The most alive moments at London Fashion Week off-schedule have always been the ones that don’t appear on any official PDF. While Alexander McQueen’s return to London after 25 years was generating the expected column inches, Sean McGirr presented menswear and womenswear at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, with a collection that, according to The National, combined sharp tailoring with rave culture and Renaissance art, and included a collaboration with Savile Row’s Huntsman, another conversation was being conducted in east London studios, Fitzrovia townhouses and Dover Street Market backrooms.
It is a familiar seasonal split. The British Fashion Council calendar anchors the week, and Christopher Kane’s debut at Mulberry will get its share of attention. But the off-schedule circuit runs on different energy: invitations go out to followers, shows are promoted independently, and the whole operation has an IYKYK quality that the official schedule, by its nature, cannot replicate. SS27 is no exception.
London Fashion Week off-schedule: the names to know
Kai Ghattaura, who graduated from Central Saint Martins in February, describes his work as ‘postmodern ragebait clothing.’ His references lean heavily on internet lore and the video games he grew up obsessed with, though many will recognise his designs from EsDeeKid, who is a devoted fan. Ghattaura is Telford-raised, and this season he’s hosting an off-schedule show alongside his partner, Fin Forsyth. His teaser for it: ‘Come and play with us.’
Ellen Poppy Hill, who told Dazed last year that she draws inspiration from ‘found things, from reading, artwork, talking to people and even from certain sentences,’ is presenting her third collection this season, titled Sharpen Up Your Act!. The south Londoner shows only once a year, and her recent Instagram posts have been gesturing, cryptically, towards pencil-shavings as a possible organising image. She is worth watching: the constraint of an annual show tends to concentrate a designer’s thinking in ways that the seasonal treadmill does not.
R&M Leathers, founded in 2018 by Ruby Mariani, is hosting its debut runway show. In the eight years since the label’s founding, it has built what the brand’s followers would call a cult following, beloved by pop stars and the broader It-girl ecosystem. The show is titled ‘MISS LEATHERS’, hosted in east London, and produced in collaboration with Pornhub. It is, on its own terms, a coherent brand statement.
Layal Balubaid, the London-based Saudi designer whose comedy-inflected couture has attracted the attention of New York City First Lady Rama Duwaji, is taking a quieter approach. Currently studying for her MA at Central Saint Martins, she’s opening her studio to visitors for the duration of LFW, a gesture that feels less like a presentation and more like an extended conversation. ‘Want to see my pieces up close? Try things on? Be nosy? Bring me a present? Now you can!’ she says.
Monitors, mussels and a reading at DSM
George Trochopoulos, the Greek designer whose viral mussel-shell bolero was worn by Solange and Tyla, counts SZA, Jorja Smith, Anok Yai and Quen Blackwell among his fans. This Friday, he’s hosting an intimate off-schedule show in Fitzrovia. ‘The past few years I have been getting to know my girl. I hope this season I can give you a proper introduction to her,’ he says. It is the kind of statement that only makes sense once you’ve seen the clothes, which is, of course, the point.
Back at the official schedule, the McQueen collection being discussed in the same breath as ankle-strapped heels that The Guardian described as looking like electronic monitoring tags says something about where the brand has positioned itself: dark humour as couture logic, the carceral made wearable. The Huntsman collaboration folded Savile Row’s own long history into the mix. The result was a collection working across several registers at once.
The week closes, in the off-schedule world at least, with Lili Curia at Dover Street Market on Saturday morning. The footwear brand, founded last year and already worn by Lisa and Suki Waterhouse, is hosting an intimate reading with model Tali Lennox: a moment of deliberate stillness inside a week that rarely pauses. If the off-schedule circuit has a philosophy, it is something like this, that fashion can hold more than one register at once, and that the quieter rooms are sometimes where that becomes most legible.
