I WOULD PREFER NOT TO: 032c Readytowear Spring/Summer 2026

032c Launches I WOULD PREFER NOT TO, the Spring/Summer 2026 collection of 032c Readytowear. Featuring 032c cover star Stella Maxwell and others.

“Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance” wrote American writer Herman Melville. His short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) sketches a life of silence and withdrawal, a man who declines not out of aggression, but from a deeper logic of preference. A refusal masked as choice.

032c's new Readytowear’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection “I Would Prefer Not To” by creative director Maria Koch denies any form of active protest, it is passive resistance. Like in “Bartleby,” it is a muted negation of the apparatus of expectation – of fashion, of deceptive productivity, of endless novelty.

This collection marks the beginning of a transformation. A return – not nostalgic, but strategic, out of a moral necessity – to classic menswear silhouettes with accentuated, cinched waists, wide shoulders, and cropped cuts. This exaggeration is intentional, almost theatrical, reasserting form as control. For women, intricate silhouettes exist that cannot be worn easily: tight power suits, absurdly voluminous shapes that expand beyond reason. They are both armor and performance, referencing conservative codes only to corrupt them. It stands in opposition to society’s renewed obsession with conservatism. And yet, it borrows from it. Acknowledging and incorporating what needs to be opposed is the beginning of transforming it.

This is not about fashion. It’s about an attitude. It’s about creating a counter culture. A deliberate withdrawal from the urgency of now. “I would prefer not to.” Not because there is no alternative, but because a new world silently opens in that phrase – a teaser for the future.

VOGUE RUNWAY

"The collection models a similar kind of restraint; a lineup of 032 basics, it includes cool leather separates, workwear, and some proper tailoring, a category that’s looking better and more identifiable each season here." - READ MORE

Here are the full look book images.