It’s not often that I find myself spelling out my mother’s name to a Brit Award winner and Grammy nominee over Zoom, but it turns out my mum knows Jorja Smith’s mum. The pair – or so the aforementioned Julia tells me – attended the same jewellery-making course in Walsall, Smith’s hometown near Birmingham. As ice-breakers with A-listers go, I’m quite pleased with this one – Smith, though, takes a more direct approach when seated next to fellow stars at fashion shows. “My small talk isn’t good,” she says, with a laugh. “I usually just say, ‘Hi, I’m Jorja,’ while thinking, ‘I know who you are.’”
She was delighted, then, to learn that her friends Dina Asher-Smith and Kano would also be attending Burberry’s spring/summer 2027 show, which closed London Fashion Week this evening at Chelsea College of Arts. “I can just ask them what they’ve been up to, without introducing myself,” she says. Smith is on similarly familiar terms with Burberry, singling out a yellow trench coat billowing with faux fur – “that was fire” – that she wore to promote her third album, , and a classic gabardine number with a “fluorescent pink strip”. For tonight’s front row, though, she opted for a slate-grey leather iteration from creative director Daniel Lee’s nightlife-inspired autumn/winter 2026 show at Old Billingsgate Market. “It’s so beautiful and really soft,” she adds. “I’m wearing chunky boots to give it some edge.”
Getting ready for the occasion, though, is a refreshingly low-key affair. An Earl Grey tea with milk, a constant live stream of Birmingham radio station Hot 92 – which plays “dance, funky house, reggae and lover’s rock” – and a quick check that she’s “plucked her eyebrows and doesn’t have a moustache.” Her downtime is similarly relaxed when she returns to the Midlands, as she did earlier this month to play Walsall Arena for the first time as part of the Spotify Hometown Series. She recommends coffee at The Table, a walk through Walsall Arboretum and, a little further afield, a trip to Medicine Bakery in central Birmingham. Tips I’ll be sending straight to my mum.