With their debut Paris Fashion Week collection The Other, Montreal’s Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran did not just arrive on fashion’s biggest stage — they reshaped it.
There is a particular kind of poetic justice in the fact that we first met Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran not at a show, but in a gallery. It was 2019, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, at the Thierry Mugler: Couturissime exhibition — a landmark retrospective developed in collaboration with the Clarins Group and Maison Mugler, charting the singular vision of a designer who remade what fashion could be. Dalton arrived in the label’s signature Heeless Skin Boots, handbag with a dildo handle in hand — already a walking statement of everything Matières Fécales stands for. Surrounded by Mugler’s towering constructions and refusal to be anything other than himself, the two young designers seemed to belong there. It feels, in retrospect, like the universe was leaving a hint.
The parallel is not a superficial one. Like Mugler, Dalton and Bhaskaran — who work together under the name Matières Fécales — are not interested in fashion as decoration. The label they have built in Paris stands for something more difficult and more lasting: a version of glamour that is entirely their own, born not from market research but from lived experience and an uncompromising commitment to identity.
A LOVE STORY
That commitment has its roots in Montreal, where the two met in 2014 while studying fashion design at LaSalle College and, in the process, found in each other something they had not found anywhere else. “We have each encouraged each other to become who we are deep down,” Bhaskaran has said. “This has been the greatest blessing we have given each other.” What followed was a decade of building — a label, an aesthetic and a global community of people who share their conviction that self-expression is not optional.
The name is deliberate and confrontational. Matières Fécales — fecal matter — refuses the perfumed language of luxury. It insists on the full picture: the beautiful and the repellent, the aspirational and the abject. It is a challenge to an industry that has long preferred its surfaces unexamined.
POWER UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
For their third collection, the duo turned that challenge toward power itself. The Other took the world’s wealthiest individuals as its subject — not to celebrate them, and not simply to condemn them either. “The goal is not to just point the finger and say they are bad people,” Bhaskaran explained. “It is not that they are bad people, but I do think it is a time that we should be talking about it.” The collection drew from the visible codes of extreme wealth, from a decade of subcultural language the label has developed, and from what the designers called “the immortals” — their term for an ultra-privileged class now openly preoccupied with defeating death itself. “We really wanted to explore that tension within our duality, but also explore specifically Hannah’s affluent background this season,” Bhaskaran said. “Because in the world we live in right now, I think there is a lot of corruption of power.”
THE CAST
Daphne Guinness walked the show, her presence on the runway an entirely fitting one — a figure who has long occupied the precise territory the collection was examining, where extreme wealth and extreme individuality meet. Bryan Johnson, the American entrepreneur who has spent millions attempting to biologically reverse his own ageing, walked alongside her, his participation giving the “immortals” chapter an almost documentary charge. Michèle Lamy, muse, collaborator and one of fashion’s most singular figures, also took to the runway — her presence a testament to the world Matières Fécales has built and the community it continues to draw.
The show was held at Palais Brongniart in Paris, before a front row that included Chappell Roan, Rick Owens, Juergen Teller and Christian Louboutin.
COUTURE UNRAVELLED
What appeared on the runway was couture at its most unruly. Full-skirted gowns in cascading tulle filled the space around their wearers, their hemlines frayed as though the garments had survived something. A magenta taffeta ball gown — structured around an enormous asymmetric bow, its layers deliberately torn — had the quality of a fairy tale that had gone slightly wrong, which is precisely the point. Elsewhere, a jacket assembled entirely from woven banknotes made the collection’s central argument without needing to say a word. And the silver feathered looks, floor-length and shimmering, suggested beings who had moved beyond the human categories the rest of us still inhabit.
“This collection is about being fearless in your identity. It is about walking into a room with your head held high, even if nobody wants you there.”
THE LOUBOUTIN CHAPTER
The season also brought a collaboration with Christian Louboutin, whose iconic red-soled shoes were reimagined in forms that bent and distorted the familiar silhouette into something altogether stranger. Paired with the label’s signature horn bag, they extended the world of the collection into every detail of the dressed body.
FASHION FINDS ITS PEOPLE
That world has found its people. Lady Gaga and Tilda Swinton have both worn the label, two figures for whom the intersection of fashion and transformation has never been incidental. Sarah Paulson wore Matières Fécales to the Vanity Fair Oscars Party, dressed by Canadian stylist Karla Welch — a moment that confirmed the label’s arrival not just on the runway but in the broader cultural conversation.
Matières Fécales operates without apology and without compromise. With The Other, they did not simply make a case for their place in Paris fashion. They made the case on their own terms entirely — which, it turns out, is the only way they know how.
Author Profile
- Helen Siwak is the founder of EcoLuxLuv Communications & Marketing Inc and publisher of Folio.YVR Luxury Lifestyle Magazine and PORTFOLIOY.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine. She is a prolific content creator, consultant, and marketing and media strategist within the ecoluxury lifestyle niche. Helen is the west coast correspondent to Canada’s top-read industry magazine Retail-Insider, holds a vast freelance portfolio, and consults with many of the world’s luxury heritage brands. Always seeking new opportunities and challenges, you can email her at [email protected].
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