“If you can’t afford it, make it at home.” With that invitation, Simon Cracker opens the door to Via Francia, its Spring/Summer 2027 collection, and returns fashion to one of its most instinctive pleasures: taking what is already within reach and imagining it differently.
Presented in Milan on September 25, 2026, at 3 p.m. at the Leather Fashion Hub in Piazza Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Via Francia appeared as part of Lineapelle Designers Edition during Milan Fashion Week. The setting placed Simon Cracker’s intensely handmade universe within the international fashion calendar, yet the emotional geography of the collection lay elsewhere—in the countryside of Romagna, among cherry trees, family trunks and the wonderfully uninhibited wardrobe experiments of childhood.
Founded by Simone Botte in 2010, Simon Cracker has developed a vocabulary around upcycling, transformation and the expressive possibilities of materials that have already lived a life. Forgotten clothes, deadstock textiles and discarded elements become raw material rather than relics. Via Francia brings that philosophy into particularly personal territory.
The collection takes its name from the street where, at eight years old, Botte and his cousin Nicoletta staged summer variety shows for their neighbors. Their July productions involved dancing, jokes and costumes assembled from the contents of their great-grandparents’ trunks. Oversized skirts, tablecloths and curtains became precious fabrics through a child’s eyes. Floral tunics could meet enormous underwear; patterns could collide without asking permission. Elegance was whatever imagination decided it was.
That memory becomes the pulse of Via Francia. Botte describes the SS27 wardrobe as something close to a playroom: clothing arrives ready to be manipulated, rearranged and interpreted by its wearer. Hooks allow modules to move and silhouettes to change, making the body an active participant in the construction of a look. A dress does not have to remain one dress. Its proportions, exposure and shape can shift according to the person wearing it.
There is a liberating idea beneath the playfulness. Simon Cracker proposes that people establish their own relationship with their bodies—choosing when to reveal them, when to cover them and how they wish to be seen. Fashion becomes less about obeying an image and more about creating one.
The designer’s memories of childhood also offer an answer to a very contemporary tension. Fashion continues to exert enormous cultural magnetism at a moment when many younger consumers face considerable economic pressure. Via Francia addresses that distance through making rather than aspiration alone. The Simon Cracker community has long recreated ideas seen in the brand’s collections, rescuing existing garments and investing time and ingenuity in transforming them. For Botte, that participation has been integral to the project since its beginnings.
Here, DIY carries its original sense of possibility. It asks what can happen when desire encounters resourcefulness. That attitude runs visibly through the clothes. Via Francia filters grunge through the Simon Cracker vocabulary, bringing promotional T-shirts into conversation with elegant dresses, coating and patchworking leather, turning lunchboxes into bags and introducing echoes of 18th-century dress through reclaimed and deadstock textiles.
“Poor Couture” is the collection’s knowingly provocative expression for paisley and “granny” patterns meeting historical references through materials already in existence. The phrase captures the tension that makes Via Francia so engaging: grandeur can emerge from what was overlooked, discarded or considered ordinary. Some garments push the handmade principle even further. Simon Cracker’s “zero-energy” pieces are assembled entirely by hand without electricity, allowing the act of construction itself to become part of the collection’s meaning. Visible human intervention is treasured rather than disguised.
Elsewhere, the childhood theater returns through “The Curtain,” a group of dresses and tops made from patches of different fabric scraps stitched together. What began decades ago as improvised scenery for a neighborhood performance is translated into a tactile fashion language of fragments, memories and accumulated surfaces.
Leather receives an equally playful treatment. “Ice Cream Leather” brings different leathers together in combinations conceived like flavors in an ice cream counter, while painted surfaces introduce another unmistakably manual dimension. Dr. Martens footwear and bags are customized and hand-painted as part of the Dr. Martens co-op, extending the collection’s instinct for personalization all the way to the accessories.
Nothing is too humble to enter the story. Promotional T-shirts migrate into other garments. Object-like bags are produced in 3D using recycled filaments. Earrings are fashioned from plastic bottle caps recovered from beaches. Materials change status through context, labor and imagination. The result retains the evidence of the hand. Raw hems, irregular constructions, patchwork, drawing and painted interventions give Via Francia the intimacy of clothes that have passed through a studio filled with people and ideas rather than emerging anonymous and untouched.
There is humor here, too, and it matters. Simon Cracker’s approach to punk has long carried a gentler undercurrent the brand calls “PUNKINDNESS.” Its philosophy replaces aggression with community and hierarchy with a creative refuge built around respect for the individual. In Via Francia, that spirit feels particularly at home. Rebellion can take the form of gratitude, reuse, imperfection and the confidence to wear something according to personal instinct.
Perhaps that is why childhood provides such fertile territory for SS27. Before taste becomes codified, dressing is often an act of pure invention. A curtain can be couture. A lunchbox can be a handbag. Clashing prints can look magnificent because the person wearing them has already decided they do. Via Francia attempts to recover that moment before the rules arrive.
Botte has spoken openly about having more ideas than time to realize them, and this season he challenged himself to concentrate on a smaller number of stories and explore them more deeply. The discipline gives the collection an emotional clarity. Behind its layers, painted leather, scraps and shifting silhouettes is a remarkably simple proposition: look again at what you already have.
That message feels particularly resonant in 2026. Upcycling here is connected to desire rather than deprivation. Old materials are allowed to become seductive again. Time spent altering a garment acquires value. Personal creativity enters the space traditionally occupied by consumption.
Botte acknowledges the community surrounding Simon Cracker, including Lineapelle, his mother Susi, his partner Nicholas and Aunt Alberta, whose archival videos from the 1990s helped inspire the collection’s narrative. Those family images complete the circle. A childhood summer becomes an archive; the archive becomes a collection; the collection returns to the public carrying an invitation to participate.
Via Francia ultimately asks its audience to remember the freedom of getting dressed before anyone explained what was supposed to match. It celebrates the intelligence of the hand, the potential of an unwanted object and the private thrill of turning something familiar into something entirely one’s own. Somewhere between a cherry tree in Romagna and a Milan runway, Simon Cracker finds fashion’s playground again. The door is open, the trunks are full, and the rules are ours to write.
