The London Fashion Week SS27 season saved its most visceral moment for near the end: the Di Petsa Holy Milk collection, a runway meditation on motherhood that concluded with Little Mix’s Leigh-Anne Pinnock standing centre stage, baby bump visible, as milk spurted from her breasts and drenched the models crouched at her feet. If fashion weeks are judged, in part, by the images that survive the algorithm and circulate on their own momentum, Di Petsa has already won the week.
What the Di Petsa Holy Milk collection was actually about
The collection’s title was not metaphorical dressing. According to Outlook India Luxe, the designer set out to explore pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and the changing body as the collection’s central preoccupations. That framework gave the runway a coherence that the more theatrical gestures might otherwise have obscured. Two models carried real-life babies down the runway, their own, the show suggested. One paused mid-walk to kiss her partner, who was holding their child on the front row. A mature female model walked alongside a younger male model in what read as a mother-and-son pairing. Another couple strolled hand in hand before making out directly in front of the photographers’ pit, the sequence tracing something close to a full arc of human generation.
Di Petsa is a designer who has built a practice around the runway as spectacle and provocation in equal measure. Previous seasons have seen her enlist Mia Khalifa to walk the show and instruct models to kiss members of the front row. The tendency is not shock for its own sake but rather a sustained interest in the body as a site of something charged and communal, where the audience is never quite a passive observer. Holy Milk extended that logic into its most ambitious territory yet.
Pinnock’s finale and the logic of the closing image
Leigh-Anne Pinnock’s appearance as the closing look was, in the grammar of the show, exactly right. Dressed in a Greek goddess-like two-piece that foregrounded rather than concealed her pregnancy, she stopped mid-runway, surrounded by the rest of the cast, and the milk began. She turned on the spot as the liquid continued, reaching the models crouched around her. As a closing image it was surreal, but surreality was the point: the collection had been building toward a representation of the maternal body as something mythic, excessive, beyond the usual parameters of what a fashion show permits itself to show.
Di Petsa herself does not have children, a fact she addressed directly. ‘We are pregnant with our own self,’ she explained. ‘We give birth to different versions of ourselves when we grow too large inside us to be hidden and then again will be reborn.’ The statement reframes Holy Milk as something broader than autobiography: motherhood as a structural condition of self-transformation, the body as a vessel for becoming rather than merely for reproducing. It is a more abstract vision, and one the runway images carry rather than merely illustrate.
There is a long tradition, in both art and fashion, of the maternal body appearing as symbol before it appears as fact. What Di Petsa’s show did, with its real babies, its nursing mothers and its milk-drenched finale, was insist on the fact first and let the symbol follow. The sequence of events on the runway, from conception mime to breastfeeding close, was almost pedagogical in its directness, and all the more arresting for it.
London Fashion Week SS27 continues with Burberry still to come, but the image that will define the season’s closing days is already fixed: Pinnock, mid-runway, surrounded by the cast of Holy Milk, as the liquid caught the light and the room tried to decide whether it had just witnessed a fashion show or something closer to a ritual.
