Emily Dawn Long has always been a bit saucy. The designer’s screen-printed tees are printed with phrases like “Take Off Your Clothes” and “Bug Me” (about ladybugs mid-coitus) and have become a staple among the downtown Manhattan in-crowd. So it was fitting that, for her spring 2027 show, cheekily titled “The Crack of Dawn,” the nominee for the CFDA Award for Emerging Designer of the Year brought new levels of horniness to New York Fashion Week. On display, through low-slung dresses, sagging low-rise bottoms, and sacrum-cut jeans, was a wide array of derriere cleavage.
“Butt cracks were the basis for the collection itself,” Dawn tells GQ. She started off with a yellow crack dress and pushed herself to show off more tushy with other pieces, saying that a pair of Japanese men’s denim had a rear opening that was designed to mimic the back of a baseball cap.
EDL forecasted the trend for the rest of the week: a strong showing of rear slit among male and female models. At Marcus Allen’s debut ready-to-wear collection for his vintage-slinging brand The Society Archive, it peaked out of khaki low-rise drawstring bottoms and slouchy board shorts. At Eckhaus Latta, onlookers could catch a glimpse of it from a pair of hip-grazing dijon-collared jeans. Blame the resurgence of Y2K style, or the record-setting heat of the summer: we are living in, as Long so deftly put it, the dawn of the crack.
The Society Archive’s debut ready-to-wear collection revealed a touch of butt crack.Courtesy of Gerald Ortiz
Low-rise bottoms at the Eckhaus Latta show revealed a touch of upper glute.Courtesy of Sasha Mutchnik
The stunty flaunting of butt cracks has a long history in the fashion world. During Tom Ford’s run at Gucci, the designer put men in the S/S 1997 show in g-strings that showed off cheek just as much as it did crack. Fast forward to 2025, Diesel prominently showed off upper gluteal cleft at its Milan Fashion Week show, which was a rare enough display of skin that prudish observers didn’t know what to make of it. Time and reflection have done wonders for NSFW displays of skin. Our colleagues over at Vogue declared that 2026 was to be the year of the butt crack, but little did we know that proclamation would also apply to men. As designers command our line of sight lower and lower below the waistline, the sensuality of the body part is being made apparent.
“I’m interested in the tension between concealing the body and giving permission to observe it,” says designer Kate Walz, whose S/S 2027 show “Vestige” showed off crack with a few low-worn skirts. “Sometimes the clothes are quite reserved, but then they deliberately expose or frame a part of the body I find particularly sensual—the hollow of an armpit, the small of a back, a collarbone, the slightest glimpse of the upper butt.”
While the butt crack draws attention on a runway, it’s certainly not for the faint of heart (and not suitable for most professional office environments). An evening stroll downtown or a day at the beach might be a good place to experiment with the look. Just make sure you keep the area clean an dwell-groomed. And if you are really committed to the idea, consider working those glutes.
