Who Is Matières Fécales, the Brand Now Closing Paris Fashion Week's Opening Day?

A brand named, quite literally, "fecal matter" in French is closing the opening day of Paris Fashion Week's Spring/Summer 2027 presentations today, a slot NSS Magazine has compared to ones historically held by houses at the level of Alexander McQueen in his prime. For a label that started out selling designs on Depop, that trajectory is worth understanding on its own terms.

Two Students in Montreal

Matières Fécales was founded by Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, who met in 2014 while studying fashion design together in Montreal. According to the brand's own account, the pair found in each other the freedom to embrace their identities more fully than the environments around them had allowed, and spent the following decade developing what they describe as a post-human aesthetic built around fearless self-expression. Before Paris Fashion Week, before Dover Street Market, before any of it, they were simply two design students building a shared visual language.

Why the Name Is the Point, Not the Provocation

The brand operated for years under the English name Fecal Matter before formally adopting Matières Fécales, its French translation. Dalton has explained that the choice was deliberate: fecal matter is, in her words, the scientific term for the substance, and translating it into French, in her telling, made it sound considerably more glamorous. Bhaskaran has described the name separately as intended to challenge the wasteful side of the fashion industry. The apparent contradiction, an ugly name attached to genuinely well-made luxury clothing, is not incidental. As the founders have put it, for a name like theirs to work in a luxury space, the clothes themselves have to hold up.

From Guerrilla Fashion to the Official Calendar

In its earliest form, Fecal Matter operated more as a provocation than a production line, appearing at fashion events to disrupt rather than to sell collections in any conventional sense. A Selfridges London collaboration in 2019 marked an early step toward something more commercially structured, but the turning point came in 2024, when Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons and co-founder of Dover Street Market, encountered the pair backstage at a Madonna concert and brought them into the Dover Street Market ecosystem. That relationship gave the brand a genuine commercial and institutional backer, and the label debuted on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar in March 2025 with a collection called The Other, described by its founders as an ode to being fearless with identity.

Who's Actually Wearing It

The brand's visibility jumped considerably when Zendaya wore a Matières Fécales design, a strapless gown with feathered white wings, to the premiere of The Odyssey in New York, with her stylist Law Roach naming the label directly when asked. Since then, Lady Gaga and Kylie Jenner have both been seen in Matières Fécales pieces, and influencer Nikki Lilly walked in the brand's runway show during Paris Fashion Week in October 2025. The brand's second official collection, presented as part of the calendar, was staged inside the Hôtel d'Évreux on Place Vendôme, a location its founders have described as a symbolic gesture of opening doors normally closed to people like them.

Where to Find It

Matières Fécales sells through its own website and through Dover Street Market locations. Ready-to-wear pieces, including graphic T-shirts printed with images of the founders themselves, sit alongside more structured tailoring, an intentional mix the brand has built its identity around: genuinely wearable clothing carrying a name designed to make people uncomfortable before they ever see the garment itself.

Sources: AnOther Magazine; Fast Company; Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode; Tech Times; Wikipedia.