London Fashion Week SS27 has opened with a season that feels, for the first time in a while, genuinely charged. Emerging talent is everywhere, the shows are rangy and alive, and looming over the whole week is the return of Alexander McQueen to the London calendar after an absence of more than two decades.
McQueen Comes Home
It is worth pausing on what the McQueen return actually means. According to The Impression, the house last appeared on the London Fashion Week schedule in 2001, before relocating to Paris. That is a long time. Vogue reports that creative director Seán McGirr, who was appointed in 2024 and who succeeded Sarah Burton in late 2023, is the force behind the homecoming. Whether London is ready to absorb the spectacle McQueen tends to generate is a question the week will answer. For now, it casts a long shadow over everything else, in the best possible way.
London Fashion Week SS27: The Collections
Aaron Esh arrived at Camden’s Electric Ballroom having just debuted his inaugural collection for AllSaints as the brand’s chief creative officer, and chose his eponymous label as the place to do something altogether different. The usual Esh palette (sooty grey, rich navy, an awful lot of black) gave way to hot pink leather jackets over matching tees, red tights, and wafer-thin organza dresses with underlays of turquoise and sharp red. ‘There is a feeling of excess without being excessive,’ he wrote in the show notes. ‘Young, but not innocent. Beautiful, but with something slightly strange about it.’ The darker pieces were still present, but the colour running through the collection shifted its mood entirely. Last season’s character lurked at the edges of the party; this season, they are right in the middle of it.
Ashley Williams was, in the most literal sense, wigging out. Blunt bobs, bursts of colour and an attitude that might charitably be described as good-girl-gone-bad set the tone for SS27. Nude mesh tights were stuffed with soft toys and repurposed as makeshift belts; hairbrushes were tucked into wigs or warped into accessories. The soundtrack slipped between fairy-tale melodies, rap and R&B without apology. Williams has long toyed with the codes of girlhood, but this season her girls seemed less interested in the codes and more interested in rewriting them entirely.
Joshua Ewusie staged a presentation-cum-exhibition in The Salon space at King’s Cross Town Hall, working alongside his friend Cynthia of C-Studio to curate a display featuring emerging artists exploring diaspora, heritage, craft tradition and the immigrant experience. Titled In Lieu of Flowers, a reference to the floral motifs of his childhood home’s interiors, the collection translated the front room of a house into garment. Dresses were crafted from the kind of plastic used for a kitchen tablecloth; leather was laser-cut so pieces were spattered with petal-shaped holes. Lace and satin appeared alongside heavier fabrics, a more feminine register than before, but the work retained the same character it has carried from the start.
Petra Fagerström made her catwalk debut with a technical confidence that put her well beyond first-show nerves. The Scandinavian designer, who reached the final of this year’s LVMH Prize, skews feminine tropes to produce a wardrobe that is beautiful and pleasingly off-kilter. Florals moved along leather pencil skirts that cascaded into razor-sharp knife pleats; other leather skirts were sliced to reveal knickers beneath; dresses were slightly warped in their construction or given a hazy trompe l’oeil finish. Precise and strange in equal measure.
Harris Reed marked five years of showing in London, and his first collection since leaving Nina Ricci, with a show held in the pink-carpeted ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental. The signature picture necklines built on tightly laced corseted superstructures were present, some with caged crinolines. But Reed let go of the supersized platform shoes that have anchored his silhouette from the beginning, a welcome evolution. The all-white colour way worked simultaneously as palette cleanser and bridal calling card, pitched at VIC customers of any gender. Harris Reed is, clearly, here for your big day.
Maximilian Raynor titled his SS27 show A Village Green Rivalry, staging two feuding fictional households on an English lawn pitched somewhere between Ascot, Wimbledon and Romeo and Juliet. Fascinators arrived fractured, tea dresses were reworked into something considerably ruder than the garden party intended, and sportswear was subverted with knits and contorted silhouettes. At the centre sat a glossy 1968 Bentley, a family heirloom in a collaboration with Bentley Motors, staged in defiance of the whole scene and set to the cheerful blare of a brass band. The heritage conceit is the easy part; the tailoring underneath is the reason to keep watching.
