WORDS Madeline Reid & Chiara Maculan
HEADER IMAGE Di Petsa SS27, courtesy of Purple PR
Not all fashion week seasons are created equal. Sometimes the schedule feels more alive than ever; other times, it can start to feel like a particularly expensive exercise in repetition, with the same names appearing in the same ordered spots, traipsing around the same venues to see the same faces shot by the same photographers. For independent brands especially, questioning whether it’s worth spending thousands of pounds on an on- or off-schedule presentation, often for a relatively small audience, is more than fair. Fashion Week is supposed to be about seeing what comes next, after all, so there’s something slightly counterintuitive about a system that can make the new feel so familiar.
But every few years, something comes along to kick a renewed sense of energy into the same tired cohort of journalists, stylists, critics and buyers. This season, that came in the form of Alexander McQueen’s return, Mulberry’s revival under newly appointed creative director Christopher Kane, and the gaggle of emerging designers hoping to catch the eye of the international press flown in especially for these big-ticket shows. Five days of running between venues, standing in the rain, trying to remember where you left your phone charger and occasionally wondering if you’ve developed a permanent bad posture later, it was clear that London still knows how to put on a fashion week.
On the runways, aubergine and turquoise emerged as two of the season’s most persistent colours, while undone dressing appeared across the schedule from AGRO Studio to KNWLS and Yuhan Wang, proving that there are still new ways to make a falling strap look deliberate. The schoolboy was also having a moment, with Mithridate, Maximilian Raynor and Geordie Campbell all finding different ways into shorts, socks, tailoring and the slightly irritating confidence of a teenage boy who has just discovered his dad’s wardrobe. Then there was Gossip Girl. Oscar Ouyang, Gui Rosa and Simone Rocha all incorporated dialogue or footage from the series into their shows, a particularly telling choice for a show about status, anonymity and voyeurism. For a generation raised on the series, its voices have become cultural shorthand: you only need to hear that familiar narration for an entire world of private schools, party dresses, and aggressively expensive headbands to reappear.
Below, see our favourite collections from London Fashion Week SS27.
KEBURIA
Ahead of its SS27 runway show, we were eager to see who might become the latest victim of George Keburia’s infamous slogan tees. For SS26, we got a “Bye Anne” for Wintour’s Vogue departure, while AW26 brought “Hello Lauren Sanchez Bezos”, a nod to the billionaire’s continued prevalence in the industry. This time, it was Putin on the firing line, but not quite as we expected. Rather than a slogan tee, the Georgian designer placed his statement across a guitar case slung over the back of his opening model, reading: “Hope You Burn Putin.”
Music, or more specifically the kinds of male musicians who would likely have haunted any millennial teenage girl’s bedroom wall, served as inspiration for Keburia’s first foray into menswear. As did the great British countryside, with imagery of rural landscapes worked into custom jacquards before being cut into pieces that felt considerably more suited to the stage than the stables. Equestrian shapes, Western details, studs, washed canvas, camouflage and metallic tweed all appeared throughout, taking the visual language of rural life and giving it a decidedly night-out makeover.
There was something oddly nostalgic about it all. Horse girls, after all, feel like an inherently millennial phenomenon: a generation raised alongside the internet, but who could still spend their weekends covered in mud, obsessed with a 500kg animal and convinced that riding lessons counted as a personality. As a former horse girl myself, seeing equestrian references crop up across the collection was therefore less country living and more a strangely specific blast from the past. And, frankly, I was very happy to see it.
AGRO STUDIO
Founded by George Oxby and Angus Cockram, AGRO Studio has quickly become a reliable source of jaw-dropping fashion. This summer alone, Lady Gaga, Zara Larsson, JADE and Madonna have all worn the London label’s waist-shrinking corsets, bedazzled bikinis and knowingly irreverent designs. For its third London Fashion Week offering, ‘Glass Body’ pushed the studio’s couture-level craftsmanship further into ready-to-wear, playing with transparency, distortion and movement while pulling from a distinctly nostalgic visual language.
Despite being one of the first shows of the week, AGRO was already one of the most talked-about collections of the season, and it’s easy to see why. ‘Glass Body’ brought together historical dress, ballet, equestrianism, Y2K clubwear and 1980s sportswear, with George explaining that the seemingly disparate references were connected by colour and recurring technical details. The result was less a trip through fashion history than a remix of it: corsetry and historical references were deliberately contrasted with athletic and equestrian wear, keeping everything firmly in the present. “It’s never going to be presented in a way that feels historical,” George told BRICKS.
That approach was particularly effective in the clothes themselves. Lightweight, translucent fabrics were thrown against sculpted corsets, structured tailoring and sportswear-inspired details, with skin-hugging silhouettes suddenly giving way to clouds of tulle and exaggerated volume. The latter half of the collection was awash with ombréd aubergine, a shade I hadn’t previously considered particularly urgent until it appeared approximately everywhere. As someone with pink hair, I was asked several times throughout the week whether I’d consider switching to purple, so apparently the collection had already started influencing the public.
MAXIMILIAN RAYNOR
As soon as guests stepped into the garden courtyard of Goodenough House, a brass band, a shiny Bentley and an unmistakably British atmosphere welcomed us into what felt like the most quintessential village fete imaginable. Titled ‘The Gingers vs. The Elders’, the collection imagined two opposing clans, fuelled by ginger beer and elderflower, battling it out on the village green. Throughout, Raynor brought this playful fantasy to life through a wardrobe steeped in 1980s nostalgia, built around his signature attention to detail and love of fabric experimentation.
Checked waistcoats, low-rise trousers and schoolboy-style shorts were paired with white socks and black trainers, establishing a distinctly British aesthetic. Vibrant red checks, soft knitwear and generous fringing added texture, movement and eccentricity to the silhouettes, floating down the runway as we mouthed along to the brass band’s rendition of Frankie Valli’s ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ and Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘Unwritten’. Classic Raynor territory, the collection’s charm lay in its familiar characters: the prep-school boy, the rebellious teenager, the eccentric country relative and the village regular. Each was exaggerated just enough to become a fashion character, while retaining an unmistakable sense of familiarity.
PETRA FAGERSTRÖM
There are too many overused superlatives that come to mind when considering Petra Fagerström’s SS27 collection: genius, innovative, iconic… You get the gist; I’m a big fan. But it’s so hard not to be when meticulously made clothes are paired with clever storytelling and genuinely unusual ideas. Following last season’s skate momager collection, this season the Swedish designer looked to the tension between technology and craft, taking inspiration from the glitches and imperfections of AI-generated imagery and translating them into physical garments.
A trench coat appeared to have been interrupted halfway through its construction, with its canvas exterior deliberately falling open to reveal a leather body embroidered with flowers beneath. Fagerström’s impressive take on Dior’s Bar jacket was cut in fitted leather, while a parka was close-fitting at the front before ballooning dramatically at the back. The clothes had the kind of technical precision that makes you want to get right up close to them, just to work out exactly how the hell they were made.
Silver sequins returned too (her glittering gown was my favoruite garment from AW26) but this time the dress seemed to stop at the front, wrapping around the body and tying at the back to leave the wearer’s skin exposed. Elsewhere, black leather was sliced open to reveal flashes of red lining, while pleated garments returned, shifting between different images as the wearer moved. Fagerström’s clothes are technically impressive without feeling like they’re trying to prove a point about how technically impressive they are. Instead, the construction is often the joke, and admirers are in on it: look at a garment one way and it’s one thing, move a few steps and suddenly it’s something else.
SUSAN FANG
Susan Fang’s three-dimensional floral collections are always a joy to behold, and this season, she continued her fascination with nature, technology and the blurry line between fantasy and reality. Inspired by M. Butterfly and its story of love existing alongside an illusion, AIR-ILLUSION played with traditional Chinese prints and ceramics, transparent layers and optical tricks. There were, inevitably, plenty of flowers: resin lilies, air-flower dresses, jade blooms and porcelain-inspired motifs, making the collection instantly recognisable as Susan Fang.
Where the collection really came into its own, though, was in the technology behind those familiar signatures. 3D printing has become increasingly central to Fang’s practice, and here it was pushed into footwear, from the custom heels covered in exuberant clusters of flowers to the genuinely exciting upcoming Crocs collaboration, which made its global debut on the runway. Elsewhere, 3D-printed neon lace and a pixelated flip-flop that appears distorted from every angle demonstrated just how much potential there is in treating the technology as a design tool rather than simply a novelty.
AHLUWALIA
For SS27, Priya Ahluwalia makes a case for taking it easy. Titled Revel, the collection considered joy, rest and togetherness as forms of resistance, beginning with photographs of former Black Panther members at home and off duty. The shift in perspective feels important, especially now: resistance isn’t only about fighting back, but about having the space to rest, care for one another and enjoy being alive. Ahluwalia also looked to FESTAC ’77, the pan-African festival that brought together artists and musicians in Lagos, alongside the sounds of Fela Kuti and Mumbai’s underground rap scene, finding rebellion in celebration as much as confrontation.
That idea translated into clothes that balanced protection with softness. Draping, usually pulled close to the body in Ahluwalia’s work, expanded outwards into low-backed puffball tops and dresses, while water-resistant fabrics and heavy topstitching gave outerwear a protective quality. Elsewhere, organza, mohair and jacquard softened the collection, with motifs lifted from domestic scenes and archival imagery. Tailoring, denim, leather and knitwear provided the foundations, punctuated by fringed dresses, a new men’s tuxedo top and flashes of red, blue and green against a warmer palette of creams and browns. Even the branding was kept deliberately close to the chest: tonal badges were designed to be illegible from a distance, revealing themselves only when you got closer.
KNWLS
Undone dressing has become something of a Fashion Week staple. Exposed bra straps, falling camisoles and deliberately displaced hems have appeared across enough runways to make the whole thing feel increasingly predictable. Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault, however, pushed the idea so far that it felt original again. For SS27, Chambre Close imagined its heroine coming undone, with clothes appearing to slip, unravel and fall apart across the body.
The sexiest example was a sheer black tank top, its straps fallen almost completely from the shoulders and sitting just low enough to perfectly cover the model’s modesty. Elsewhere, a beige and peach dress combining lace and silk appeared to have burst open at the bodice, revealing a slip dress underneath. There were gabardine skirts seemingly sliced from trench coats, torn lace hanging from waistbands and hems, and jersey tanks seemingly hanging from the legs in mid-air. I think what really made it work was the colour: rather than sticking to expected lingerie shades of nude, pearlescent taupes and ochres sat alongside lurid greens, blues and mauves, giving the deliberately dishevelled styling a distinctly modern feel.
The collection’s biggest question, at least for me, is how much of that undone effect is actually built into the clothes. KNWLS says its apparently collapsing garments are held together by invisible wire and phantom tulle, suggesting that plenty of the chaos is carefully engineered. I’ll be interested to see how those pieces look on a rack, and then on an actual person getting dressed in the morning. Because there is a difference between a garment that is designed to fall apart and one that has simply been styled to look that way, and KNWLS has made that distinction particularly difficult to spot.
LEO PROTHMANN
Leo Prothmann brought the artwork of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to Fashion Week with his Spring/Summer 2027 collection, ‘Marcella’. Staged in the Mandrake Hotel’s COOC basement club, the showcase was crawling with dancing, dry-humping models and, yes, a real-life gimp, setting the scene for a collection exploring the relationship between Kirchner’s 1913 painting ‘Street, Berlin’ and London nightlife in 2026. If the setting made the connection fairly obvious, Prothmann’s clothes found a more considered balance between sexuality and utilitarianism.
Sustainability and material experimentation shaped the collection, with the designer reworking pieces from his own archive alongside deadstock fabrics. Fifty kilograms of denim were sourced from a warehouse, then spent months being cut, distressed and reconstructed into new silhouettes. Leather originally developed by Muirhead for Aston Martin interiors was transformed into outerwear and accessories, creating structured pieces that reinforced Prothmann’s signature cage-like construction.
YUHAN WANG
For the girls who can never seem to switch their brains off at bedtime, Yuhan Wang’s SS27 collection Sweet Nightmare feels particularly familiar. There is something about lying in bed with nothing left to distract you that makes every thought suddenly feel much more important, as your imagination races through memories, fantasies and increasingly bizarre made-up scenarios. After being forced to cancel her show last season due to personal reasons, it was particularly lovely to see Wang back at Fashion Week with another wonderfully camp concept, this time turning the bedroom into a space where getting dressed and dreaming blurred together. If she’s spent the last six months thinking about lace when her head hit the pillow, the work certainly paid off: lingerie-inspired pieces, transparent fabrics and delicate trims ran throughout the collection, giving the clothes that slightly unhinged feeling of getting ready when nobody else is watching.
That sense of private chaos made for some of the collection’s best details: lace stockings were paired with boxer shorts, lingerie silhouettes were reworked in striped polo jersey, and one pair of briefs seemed to have been pulled on over another, exposing the layers of getting dressed half-awake. Elsewhere, hairbrushes became accessories on charm belts and, while necklaces appeared caught in garments.
YAKU
YAKU has always understood that a fashion show can be a proper performance, but with his background in dance, SS27 felt like the moment everything clicked into place. I genuinely found myself sitting down and waiting for the performance to begin in the same way I would at a theatre, because with YAKU you know you’re actually going to see something. One of our favourite shows across the whole schedule, The Possible Family Reunion in RPG Space dropped us into an RPG dreamscape built from Black family storytelling, where an ordinary barbecue becomes a portal into memories, folklore and childhood imagination.
The video game framing feels completely at home within YAKU’s world-building, giving the collection a way to treat family history with the same limitless logic as childhood play. Stories about grandparents, parents, awkward teenagers and family gatherings become warped and embellished through retelling, while familiar memories take on the scale of mythology. The idea that a handful of pixels can be enough to build an entire universe feels particularly fitting here: YAKU does something similar with the everyday, taking the people, stories and memories that make up a family and giving them their own expansive universe. On the runway, the choreography made that world feel even more alive, with dancers turning the clothes into characters within the story rather than simply presenting them. YAKU isn’t just making collections, he’s building worlds, and this season felt like his most fully realised one yet.
CHARLIE CONSTANTINOU
Charlie Constantinou has built his practice around dyeing, with every garment designed in white before colour is introduced through his dyeing process. It means the clothes have to work before they’re transformed, and SS27 made that especially apparent: the silhouettes, construction and fabrics were strong enough to stand alone, but the dyeing brought them to life. This season, that transformation expanded into a new colour palette for Constantinou, with vibrant yellows and pinks joining his more familiar indigos, olives and greys. The result was one of his most exciting collections yet.
The collection looked to traditional Cypriot dress and the collision between Eastern and Western clothing that emerged during the country’s transition from Ottoman to British rule. Vrakas breeches, Antari robes and Zostra waistbands were reworked into modern, functional silhouettes, while classic tailoring was rebuilt in technical ripstop and natural linens and cottons were set against synthetic fabrics. The footwear was a particular highlight, with Nike trainers treated through Constantinou’s dyeing and coating techniques to match the collection’s weathered finish. But it was the colour that really got me: watching the pieces come alive through deep indigo, earthy olive, brilliant yellow and punchy pink made it impossible to see the dyeing as an afterthought, and it makes Charlie’s garment feel unmistakably his.
SELASI
Having spent a decade working as a photographer and embedded in London’s creative community before designing for it, Ronan Mckenzie has a particularly clear understanding of the women she wants SELASI to dress. That lived-in perspective makes the clothes feel real and, importantly, unpretentious. Even her gowns often come in simple jersey, allowing the woman wearing them to remain the focus rather than the garment doing all the work. SS27 made that particularly clear. The casting was excellent, bringing together a mix of industry names, friends, family and cultural figures that made the runway feel like a genuine community rather than a collection of interchangeable models. Presented at M&A Coachworks, Going Places looked to the relationship between the female form and the automobile, pulling from the curves of a car, the freedom of the open road and the intimacy of what happens behind closed doors.
That sensuality came through most clearly in the construction, with Mckenzie designing for the back as much as the front. Exposed backs and cut-outs appeared throughout, allowing otherwise structured pieces to reveal the body from behind, while draping followed the curves of the figure. A brown deadstock leather moto jacket sourced from Mulberry brought the automotive references into the clothes, alongside white moto-inspired pieces and a palette of sky blues, deeper blues, white and rich brown. But it was the women wearing them that made the collection feel most convincing: Going Places never seemed to be imagining some distant, idealised SELASI woman, because she was already standing there on the runway.
DI PETSA
For the past few seasons, Dimitra Petsa has returned again and again to motherhood. For SS27, HOLY MILK continued that exploration while turning the idea inwards, asking what it might mean to mother yourself. The answer arrived in particularly spectacular form when BRICKS cover star Leigh-Anne Pinnock walked onto the runway heavily pregnant, surrounded by models at her feet as milk dramatically spurted from the bra of her dress. Mother had, quite literally, arrived!
The scene was the perfect distillation of Petsa’s ongoing fascination with motherhood as something simultaneously intimate, sensual, spiritual and theatrical. Milk became both material and metaphor, with white translucent draping creating a wardrobe that encompassed bridalwear, ritual dressing and Grecian goddesses. Deep blue, black and flashes of liquid gold interrupted the white, giving the collection a darker edge and stopping its softness from becoming too sickly sweet.
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