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London Fashion Week’s Spring/Summer 2027 season began Thursday with five shows spread across the city: Paul Costelloe, Daniel W Fletcher’s Mithridate, Harris Reed, Barbour’s Saatchi Gallery exhibition, and H&M’s evening show.
William Costelloe presented his second collection since taking over the label from his father, who died last November. Fletcher combined womenswear and menswear for Mithridate. Reed stripped nearly all colour from his own show. Barbour opened an exhibition tracing its 130-year history and reworked its tartan sett into new student designs. H&M’s shoppable collection rounded out the schedule.
William Costelloe opened the day at 10 am with his second collection as creative director of the house his father built over four decades. Paul Costelloe died in November at 80, and William, previously the label’s design director, presented his debut in February. This season moved venues, leaving the Waldorf Hilton after fifteen years for Banking Hall near Liverpool Street.
The collection returned to the Eighties references most associated with his father, who dressed Diana, Princess of Wales, from 1983 until she died in 1997. Broad shoulders reappeared throughout, along with pussy-bow blouses, silk headscarves, and an oversized jacket with bulbous buttons.
Tailoring formed the backbone of the show, softened with linen, silk, and lightweight cotton to carry looks from morning into evening. Costelloe pushed the styling further than in previous seasons too, throwing blazers over swimsuits and mixing decades within single looks.
The show opened with a hand-drawn animation by the artist Nicholas Costelloe, showing a fox travelling through the fabrics and craftsmanship associated with the house, a tribute to Paul. His daughter Jessica worked the door. Mollie King and Roxy Horner sat in the front row, both dressed head to toe in archive pieces from the label’s AW26 collection.
Daniel W Fletcher’s combined womenswear and menswear show for the China-based label Mithridate leaned into 1980s codes and military styling without tipping into costume. Shoulderlines were exaggerated, but the rest of the collection stayed close to the ground: slouchy knee-length pencil skirts, mini bubble skirts, epaulette shirts, slim-cut jackets with brass buttons, and roomy blousons.
Cummerbunds appeared both high-waisted and slung low on the hip. Classic men’s shirting ran through both the men’s and women’s lines, joined by preppy striped rugby tops and fine-gauge cable-knit sweaters, while the roomy double-breasted jacket emerged as Fletcher’s answer for men’s suiting this season. A corset top with dangling suspenders nodded to Madonna’s Eighties image. Despite the season, the palette leaned autumnal: sunshine yellow and pink alongside scarlet, green, brown, low-key blue and grey.
Harris Reed, showing in London for a fifth season, removed colour almost entirely from his collection, working instead in white, ivory, fawn, and metallics, a combination he described as a “ghostly palette.” The silhouettes stayed as extreme as ever. Corsets grew from the waist, extending to frame the shoulders or flaring into wing shapes, paired with exaggerated, curved hips.
A crinoline cage dress revealed the body while building a structure around it. Elsewhere, a tailored suit came with a cut-out back, necklines curved upward into near-architectural shapes. Reed balanced the structure with sheer counterpoints in devoré, chiffon, lace, and gazar and used gold duchesse satin hand-painted with a textured white rose motif to bring detail to a collection with almost no colour. Piqué and scuba fabrics carried further textured floral work throughout.
Barbour opened an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery on Thursday afternoon: Tartan Reimagined: The Barbour Way, part of London Fashion Week’s official public programme. Press attended a preview on the 17th, with doors opening to the public on the 18th and 19th.
The show traces the brand back to founder John Barbour, who travelled from Kirkcudbrightshire in southwest Scotland to South Shields, where he opened his first shop in 1894. One section is devoted to the Barbour tartan sett, the specific sequence and arrangement of coloured threads running through the fabric’s crossing points, reworked into new colourways each season while the underlying pattern stays fixed.
The clothing on display comes from Barbour’s AW26 collection, shown alongside winning entries from a student competition run with the British Fashion Council, where entrants reinterpreted the Barbour sett in their own style. A further section covers Barbour Re-Loved, the brand’s repair and resale scheme, with South Shields factory craftspeople cleaning, mending, and rewaxing the garments. On display: collaboration pieces with Gucci, Erdem, Paul Smith, Aardman, and Glastonbury × Oxfam, next to a live re-waxing table recreating the factory process on site.
Ruffled jackets, a dress with twisted panels, corset tops, embroidered details, and a run of strappy silhouettes made up H&M’s 8 pm show, geared toward nights out and downtime dressing. Cream, black, and burgundy anchored the palette, with an embroidered off-white hussar jacket, a black appliqué peplum jacket, and a run of simple white blouses. Jeans and tailored trousers grounded the ultra-feminine pieces for daywear.
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