Following NYFW, London’s designers turn their gaze between past and future, drawing inspiration from myth, memory, nature, and image. This season’s collections blur the line between fantasy and form, offering clothing not just as aesthetic gesture but as storytelling ritual, each look a portal into alternate histories, futures, and selves. At St. Pancras Hotel, Harris Reed celebrates ten years with “The Aviary,” a theatrical display of sculptural freedom wrapped in gothic interiors and heritage fabrics. In a poetic reclamation of leather, Leo Prothmann conjures warriors and wanderers, blending material innovation with ecological narrative and ritual performance. Theatrical staging and storytelling converge in Completedworks’ “The Gift,” where jewelry, furniture, and performance coalesce into relics of memory and meaning. In London, fashion becomes more than trend or silhouette—it becomes ceremony, myth-making, a dialogue between time and texture.
Alessandra Rich’s Modern Muses
Courtesy of Alessandra Rich.
Courtesy of Alessandra Rich.
Alessandra Rich presented “Bright Young Things,” her Spring/Summer 2026 collection, channeling the intoxicating duality of the 1920s. Founded in 2010 with bases in London and Milan, the brand has long embraced the tension between innocence and provocation—and this season the two collide beautifully. Rich’s muses recall an era when rebellion hid behind lace and flirtation was strict, romance edged with daring discipline. Silks, crepe‑de‑chine, tweed boucle, Chantilly lace trims, puffed sleeves and ribbon details entwine to suggest elegance that refuses conformity.
The structured silhouettes—tailored jackets, defined hems—are softened with bows, contrasting lace, ruffles, and subtle fluidity. White, black, beige, red, soft yellow, and pastel pink compose the palette, each shade modulated with provocative touches that challenge traditional decorum. Pointed heels—matching or in contrast—ground the looks with precision. Models carry a gaze that is both mischievous and measured, their poise speaking of restraint even as the garments flirt with audacity. Here, romanticism is never passive: it pushes back.
Harris Reed Wings of Drama
Courtesy of Harris Reed.
Courtesy of Harris Reed.
Celebrating ten years of his eponymous label, Harris Reed took over the lavish Victorian‑Gothic interiors of St. Pancras Hotel to present “The Aviary,” an exploration of freedom within captivity and movement within structure. Cage‑like skeletons wrap the body, offset by wing‑like décolletés, voluminous drapery and theatrical corsetry. Proportions are exaggerated: hips flare wide, shoulders broaden, waists cinch dramatically. A crisp white‑blue suit emerges, trousers billowing from the hip and a corseted jacket sculpting the torso. Signature crinolines transform—mermaid flares exposed and then contorted as if caught mid‑dance—before transforming into ribboned chest‑plate armor in rich grosgrain reds.
Fabrics draw on heritage: archival silks from Fromental, brush‑textured velvets, Nottingham lace inspire bodices. Hand‑painted, embroidered, gold‑leafed Fromental panels shimmer in the light. Reed’s theatricality does not overwhelm.
Emilia Wickstead Electric Contrast
Courtesy of Emilia Wickstead.
Courtesy of Emilia Wickstead.
Emilia Wickstead’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection is quietly electric, drawing from the stark beauty of Robert Mapplethorpe’s lens. It’s not a replication of his work, but a deep conversation—about contrast, identity, light, and form. Beauty meets brutality. Softness confronts severity. Here, garments manifest those tensions: refined yet provocative, structured yet vulnerable.
A primarily black‑and‑white foundation is punctuated by acid lime, bright yellow, indigo mélange, muted florals, and subtle checks—jolts of color in a monochrome terrain. Fabrics like silk twill and double warp jacquard are sculpted with pleating and sharp cuts while denim escapes its utilitarian roots, elevated into evening essential. Straps and ties, echoing Mapplethorpe’s most provocative imagery, are reworked into elegant detail, a nod to 1970s Downtown NYC energy. The silhouettes are architectural, the lighting dramatic, the mood poised between demure and dangerous. In this collection, Wickstead harnesses Mapplethorpe’s visual language not just as homage, but as source code, decoded through fabric, shape, and shade.
ERDEM Romantic Cycles Myth and Reinvention
Courtesy of ERDEM.
Courtesy of ERDEM.
ERDEM’s newest collection draws on the uncanny life of Hélène Smith, the 19th‑century Swiss medium whose past lives—French courtier, Indian princess, even Martian voyager—were as vivid in her psyche as they were controversial. These “Romantic Cycles,” as dubbed by psychologist Théodore Flournoy, become the seed for a collection about reinvention, myth, and transformation. Dreamlike silhouettes—hourglass gowns, skeletal bustier cages—interlace with detail: crystals, embroidery, lacing overlaying satin, linen gauze and poplin. Fabric choices shimmer between the ethereal and the rooted, between the stitched past and possible future selves. Romanticism pulses through every seam: tissue weight textures, corseted lines that recall masquerade, color washes that evoke visions rather than daylight.
ERDEM offers women a chance to shift identity through clothing, to inhabit past life fantasies, reimagine the self with texture and silhouette. It is both a requiem and celebration, the injured myth and its resurrection, woven into gowns that feel timeless and strange.
Di Petsa’s Archeological Dig
Courtesy of DiPetsa.
Courtesy of DiPetsa.
Di Petsa’s runway became a ritual of unearthing—an intimate excavation of memory, identity, and ancestral myth. Titled “Archaeology of Self,” the collection invites viewers to look inward, to dig through layers of subconscious longing, inherited love, and collective hurt. Central to this poetic narrative is the search for a Moon Goddess, a mythic figure that shapes the seekers as much as they search for her. The house’s signature wetlook technique evolved into loosely draped ribbons of silk and jersey, layering like sediment over skin. Garments feel like emotional relics—fluid, unfinished, sacred. Metallic knit, organza, and rattan bags glint briefly under light, then vanish like mirages.
The runway becomes a site of transformation, each model walking as both archaeologist and artifact, shedding layers of self. Di Petsa uses fashion not as spectacle, but as ceremony, a tool to map the emotional terrain of womanhood, mythology, and cultural memory. Each piece asks not just who we are, but who we have been, and who we are becoming.
Leo Prothmann Unravels Gaia
Courtesy of Leo Prothmann.
Courtesy of Leo Prothmann.
Within the Mandrake Hotel, Leo Prothmann asks: where does Gaia live now? The designer reclaims leather as a vessel of memory, protest, and form—far beyond ornament or luxury. Prothmann’s designs see nature embodied in guardians, land keepers, night women, and riders. Leather becomes armour, blacksmith aprons, defiant bomber jackets, and hides‑bound bolts. Guardians stand still, travellers drift in rich hues—yellow, blue, maroon, stone, white—all underscore earth and flesh.
The collection makes an ethical texture with choices like Silverfin, a leather made from invasive carp in the Mississippi River Basin, repurposed for handbags, emblems, plaques, the material itself becomes part of ecological story. Iconic Chuck Taylors are reimagined in fluid forms. A commissioned composition by Holden Federico imbues the show with tension between classical and deep techno, so guest experience stretches beyond fashion: at once ritual, reclamation, and challenge. Prothmann turns leather into myth, remembrance, revival.
Completedworks The Gift Ritual of Myth
LONDON, ENGLAND – SEPTEMBER 20: Jerry Hall attends Completedworks SS26 Show on September 20, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by Jed Cullen/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Completedworks)
Completedworks’ Spring/Summer collection, titled “The Gift,” opens as theatre with staged drama, myth, and objecthood with Laura Waldren’s “The Gift” featuring Jerry Hall in a periwinkle velour suit and red necklace on a pastel sky‑blue and dark blue backdrop.
The presentation fuses jewelry, furniture, performance and narrative: delicate forms disrupted and unbound, objects animate. Jewelry pieces are named—Yet Another Strong Westerly Gust—and move like sheets on a line, fluttering in wind; leather combines with metal, resin, stone; earrings dangle, trinkets whisper history. There’s satire, there’s sacred, and every piece seems to carry imagined lives. The stage, rough‐hewn furniture and raw textures, underscores objects as not just decoration but relics, commodity and myth intertwined. Completedworks reflects on the stories we gift and the objects that carry weight, memory, and future. The line between the everyday and the sanctified blurs in this ritual of design.
Susan Fang’s “Air-Evolution”
Courtesy of Susan Fang.
Courtesy of Susan Fang.
At London’s Barbican Conservatory, Susan Fang debuted “Air‑Evolution,” a collection straddling the present and a speculative mirror world in 5202, where tech and nature coexist in harmonious tension. An 11‑year old narrator, Nasus, serves as guide hoping to be chosen to summon someone from the past into this future communion. The brutalist architecture of the venue echoes the contrast Fang constructs — steel and greenery, sharp edges softened by organza and feathers. Silhouettes float, layers of organza tulle bloom with hand‑stitched petals, surreal flora, fauna, and marine forms. Craft and tech blur with printed flowers, textile engineering, embroidery that seems to grow.
Collaborations with Nike, Melissa, Rockfish yield whimsical footwear—ribbons, bubble beads, lace—each shoe a story in itself. The collection doesn’t comfort: it evokes awe, wonder, possibility. Fashion here is the portal between times—a vessel for empathy, hope, for what we might become when nature and invention breathe as one.
