The debut off-schedule show by Kai Ghattaura and Fin Forsyth SS27 did not take place in a Mayfair hotel ballroom or a repurposed gallery on the Strand. It happened in a warehouse near Bethnal Green tube station, in front of several hundred design students and recent graduates who queued down Cambridge Heath Road clutching White Claws and wearing their own work, which made them, by some distance, the best-dressed crowd of the London Fashion Week season.
The designers are, by any conventional measure, newcomers. Fin Forsyth graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2024; Ghattaura showed his MA collection in February this year. They are also partners in life, a detail the show’s emotional register made immediately legible. The front row held teachers, family members and faces from the MA’s 2026 graduating class, the whole thing carrying the atmosphere of a talent show staged by people who had not yet learned to be self-conscious about ambition.
A cardboard kingdom and the grammar of childhood
Inside, the designers had erected an enormous cardboard house. Paper crowns sat on every seat. The reference was Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, the Maurice Sendak Foundation‘s cornerstone text, in which a boy named Max transforms his bedroom into a forest ruled by monsters, and himself into their king. The show opened not with a model but with four children, dressed entirely in white, clattering down the runway with cardboard swords and shields before breaking into a duel. A nearby PR person eventually shooed them offstage to make way for the first look.
What followed was a collection that treated the runway as a territory somewhere between the nursery and the wilderness. Paper masks appeared: a fox, possibly a bear, depending on the angle. Later came birds, possibly pigeons. Caps were reshaped into something resembling platypus bills. The models seemed to have assembled their looks from whatever materials a resourceful child might find at the bottom of a craft box: makeshift cummerbunds and head scarves cut from bold prints, extra fabric added around the neck, around one knee, pooling at the arms. The styling logic, if logic is even the right word, was accretion: more is more, and found objects count.
The literary touchstone shifted, mid-collection, from Sendak toward something closer to Lord of the Flies: the models occupying that uneasy register between boyhood and something rawer and less socialised. Then glitter arrived, and the atmosphere shifted again. One model appeared covered entirely in fuchsia glitter; another closed the show dripping in silver sparkle, the finale that gave the collection its title, Glister. The last model also carried a giant fidget spinner, the most recent in a procession of toys woven throughout.
Kai Ghattaura and Fin Forsyth SS27: the longer story behind the debut
For Ghattaura, the show represents a trajectory worth tracing. According to Archived Dreams, he grew up in Telford before moving to London at 18 to study a BA in Fashion at Central Saint Martins. His BA collection, “HonourBound,” drew on folk stories from Grimms’ Fairy Tales alongside references to 4chan, Reddit and other internet communities, a combination that positioned him from the start as someone interested in the collision between inherited cultural forms and the vernacular spaces where contemporary identity is actually assembled. The instinct evident in Glister (reach for myth, then drag it through the present) appears to have been consistent since the beginning.
What Ghattaura and Forsyth have achieved here is not a refined statement. Refinement is not the point, and anyone attending in search of it was in the wrong warehouse. The show was joyful in the precise sense that joy involves release rather than control: children running with cardboard weapons, glitter applied with the conviction of someone who has decided that more is always the answer, a fidget spinner carried with the gravity of a sceptre. The graduate crowd outside understood this. They had queued for it. The Kai Ghattaura and Fin Forsyth SS27 collection will show again, in the sense that these two designers will keep working. The next collection is the one to watch.
