There is a certain kind of woman, mythology has never known what to do with – the woman who leaves before she’s asked to shrink. That’s the woman the contemporary luxury label HILÁ has set out to dress this season.
At New York Fashion Week, Creative Director Hila Arshadnia debuted the company’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection, Lilith – a deeply personal exploration of exile, self-restoration, and what it really looks like to come back to yourself after loss. The collection, named after the biblical figure who chose banishment over submission, does more than borrow her story for aesthetic shorthand. It uses her as a model structure.
Collection in Four Acts
Lilith plays out not as a mood or palette, but rather as a narrative arc — four distinct chapters charting a course from self-protection to full, unguarded illumination.
Exile starts the story on the defensive. There are metallic structures and silhouettes that look like armour, and we see the first appearance of a recurring snake motif in the collection — a sly nod to the myth’s most enduring symbol.
Awakenings smooths out the register. The palette moves to lilac, bone and ivory and the silhouettes start to open up, revealing rather than concealing the body. Here HILÁ showcases one of the most technically impressive pieces in the collection: intricate crochet leather. Taking a notoriously tough material and transforming it into something more akin to lace.
Fire is the emotional peak of the collection. Restraint is replaced with intensity — saturated reds, deep purples, and the return of the serpent motif, sharper, bolder, more in your face than before.
Phoenix in light, completes the circle. Bright yellows, reflective crystals and a new ease complete the transformation, from rigid armour at the beginning of the collection to something more like pure radiance by its end.
Together, the four chapters follow a complete material and emotional evolution: protection, opening, power, and finally illumination.
The woman behind the legend
The collection, for Arshadnia, is not so much about the myth itself — it’s about the woman inside it, and what her story has always meant. “I was interested in the woman behind the mythology, the woman who would not submit, who preferred exile to self-abandonment, and was punished for it,” she explains.
That reframing is central to Lilith’s approach to rebirth. Instead of a rupture of the self, Arshadnia sees transformation as a sort of homecoming, a shedding of all that was never really hers to bear in the first place. “Rebirth isn’t about becoming someone new,” It’s about returning to yourself without the roles you’ve been taught to play. Lilith never returns to Eden, she walks through the fire and she becomes her own beginning.
A closet without excuses
Fundamentally, Lilith is a resistance to a familiar cultural script: that women should smother their ambition and instincts so that they can be more palatable. HILÁ’s SS27 collection does the reverse – it’s a wardrobe made for a woman who has already made her choice and isn’t interested in softening it for anyone.
It’s armour, it’s delicacy, it’s fire, it’s light. It’s a journey, a whole journey told through fabric, colour and form. And it doesn’t finish with a return to where she started, but something completely new.
HILA Presentation Credits: Creative Director: Hila Arshadnia, Styling: Yasi Guilani Schulz, Hair: Frank Rizzieri for Aveda, Makeup: Alex Yarber and team for New York Makeup Academy using NYUMA Cosmetics
Article Photos by Dana Kasap @danalavie
