sacai remixes Brooks Brothers preppy codes into streetwear for Paris Men’s Week

Chitose Abe made sacai’s case for a new streetwear uniform with The New Classics, a stand-alone men’s presentation that mixed Brooks Brothers tailoring, Soul II Soul references and hybrid Birkenstock sandals into something sharper, stranger and easier to wear than hype. Shown during Paris Fashion Week Men’s SS27, which ran from June 23 to June 28, 2026, the collection landed inside a provisional calendar of 74 labels, 36 shows and 38 presentations, but it felt far more focused than the week around it.

Abe said she wanted to concentrate on menswear this season and subvert classics through sacai’s familiar splicing of fabric, color and genre. That idea showed up in 1980s preppy shapes viewed through a rougher 1990s lens: navy blazers were cut open at the lapels to expose their linings, silk ties were stretched into loose scarf-cum-cravats, and blue button-downs came undone with tassels and rosettes. Utility straps crossed trousers, while cropped outerwear and bright shirts pushed the clothes toward an outdoor-rave mood rather than polished campus nostalgia.

The styling worked because it never treated prep as precious. Sacai has always liked to disturb the obvious, and here the brand used Brooks Brothers not as a logo-flex but as raw material, softening the formality with tees, bombers and sweats that could move from runway to street without losing the tension Abe built into them. The result was less about schoolboy neatness than about loosening the uniform until it could hold music, motion and attitude.

Soul II Soul gave the collection its cultural pulse. Abe pulled archive images and album-art references from the London collective, including the Funki Dred emblem and phrases such as Back to Life and Keep on Moving, and turned them into collage fabric and graphic layers. The link ran deeper than decoration: Soul II Soul’s Sunday-night sessions at The Africa Centre in Covent Garden tied the clothes to a London institution established in 1961, one that moved its headquarters to Southwark in June 2022.

The footwear finished the argument. Sacai worked with Birkenstock on hybrid sandals with extra straps or XL buckles, an extension of the brand’s long-running interest in hybridized design. Birkenstock’s Paris line already leans into a Mary Jane-inspired silhouette, and sacai’s version pushed that idea further, making the sandal look engineered rather than purely casual. Founded in Tokyo in 1999, sacai first appeared on the Paris runway in 2011 and has built its reputation on exactly this kind of construction, through collaborations with Birkenstock, Vans, Hender Scheme and Ugg. Here, Abe made preppy menswear feel less fixed than fluent.