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.

Simone Rocha 
Caterina Guarna

A dream made of organza, silk and taffeta, Simone Rocha’s SS26 collection debuted at the grand Mansion House, where models The collection is all about grasping the delicacy and willfulness of girlhood, with Girl Pictures by Justine Kurland as one of the inspirations cited for this collection. 

Rocha’s girl is awkward but powerful, regardless of her out-of-placeness, she stands proud and challenging — girlhood is complex, and so is she. The SS26 Rocha girl wears crinoline dresses and skirts covered in organza, awkwardly trying to fill a woman's shoes. She carries pillow case bags sometimes seemingly out of boredom, others out of comfort. On this season’s runway the designer also dropped the latest installment of her collaboration with Crocs, the Ballerina Platform: a platform Mary Jane mule. 

Through droopy bralette straps, extravagant sequins and reimagined tiaras, Simone Rocha managed to immerse us in the complexity and blindly confident naiveté of adolescence.

Talia Byre 
Eve Bailey 

Talia Byre’s SS26 felt like a love letter to clothes as companions, the kind you live in, soften, and carry forward. In a hushed palette of ivory and cream, sharp trousers and shirting were grounded with quiet gravitas, while apron dresses in bridal satin became Byre’s strange, modern answer to eveningwear.

Stripes, stretched to rugby lengths, and the brands first florals, scorched into devoré, printed on towelling, roughened into something sly, cemented her reputation as fashion’s ultimate print cool girl. Editors in the room nodded knowingly; Byre has fast become a fan favourite for her offbeat eye and emotional precision.

Textures told their own story: sheer over jersey, terry against knit, silhouettes stretched long or cropped abruptly. Accessories - binocular bags, studded belts, spliced UGGs - added a wink. Less nostalgic trousseau than toolkit for living, Byre’s clothes are tender, witty, and increasingly essential.

TOVE
Eve Bailey 

TOVE’s SS26 was a masterclass in minimal chic, with a twist. Founders Camille Perry and Holly Wright have honed a language of softness and structure, here played out in fluid tailoring and undone layers that redefined masculine codes with an undercurrent of sensuality.

Desaturated suede grounded sweeping trenches, while hand-crafted chenille softened outerwear and dresses with a tactile richness. Silk cascaded in undulating layers, asymmetry threaded through belts and draping, and exposed backs offered the best kind of reveal. It was confidence expressed not in volume but in gesture, form, and restraint.

Minimal yet emotive, it felt like the wardrobe of the woman editors love to call “the ultimate chic woman”: complex, strong, and entirely at ease in her skin. With each season, TOVE makes its case as London’s answer to quiet luxury.

Erdem
Eve Bailey 

Erdem’s SS26 show felt like a séance staged in silk, channelling the visions of Hélène Smith, the 19th-century medium who dreamt herself into French courts, Indian palaces, and even Martian skies. Smith’s lives, dismissed in her time as delusion, became here a meditation on multiplicity: monarch, mystic, Martian, all coexisting in a single silhouette.

The collection played with those fractured identities. Regal fabrics dissolved into airy layers, fantasy collided with history, and garments seemed to hover between costume and dream. There was a sense of theatrical reverie, but also of women writing themselves into myth, again and again, through reinvention.

Erdem has always revelled in the romantic, but this season carried a deeper charge. By invoking Smith, he captured femininity not as one fixed narrative, but as something fluid, contradictory, and endlessly expansive, a kind of fashion mediumship in its own right.

Kyle Ho
Eve Bailey 

In the vaulted hush of St Marylebone Parish Church, Kyle Ho staged Chapter Two: Goodbye, Martin, a meditation on love, loss, and the impossibility of holding onto what slips away. It followed on from his debut Love, Louis, affirming that for Ho, collections are less reinvention than narrative continuity.

Sculptural tailoring anchored the show: golden-ratio cuts, high-waisted trousers, cropped jackets and fluid silhouettes pushing menswear into something at once precise and tender. Hand-stitching took centre stage, some pieces demanding over 250 hours of work, their meticulousness a kind of devotion.

The atmosphere was enriched by live illustration from Drawing Cabaret Couture and an improvised piano score, heightening the sense of performance-as-preservation. A bespoke top-hat collaboration with milliner Katherine Elizabeth lent a touch of theatre.

Ho’s tailoring felt genderless, romantic, and serious about craft, an attitude as much as a garment. In his hands, fashion became not just clothing but continuity, a way of remembering.