The R&M Leathers debut catwalk show, held on the evening of 16 September inside Clapton’s Round Chapel and funded by Pornhub, did not arrive quietly. It arrived as an argument: that sex, long aestheticised into tasteful abstraction by the broader fashion industry, is most interesting when it is allowed to be knowing, a little lawless, and entirely itself.
Founded in 2018 by designer Ruby Mariani, R&M Leathers has spent the better part of a decade earning its position as London’s go-to fetishwear brand. This year alone it has been worn by Charli XCX, Addison Rae, Miley Cyrus and Olivia Rodrigo. The celebrities arrived before the catwalk did, which is its own kind of cultural statement: the label built its reputation through bodies before it built it through spectacle.
42nd Street in a South London chapel
For the collection, titled Miss Leathers, Mariani looked not to the runway’s usual referents but to an older, vanishing world of urban vice: the peep shows, leather bars and neon-soaked excess that once defined 42nd Street, according to Hypebae. The collection name itself was borrowed from Versace’s AW92 collection, Miss S&M, a lineage that positions R&M less as provocateur and more as inheritor of a long tradition of fashion treating transgression as a serious formal proposition.
The room in which all of this unfolded matters. Round Chapel, a Victorian nonconformist church, offered the show’s central joke at full volume: a brand rooted in kink taking its bow inside a consecrated space, bankrolled by the world’s largest pornography platform. The combination was too precisely calibrated to be accidental. These are the choices of a label that understands, as well as any stylist or set designer working today, that context is content.
It is also worth knowing, as Vogue has reported, that Mariani’s studio is situated in a poky room above a South London pub. The distance between that room and a Clapton chapel packed with fashion industry observers is not merely geographical.
R&M Leathers debut catwalk show: what was on the runway
The collection itself was rigorous in its genre-mixing. Tudor necklines and peplum silhouettes gave the proceedings an Anne Boleyn quality, kinked and corseted. A pageant queen appeared in full leather regalia: leather sash, leather tiara, leather riding crop shaped into a sceptre. Elsewhere there were Barb Wire-style runaway brides, showgirls, waitresses, bondage harnesses, tasselled two-pieces, baby-doll dresses and T-shirts bearing the Pornhub logo.
The tailoring had its own precision. Hypebae noted slimline calfskin bodices softened with broderie-anglaise-inspired trims, alongside corseted busts, high-cut bodysuits and crystal-studded leather strips that reshaped the body into exaggerated arches. One accessory in particular crystallised the show’s relationship to its reference points: a brass admission token from Show World Center, a former New York peep-show arcade, transformed into an oversized belt buckle. The object is both souvenir and manifesto, a piece of pre-sanitised urban history repurposed as jewellery.
The theatrical register peaked mid-runway, when two models kissed in a gesture the original fashion press compared, with some justification, to Britney Spears and Madonna at the VMAs. The reference lands because R&M understands that pop spectacle and fetishwear share an audience that has always been larger than polite culture likes to admit.
Miss Leathers, then, is not simply a collection about sex. It is a collection about the semiotics of transgression: what it looks like when desire is dressed, formalised, given a tiara and walked down an aisle in a nineteenth-century chapel. London Fashion Week has long traded on its punk credentials. R&M Leathers, with this debut show, makes a case that the more interesting provocation was always happening somewhere darker and more finely stitched.
