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London Fashion Week ends today, 21 September, after five days and 47 catwalk shows in the British Fashion Council’s spring/summer 2027 programme, which took in Christopher Kane’s debut for Mulberry and Simone Rocha’s collection at the Old Bailey.
Petra Fagerström, a NEWGEN first-timer at LFW, put lingerie on the catwalk on Friday, printing trompe-l’oeil underwear onto florals and citing Isabelle Huppert’s character in The Piano Teacher as her starting point, alongside leather jackets modelled on Dior’s Bar jacket.
On Sunday, Simone Rocha sent models across the Old Bailey’s marble floor in sheer dresses with red underwear showing beneath, along with a leather jacket that plunged almost to the waist and carried oversized roses on its lapels.
For a designer whose clothes usually bury the body under tulle and frills, this was a pared-back turn. The collection, titled I Was Trying To Love You, put trousers beneath dresses with cuffs rolled up, and one cream jacket, its collar a huge white flower, came with red briefs edged in fabric roses. The courthouse setting came from the story of a Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ, that hung unrecognised in a Dublin drawing room for years.
Erdem Moralıoğlu staged his Sunday show at the Roundhouse, the Camden concert venue, where dry ice drifted across a pitch-black floor, and models in crystal-studded bodysuits parted it on their way out. Showgirl feathers and sparkly panties sat alongside high-collared Edwardian shirts and mannish wool coats, and the inspiration was Barbette, the Texas-born trapeze artist who became a sensation in 1920s Paris. A muse to Cocteau and a sitter for Man Ray, he also appeared on Moralıoğlu’s backstage mood board in a double-breasted suit and fedora.
KNWLS took its cue on Saturday from Bettina Rheims’s book Chambre Close, photographs of women in various states of undress. Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault built clothes that look as though they are slipping off, held in place by what they call a “phantom” structure, and set knicker dresses beside a shrunken leather jacket and a plush shearling coat. Crushed-rose cargo pockets in leather nodded to early-2000s boudoir nostalgia.
Chopova Lowena took over a London bowling alley on Saturday and dressed it as a Slavic fever dream, with branches growing indoors and Baba Yaga and Morana, the winter goddess whose effigies are drowned and burnt at springtime, as muses. Morana’s look was a cropped shrug and a white corset whose boning traced the ribs. Elsewhere, laser-cut chiffon spikes bristled from a black dress.
Polish folk sleeves and beadwork sat beside the label’s pleated carabiner skirt, now in tapestry fabric, and much of it came apart: aprons snapped on, and carabiner panels clipped just as easily onto jeans. Bowling shirts and house dresses took their cue from 1950s bowling star Marion Ladewig.
On Friday, Bora Aksu showed a funereal black lace gown and two wine-coloured gothic dresses, one veiled, in a church in Marylebone, and Paolo Carzana closed the day at St Cuthbert’s in Earls Court, where models like shrouded statues coming to life wore shredded knits and fraying seams, with openings that flashed an inner thigh or the curve of a hip.
Pauline Dujancourt’s Saturday collection moved from dusty pink tulle and ballet flats into gothic black lace, with rosette-studded dresses trailing ribbons, and closed on a wedding gown.
Christopher Kane’s debut as creative director of women’s ready-to-wear at Mulberry, shown on Sunday at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, was the house’s first ready-to-wear collection since 2020. He built it from the handbags: laser-cut leather dresses and skirts in taupe, cream, caramel and chocolate took their sleek lines from the pockets and flaps of the Bayswater and the Piccadilly, with car-wash pleats and curved cutouts around the shoulders.
Minidresses wore layers of leather flaps like abstract ruffles, and boxy coats had square cutouts at the front. Eveningwear used flaps the size of sticky notes, cut from a papery Japanese nylon Kane has used before, that fluttered across shift dresses. He also revisited the oversized Mulberry sweatshirts he remembered football casuals wearing when he was growing up, and the collection reaches stores and online in January 2027.
Roksanda Ilinčić went to sculpture for her Sunday show, taking Françoise Grossen’s knotted and braided rope works as her starting point and staging it in the National Theatre’s Natural Dye and Wellbeing Garden, a venue she chose for her love of Brutalist architecture. A tightly braided spine ran down a bias-cut brown silk gown, and looser braids of velvety neoprene framed the bustiers of the glossy panniered finale dresses. Eyelash fringe trimmed a little black dress, and loose threads trailed across pillow-like bags and the godets of evening gowns, some tangling in the breeze. Ilinčić also widened into daywear at her clients’ request; they want everything for seven days a week, she said.
Marks & Spencer joined the official LFW schedule for the first time on Friday, using its 100th year in clothing as the occasion for a catwalk show at the Design Museum. The 59 womenswear and menswear looks, worn by Lara Stone, Erin O’Connor, Jodie Kidd and Karen Elson, were available online and in selected stores as soon as the show ended, and half the collection was priced under £50.
Richard Quinn sent 42 gowns down a mirrored, chandelier-hung runway on Saturday evening, with Helena Christensen closing the show. Most silhouettes were bare-legged, topped with billowing army-green parkas or denim duster coats. Quinn was frank backstage that the show doubles as an advertisement for his online business and his shop at Liberty, and many of his clients attend in his evening wear.
John Richmond’s noon show at St-Martin-in-the-Fields on Saturday drew Duran Duran’s Roger Taylor and Nick Rhodes, Carl Barât of The Libertines, Lennon Gallagher and Ringo Starr’s grandchildren Louis and Sonny Starkey. Dave Stewart of Eurythmics performed briefly after the show, with Richmond singing a few notes alongside him, just after releasing his album The Way It Was Back Then on 18 September.
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