A little over a year ago, Ellen Poppy Hill presented a collection in a south London church hall. I remember it being a happy afternoon, prayer songs drifting through a lavender-dappled courtyard, where her friends had gathered early to drink from tinnies and smoke cigarettes. There was a long wait, then a scramble for unassigned seats, with Hill hiding beneath a piano. Once the designer’s ragtag cast flounced onto the stage in looks including a skirt suit tailored from brown paper bags – a one-off using repurposed materials, like everything she had made to date – it was clear she had something. And yet just two journalists had come to see it. Granted, it was only her second outing since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2022, but given how much we make of London’s yen for discovering talent, you’d expect a few more of us to have been there to recognise hers. “I was happy as long as my friends were there, because all the designers I know end up leaving their communities behind,” Hill says. “My biggest fear is becoming someone I don’t recognise.”
The 28-year-old is sitting across a trestle table in her new studio, a former pharmacy on Southwark’s Aylesbury Estate that she and her partner, Leo Benavides, spent the end of 2025 fixing up. It could be home to the Borrowers. Charcoal illustrations paper the walls, with more stuffed behind exposed pipes; shelves hold millinery blocks, books bristling with Post-it notes, towering feathers, porcelain ornaments and the odd shoe; wooden clothes hangers shaped like cartoon heads dangle in the original shop windows. There’s a neighbourly feel to the place, as though someone from the surrounding flats might pop down for a dress as they once did for a prescription. “That’s been my thing all year,” she says. “I love having someone text me, like, ‘I need a dress, can you make me one in two weeks?’” But commissions for Twos, Alfie’s Antiques and Dover Street Market, alongside costumes for Oliver Leith’s opera , have given her business a firmer commercial footing. She’s even figuring out how to put her collections into production, while still using deadstock materials. “Having this studio has changed everything,” she says. “Everything’s grown in a way that feels confident.”
Hill’s spring/summer 2027 collection takes its title, Sharpen Up Your Act, from that determination to move further into the industry without losing herself in the process. “Going into a traditional fashion space, I feel like I shouldn’t be in the room, as though people are like, ‘She’s got dirty shoes…’,” Hill says. “Like, fine, I get the pressure to be more ‘polished’ and ‘refined’, but actually I’m gonna sharpen my own sense of integrity and independence, rather than get shaved down to whatever is most commercially ‘presentable’. Pencils duly became the collection’s central motif, their shavings embedded in a plastic liberty cap that give off a woody pong when Hill tries one on, their stubs painted to resemble cigarettes for models to snarl behind on the first day of London Fashion Week. Most fun is her reworking of the pencil skirt, that restrictive, sexualised staple of ’80s power dressing, into loose panels that taper into nib-like points. “It’s a metaphor for female autonomy, prodding at male designers dressing women as objects, in my own queered, silly way,” says Hill. “There isn’t space for queer joy in fashion that feels silly. Everything’s so dull and boring at the moment.”
She felt this most keenly after a trip to India in January. “It was the classic thing of like, ‘Woah… the colour!’ And then coming back to London, like, ‘Woah… the dark and horrible.’” Hill and Leo had spent two weeks in Jaipur on a textile programme organised by gallerist Stella Berkofsky, with whom they exhibited a series of exquisite corpse-style illustrations at Paris’s Villa Riberolle the previous October. A workshop led by the Dwarka Collective and Zandra Rhodes introduced them to Kalamkari – a traditional technique of hand-printing on fabric – and yielded two six-metre silk drawings, one of which now hangs in her studio. Hill fell in love with the process, and while she didn’t want to replicate Kalamkari back in London, she did want to bring painted fabrics into Sharpen Up Your Act, with a silk dress and a cotton top, the latter made from the first bolt of fabric she has ever purchased. “I saw where it was made in India, and was like, ‘I’ll buy new fabric if it’s like this.’” She later had “the best day ever” dyeing it with turmeric, though “the best day of [her] life” was spent in a button shop on that trip, hundreds of them now clustered across the collection.
But perhaps the most important thing she came back with was a kinship with Rhodes. “I asked to have a day in her archive,” she says. “And it steamrolled from there.” What Hill found was the physical manifestation of everything she had already been reaching towards: the vibration-raising colours of the subcontinent, a preternatural flair for print and an ’80s exuberance – Rhodes donated her shoe collection from the decade for Hill’s show – that punctures fashion’s prevailing flatness. (“Everyone seems so beige these days,” Rhodes herself told me in 2024, “fashion’s getting a bit too sexless.”) Indeed, even in Hill’s saintly use of the second-hand, there is mischief. “People are like, ‘I didn’t expect it to cup the bum’, and I’m like, ‘I wanted you to feel that’,” she says, holding up a pair of crotch-digging, ultra-high-waisted trousers, repurposed with a flounce of lace from her great-aunt’s Victorian petticoat. There are also bolero jackets fashioned from military doctors’ curtains, a batwing jumpsuit patchworked from Primark T-shirts found at a car boot sale, and a bust-cradling, cowl-neck polo made from striped fabric she bought in a garage from a man who guts shops.
There was yet more serendipity in Hill’s decision to stage the show in the Camden Arts Project, amid an exhibition of recent work by British pop artist Allen Jones, whose semi-naked mannequin tables, hatstands and chairs Rhodes had made clothes for in the ’60s. “It was criticised as misogynistic at the time, but he just ignored it like, ‘No, that’s not what I’m doing’, and carried on,” Hill says. “It’s the perfect setting for a show all about being strong and autonomous.” Models will wander among his vast (2024) and (2026) sculptures, playing out an elaborate narrative of Hill’s invention, while a cellist and violinist “dance in song”. She proceeds to recount, in biographical detail, the life of a down-and-out pencil who, discarded for having gone blunt, stumbles upon a shop where a pristine HP shoves it into a sharpener it then learns to use by itself. I soon realise Hill is talking only about the first model, and that she has concocted a backstory for each of those to follow. “Last time, I gave each of them a 15-minute talk in preparation,” she says, which explains the lengthy wait. “And it’ll take an hour and a half to do the same before this one.”
It is Hill’s commitment to a world completely of her own making – both in her dedication to sustainable practices and the imagination with which she brings it to life – that sets her apart from many of her peers. “I always try to make something that I would want to see,” she says. “I’ve only seen a few fashion shows, but I’ve been to a shit-tonne of plays.” Her parents, long since separated, are actor Tom Goodman-Hill and Kerry Bradley, a set designer who now leads Nottingham Trent’s Design for Film and Television course. “So I was a theatre kid through and through,” she says, adding that she had originally intended to call the collection Draw Your Own Spotlight, spending the design process listening to ’s “Maybe This Time” and “The Ladies Who Lunch”. Not an admission you could usually waterboard out of anyone on fashion’s anti-establishment fringe. “It’s very intimate, vulnerable listening to musicals, because it touches an element of your inner child.” She hopes her shows will do the same. “I want your heart rate to go up, then drop, and then I want you to be left with yourself.” But how does Hill want to feel? “I want to feel capable, because I’ve done this on my own terms,” she says. “I guess I want to feel accomplished.”