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On Tuesday, Rosie Wrighting MP opened a Westminster Hall debate on “The cultural contribution of London Fashion Week” — the first time such a discussion has ever been recorded in parliament. A fashion graduate of Westminster University and a former Asos buyer, the 28-year-old Labour Member for Kettering is the youngest female MP. Last fashion week, she spent hours talking with designers backstage. All-party MPs from constituencies in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Somerset, Derbyshire as well as London urged the support of fashion education and careers around the country — while agreeing on the importance of London Fashion Week as the national amplifier of talent and business.
With Wrighting’s governmental push, and with new British Fashion Council (BFC) CEO Laura Weir in place (who’s also a retail insider by dint of her last job as creative director of Selfridges), the start of London Fashion Week feels buoyed by a new kind of energy.
“London Fashion Week is an exposition of excellence that tells the story of fashion as a true national asset of our country,” Weir says. She wants the government to place the industry on a level with film, theatre and gaming — “to rebuild respect and to back British fashion’s diplomatic ‘soft power’ on the world stage.” “More than clothes,” she says. “It’s the story of who we are.”
For a litany of reasons — the kinds of giant geopolitical, economic and industrial conditions that even the mighty European conglomerates LVMH and Kering have zero control over — London Fashion Week has recently come in for one its cyclical bashings. Now, it’s the online jury, disparaging London Fashion Week (and New York) for not getting as many hits as the 10 days of mega luxury brand shows in Paris.
Self-lacerating from London-based media comes around with almost comical predictability — considering that the city’s history reliably proves that when establishment opinion is moaning that there’s nothing worth seeing, there’ll be a revolution brewing somewhere they’re not seeing, or just don’t count as ‘fashion’. From its inception in 1984, LFW was castigated by Fleet Street journalists for its Ab Fab-style chaos — even while John Galliano, Leigh Bowery and the generation of Blitz kids, the phenomenal creative people now lionised in major exhibitions, were rising. (‘Blitz: The club that shaped the ’80s opens at the Design Museum on Thursday.)
In 1992, another London-Fashion-week-is-dead press furore erupted when established London designers — including Westwood — ‘defected’ to show in Paris. It was exactly in the same season that Alexander McQueen made his first LFW appearance, soon joined by Hussein Chalayan, turning London into the ’90s hotbed of spectacle and notoriety that’s celebrated to this day. (A relic from Chalayan’s scandalous ‘Buried’ 1993 graduation collection is a centrepiece of ‘Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion’ at The Barbican on 24 September.)
The talking down gets amplified exponentially when online opinionators pile on. But if you’re looking to quantify “the cultural contribution of London Fashion Week” through a foreign lens, you might consider the huge banner for the exhibition ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ currently hanging on the front of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The image is of a suit by Grace Wales Bonner from her landmark LFW runway debut, which she pulled off with BFC Newgen support in spring 2017.
Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the museum’s Costume Institute, sees what’s going on in London as unmissable. “London is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance — spearheaded in part by an emerging generation of designers who are bringing a new voice to fashion that prioritises diversity, inclusivity and sustainability,” Bolton says. Over the recent years, he notes the Met has been acquiring a slew of young London designers for posterity — Paolo Carzana, Jawara Alleyne, Torishéju Dumi, Phoebe English, Nicholas Daley, Saul Nash, Bianca Saunders and Martine Rose among them.
Far be it from me to say that everything in the garden’s lovely. It isn’t. Viewed from the perspective of the decay of the commercial scaffolding that has underpinned the wholesale ready-to-wear system for half a century, the relevance of fashion shows, which rested on top of it, seems to topple.
Bigger picture, London designer businesses are far from alone internationally to have been serially hit by the fall of Matches, the bankruptcy of Ssense, the failure of large US department stores, the closure of independent boutiques and the pandemic — although Brexit has certainly added its special British-specific sprinkling of agonies on top. All these are the impacts of the old order of 25 years of globalisation being decommissioned. Nobody escapes them.
Yet, as ever, in London you need to turn in a different direction to see something interesting happening. In a very British combination of punk DIY attitude and old-fashioned principles, it’s as if London’s designers have suddenly remembered the thing Napoleon said about us: the British are a “nation of shopkeepers”.
On Friday, Jonathan Anderson’s reinvention of his JW Anderson business as a bricks-and-mortar shopping experience is about to spotlight this phenomenon. Instead of a runway show, his show is a dinner (certain to be Anderson friends-and-family actor and artist-studded) co-hosted by Weir. The point is the reopening of his Soho store. “It’s more of a going backwards, to a corner shop,” he said, while previewing his concept in Paris this summer. “It’s building a client base, and nurturing it.”
Journalists, influencers and everyone else with an eye on the JW Anderson Instagram will have been pawing the ground to get in there and snap up whatever it is he’s been teasing us with: maybe a set of traditional Irish linen tea towels woven with the words ‘PEACH’, ‘CRAFT’ and ‘ART’, a Loafer bag, a JW Anderson logo scarf, or a Fair Isle Pig jumper. Or something from what he has down as goods: Wedgwood, mugs, antique watering cans, silver decanter labels, some serious painting. “It’s high, low and in-between.”
As far as ‘fashion’ is concerned, Anderson is seeing this policy as locally specific, largely sourced from UK manufacturers (Scottish kilts; Welsh blankets) with JW Anderson studio-made ‘experiments’ on top. Drops of “Things I like”, twice a year. It’s a case of simply replenishing when stocks run out, he told me. “We have redone our big sellers, and we’ve made them perfectly, and we just re-issued them, better,” he said. “I’m trying to work out a way that is allowing us to be creative, but at the same time build a client. I don’t want to make a bag, and then have it discounted somewhere else: this doesn’t work. It’s impossible for young brands.”
A wave of radically self-reliant entrepreneurialism is on the rise across the city, reinventing multiple methods for recharging the near-extinct pleasures of in-person retail. It runs from Mayfair to market stalls, private salons to galleries and garages. At one end of the spectrum, there’s Erdem, about to celebrate his 20th year as an independent, who’s opening a second London store on Sloane Street next month (to add to two under licence in Korea), and has his eyes set on New York next. At the other, there’s newcomer Yaku Stapleton, who has built his Yaku landscape around his Afrofuturist role-playing game world, and a fanatical fanbase with it. At his presentation on Saturday, the audience will be able to buy Yaku merch, served at a booth by one of his characters.
On a practical level, it keeps cashflow going — a continuation of the occasional shopping open days that are part of the inspirational success of the Paul Smith Residency, the free studio space at Smithfield Market where Yaku, Paolo Carzana and Pauline Dujancourt (all LFW on-schedule designers) are current incumbents. “People say hello, we get to chat. Find out what they’re into. Form those connections, speak to them later,” Yaku says. “We made a goal: let’s really push our direct-to-consumer, because that’s what we’ve always wanted to do more than anything else,” he adds. “I think we’ve met that goal and exceeded it in three months,” says his co-director and life partner Nas Kuzmich. She baulks at the idea that ‘building community’ has become an inauthentic fashion marketing buzzword. “Yeah, I think a lot of the time when people say community, they mean ‘customer base’. We don’t want a customer base, per se. The whole reason for us doing pop-ups and workshops is to promote access to our brand that’s non-commercial. It almost feels like a third space of sorts — not a commercial space, necessarily, but people come and hang out and they meet each other, without buying into us necessarily.”
Cutting out the risks of relying on middle people — stores or e-commerce platforms, which don’t always pay, demand watered-down product and ask for discounts — has come naturally to the young generation of London designers. It’s creating — rather, has recreated — a private culture of British custom-made couture. Steve O Smith, who just won the Karl Lagerfeld Award in the LVMH Prize ceremony, has never had a show for his drawings-as-dresses, sells only to personal customers and is supported by the BFC’s Newgen scheme (and participates on LFW’s digital schedule). Michael Stewart of Standing Ground (the 2024 winner of the LVMH Craft Prize) is operating the same way.
Richard Quinn has never missed staging his epic LFW shows, except during Covid. Behind the scenes, Quinn’s built an impressive bespoke business at his large atelier and showroom in Peckham, flying tailors to fit wedding parties around the globe. This summer, he hosted a salon in a Dorchester suite for visiting private clients, and collaborated with Liberty London on a pop-up evening dress corner.
These multifarious ways of shopping, and meeting designers — and experiencing the human thrill of fashion — are a far cry from the last London designer retail sensation when Christopher Kane, Roksanda, Nicholas Kirkwood and Simone Rocha opened on ultra-posh Mount Street in the 2010s. Though Simone Rocha remains, London’s notorious rent greedflation and Covid did a lot of damage to the businesses of that generation of designers.
These days, the way to do it is to open off the beaten track, without taking on permanent overheads. In Vyner Street, Jake’s by Stefan Cooke partner Jake Burt opens on Saturdays in an upstairs space shared with two artists. Here, they sell whatever they have on the day — subversive twists on Fair Isles and Argyles knitted to order by Eleanor Butler-Jones, classy leather bags by Bristol-based Six95 and jewellery made by Alice Goddard (their stylist and sister of designer Molly Goddard). “I really believe the next sort of cultural revolution is going to be around retailing,” says Burt. “Not only financially, but because you get the opportunity to grow a community around your shop. I think that’s been missing for a while.”
Perhaps the most exciting manifestation of these new market forces is Fantastic Toiles — the closest thing to a fashion farmers market packed with fresh, wild product — which Nasir Mazhar has been convening with friends on occasional weekends around London since 2019. “I wanted to go back to being free,” says Mazhar, whose long-standing multi-career as a milliner, collaborator, originator and centrifugal leader in London resists categorisation. “Fantastic Toiles isn’t just a shop. It’s all of us doing it with as few barriers as possible. It’s a place for like-minded people to experiment and explore ideas.” He extracts no charges except a contribution to venue hire, never gets involved with selecting what people want to sell on the day. They are one-offs, also available on the marketplace’s Instagram, which the designers service themselves.
Mazhar started it because he was fed up with wholesaling his East End club-influenced collection to retailers who argued him down to the most commercial stuff at the cheapest price. It’s the soul-sucking reality that’s escalated steeply for independent designers ever since — while causing a great global blanding-out of luxury shopping for customers. “I mean, isn’t jaw-dropping incredible fashion what attracted all of us to be it in the first place?” he exclaims. “The ethos is we pay for everything equally. People do just come to hang out and talk to designers,” he says, “because fashion culture is more than just a catwalk.”
Jawara Alleyne, a London hero showing this week, testifies to the upskilling effect of selling at Fantastic Toiles. “Nasir is really a renegade. He was the first person that showed me that actually you can do your own thing. It wasn’t just words, you actually see it in practice. And you have the conversation with yourself as well,” Alleyne says. “Something happens when you see that person in front of you, and actually talk to them. With something like this, it’s all on you. It’s figuring out solutions of how you can build a new structure, a new framework for what selling fashion can be. Everyone comes here with responsibility. Complaining does nothing.”
So in London, markets are markets, shops belong to shopkeepers, and designers make and sell clothes in-person. In many ways, this invention of new hybridised British ways of doing business is a harking back to Kensington Market and Hyper Hyper, bastions of London underground indie fashion culture in the ’70s and ’80s.
That, in fact, is the very idea that inspired Rei Kawakubo, champion of all independents, to found Dover Street Market (DSM) as an umbrella for selling designers she admires. DSM carries that tradition across continents now. A long list of British-based designers are showcased at the Haymarket store, as well as in Paris, New York and Tokyo. “The important thing is to give these designers visibility. We feel duty-bound to do that when there are less and less stores for their work to be seen in,” says Dickon Bowden, DSM’s global VP. “There’s a huge appetite around these London brands. Our e-commerce is about 25 per cent of the business, but there’s also a swing towards physical retail. People want to interact with people.”
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