For a city that has spent much of the past decade being told it has lost its way, London suddenly has something to shout about.
This September, its fashion week felt less like an industry event taking place in spite of the city and more like an expression of renewed creative confidence.
Laura Weir, who was appointed as chief executive of the British Fashion Council in April 2025, arrived promising to restore London Fashion Week’s purpose and international relevance. For the September 17–21 edit, the schedule finally carried enough weight to suggest that the revival has begun.
Big names come home
Some of the names that once made London impossible to ignore came home. Alexander McQueen returned to the official schedule for the first time in 25 years, with Sean McGirr presenting menswear and womenswear at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel. Its historic, faintly gothic grandeur provided an appropriately McQueen setting for a collection that combined sharp tailoring with rave culture and Renaissance art. A collaboration with Savile Row’s Huntsman added another strand of British fashion history.
The return carried symbolic weight. Lee McQueen staged many of his most important early shows in London in the mid-1990s. Under a new creative director and in a very different industry, the house was once again presenting London as a place in which a major fashion story could be told.
Mulberry returned to the runway after almost a decade, with Christopher Kane making his debut as creative director.
Fifteen years ago, Kane and Mulberry were among the most closely watched names on the London schedule. Kane’s own label entered administration in 2023, while Mulberry endured years of weak sales and strategic drift. Their joint return consequently felt like another vote of confidence in the city.
Titled City, Town, Country, Kane’s collection made the connection explicit. Leather sheath dresses, pared-back car coats and heeled loafers incorporated details from the Bayswater bag, while miniature axe heels and sharply cut leather brought his familiar taste for provocation. Concrete grey, coal-miner orange and muted checks evoked the post-industrial Scotland of his childhood.
The new establishment
Encouragingly, however, London Fashion Week was not simply an exercise in nostalgia. Fashion East and BFC Newgen returned alongside designers including Aaron Esh, Chopova Lowena, KNWLS, Talia Byre and Paolo Carzana.
Those smaller names matter because London has never been at its most compelling when attempting to rival Paris in luxury or Milan in manufacturing. Its strength lies in the unruly ecosystem connecting art schools, music, nightlife, subculture and fashion: the environment that produced McQueen, John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood.
London spirit
That rebellious spirit ran through this season’s collections. At Burberry, Daniel Lee worked with Celia Birtwell, the textile designer and key figure in 1960s London, whose floral patterns softened and disrupted the house’s familiar visual codes.
At Simone Rocha, clothing became protective armour in a collection inspired by Caravaggio, expressed through trailing silk roses, tulle and historical textures. Erdem looked to Barbette, the Texas-born trapeze artist who became a sensation in 1920s Paris, translating his performances and fluid presentation of gender into crystalline, circus-like eveningwear.
Roksanda drew on Swiss-American artist Francoise Grossen’s fibre sculptures through braided and intertwined textures. Priya Ahluwalia combined references to resistance movements with the commercial ease of her Puma collaboration, pairing track tops with fringed trousers2, and filling the collection with terracotta, emerald and exaggerated silhouettes.
Harris Reed, meanwhile, marked his fifth London Fashion Week with what counted, by his standards, as restraint. An almost entirely white collection brought together fabrics such as chiffon, duchesse satin, hand-painted silk, devore and scuba, shaped through corsetry, exposed cages and theatrical silhouettes.
Fashion for everyone
Even the high street wanted a place at the table. Marks & Spencer staged its first London Fashion Week show to celebrate 100 years in fashion. The 59-look, see-now, buy-now collection offered an unusually democratic proposition: half of its pieces cost less than £50 ($67).
H&M also made a statement with a show created alongside Nick Knight and SHOWstudio. Romantic dresses, leather, lace and ruffles appeared in an event conceived as part fashion show, part artistic performance.
Elsewhere, Dover Street Market hosted a British Fashion Council jewellery showcase, while Selfridges and other retail partners joined a programme that extended beyond the traditional fashion-week audience through pop-ups, exhibitions and public events.
Together, they restored something London has always possessed but appeared temporarily to have lost sight of: the idea that fashion belongs to the city, rather than to a closed industry operating within it.
A city finding its confidence again
The timing also felt significant. For much of the past decade, London fashion has operated against a backdrop of decline. Brexit, the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and rising operating costs have placed independent designers under enormous pressure, while established houses have increasingly favoured Paris or reduced their physical shows.
Now, after a bleak period, the mood appears to be shifting. The so-called “Burnham bounce” has become shorthand for the modest rise in national confidence following Andy Burnham’s arrival as prime minister. It would be premature to call it a transformation, but some economic indicators have proved stronger than expected.
Retail sales rose 0.5 per cent in August, despite economists predicting a fall, with department stores, online retailers and clothing among the contributors; while the GDP grew 0.4 per cent in July. Hardly an economic miracle, but enough to give London reasons to feel marginally more buoyant.
The city has also been pushing back against the damaging narrative that it is increasingly unsafe and dysfunctional. Metropolitan Police figures indicate that theft from the person has fallen by 23 per cent, representing more than 23,000 fewer offences, while wider neighbourhood crime has also declined. The problem has hardly disappeared, but the direction of travel matters.
Fashion is unusually sensitive to atmosphere. It responds to whether a city feels curious or cautious, outward-looking or defensive, whether it is prepared to take risks or simply trying to survive another season.
This September, London appeared willing to take those risks again. After several years in which its fashion scene seemed preoccupied with survival, possibility feels like a good place to start.
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