And just like that, another London Fashion Week has drawn to a close – and what a fashion week it was. Between a blockbuster H&M show, the return of Christopher Kane at Mulberry, McQueen’s London homecoming and a memorable Burberry show, spring/summer 2027 was a season for the books. Just as central to the British fashion industry’s marquee moments are the independent talents that truly define the city. Below, catch up on the latest collections from Britain’s very best indie brands.

Oscar Ouyang began spring/summer 2027 with a small assortment of found objects – antique silverware, beaded pouches, a hand-crocheted pine nut – gathered, he says, for their “beauty, strangeness and the feeling of another life”. A silver swan pincushion gave rise to the collection’s central motif: a cygnet, representing “becoming, youth and beauty” as he worked through the emotions of an imagined prom night, with all the anticipation and self-invention that such a rite of passage entails. And so, at the former Rochelle School in east London, to a nostalgic soundtrack that lurched between Fergie’s “Glamorous” and soundbites from an early episode of , the clothes suggested a teenager assembling an idea of adulthood. There were cummerbund miniskirts, bias-cut halter-necks, plissé dresses stitched down with velvet ribbons and tiny tasselled shorts. Traces of those original objects added to Ouyang’s dressing-up-box vision: silverware translated into metallic cording and crochet, beadwork carrying the glint of old jewellery, tassels swinging from shirts, jackets and drawstrings. It was one of the week’s most plainly covetable collections – I was particularly taken with a CWU-45 bomber reworked with twisted knots and a cape, and an M65 jacket in silk satin. “I wanted people to feel excitement about the clothes, thinking about which piece they’d like to fit into their own wardrobe,” Ouyang says – something his peers might take heed of. “Hopefully it also brings back memories of their teenage years.”

Oscar Ouyang SS27.

“I want people to think, ‘I want to be her’,” says Petra Fagerström of the woman she conjured for her runway debut at 180 The Strand. Which was a mission accomplished, judging by the guests I spoke to afterwards, all praising the Swedish designer’s bolero bombers, slim-cut, flower-embroidered leather trousers and oversized weekenders – her first bag design, made in collaboration with fellow Central Saint Martins graduate Eden Tan’s ETMFG. “She has always been a woman who allows herself pleasure without apology,” adds Fagerström. “With this collection, I’m investigating her sensuality and sexuality.” Most impressive were a shift dress whose lenticular pleating flashed from tweed to underwear, and a trench coat that opened onto a black leather suit with a knife-pleated skirt, all fused into a single piece. These were the clearest expressions of Fagerström’s ongoing negotiation with femininity: how to indulge her attraction to things like 1950s knife-pleated circle skirts, lace-edged silken lingerie and nipped-waist jackets while stripping them of their tradwife associations. “My work has always been about taking those silhouettes and glitching them,” she says. “Every collection starts with my desire for agency while knowing the clothes that give me that feeling often uphold conservative values.” By the time the models stormed the finale to “Edge of Seventeen”, any notion of well-behaved domesticity had been firmly put to bed.

Petra Fagerström SS27.

“We’ve never really done nudity before,” smile Stefan Cooke and Jake Burt of the tees with boxy cut-outs at the nipple, which feature in their spring/summer 2027 collection lookbook. “We were looking at Klimt’s take on the breast,” explains Cooke of the subtle Viennese references in the vivid colour-swathed offering, which evoke memories of Cooke visiting Austria, the birthplace of his mum, in his teens. Nostalgic thoughts – warped by time and emotion – seep into the varsity silhouette-infused collection, shot inside a vast sports hall at Kensington Primary Academy. “It’s a space that feels oddly purgatorial,” laughs Burt, calling out a sculptural vintage American football shirt in his archive. “If anyone had a film made of their life, it would surely reference one.” Equally childlike, knitwear was accented with chunky wooden bracelets, made by Cooke under the pseudonym Faimann (you can find it stocked at Burt’s cult eponymous store Jake’s in Hackney), using salvaged pieces of Brio train sets.

Stefan Cooke SS27.

Few fashion insiders could be persuaded to travel to Earls Court at 9pm on the Friday of London Fashion Week, but Paolo Carzana’s sporadic show pattern means that when he does pop up on the grid, you RSVP “Yes. To St Cuthbert’s Church, then, where a select group, including the always joyful costume designer Sandy Powell, watched as Carzana’s shadow-like figures emerged from behind vast sheets of pale fabric pinned to the gothic interiors. We were gifted a lengthy title – Why Wait Until Wednesday, the Holy Wine Is Bleeding and the Colours of the Carrots Are Changing, I’ll Still Be Your Prince of Pain, Until Man Colours the Rain – to make sense of the looks that Carzana considered a baptism for his brand: delicate bias ruffle satin and chiffon dresses, knotted jersey “T-shirts” and layered skirts all draped and sculpted in peace silk satins, hemp jerseys, organic cotton calico and bamboo satin. The dusty palette might have skewed -esque, but the inspiration behind this eveningwear-focused edit was actually the Indiana Jones film, . No one utilises dye quite like Carzana, who broke his rib two weeks prior to the spring/summer 2027 presentation, but ploughed on anyway, starting with notes of marigold and turmeric, then introducing wine tannins, before letting the sun do its natural bleaching. The builder’s son thanked the women in his life who have guided him, but, from a front row shrouded in darkness, it looked like it was Carzana who was paving the way with his nomadic tribe this season.

Paolo Carzana SS27.

You’ve probably seen Geordie Campbell’s T-shirts emblazoned with the likes of “Best Boy” and “Queer Boy”. What “started off on a bit of a whim” has become his signature. “We wanted to push this idea of coming-of-age confusion,” he says. For Campbell’s spring/summer 2027 collection, entitled 15 Steps, he went back to the ’80s, finding his North Star in the patron saint of queer counterculture, George Michael. He translated the performer’s particular collision of sex, celebrity and excess into scandalously-low necklines and teeny-tiny briefs. With a presentation set in a recreation of a Central Park public toilet, this has to be one of the more unfamiliar places fashion week has brought me to. Nonetheless, it was an apt setting for Campbell’s dive into the codes of cruising, with the designer’s “Best Boys” languishing with blown-out hair and latex boots, at home amongst the half-drunk beers and cigarette butts littering the men’s bathroom.

Geordie Campbell SS27.

Matt Hickmott / Courtesy of Geordie Campbell

Ronan McKenzie’s last Selasi collection took us back to the classroom with an homage to Walthamstow School for Girls, but this season, the designer took a different turn, speeding out of the sports hall and onto the open road. Titled , the intention was to feel “sensual and free”, with a collection focused on “the sense of possibility that comes with movement”. Returning to the London Fashion Week schedule for a second season, McKenzie took over M&A Coachworks, sending models in cropped motocross jackets around the industrial paraphernalia of the working garage before ducking behind car parts hoisted up on rigs. Despite the setting, this was a far cry from an oil-stained mechanic’s uniform. Buttery leathers were back courtesy of deadstock supplied by Mulberry, alongside crisp whites, soft beiges and stain-free sandy neutrals, with exposed skin and unfinished hems modelled by the likes of Zezi Ifore and Lea Ogunlami.