Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena, the designers behind raucous London-based label Chopova Lowena, have fond memories of Dr Martens footwear. ‘[We remember] wearing our Docs to play at primary school, to thrash at Warped Tour, and to run between classes at university,’ say the pair, who revealed custom pairs of the brand’s Aurix line as part of their S/S 2027 show at London Fashion Week this past September. True to style, they were adorned with buckles, topstitching, faux fur and checkered finishes, capturing what they called the ‘rebellion and joy’ central to their spirited label (they say they are perfect for ‘headbanging, stomping, and dancing’).

The collaboration (available later in autumn) was part of a wider set of partnerships from Dr Martens, whose history dates back to 1945, when Dr Klaus Maertens created an air-cushioned sole to aid his recovery from a broken foot. In the decades since – and after a collaboration with British bootmaker R Griggs Group created the signature ‘1460 Airwair’ boot that saw the brand officially launch in 1960 – Dr Martens has become synonymous with rebellion and subculture, the hardwearing style adopted by punks, mods, Britpoppers and the American grunge movement of the 1990s.

The latest collaborations, which are called ‘Statements in Craft’, and also saw Dr Martens unite with Labrum and Fashion East’s Goyagoma on the London Fashion Week runway, as well as with Sage Nation in a standalone project, are part of a wider reinvention of the footwear brand (an earlier iteration of the series came with Dr Martens’ collaboration with Margaret Howell’s MHL line). In late September, Dr Martens launched its ‘With Bouncing Soles’ platform – its name a reference to a tagline that is stitched into pairs of classic Dr Martens – seeing figures such as actress Chloë Sevigny, musician Jordan Stephens and comedian Naomi Watanabe join a wider cast of ‘community and tastemakers’.

The brand says the campaign is rooted in the ‘micro-joys’ of fandom, with the majority of the participants having worn Dr Martens throughout their lives. ‘I’ve always been drawn to pieces that become more personal the longer you live in them, and Dr Martens has always represented that for me,’ says Sevigny. Each participant was asked: ‘What makes your sole bounce?’; for Sevigny, ‘it’s staying curious – taking on new roles, finding inspiration in unexpected places, and always being open to what’s next’.

‘“With Bouncing Soles” has been stitched into some of our most iconic boots and shoes since production started in 1960. [Now] it becomes the creative thread that connects the people who have shaped Dr Martens with a new generation discovering the brand for themselves,’ says Neil Cummings, global brand creative director, who has led the campaign. Beyond the initial images, a roster of events will take place at the brand’s London Brewer Street store in the coming months, from a set-up by Camberwell’s Lala Books to poetry readings, comedy nights and writing workshops.

The ‘Statements in Craft’ series will run alongside, and is rooted in the idea of collaboration – a defining tenet of the brand. Each of the various collaborations is distinct: at Sage Nation, Sage Toda-Nation took a stripped-back approach, reimagining the cult 1461 shoe with a double-welt seam which runs along the front of the shoe in a reference to his signature welt-stitch trouser; at Labrum, Sierra Leone-born designer Foday Dumbuya adorned the ‘Desert Oasis’ suede boot with a floral motif as part of his S/S 2027 runway show.

Dr Martens has coined the term ‘alternative craft’ to describe the way the various designers have approached the collections: a reference to the way in which its traditional boots and shoes are handcrafted in its Northamptonshire factory using tanneries such as CF Stead in Leeds. ‘Dr Martens is a British icon built on making things properly, boots made to protect you on your journey. I saw a shared language there,’ says Dumbuya, who evoked the Olokun flower, associated with Olokun, a West African deity of the sea, on his design.

‘For me, alternative craft is about who gets to be called a craftsman. Where I come from, the people who carved the Nomoli, who dyed the cloth, who forged the bronze, they were masters, but history didn't always write their names down,’ he continues. ‘Alternative craft is honouring those hands and carrying that knowledge forward into spaces it was never invited into. Craft isn't only technique, it's memory.’

‘At Sage we use very little print or embellishment – the focus always comes down to construction and detail, which is why craft is so important to us,’ adds Toda-Nation. ‘[It’s] why the detailing on this shoe felt like the perfect touch. It was an accent that the Made in England factory in Northampton were excited to execute. We love working with our makers on designs that are new to them; I believe that’s how we can keep heritage craft around, by expanding its vocabulary.’

Dr Martens x Sage Nation is available now. Dr Martens x Chopova Lowena will be available this autumn; Dr Martens x Labrum will be available this winter

drmartens.com

London Fashion Week concluded yesterday evening with Daniel Lee’s latest show for Burberry: a collection of ‘lived-in imperfection’ that featured a collaboration with 85-year-old textile designer Celia Birtwell, whose prints defined the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Nothing is overly pressed or pristine,’ Lee said. ‘There’s an intentional imperfection: the idea of owning a piece, living in it.’

Elsewhere, the consensus was that this week’s edition has been a success: prior to its start, British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir, who is now in her third season, promised to bring back London’s reputation as a hub of creativity. ‘The schedule reflects the confidence and momentum of British fashion today, bringing together established houses, emerging designers and industry partners on a platform that continues to shape global fashion,’ she said. ‘Together, they reaffirm London’s position as the global home of creativity and a catalyst for innovation, opportunity and growth.’

This included the return of McQueen and Mulberry, the latter under new creative director Christopher Kane, who is himself showing for the first time since the shuttering of his eponymous label in 2023. His ‘modern, streamlined’ vision for the British heritage house was one of the highlights of the week. ‘For me, heritage is a foundation, not a limitation,’ he said. ‘I want to write my own codes.’

Explore our pick of the best shows of London Fashion Week S/S 2027 below.

Oscar Ouyang

Central Saint Martins graduate Oscar Ouyang chose the sunlit upper floor of Rochelle, a former school in London’s Shoreditch, to show a collection which he described as one of ‘youthful romanticism’. The designer, who was born in Beijing and now lives and works in London, said he was thinking about the way that we ‘assemble’ identity on the journey from youth to adulthood. As such, the collection had a feeling of dress up, combining ‘curiosities’ (pine cone-shaped jewellery, curtain-like tassels, satin hair bands, intarsia swans) with garments which looked as if borrowed or deconstructed (a dinner jacket with its arms cut away and its lining on show, waistcoats which flapped open at the front), or worn in playful combinations, like slouchy sweaters with embellished silk shorts, or ruffled shirts and evening jackets with insignia track pants (he described it in the collection notes as ‘the uncertain interval between adolescence and adulthood, when familiar objects, clothes, and gestures suddenly acquire new meanings’). Knitwear, as ever, remained central – Ouyang began his career working primarily in the medium – but there was plenty more on show here. A series of safari-style jackets, cut in satin and nipped at the waist with a tassel fastening, or the white blouse and waistcoat which cleverly twisted across one shoulder, felt like the promising young designer was breaking new ground.

A Letter

There was a graphic simplicity to A Letter’s debut runway show which made it one of London Fashion Week’s best shows (other designers should note that choosing a location with natural light and bright white walls, as the Rose Easton Gallery has, can sharpen the audience’s view of a garment – and make for much better pictures). The designers Matt Empringham and Freddy Coomes are alumni of JW Anderson and Loewe respectively, and there are certainly traces of their mentor Jonathan Anderson’s work here in the way he oftentimes repeats a look or idea in a collection, and revels in the strange and offbeat. For their part, Empringham and Coomes described the collection as ‘exciting clothes with a hint of something slightly off,’ via the Dal Chodha-written press release.

The starting point for this S/S 2027 outing was ‘a pile of British clothes’ – among them ‘a Ben Sherman gingham shirt, a St Michael’s underwear and day dress, a nightie, a sweater, a mod shift’ – which in their hands felt radically simplified, and often hung away from the body, giving them a paper doll-like quality (indeed, last season, their entire collection was made from paper). Versions of the day dress or pinafore, with single flap pockets and a homespun feel, were reiterated throughout, while other garments were cleverly constructed to reflect the folds that remain when you remove clothing from its packaging. Most intriguing, though, were a series of PVC dresses with a degradé effect which made them appear like fabric on their front and sheer along the back, revealing underwear beneath. ‘A naivety – an unsureness – is the thing,’ read Chodha’s notes. ‘A new kind of eccentricity lurks in plainness.’

Fashion East

Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East took place once again this season in Manor Place, a community space created in collaboration between skatewear brand (and guest editors of Wallpaper’s October 2026 issue) Palace and sportswear behemoth Nike. It is fitting, and not just because of the longstanding support Nike has given Fashion East, but the way that – over 20 years since its founding – Kennedy continues to foster a thriving community that makes her shows feel like a back-to-school moment (they typically happen on the first full day of London Fashion Week). This season, there were two returning designers, Jacek Gleba and Goyagoma by Traiceline Pratt – participants in Fashion East tend to show for three seasons before transitioning to Newgen or other support programs – as well as new arrival Mé Mé, a label helmed by Central Saint Martins MA Graduate Mie Mie, who has previously worked at Alexander McQueen and Maison Margiela.

As ever, the three designers were singular in their approach. Gleba continued to reference the sinuous line of dancewear through asymmetrical folds of jersey and leotard-style dresses which fell away into looping handkerchief drapes (shoes were also a tottering heeled take on the dance slipper). This season, he took his waifish protagonist on holiday, leading to more romantic flourishes: romper shorts and criss-crossing vests were edged with lace, which Gleba said were inspired by the ‘beach pyjamas’ of the 1920s and 1930s. Through it all, a focus on the human form: ‘the clothes fall down and around the body,’ read the collection notes, capturing the feeling of motion that the Polish-Spanish designer puts at the centre of his work – a reflection of his own adolescence as a dancer, and continuing fascination with figures like Pina Bausch and Vaslav Nijinsky.

Goyagama, meanwhile, was more rooted in the quotidian wardrobe – polo shirts, utility jackets, roomy leather trousers and the like – albeit interspersed with a series of ceremonial column dresses adorned with ropes of beads and shells, which Pratt described as ‘exaltations of summer elegance’. The various looks drew inspiration from the figures he encountered in the Bahamas, where he grew up; through them, he hopes to ‘assert a new language of luxury’. Mé Mé, also looked towards ideas of luxury: designer Mie Mie grew up in Hong Kong and said that she was thinking about the ‘1980s glamour’ of the city, albeit reimagined as a series of purposely frenetic, deconstructed looks. Playful elements sat throughout: tiny flies appeared to have ‘landed’ on models’ faces, while headpieces reimagined the smoke from a cigarette in folds of tulle.

Aaron Esh

The London-born designer Aaron Esh began his tenure as creative director of British high street brand All Saints earlier this month, revealing a collection for men and women which reflected the insouciant, morning-after-the-night-before dress codes of his eponymous label (he has shown on the London Fashion Week Schedule since 2023). With All Saints now the outlet for his more quotidian designs – riffs on the leather biker jacket, checkered shirts, torn jeans and the like – it felt like there was new freedom to his latest Aaron Esh collection, shown on Friday evening at the Electric Ballroom in Camden (Esh channels a hedonistic, rock and roll attitude in his clothing; the venue has long hosted such live performances).

Much of this freedom was found through colour: vivid pinks, oranges and reds all featured, oftentimes clashing, providing a counterpoint to the monochrome black which has become Esh’s signature (which did continue to feature alongside, like the body-contouring black leather jacket and pants worn by model muse Kiki Wilhelms to close the show). ‘[This collection] feels electric,’ he said. ‘The colours are bright, almost aggressively so. They collide rather than coordinate: unexpected shades sitting beside one another, things that shouldn't belong together somehow making perfect sense. There is a feeling of excess without being excessive.’ It was also nice to see the return of the more experimental silhouettes which defined his early collections, like a leather jacket which fell away into a narrowed, waterfall hemline and came with a sized-up fireman’s-style hood, or his play on the safari jacket which was narrowed in proportion and entirely covered in pockets. Because, with his collections at All Saints covering his customers’ wardrobe foundations, Esh fans will now look to his own label for something a little more special.

Talia Byre

The big news from Talia Byre was that its designer, Talia Lipkin-Connor, will be working with British high street label Topshop in the coming months. It comes as such high street brands are currently in the midst of a revival: M&S held a runway show as part of the fashion week schedule this season, while All Saints recently appointed buzzy London designer Aaron Esh to breathe new life into the label (see above). Topshop – which once ruled the high street – will be hoping that Lipkin-Connor can bring similar energy. And, though there was only footwear from the collaboration on show for now (apparel will follow later in the year), the news nonetheless set the stage for what Lipkin-Connor hinted was a shift in direction for the label, which until now has revelled in its nicheness (its previous shows have been held in bookshops and tiny galleries, with room for just a handful of people watching on).

Held at Marylebone’s Hellenic Hall, it felt like her most typical runway show yet, the bright white space adorned with an artwork by Dillwyn Smith. His practice – which is defined by translucent fabric stretched across frames – also inspired the collection, which this season had a lighter, more romantic bent (Lipkin-Connor said a use of whites and creams came from the success of her recent bridalwear launch). Largely eschewing the bold, graphic stripes that were her signature, this season she opted for softer moiré, sheer jersey and lightweight cable knits, though the garments still had the easy glamour which has won Lipkin-Connor a dedicated legion of fans.

KNWLS

Staged in the circular assembly hall of The Ark, a school in South London’s Elephant and Castle, KNWLS’ S/S 2027 show signalled a shift in direction: though Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault’s woman certainly still had plenty of attitude, the garments themselves moved away from the corseted jackets and body stockings that had become their signature. Lingerie was still an inspiration, though in a more languid manner: one reference was Chambre Close, a book by photographer Bettina Rheims which captures women in states of undress. As such, garments often looked to be in a state of removal – straps slipped off shoulders; vests were turned upside down – while new baggy denim jeans were turned back to front. The designers said it was the KNWLS heroine ‘coming undone’, though that didn’t mean she was out of control. ‘[It’s about] remoulding [feminine] conventions on one’s own terms,’ they said. ‘Rather than a mark of dishevelment or decline, it’s a reflection of an exacting self-possession and control.’

Chopova Lowena

The designers Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena are known for their riotous runway shows, which often feature playful runway sets (last September, guests sat on a menagerie of different chairs, from giant shells to toad stools) and a cast that reflects their own eclectic community (an editor or two have also taken their turns on the Chopova Lowena runway). This season, it was to the Bloomsbury Bowling Alley for a show which used its lanes as the runway, though the designers were thinking less about ball games than something altogether more mystical. ‘There was a time when the worst thing a woman could be was a witch,’ said the pair, who have often drawn of folkloric elements – particularly from Chopova’s native Bulgaria – in their collections. ‘Maybe that is true still. But harnessing your magic is what makes you a special and beloved CL girl.’ Cue a darker twist on Chopova Lowena’s stacked-up, more-is-more look: from their signature carabiner kilt reworked into an inky blue cape, to a witchy black tulle shirt and skirt adorned with torn-edge flowers and a requisite black-stained lip. Elsewhere, there were still plenty of moments of levity and play: a duo of dogs took to the runway (one needed treats to encourage it to make its full runway walk), while T-shirts were printed with pigeons, horses and slogans like ‘Help Me Chop Ova Lowena’, complete with three knife-wielding schoolgirls.

Simone Rocha

In 1990, Caravaggio’s ‘The Taking of Christ’ was discovered in the dining room of a Jesuit house in Dublin. This idea of finding beauty in unexpected places inspired Simone Rocha’s latest collection, which was presented at London’s historic criminal court, The Old Bailey, on Sunday morning. Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary is familiar ground for Rocha, who has drawn on christening dresses and bomber jackets, military attire and religious vestments across her career, reimagining them in her distinctive style, which often sees them adorned with layers of embellishment and reworked into blooming new forms. But the influence of Caravaggio added new richness to her work: ‘Old Master blue’ ran throughout, forming into twisted roses – another recurring motif of the collection – while shroud-like tops, which cocooned models’ heads, added a Renaissance flair. Other familiar garments, particularly those particular to Rocha’s world, like the baby-doll dress or slip, had been ‘tucked and touched and pushed’: a lace-edge camisole appeared pulled off the shoulder and hung skewiff on the body, while gowns were ruched into jaunting ruffles – a reflection of the way Caravaggio was so adept at capturing fabric in motion. The occasion marked her first womenswear-only show in some time: earlier this summer, Rocha presented her first men’s standalone show at Pitti Uomo, which would usually be shown as part of the collection in London. Rocha said the shift allowed her new focus: ‘I wanted everything to feel a bit more personal,’ she said.

Erdem

Erdem has long been fascinated by historical figures who defied the gender norms of their era, leading to collections which cleverly meld masculine and feminine tropes, as well as an influence of historical dress. This season, it was Vander Clyde Broadway, who performed the high-wire trapeze as Barbette, his female alter-ego, in the 1920s and 1930s (only when he had performed the high-wire act did he remove his wig and reveal his gender; later, he became a muse to Jean Cocteau, who described him living between genders in the ‘supernatural sex of beauty’). It made for one of Erdem’s most liberated collections yet, swaying between masculine tailoring, nipped circus body suits, and showgirl feathers, before mixing up these elements into single looks: a mannish dinner jacket erupted into a lace and tulle bustle; military parkas sat over sweaters and embellished underwear; while other tuxedo jackets were underlaid with twists of satin and enormous feathers. What was most impressive, though, was the extent of craft that goes into each look: it is little wonder he is doing great business with bespoke creations – these pieces are a British alternative to haute couture.

Mulberry

Mulberry’s S/S 2027 marked a new chapter for Scottish designer Christopher Kane, who is the British heritage brand’s new creative director (he shuttered his own eponymous London label in 2023, much to the disappointment of his many fashion-world devotees). Speaking to Wallpaper*, he said this opening gambit was about creating a ‘streamlined, modern, and stripped-back’ vision of Mulberry, rooted in its codes of leather craft but not restrained by them. Two motifs came to the fore: one was the axe, which inspired the shape of narrow, blade-like handbags and the collection’s razor-sharp, unadorned line (he said he was thinking about the idea of a tree surgeon cutting away the extraneous to encourage growth; fittingly, the Mulberry symbol is also the Mulberry tree). Another was the construction of the flap of the Bayswater handbag – Mulberry’s most enduring and bestselling bag – which inspired the notched detailing on jackets, shirts and sweaters. Elsewhere, a supersized version of the Piccadilly bag looked particularly appealing, while footwear was adorned with Mulberry’s signature Postman’s Lock. ‘For me, heritage is a foundation, not a limitation,’ he said. ‘I want to write my own codes.’

READ: Christopher Kane debuts his ‘modern, streamlined’ vision for Mulberry

Roksanda

This season, Roksanda Ilinčić chose the rooftop of London’s National Theatre, a serene garden that caught the late-afternoon sun, to stage her latest runway show. The designer once again looked to a woman artist as a starting point: this season, Switzerland-born, New York-based textile artist Françoise Grossen, who is known for her twisting, braid-like sculptures. It set Ilinčić thinking about the idea of intimacy: ‘[her] rope is twisted, knotted, braided and transformed into sculptural forms, becoming a language for the collection: soft yet powerful, intimate yet monumental,’ she said. As such, these ideas became motifs in the collection: bags and shoes were adorned with raffia-like streamers, while tailoring was given shape with knotted detailing across its back (another fabric used throughout the collection appeared frayed and undone). Despite its more dramatic silhouettes – like a series of dresses which jutted out from the front of the waistline like a turned-around bustle – this collection also saw the introduction of a dedicated daywear line, including blousons, safari jackets, silk blouses and satin trousers, a clever counterpoint to her more outré designs.

Lovebirds

Last season, Indian label Raw Mango made its debut at London Fashion Week at Victoria’s Horticultural Hall; this season, it was the turn of wife-and-husband duo Gursi Singh and Amrita Khanna’s New Delhi-based label Lovebirds, who also chose the venue for their own London debut. And, while both labels are distinct in their design language, they share a desire to expand the preconceptions of what Indian fashion is: ‘It is not the India we are introducing to the world; it’s the India we already know. We are just looking at it through the contemporary fashion lens,’ says Khanna, who established the brand with Singh in 2014. One inspiration was the classic Indian chintz fabric, which was here ‘disrupted and re-layered’ and used – alongside handwoven silks, tussar, dupion and brocade – to make free-flowing shirts and breezy, oversized tailoring. These sat alongside clean-lined 1990s-style skirts, embroidered denim, blousons and vest tops, which encapsulated Lovebirds’ brand of ‘minimalism, precision and restraint.’

Burberry

‘Lived-in imperfection’ is how Daniel Lee described his latest collection for Burberry, which was shown in a purpose-built space at Chelsea College of Art and marked the final act of London Fashion Week (and by far the most star-studded of the week, with Skepta, Gemma Chan, Lila Moss, Fiona Shaw and Romeo Beckham all front row, while Central Cee walked the runway). Washed silk and cotton iterations of the signature trench coat were designed to feel ‘worn-in and loved’, as Lee described, while trompe l’oeil details evoked utility and military attire (a new exhibition at the V&A charts the history of the trench, which began as part of the uniform for the British Army). ‘This is classic Burberry utility made easy,’ he said.

The collection also featured a collaboration with textile designer Celia Birtwell, who sat front row. Known for her vivid prints which defined the 1960s and 1970s – as well as being a friend, muse and subject of David Hockney – she created a gingham version of the house’s signature check, as well as playful faces and florals designed to ‘bring joy’. It made for an uplifting collection from the British heritage house, which was enlivened with embellishment, like a series of coats adorned with colourful beaded and studded flowers. ‘Nothing is overly pressed or pristine,’ Lee said. ‘There’s an intentional imperfection: the idea of owning a piece, living in it.’

British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir has promised a renaissance of London Fashion Week under her leadership, wanting the city to become ‘the world’s laboratory for innovation and creative exchange’, as she told WWD earlier this year when outlining her vision for the institution. ‘If Paris is luxury and Milan is heritage, then London is creativity and innovation. It always has been. But it’s about telling that story in a more exciting way,’ she said.

Now overseeing her third edition of London Fashion Week, which begins today (17 September 2026), Weir has secured two major coups: the return of McQueen, which will show its latest collection under creative director Seán McGirr on Sunday 20 September (previously the brand has shown in Paris), and Mulberry’s first runway show since 2017, which will also mark the debut of lauded (and much beloved) Scottish designer Christopher Kane as creative director of the British heritage brand.

Though the rest of the S/S 2027 schedule feels equally upbeat: few designers have fallen away this season, while elsewhere a balance has been struck between the established (Burberry, Simone Rocha, Roksanda, Erdem and the like) and the emerging (Aaron Esh, Talia Byre, A Letter and Chopova Lowena will all show across the five-day schedule). In total, there will be 47 catwalk shows and 23 presentations, run under the banner of ‘a celebration of London fashion’.

‘This season marks an exciting moment for London Fashion Week, with the return of leading British brands alongside an exceptional new generation of creative talent,’ says Weir. ‘The schedule reflects the confidence and momentum of British fashion today, bringing together established houses, emerging designers and industry partners on a platform that continues to shape global fashion. Together, they reaffirm London's position as the global home of creativity and a catalyst for innovation, opportunity and growth.’

Read on for Wallpaper’s moments to look out for at London Fashion Week S/S 2027 (17–21 September 2026).

McQueen is back

Lee Alexander McQueen held some of his most memorable shows in London – ‘Highland Rape’ (A/W 1995) took place at the Natural History Museum, ‘Dante’ at Christ Church in Spitalfields (A/W 1996), and ‘Untitled/Golden Shower’ at a former bus depot close to Victoria station – though it would be Paris where the designer would end up presenting the majority of his collections. It has been a coup, then, for British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir to lure the British label, which is currently led by Irish creative director Seán McGirr, back to London Fashion Week (whether this is a permanent move remains to be seen). McGirr will show his S/S 2027 collection on Sunday evening (20 September 2026) at the historic Lincoln’s Inn, one of the four barristers’ Inns in central London.

Christopher Kane will debut at Mulberry

There was a collective outpouring of disappointment from the British fashion industry when Scottish designer Christopher Kane announced the closure of his eponymous London-based label in June 2023 – his runway shows, which ran as part of the city’s fashion week schedule since it was launched in 2006 with his sister Tammy, were both critically lauded and beloved among fashion insiders. This season, though, Kane will make his much-anticipated fashion return at the helm of British heritage brand Mulberry, which itself hasn’t held a physical runway show since 2017. So far, there is little hint of what to expect from the show: an intriguing Instagram teaser sees a mulberry squashed on a wooden plank. It will take place on Sunday 20 September at 3pm.

Fashion East has a new line-up

Lulu Kennedy’s Truman Brewery-based talent incubator, Fashion East, has helped launch the careers of some of the industry’s biggest names: among them Jonathan Anderson, Kim Jones, Grace Wales Bonner, Martine Rose and Craig Green. Each season, Kennedy chooses three designers to show on the runway, with each typically presenting with Fashion East for three seasons. For S/S 2027 – which will take place once again at Manor Place, a space created in collaboration between Palace (Wallpaper* October issue guest editors) and Nike – the line-up includes Jacek Gleba, who is now in his third season, Traiceline Pratt’s Goyagoma, which debuted last season, and new arrival Mé Mé by designer Mé Mé Yin, a graduate of Central Saint Martins with experience at Alexander McQueen and Maison Margiela. As ever, expect bold and singular collections from the trio of designers, who will take to the runway on Friday 18 September.

Indian label Lovebirds will make its debut

This past March, Wallpaper’s Dal Chodha travelled to Geoffrey Bawa’s home in Sri Lanka to see the latest resort collection from Indian label Lovebirds, which is helmed by Amrita Khanna and Gursi Singh (based in New Delhi, it has five stores across the country). ‘The collection – full of geometric patterns, dresses with rippled folds, shoulders cut away, floral patchwork and batik prints – had all the aesthetic attitude for which the brand is loved,’ said Chodha at the time. For S/S 2027, the brand is making its London debut, showing on the morning of Monday 21 September 2026 – the same slot that fellow Indian label Raw Mango showed last season, in their own debut at London Fashion Week. ‘People have opened up to see what’s coming from South Asia and there are more voices internationally too,’ says Singh.

Watch out for A Letter

Showing on the afternoon of 18 September at the Rose Easton Gallery, A Letter is one of the more intriguing young designers on the fashion week schedule this season. Previously known as Aletta, its designers Matt Empringham and Freddy Coomes bring plenty of pedigree: Empringham worked at Loewe under Jonathan Anderson, while Coomes also worked under Anderson, though at the Irish designer’s eponymous label, JW Anderson. Their work so far has mined a similar embrace of the surreal to that of their mentor: last season, at London’s White Cube Gallery, they presented a series of looks constructed from the paper used to make faux flowers. This season marks their first official runway show.

Burberry will celebrate the trench at the V&A

As well as showing Daniel Lee’s latest collection on Monday 21 September at an as-yet-undisclosed location, Burberry is also using fashion week to open its new exhibition at London’s V&A Museum. Titled ‘The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon’ (opening 21 September; free to the public), the concise exhibition offers a history of the British heritage brand’s most enduring export – from its roots on the battlefield to iterations under the house’s various creative directors, including Christopher Bailey, Riccardo Tisci and Daniel Lee. ‘The Burberry trench is a global design icon rooted in British craftsmanship and a symbol of innovation, creativity and timeless style,’ says Carly Eck, brand curator, Burberry. ‘In this special display, a myriad of objects from the brand’s archive will be publicly exhibited for the first time – from early 20th-century catalogues to a Burberry trench coat worn by fashion designer Hardy Amies. We are thrilled to partner with the V&A as a highlight of our global celebrations marking 170 years of the house.’

Each season, designers must grapple with fashion’s unique balance of pragmatism and fantasy – clothes you can wear, yes, but also those that can thrill, transport, excite. It is why, when it comes down to defining the trends and takeaways of a given season, juxtapositions can be found here, too.

Take, for example, this A/W 2026 season, which culminated this past week in Paris after stops in Milan, London and New York. On the one hand, there was a prevalence of black – a colour that suggests a certain seriousness, or sobriety – on the other, Muppets-bright faux fur and shearling dominated the runway, suggesting an altogether more liberated mood. The same could be said for what seemed to be the season’s defining garments, the slip dress and the tailored suit – both loaded with connotations – or the lived-in layers of Prada’s A/W 2026 collection versus the levity and romance of Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore ready-to-wear collection for Dior.

Here, Wallpaper* unpacks six of A/W 2026’s defining trends and takeaways – ones that begin to set a blueprint of how we might dress for the season ahead.

Layering ultra

Prada’s A/W 2026 show had a novel conceit: instead of the usual 40-or-so models, there were just 15, each wearing four looks in an impressive act of quick changing (such was the power of the illusion, when Bella Hadid appeared just a minute or so after she'd left the runway, I wondered if perhaps she had a secret twin). Largely, this was achieved by clever layering, with models stripping away garments to reveal what lay beneath – a metaphor, said co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, for the changing demands of a woman’s life. ‘As a woman, your life is layered – each day demands not only a shifting of clothes, but a richness of identities within yourself,’ said Mrs Prada of the collection, where an anorak might have been layered over a cocktail dress; an organza skirt removed to expose a pair of bloomers. ‘You make choices, you decide who you want to be.’

Indeed, it is a way of dressing that feels particularly attuned to the demands of contemporary life – not least the changing weather, which was in full display over fashion month (the early days of Paris Fashion Week were so warm for early March that the discarding of items of clothing was necessary). Aside from Prada, collections this season felt particularly richly layered: at Celine, polo-neck sweaters were worn beneath a silk shirt, which was in turn worn beneath an overcoat (Michael Rider added plenty of accessories to the collage, too, from belts and enormous scarves to blankets grasped in the hand) while at Acne Studios, blazers were insouciantly hung over the shoulder via the use of clever in-built straps (the idea of layering was enhanced by a pile-up of clashing checks). At Loewe, parkas were constructed with extra collars, hoods and shaggy shearling trims (some layers could even be inflated like beach lilos), while Rabanne, Chanel and Valentino favoured vivid amalgams of colour, embellishment and texture, often achieved through placing one garment over another. In the respective shows, it made for some bold looks, but one could imagine teasing these pieces apart and wearing them – or indeed layering them – with your own wardrobe.

Black out

It might seem trite to call black a trend: after all, this is a colour that never goes out of style (so much so, it is the colour all others are compared to – such and such is the new black). However, the prevalence of the hue on this season’s runway was noticeable – not least at Fendi, where Maria Grazia Chiuri embraced the colour for her first Fendi collection, presented in Milan. By our count, around three-quarters of the 81 looks were majority black, a stark departure from Silvia Venturini Fendi’s primary-hued S/S 2026 collection last season. Though it didn’t feel dour: instead, it allowed the collection to straddle both a uniform sleekness – lean tailoring, flight jackets, and the like – and something more sensual in textures of lace, silk and crepe. Part of the choice, she said, was a riposte to the kind of attention-grabbing collections she sees as becoming the norm. ‘I think we must be pragmatic,’ she said. ‘Fashion is not entertainment. Fashion is a job. I am that kind of designer.’

A similar mood was struck by Peter Copping at Lanvin, where the languid glamour of the 1920s and 1930s inspired sculpted tailoring and sinuous gowns, many in textures of black, from lustrous vinyl and silk to dramatic faux fur, while at Saint Laurent, a stream of black Le Smoking-inspired tailoring introduced Anthony Vaccarello’s femme fatale for the season. Balenciaga, Issey Miyake and Gucci also had large sections of black in their respective collections, though it was Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons who was most adamant about the colour’s creative – and indeed revolutionary – potential. This season, save for a short interlude in saccharine pink, the rest of the Japanese brand’s A/W 2026 collection was all-black. ‘I have come to realise that, after all, black is the colour for me,’ said the Japanese designer. ‘It’s just the strongest, the best for creation, and the colour that embodies the rebellious spirit. And has the biggest meaning: the universe and the black hole.’

Fun ‘fur’

Fashion has long revelled in its contradictions and, if black dominated several of the runways, a more colourful countercurrent ran alongside. There was the bold yellow floor at Loewe (and equally pop-hued collection); Matthieu Blazy’s lustrous metallic palette at a triumphant Chanel; or the bold flashes of electric blue hosiery at Jil Sander, where Simone Bellotti, in his sophomore collection, sought creative liberation and ‘abandon’. Bolder still, though, were the flashes of brightly hued faux fur and shearling – or indeed fabrics which mimicked their shaggy textures – which appeared throughout the season, lending a sense of play that my colleague Jason Hughes, Wallpaper* fashion & creative director, affectionately described as a ‘Muppets mood’.

So there were Louise Trotter’s bold, shaggy silhouettes at Bottega Veneta, constructed from various fabric innovations from pulled threads of silk (they evoked fur, or shearling), or high-pile velvet manipulated to look like astrakhan; Junya Watanabe’s collaged silhouettes, where alongside crunched-up Mylar blankets, curtains and licence plates were bold panels of soft toy-like faux fur; or Loewe, where degradé shearling was trimmed ‘in the same manner as poodle grooming’. These ‘fun furs’ made a case for dressing outside of your comfort zone, or simply giving your outfit – even if it is all-black – a single colourful (and fluffy) flourish.

Slip on

In our March 2026 Style Issue, we identified the slip dress as one of the S/S 2026 season’s defining garments, particularly those that recall 1990s minimalism. For A/W 2026, the garment returned to the fore, albeit reimagined in an unconventional manner. Take Loewe, for example, where nighties – like those you might find in a Marks & Spencer four-pack, complete with the tiny bow on the chest – were recreated in rubber, cleverly 3D-printed in various primary hues (for men, a version came as a top with long sleeves). The result was something playful and a little surreal – a reflection of the collection itself, which was defined by a feeling of experimentation. ‘For us, the act of making is, at its core, an expression of joy – an intellectual, process-driven pursuit charged with playfulness,’ said Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the American designers behind the collection.

A similar, if more overtly sensual, approach came at Saint Laurent, where Anthony Vaccarello constructed a series of garments from sheer lace coated in silicone (he talked about the technique giving ‘structure’ to the traditionally delicate material, with ‘fragility becoming force’). Meanwhile, at Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada also explored the juxtaposition of delicacy and toughness, something the deep-thinking designer said was inspired by the contrast between the ‘smallness of the body... and the vastness of the [world] which surrounds us’. The latter came in trapper hats, shearling-lined parkas and hefty, bubble-soled shoes; the former in a series of sheer organza slip dresses adorned with sequins, crystal embroidery and scalloped trimmings.

New romantic

Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore ready-to-wear collection took place in Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries, where a runway had been constructed around one of the circular fountains, its surface dotted with Monet-esque water lilies (or, at least, very real-looking reproductions). In the bright spring sunshine, it made for an idyllic scene, one backdropping a collection of romance and lightness, from Belle Époque ruffles and feather-trimmed outerwear to floral appliqué and bow adornment (completing the look were polka-dot pumps or shoes decorated with lily pads). ‘Dior has this giant past, and I had to start there,’ he said of the free-spirited mood. ’Now I feel free to release it from that.’

Throughout the season, designers mined this feeling of contemporary romance, defined by levity and play. At Matthieu Blazy’s own sophomore ready-to-wear collection for Chanel, looks were richly textured and adorned – from crystal flowers to golden butterflies, or the multitude of illusory tweeds and trompe l’oeil fabrics – though never felt heavy. Meanwhile, ruffles and lace became defining motifs, appearing everywhere from Alaïa (dropped-waist peplum dresses with layers of raw-edge ruffles) and Bottega Veneta (fronds of ruched fabric reminiscent of shearling that emerged from beneath tailored fabrics) to Simone Rocha, where sheer lace and organza were delicately embellished with crystals. One inspiration for her A/W 2026 collection was a fairytale from her native Ireland – Oisín and Niamh's journey to Tír na nÓg, the Celtic land of eternal youth and beauty.

Power move

The Saint Laurent show began with eight dark-coloured suits in a row: some double-breasted, others single, each with a sloped shoulder and narrowed – though not constricted – waistline. Anthony Vaccarello said it was about proposing a new power suit, one influenced by ‘severity of the 1970s and 1980s’ but with new fluidity and ease. ‘[They are not about] a clichéd projection of power,’ he said via the collection notes. ‘[But] a quiet and fluid conversation between the parameters of femininity and masculinity.’ Indeed, the show ended with his riff on Le Smoking, Yves Saint Laurent’s tuxedo cut for a woman’s body and one of his defining creations (it celebrates its 60th anniversary this year). Worn by model Loli Bahia, it was cut with the same fluid line as the opening looks – ‘the attitude more insouciant shrug than swagger’.

It was a season of great tailoring across the board, particularly in Paris. At Givenchy, Sarah Burton said reuniting with her tailoring team from Alexander McQueen had brought new sharpness to her suiting this season – there were some great blazers with cut-in lapels and gently sculpted waistlines – while the highlights of Copping’s Lanvin came in jackets with plisséd panels on the back, which gave a dramatic (though not restrictive) hourglass silhouette. If largely tailoring this season followed these contours (wide-shouldered; narrow-waist; fluid in construction), an opposition came in a more streamlined proposition from the likes of Fendi, where narrow suiting had a uniform feel, or Hermès, where contouring equstrian-inspired blazers recalled those worn for dressage competitions.

Earlier this week, hundreds of spherical glass containers lined the parquet floor of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Hall. Inside them lay tiny garlands of creamy mogra (jasmine) flowers. The vessels marked out the runway for Raw Mango’s debut on-schedule London Fashion Week show, ‘It’s Not About The Flower’ (on 23 February 2026). The contemporary Indian label, founded by textile designer Sanjay Garg in 2008, was invited this season by the British Fashion Council’s Laura Weir. Appointed as CEO of the organisation in January last year, during A/W 2026’s opening speech the previous Friday, she noted that over the past 12 months, the organisation had been working to reposition London Fashion Week as a platform for creative ‘global dialogue’, which is certainly broadened through the invitation of Raw Mango.

It’s a sentiment that Garg reiterates. ‘I do feel close to the city. London’s very cosmopolitan. On any given day, you can hear a dozen different languages being spoken on the street,’ he told Wallpaper* ahead of the show. He also explained that the subject of British imperialism doesn’t get swept under the rug. ‘People here don’t hold back, whether it’s conversations about the country’s colonial past or capitalist present. It is home to all of these perspectives, which conflict with each other. I think all of these resonate on some level with Raw Mango. There’s an imperfection to it, and I find that compelling,’ he said.

Raw Mango debuts at London Fashion Week

Garg also stresses that London had no impact on Raw Mango A/W 2026, either conceptually or technically. ‘We have presented in London before, and this show is a continuation of that journey,’ he said. ‘For me, a stage is a stage. Presenting in London is as good as presenting in Kanpur. At the end of the day, it is the work being presented that matters. And that doesn’t change according to who is viewing it, or where.’

Speaking to the ‘unripe and imperfect idea of beauty’, Raw Mango blends Garg’s own ‘curiosities’ with contemporary design and textile techniques, transcending centuries of Indian culture and heritage. Raised in the Rajasthani village of Mubarikpur before relocating to Chanderi, Madhya Pradesh, where he honed his textile design, the brand is now based in New Delhi. Though all that it does ‘begins at the weave’, melding contemporary design with yarns and artisanal textile techniques that transcend centuries of Indian culture and heritage. So, collaborations with 1,200 karigars (artisans) from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Varanasi remain at its heart.

Though often romanticised by western audiences, the flower garland is, as Garg says, ‘simple, utilitarian, and so familiar it almost exists within the subconscious of Indian visual culture.’ Accompanying the ‘It’s Not About The Flower’ collection was a pocket-sized photo book of the same title, which had been distributed to the A/W 2026 guests via their seats. ‘I haven’t seen a book that documents this tradition of the garland in the Indian subcontinent, so we just went ahead and did it,’ he says. ‘We commissioned various photographers who travelled the length and breadth of India, capturing the garland and its prevalence in our multiple cultures.’

Here, the garland is depicted in temples and churches; births, deaths, weddings and funerals all feature. ‘When someone buys a new car, they celebrate it with a garland,’ says Garg. If there’s an important occasion in the home, we place garlands on the doorway; and these garlands are not always just made of flowers – there are garlands of beads, banknotes, even spices and banana leaves. We wanted to celebrate the garland in the same way that garlands mark the importance of what holds meaning to us. It’s not about one individual flower; it’s about the plurality. The arrangement, instead of the singular disembodied motif. The weave and the structure, instead of the golden threads on the surface.’

According to Garg, this book is ‘a glimpse of a larger project’ yet to come. ‘Without getting into specifics, I can say we have a lot of things in the pipeline,’ concludes Garg. ‘Not all of them may be related to the “calendar” that fashion brands are expected to follow. We don’t follow a timeline or fashion seasons. Our work is a response to an internal pursuit: what excites us, what needs to be explored, what holds meaning. Some of the things coming up have been in development for years, and we can’t wait to share them with you.’

Read more of Wallpaper’s London Fashion Week A/W 2026 coverage here.

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For those in London, it is a familiar sight: landmarks sheathed from view in tarpaulin hoardings or edged with scaffolding, ready for months-long renovations and repair (memorably, Big Ben’s Elizabeth Tower was hidden away for five years, its spruced-up clockface revealed in full in 2022).

This evening at London’s Old Billingsgate Market, Daniel Lee played with the idea of a city ‘in construction’ for his latest Burberry show, presenting the A/W 2026 collection amid a recreation of London’s architecture – most notably, the recognisable neo-Gothic spires of Tower Bridge – deconstructed into toy-like blocks and wrapped in scaffolding. Across the rubber floor, resin puddles ‘echo London’s rain-soaked streets’, while low lighting and black velvet seating capture what Lee calls an ‘after dark’ mood.

A first look at Burberry’s ‘under construction’ A/W 2026 show set

Lee, who has been the house's creative director since 2022, said the show’s design reflects the distinctive energy of the city – one of ‘work-in-progress and constant evolution’. Indeed, the Yorkshire-born designer – who studied at London’s Central Saint Martins before roles at Phoebe Philo’s Celine and Bottega Veneta – has sought to put Britain’s creative energy and evolving traditions at the forefront of his vision for Burberry.

‘You walk down the street and you’re surrounded by people from so many walks of life, all living together,’ he said after his first runway show in February 2023. ‘There is great music here, great theatre, great art. I want to shine a light on those things and show a positive side of Britain to the world. That’s something I missed in recent years and that’s what I’m trying to celebrate.’

Over the course of his tenure so far, he has drawn inspiration from British music festivals and period dramas; collaborated with the Royal Ballet on costumes; worked with artist Gary Hume on the set for his S/S 2025 show at the National Theatre; as well as cast a slew of notable actors and musicians in his campaigns and runway shows (these have spanned Richard E. Grant, Skepta, Vanessa Redgrave, Mary Berry and Barry Keoghan, among several others). This evening’s show will mark the first time Burberry has shown at Old Billingsgate Market, which is a London landmark in its own right. Constructed in the 19th century on the banks of the Thames, it would go on to become the largest fish market in the world.

With the A/W 2026 collection itself – soundtracked on the runway by longtime collaborator, DJ Benji B – Lee says he wanted to capture the ‘ease with which Londoners put together an outfit’. The house’s trench will remain central, appearing in new deconstructed iterations and evolving into eveningwear, while a black and white palette, interspersed with rich inky blues and purples, ‘gives the effect of something a little more sophisticated, dressier, cleaner or sleeker’. ‘[The collection] returns Burberry to the city and to going out in a particularly London way,’ says Lee.

Follow our London Fashion Week coverage here.

Tomorrow marks the beginning of New York Fashion Week, which, in turn, heralds the start of a month-long A/W 2026 season of shows, with subsequent stops in London, Milan and Paris. It looks to be a season of (relative) calm: after 15 creative directors made their debut for S/S 2026, the coming weeks look set to see designers hone their visions as they settle into their roles (as such, A/W 2026 looks to be defined not by the ‘debut’, but the ‘sophomore’ show).

That said, the debuts continue, most notably in Milan, where Gucci will hold its first runway show under new creative director Demna (last season, as an introduction, he presented a short film starring Demi Moore and Edward Norton), Maria Grazia Chiuri will show her first collection for Fendi, and Meryll Rogge will debut at Marni. And those shows aside, the schedule across the month remains busy – not least in Paris, where an eight-day schedule cements the city’s status as the world’s style capital.

Here, on the eve of a new season in style, everything you need to know about Women’s Fashion Week A/W 2026.

New York Fashion Week (11–16 February)

A slight reshuffle of the New York Fashion Week schedule means that this season is front-loaded: on the opening day, three of the city’s biggest names – Proenza Schouler, Coach and Tory Burch – will all present their A/W 2026 collections, moving forward from their usual slots later in the week. Proenza Schouler will likely command the most attention: this season marks the runway debut of Jamaica-born, New York-based designer Rachel Scott as creative director, following a soft-launch presentation last season. She comes with plenty of experience: after roles at Costume National, Elizabeth and James and Rachel Comey, she founded her own label, Diotima, in 2020. She has since won the CFDA American Womenswear Designer of the Year in 2024 for her work at the brand, which held its first runway show last season to wide acclaim (it was one of Wallpaper’s highlights of the season). Alongside her new role at Proenza Schouler – where she takes over from founders Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez – she will continue to work on Diotima, showing her latest collection on Sunday.

Elsewhere, New York’s usual banner names return: Michael Kors will show on February 12, Calvin Klein on February 13, and Eckhaus Latta on February 14. Surrounding them are some brilliant rising names: we are big fans Zane Li’s fledgling label LII, which marries 1990s minimalism with architectural construction and a bold colour palette, while Ashlyn, led by Yohji Yamamoto alumnus Ashlynn Park, is evolving into one of New York’s most intriguing young labels with its reimagining of historical silhouettes and straddling of Japanese and Parisian codes (she recently won the 2025 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund). Other moments to watch out for are Nicholas Aburn’s sophomore show as creative director of Area, and the latest runway show from Khaite, which – if previous runway shows are anything to go by – will come with cinematic scenography conceived by founder Catherine Holstein and her architect husband Griffin Frazen.

London Fashion Week (19–23 February)

London Fashion Week seeks to continue the momentum built last season under new British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir. Proceedings begin on Thursday evening with the graduating class of Central Saint Martin MA program – long an incubator for fashion’s rising stars – while on a similar track, Fashion East will continue a two-decade-long tradition of showcasing a trio of on-the-rise designers (this season, Jacek Gleba and Louis Mayhew will return after their debuts for S/S 2026, joined by Traiceline Pratt’s GOYAGOMA). Other rising names on the schedule to look out for include Lucila Safdie, Selasi (the Ronan McKenzie-run label will hold its first on-schedule runway show) and Oscar Ouyang, while the more established Chopova Lowena and Talia Byre will both show their latest collection in a presentation format. Conner Ives, whose ode to the women of pop was one of last season’s highlights, will also show on the closing on Monday.

Elsewhere, expect shows from longtime London Fashion Week stalwarts: these include Simone Rocha and Erdem, while Roksanda is taking the season off to instead hold an intimate dinner with the BFC. There are some returning names, too: Julien Macdonald will bring his brand of typically outré glamour with a runway show on Saturday afternoon, while Joseph will host its first runway show under Mario Arena, who came to the British label in 2024 after stints at Nanushka and JW Anderson. Last but not least, Burberry will close out the week on Monday evening – expect the usual high-wattage happening with an eclectic star-packed front row.

Milan Fashion Week (24 February–1 March)

A new energy permeates Milan Fashion Week as Gucci makes a welcome return to the runway in its first show under new creative director Demna (if his Balenciaga shows were anything to go by, expect spectacle), while Fendi shakes off a period of flux as Maria Grazia Chiuri takes the helm of the Roman powerhouse (they will show on Friday and Wednesday respectively). Meanwhile, Belgian designer Meryll Rogge – who worked at Marc Jacobs and Dries Van Noten before starting her own eponymous label – will also make her debut as creative director of Marni, showing on Thursday evening.

Elsewhere, Milan continues to be dominated by its legacy names (the schedule is light on rising talent), which will host their usual blockbuster runway shows across the week. These include Giorgio Armani and Emporio Armani (the latter will be co-ed, having skipped Men’s Fashion Week), Max Mara, Tod’s, Ferragamo, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada – the latter long a barometer for the season’s trends – while at Jil Sander and Bottega Veneta, Simone Bellotti and Louise Trotter will show their sophomore collections after acclaimed debuts last season. We look forward to seeing their visions evolve.

Paris Fashion Week (2–10 March 2026)

As ever, Paris Fashion Week continues to dominate: a packed eight-day schedule cements its status as the world’s style capital. Though perhaps this season can be seen as one of relative calm – after the frenzy of big-name debuts last season, including Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Jonathan Anderson at Dior, A/W 2026 will see this new class of designers settle into their roles and hone their visions. Other designers hosting their sophomore ready-to-wear shows this season include Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier, Miguel Castro at Mugler, and Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe.

Elsewhere, expect the usual line-up of the Paris’ storied houses – among them Louis Vuitton, Givenchy and Celine – alongside those who travel to the city each season, including the Japanese avant-garde (among them Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Issey Miyake and Noir Kei Ninomiya) and a slew of international labels, from Miu Miu and Stella McCartney to McQueen. Meanwhile, an energetic and eclectic line-up of younger designers completes the schedule, including Julie Kegels, Hodakova, Vaquera, Matières Fécale and Niccolò Pasqualetti.

The S/S 2026 season will likely take some time to metabolise. It was fashion’s changing of the guard moment – no less than 14 designers presented debut collections as the newly installed creative directors of the industry’s biggest brands – and with this seismic shake-up came a feeling of noise. Strident social-media comments; opinions formed in moments; debates as to what constitutes the essence of a particular fashion house, and whether this or that designer captured it – lines were well and truly drawn. Duran Lantink’s divisive opening act for Jean Paul Gaultier on Sunday afternoon became something of a lightning rod: drawing ire from social-media users, it prompted questions as to how we engage with fashion online.

‘I have read some really heinous comments about the work of many designers in these last few days,’ said Edward Buchanan, former design director of Bottega Veneta and the Milan Fashion Director for Perfect magazine, in a much-reshared Instagram post. ‘I am a designer and I know that these creatives work hard to get these collections out. It is not always perfect, and it is not always what you personally imagined it to be. You don’t have to like everything... Why not celebrate and talk about what you love?’

Fashion week S/S 2026: the key takeaways

It was why the finale of Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel debut on Monday evening felt joyful not only for the model Awar Odhiang twirling across the runway to the sounds of ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’ in a gown that descended into thousands of colourful chiffon feathers, but the fact that a weight felt like it had been lifted. Save for a handful of exceptions (Fendi is yet to announce its new creative leadership), that final debut meant that the line-up of designers at fashion’s major houses is set, and likely for some time – no more speculation or gossip, hearsay or rumour. Now, after their opening gambits, these designers must be left to hone their vision – after all, a debut is only the beginning.

Despite this, it has been a strong season of shows, with plenty of big, bold ideas sitting alongside propositions for a real-world wardrobe. There is no doubt that this new class of designers have brought with them a fresh energy: thematically, the idea of freedom emerged again and again, of dressing on your own terms. It's why this season’s trends feel equally liberated – designers gave into romance (albeit rewritten in distinctly modern terms), were unrestrained in their use of colour, and created distinctive silhouettes to match (from the ultra-streamlined to the panniered).

Here, we break down the trends and takeaways from the S/S 2026 shows, which concluded earlier this week in Paris.

The idea of freedom was on designer’s minds

A feeling of eclecticism has run through recent Prada collections, seeing co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons favour the bold and intuitive over strict thematics – a response, they say, to the uncertain, algorithmic times in which we live. This season, they talked about wanting to liberate clothing from ‘hierarchies’, shuffling simple workwear uniforms – a longtime Prada inspiration point – with colourful flourishes of eveningwear, from ballooning taffeta skirts to opera gloves. The result, said the pair, was a ‘new elegance’ – unconventional, instinctual, free. ‘In the combination of the different elements, in this idea of composition, there is a choice and freedom, authority and agency for the woman wearing them,’ said Mrs Prada. ‘It is fashion that is connected inherently to the world, with a meaning and usefulness. How to face the world, and how to survive.’

Again and again, the idea of sartorial freedom appeared in this season’s collections: at Ferragamo, Maximilian Davis channelled the liberatory dress codes of the 1920s (‘this was a moment where women were creating a new femininity... it was a celebration of freedom, a reclaiming of self’) while at Bottega Veneta, Louise Trotter’s debut collection looked towards Laura Braggion, Bottega Veneta’s first female creative lead, in its expressive use of colour and texture (as young woman, she was a part of Andy Warhol’s Factory). ‘I was imagining her journey – her freedom of being an Italian woman, an archetypal Italian woman, moving to New York,’ she said post-show. ‘It was a liberation for her. And that's really what I wanted to capture – a feeling of liberation.’

A similar mood was struck at Chanel (Matthieu Blazy was inspired by the ‘modernity and freedom’ of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel’s designs), Loewe (the collection’s bold, graphic line drew on the work of artist Ellsworth Kelly) and Hermès (titled ’Free Rein’, Nadège Vanhée referenced the untethered wild horses of Carmague). Through it all, there was an invitation to dress on your own terms, and without restraint.

Kaleidoscopic colour ran throughout

With this exploration of freedom came an equally liberated use of colour, as designers embraced bold, unapologetic hues in what was the most colourful fashion season in some time – a response, perhaps, to the feeling of bleakness elsewhere. This was a trend not restrained to a single city: in New York, Rachel Scott made a powerful impression with a debut runway show for her label Diotima which drew on the energetic spirit of carnival – a vivid, painterly palette spanned bright red, sky blue and cerise across anemone-like ruffles and tassel flourishes – while London saw colour-saturated outings from Erdem, Talia Byre and Burberry (a hot pink whipstitched leather jacket provided the latter’s closing look, with creative director Daniel Lee looking towards the dress codes of 1960s and 70s musicians).

As the season continued, a more graphic use of colour emerged: Simone Bellotti’s debut collection for Jil Sander featured bold primary hues of red and blue throughout; when viewed against the crisp white walls of Jil Sander’s Milanese HQ, they took on the feel of contemporary artworks. At Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s debut for Loewe, a work by Ellsworth Kelly set the tone: hanging in the entranceway of the showspace, Yellow Panel with Red Curve (1989) inspired the ‘chromatic intensity’ of the collection (zingy hues of yellow, electric blue and orange featured throughout). Stripes also appeared in the former Proenza Schouler designers’ collection, another recurring motif through the season, like at Dries Van Noten, where Julian Klausner – already proving himself as much of a master colourist as the label’s eponymous founder – presented a vivid collage of print and colour, from bold yellow stripes to abstracted polka dots, spirals and harlequin diamonds, blown up is size.

Designers evoked the time-worn and well-loved

The idea of inheritance was unsurprisingly on the mind of Matthieu Blazy at Chanel – after all, his debut for the house sees him take on the legacy of not one but two fashion greats: Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld. Originally inspired by the love affair between Gabrielle Chanel and British polo player Boy Capel, and the way she would borrow his jackets and shirts, the idea of passing garments between people – or indeed through generations – was one of the throughlines of the collection. That, he said, is the luxury of a house like Chanel, ‘the worn familiarity of the truly chic, items feel passed down and utilised,’ as he described. In the collection, this was figured in garments which appeared to be unravelling at their edges (the hanging ‘threads’ were actually minuscule strings of beads), while the 2.55 quilted handbag had been cleverly manipulated to appear battered and worn.

Indeed, the idea of the time-worn and well-loved run through the season: at Tory Burch in New York, cardigans seemed to be disintegrating at the sleeves, while other garments were purposely crumpled and creased. ‘I wanted something familiar and worn, but uber-chic and elevated,‘ she said after the show, noting that such fabric manipulation took months of experimentation despite their illusion of ease. At Coach, garments were weathered and worn – creative director Stuart Vevers said he was inspired by seeing vintage, decades-old Coach bags carried by young people on New York’s streets – while at Loewe, some of the more washed-out hues looked to reference fabric left out too long in the sun.

There was a mood of modern romance

Taking place at the Louvre Palace, the opulent summer apartments of Anne of Austria, Queen of France provided the backdrop for Nicolas Ghesquière’s latest collection for Louis Vuitton, an attempt to capture ‘the boundless freedom of the private sphere’. In its evocation of nightwear and lingerie – as well as flourishes of beaded floral embroidery, satin ruffles and enormous bows – the era-traversing collection captured a mood of romance that ran through the season, one which was influenced by history but distinctly modern in construction and anything but saccharine.

At his debut womenswear show for Dior, Jonathan Anderson evoked the pannier waistline – another surprising trend of the season, particularly as it coincided with the opening of ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at the V&A – as well as bows, lace necklines and shoes adorned with twisting satin roses. The Irish designer said he was interested in the ‘tension’ between fantasy and reality: ‘past converses with the present, the bold with the calm, the grand with the commonplace,’ he said. Similar juxtapositions ran through Simone Rocha’s S/S 2026 collection in London, a designer who has long contrasted sweetness and subversion. Her crinoline skirts were purposely skewiff; ruffled-edge bags were shaped like pillows, while panels of clear vinyl sat atop delicate silk gowns.

Meanwhile, at Givenchy, Sarah Burton rallied against the idea that power dressing for women means simply donning a man’s suit. Instead, she sought to find authority in the feminine, from pearl-adorned bra tops to frilled mini dresses which flared like tutus. ‘I was looking at female power,’ she said. ’And how to empower women through archetypes of the feminine, an iconography of the female.’

Bold silhouettes signalled new chapters

Like this season’s prismatic palette, designers were equally expressive when it came to shape and form: spanning the playful, the sculptural and the streamlined, silhouettes echoed the month’s liberated spirit. There were Nicholas Aburn’s bold party dresses at Area, constructed from blown-up streamers, enormous pailettes or a shaggy mass of glimmering tinsel (such was their size, they transformed the proportions of the body); Louise Trotter’s undulating fibreglass tops and dresses at Bottega Veneta; or the hiked up shoulder line of Satoshi Kondo’s latest collection for Issey Miyake (the Japanese designer said he imagined the garments having a conscious of their own).

Contemporary riffs on pannier waistlines and crinoles ran through the season, including at Alaïa, where Pieter Mulier continues to define a powerful vision of womanhood with an eye to the contours of the body. ‘This collection is reduced, sculptural. Precise. Yet there is also an extremity to it, in heightened colours, bold shapes. Uncompromising,’ he said. Perhaps most extreme, though, were the bold forms of Duran Lantink’s Jean Paul Gaultier debut – like in his collections for his (currently paused) eponymous label, garments were exaggerated into almost cartoon-like proportions, riffing on the house’s signatures, from the sailor hat to trompe l’oeil prints. They may not have been for everyone, but in their audaciousness, they captured S/S 2026’s mood of abandon.

It’s been a rollercoaster of a fashion season, which concluded with the final day of Paris Fashion Week yesterday. An unprecedented number of debuts took place at fashion’s biggest houses – so many that it was, at times, hard to keep track – from Jonathan Anderson’s fantasy-inflected first take on the Dior woman to Matthieu Blazy’s joyful start at Chanel. With these blockbuster moments dominating much of the airtime, some intriguing displays from independent brands may have flown under the radar – from beautiful imagery to bookshop takeovers, museum displays and travels across the pond, these talented designers are doing things their own way.

Here, we select the best collections you might have missed from the S/S 2026 season.

Stefan Cooke

Stefan Cooke and Jake Burt have taken pleasure in doing things their own way over the past few seasons, opting to host relaxed gatherings rather than get caught up in the stress of producing runway shows. Last season, they invited friends, editors (and pets) to Burt’s east London shop, Jake’s, to try on pieces from their A/W 2025 collection. Amid jumper-swapping and chatter, an enormous cake by baker Louis Thompson provided a convivial centrepiece. This season, the pair took over Tenderbooks on Cecil Court, presenting their S/S 2026 collection with a newspaper-style lookbook and window display shot by Angus Williams. There was no cake this time, but generously filled ice buckets of beer (Thompson, however, did make an appearance as a model in the lookbook). The collection itself saw the pair’s unmistakable wardrobe take on skin-baring, thrown-together configurations – men in ecru trenches paired with tracksuit bottoms and ballet flats; women in chainmail mini-dresses and glam-rock boots, drop-waist pleats and chevron-detailed cinched jerseys. It made for an off-kilter but easy offering from two designers who somehow just get better season after season.

Lucila Safdie

Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2021, Argentina-born Lucila Safdie has used her brand to explore various ideas of girlhood, drawing upon the worlds of cinema, literature and Tumblr to craft clothes that skew saccharine fantasies with the wearable edge of the real women in her life. While most young designers are caught up in personal fantasies, already Safdie has grounded herself in a community – outside of the studio, she hosts a well-attended monthly film club, screening features that have inspired her world.

This season marked Safdie’s first appearance on the London Fashion Week calendar, and she used the opportunity to do something quite unusual. Inviting editors to the Soho Review gallery, the designer staged a teen bedroom scene where her models – impervious to their visitors, as teenagers so often are – lounged on beds and tried on her S/S 2026 designs in mirrors. The collection used Helen Rappaport’s book The Romanov Sisters as a starting point, translating its tragic tale into a 2010-coded wardrobe that brought together Peter Pan-collared jersey polos, frill-edged shorts and cut-out cotton dresses in girly hues of pink, white and grey. It was a clever and distinctive introduction to the designer’s world, marking the arrival of an intriguing new storyteller in the city. We’re looking forward to seeing what she does next.

16Arlington

Marco Capaldo enjoyed a season off the schedule, turning up to cheer on friends at their displays instead (the designer attended Chopova Lowena and Conner Ives in support). Presenting his S/S 2026 collection with a sleek, pared-back lookbook circulated online, this season Capaldo was thinking about an ineffable quality of glamour that stretches through decades. 1920s lingerie, 1940s sleepwear, 1970s shirting and 1990s pencil skirts formed the framework of his collection, creating points of intrigue through an assemblage of tactile textures and embellishments – from a delicate brown feather trim floating from oversized trench coats to a dress formed of glimmering strands of sequins. These were clothes, said the brand, ‘made to be worn; to be seen in movement; to be enjoyed’.

Federico Cina

Italian designer Federico Cina named his S/S 2026 collection ‘Sottovoce’ – meaning to speak in a low or hushed tone. In keeping with the word’s dulcet spirit, he chose to forgo the circus of a runway show for something quieter during Milan Fashion Week. Inviting guests to Fondazione Sozzani, the designer created a ‘silent landscape’ where models gently embraced before paper backdrops, while others interacted with the cool blue set, slipping their arms into paper jackets affixed to the walls. The clothes themselves explored ideas of fragility and structure through workwear silhouettes and crisp tailoring in a palette of blue, white and grey, inspired by the muted paintings of Bologna-born artist Giorgio Morandi. The soothing presentation, said Cina, was about pausing to contemplate what it means to ‘inhabit a place, a body, a garment, the world’.

Vaquera

Over the past decade, Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee have established Vaquera as one of the most original forces in New York’s fashion scene. As the brand turned ten, they promptly upped sticks to Paris – keen, it would seem, on retaining their underdog status. This season, they were thinking about ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste, presenting a cast of unruly, expressively dressed characters in an intimate showspace covered in draped curtains.

Proposing the idea that there’s a right place and time to wear anything, this season their typically berserk wardrobe mixed up romantic 18th century dress, square-shouldered two-piece sets of an 1980s bent, and surreal patchworked lingerie, worn with sneakers that were the product of a new collaboration with Nike – a sign of the ever-rising popularity of their witty, anti-glam aesthetic.

‘We moved to Paris this summer – iconically the centre of “good taste”,’ said the pair. ‘But what does that mean? When you start to see the world through our lens, you realise that these categories don’t exist… We are always examining why we are still doing this brand after so many years. The answer we always come back to is joy.’

Hodakova

Ellen Hodakova Larsson has hit her stride. ​​Marking her second Paris display since winning the LVMH Prize last year, the Swedish designer showed her S/S 2026 collection in the stony 1992 extension wing of the Musée Bourdelle. This season, as ever, saw a merging of stories from the designer's rural upbringing with scattered references of personal artistic intrigue. Using an array of salvaged materials from Swedish small towns (vintage bed linens, leather furniture covers, and umbrella boning), the collection looked to three different makers for inspiration – Donatello’s 1440 woodwork of Mary Magdalene, the architectural metalwork of sculptor Claes Oldenburg, and the heritage thatch work of Joar Nilsson, who helped her make several of the collection’s straw-woven pieces. From this melting pot, a highly original wardrobe emerged, spanning bulbous outerwear in heavy leather, furry shapes that recalled mittens, and her first experiments with shoes, which arrived in rounded, toe-capped shapes with sturdy wooden heels. It made for a rich, textural study in form and material – and yet another glimpse into Larsson’s endlessly interesting world.

August Barron

Shown at Gare des Mines in Paris, August Barron’s S/S 2026 collection marked a new era for Bror August Vestbø and Benjamin Barron – their first since rebranding from All-In to a portmanteau of their names, and a new chapter across the pond in Paris (where they’ve been based for less than a year).

The collection continued the duo’s signature approach to character dressing, this time channelling the suburban housewife of 1950s America through a lens of ‘subversion and desire’. Inspired by Japanese bondage magazines in which women’s clothing appears caught mid-undress, garments were suspended in moments of ‘tension and release’ – shirts and cardigans lifted and frozen above the chest, double-layered hoodies revealing lace bras beneath, and dresses twisting across the body as zippers sliced through midriffs.

Styled by longtime collaborator Lotta Volkova, the show saw models – including photographer Petra Collins – bounce animatedly through the space, ruffling the heads of onlookers on the front row. August Barron might have moved on from All-In, but their irreverent spirit, evidently, remains intact.

Much has been made of the ‘Great Fashion Reshuffle’ this past season, which saw as many as 14 creative directors debut their first collections at some of the industry’s biggest houses. While the clothes were, of course, the main attraction, the S/S 2026 shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris also counted a number of striking beauty moments among them.

Notably, this season pointed to shifts that are happening in beauty and fashion more generally, as the line between the two industries continues to blur and many fashion brands are branching beyond the traditional categories of make-up and hair to explore how fragrance, skincare and wellness can create novel new experiences of their clothes, both on the runways and off.

The best unconventional beauty moments of S/S 2026

For the most part, the beauty looks this season were kept relatively simple, with minimally made-up faces and slicked-back or classically blown-out tresses dominating the runways. There were a few notable exceptions: Rick Owens complemented his operatically gothic designs with eerie black contact lenses, while Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela outfitted models in logo mouthpieces that gave them a root-canal-ready appearance.

At Alaïa, Pieter Mulier combined his fluid designs with cascading, knotted hair extensions, while The Row featured sinuous up-dos held together with various combs. Meanwhile the unabashed sensuality of Haider Ackermann’s S/S 2026 collection for Tom Ford featured lacquered lips in different colours, designed by make-up artist Lucy Bridgeto match the runway floor. Not long after the show, Bridge was announced as the brand's first-ever global make-up artist, a fitting move for both Bridge and the brand, who share a penchant for opulent, cinematic glamour.

One wonders whether the appointment marks a new era for Tom Ford Beauty, which set a new standard for luxury in the industry when it launched in the early 2000s with lipsticks that cost a then unheard of $50 and the launch ‘Black Orchid’, a now-iconic fragrance made from one of the darkest, most elusive flowers on earth (and which was recently the subject of a new campaign starring Tilda Swinton). The brand’s shock factor when it comes to beauty has since mellowed, but with Bridge and Ackermann at its helm, could this now change? It will need to, if Tom Ford Beauty wants to stand out in a market that in the past five years alone has become saturated with new lines from luxury houses, including Hermès, Prada, Dries Van Noten, Celine, Rabanne and, most recently, Louis Vuitton.

The proliferation of beauty brands by fashion houses is a testament to the increasingly symbiotic relationship between the two industries, and this season proved that that relationship is poised to grow even closer. The most notable example of this is the launch of Coperni’s C+ line, a collection of skincare-infused activewear that is designed to deliver a blend of probiotics and prebiotics to the wearer. ‘We are rethinking the connection between clothing and the body,’ said designers Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer in a press release. ‘Beyond covering, protecting or expressing, garments can now care for, nourish, and support the body where it feels most alive. That vision gave birth to carewear: a new category of clothing with a new role to play.’

Whether skincare-infused clothing will take off is yet to be seen (although the success of Skims’ ‘collagen yarn’ face mask suggests it might), but New York brand Eckhaus Latta also incorporated skincare into its latest collection, with models walking down the runway in limited-edition eye masks designed by skincare brand Dieux.

When it came to fragrance, Vaquera released a scent designed with Comme des Garçons Parfums a few days before its Paris show. The brand's first fragrance is 'a scent that feels like a perfume you once knew, then forgot, and have just stumbled upon in the back of a clearance shelf'. Designed to evoke the feeling of being young in the 1990s-early 2000s, it recreates the scent of perfume ads in 1990s fashion magazines, the scent of freshly shampooed hair, and ‘the secret of your childhood car’s air conditioning’.

London-based brand Chopova Lowena pumped its runway with a rotation of its three fragrances, which it launched earlier this year, adding to the high-energy atmosphere of the show’s cheerleader-inspired collection. Its designers are certainly not the first to incorporate fragrance into their collections – Willy Chavarria perfumed Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse with Parfums de Marly’s Haltane fragrance for his A/W 2024 collection and Demna frequently tapped scent artist Sissel Tolaas to perfume Balenciaga's shows when he was still creative director of the house (including a scent of antiseptic, blood, money and petrol for its S/S 2020 show).

For his first show at Gucci this season, however, Demna played with beauty in a different way, spoofing wellness culture in The Tiger, a film that accompanied the collection and saw stars Demi Moore, Edward Norton and more falling down a psychedelic wormhole after taking a ‘homopathic, collagen-based root-infused vitamin tincture’.

Unlike with fashion, runway shows these days hold little sway when it comes to the beauty trends we see on the street. Beauty’s trend arbiters tend to be celebrities and influencers, and while certain beauty moments can go viral (cue Pat McGrath’s glassy skin for Maison Margiela), the beauty looks that stand out from the shows tend not to seep into the culture at large (McGrath’s at-home glassy skin mask did not find wide commercial success).

This season, however, hinted that the relationship between beauty trends and the runway might be changing. Not because fashion brands are presenting make-up and hair looks that people want to recreate at home, but because they are finding novel ways to bring other aspects of the industry – namely skincare – to the public and using fragrance to amplify the experience of their clothes. As wearable wellness becomes increasingly popular, it will be interesting to see if major fashion houses start incorporating developments in skincare, fragrance, and wellness into their collections moving forward, dissolving the line between what we typically think of as beauty and fashion.

It’s three days out from Paolo Carzana’s London Fashion Week show, and his studio above the meat markets of Smithfield, Farringdon, is a hive of activity. Stylist Patricia Villirillo has arrived to begin assembling looks from rails of pigmented pieces, interns are hand-sewing garments on messy tables, and the designer’s partner Joseph Rigby has decamped from his Sarabande Foundation studio to join the effort. ‘As much as I put everything into these collections, what I would like to imagine as magic really does come from the team around me,’ says the shy Welsh designer, who is sat across from me in a track jacket with a piece of silk tied around his head, his fingers stained from hours of working with natural dyes. ‘I’d feel lost without them.’

It’s a humble remark from one of London’s most singular rising design talents, whose emotive shows have become many editors’ most anticipated of fashion week. Last season, he chose the gothic – and, legend has it, haunted – 18th-century pub The Holy Tavern around the corner from his studio, which he first stumbled into two years ago to celebrate gaining the support of the Paul Smith Foundation. The season before, he moved several people to tears with a poetic display in the back garden of his Hackney flat, the first place in London that truly felt like home to him, after a chaotic period living in social housing in a former nurse’s accommodation. On Sunday evening, in the hushed rare-books reading rooms of the British Library, his S/S 2026 show managed to feel every bit as personal and intimate despite the imposing architecture of the building.

Paolo Carzana stages emotional display in the reading rooms of the British Library

Guests instinctively lowered their voices to whispers as they trickled into the vast library, taking seats at rows of desks surrounded by wood-panelled bookcases before a rousing score from David Attenborough’s new ocean documentary broke the silence. Then in came Carzana’s cast of characters, walking in a procession of delicately constructed silhouettes that only he could have made. Moving through a rainbow of mottled colours achieved with natural dyes derived from vegetables, flowers and spices, ornate pieces in pea silk and organic cotton merged 19th-century dress with forms drawn from Carzana’s own imagination: wizard-sleeved cascading tailoring, tattered pirate culottes with deconstructed blouses, and gauzy bias-cut dresses that floated from the body like jellyfish tendrils. Theatrical yet from the heart, these were clothes not made for buyers’ linesheets or the rush of social media likes, but for the pure love of Carzana’s craft.

As ever with the sensitive designer, the story the collection tells grapples with some big ideas. Following a trilogy of collections exploring the elemental powers of the planet – culminating last season in a fiery narrative of dragons and purgatory – this new chapter, he tells me in the studio, was about the supernatural. ‘I became obsessed with the idea of exploring the supernatural, and by that I don’t mean aliens,’ he explains. ‘I was thinking about really beautiful, extinct and endangered animals that we've lost. I wanted to explore the idea of Mother Earth being the genius and humanity being the monster. The idea is that we travel back from the sixth extinction to a time where the Earth can still taste salt, smell basil, and feel fire.’

Behind him in the studio, these otherworldly creatures are tacked up on a moodboard alongside faded lithographs of Victorian women by Welsh artist Albert de Belleroche, another point of inspiration this season. From impossibly blue lizards, monster-like amphibians, and regal tropical birds, Carzana points to an armadillo-like animal called the pangolin, to which the collection is dedicated. ‘It’s the most trafficked mammal in the world,’ he says. ‘Its only means of protection from poachers is to curl up into a ball. I’m obsessed with the beauty and the fragility of the animal, and how it's basically at the mercy of humanity. I get really emotional thinking about the fact that we will be the reason there'll be the last pangolin on Earth. That’s devastating.’

A love letter to the supernatural beauty of these animals, and an elegy to the ones we have pushed to extinction, comes through in special attention to this collection’s colours. Carzana is a lifelong vegan, priding himself on using only natural materials and dying techniques of ages past. This season, a finessing of his process allowed for a new kind of brilliance in the colours, which ranged from deep indigos to verdant mossy greens, blushing pinks and burnt oranges. Using mordants like cream of tartar, vinegar and sea salt to intensify some shades, dappling others with naturally water-resistant soy wax, the result was a palette that felt alive with an unreal kind of nature. ‘Every fabric, every thread, every button, every colour, has come from the earth,’ says the designer of the pieces. ‘I think that's very rare.’

Carzana usually conducts his research by trawling through archives and antique markets like Portobello, but this season he learnt about the endangered animals in the very location of the show itself – the rare-book reading rooms of the British Library. Though initially resistant to such a large venue, it felt fitting after the British Council invited him to host its annual fashion design competition, for which students create collections inspired by the library’s archives. ‘The British Council enabled my education with a scholarship, so the ability to hopefully inspire students with the project is something close to my heart,’ he says, adding that when he learnt the building (completed in 1997 after many years in progress) was designed by architect Sir Colin St John Wilson to resemble a naval ship, it became the perfect setting. ‘The reading room is a quiet space where there’s no talking, basically like being at the bottom of the ocean. I want to transform it to feel like an underwater world away from [what we experience], where the colours are beyond our imagination.’

Rather than a sanctimonious or self-righteous demand for us to save the planet, with these clothes, Carzana offers an invitation for us to recognise the unbelievable splendour of nature – making a quiet, purposeful plea to preserve what is left. ‘The idea was that you walk into the room and find yourself in a really special place that serves the public,’ he says. ‘Without ever telling anyone what to do, it's like an offering: look at the power of what we have. I feel like the last few collections, I've been working in this way, but I don't think I really understood what I was doing. This time it feels really clear.’

The authenticity of this message was evident in the room, as guests rose from their seats to applaud the designer at the show’s close; he seemed visibly surprised by the effusive reception. ‘It’s unbelievable that people say such wonderful things,’ he says, back in the studio, when I remark how much people love his shows. ‘It sounds like such a cliché, but I feel like I don’t particularly fit in. My idea of what fashion is, and what it means, is perhaps quite different from the industry at large. To me, it’s meaningful, powerful, and completely unfrivolous. I've had such amazing support that has enabled me to build, and I just hope to keep growing something with real value.’

Catch up on the standout shows of London Fashion Week S/S 2026 here.

London Fashion Week (LFW) arrived in the midst of an upgrade: Laura Weir, new CEO of the British Fashion Council (BFC) – the organising body that hosts the event each season – has promised to reshape the country’s fashion landscape, with equality at the fore. Coming from a publishing background (she was editor of London-based ES magazine for some years), an opening manifesto presented at the Serpentine earlier this summer saw her call for waived fees for designers to show at LFW (‘fashion week is a valuable piece of national IP and our shop window for what creative Britain looks like’), increased scholarships and funds for young designer businesses, and doubling an international guest programme to get more attendees to the event each season. ‘Fashion is not just about shows and clothes. Fashion gives us a preview of society’s next chapter. It’s time to write a new story together,‘ she concluded.

Weir presided over a schedule that – as ever – captured London’s unique and energetic mix of established and emerging talent. In the former camp, alongside the city’s creative stalwarts such as Simone Rocha, Erdem and Roksanda, all entering their second decades in business, is Burberry, which held a blockbuster show on the closing Monday evening (22 September, taking over Perks Field in Kensington Palace), while Jonathan Anderson hosted a special dinner at The Ritz to celebrate the relaunch of his eponymous label on Friday (19 September). In the latter camp is a raft of on-the-rise talent, from fledgling names such as Oscar Ouyang to those gaining traction, like Talia Byre, Aaron Esh and Conner Ives, who presented their S/S 2026 collections across the week.

Here, reporting from London, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss and contributing fashion writer Orla Brennan picked LFW’s standout shows – as they happened.

Burberry

Burberry provided London Fashion Week’s closing act yesterday evening, taking over Perks Field in the grounds of Kensington Palace – a location the British house hasn’t shown at for a decade, when it was led by Christopher Bailey. The setting was a vast gabardine tent, its fabric a nod to the pioneering weather-proof material founder Thomas Burberry created in the 19th century, part of the house’s roots in outfitting the era’s adventurous explorers and aviators. Inside, the fabric was printed with a blue, cloud-strewn sky; creative director Daniel Lee said he wanted to evoke a hazy British summer, a counterpoint to the windswept country escapes of last season.

The idea of a British summer led the Yorkshire-born designer towards music: after all, the festival is as much a part of summertime culture in the United Kingdom as the more traditional pursuits of boating, tennis or horseriding with which Burberry was once synonymous. Music is also arguably Britain’s greatest cultural export: the recent blockbuster tours of Oasis and Coldplay are proof of its worldwide capital, while the front row at the show showed a breadth of the country’s musical talent (from Elton John to Raye, Skepta and Loyle Carner). Lee also noted that the upcoming Beatles movie had inspired the narrow silhouettes of tailoring for men this season, though the crochet bra tops, tasselled outerwear and abbreviated tunic dresses also recalled the 1960s (Twiggy was another guest, sat alongside her Absolutely Fabulous co-stars Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley).

It made for a colourful outing: there were hot-pink leather jackets and vibrantly-hued versions of the Burberry check, while the trench coat was imagined in coated denim. A sense of eclectism also ran throughout – from beaded fabrications to python print and checkered chainmail – which Lee said was inspired by the uninhibited style of musicians, past and present. ‘Music is about self-expression, originality and belonging,’ he said. ‘Musicians have always been pioneers – fearless in the way they dress and sound. [It’s] a legacy you’ll see in the looks, cast and styling.’ Jack Moss

READ: A first look at Burberry’s S/S 2026 show set, which takes over Perks Field in Kensington Palace

Conner Ives

Conner Ives’ S/S 2026 collection was an unabashed homage to the women of pop, from those who featured on the soundtrack – Uffie (‘Pop the Glock’), Robyn (‘Dancing on my Own’) – to Lady Gaga, whose face appeared on the T-shirt the American designer wore for his closing bow (taken from her candy-pink Viva Glam campaign, she was perhaps the collection’s patron saint). ‘Pop music will never be low brow,’ he wrote in his playful collection notes, informing a neon-soaked collection of girlish glamour – from signature sinuous bias-cut dresses to luminous bodysuits and flourishes of pailletes, feathers and tassels (even day-glo underwear, which peeked through smocked mini dresses). Triumphantly modelled by a cast of predominately trans and non-binary models – power walks and twists recalled the runway heyday of the 1980s and 1990s – Ives said that this one was dedicated to his ‘dolls’, a reference to the viral ‘Protect the Dolls’ T-shirt he wore in February. A response to growing anti-trans sentiment under Trump, it has since raised over $600,000 for Trans Lifeline and been worn by everyone from Pedro Pascal to Addison Rae. ‘In times like these where every day feels more perilous than the last, I am moved by the humanity of this movement and what it has made possible,’ he said. ‘This is only the beginning.’

Paolo Carzana

Paolo Carzana’s clothes carry a deep kind of romance, and as such, his past shows have been displays of emotionally rousing theatre. Last season, he staged a gothic display in the candlelit Farringdon pub The Holy Tavern; the season before, he held a Caravaggio-inspired performance in the leafy garden of his own home in Hackney. While the location was less intimate this season, Carzana’s vision was, nevertheless, still typically moving. Taking over the cavernous rare books reading rooms in The British Library on Sunday night, through which a crescendoing score from a David Attenborough ocean documentary played overhead, his S/S 2026 display paid ode to the supernatural beauty of the earth’s most endangered creatures – including rare salamanders, lizards, and pangolins (an armadillo-esque animal native to Asia and Africa that has been poached close to extinction, which the collection was dedicated to).

The alien colours of these animals were echoed in a rainbow of mottled natural dyes which stained pea silks and paper-thin muslins in shades of indigo, moss green and deep orange. Silhouettes, meanwhile, were delicately constructed and of a 19th-century feel, ranging from cascading tailoring, tattered pirate culottes worn with deconstructed blouses, and gauzy bias-cut dresses that floated from the body in jellyfish tendrils. It was, the designer tells Wallpaper*, not a sanctimonious or self-righteous demand for us to stop harming the planet, but an invitation to recognise the splendour of nature – and a quiet, spirited plea to preserve what is left. ‘Without ever telling anyone what to do, it's like an offering: look at the power of what we have,’ he told Wallpaper* ahead of the show. Orla Brennan

READ: Paolo Carzana on his emotional London show: ‘To me fashion is meaningful, powerful, and completely unfrivolous’

Jawara Alleyne

On Sunday night, in the upper drawing rooms of the ICA, Jawara Alleyne presented an S/S 2026 collection that channelled the feeling of a particular word – tabanca. Originating from a dialect in Trinidad and Tobago, it translates roughly to a romantic longing after loss, but these days in Caribbean culture it more accurately captures the crash after the highs of a party. Staggering into the room tired and wired, Alleyne’s models looked like they had had big nights, dressed in celebratory looks that offset a joyful carnival feeling with the subversively dishevelled, chopped-slashed-and safety-pinned style that has made Alleyne one of London’s favourite designers.

Mixing old and new, fabrics layered up jersey from Jawara’s archive with light chiffons, grunge-inflected denim and deadstock T-shirts that paid homage to Caribbean wildlife artist and conservationist Guy Harvey. Two collaborations also made their way into the collection – one with Converse, who Alleyne first worked with on a Notting Hill Carnival release, and a second with Japanese rock band Bo Ningen, using guitar strings to stitch circle shapes in band tees and broken cymbals and drumsticks for jewellery. A love of music and his community also extended to the soundtrack in the room, orchestrated by collaborators like Ib Kamara and his own brother Tafari Alleyne. ‘I’ve been thinking about the way you feel after a carnival or a good night out at the club,’ said the designer of the mood he wanted to capture. ‘You start out with your look intact, but by the end you’re completely dishevelled. You don’t care, though, because the elation of an unforgettable night is all that matters – and that’s the feeling I’m trying to capture.’ Orla Brennan

Simone Rocha

Justine Kurland’s seminal 2000s photo series, ‘Girl Pictures’, provided the inspiration for Simone Rocha’s S/S 2026 collection, shown in the grand Egyptian Room of Mansion House, the ceremonial residence of the Lord Mayor of London. Kurland’s images, taken across the United States, capture young women in places of wilderness, imagining that they have abandoned their homes and established their own communities. Her subjects are at once defiant and vulnerable, with a sense of danger just out of reach – for this reason, they have become emblematic of the experience of being a teenage girl. ‘I channelled the raw, angry energy of girl bands into my photographs of teenagers. All the power chords we would ever need lay within reach, latent, coiled in wait,’ she once wrote of the images.

Similar juxtapositions between sweetness and subversion have run through Rocha’s oeuvre, which continued for S/S 2026. Markers of femininity were twisted: crinoline skirts were skewiff and worn with sequinned bra tops, their straps falling off the shoulder, enormous satin flowers bloomed on waistlines, while disorientating panels of clear vinyl sat atop delicate silk gowns. Meanwhile accessories spanned glimmering sequinned gloves and ruffled-edge bags shaped like pillows – capturing a desire to dress up and stay home at once (lips, meanwhile, were written with ‘Sweet Dreams’). As ever, the applause was rousing as Rocha took her finale bow – over a decade into her eponymous label, her collections continue to thrill. Jack Moss

Johanna Parv

‘Elegant, efficient, with no time to waste’ is how Johanna Parv described her wardrobe this season, unveiled yesterday morning in the Newgen space below 180 The Strand. It’s a sentiment that could apply to any of her collections, which meticulously refine and tweak an unmistakable action-ready uniform rather than presenting a new fantasy each season. Yesterday, that obsessive approach imbued Parv’s wardrobe with a subtle magic, as her cult cycling-inflected shapes appeared in a litany of sensual, technically impressive new variations. Rendered in a natural palette punctuated with shocks of red, layers of body-clinging shorts and dresses came in featherlight yet durable blends of linen, cotton, and nylon, each engineered with problem-solving quirks – from hidden hoods to adjustable straps, subtle air vents and cleverly placed pockets. What felt new was a sense of summery looseness, seen in baggy nylon cargo shorts slung low on the hips and crisp white track sets paired with red neoprene sock shoes.

While other designers might do their research in libraries, Parv has always designed from the experience of the wearer, often personally test-running her pieces and adjusting them for weeks until satisfied. This season, a foldable bag was the result of this experimentation, made to sit snug against the body in multiple configurations or clip neatly onto a bike frame. While most of her work comes from a sensory place, Parv did however return to a book she read as a teenager while making the collection, ‘Streetwalking the Metropolis’, which details the tension between independence and danger women face in the city. Using it to think forensically about armouring her women for any eventuality, this season Parv’s clothes felt charged with a particular sense of purpose – sharp, chic, and completely her DNA. Orla Brennan

Talia Byre

Talia Lipkin-Connor was thinking about the idea of ‘home’ this season, having read Deborah Levy’s ‘Real Estate’ at the start of the creative process. Part of the British author’s ‘living autobiography’ series, it is a meditation on female creativity and the meaning of home. ‘I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives,’ writes Levy in the 2022 book. ‘Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy?’

On a bright Sunday morning in Vauxhall, Lipkin-Connor’s intimate S/S 2026 continued this exploration. ‘It begins at home,’ she wrote in the accompanying collection notes, seeking to capture the moments of intimacy between a woman and the clothing she wears – clothes that are ‘not costumes but companions... the clothes I want to wear’. It made for an uplifting, appealing outing from the Warrington-born designer, who was marking her first runway show proper (previously she has shown in minuscule presentations at bookstores and galleries; this, though bigger in scale, still had only just over 40 guests, a suggestion of Lipkin-Connor’s desire for intimacy).

This season, she continued to be inspired by the women around her, having previously spoken about how her collections emerge from observing the daily clothing habits of those who work in the studio alongside her. Her signature stripes returned across flared-sleeved tops and voluminous rugby shirts, while apron-style gowns straddled utility and glamour. Flourishes of embellishment added new textural richness to her vision, like a V-neck sweater adorned with strings of beads, while millinery – something she has explored in recent seasons – came in baseball caps with elongated trains, or slouchy beanies tied with tassels. Terry-cloth fabrics suggested interiors, as did nods to William Morris prints.

Lipkin-Connor’s approach – satisfyingly off-kilter, but grounded in reality – has won her a small but devoted legion of followers, many of whom were in attendance today. If their response was anything to go by, they were more than satiated by the new season offering – several people said it was their highlight of the week so far, proof that amid the noise, such moments of quiet beauty can be equally arresting. ‘This season I wanted the woman to feel very elevated, grown up,’ she said. ‘Past the craziness of your twenties.’ Jack Moss

Aaron Esh

Queuing up for Aaron Esh’s S/S 2026 show last night felt more like stumbling into an underground party than attending a fashion week event – and not just because of the late hour or its setting in the former nightclub Oval Space in Hoxton. Alongside the usual circuit of editors, a sea of the designer’s friends and black-clad fashion kids packed the walls of the warehouse space to see Esh’s new collection – his first in a year after skipping last season.

What came was testament to the authentic vision the London-born designer has built since launching his brand in 2022 – and to taking time to do things properly. Styled by Katy England and set to a poundingly aggressive soundtrack that moved from scouse rapper EsDeeKid to bassvictim, a vampiric army of models – including Lux Gillespie and Kiki Willems – stormed through the room in clothes that merged the finery of 1930s couture with East End leather craft. Silhouettes were skinny, colours were dark, and the clothes were, above all, beautifully made. A nod to craft came in Harrington jackets constructed from lustrous satins and double-faced suits cut in Highbury by the same tailor who made Esh’s father’s wedding suit. For women, slinky A-line dresses and skirts were cut languidly on the bias in brown silk and soft jersey, worn over drain-pipe leather trousers. Offsetting artisanal glamour with the eclectic style of the Londoner on the move, looks were finished with black baseball caps and big leather boots ready to be wrecked on the city’s streets.

Now a few years into his brand, the precise attitude of display was evidence of a designer firmly in his stride. Last night it was clear that Esh, as Osman Ahmed observed in the show notes, is able to capture the mood of London like no one else at this present moment: ‘At the fitting I noticed something: the models looked like they owned the clothes, as if they’d walked in wearing them. That, I think, is a very London thing.’ Orla Brennan

Roksanda

Roksanda has been in business for two decades, a landmark the label celebrated on Saturday afternoon in the vast subterranean ballroom of Chancery Rosewood, a new London hotel opening in the former American Embassy on Grosvenor Square. A tangible nod to the past came in a trio of dresses from past collections, reissued and reimagined in new fabrics and colours – the Margot (S/S 2012), the Anya (S/S 2016), and the Cataline (A/W 2022) – but the S/S 2026 collection also felt a summation of the essence of Roksanda Ilinčić’s work over the last 20 years, which is rooted in a study of form and inspired by the work of (largely women) artists.

This season, it was British artist Barbara Hepworth, whose sculptural works inspired a series of graphic cut-outs (Ilinčić said she was drawn to her use of ‘negative space’), as well as the undulating forms of panniered dresses. Ilinčić also looked towards the landscapes surrounding the Hepworth Wakefield, the Yorkshire institution which houses a permanent collection of her work. A nearby river informed hazy prints on diaphanous silk, while fronds of colourful raffia were a nod to its wildflower gardens. The Serbia-born designer described Hepworth’s work as ‘contrasting strength with femininity and tension with grace’ – a summation which could equally apply to her own oeuvre, which has been embraced by the creative women of London and beyond (many of whom cheered on Ilinčić from the front row, including performance artist Marina Abramović). Jack Moss

Chopova Lowena

The cheerleaders in American movies are usually the popular girls – emblems of clean, sunny energy and conformity that rule the school. But not on the campus of Chopova Lowena. In a church-turned-gym hall in west London, design duo Laura Lowena and Emma Chopova channeled the sugary energy of the sport into a wardrobe for the outcasts, presenting a collection that the pair said ‘brought us back to our roots of playfulness and experimentation’.

The duo have been designing as one for over ten years now, forming a symbiotic language that was felt in the show’s confidently bonkers vision. These are two designers who have, season after season, chosen to cast unconventional characters over typical runway models, armouring them in beautifully eccentric clothes that have deeply resonated with a devoted cult of followers. Set to a hyper-drive soundtrack that blended death metal, cheer chants, and heart-racing bass, this season the duo’s unmistakable wardrobe was told through a storyline that blended Bulgarian Karakachani costumes with high school sports gear. Layering up an overdose of trimmings and textures, silhouettes paired their signature carabiner skirts in gothic glittery shades with new sport jerseys and track pants, football lace-up bras, shoulder-pad panniers and pom-pom jackets.

A love letter to the ‘weird girls’ they have been doing it for since the start, the display marked a satisfying close to the first day of London Fashion Week – a city where outsiders have long found a home. ‘There is no“I” in team... but there is one in individuality,’ Chopova and Lowena said after the show. ‘In the collection, we celebrate that push pull of blending in and standing out.‘ Orla Brennan

Fashion East

It has been 25 years since Lulu Kennedy founded Fashion East, the Brick Lane-based talent incubator which has helped usher the careers of names like Kim Jones, Jonathan Anderson, Martine Rose, Craig Green and Grace Wales Bonner through its runway shows (traditionally, Kennedy chooses a trio of designers to show each season, spanning both mens and womenswear). The ICA provided the location for the celebrations: in one room, a decade-spanning exhibition of ephemera from Fashion East’s ‘rowdy and raw’ history (Craig Green’s wooden ‘broken-fence’ chestplates; a leopard-print birthday cake by Mowalola; a pair of elongated soft toys by Claire Barrow), in the other, a darkened runway ready for Fashion East’s future. It was there that Kennedy introduced two new additions to her roster – Mayhew, the eponymous label of London College of Fashion’s MA Womenswear graduate Louis Mayhew, and Jacek Gleba, a graduate of the Central Saint Martins MA – as well as the return of Cameron Williams’ Nuba after two seasons.

Mayhew titled his S/S 2026 collection ‘Hard Graft’, looking towards the act of ‘mudlarking’, a historic tradition which sees people combing the tidal shores of the River Thames to find trinkets and treasures. As such, garments were adorned with rocks, rusted keys and ceramics like charms, while sweatpants cinched with cable ties and paint-splattered sweaters nodded towards the designer’s background in labouring (he previously worked as a painter-decorator). In its undone eclecticism, it felt typically Fashion East – though despite the energetic start, the challenge for Mayhew will be to find a piece which sets him apart from the pack (playful ladylike handbags, draped with sheets of faux fur, demonstrated a knack for accessories he might explore further). Gleba’s aesthetic felt more defined: a series of body suits and sweat jackets informed by the ‘balletic body’ in intriguing colour combinations which called to mind the work of designers like Kiko Kostadinov. The designer said his work is inspired by his own background in dance, which informed the collection’s sinuous line. Next time, it would be good to see the pieces come alive in greater fields of motion.

Nuba, which came between the debuts, saw Williams continue a strong eye for drape and silhouette, capturing a twisted elegance in satin trousers constructed to appear like they had been pulled open at the front, cropped jackets which twisted sensually around the body and diaphanous, semi-sheer trousers which fluttered as the models walked. The deep-thinking designer said it was about ‘the silent pull of another life... in act of bravery that consists in remaining yourself within transition’. Indeed, Williams’ shape-shifting pieces seemed to transform on the body, culminating in a jacket which came alive in feather-like fronds of tulle.

As ever, the mood in the room was buoyant: as Fashion East marked its quarter century, it was a reminder of how much a part of London Fashion Week the incubator has become – and a testament to Kennedy’s own (seemingly endless) well of energy in hunting out the next generation of fashion talent. Over the weekend, celebrations will continue at the ICA with a packed programme of talks and film screenings. ‘We’ve had a lot of fun digging through the archive,’ says Kennedy. Jack Moss

Oscar Ouyang

Joining the ranks of the Newgen cohort this season, Oscar Ouyang presented his debut runway show yesterday morning in London. It’s an event he’s been dreaming of since he was 17, he told Wallpaper* in an interview earlier this week, ever since moving from Beijing to the UK to study knitwear at Central Saint Martins. Rewriting the traditions of the craft with experimental techniques and stories found in anime, medieval history and the wardrobes of his friendship circle, Ouyang’s personal approach to knitwear has already seen designs stocked in Dover Street Market.

Transforming the Newgen runway in the basement of 180 The Strand with a letter-strewn floor created by artist Gary Card, his runway debut looked to messenger birds such as owls, doves and eagles as a storyline. In practice, this saw classic materials like silk, linen Harris thread and Irish Donegal yarn taken to experimental new realms, spinning them into ultra-light jumpers and honeycomb weave short shorts that translated the grunge-coded Ouyang wardrobe for summer heat. Adding flourishes of glamour and fantasy through feathers salvaged from the meat industry, the resulting display made for an original debut from a designer set on proving knitwear to be as exciting a craft as any other design discipline.

‘The challenge this season is how to translate the Oscar wardrobe into the warmer months,‘ he told Wallpaper* in an exclusive collection preview. ‘This season, we're trying to play with the possibility of silk and linen blends and more traditional yarns that people would associate with a vintage kind of look, like Irish Donegal and Harris thread. We want to engage with that history, but with a little twist, adapting them to be more contemporary and hopefully more chic.’ Orla Brennan

Rising talent, names to know: ‘Uprising’ is a monthly feature highlighting an energetic new vanguard of fashion talent, selected by the Wallpaper* style team.

Crib notes

Name: Oscar Ouyang

Brand: Oscar Ouyang

Alumnus of: Central Saint Martins MA

City: London

Signature style: Technically experimental knitwear woven with stories found in anime, nature, and the Middle Ages.

Design philosophy

Oscar Ouyang has found a quiet corner of an east London pub to speak on the phone, somewhere between his Hoxton studio and castings for his first runway show. ‘We’ll see over 100 models this week,’ he says, noting how the process has opened a Pandora’s box of new – and some stressful – aspects to running a brand. ‘It’s the first time I’ve worked with a really established hairstylist, stylist, photographer, and casting director. You begin to see how everyone comes together to build a narrative. Each person brings a bit of themselves into it, which has been amazing.’

Growing up in Beijing’s Haidian district, Ouyang launched his namesake label swiftly after graduating from Central Saint Martins’ (CSM) MA knitwear course two years ago. Already, he’s generated an air of intrigue around the brand, with editors taking notice and his designs appearing on rails in Dover Street Market seemingly overnight. When you see his clothes, however, it's clear this is by no stroke of chance. Pushing the humble knit to imaginative new realms, Ouyang’s designs are unlike anything else out there. He takes pride in creating his own materials from thread to garment, weaving influences from Studio Ghibli, medieval Italian manuscripts, and the piercing street photography of Chris Killip into forms that are as technically experimental as they are resolutely wearable.

As he prepares to make his London Fashion Week debut tomorrow (18 September 2025), joining the ranks of the Newgen cohort, Ouyang is intent on proving knitwear to be as exciting a proposition as any other design practice. ‘When you think of knitwear, you probably picture something traditional or maybe you associate it with grannies,’ he says. ‘Even at luxury brands, it’s always in the background.’ Since his first days at CSM, however, Ouyang has been taken by the fluid potential of the craft. ‘Some part of me is really drawn to the idea that you can create something from just a thread, and all the possibilities that come with that,’ he explains. ‘There’s far less structure than other forms of design. You can literally take it anywhere.’

Whether its maker is working on antiquated looms or spooling yak wool sourced from Mongolia, each piece is a time-consuming labour of love. This effort is felt in the mystic life that brims in Ouyang’s knits, where traditional Fair Isle jumpers are darkened into wonky shapes of monochromatic intrigue, tendrils of wool drift from chunky earth-toned weaves, and stiff army gear is cut into youthful silhouettes that play on the eclecticism of Japanese street style. While Ouyang is drawn to the animated worlds of Princess Mononoke or Zelda, and to designers like Jun Takahashi and Number (N)ine – admiring, he says, their ability to refract European culture through an East Asian design identity – his first port of call for inspiration is always his friendship group. ‘I definitely look at what everyone around me wears,’ he says. ‘That’s what feels most important to me as a designer. I want to make things my circle will feel comfortable putting on.’

Ouyang’s S/S 2026 collection, previewed here on Wallpaper*, expands on this world with the added challenge of telling a knitwear story for the warmer months. Ever the romantic storyteller, he has titled it ‘Don’t Shoot The Messenger’, taking the motif of carrier birds such as owls, doves and eagles as a throughline. Offsetting practical shapes with delicate flourishes of glamour, its most beautiful pieces see chicken and turkey feathers (sourced from the otherwise discarded leftovers of the meat industry) line soft jersey beanies and mini shorts. Elsewhere, T-shirts are hand-crocheted from lustrously breathable silks and linens, while Ouyang has his fun with heritage fabrics, spinning typically weighty Irish Donegal yarns into ultra-light jumpers and waxing featherlight Harris tweed jackets to protect against summer downpours. Cohesive, emotional, and clever, the result is a confident debut from a young designer who knows exactly what he wants to create and what his community wants to wear.

‘The idea was a kind of athletic look but with a really crazy level of craftsmanship,’ he says of its making. ‘I wanted it to feel effortlessly luxurious.’ While the collection translates Ouyang’s subversive design language for summer heat, the designer has stuck to his guns with a signature earthy palette. ‘I wear so much khaki, it’s like black to me,’ he says. ‘So we have lots of that and colours with a melange tone in them, where a plain colour is textured on top. There’s black, white, grey, sandy beige and navy blue – really classic colours.’

Beneath the transportive craft of the clothes, it was important to the designer that the collection also be tethered to our present moment. ‘We were thinking about these birds and the phrase ‘don’t shoot the messenger’,’ says Ouyang. ‘If the message is intercepted, it causes chaos. There is so much miscommunication in the world right now, especially online. I feel like the gap between what we see and real events is getting bigger and bigger.’ In practice, this grounding emerges not only in the collection’s moody undercurrent, but also in its functionality. Ouyang is always thinking about how his pieces feel on the skin. ‘As much as we try to push the boundaries of knitwear, I feel like it still needs to be comfortable,’ he says ‘If you're getting a jumper, it still needs to be a protective layer and have all the things you want to feel from a jumper.’

That said, the piece Ouyang is most eager to unveil tomorrow is one made specifically for the runway – a dramatic metallic-gold knitted evening dress, cut with a deep V-back and tassels that skim the floor. ‘It’s very glamorous,’ he says. ‘We’ve done so much ready-to-wear the past four seasons, so that look has a special place in my heart right now. We haven't found the right model for it yet, but I’ve been looking for them throughout the casting.’

As the show looms closer, the designer is readying himself to share a fully realised portrait of his brand and the intrepid spirit of the community that he’s steadily growing around it. ‘With the music and the set, we're really trying to bring the Oscar boy or girl to life,’ he says. ‘It’s a chance to really push my community's identity. I want it to be full of energy and be fresh, but with a little bit of a naiveness. It's the feeling of having a curiosity towards the world: open-minded but confident.’

In their words

‘Growing up in Beijing, I always felt a bit different being queer. While other boys were playing basketball and football, I was weirdly attracted to magazines. I’d just stare at all these covers on magazine stands and felt I'd love to be part of that. I moved to London when I was 17 for St Martins Foundation, BA and MA, and my practice has always been fashion design with knitwear. I’ve always loved that with knit, I'm controlling the outcome.

‘The challenge this season is how to translate the Oscar wardrobe into the warmer months. I think in the beginning, we definitely worked with a lot more experimental materials. This season, we're trying to play with the possibility of silk and linen blends and more traditional yarns that people would associate with a vintage kind of look, like Irish Donegal and Harris thread. We want to engage with that history, but with a little twist, adapting them to be more contemporary and hopefully more chic.’

Where to buy

At Dover Street Market and its webstore.

It is set to be a definitive fashion season: with stops in New York, London, Milan and Paris, over a dozen designers will make their debuts as creative directors of some of the industry’s most well-known houses, among them Chanel (Matthieu Blazy), Balenciaga (Pierpaolo Piccioli) and Bottega Veneta (Louise Trotter). Add to that numerous sophomore collections – from Sarah Burton’s Givenchy to Jonathan Anderson’s first womenswear collection for Dior – and the S/S 2026 season looks set to provide our most comprehensive view of the future of fashion in some time, following a turbulent couple of years defined by a merry-go-round of creative director departures and arrivals. With these upcoming collections, the industry looks to settle the ship.

In anticipation, and ahead of New York Fashion Week, which begins tomorrow (11 September 2025), we straw-polled the Wallpaper* style editors about their most anticipated moments of the month. And, while the blockbuster debuts appeared in everyone’s lists, there remains an appetite for the under-the-radar – from Talia Byre’s first runway show proper in London (contributing fashion writer Orla Brennan says she’s one of a handful of younger brands in the city ‘gaining momentum’) to Diotima in New York, where founder Rachel Scott hosts her own debut runway show, made all the more of an event after her recent appointment as creative director of Proenza Schouler.

‘While I am of course looking forward to the big-name debuts – I was a huge fan (and shopper) of Matthieu Blazy’s Bottega Veneta, so I’m excited to see his vision for Chanel – I am most intrigued by a more under-the-radar appointment, Simone Bellotti at Jil Sander. He takes over from Lucie and Luke Meier at the house, coming from Bally, where his (brief) tenure was full of great pieces – his collections took wardrobe archetypes and transformed them with satisfyingly strange, off-kilter details, from asymmetric hemlines to flourishes of faux fur. From the few hints that we’ve seen so far (and some rumours from Milan), Bellotti seems perfect for Jil Sander, looking to bring back the mood of reduction and rigour that defined the house’s namesake designs. He’s showing on Wednesday (24 September) in Milan – I’m excited to see what this new chapter brings.

‘In Paris – which is full of great shows this season – my eyes will be on Celine, where Michael Rider will show his sophomore collection for the house (and first on the ready-to-wear schedule). I was really impressed with his first show, which was held during haute couture week earlier this year, all the more so when I went to the re-see the next day – taken apart from the runway, it was full of fashion hits, especially the accessories. My favourite? A version of the house’s ‘Phantom’ bag, complete with a smiley zipper face.’

‘There’s an almost overwhelming onslaught of newness this fashion month – as Orla outlines below, 15 creative directors will make their debut over the month, many of them at fashion’s best-known houses. While I am of course excited to see what these debuts bring – Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel will no doubt be a highlight – there is plenty more to fashion month from designers both emerging and established. In New York, I’ve enjoyed recent collections from Eckhaus Latta – it feels like the American label has hit its stride again – while I’ll be travelling to Brooklyn for Rachel Scott’s debut runway show for her label Diotima, which has previously only shown via presentation (it will be all the more exciting after the announcement that she is the new creative director of Proenza Schouler, taking over from founders Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, who are heading to Loewe). Scott is a testament to taking your time: she worked for over a decade in Milan for brands like Costume National before returning to the United States to start her label.

‘In London, Talia Byre will host her first full-scale runway show – at the magazine, we've been big fans of her work for some time – while Paolo Carzana, currently part of Sarabande, has made a name with thoughtful, craft-focused collections shown in unexpected locations (one was held in the garden of his own Hackney home; another in a tiny Farringdon pub). I’m looking forward to seeing where he chooses next. There’s of course plenty to look forward to in Milan and Paris – as ever, Prada will be my highlight in the former (I have been a dedicated fan for decades – few fashion houses have such consistently thought-provoking collections), while at the latter I look forward to Duran Lantink’s debut show for Jean Paul Gaultier (the Dutch designer’s collections under his now-paused eponymous label have been a highlight of recent seasons – he will no doubt carry this energy to his new role). Hopefully, after what has felt like some seasons of stasis in fashion, with creative director positions now filled and in motion, this will be the one where a new vision falls into place.’

‘There’s a sense that this fashion month could be the most exciting in years, with no fewer than 15 creative directors unveiling their first collections. I expect the big house debuts will take up much of the conversation in the coming weeks, so I’d like to mention a few rising designers not to miss. In New York, FIT graduate Zane Li will stage his first runway show after two seasons of sharp, architectural collections under his label LII, until now presented only via lookbooks. Over in London, the perennial hub of fledgling talent, I’m most looking forward to seeing CSM graduate Oscar Ouyang’s off-kilter, earthy knits appearing on the runway as he joins the Newgen cohort.

‘It’s also nice to see designers with a few years under their belt gaining momentum. Talia Byre is joining the official schedule after hosting intimate shows in small London galleries and candlelit restaurants, and I’m looking forward to seeing whatever evolution of shadowy London cool Aaron Esh will likely produce this season. I’m also intrigued by the late-night spectacle Dilara Findikoglu is planning for Sunday – her invitation, a medieval brass choker with a lock and key, is the only (very on-brand) clue so far. As for the blockbuster shows, like everyone else, I’m curious to see what fresh ideas Matthieu Blazy will bring to Chanel. It’s the season’s closing event, and – with any luck – will be worth the wait.’

‘Despite Paris being the epicentre of designer debuts this season, the one I’m most excited to see is Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta in Milan. She’s been dropping hints as to what we can expect (see her first campaign pulling in collaborators of the house past and present) and so far, so very good in my opinion. Bottega has been one of the most influential fashion brands of the last decade under Daniel Lee and Matthieu Blazy and it’s fantastic to see a talent like Louise being handed the reigns. I have high hopes!’

‘In terms of fashion, I’m a big fan of the south London-based label KNWLS, so it will be exciting to see what designers Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault have planned for their debut show in Milan – rumour has it that they are plotting something special.

‘There are bound to be plenty of outstanding beauty moments over the month – there's always great hair and make-up at Simone Rocha in London, Prada in Milan, and Dries Van Noten in Paris. But even more intriguing will be how the slew of new creative directors address beauty in their opening collections – Pierpaolo Piccioli had some incredible beauty looks while at Valentino (the Kaia Gerber bouffant, for example), something he’ll hopefully replicate at his new role at Balenciaga.

‘Finally, beauty will no doubt be central at Louis Vuitton – the house recently launched its ‘La Beauté’ beauty line, led by Pat McGrath. I’m sure the show – which takes place during fashion week – will have an impactful look to show off these incredible products, and maybe even tease a few upcoming additions to the line.’

Stay tuned to Wallpaper.com for more from Women’s Fashion Week S/S 2026.

Amid the heady hedonism of the 1990s, fashion shows transcended from industry showcases to cultural touchstones. Designers became celebrities. Models became super. Fashion houses became global luxury brands. The fashion show, catapulted into mainstream culture thanks to the rapid advance of technology, was a powerful catalyst for image creation and dissemination. Against this backdrop, Alexandre de Betak founded his Paris-based production company Bureau Betak. Over three decades, he revolutionised the very concept of fashion communication.

Alexandre de Betak stepped away from Bureau Betak three years ago. The company is now co-helmed by Bénédicte Fournier Beckmann, Paco Raynal and Guillaume Troncy, and it’s very much business as usual (in so far as this business is ever quotidian).

How Bureau Betak transformed the runway show

‘We work as a collective with strong creative and production teams everywhere, made stronger by our shared experience,’ says Fournier Beckmann. For our interview, it’s fitting that the trio are beamed by a screen from their Parisian offices. A fashion show today is experienced live by a 1,000-or-so people, but it is devoured by millions virtually, via a plethora of media platforms and posts.

Today, Bureau Betak employs around 100 people across four offices in Paris, New York, LA and Shanghai. It is best known for the production of fashion shows for some of the world’s biggest brands, but its creative tentacles are far-reaching across events of all shapes and sizes, from brand activations and parties to exhibitions and keynote speeches. ‘We are like the fairies in the background,’ says Troncy. ‘We make ideas happen.’

It’s a modest statement because Bureau Betak is actually a meticulously skilled outfit that understands how all aspects of its involvement connect: first imagining, then creating and communicating the codes of a house, its designer and their collection. The volume of its productions has mushroomed. ‘When we started,’ says Fournier Beckmann (who, together with Raynal, has been at Bureau Betak since its infancy), ‘we would do four shows a year for a brand; now we do between eight and 12 a year – and they only get bigger.’ Until relatively recently, this was called fashion show production. Today, this is more like conducting the orchestra for a single track in the canon of a brand, and ensuring that it plays out pitch-perfectly to a febrile, global audience, first live and then in ripples that continue until the next show drops.

‘Our job does not stop at delivering a set,’ Troncy says. ‘In many ways, it’s just the start. The live event is when the magic happens and what will travel the world.’ A show must be impactful and memorable for its physical audience and professional photographer bank, but it must also translate effortlessly on to the phone cameras of everyone in attendance, too. Beyond the ‘owned assets’, this is how the majority of people see a collection for the first time nowadays. ‘We’ve been looking at our sets through our own camera phones for about 15 years,’ Fournier Beckmann says. ‘The feeling, the lighting, the staging – everything must look as good as possible from any angle. A show goes worldwide in five seconds.’

At the A/W 2025 shows earlier this year, the team transported us (metaphorically) to a louche weekend at an English country house for Burberry; through the dawn of time with artist Robert Wilson for Dior; into a maze of glossy red bathroom cubicles for Valentino; and inside a glowing onyx monolith for Saint Laurent. ‘The scale and speed may have changed, but the way we work is very similar to how we’ve always worked,’ Raynal explains. ‘We begin in conversation with the client and from this we interpret a brief. It is not always a precise one. It could be a single word, a picture, a conversation. We then present our vision of the interpretation of their brief to the client. Once we get approval for the vision, we work out how to achieve it. We are careful to work within an allocated budget. Every bit as important as the show itself, is what happens after the event – not just to the brand assets, but to the physical elements too. We take the eco-responsibility of our projects very seriously.’

Operating at the sharper edge of an industry not celebrated for its sustainability credentials, Bureau Betak has been a pioneer. In 2020, it was the first production agency to be awarded 20121 certification for sustainable event management. Better Betak launched in 2022 as an open platform for recording observations, sharing solutions and identifying commitments towards more sustainable event management within the luxury sector. It is an impressive core of the company’s mission rather than a green-tinged add-on, and is clearly heartfelt by the trio, who wax lyrical about ever-better practices being a key ingredient to their success.

Ultimately, though, they agree that certain primal, human qualities are what define their practice and reputation. ‘We are dealing with human relationships essentially: emotion, trust, support, passion and memory,’ Troncy says. Raynal adds, ‘Our currency is emotion and memory. These can never be delivered by a computer. A render might look beautiful, but it feels soulless – the emotional connection is absent. We believe wholeheartedly in the power of human creativity.’ That vital trust between brand and agency is hard-earned, not just by staging shows smoothly, but by creating magic. Troncy describes the feeling of Alessandro Michele’s S/S 2023 show for Gucci, where 68 pairs of identical twins were flown in to model. A wall divided the identically dressed twins for the show, and was only raised at the end when the twins took each other’s hands for the finale. ‘At first, there was a gasp and then the entire room was crying,’ says Troncy. ‘AI could never do this.’

Indeed, Raynal points out that event production is not simply confined to fashion, but is a fundamental part of humanity: we are, by our very nature, show-offs. ‘This job will exist forever,’ he says. ‘The need for ceremony and events is part of any empire, from the Egyptians to the Romans to Louis XIV – bringing people together to celebrate is a nothing new, it is part of life. Tools change and context evolves, but the need to stir emotion and create a memory [that] endures.’

A version of this story appears in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

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The tapestry-draped interiors of British country homes have inspired this season’s Burberry show set, held in London’s Tate Britain and conceived by creative director Daniel Lee and Paris-based production company Bureau Betak.

The space – which takes over the gallery’s main thoroughfare – features a carpeted runway in Lee’s bold Burberry blue, while enormous draped tapestries line the walls. Guest seating is also draped in the patterned fabric, which features bucolic scenes of nature.

First look at Burberry’s A/W 2025 show set

He notes that inspiration for the new collection (shown this evening as part of London Fashion Week A/W 2025) comes from the idea of the ‘weekend escape’, imagining ‘long rainy walks in the great outdoors to disconnect and day trips to grand stately homes’. ‘It’s that slightly eccentric, somewhat bohemian need to travel – weekend luggage included.’

‘Part fabulous tale, part fact’, the collection’s garments are rooted in a countryside sensibility, whereby motifs from ‘the faded interiors and fabrics found in the great country houses of England’ are transposed onto contemporary outerwear and scarves. Tapestries, wallpaper and wall hangings were all inspirations, says Lee, noting a mood at once ‘faded and noble’.

In part, the collection arose from the tropes of the British country house in television and film, which he calls a ‘potent touchstone’. As such, he chose a cast not only of models but also of actors, including Richard E Grant (Gosford Park), Elizabeth McGovern (Downton Abbey), Jessica Madsen (Bridgerton) and Lesley Manville (The Crown).

The casting follows a recent all-star campaign for the British heritage house, which returned to Burberry’s roots with a story of London romances in the rain, starring Kate Winslet, Nicholas Hoult, Richard E Grant, and Jodie Turner-Smith.

‘Interplay is a great word and something we considered in the collection,’ Lee exclusively tells Wallpaper*. ‘There’s an interplay and a deliberate tension between the indoor furnishing fabrics and outdoor clothing and accessories. You’ll see velvet brocade jackets, which echo flocked wallpaper you’d see in a great country house, and pheasant prints which are intricately cut to create feathered trims and so on – all interplay, all new propositions.

‘It’s something we wanted to further explore at Tate Britain as our venue. All the cleverly hung art is involved in its own complex dialogue, its own interplay, and that speaks directly to the collection.’

The choice of Tate Britain was personal for the brand. Burberry’s headquarters on Horseferry Road are just a stone’s throw away from the Pimlico gallery. Meanwhile, some digging into the house’s extensive archive led to the discovery of a photograph of the ‘Radcliffe’ trench photographed outside Tate Britain in the 1970s.

It’s a venue that also cements Burberry’s link to London, which the brand says ‘remains our creative backdrop and our spiritual home’. To celebrate Britain’s rich cultural output has been a driving force of Lee’s tenure since he presented his first collection for the house in 2023. (The latest show will mark the start of a one-year partnership with Tate, supporting conservation work at Tate Britain’s Painting Conservation Studios.)

‘[I want to] show a positive side of Britain to the world,’ Lee said at the time. ‘There is great music here, great theatre, great art. That’s something I missed in recent years and that’s what I’m trying to celebrate.’

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Despite some notable absences – among them Molly Goddard, Chopova Lowena and JW Anderson – London Fashion Week A/W 2025 arrived in the city with a five-day schedule of presentations and runway shows, buoyed by the energy of its stalwart names, from Simone Rocha to Erdem. There was plenty of new talent, too: Fashion East showcased its latest class of emerging talent on Friday evening (21 February), while Talia Byre, Paolo Carzana and Jawara Alleyne each offered intriguing perspectives, and are ones to watch. Though with many younger designers choosing to show only once a year, September looks set to be a busier edition.

Elsewhere, Burberry proved the week’s biggest draw, with Daniel Lee choosing to show his latest collection for the British heritage brand on Monday evening (24 February 2025) with a blockbuster show at Tate Britain which saw him inspired by country house dramas and ‘weekend escapes’. Meanwhile, other brands are choosing new ways to present their collections: Marco Capaldo revealed his 1980s-inspired A/W 2025 collection for 16Arlington at an intimate dinner on Saturday evening at Almine Rech Gallery, while Stefan Cooke hosted a presentation at its east London studio (complete with an enormous cherry-studded cake). Roksanda, Kent & Curwen and Conner Ives rounded out the schedule.

Here, reported from London, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss picks the best of London Fashion Week A/W 2025.

London Fashion Week A/W 2025: the best of

Burberry

It was an impressive transformation: for Burberry’s latest outing, which closed London Fashion Week yesterday evening, the interior of London’s Tate Britain was entirely swathed in floor-to-ceiling drapes of cloth, their bucolic scenes evocative of tapestries found in British country houses (and perhaps some of the landscapes in the institution’s own hallowed halls). There was no doubt that this was a statement of intent from Burberry: here was Daniel Lee’s first real blockbuster show at the heritage house, from the set – conceived with Paris-based production agency Bureau Betak – to the starry front row, the names too numerous to mention (though the wall of camera flashes outside the venue were a hint to who was inside). There were stars on the runway, too, namely Richard E Grant, Lesley Manville, Jason Isaacs and Elizabeth McGovern, each loosely chosen by Lee to evoke the grand tradition of the British country house drama, from Gosford Park to Downton Abbey.

Lee said these were ‘potent touchstones’ of the collection, which imagined the faded romance of country piles and ‘weekend escapes’ from London, here figured in enveloping outerwear, which was undeniably the focus (new CEO Joshua Schulman has his attention on the pieces Burberry is known for, among them outerwear, scarves and umbrellas, which several models carried in their hands). There were faded tartan overcoats, worn with matching scarves, embroidered leather blousons and enormous shearling jackets, and of course plays on the trench (here, bulked up in heritage wools). And, though there was certainly an outdoor mood, flourishes of glamour – from velvet suiting to bell-sleeved 1970s-inspired dresses which gathered at the collar – were inspired by the wild, bohemian parties in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn and the eccentric dress codes of Britain’s upper classes (‘the way the whole thing was super twisted,’ he elucidated after the show). In this vein, there was even a knight in armour who sat front row – like a country house reveller playing dress-up – an addition which ensured Instagram ubiquity post-show.

It was a reminder, after what has largely been a quiet – even uneventful – London Fashion Week, that the city can still conjure the type of spectacle of its counterparts in Milan and Paris (the latter where several British designers have escaped in recent seasons). It was also a reminder of Lee’s own ability to rebrand: in fashion’s fast-moving landscape, it is easy to forget the way he transformed Bottega Veneta into a major fashion player nearly overnight. If Burberry has not been so instant – prompting nagging rumours of his departure – last night his vision began to take shape. ‘Things are definitely improving, and I think we’re all in a really positive place,’ he said after the show. ‘I love the brand, it's an incredible brand. It's really an honour to work for Burberry.’

READ: First look at Burberry’s A/W 2025 show set, which is inspired by the tapestry-draped interiors of country houses

Erdem

Erdem Moralıoğlu’s latest collection, presented in the atrium of the British Museum, was centred around a collaboration with the Scottish figurative painted Kaye Donachie. Moralıoğlu and Donachie had attended London’s Royal Academy of Arts at the same time, but a more recent connection – Moralıoğlu commissioning the artist to paint his late mother’s portrait – provided the impetus for this new collaborative venture. Inspired by the ‘poetic licence’ that Donachie took while painting somebody she had not known, what followed was a collection that was not only adorned with the artist’s work but also captured the ephemeral ‘veil between imagination and reality’ that defines her oeuvre. As such, the collection became one of free-flowing ideas and looks that appeared like apparitions, from garments overlaid with lustrous sheer layers of organza to sculpted-waist gowns and swathes of glimmering spike-shaped paillettes. The collection was presented with a quote from Virginia Woolf – ‘and as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past there’ – which speaks not only to Donachie’s ability to conjure the past in her paintings but Moralıoğlu’s own impulse to continually reimagine historical silhouettes in vibrant and contemporary new ways.

Simone Rocha

There was something stripped back about Simone Rocha’s A/W 2025 collection, which despite its typical flourishes of romance (a delicate beaded eyebrow, pearlescent tortoise-shaped clutch bags, rabbit-shaped stoles, and, as ever, smatterings of pearls and crystals) had a feeling of directness, encapsulated in the primitive slices of faux fur and slashed pleats that became motifs throughout. In part, this came from memories of her time at school in Dublin, a period of sartorial experimentation albeit confined by uniforms and rules. Gathered gowns were pierced through the neckline with bike locks (a reference, Rocha said, to going ‘behind the bike sheds’ with a teenage crush), while rugby shirts, school scarves and ‘twisted twin sets’ were all references to school days, twisted and adorned in Rocha’s signature style. The show – which was also partly inspired by the fable of The Tortoise and the Hare, a nod to Rocha’s working at her own pace after 15 years in business – was presented on a cast of both models and actors, among them Minha Kim, Bel Powley, Andrea Riseborough and Fiona Shaw, who played the role of domineering headmistress in typically arresting fashion.

Roksanda

The voice of late sculptor Phyllida Barlow provided the soundtrack for Roksanda Ilinčić’s A/W 2025 show, held for the second time on one of the circular upper floors of Space House, a Richard Seifert-designed brutalist office building in London’s Holborn (as such, the show’s backdrop was an impressive 360-degree-view of the London skyline). ‘Space is malleable, it’s a material, it’s not just an empty vacuum,’ said Barlow on the recording, ‘And I suppose for me, sculpture, whatever sculpture is, it isn’t just the object; I think it’s a sentient physicality of something that replaces us with our own physicality.’ Ilinčić, who has long referenced artists – particularly women artists – in her work, said she drew inspiration from Barlow’s exploration of ‘fragility, impermanence, and physicality… creating work that feels in constant motion and transformation’. This was perhaps most evident in the collection’s closing looks, a series of gowns constructed from a bouncing collage of cut-out neoprene, their shapes inspired by the offcuts made when cutting pattern pieces from fabric (Barlow was known for her use of discarded objects). This exploration of tactility and experimentation ran through the collection, whether in the enormous paillettes (some of which became masks to conceal part of the face), delicate wisps of tulle, or the colourful, unruly painted strands of raffia that captured the dynamism of Barlow’s work. Among the more dramatic show pieces, elegant tuxedo-inspired tailoring, silk bias-cut dresses (in typically painterly hues) and cocooning knitwear will no doubt cater to her devoted clientele.

S.S. Daley

Steven Stokey-Daley’s A/W 2025 show came with something of a delay: originally slated to show in Paris during the city’s menswear week this past January, a last-minute switch saw him stick with his adopted home town, opening proceedings on Friday morning (Stokey-Daley is originally from Liverpool, but has lived and worked in London since graduating from Westminster University’s fashion course in 2020). The show, which was set to the soundtrack of Pet Shop Boys’ 1986 hit ‘West End Girls’, continued Stokey-Daley’s interrogation of Britishness and its dress codes, with several of the looks riffing on heritage outerwear, from the duffle coat to the donkey jacket (the latter came with a cocooning rounded shoulder and enormous front patch pockets). Other pieces continued to explore the uniforms of the upper classes – Stokey-Daley has long used the trappings of high society as a jumping-off point for his collections – seeing black-tie dressing warped with enormous elongated shirt collars, ruffled-front blouses, and feathers that emerged romantically from beneath blazers.

The show’s palette and prints, meanwhile, were drawn from the work of the Scottish Colourists – particularly Francis Cadell’s portrait Ioana Croft, which was replicated on a felted trench coat – an artistic group Stokey-Daley chose for their synonymy with ‘craft, textiles and forms’ (indeed, elements of beading and intricately printed organza spoke to a greater focus on make this season). Though it was the late British musician Marianne Faithfull who was the spiritual figurehead of the collection, with Stokey-Daley noting how her ‘willingness to experiment and explore different genres of music, poetry and spoken word helped pave the way for other artists to push boundaries’. One sweater was scrawled with ‘Stay Faithfull to Marianne’, while her 1979 song ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ – originally recorded by Dr Hook & the Medicine Show earlier in the 1970s – soundtracked the finale, providing an emotive final refrain.

Fashion East

There was a surprising mood of restraint at Fashion East this season, the Lulu Kennedy-led fashion incubator that has usually swayed more towards the unconventional and the outlandish. It was no bad thing: all three designers, Olly Shinder, Louther and Nuba offered clever proposals for real-world dressing nonetheless instilled with elements of subversion – like a pair of trousers from Nuba with pockets on the crotch, as if the model’s hand was stuffed into their underwear. Nuba is led by co-creative directors Cameron Williams and Jebi Labembika, and in their second outing at Fashion East they talked about conjuring the feeling of waking up from a dream, figured here in cocooning forms constructed from ribbed knitwear or soft-to-the-touch wools, which felt more gentle in approach than their debut last season (the designers called the pieces ‘cross-seasonal’ and ‘foundational’, an exploration of ‘functionality, environment and desire’). If occasionally the collection called for a little more refinement in cut and finish, Williams and Labembika are developing an intriguing vision: here, it was captured in an unexpected colour palette of slate grey, deep brown and cooler moments of cyan blue, the last inspired by the hospital scrubs one might see when waking up from a coma.

Louther, which is led by German designer Olympia Schiele, worked closely with the Polish visual artist Helena Minginowicz this season, whose own dreamlike works have been called ‘ambiguous’ and 'ephemeral’. With this collection, Schiele was particularly inspired by the idea of illusion in Minginowicz’s work, here evoked in an interplay of textures (trousers appeared flocked across their surface; various gauges and weights of knits were stitched together on a single cardigan; flourishes of faux fur came in dual-tone colours) and hazy, airbrush-effect motifs, a signature of Minginowicz’s oeuvre. Silhouettes, meanwhile, were largely generous and oversized, reflecting Schiele’s roots in street and skatewear (though here, that sense of volume called to mind labels like Lemaire, as one editor remarked). It made for a collection of clothes with real-world appeal, and was a definitive push forward from her debut last season. So too was Olly Shinder’s latest collection, his best as part of Fashion East so far (the collection was his fourth, and presumably final, with the incubator). Shinder is inspired by queer clubwear and corporate attire, often mashing them together; this season, he found a new sense of clarity, moving away from overt expressions of fetish towards a more subtle undercurrent of perversity. Consider a pair of trousers sliced across the back with a panel of sheer fabric – evoking a pair of women’s tan tights – or a terrific raincoat in black wipe-clean rubber.

September, so said legendary American Vogue editor Candy Pratts, is the January of fashion. Following a brief summer break after the conclusions of menswear and haute couture – which took place over June and July – Women’s Fashion Week S/S 2025 arrives in New York next week on September 6 2024, with subsequent stops in London, Milan and Paris. Think of it as a new fashion term.

The schedule is now set, with a few surprises along the way. Among them, the news that Pieter Mulier will show his next Alaïa collection in the city on September 6, heralding the start of fashion month. It is over four decades since the house’s eponymous founder, Azzedine Alaïa, first showed in the American city, when he presented a collection in September 1982 to an audience which included Andy Warhol and Paloma Picasso. No doubt Mulier – who has garnered plenty of high-profile devotees of his own – will draw a similarly starry crowd. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren will show the day prior with a special show in the Hamptons on September 5. London-based label Cos has also announced a return to New York, having shown last season in Rome.

Elsewhere, it will no doubt be the season of debuts: chief among them is the much-anticipated arrival of Alessandro Michele at Valentino, who will show as part of Paris Fashion Week. Eyes will also be on Givenchy, Chanel and Dries Van Noten which – at the time of writing – are each without creative directors.

Here, everything Wallpaper* knows about Women’s Fashion Week S/S 2025.

Women’s Fashion Week S/S 2025: what to expect

New York Fashion Week S/S 2025 (6 – 11 September 2024)

New York Fashion Week S/S 2025 will begin – unofficially – on September 5, as American fashion behemoth (and member of the Wallpaper* USA 400) Ralph Lauren presents his latest collection in an exclusive show in the Hamptons, the beachside Long Island locale which has long played host to the rich and famous. ’The Hamptons is more than a place,’ said Lauren in a statement. ’It’s a natural world of endless blue skies, the ocean, green fields, and white fences, rusticity and elegance with a quality of light that drew artists here decades ago. It has been home, my refuge and always an inspiration.’

The day afterwards, Pieter Mulier will show his latest Alaïa collection in New York, four decades after Azzedine Alaïa first showed in the city in 1982. It will be his second time showing outside of Paris – an intimate show at the designer’s brutalist home in Antwerp, Belgium took place in 2023 – and will no doubt be one of the highlights of the schedule. ’A city close to Pieter Mulier’s heart and the maison’s,’ said Alaïa on Instagram. It will be accompanied by ‘a series of exclusive moments’ which will take place in the city from 6–8 September. Meanwhile Cos – which last season showed at Corsie Sistine in Rome – will return to New York with a show on September 10 in Brooklyn. ‘New York is a dynamic city with so much character – it’s a place of inspiration, full of interesting and creative people,’ says the brand’s design director Karin Gustafson. Another new arrival is Off-White, who under creative director Ib Kamara will swap Paris for New York, showing on the afternoon of Sunday 16 (the title of the show is ‘Duty Free' and will take place at Brooklyn Bridge Park). Nanushka will also debut at the week, showing on the afternoon of September 7.

Elsewhere, expect a continuation of the Tory Burch renaissance as the designer presents her S/S 2025 collection on the evening of Monday 17, while New York stalwarts Coach, Michael Kors and Carolina Herrera will all show during the week. Wallpaper* USA 400 members Willy Chavarria and Peter Do, the latter showing his third collection for Helmut Lang, will round out the schedule, alongside rising names Zankov and Diotima. Tommy Hilfiger has also confirmed a spot on the week’s schedule, having initially been absent. He will show his latest collection at 6.30pm on Sunday 16.

London Fashion Week S/S 2025 (12 – 17 September 2024)

Beginning slightly earlier this season to avoid a clash with Milan Fashion Week (which starts this season on September 17), London Fashion Week will continue its 40th birthday celebrations with a packed schedule comprising the usual slew of energetic, emerging labels amid a smattering of more well-established names. Of the latter, Burberry will remain the chief draw for international editors visiting the city – Daniel Lee will show his fourth runway collection for the British label – while JW Anderson will present another agenda-setting collection on Sunday morning, his usual slot.

Other names showing this season are Simone Rocha, Roksanda, Erdem, Ahluwalia and Aaron Esh, alongside a new edition of London-based incubator Fashion East (participants are yet to be announced). Watch out for Derrick – Luke Derrick’s burgeoning London-based label had plenty of buzz last season for its sleek, contemporary riff on men’s tailoring – and Nensi Dojaka, who returns to the schedule after a hiatus. Feben will also return to London, having shown last season with the support of Dolce & Gabbana in Milan. Look out too for the rebirth of Kent & Curwen, with the British label having been purchased by Chinese golf brand Biem.L.Fdlkk Garment in 2023.

London Fashion Week will also have a new home this season, the central Newgen space moving from Old Selfridges Hotel back to 180 Strand.

Milan Fashion Week S/S 2025 (17 – 23 September 2024)

Milan Fashion Week will run a day longer this season, part of a re-jigging of the fashion month schedule led by Camera della Moda, the week’s organising body. ’I’m very satisfied with this synergetic effort by the four main players on the fashion circuit,’ said the organisation’s president Carlo Capasa. ’[We] had for some time been asking for an extension of the Milan Fashion Week, given its calendar of over 200 appointments.’

As such, the week will begin with Fendi on September 17, the Roman house presenting its S/S 2025 collection at 3pm (this time, the show will take place on a Tuesday, as opposed to its usual Wednesday). Elsewhere, expect a continuation of Prada’s ‘fairytale ravescape’ set which it revealed as its menswear show in June (the house’s womenswear sets usually riff on their menswear predecessors ), alongside similarly blockbuster shows from Gucci, Versace, Ferragamo, Dolce & Gabbana and Bottega Veneta.

Absent from this season’s schedule is Tom Ford – after the departure of creative director Peter Hawkings earlier this month – and Giorgio Armani, the latter showing in New York off-schedule in October. Also currently absent are MSGM and Blumarine (David Koma will show his debut as creative director next season), while Central Saint Martins graduate Susan Fang will show with the support of Dolce & Gabbana on Sunday morning.

Paris Fashion Week S/S 2025 (23 September – October 1 2024)

No doubt the biggest moment of Paris Fashion Week will be the arrival of Alessandro Michele at Valentino, who will present his first runway show this September (the ex-Gucci creative director’s first collection for the house, titled ’Avant les Débuts’ was revealed in a surprise lookbook drop this past June). ‘It’s an incredible honour for me to be welcomed at Maison Valentino. I feel the immense joy and the huge responsibility to join a maison de couture that has the word “beauty” carved on a collective story, made of distinctive elegance, refinement and extreme grace,’ said Michele in a statement issued after his appointment in March 2024. He will show on the afternoon of Sunday 29.

A number of other houses – among them Givenchy, Dries Van Noten and Chanel – are currently without creative directors. Givenchy is absent from the schedule (the new creative director will likely debut in February 2025), Dries Van Noten is slated to show on the afternoon of Wednesday 25 (it will be the first show since the eponymous creative director exited in June), and Chanel will retain its usual spot on the morning of Tuesday 1 October. An otherwise busy schedule – as has become the norm for the city – will include shows from Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Rick Owens, Dior, Saint Laurent, Hermès and more. Balenciaga, meanwhile, will show on the evening of Monday 30, shifting from Sunday morning.

In other news, Paris label Coperni will host its S/S 2025 show on October 1, 2024 at the so-called happiest place on earth – Disneyland Paris. Founders Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer have said the collection will blend ‘magic with reality, paying tribute to the beloved Walt Disney Animation Studios movies of our childhood’. Meanwhile Ganni, the stalwart of Copenhagen Fashion Week, will shift to Paris this season, following the appointment of Laura du Rusquec, previously of Balenciaga, as CEO this past April.

Stay tuned for more from Women’s Fashion Month S/S 2025.

London Fashion Week A/W 2024 heralded the 40th anniversary of the event that, despite earlier iterations, was inaugurated in the early 1980s by British PR maven Lynne Franks (Franks was said to be the inspiration behind Absolutely Fabulous’ Edina Monsoon). Since then, the week has held its unique balance of rising stars – perhaps best represented by fashion incubator Fashion East – and the city’s blockbuster names, from Vivienne Westwood to Burberry (and even featured an appearance from Queen Elizabeth II, who attended a Richard Quinn show in 2018). 

This latest edition continued the week’s legacy, beginning on Friday evening with a return to London Fashion Week from historic British house Dunhill after four years (it heralds the arrival of new creative director Simon Holloway). Elsewhere, the two biggest draws were JW Anderson – its eponymous designer Jonathan Anderson first rose to prominence at Fashion East in the 2010s – and Burberry, where Daniel Lee showed his third runway show for the historic British label in Victoria Park on Monday evening. Rounding out the schedule was a mix of the week’s stalwarts, including Molly Goddard, Simone Rocha, Roksanda, Erdem and Ahluwalia, alongside a raft of next-generation talent, from KNWLS, Aaron Esh and Conner Ives to the Central Saint Martins MA fashion show.

Here, reported from the shows, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss rounds up the best of London Fashion Week A/W 2024.

The best of London Fashion Week A/W 2024

Burberry

It was a return to the great outdoors for Daniel Lee’s third runway collection for Burberry, shown yesterday evening in a vast tent erected in east London’s Victoria Park (on the floor were woodchips, while guests sat on enormous fleece cushions). It has been a thematic link that has run through his opening triptych, initially inspired by tents and outdoor-wear from the late-19th and early-20th centuries that he found in the British house’s archive. ‘Burberry’s heritage of the outdoors continues to inspire me,’ said the Yorkshire-born designer in a series of quotes issued after the show. ‘[This season], I wanted this collection to feel warm and protective.’

Soundtracked by a collage of Amy Winehouse clips and music – Lee said backstage that he was inspired by her tenacious desire to write about her life, in her own way – the collection doubled down on Burberry’s synonymy with outerwear, seeing a funnel-neck moleskin version of the trench coat, abbreviated parkas and puffers, and hefty shearlings appear throughout. The mood of textural richness was inspired, Lee said, by British and Irish wool and fabric (also used across long pleated skirts, zip-front trousers, and myriad enveloping, homespun knitwear). ‘[It’s] functional – these pieces are made for the outdoors,’ he said. The line-up of models, including Agyness Deyn, Lily Donaldson, Lily Cole, Naomi Campbell and Edie Campbell, recalled the 2010s, when Burberry was at cultural ubiquity. 

Backstage, after the show, Lee noted the trickiness of designing for a brand that is made to appeal to huge swathes of people: from royalty to football fans. With this collection – which was full of seductive propositions for real-world wintertime dressing – Lee made his strongest push yet. ‘I have to have a point of view,’ he said. ‘You can’t just make a simple trench coat forever.’

Aaron Esh

A brilliant winter collection from rising London-based designer Aaron Esh, inspired by the dress codes of his inner circle, closed out Sunday evening in an intimate show at east London’s Sarabande (Esh recently became part of the foundation, which was set up by Lee McQueen and offers studio spaces to emerging artists and designers). Building on his runway debut in September 2023, staged at Tate Modern against views of the London skyline, the designer once again noted the influence of his native city and its ‘rhizomatic’ streets. ‘It’s the clothes that I see when I’m at a house party; or the clothes someone would wear to do an off-licence run – big shades, ripped jeans, a blouse thrown over her shoulder,’ he told Wallpaper’s Hannah Tindle at the time.

It lends his work a kind of dishevelled sensuality, where slinky bias-cut dresses, smeared eyeliner, sunglasses, caps and hoodies meet intriguing tailoring, like a wide-lapelled tuxedo cut with a poker-straight hem (later, it evolved into an expansive overcoat), or the pinched hooded tailored jackets that the models grasped closed with their hands. Esh says that he hopes the ease of his clothing belies the craft and construction behind them, something that felt achieved here: his models looked as if wandering home from evenings out, or perhaps the morning after. Skinny jeans, meanwhile, heralded the return of a silhouette introduced by Hedi Slimane in the 2000s while at Dior Homme – the French designer’s singular, subculture-infused approach no doubt an influence on Esh’s growing oeuvre. 

JW Anderson

Nosy neighbours, M&S knickers, horse riding trophies – after the show, Jonathan Anderson laid out the nostalgic inspiration points for his A/W 2024 collection, presented this season at Marylebone’s Seymour Leisure Centre in a shift from The Roundhouse. ‘It was something twisted, in terms of the woman next door,’ he said, a mood elaborated in the press release as ‘a grotesque everydayness, in grotesque distortions and proportions’. So there were knit dresses with enormous stitches, trails of blown-up haberdashery adornments, layers of everyday ribbed underwear and vests, house slippers, and brassy grey curly wigs. In its strange banality it was surprisingly affronting, a further demonstration of Anderson’s ability to traverse the seductive and the ugly (the designer is perhaps only equalled by Miuccia Prada in his ability to strike this dichotomy so successfully season on season). 

Other pieces were designed to recall interiors, like a series of twisted dresses which evoked curtains and curtain ties, looping elegantly around the model’s bodies (their evolution into a version in pearl made for a convincing proposition for a contemporary wedding gown). Outerwear recalled British heritage styles, here blown up in size and slightly dishevelled, pulled up at the sleeve to reveal the lining beneath, while everyday staples like the striped sweater and sweatpant shorts appeared throughout. Anderson elaborated backstage that it was in part a consideration of Britain, a strange refraction of the country’s past – at once nostalgic and subverted, likening it to the slew of recent songs that have risen up the charts years after they have been released. 

‘Young people are discovering nostalgia,’ he said. ‘And then they glorify [things from the past], and it becomes a kind of future thinking in a didactic way. They’re like mixing things that my parents know, that we all know, and reconfiguring them. It makes nostalgia not such a scary thing.’

Simone Rocha

Simone Rocha described her A/W 2024 collection as the closing chapter of a triptych of works which began with last season’s ‘Dress Rehearsal’ – capturing the anticipation and fraughtness of the evening before a wedding – and continued with the designer’s haute couture collection for Jean Paul Gaultier shown in Paris last month, which was titled ‘The Procession’ and looked towards the nuptials themselves. Presented in medieval church St Bartholomew-the-Great in Smithfield, the conclusion was titled ‘The Wake’, with Rocha beginning the collection by looking towards the mourning attire of Queen Victoria after the death of her husband Prince Albert (famously, she would mourn the loss for over four decades of her life). It made for fertile ground for the Irish designer, whose collections have long had a swelling undercurrent of darkness despite the beauty of their execution. Here, pelts of faux fur sat on the shoulders of delicate, near-transparent tailoring, while corsets – adorned with shimmering crystal embellishment under the chest – seemed a continuation of her collaboration with Gaultier. Unexpected accessories came in the shape of soft-toy lambs carried in the models’ arms, a nod to the mythical animals which serve as church guardians, while mourning blacks were reimagined in tie-hem anoraks, worn with faux-fur stoles adorned with crystals. ‘This was the final piece of the triptych, because I was working on these collections at the same time,’ explained Rocha backstage. ‘I’ve been looking at a lot of preserved garments, a lot of archives, and I really wanted to take that and place it today.’

Molly Goddard

A vast mural by London Group artist Ivon Hitchens provided the colourful backdrop for Molly Goddard’s latest collection, staged at the main hall of Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in north London. The collection itself reflected the work’s freewheeling composition – Hitchens took three years to complete the 1954 mural, which depicts a mass of abstract figures dancing in a mythical woodland – with Goddard noting that this season she once again began the collection with an ‘experimental fitting’. In these, the designer takes vintage pieces, samples from her archive and toiles and begins to combine them as a starting point for the collection (she also noted inspiration from her eBay watch list, which with two young children is currently comprised of colourful baby and toddler wear). Here, it led her to a consideration of form – ‘shapes on top of shapes; garments combining – pulling in, pushing out, smushing’ – in part inspired by the haute couture silhouettes of Cristobal Balenciaga and Christian Dior, though relaxed with elasticated and tie fastenings for the everyday. Meanwhile, a continuing exploration of tulle – this season, Goddard described their construction as ‘blobs’, tightly ruffled shapes which provided dramatic silhouettes across skirts, shirts and dresses – met slouchy sweaters, cowboy jackets and polka-dot tops and bustiers in a collection of refreshing levity. 

Roksanda

Earlier this week, Zendaya wore a Roksanda look to Dennis Villenvenue’s Dune: Part Two London premiere: a plum-hued suit, jacket nipped in at the waist with exaggerated shoulders and loose-cut trousers, layered with a knee-length skirt. It turned out this was a sneak preview of the A/W 2024 collection presented yesterday, against the backdrop of the Tate Britain. (The suit opened the show with Law Roach, the actor’s stylist, watching on from the front row).

This season Ilinčić said she had been inspired by Le Corbusier, one of the Serbian-born designer’s ‘heroes’, and that she had recently spent time at the architect’s tiny holiday cabin, Cabanon de Le Corbusier. It was constructed in 1951 and located in Cap Martin, a coastal commune in the South of France. The interiors, and most notably the murals in the entrance hall, were subsequently referenced in the tapestries swathing around the body and trailing dramatically along the runway. Melton wool, a fabric ‘used in interiors and homes, places that provide refuge and comfort’, formed the opening suit and additional tailored pieces, where boucle, fil coupé jacquard, and a smattering of faux fur also lent themselves to the embrace of soft furnishings.

Roksanda is renowned for her considered use of colour, and of course, A/W 2024 was no different. The show notes reeled off a descriptive list of shades, reminiscent of the names that one might find on tins of expensive emulsion: Chartreuse-Verse, Canvas, Dark Flamant, Grey-Melange, Bleu-Cair, Pale-Lime, Light Hibiscus, Antique Rose, Peche-Clair. There were also sportier nods to windbreakers and wellingtons (footwear was produced in collaboration with Fit Flop), with the closing looks of the show taking the form of huge taffeta dresses that appeared almost tent-like, as though held up with a framework of poles. They conjured the idea of spending a windswept day along the coast, before returning to the warmth of a lavishly decorated home. Hannah Tindle

16Arlington

Writer and curator Charlie Fox’s 2019 exhibition My Head is a Haunted House, presented at Sadie Coles gallery, provided the starting point for Marco Capaldi’s A/W 2024 collection for 16Arlington. At the time, the group show was described by Fox as an attempt to recall ’the hallucinogenic memory’ of a childhood obsessed with werewolves, bats and monsters; here, Capaldi gave the monstrous a more elegant twist, seeing his sharp, streamlined vision for the brand enlivened with flourishes of strangeness, like swathes of shaggy faux fur or the clattering tinsel looks which closed the show. A pair of diaphanous white dresses, meanwhile, seemed to conjure Frankenstein’s bride, while shirts and sweaters tied around the neck in lieu of scarves suggested a mash-up of parts. ‘It’s not about Halloween – it’s about human nature,’ Capaldo said. ‘Hence the title of the show, I’m Not Sorry, It’s Human Nature, borrowed, of course, from Madonna. Those who go against conventions are often ostracised, but there’s so much strength and power and beauty in rejecting norms. These are the people I design for.’

Dunhill

For its first runway show since 2020 – and the first collection from newly installed creative director Simon Holloway – Dunhill chose the Duveen Wing of the National Portrait Gallery, a series of rooms inaugurated by King George V and Queen Mary in 1933. The historic venue hinted a return to classicism for the British brand (itself in its 130th year), a mood also captured in show’s the layout, which with its low-lit individual tables, gin martinis and dainty plates of cucumber and caviar sandwiches nodded towards traditional salon-style fashion presentations of the early 20th century.  

’This collection celebrates our origins and subsequent evolution into a unique British luxury house,’ explained Holloway of the A/W 2024 collection, which sought to capture Dunhill’s rich tailoring heritage and tradition of dressing figures from stage and screen (earlier in the week, the brand hosted a star-studded pre-BAFTA party, a hint towards this new direction). So the collection itself ran the gamut of what Holloway called the ‘finer things in life’ – whether motor racing (recalled in the suede field jacket worn by model Kit Butler, or the leather driving gloves throughout), jaunts to the great outdoors (gabardine chinos, blazers in heritage checks and cord, aran-stitch cashmere sweaters) or a swathe of evening wear, including an elegant ivory riff on the tuxedo with matching bowtie and overcoat (worn here with a sneaker).

‘[These are the things] we have always done best,’ concluded Holloway of the collection, which felt like something of a palette cleanser for his tenure ahead. ‘I hope we have re-captured that spirit, one that is at once refined and international,’

Fashion East

There was an interesting synchronicity to this season’s Fashion East designers Olly Shinder and Johanna Parv – the latter in her third and final season at the talent incubator – who both provided their own distinct riffs on the nine-to-five wardrobe. Shinder, who last season presented a debut collection of pieces inspired by the sporty, sleazy nightlife uniforms of Berlin and London, where the designer splits his time. Soundtracked once again by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, here Shinder turned his attention towards the corporate uniform, which was ‘queered... displaced, subverted and refined’. So there was a take on ’middle managerial’ shirting, which appeared to have been grasped at the collar and sliced down the back, while other pieces continued Shinder’s more familiar exploration of workwear, with clean-lined functional sets with PVC at the sleeves and over the trousers, as if models were about to deal with hazardous materials (indeed, Shinder likened his studio this season to a lab). Completing the lineup were pieces primed for the dance floor: slick, semi-shirted latex bodysuits, or abbreviated mini shorts in black and silver. Judging by buzz, he already has an audience for these clothes.

Parv, meanwhile, is a designer who looks towards the functionality of sportswear through toggle and adjustable fastenings, and technical fabrics, attempting to replicate them across the full gamut of a woman’s wardrobe. This season, a polished collection continued this approach with what she said was inspired by the ‘topography of the city’, and the demands of urban life. The mood was darker, and more sensual than previously – the skirt suit was sliced open at the front and shoulders – while zip-up mini dresses were featherweight in their fabrication. As ever, a series of clever accessories accompanied in the form of leather bumbags and handbags with an adjustable nylon strap, evocative of those found on a backpack. It will be interesting to see what Parv does next.