Sweetie, Darling, It's London Fashion Week!
London is a tough place for inventive designers to create these days. It can be difficult finding ingenious solutions to suggest fresh irreverence in the ‘British Fashion’ way when affordable workspaces can take up more money than fantastic toiles cost. Pivotal then, is this latest London Fashion Week showcase of dynamic resourcefulness that thrives against the government’s slow, slow, support of the UK creative industry.
Beginning Thursday 12 September, London Fashion Week (LFW) will occupy the next five days of fashion month. In continuing its 40th anniversary celebrations, LFW present the next wave of emerging designers that, we hope, produce magic from a dialogue between the hunger of something unexpected and harsh reality.
Check out our list of LFW activations and activities that examines how creativity through adversity sandwiches together on a catwalk. For bonus lunacy, let’s use Patsy Stone and Edina Monsoon quotes from Ab Fab to do so!
Saffy: So what does a fashion director actually do?
Edina: Oh darling, she gets a 50% discount at Harvey Nichols
London Fashion Week celebrates 40 years of British fashion moments with an LFW40 retrospective at events space 180 The Strand. Curated by the tireless champion of British fashion’s new generations, Sarah Mower MBE, visitors are invited to look back on LFW’s history in pictures. The British Fashion Council (BFC) then goes beyond in partnership with 1664 Blanc on Le Journal Bleu, a newspaper that combines memorable shows, looks and designer interviews.
Activities at 180 The Strand, while ceremonial, can actually serve as a fashion appetizer for greed. Take time this week to indulge your ready-to-wear hunger at the Haymarket while Dover Street Market is marketing. To commemorate this anniversary week, dedicated product launches from Stefan Cooke’s Citizen’s Band and Wales Bonner’s Dream Study A/W 24 collections are featured. Dover Street Market's biggest news is the Martine Rose/Supreme capsule release. Ms. Rose’s beloved new beat generation gets revisited with beer towels, beer cans, velour trackies and collage shirting that are both hers — common men on common turntables in 2013, Chalk Farm daytime nightclub in 2018 — and ours. Dover Street London proves greed is good.
Patsy: Are you mad? I've got nothing to wear on public transport!
Fashion East will ensure Patsy and her boyish boyfriends, stay skin tight with the talent incubator announcing a lineup including Olly Shinder and SOS SKYN. Shinder serves double duty as part of another incubator at Dover Street Market Paris, which means added notoriety for his intersecting tensions of military workwear filtered through a queer lens.
SOS SKYN are translucent, liquid experiments gone wearable from a collaboration between artist Samara Scott and curator Tayah Leigh Barrs. Their one-of-one garments are made from recyclable materials that reimagine fetishism and Jackson Pollock paintings together at long last.
Another upcoming designer showing during LFW is tailoring-focused Luke Derrick. He’s been suggesting a type of suiting and casualwear since 2021 that makes your insides rise to the occasion…not those insides. Trained at Dunhill, Derrick ushers DERRICK into an eased-back elegance and the coherency of slightly luxe appearances tapping into your insides that speak to your comfortable style self…again not those insides.
Edina: I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!
JW Anderson and Burberry represent the top of the LFW food chain. Jonathan Anderson’s relentless ambition to bewilder collective assumptions about what a new direction for fashion should look like has reduced Troye Sivan, Omar Apollo and Adele to putty in his hands. Evidently, an expertly branded sense of wrong makes JW Anderson feel right. Then there is Burberry, which hasn’t felt right since removing ‘Prorsum,’ the Latin term for 'forward,' from its name. As Daniel Lee refines his kinetic sense of modern British life inside a publicly traded luxury fashion company — cool new Britannia crews easily acquainted with a woodsy aesthetic flex — the desire is not aligning with success. A new season brings new positivity. Perhaps Lee can learn from Anderson’s oblong chic solutions to rediscover what modernised the Burberry DNA into a coveted factory for ‘nice things’ over fifteen years. Jonathan Anderson is a big David Wojnarowicz art fan. Similarly, Anderson evinces private or personal aspects of life — pets, kink, ambiguity — successfully into the public realm. In Burberry terms, this is could be called irreverence. Then again, another famous Wojnarowicz print was the Time and Money one with ants feeding on shattered clocks and eroding currency. There is something eerily foreboding, yet darkly enjoyable, about that image considering Burberry’s next show. Good luck, Mr. Lee.
Edina: Why does everything you wear look like it's bearing a grudge, darling?
Sinéad O’Dwyer and Paolo Carzana represent the buzzword ‘intentional’ as we feel out what defines fashion in the 2020s. These two designers inculcate heart and soul into yawn-inducing, overused terms like ‘inclusivity’, ‘body positivity’ and ‘sustainability.’ They revolt by showing, not telling. Fresh from Copenhagen, O’Dwyer tours her Everything Opens To Touch collection for LFW eyes. Big time sensuality encapsulated her sounds, set design and natural understanding that fashion is a playground for anyone, perceived ability limitations be damned. How will O’Dwyer’s massive lime green sculptures with fleshy bodies asserted freely translate at LFW?
Conversely, Paolo Carzana’s ethereal, fabulously tattered symbols that sculpt beauty and diversity quite tangibly, has been fully embraced by both London fashion and the industry overall. Paolo is a 2024 LVMH Prize semi-finalist. Paolo’s menswear has been worn by Zendaya and Michaela Coel this year alone. As Carzana prepares to show for future spells with vegetable and flower dye baths that conjure an ornate waltz between dreams and reality, LFW cannot come quickly enough.
Patsy: I decide what goes in the magazine. Y'know, one snap of my fingers and I can raise hemlines so high that the world is your gynaecologist!
Rounding out LFW is the return of Nensi Dojaka to catwalks after a two-season break. Dojaka engages LFW’s historic sense of conceptual sexiness (think: Christopher Kane, Louise Goldin, or, my beloved Marios Schwab). Dojaka’s body-hugging, transparent clothes, much like my beloved's, succeed with obsessive precision that exposes the body you hide.
Leo Carlton, who is someone we enjoy at SHOWstudio, presents their S/S 25 collection at LFW hopefully filled with more pearl sheen accessories that straddle his AR and VR realms to metamorphosize objects, existing for us between fantasy and reality. Carlton’s approach recognises Hussein Chalayan and Aitor Throup shows from LFW seasons past that used cross-disciplinary, applied art concepts to innovate our material world — a totality of provocative and evocative results that, again we hope, inspire a new British fashion spirit to pierce through adversity in this era so we can recall fondly 40 years later, when a Patsy quote summarises LFW S/S 25:
'Whatever I choose is cool because I am cool'