The first thing you notice at a Liza Keane London Fashion Week debut is whether you are dressed for rain. A member of Keane’s team, greeting guests as they took their front-row seats in the lower depths of 180 The Strand, issued a half-serious warning: these seats were, she explained, directly in the splash zone. The warning was well-founded.
At the centre of the runway stood an installation by radical design studio playbody. Six pillars of concrete breezeblocks supported a large panel constructed from metal scaffolding poles; beneath it, a black tarpaulin-lined trough lay on the floor, and a border of soil ran the entire perimeter of the space. As the room went dark and an ominous score by DJ Hezen filled the air, six bodies painted silver and stripped to their briefs climbed the breezeblocks and hoisted the panel onto their shoulders. An overhead hose began spurting water through the panel’s gauze-like surface, sending a downpour onto the floor below, a sequence that recalled Alexander McQueen’s SS98 Golden Shower finale in spirit if not in spectacle. Models moved through the structure, splashing through pooled water, tracking mud across concrete as they went.
Rain On My Parade: the SS27 collection
The clothes that moved through this constructed storm were, in their way, as precise as the set design. Waxed leather, trailing black cloaks, gauzy white dresses and shredded fabrics made up the collection Keane titled Rain On My Parade. Some models carried bows and arrows; one bore a blonde-haired baby bound to their chest. The opening look wore a pair of distressed angel wings, lengths of fabric trailing behind through the muddy water.
The show’s narrative, as set out in Keane’s notes, is situated in the aftermath of an undisclosed disaster. Ash is still falling. Survivors have been left, in her words, ’emptied, of hope, of beauty, of desire.’ Skin has hardened into hide; leather has become, she writes, ‘keratinised into the body rather than worn against it’, perforated and gashed to match the skin beneath. The post-apocalyptic register was clear, if handled with more internal logic than the genre usually permits.
Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2022, Keane has been building this world incrementally, transmuting inner states into physical forms. Her Liza Keane London Fashion Week debut was the latest, and largest, iteration of that project. According to London Fashion Week, the label defines a contemporary vision of subversive womenswear and menswear, and Keane draws on a specific set of philosophical references in doing so: the writings of Georges Bataille and Carl Jung inform how she understands fashion as a form capable of holding the contradictions of embodiment (seduction and fragility, strength and decay) in a state of constant tension. This is not purely a conceptual position; it is the difference between clothes that illustrate an idea and clothes that are, in some sense, the idea itself.
The week that almost wasn’t
Getting to show night required, as it almost always does, a week of controlled near-disaster. Keane kept a diary of the final stretch. Monday, 14 September: meetings back to back, pattern-cutting a trouser wherever time allowed, music review running simultaneously in the background. By Wednesday, a light test with her dog Uma on the bike; by midnight, still fitting one of the harder trouser patterns, with the studio not clearing until 2am, which she noted was, relatively speaking, an early night.
Thursday brought what she called the chaos before the storm: the most hectic day of the build-up, the studio emptying out at last, and still a pair of trousers, a dress and a bag left to cut before morning. Friday was deadline day for all samples. Saturday, casting began with her casting director Yuri, whom she described as a wizard, the studio team working around the fittings with what she called tightness. Sunday brought no sleep at all: her assistant Gabriel stayed up finishing feathers while Keane completed final alterations, breaking the night with a practice run for a BBC radio interview conducted by the two of them in the studio at some small hour.
Monday morning, show day for the Liza Keane London Fashion Week debut, she nearly fell asleep at the sewing machine at nine. Her sister Lilia and assistant Liv arrived at ten to help load, but Keane was still sewing. When the Uber arrived and the driver saw the volume of what they were carrying, he initially refused. She told him where they were going and why it mattered; he took them. They arrived an hour late to the venue. Her sister, she wrote, handled last-minute calls while Keane allowed herself a few minutes of stillness in the back seat before the final push.
‘I loved it,’ she wrote afterwards. ‘I’m so happy. So grateful. Even through it all, I wouldn’t have it any other way.’ The Liza Keane London Fashion Week debut is now on the schedule as a completed fact, mud, water, and all.
