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Mulberry is coming home. On Sunday, September 20, at 3 pm, the British heritage house will present “Mulberry by Christopher Kane” on the official London Fashion Week schedule, the brand’s first runway show in six years and the first collection from its new creative director of women’s ready-to-wear.
The news broke this week at a lunch hosted with the British Fashion Council at Bar Finch, the recently opened Mayfair spot from publisher and film producer Charles Finch. Kane, Mulberry chief executive Andrea Baldo, and BFC chief executive Laura Weir addressed the room together, with industry guests gathered to hear the details firsthand.
Weir talked about wanting to see more heritage British names back on the London calendar, a goal she said dates back to the start of her time at the BFC. London has watched a string of those names quietly drop off in recent years, showing internationally or scaling back their UK presence altogether.
Baldo was specific about what drew him to Kane when the appointment was first confirmed back in March. He described Kane’s mix of craft, discipline, and playfulness and said the designer’s outlook fit naturally with Mulberry’s own history and its British roots. Mulberry has built its business on exacting leather craftsmanship for decades, working with the same factories and skilled makers season after season. Baldo’s comments point to a designer he trusts to bring that same discipline into clothing, not just accessories.
Kane trained at Central Saint Martins and ran his own label for more than fifteen years before closing it in 2023, dressing Alexa Chung and Rihanna along the way. His work has always paired technical precision with a willingness to take real risks. His fall 2008 show carried a screaming gorilla print inspired by Planet of the Apes. He put Crocs on his own runway for a tenth-anniversary show, years before the shoe became a talking point elsewhere in fashion.
His 2019 Met Gala looks, worn by Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirk, leaned into boxy silhouettes and latex with a directness few designers attempt on that carpet. He also won four British Fashion Awards over the years, including Womenswear Designer of the Year, and picked up the Vogue Fashion Fund early in his career.
Kane’s most recent public work came through Self-Portrait’s residency programme in 2024, where he reworked ideas from his own graduate show for a one-off collection. His sister, Tammy Kane, his long-time business partner, co-owned the label with him throughout its run and helped him reacquire its trademarks after its 2023 closure. Drapers has reported that she will work alongside him again on the Mulberry collection.
What that translates to on a Mulberry runway is not yet public. Baldo has talked about wanting to evolve the brand’s creative language beyond accessories. Kane has been asked to push the house somewhere new. Beyond that, the collection remains genuinely unseen, and any real detail belongs to September itself, not to this announcement.
London Fashion Week has spent recent seasons losing ground to Paris and Milan for major runway moments from established houses. Several British labels have shown internationally or scaled back their UK presence, thinning out a schedule that once felt packed with genuine industry weight. A heritage name with global recognition, staging a debut from a widely respected designer, gives buyers and press a concrete reason to build their September calendars around London dates.
Mulberry ended its womenswear line in 2020, during a period of financial strain that pushed the brand to concentrate entirely on accessories. The decision kept the company stable but also narrowed its identity for half a decade. Bags carried the business almost single-handedly during that stretch, and Mulberry existed in the public eye mostly as a handbag brand; however successful that business remained on its own terms.
Bringing back ready-to-wear changes what the house can do creatively. Clothing gives Mulberry a way to set a design direction each season, something bags alone cannot easily provide, and puts the brand back in the room with London’s other houses on questions of craft and ideas.
The financial groundwork supports the timing. Mulberry cut operating losses by 63 percent year on year in the 26 weeks to September 2025, and full-price retail sales rose 19 percent over Christmas trading that same year. Total sales for fiscal 2026 climbed 5.7 percent at constant currency, with a 13.6 percent jump in the second half alone. Mulberry is controlled by Singaporean entrepreneur Christina Ong and her husband Ong Beng Seng through Challice Limited, and a show of this scale required their backing.
The collection reaches stores and online from January 2027. Kane gets a second act with real institutional weight behind it. Mulberry gets a chance to be judged on more than its handbags again.
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