The Aaron Esh All Saints AW26 collection arrived in stores and online today, bringing with it the most comprehensive overhaul the British brand has undertaken in years: new clothes, a redesigned website, a new graphic identity, a revised tone of voice, a new social media strategy and even a new in-store music playlist. All of it, down to the last detail, has passed through Esh’s hands.
That level of control is not incidental. Esh was appointed chief creative officer at AllSaints last October, arriving at the company’s headquarters, a former industrial warehouse in London’s East End that has housed the brand for some three decades, according to Vogue, on his first official day last November carrying thousands of printed images, stacked into towers and divided by category. He handed them to the design team and asked them to respond to what they loved, not to execute a brief he had already written.
‘It wasn’t about me saying “Go and design these jackets”,’ he explains. ‘It was more: “Out of these details of these jackets, these historical references, what inspired you?”‘ The distinction matters to him.
Thirty Years of AllSaints, Reasserted Rather Than Rebuilt
AllSaints was founded by Stuart Trevor and Kait Bolongaro in 1994, per Vogue, and the decades since have given the brand a specific cultural gravity, its leather biker jackets and rugged separates became something close to the unofficial uniform of a certain strain of British cool in the 2000s and early 2010s. Esh, who bought his first pair of All Saints military boots as a teenager, is careful not to treat that history as either a burden or a prop. His stated intention was to reassert the brand’s identity rather than reconstruct it from scratch, and just as deliberately to avoid the easy nostalgia of a revival.
‘It was about asking myself: “What made me, as a 17-year-old, feel so confident wearing All Saints, and what is that today?”‘ he says. ‘How do we make something feel contemporary, cool and authentic within the codes of the brand but in a completely new way?’
The AW26 collection answers that question with a range built around wardrobe fundamentals (a strong white tee, rugged denim separates, leather biker jackets) refreshed in cut and proportion, alongside new additions: lilac leather dresses, shaggy faux furs, handsome woollen overcoats and considered knitwear. The tonal shift is in the attitude rather than the archive. Sitting down with stylist Katy England, the pair wrote out what they described as the perfect wardrobe, item by item. ‘Long sleeve T-shirt, short sleeve T-shirt, oh we forgot a vest,’ Esh recalls, with some amusement at the low-tech method. England works with Esh across both AllSaints and his eponymous label, as do writer Osman Ahmed and art director Jamie Reid.
Aaron Esh All Saints AW26: The Campaign, the Magazine and the Cast
To mark the launch, Esh recruited photographer Alasdair McLellan to shoot 17 people, mostly street-cast, rendered in pared-back black and white portraits, for the campaign. Models and Esh muses Kiki Willems and Lux Gillespie appear alongside artists, writers, chefs, retail workers and students. Ten thousand copies of an 80-page magazine celebrating the relaunch are being distributed across AllSaints stores globally.
‘Alasdair’s portraits make someone look like the best version of themselves,’ Esh says. ‘That is essentially what we are trying to do with the clothes, too.’ He describes the project as anthropological, very specifically London. ‘When you see [all the cast] together, it’s like being down the pub. I feel so unbelievably proud of it. I burst out crying on set and I’m not a crier.’
The precision Esh brings to AllSaints runs in parallel with a career he has been building independently since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2022. His eponymous label made it to the LVMH Prize finals in 2023 and earned him a place on the BFC’s Newgen programme. His next collection for that label is set to be unveiled on Friday 18 September during London Fashion Week, and is described as his biggest to date. Cropped leather bombers with matching skinny trousers, suede military jackets, bias-cut silk dresses worn with distressed baseball caps: the aesthetic is slick in a way that doesn’t announce itself as trying.
That sensibility is precisely what he is bringing to the larger stage. Esh’s appointment is part of a broader shift he sees reshaping the industry, one where the distance between luxury design and accessible retail is narrowing. Clare Waight Keller and Francesco Risso at Uniqlo, Zac Posen at Gap, John Galliano’s two-year partnership with Zara: the precedents are accumulating. ‘Ten years ago, the idea of a designer working with a brand at an accessible price point was looked down upon,’ Esh says. ‘I think this is just the start of people being able to wear really great clothes, designed really nicely, without having to spend extortionate amounts of money on them.’
The Aaron Esh All Saints AW26 collection is available to shop now at allsaints.com. His eponymous label’s next show follows on 18 September during London Fashion Week.
