The H&M Nick Knight LFW show, staged this week at Kensington Olympia, opened not with a model on a runway but with a ballerina. Brazilian dancer Ingrid Silva performed the opening act, according to V Magazine, setting a tone for an event that consistently refused to resolve itself into the familiar grammar of a fashion show.
The production was titled H&M&YOU&I, a name that positions human connection as the structural principle of the whole enterprise. Knight, who founded SHOWstudio in 2000 and has spent the intervening decades treating fashion photography as a form of moving image, led the creative direction. His collaborator was H&M, a brand that has, in recent seasons, been testing whether the mechanisms of a fashion show can be repurposed rather than simply repeated.
A runway built for reflection
The physical space itself was conceived as an argument. According to The Rakish Gent, the runway stretched 40 metres, flanked by curved mirrors and a video installation by Karyn Nakamura, described as a Tokyo-born artist and engineer. The mirrors are worth sitting with: in a show themed around human connection and the interaction of artistic expression with technology in real time, a curved mirror is not décor. It is the whole proposition made literal. The viewer becomes part of the image; the boundary between the spectacle and its audience curves back on itself.
It is the kind of decision that Knight has always made, the formal choice that carries the conceptual weight, so the surrounding language does not have to. When he says, in a statement released ahead of the show, ‘I believe that for fashion to be relevant, it needs to constantly change and push creative boundaries,’ the environment he built at Kensington Olympia is what that claim looks like when it is tested against a room and a budget, rather than a press release.
Labrinth and the question of the soundtrack
The sound was produced by British artist Labrinth, for whom the commission was personally weighted. ‘In London, my hometown, something close to my heart,’ he said. ‘This project is blending genres and eras, blurring the lines between what’s physical and what’s digital, no straight lines just time folding in on itself.’ The description lands as something close to a structural brief for the whole show: Silva’s ballet at the opening, Nakamura’s video installation running through it, Knight’s curved mirrors doubling the space back on itself. A soundtrack that folds time is not an incidental choice when the visual environment is already doing the same thing.
Labrinth noted that he has worked with H&M before, ‘a few times over the years but not like this,’ describing the project as ‘one of my favourite and most inspiring ways to have created with them.’ The distinction he draws is useful: previous collaborations apparently sat within more legible parameters. This one did not.
Opening the room, online and off
For those outside the venue, H&M offered a livestream from 7pm via its Instagram account, moving through the event (red carpet, backstage, front row) in a sequence hosted by Marlon Lundgren Garcia, Julia Hobbs and Leomie Anderson. The gesture is familiar enough now to read almost as default, but the hosting choices are interesting: three figures whose reference points span different edges of the London fashion world, holding together what the show itself kept insisting was the point. Connectivity, real and constructed.
The afterparty, held on 17 September, featured Kim Petras and u.r.trax alongside Foundation.FM, with entry for Dazed Club members available through the Dazed Club app. The event’s logic, from the Kensington Olympia space to the app-gated afterparty, was consistent throughout: a show designed to be experienced in multiple registers simultaneously, never just from a single fixed position in the room.
