Nicolò Opens MNL Fashion Week 2026 With Flow State, a Love Letter to the Work Itself

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For his debut on the MNL Fashion Week runway, Nicolo Perez builds Flow State around three Greek myths and the question of how much wanting is too much.

By Kobe Janer

At 5 p.m. on Thursday, Nicolò opened MNL Fashion Week 2026 with a collection that begins in labor and ends in flight. It was the label's first time on this calendar, and the opening show sets a week's temperature.

Flow State takes its name from psychology, though the term is only a label for something most people have felt. It is the part of working where the hours go missing. Perez tells BLNC the collection reflects his own relationship with work and ambition. After a few very good years came the pressure to keep topping himself, until he was asking "where the line is between healthy ambition and obsession."

Sisyphus, Narcissus, and Icarus are usually met once, in a literature class, on the way to something else. Perez returns to them the way a working person returns to old advice, and finds all three describing his own week.

Sisyphus rolls his boulder up the hill forever and watches it fall back each time, and the collection opens in his company, with relaxed tailoring, workwear, and oversized shorts finished in the curved hems and zigzag topstitching that have become the house signature. Nothing strains for attention. It looks like a craft practiced so often it no longer needs to announce itself.

Narcissus leans over the water, sees himself, and cannot look away. In the middle of the show the clothes become that water. Sheer layers arrive, rippling shapes travel across the surfaces, and a denim jacket is cut into waves and stitched back together with sheer panels, so the garment keeps moving even when the model is still.

Icarus takes to the air on wings of wax and falls into the sea, and the final looks lift accordingly. They are the lightest of the night, with birds appliquéd across sheer sets and fringe loosening from the hems like something undone by wind.

Sequins, glitter, technical nylon, denim, and appliqué sit beside the airier fabrics, and sailor and resort references keep the mood sunlit. The collection also brings womenswear to a house built on menswear, and it arrives in the same clean language, less a departure than an opening of the door.

That instinct for structure has a source. Perez studied psychology at Ateneo de Manila University on his way to medicine, and spent his real hours with a theater organization's costume team until one elective changed the plan. He founded the label in 2020 and still makes it in a studio in Rizal.

His ambition for Filipino fashion is plainly stated. "We don't need to imitate what already exists elsewhere," he tells BLNC. He says the lesson of this collection was learning to simplify, and that the strongest ideas were the simplest.

What stays is how kindly Flow State treats wanting. All three myths are warnings, and Nicolò declines to warn anybody. He lets the boulder be practice, the reflection be honest, the fall be worth the flight, and sends it out in clothes light enough for a hot Manila afternoon. Three days of designers followed him, each with a collection pulled from their own life, and the week never lost the pitch he set that first night.