For Spring/Summer 2027, 032c Mode enters stability in pursuit of precision. Titled STABLE, Maria Koch’s latest womenswear collection takes the codes of competitive equestrianism and brings them into contact with Berlin’s restless nightlife, exploring what happens when discipline meets desire and control slips into release.

Presented during Paris Fashion Week at La Ménagerie de Verre, STABLE builds upon the modular wardrobe at the center of 032c Mode. The brand conceives womenswear not as a fixed identity, but as a system that moves between power and sensuality, performance and pleasure, work, sport, and nightlife. That philosophy becomes particularly literal this season: clothing responds first to the body and what it needs to do. Koch, a competitive rider herself, looks to equestrianism less as an aesthetic reference than as methodology. Riding requires an ongoing negotiation between rigor and intuition, pressure and release. Clothes become equipment and are treated as functional tools rather than decorative accessories.

The opening looks establish this vocabulary with almost clinical clarity. While riding boots extend to the knee beneath slim white trousers and technical outerwear, crisp shirting is tucked into fluid trousers; gloves, narrow sunglasses, and riding-inspired belts recur like pieces of protective gear. Elsewhere, flashes of saturated red and electric blue disrupt the otherwise controlled palette of black, white, gray, and taupe. The effect is less countryside stable than a rider arriving at a Berlin nightclub.
The collision is precisely the point. STABLE also draws on Neue Sachlichkeit, German for New Objectivity. The movement emerged during the Weimar era. In particular, Koch references painter Lotte Laserstein, whose women complicated conventional ideas of femininity. The same refusal of easy binaries runs throughout Koch’s collection.

A fitting scarlet suit possesses the severity of a uniform, while its narrow silhouette amplifies the body beneath it. A sheer nude blouse offers almost no physical concealment, yet appears alongside loose, utilitarian trousers and a riding-inspired belt. Black tailoring is pared down until it becomes nearly austere; later, a jacket is worn over a bare torso, and a long skirt is split high along the leg. In STABLE, exposure does not automatically signal vulnerability. As 032c’s broader womenswear philosophy proposes, transparency can reveal the wearer without making her fragile. As the collection progresses, restraint gradually gives way to decadence. Leather mini dresses, abbreviated tailoring, and lean black silhouettes begin dissolving into satin and shimmer. A pale blush slip-like look traces the body with delicate black piping, its softness standing in sharp contrast to the collection’s riding boots and technical layers. Reflective, almost liquid-like evening dresses follow, catching the light with every movement. In one of the collection’s most striking final looks, a sheer embellished dress is reduced across the torso to fine black straps, paired with long opera gloves and black heels. The horsewomen’s uniform has seemingly transformed into eveningwear without entirely abandoning its sense of control.

It is the progression that makes STABLE more than an exercise in equestrian dressing. Koch is interested in the contradictions of the women wearing the clothes. The collection’s robust technical fabrics and riding equipment coexist with feminine elements because 032c does not treat these identities as mutually exclusive. And that thinking extends beyond appearance. The brand describes clothing as a way to support how people “move, work, desire, perform, and exhaust themselves daily,” beginning its design process with the body's physical reality. For STABLE, the horse and the rider become an especially apt metaphor: balance is achieved not through rigidity, but through constant adjustment. Specialist collaborations make the connection tangible. 032c worked with DeNiroBootCo and Roeckl Sports on equestrian products, while MYKITA developed performance eyewear for the collection. Yet, even at its most technically specific, the collection resists becoming a costume. No nostalgic fantasies of aristocratic riding culture appear here. Instead, Koch extracts its underlying principles: precision, repetition, protection, and freedom of movement. She then relocates them within contemporary city life.

The result feels extremely on-brand for 032c. It is a wardrobe built for someone who refuses to choose between extremes. She moves from the stable to the street, from work to the club, from protective layers to near-nakedness without assuming a new identity each time. With STABLE, control and freedom are not opposites; one makes the other possible.

Article by Emma Green, Assistant to Editor-In-Chief, PhotoBook Magazine
Tearsheets by Daniel Lopez, Art Director, PhotoBook Magazine

032c Mode SS27 Finds Freedom in Control