One of the worst side-effects of the emergence of the green-screen social media critic was the death of the catwalk gimmick. Yes, it could be conceptually thin, often too obvious in its intentions to merit introspection, but it was also a lot of fun – and gave rise to the original conceit of this article, whose headline featured the word “viral” for several post-pandemic seasons. That was excised around the time designers were shamed out of airbrushing dresses onto supermodels in real time, unleashing robot dogs and sending Kardashians through Disneyland – and that was just Coperni – and returned to sending models up and down in a line. That isn’t to say the stunts have disappeared entirely – Prada cast just 15 models last season, each wearing four layered looks, for a total of 60 exits – but we are, broadly speaking, in a gag recession. Is that such a bad thing? I suppose it forces us to look more closely at the clothes, searching out the surprise rather than having it thrust in our faces – and if that is what you’re after, well, there are always the celebrity arrivals.
Scroll down for all the viral moments you missed from the spring/summer 2027 shows.
St Michael’s conceptual makeover at A Letter
For their debut LFW presentation last season, Freddy Coomes and Matt Empringham presented conceptual works made predominantly from rolls of crepe paper on mannequins. But for their first physical show inside Rose Easton gallery, Coomes explains, “We were more interested in how things resonate physically than visually.” Specific clothing archetypes, sourced from Angels Costumes in Hendon, formed the starting point – from a donkey jacket to a Ben Sherman gingham shirt, St Michael’s underwear to a ’50s day dress – for pieces that the design duo associate with British suburbia and domesticity. Dedicated to rooting out what clothes really mean – symbolically, materially, conceptually – Coomes emphasises the collection is not a “love letter” to these pieces, but rather an exploration of how they can be elevated, using velvet flocking and pressed silks, and with the addition of contemporary Venetian masks. “We were thinking about how we make these clothes feel modern, rather than nostalgic”.
A Letter SS27.
Aaron Esh, now available in colour
Much has evolved for Aaron Esh over the past year. He’s added a new job title – chief creative officer of AllSaints, no less – to his CV, while maintaining his position at the helm of his namesake label. “My life changed so much,” he shared in a preview. “The personal, professional… When I think of who I was a year ago, I was a completely different person.” This shift could be felt in the collection he presented at Camden’s Electric Ballroom, marking Aaron Esh’s return to the runway after last season’s lookbook. The telling factor? The loud and proud use of colour – immaculately crafted suede jackets in hot pink and electric-blue shirting; double-layered silk chiffon dresses in fuchsia. Rather than a direct transcription of his personal emotional landscape, this brighter palette – replete with unexpected, almost jarring tonal clashes that were all the more alluring for it – signalled an impressive broadening of the designer’s remit beyond the now rather ubiquitous “East London night owl” figure he’s long been associated with – a fact also signposted by the debut of a collaboration with On in the form of sporty yet subdued Cloud trainer.
A trio of tricks at Fashion East
Filling a South London skate park with editors on the first full day of fashion week is no mean feat, but it’s one Fashion East has managed for a second season running. The Victorian bathhouse-turned-Supreme hangout was packed with the highest quota of small dogs and razor-sharp bobs you’ll find anywhere on the LFW schedule – proof of just how hotly anticipated this slot has become. Newcomer Mé Mé kicked off the three acts, finding “glamour and absurdity in the everyday” and urging us to “dare, grab and take”. The Cantonese designer was inspired by the “casual glamour of busy women on the streets of ’80s Hong Kong”, paying homage to the overworked girl crying in the cubicle, all smudged eyeliner and raw hems, with a cigarette welded to gloves coming undone at the seams. Next up was a languid, summery jaunt courtesy of Jacek Gleba’s , which took its cues from Denton Welch’s In Youth in Pleasure: think pool boys, denim left to dry and fabric wrapped around wet bodies. Closing out the show was insider favourite Traiceline Pratt with Goyagoma, who brought us back down to earth with oversized rugby shirts, beaded belts and leather separates.
M&S brings the fizz (and picky bits)
Ian Wright and Joan Collins on the front row! Erin O’Connor, Karen Elson, Jodie Kidd and Lara Stone bringing supermodel clout to the runway! Clothes for under £50! Picky bits for afters! Despite there not being a Percy Pig or a pair of 50 deniers in sight, it could only have been the M&S show. Celebrating 100 years of fashion at the great British high-street favourite, the Design Museum takeover – soundtracked by Bronski Beat, as well as the whoops of friends of the brand, like David Gandy – the show had serious birthday energy. Marks & Sparks could have rolled out Colin the Caterpillar, but, instead, marketing director Sharry Cramond got on the podium and asked everyone to guess how much her buttery leather jacket was. The answer? Head over to the website to find out. A brilliant interlude in London Fashion Week’s usual programming.
Legacy models and Labrinth: H&M rolls into town
How would H&M live up to the hype of previous seasons? By giving Nick Knight – the experimental British photographer known for his pioneering use of technology, who recently announced he was building his own AI model – a 40-metre-long catwalk at Kensington Olympia to play with. Casting Alex Consani, Paloma Elsesser and Lila Moss – plus two mother-daughter duos, Kristen and Lily McMenamy, and Karen Elson and Scarlett White – to walk it also helped. The show unfolded in three chapters, encompassing H&M’s premium Studio and men’s Atelier lines alongside its mainline collections, against an evolving backdrop of light, movement and sound. Longtime collaborator Labrinth took charge of the latter. It was an explosive end to Thursday, with thousands watching the livestream around the world. “We love London!” said Ann-Sofie Johansson, head of design, womenswear, at the Swedish retailer.
H&M AW26.
Zach Hilty/BFA.com
It’s for Harris Reed
A sense of grounding seems to be something that many of us are after at the moment, not least Harris Reed. For his latest collection, the designer – who’s earned something of a reputation as one of the city’s great showmen – decided to “really look at past silhouettes, and bring them down to this earth,” he shared. A shift in focus from fantasy spinning to the real-world wants of his growing customer base, this season saw the designer veer away from polychrome prints and jewel tones for pieces in “fifty shades of white”; with a sensible Manolo Blahnik collaboration in place of the usual towering platforms. Of course, Harris Reed would not be Harris Reed without a bit of razzmatazz. Corsets and structured tailoring with ballooning puff shoulders were realised in opulent, custom-developed ivory jacquards; zebra stripes came in understated silk dévoré and shimmering beading – all of which will be available to his select clientele in a variety of hues. “There will still be these levels of theatricality,” says Reed. Pared back as they may be by comparison, these aren’t quite clothes you’d wear for the milk run.
Francesca Lake takes us to church
“Wake the town, welcome to church,” read the programme accompanying Francesca Lake’s spring/summer 2027 presentation. Whereas her previous collections took us to the schoolroom, pairing perspex pleasers with exaggerated tartan, for her London Fashion Week debut, the mood took a sombre turn. Against a backdrop of concrete and crucifixes, the Jamaican-born designer paired larger-than-life bustle skirts, broderie handkerchiefs and deconstructed military jackets with ladylike pumps and slashed leather overflowing with tulle. The palette was black, white and sun-bleached orange, with flashes of neon fringe peeking out beneath signature sculptural church hats. The order of service itself doubled up as a reading list. Junior Byles’s reggae classic “Fade Away” was printed alongside a passage from Virginia Woolf’s : a timely meditation on the pitfalls of vanity and hollow wealth (both apt and essential reading for any fashion week attendee). The show itself drew on a three-year body of work developed during Lake’s postgraduate studies at Central Saint Martins. A designer, but also a writer, sculptor and videographer, Lake has a habit of pulling her various disciplines under one roof, and “Wake the town" was no exception.
Homme Plissé Issey Miyake designs at a snail’s pace
When the Homme Plissé Issey Miyake team decamped from Tokyo to London for a research trip to view Henri Matisse’s – the artwork hung in Tate Modern that has inspired their sophomore Open Studio collaboration – they were surprised by its large scale. For their show inside the museum’s vast, subterranean Tanks, the team were influenced by the gouache-on-paper, cut-out collage artwork’s “spectrum of colour”, transforming each piece of collaged paper into a single garment, worn by the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company in an interactive performance. “We wanted to faithfully represent the richness of each cut-out piece,” they explain. The team also paid attention to Matisse’s use of visible brushstrokes, using the garment pleating technology synonymous with the 2013-launched Homme Plissé line to mimic their tactile direction. The joy in the design process came from the “foundation of respect for the artwork,” which transformed when its collaged cut-outs were transposed onto the body. The Tate Modern partnership has also culminated in a capsule collection, featuring printed dresses, tote bags and block-colour tops that will be available to buy in its Terrace Shop and online store.
Homme Plissé Issey Miyake Open Studio.
R&M Leathers hotly-anticipated debut fashion show wasn’t one for the pious. Staged in a listed chapel in East London, the cult leather brand – with fans including Charli XCX, Lily Allen, Dua Lipa and Addison Rae – transformed the space into a curtain-draped peep show, an homage to “the vanishing vernacular of pre-sanitised urban vice,” the show notes read. Expectations of raciness were more than met by the parade of body-flaunting calfskin corsets, studded micro shorts and body harnesses accessorised with swinging cat-o’-nine-tails, and a look that nodded to Nan Goldin’s seminal 1978 self-portrait as a dominatrix. It was the pieces with unexpected – dainty, even – craft details, like hand-cut broderie anglaise-style trims that convincingly challenged assumptions that full leathers automatically mean sleaze. “It’s nice for us to play with what people perhaps think of as fetish clothing and soften it a little,” said Ruby Mariani, the brand’s founder, in a preview. “People can sometimes get a bit afraid of ‘kink’, but we’re trying to show another side to leather than that.”
It’s A Bug’s Life at Thom Browne
Thom Browne channelled A Bug’s Life for spring, sending an army of caterpillars down the runway, before they danced around a giant chrysalis and became butterflies, bees, dragonflies and beetles in the aptly titled show venue, The Shed. The insects appeared everywhere, from bumblebees embroidered onto tailored jackets and dragonflies woven into checked coats, to black-and-red ladybird spots and beetle wings on sculptural skirts and corsets. The final look saw the caterpillar reach its final form, which is probably the opposite of how all those harried editors and PR girls are feeling on the last day of New York Fashion Week, but a reminder that inspiration is everywhere. The next time you see a wayward beetle, think of Thom Browne, instead of recoiling in horror.
Thom Browne SS27.
Launchmetrics.com/spotlightUlla Johnson gets green fingered
Ulla Johnson’s choice to stage her show in the sapling-and-grasses-dappled Gotham Park, as the monumental Brooklyn Bridge swelled in the skyline above, echoed a collection that mediated between the tailored and romantic, or what Johnson defined as the “urban pastoral.” In her tale of two cities, her women wear fringed floral dresses, and pasted hued tailoring, gossamer slip dresses and trenchcoats: pieces that would be equally at home on a Grecian isle or in The Hamptons. A longtime sustainability advocate, Johnson is committed to the ground her models walked on. Once a hangout for skaters, Gotham Park is in the midst of a large-scale regeneration, overseen by architects Field Operations, and Johnson plans to dedicate 750 native plants and 12 trees to its permanent landscaping.
Ulla Johnson SS27.
Conner Ives shows across the pond
“The thought of doing a show in New York has always been there, and people would kind of make fun of me because I saw New York as my Paris,” Conner Ives told ahead of his Stateside debut. If the decampment seems sudden, fresh off his BFC/Vogue Fashion Fund win, it’s not quite. The idea to guest star in NYC began to take shape at the end of 2025, when Westchester County-born Ives returned home for a prolonged trip during his British visa renewal process, and he was reinfected with the American itch. When he began development for February’s show in London, he brought his USA idea to BFC CEO Laura Weir and eventually the CFDA, who both helped to make it happen. He titled the collection “Across the Pond”, with plenty of New York references to match, like The Grill, a power-lunch restaurant, the 60th anniversary of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, and Jonathan Glazer’s starring Nicole Kidman. While Lila Moss and Iris Law ensured that the Brit contingent was represented on the runway, the designer’s parents and his high-school art teacher, plus a handful of current students, were in attendance. “I feel like I am now embarking on a point in my career where I’m present in both spaces, which I think for the longest time, I almost maybe thought wasn’t possible,” said Ives.
Calvin Klein Collection’s modern minimalism
Veronica Leoni’s choice of a vast, sparse red-brick warehouse on Manhattan’s post-industrial West Side as the show venue for her latest Calvin Klein Collection offering was telling. Hers, after all, is an aesthetic defined by function and restraint; by “taking away everything that does not carry the work, until only what is necessary remains,” the show notes read. An extension of her ongoing exploration of American minimalism, Leoni’s latest collection was certainly pared back, though an urgent sensuality made itself felt in the movement of sheened silks against the body; an optimism in the flashes of marigold and cyan that lifted the predominantly monochrome palette. Minimal, perhaps, but hardly skimped on.
Calvin Klein SS27.
Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.comFashion and art’s commingling has been a hot topic of late on account of the current exhibition at The Costume Institute at The Met, but the perfect place to behold the overlap of the two creative spheres remains a vernissage, according to Michael Kors. “I love the idea of the mix of people that you see at a museum. Sometimes, it can be as interesting as the art,” the designer remarked in a preview. It was in the MoMA garden, no less, that Kors presented his treatise on contemporary gallerina style, a city-minded wardrobe that counterposed classic, all-black tailored separates with coats with painterly embroidery, dresses with flickering scrims of primary colour and op-art stripes. With Frieze week on the horizon, it’s all the inspiration you could wish for.
Michael Kors SS27.
Launchmetrics.com/spotlightThere was an almost ominous air around yesterday’s Tory Burch show. On arrival, guests descended beneath Wall Street’s glass-and-steel towers into Noguchi’s Sunken Garden to the booming bass of ’s opening theme. This hard edge percolated into a good number of the clothes themselves: ultra-constructed tailoring, subtly contoured coats in the driest of matte wools and sober tweed two-pieces, as worn by Alexa Chung. This was not, however, a collection entirely preoccupied with severity. “Opulent femininity meets American pragmatism,” read the show notes, with richly embellished jewel-toned suits, Fortuny-pleated silk gowns and chunky, gleaming belts checking the former box. Ultimately, it was a collection that offered a template for feminine dress that felt both aspirational and realistic, as rooted in the need for armour as in the yearning for escapism and, moreover, fun.
New York’s cultural tapestry brims with world-class landmarks, but when it comes to its hotels, few carry quite the same clout as The Plaza. It was here, in the Central Park-facing grande dame’s marble-colonnaded, frond-filled Palm Court, that Tommy Hilfiger staged his latest show. It’s a spot of particular significance to Hilfiger – he and his family, in fact, lived here for a number of years, during which time he observed the mêlée of uptown ladies who lunch, joined at the weekends by their downtown-dwelling It-kids. The collection he presented skewed towards the latter, rejuvenating the prep that Tommy has been purveying for more than four decades. Boxy gabardine coats and rugby shirts in block primary tones, along with jaunty riffs on classic poplin shirting, came in hand-me-down proportions, styled with silk foulard bags and knitted ties. They were sported by today’s It-kids, too, with Gigi Hadid opening the show and Romeo Beckham closing things out as Slayyter belted out her hit of the summer, “Dance”.
Tommy Hilfiger SS27.
GoRunway.comA very happy birthday to Coach
Party hats, presents, and confetti canons, it had to be Coach’s 85th birthday! Stuart Vevers’s downtown party saw Elle Fanning and Troye Sivan discuss the trends they hope will no longer be around in 85 years (queuing for frozen yoghurt?), while a Bronx youth orchestra and voguing dancers were tasked with evoking the celebratory air of Studio 54 (no pressure). The looks were inspired by Meg Ryan in underrated Noughties hit and the suit Vevers wore on his own wedding day, but the key takeaway came from the sound system, not the runway, via MFSB’s “Love Is the Message”.
Everything is romantic, for Ralph Lauren
The chicest thing is to show off-schedule and, on 9 September, Ralph Lauren did just that, but with a presentation designed to “upend traditional notions of chic”. Indulging his inner romantic, the 86-year-old all-American designer, who rocks a varsity jacket like no other, said he wanted to create “a new elegance” via ways of dressing that “celebrate ingenuity, originality and character”. In practice, this meant tailoring and gowns, given a distinctly fanciful feel with ruffles, feathers and tassels that bounced down the runway, like models had a spring in their step. The start of the season is always a giddy affair and this intimate Tribeca show, with Viola Davis, Helena Christensen, Iman and Katie Holmes all in attendance, set the tone for the month to come.
