Three collections into London Fashion Week SS27, a pattern has emerged that is harder to dismiss than a passing seasonal reference: the London Fashion Week Gossip Girl thread, running through the work of Oscar Ouyang, Simone Rocha, and CSM graduate Gui Rosa, suggests that the mid-2000s teen drama has become the season’s shared unconscious. Whether or not the designers coordinated (and they almost certainly did not) the convergence says something about where fashion’s appetite for class, prep, and performance currently sits.
Oscar Ouyang’s Cygnet: prep with a crocheted edge
Oscar Ouyang, who is Beijing-born and London-based, has been building a reputation for clothes that sit easily on what one might call London’s bright young things: preppy in construction, socially fluent in their references. Having debuted at London Fashion Week in September 2025, his SS27 collection, titled Cygnet, was his third on-schedule runway show, and it found him deepening the world he has been constructing rather than abandoning it.
The collection’s premise was young people raiding their families’ wardrobes, finding identity through inheritance, reinventing what they found. It is a concept that maps almost perfectly onto the Gossip Girl universe: wealthy adolescents discovering themselves against a backdrop of old money and new performance. Quotes from season one, episode four of the series, the episode in which Blair is replaced by Serena as the face of her mother’s fashion campaign, played over the speakers as models including Lily McMenamy and Lennon Gallagher walked the runway.
According to WWD, Ouyang loosened things up for spring 2027, making the collection lighter, shinier and easier to wear than previous seasons. Silver tassels swung from crocheted pieces, and what might once have been a cosy pullover was transformed into something closer to jewellery: a crocheted pine nut reborn as a precious trinket, a swan gliding across tiny knitted shorts. The lightness is the point. The Cygnet of the title is not yet the swan (still forming, still finding its shape) and the clothes embody that in-between state with an ease that the heavier tailoring of earlier collections did not quite reach.
Rocha, Rosa, and the London Fashion Week Gossip Girl recurrence
If Ouyang’s Gossip Girl reference was structural, the show’s social world providing a frame for the collection’s ideas about identity and inheritance, Simone Rocha‘s was more oblique, arriving through sound rather than stated concept. Among the tracks chosen for her SS27 show was ‘gg’, by the Russian-Estonian experimental musician Lolina, whose original recording opens with the line: ‘That’s one secret I’ll never tell’, and references Gossip Girl by name later in its lyrics. Rocha played the Arca remix. The clothes reinforced the reading: sparkling gowns that could sit plausibly at Constance School for Girls’ debutante ball, Argyle-print sweater vests in the register of Blair Waldorf’s Upper East Side uniform.
Gui Rosa’s take was the most explicit and, arguably, the most interesting. A CSM graduate making her on-schedule debut with an intimate presentation at St James’ Court Hotel, Rosa described her work as ‘my own interpretation of Gossip Girl‘s Kiss on the Lips party, from the first season’. But she was quick to claim the distance: ‘It’s a deranged version of it, and I’m bringing elements of my own life into it. I could be wearing a ballgown, but then I’m taking the tube and eating crisps on the way home.’ The models wore long, blonde wigs and party dresses, moving through the hotel ballroom all at once in a deliberately chaotic staging. Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ (which also featured in Gossip Girl season two) played alongside Slayyyter’s ‘I’m Actually Kinda Famous’. The presentation was, in Rosa’s framing, a collision between the show’s rarefied fantasy and the grittier reality of actually living in London.
What draws all three designers to this particular source? The timing is partly mechanical: if fashion does return every 20 years, then 2007, the year Gossip Girl premiered, is squarely in the frame for SS27. But the pull feels less nostalgic than structural. Gossip Girl was always a show about display, about who is watching, who is being watched, and what clothes signal in a social economy built on visibility. That is not an irrelevant set of questions for fashion designers to be asking in 2025.
The broader runway context reinforces this. Preppy and upper-class references have been accumulating across the major fashion cities: Jonathan Anderson’s Dior has drawn consistently on young aristocrats; Conner Ives has worked New York society girls; Thom Browne has made a career out of the genre. The London Fashion Week Gossip Girl thread is, in this sense, a local inflection of something much wider, three designers finding their own entry points into a conversation the runways have been having for several seasons now. The question, as fashion month continues, is whether anyone will push the reference somewhere it has not yet been, or whether the secret really will never be told.
