LFW SS26 Highlights: Part 1

This season in London belonged to the so-called outsiders, the rejects, the nobodies, the ones who often slip through the cracks. And yet, what emerged was anything but marginal. Young designers came forward with collections of startling polish, staged with a sense of community so palpable it felt tribal; rooms thrummed with energy, with loyalty, with the pride of belonging.

Movement ran like a current through the week. Chopova Lowena sent their alt-cheerleaders into formation, Jacek Gleba made his Fashion East debut with the curve of Nijinsky and the contortions of Schiele, and Ashish closed with a frenzy of dancers that transformed 180 Studios into a kind of ecstatic afterparty. Everywhere, clothes seemed less like garments and more like choreography, gestures stitched in fabric.

And threaded through it all was a dialogue with women who shaped culture in their own ways: Erdem drew on the visions of 19th-century medium Hélène Smith, while Roksanda engaged with the forms of Barbara Hepworth. Across the week, designers looked to female artists and dreamers as muses, grounding their collections in legacies of imagination, reinvention, and resilience.

Oscar Ouyang
Caterina Guarna

Oscar Ouyang’s debut LFW show told a story of delicate defiance, of uncovering yourself to an outside that doesn’t always accept you — a story told through the use of feathers. 

Feathers make an appearance in every look, even if it's just a single one carefully placed in the model’s hair or plentifully on a pair of Converse Chuck Taylors. But mostly they are on shorts and beanies, either shadowing the models’ faces or gleefully aiming for the ceiling. They metaphor the private, truthful, essence of Ouyang’s characters: careful in its showing but defiant in its presence. 

The models walked down a runway made of letters — a perfectly fit paper carpet for his SS26 collection Don’t Shoot The Messenger, in which the designer’s signature Fair Isle patterns are not to miss. They appear on almost every one of his hand-knitted pieces, and at times are signed with his name, just over the models’ knees. Ouyang’s debut is nothing but truthful to the fantastical tale he’s been designing throughout his career, and technically impeccable.

Fashion East

Eve Bailey 

In the year that Fashion East marks its 25th anniversary, designer Jacek Gleba made a debut that felt like a fitting continuation of its legacy of risk and revelation. It’s True was a meditation on the balletic body, Nijinsky’s curve, Egon Schiele’s contortions, the ghostly flutter of chiffon on a haunted stage.

Heavy jersey mapped muscles and ligatures like anatomy sketches, while seams were left raw, embroidered, or hooked together in slashes that suggested fragility and defiance at once, with colours appearing as if lifted from smoke-stained 1930s canvases.

Drawing from his own history as a dancer, Gleba translated gestures,  a dropped wrist, a swing of the hip, into clothes that spoke of intimacy and queerness in a hyper-paranoid world. It was restless, elongating, always reaching beyond the frame. As Fashion East celebrates a quarter century, Gleba proved why its stage remains vital: a place for new voices to rewrite the choreography.

ASHISH
Eve Bailey 

Ashish closed the week not with solemnity but with sequins, and with joy. In a room where dancers spun, frolicked and laughed, his “Autobiography of a Dress” came alive: a manifesto stitched in indigo, tie-dye, and Madras checks, sequins shimmering like tiny ciphers.

The collection read like poetry, and in fact was presented as such: cloth as atmosphere, sequins as love letters, every stitch a gesture of resistance and of care. Dancers moved in ecstasy, turning garments into choreography, sequins into sparks of rebellion and delight.

It was Ashish at his most heartfelt and a soft and glittering fuck you to despair, and the most exuberant send-off London Fashion Week could have asked for.

Chopova Lowena
Eve Bailey 

Game day, but make it folklore. Chopova Lowena’s “Cheerlore” collection pulled us into their clubhouse where Bulgarian craft clashed with American football bravado and somehow the cheerleaders came out on top. Pleated skirts and varsity sweaters swung beside carabiner kilts and shoulder-padded panniers, while pom-pom jackets and faux-fur coats pushed girlhood into armour.Even the soundtrack was a fever dream of dub-meets-cheer chants, ASMR pep talks and Darth Vader therapy speak, a rallying cry for the “weird girls” everywhere.

Cheerleaders, after all, aren’t just side-line sparkle here; they’re athletes, leaders, performers. Chopova Lowena reminded us that team spirit and individuality aren’t contradictions, they’re choreography!

Labrum London 
Eve Bailey 

Foday Dumbuya’s Labrum returned this season with Osmosis, a collection about how culture flows, shifts, and survives across borders. True to the brand’s DNA, this wasn’t just a fashion show, it was performance in its truest sense.

West African references were stitched throughout: cowrie shells embedded into tailoring and headwear, silhouettes inspired by African architecture and ceremonial adornments, and a new “ventilation” print echoing concrete latticework across the continent. Military tailoring brought sharp edges, but was lit up in green, turquoise and crimson, a reminder that rigidity can hold vibrancy too.

Accessories and headwear made from hemp, wheat, raffia and paper pushed the conversation into craft and ceremony, while the Balimaya Project’s score turned the runway into a migration in music, West African rhythms spliced with UK jazz, street soul and broken beat.

Labrum isn’t just about clothes; it’s about storytelling. Osmosis reminded us that heritage is never static but that it moves, it reshapes, it redefines the now.

Roksanda
Eve Bailey 

At The Chancery Rosewood’s ballroom, Roksanda marked two milestones at once: twenty years on schedule, and a dialogue with Barbara Hepworth that felt as much sculptural as sartorial. The show unfolded like a study in negative space, garments slashed, folded, pared back until their very absence became presence.

Laser-cut velvet, raw raffia and fil coupé built volumes that were architectural yet alive, while cocooning coats and modular trenches wrapped the body in protective modernism. Dresses swelled with organza and crinoline, painted with brushstroke prints. Colour, as always with Roksanda , spoke fluently: Azure with Cassis, Cinnamon with Venetian Red.

The finale was quietly celebratory: archive dresses reimagined in bold hues, from the Margot to the Cataline, tracing two decades of silhouette and sensibility. Hepworth once sought harmony between form and feeling; Roksanda’s anniversary made the case that clothes, too, can carve that space.