Technology Centre, this technology has taken a significant step toward industrialization, paving the way for biodegradable alternatives to conventional reflective pigments that are free from plastics and toxic substances. This research confirms a major trend: innovation is no longer only about producing more responsible materials, but about learning from the strategies of living systems themselves. Color becomes structure, vibration and interaction with light. It no longer coats the material: it emerges from the material’s very construction.

Credit: Sparxell x Positive Materials

The Organic Line as Language

In visual aesthetics and beauty, the Wild Matter prospective scenario is translating into a more instinctive approach to gesture. The line is becoming a living trace, poised between control and chance. Fragmented lines, irregular rhythms and open compositions are evoking an energy in motion, as if growing. Negative space is playing a central role. It breathes, allows matter to circulate, and opens the composition to the unfinished. This aesthetic is not seeking flawless perfection, but the intensity of a gesture that still feels alive. In beauty, this dynamic is being expressed through dry, powdery, almost mineral materials, evoking chalk, charcoal or raw pigments. Surfaces seem dusted, displaced, lightly brushed. Skin-like tones, rosy beiges, organic powders and chalky hues are punctuated by deeper contrasts: muted blacks, shadowy greens and vegetal darkness.

Material is becoming a sign of vitality. It does not conceal; it surfaces. It is expressing a freer, more primitive form of beauty, shaped by chance, growth and transformation.

Taken together, these signals are pointing to a shared direction for Autumn-Winter 27-28: a desire to reconnect with more evolutive materials that are capable of embodying the principles of the living world. Wild Matter is embracing an organic, unstable and expressive beauty, in which creation is no longer seeking merely to represent nature, but to engage with its forces, rhythms and metamorphoses.

Discover the 3 themes shaping the AW 27-28 season in our article: Autumn-Winter 27-28: “Living Matter,” Toward Creation Reconnected with Life

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