SEP 2025
Writing by Diego Fernandez, Aryana Arian & Polina Kravchenko
And this is perhaps even more poignant in London, where September means first and foremost a complete change in temperature and the sudden ushering in of the autumn season. As it is now customary, London Fashion Week (LFW) presented by 1664 Blanc comes once again, providing a platform for all sorts of talents to showcase their creativity and their input on what fashion is, what fashion should be and what fashion could be, when experimentation and innovation are at the forefront of design.
At perediza, we started this season reflecting on what makes fashion week special for us: the people, the London setting, the thrilling experiences made out of talent and new fashion proposals, the innovation in techniques, materials and sustainability, the rush in-between shows, the hidden politics of the fashion sphere, the way designers showcase not only clothes but their unique relationships with culture and society at large. And so, this time around for SS26 LFW, we decided to take a magnifying glass and pinpoint the one thing that excited us the most about each of the collections we saw within the tight four-day frame. We have decided to explore the “one thing” from each collection or presentation that resonated with us, whether it’s the clothes, the materials,
or the cultural references.
Imagine finding and old box with old film photos from your grandparents at a dinner party, the hazy lighting, the grain in the exposure, the candid warmth of capturing a memento that’s intimate and of importance only to you and those close to you, an anniversary, a birthday dinner, the echo of family signing “happy birthday to you” in the background.
Now imagine that photo coming to life, that’s exactly how the show and sophomore collection from Maximilian Raynor felt like. A table with two enormous cakes with flaming candles sat in the middle of the room, with balloons and half-eaten pieces of cake to complete the scene. A simple yet lush velvet runner carpet represents the “catwalk”, and a gorgeous draped velvet curtain separates the show space from backstage.
An incredibly simple but effective setting, paired with dim warm lighting, was all it took to fully escape into another world. The atmosphere was palpable, and a sense of true intimacy could be felt in the room. An older couple danced around the table as if sharing a tender moment after dinner, allowing us to participate for a brief moment in their love story.
Each looks like a small part of one cohesive narrative, each model a guest to this family reunion, all tailored and finished seamlessly, patterns of check and prints of leopard all spoke to each other in the same language, colour palettes complemented each other, making this collection a feast for the eye. There was also a wonderful tension between the yesterday and the tomorrow, 60’s hair encountered sculptural modern silhouettes and modern looks.
In times of economic turmoil in the past, society often looked at fantasy, distraction and diversion from the not-so-bright truth and rather turned a blind eye to the realm of escapism to help navigate and cope with the harsh times. Nowadays, we seem to encounter similarities, and the new SS26 Sprayground collection took us into a different sphere, one that made everything that may be hard about the current world seem far away, even if for a split second.
The Freemasons Hall, with its star-studded ceilings and heavenly motifs plastered across walls, pillars, and vaults, was the stage on which NYC brand Sprayground made its London and UK first time debut, bringing extravagance and that particular mix of demi couture and streetwear which is very much ingrained in the brand’s core ethos. The whole show was conceived as a ball of excitement, strobe lights and a galactic runway welcomed guests, followed by an initial performance of contemporary dancers and drummers who took the stage by storm, igniting the atmosphere with an electrical power.
Then the muses of Sprayground in which personalities like Phoenix Brown, Jack Fox, Virginia Bates, and Roxy Horner
could be spotted, took to the catwalk
and a mix of extremely wearable array of clothing and accessories in the likes of hoodies, jackets, bags and shoes were intertwined with outrageous avant-garde pieces like inflatable dresses, suits made out of tiny jackets, sleeves that were ready to take off in shades of green and pink and a Marie Antoinette-like hoodie dress.
Finally towards the end of the show artist and one of the brand’s creative directors Leomie Anderson, Sandflower closed the show with an original song and a choir of gospel singers accompanying her tune and transporting the attendees into a choir of fashion, providing what the brand is best known for, which is streetwear and instanly recognisable pieces and supersizing them with high end construction techniques, resulting in clothes that suggest the idea that streat wear is great as is but it could also be so much more in perhaps the world of tomorrow.
Prompting us to let our imaginations fly, and that sometimes even for a short while, it's okay to turn to a much lighter, fun and colourful vision of what the world could be.
Pandora Talisman unfolded at the Garden Museum as an invocation of memory. Growth and renewal framed the evening,
yet its strength lay in the way it carried the voice of the past into the present, letting history speak anew.
The museum’s architecture, once St. Mary-at-Lambeth Church, held an atmosphere of reverence and continuity.
Arched stone, medieval traces, and a vast hall softly lit like a constellation gave the night a sense of entering a space of dialogue,
a setting where Plato and Aristotle might have staged their philosophical exchanges.
Drapes softened the grandeur, creating a chamber in which ritual, ornament, and reflection could meet.
This voice was embodied not only in the jewellery but also in the performance by Joy Crookes. Wearing the talisman collection across her back, she became the living counterpart to the pieces themselves, her voice reverberating through the stone halls and filling the air with resonance that blurred time itself.
Past and present folded together, a performance as much about reverence as it was about presence.
The symbolic vocabulary of the evening drew most powerfully on the motif of coins. Across Western and Eastern traditions, coins have long stood as more than currency. They carried meaning as tokens of prosperity, markers of wealth, offerings of love, emblems of gift and exchange. Before coins were numbers, they were stories pressed into metal. Pandora, by reclaiming this essence of ancient coins, reminded us that jewellery is not merely an adornment but a vessel for cultural and emotional memory.
Each piece invited not only admiration but reflection, a meditation on history’s continuity and on how objects can be both material and metaphysical. In the Garden Museum’s hush, with Crookes’ voice reverberating like an ancient chorus, Pandora showed that the simplest of symbols can carry the weight of centuries,
and that to wear them is to carry time, culture, and love upon the body.
Right on schedule in their now staple LFW time slot of Friday at 9:00 a.m., Paul Costelloe, once again at the Waldorf Hotel in the heart of The Strand, opened the doors of the ever so elegant Palm Court to let us into his world for a SS26 collection that just oozed the word “GLAMOR” in capital letters.
At a Costelloe show, you feel at ease knowing what to expect:
beautiful craftsmanship, elegance,
glamorous femininity, a breeze of freshness
and a clear sense of debonair that manages to
feel exciting each time.
For his SS26, Paul Costello takes us back to late 60s Hollywood with a collection inspired by the taste and style of Sharon Tate and old Hollywood glamour. As if a sweet, refreshing scoop of sherbet, the clothes varied from flowy dresses in baby blues and tangy orange, feminine silhouettes in soft pink, butter yellow, to more structured skirt suits and palazzos in similar shades. Some of the garments were complemented with jewellery appliques from Ivy J studio, bringing an extra layer of femininity with a bold edge to the ultra-chic garments that walked among the beautiful venue.
Held within the dimly lit British Fashion Council’s “Fashion Space”,
at 180 Strand. British jewellery brand The Ouze, whose visual language and design ethos is built on roughness and lack of polish, pushed the aesthetics of everyday life to the absolute.
The set designer Thomas Conant, alongside the brand’s creative director Toby Vernon, recreated scenes of the home, arranging rings, pins, bracelets and cufflinks so that it looked as if they had been left behind only a moment ago.
These compositions work through the effect of recognition: an absence made present — as if someone had just stubbed out a cigarette on a plate in the heat of a conversation, or, returning in a light haze after a Friday night, had left hairpins scattered on the bathroom mirror.
We were immediately taken aback with how extraordinary yet completely mundane the space felt, paired with an eerie soundmix in the background, we walked through “The Ouze’s” curated scenes all separate from each other and highlighted by bright spotlights on top of them, we wandered through a living room that seemed to be frozen in time from a mid century modern film, a bedroom deconstructed into separate spaces like a drawer chest with a jewellery box on its top, an armoir bursting with clothes and a dirty garment hamper next to it, an office space, a bathroom mirror and sink and a dining table with an accompanying fridge left open as if by mistake.
The Ouze prompted us to reflect on how the things we wear somehow remain alive and are a physical representation of ourselves inhabiting our spaces.
How we choose things to form part of the way we interact with the world around us, and how the context of the home becomes alive and at the same time lived in entity breathing and functioning even if completely inanimate.
This presentation also felt powerful because of the mundane context in which we can all see ourselves represented, our homes, our friends, our bedrooms, our messy dining tables, our laundry hampers; fashion becomes intertwined with our own mundanity and we are reminded of the purpose of fashion to be something that we carry with ourselves as we experience being alive, its ever present with us when we eat our piece of the cake at the dinner party, when we take our dirty fashion from the hamper into the washing machine, the bracelet left behind in our little trinket trays that sit on our bedside table.
After an hour-long bus ride to Dalston in one of those rare and out of pocket unexpectedly warm September days in London, we arrived at Earth Hackney
for the new Mark Fast SS26 collection.
Paired with the outside good weather, this collection felt like a breeze and a teaser for better times to come.
Combining knitted skirts, tops and dresses with flowy fabrics and materials in a colour pallete that went from coral pink, to nudes and more severe blacks as if Fast’s was taking us along for a beach getaway and had planned what to wear for each moment from the morning walk collecting shells at the beach to a lunch by the water, lounging by a pool and then a dinner and a dance with beach torches for lighting.
Fast’s collection felt bare and minimal, and in a way, extremely refreshing in comparison.
It was also a clear approach to the fact that designers create and build clothing
that people should wear and be able to incorporate into their lives, regardless of
what kind of life they lead. The clothes felt like a manifesto of the designer
and his aesthetic, but also one for accessibility in terms of look and wearability
and a minimal approach to how the fashion business works.
It was as if the designer had said, “Let me just show you clothes that you can wear anytime, multiple times”. The knitted pants, tops and dresses are a masterclass in construction and elaborate in their conception, yet the models wore them with an air of effortless and “laissez-faire”, which means letting things be in their own course.
At Colours Hoxton, under dimmed lights that cast a reflective atmosphere, the panel Recalibrating Fashion’s Inclusivity Lens, With Purpose and Action
brought together figures from across the fashion ecosystem — agents, designers, models, and academics.
This breadth of perspective created a dialogue that moved beyond tokenistic gestures and into lived experience, systemic challenges, and the psychology underpinning fashion’s ideals.
The conversation explored the cultural weight of the body, the long history of fashion amplifying thinness as an aesthetic standard, and the way models are often reduced to symbols rather than recognised as individuals. Economic pressures on small designers were placed in contrast with the resistance of larger companies, raising the question of whether meaningful change must come from the top down or the bottom up.
Stepping into Yaku Stapleton’s presentations is like being welcomed into another world, one created and shaped by the designer throughout his past collections and presentations, referring to them as chapters in a larger narrative and calling each collection a chapter in his own journey and appreciation for the natural world, VR games and the lens of “Afrofuturism”.
For ss26, he presented “A ground to stand on”, following the storyline from his earlier collection presented in February this year. In a hybrid between fashion show, presentation and performance piece, Yaku introduces us to 3 essential figures and characters: guardianship, representing the need to protect and preserve identity and history, pragmatism, representing the need for resiliency and endurance in the ever-evolving nature of the world and shapeshifting, representing adaptability and the ability to contend with multiple truths and adapt to new realities, all together and embodied by the models and performers wearing the collection, they represent the ever shifting paradym of nature and the humans that inhabit the natural world, and how our own identities are never static but rather always changing and responding to what happens outside our beings.
The structures are meant to symbolise heritage and lineage within the colonial histories of Jamaica and St. Vincent's, but transferred to myth and imagination by the designer, for whom these subjects are extremely close to his identity and his creative practice.
With chapter six, Yaku questions our role in the world as builders, explorers, nurturers and guardians; affected by the landscapes we inhabit, but also affectors and architects of those same landscapes and the growth we all experience throughout our lives.
The designer has taken to storytelling and immersive worldbuilding to carry out and reflect on his own relationship with colonialism, migration, diasphoric existence and finding one's place in the world, constructing in turn, a fashion that feels like his very own lexicon, the dressing of his own characters and tropes, the armour of his own warriors and heroes.
Rooted in the body's primal relationship with nature and the discovery of the natural world around us, the textiles, materials and prints used for the collection are taken from organic shapes, the colours of the elements, soil, water, air and plants, all shaped in the form of contemporary wear, trainers, hoodies, trench coats and t-shirts with prints of naked body motifs stamped onto them. Yaku’s collection is made to be worn by the characters and archetypes of his own creation, yet designed for us inhabiting the real world to put on as our personal armour and tools for facing the changing landscape of today.
In a testament to how using stories and narratives as a starting point can lead to the extraordinary creation of a designer language and style, it immerses and causes a collective sentiment of awe when witnessing each portion of this story.
From the get-go go the complimentary beats by CLAIRE @tingrunrun lifted us into a different mood, one that felt easy and sensual and ultimately it just felt chic!
That’s our selected highlight for Ray Chu’s newest collection, models walked down and took their place next to the sculptoric landscape created for the show,
simple yet striking garments and specially cinched suits passed us by, in a palette that was meant to convey the lingering oceanic feeling of Taiwan’s shore,
the feeling of dusk and the spirit of hope for tomorrow.
The colour palette was a combination varying from soft watery blues to extremely bright reds and lemon yellows, demanding attention and making you focus on the simple, sleek yet impeccable tailoring of the pieces.
An array of menswear participated in the show in the form of loose silk shirts, printed shorts and beautiful matching sets that bring an air of fragility and a sensibility to the idea of clothing for men.
Sustainability forms a huge part of Chu’s
design practice, aiming to maintain high-end looks that are constructed and conceived from
a place of mindfulness to the planet and
a sustainable point of view.
Most of the garments were created using
up-scaled plant-based fabrics like mint
and crystalline ice plants, enhancing the idea
of conscious creation without compromising
the creative process and the capability
of the designer's vision.
The space, the art pieces at its forefront, the music, the lighting and the vibrant and energetic clothes gave us an accelerated feeling of being part
of something special, “catching the right vibe” as they say.
May the party never die! But may the party grow up, mature, evolve and be transformed to suit you at any stage of life.
That’s how Sinead Gorey’s latest SS26 collection felt like. An embrace of the designer’s roots, yet a desire to keep growing and elevating the brand’s aesthetics, mirroring the designer's own personal growth and life journey. Rooted in the idea of weekend getaways and British festival culture, the South London born designer unexpectedly transported us to the centre of the party in a sculptural space located at the “ME” hotel in the centre of London. In a mountain-esque platform covered in dirt, moss, and mud, a group of ravers decked out in Sinead Gorey we found dancing, posing and seemingly having the time of their lives, truly capturing the essence of what the brand is all about and then transporting it into the high fashion sphere.
Gorey’s presentation speaks on a deep understanding of who she is and her context, a commitment to re-interpret her culture and geography through her own unique lens, that of an effortless party girl. One who has grown up, and even though she still loves the party, she now tackles the party with a sense of maturity and flair.
Lacey creations adorned with bows and fringe move and dance frantically while standing in a pile of mud, underwear-inspired attire and body-hugging dresses moved around while the girls smiled and fanned themselves as if in a party haze. The show provided an unapologetic attitude and a refusal to look at life too seriously, when everyone tells you not to party, Sinead Gorey tells you to embrace the hot mess within you and to do it with panache and unafraid of irreverence, as she puts it herself, “Chainmail and silk corsetry on The Farm? Exactly.
Arrays of dried maize punctuated the catwalk space for Pauline Dujancourt’s SS26 collection. Upon arrival, we were all handed a crocheted figure of a seagull made to be worn during the presentation of the collection. As soon as the lighting dimmed and the models started walking through the space, we knew that we were watching something special, something truly heartfelt and constructed with a very intimate feeling to it.
Inspired by “The Seagull” by Anton Chekhov, Dujancourt’s delicate creations conveyed a story of grief, loss and the perseverance to make it through creativity and producing a labour of love and friendship.
The show left us completely moved and in awe of the power of design and creation as a force that moves us forward, that helps us get through the tougher moments of human life, a coping mechanism that relies on our own selves to see us grow and like seagulls eventually fly, and aslo the ability of one designer to really pour her soul into her work in a crafted and elevated way, and to truly speak to an audience via her delicate yet nuanced body of work.
There was an intellectual and sensitive approach to the collection that was paired with Dujancourt’s deeply ethereal and feminine style.
Developing her fabrics and textile constructions into a poetic language that spoke of her journey and her process of creation, integrating
and weaving as in her garments, her personal life and her practice
in a beautiful, cohesive manner.
The palette of the clothes lingered in a journey of mourning and eventually hope, creams, whites and periwinkle blues were met with darker hues of blue and for some pieces, a total black, like a wounded bird that has found solace in her flight and eventually will be ready
to soar the skies again.
In the crypt at St. Paul’s church right by Trafalgar Square, under very dim lights and vaulted ceilings and arches, we waited for the Hector MacLean show to begin. We soon discovered a collection that came out of a fairytale and had a deeper reflection lurking within. For his SS26 collection, Hector Maclean presents” The girl that ate the dragon”, reflecting on a friend’s personal story of overcoming addiction and making it out triumphantly. The collection was also conceived as the designer himself got some upsetting health-related news, and so, charging on, he developed his own medieval fairytale and made it modern and wearable for today.
As the models walked out and around the crypt a very clever
and straighforward story unfolded through medieval motifs
and silhouettes, reinterpreted to fit modern clothing,
Mclean took us through a hero’s journey one that starts by innocence and vulnerability, a damsel in distress, restricted
by her garments and by her surroundings but soon after,
she becomes her own heroine embodying armour in mesh
and structured pieces that transitions from fragile and
innocent white, to silvers and reds, silhouettes remain feminine
but daring and finally once the heroine has beaten her dragon clothing turns black, shiny, and reptilian, as reflected by
the designer himself
“you don´t have to become what you’ve beaten but it definetely changes you”.
Maclean’s work transported us into a medieval fantasy and somehow made it completely accessible and relevant for the world of today, but most importantly he gave us a lesson in resilience and a reminder that we all face battles and that we all can come victorious if we choose to face them with what we can do best, in his case,
his passion for design and keeping the show going despite
harsh circumstances.
Photography:
Maximilian Raynor: Maximilian Raynor Photographer and Aryana Arian
Sprayground: Brett Sykes, Polina Kravchenko
Pandora: Aryana Arian
Paul Costelloe: Paul Costelloe Photographer, PR Agency TRACE Publicity
The Ouze: Polina Kravchenko
Mark Fast: Polina Kravchenko
Recalibrating Fashion´s Inclusivity Lens, With Purpose and Action
Yaku: Morgan Williams, Agathe Moubembe
Ray Chu: Polina Kravchenko
Sinead Gorey: Sinead Gorey Photographer
Pauline Dujancourt: Polina Kravchenko
Hector MacLean: Ben Montgomery
© perediza 2026
