Genaro Rivas “A Feast for Crows” SS26 — menswear in recovered denim
- 2 September 2025
With Genaro Rivas A Feast for Crows SS26, the Peruvian designer frames his complete menswear debut around recovered denim, turning zero-waste cutting, hand texturing, embroidery, 3D printing and laser engraving into one coherent language of sustainability and edge. What began as a charged preview in Berlin now arrives in London as a fully realized statement: a collection that treats circularity not as rhetoric but as method, from sourcing to finishing and responsible water use along the way. With the making led predominantly by women across London and Peru, the work insists that ethics and attitude can inhabit the same garment.
Denim is Rivas’s new material lens, and he refuses the familiar. Panels are engineered to minimize waste; surfaces are worked by hand until they read almost ritual; laser-etched imagery becomes a second skin rather than a mere print. The spirit of transformation runs throughout—an idea drawn from the crow’s symbolic life in folklore as messenger, shapeshifter and keeper of the unseen—suggesting rebirth and the reclamation of value from what others discard.
Two art references anchor that symbolism. Robert Havell Jr.’s Raven (1831) and Édouard Manet’s Le Corbeau (1875) are reinterpreted as modern sigils, burned directly into cloth through laser engraving so the motif inhabits the textile rather than sitting on top of it. Elsewhere, accessories cut from discarded Lima Metro Linea Uno uniforms gain a second life, while a stand-out look translates humble market-bag raffia into something approaching contemporary couture—proof that material origin needn’t limit imagination.
Beauty direction extends the mood. Hair is led by Michael Kent for Richard Phillipart’s team, with makeup by Nataliia Herasko. Composer Kai Brophy supplies an original track—now on Spotify—that captures the show’s taut, gothic atmosphere and lets it travel beyond the room. With its official London presentation, A Feast for Crows finds full wingspan: a darkly poetic, rigorously sustainable menswear debut that marks, according to press materials, Rivas’s fifth consecutive season in London—a milestone he positions as a first for a Peruvian designer.
