The KNWLS SS27 London return had the quality of a homecoming that had been earned rather than assumed: Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault back on home soil, in southeast London, making clothes for the city’s women after a detour to Milan last September for the debut of their KNWLS x Nike collaboration. The audience that assembled for yesterday afternoon’s show understood the distinction between an away fixture and a home game.
The front row was a precise document of the label’s cultural orbit: model Alva Claire, rapper Deto Black, singer Crystal Murray, athlete Amy Hunt, and the couple Lava La Rue and Rhian Teasdale. Escentric Molecules had supplied the atmosphere in a literal sense, its Escentric 01 drifting through the space, a scent that, as the brand notes, adapts to each individual wearer. It was, the show notes conceded, quite apt for such a varied front row.
From Charlotte Knowles to KNWLS: a decade of becoming
To understand what Knowles and Arsenault were doing with SS27, it helps to trace the longer arc. According to London Fashion Week, the label was rebranded from Charlotte Knowles to KNWLS in 2021, a compression of the name that signalled something beyond typography: a move away from the singular authorial self toward a shared, harder-to-place identity. The decade of work that preceded this season’s show has been, in the designers’ own framing, a courtship of London’s coolest women, and SS27 reads as something like a consummation of that project.
The season’s conceptual starting point was Bettina Rheims’s Chambre Close, a photographic series depicting women in various states of undress. The show notes set the tone plainly: ‘With its Spring/Summer 2027 collection, the KNWLS heroine comes undone.’ The first model to appear wore a cream girdle, a white skirt held by garter clips, one side unhitched to reveal white briefs beneath. What followed sustained that register of exposure: vest straps sliding from shoulders, camis and T-shirts slashed with peekaboo openings, a bra visible below a purple cardigan.
The KNWLS SS27 illusion: architecture dressed as disarray
‘Exposure becomes an essential feature of KNWLS’ language of empowerment,’ the designers said. But the collection’s real argument was structural, not simply visual. The slashes in the tops and camis were not slashes at all: panels of sheer fabric, stitched in to simulate the look of ripped cloth. Skirts that appeared to be dropping to the ankle were similarly held in place by invisible panelling. Hemlines that seemed to float upward were anchored by boned hems. Metal wires held fallen straps suspended below the clavicles, frozen mid-slip.
The effect was, in other words, entirely authored. ‘Held together by silent architectures of phantom tulle and invisible wire, undoneness is an illusion,’ the show notes read. The word ‘phantom’ is doing real work there: these garments perform vulnerability while enacting its opposite, a kind of structural bravado hidden beneath surfaces that look as though they are barely holding together.
Knowles and Arsenault have always been interested in the mechanics of second-guessing, in clothes that present one condition while containing another. The KNWLS woman’s apparent dishevelment is not a failure of composure but, as the designers put it, ‘a reflection of an exacting self-possession and control, of a cunning knack for twisting and perverting expected presentations of empowered femininity.’ The apparent slippage is the point, and it is entirely under her control.
‘Of the power to be found in moments of slippage, unravelling and reconstruction,’ the show notes concluded. That last word carries the season’s essential logic: what looks like coming apart is, on closer inspection, a form of building. The KNWLS woman does not come undone; she stages it. The authority to truly reveal herself remains entirely her own, and the collection’s hidden architectures are the guarantee of that authority.
KNWLS SS27 will be presented as part of the London Fashion Week schedule, where the label has been a fixture since its rebrand.
