Olivia Colman did not turn up to Miu Miu’s Spring 2027 show in Paris on 4 October wearing anything that deserves the word “oversized”. The blazer draped over her V-neck jumper, French-tucked loose at the front, was cut generously, yes, but the real story is how deliberately that one jacket was chosen to do a job. That nuance has gone missing in the rush to brand every roomy jacket this season an oversized blazer moment, and it’s worth untangling before the label sticks to the wrong woman.
The UK can’t stop searching for it anyway, and fashion-watchers have logged the spike this week. It’s not hard to see why: Colman at Paris Fashion Week, photographed looking easy and put-together in a way that reads like a lesson rather than a costume. The trouble is that the lesson being taught right now is slightly wrong.
Olivia Colman’s Miu Miu blazer, decoded properly
Start with the actual Miu Miu moment, since it’s the only genuinely oversized blazer Colman has worn in months. At the label’s Spring 2027 runway presentation on 4 October, during Paris Fashion Week, she layered a boxy tailored jacket over a V-neck sweater and let the hem sit loose rather than nipping it in at the waist, a proper French tuck, reported by WWD and picked up by Yahoo, where the proportions were left to do the work instead of a belt. By any honest definition, that’s the one time this entire news cycle that “oversized” actually describes what she had on.
Everywhere else, the opposite is true. Woman & Home’s reporting has traced Colman rewearing the same black tailored blazer at both UNICEF Soccer Aid and Disney’s Upfront presentation at the Jacob Javits Centre in New York, two occasions, one jacket, zero slouch. That isn’t an oversized trend. That’s a capsule wardrobe doing precisely what it was built to do.
The clip above, picked up by mindfood.com in its own coverage of the look, is a useful reminder of how unremarkable the repetition looks in motion, which is rather the point. Nobody at either event clocked it as a “look”. They clocked it as Colman, dressed.
Why the ‘Gen Z shoe trend’ label gets her all wrong
The flats-with-blazer pairing has been doing the rounds as a generational marker lately, tucked into round-ups alongside barrel-leg jeans and Loewe’s mesh slingback mules. WhoWhatWear has made the sharper point: swapping heels for something flat under a sharp jacket isn’t a Gen Z invention at all. It’s just good sense.
Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy was doing it before most of today’s trend forecasters were born. Hailey Bieber and Katie Holmes get cited as its current custodians precisely because the combination refuses to age the way a true micro-trend does. Pinning it to a generation is a marketing shortcut, not an observation, and Colman, who has never dressed for an age bracket in her life, is the wrong test case to prove the shortcut right.
She’s worn tailoring with a flatter sole on red carpets too, including the recent Celine look at the Wicker premiere in Zurich, without a hashtag in sight. If a styling choice works equally well on an Oscar winner in her fifties and a twenty-something influencer, the only honest label for it is “good idea”, not “youth trend”.
How to build the one-blazer, two-events wardrobe
Take the Woman & Home evidence seriously and build around one blazer rather than hunting for the next one. A black, properly tailored jacket, not boxy, not cropped, earns its keep precisely because it doesn’t announce itself twice.
The proportion rule doing the rounds in generic styling guides still holds when applied properly: slouchy on top, slim underneath. If the jacket has real volume, the way Colman’s Miu Miu layer did, pair it with something narrow, such as barrel-leg jeans worn slim at the ankle rather than loose. If the blazer is doing the structured, tailored work her black jacket does instead, the rest of the outfit can relax slightly without the whole thing collapsing into a onesie.
Swap heels for flats or mesh slingbacks depending on the formality, and resist the urge to buy a second blazer “for variety”. Repetition is the trick here, not the flaw. Whether the rest of the UK takes that advice or keeps chasing a Gen Z label that was never really about Gen Z is, frankly, the more interesting question.
Photo: Soccer Aid for UNICEF, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, modified: subject cutout on an editorial collage background.
