Avant Toi’s SS27 backstage: shadow, silk and stolen moments

Backstage light at fashion week operates according to its own logic. Harsh shadows pool beneath cheekbones. Amber washes fall across silk. The Italian label Avant Toi, known for its reverent approach to textile craft and restrained elegance, allowed its SS27 collection to be seen this way during Lakmé Fashion Week in New Delhi: unlit, intimate, caught between moments rather than presented within them.

The photographs carry the quality of discovery. A model wears a knitted sweater in cream, its texture caught in profile against deep black, the fabric held loose and generous around the shoulders. Elsewhere, a tunic rendered in densely patterned weave, perhaps linen or a linen blend, appears almost to dissolve where light abandons it, its border of burnt orange and dusty rose visible only where amber illumination finds it. A third figure stands cloaked in what reads as ikat or a similar resist dye technique: white and grey florals blooming across a deep ground, the weave clearly visible in the way light moves across the surface.

What emerges from these backstage moments is the philosophy that underpins Avant Toi’s work. The label, based in Como and founded in the 1980s, has long committed itself to natural fibres, artisanal production and the kind of quiet sophistication that asks nothing of the wearer except presence. The collection reveals its materials: the slip of a silk lining, the hand of linen against the body, the weight of carefully considered proportion. Shadows serve here not as absence but as context, allowing texture and weave to become the principal subject.

The images refuse the machinery of typical fashion photography. No styling notes. No narrative imposed. Simply faces and garments encountered in the half light of preparation, where the work becomes visible precisely because the presentation has fallen away.

Imagery courtesy of Avant Toi (@avant_toi.it).