At the height of summer, while most of my contemporaries are greeting the day in Patmos or Marseille, I’m in sunny South Bermondsey, coasting past the grungy MOT garages that pepper the industrial district’s backstreets. Do I envy them? Sure, but I’m here for a worthwhile cause. Inside a suite of light-filled studios – next to units that host DIY galleries and long-into-the-next-day raves – is the HQ of one of London’s most vital independent brands: Knwls.
At a glance, Alex Arsenault and Charlotte Knowles – partners in life and work – could be misread as intimidating. Wiry, tatted-up and often sporting one of Knwls’s black cut-off caps (as he is today), Arsenault cuts a brooding figure, while Knowles, inevitably in a full look from her semi-eponymous brand, is petite, her hair in a dark blonde hime cut with lightning-bright peroxide sidelocks. She’s the Knwls femme-but-fierce spirit distilled.
Speak to them for more than a minute, though, and presuppositions fade. “It was insaaaane,” Arsenault says, beaming, the vowel drag piquing his affable Quebecois twang, as he recounts a film shoot they oversaw earlier in the week in Paris. “It’s set in a mysterious, secretive institute where female athletic heroes flex their superhuman talents.” It also marks the peak of the brand’s trajectory to date: a global collaboration with Nike – previewed here on friend of Knwls photographer Harley Weir – which hits stores later this month.
They’ll be showing outside of London for the first time too, presenting spring/summer 2026, doubtless the next evolution of their intellectually rigorous, technically audacious, sexually confident worldview, in Milan in September. Back home, they’re nominees for British womenswear designer of the year at the upcoming Fashion Awards – a deserved (if overdue) acknowledgement of eight years of graft.
“Conversations started almost five years ago,” says Knowles of the Nike project. “We started designing about two and a half years ago, so we needed to make sure it didn’t feel too trendy, or of a particular moment. That caused a bit of panic, but then we just looked back to our very first pieces,” she says, citing the Fanny skirt, a wrapped micromini with dimensional utilitarian pockets.
Working with Nike allowed the pair to indulge their obsession with craft at its most advanced frontier. That skirt, for example, has been reimagined in a custom-developed waterproof, windproof check with photo-reflective threading, while corsets use the proprietary Flyknit technology, typically reserved for footwear. Speaking of, they’ve a custom shoe too, a corset-laced mule-sneaker hybrid, while bags feature Nike’s original waffle sole pattern on the base: “We wanted it to look ‘fashion’ but also feel sporty and rugged enough to put down at the side of the club, wipe off and go.”
As with many great tales in British fashion, Knwls’s began at Central Saint Martins. Both on the MA in 2015, their meet-cute was brought about by a mutual friend asking Arsenault – in the year above Knowles – for a portfolio review. There followed a Shoreditch night out, and an offer from Knowles to help Arsenault with his graduate collection. While the CSM-to-star designer pipeline typically launches before a swooning audience of industry bigwigs at the school’s annual graduate show, neither was selected for theirs – a fate that befalls roughly half of each class.
In Knowles’s case, she feels it was down to her deconstructed corsetry and lingerie misaligning with the tastes of the times: “It was very sexy and revealing,” she says, smirking, “which people back then weren’t really into. Everyone was obsessed with wearing big coats and covering up.”
Undeterred, Knowles got the attention of Lulu Kennedy, founder of Fashion East, the legendary fashion talent incubator. “The pieces on the rail were almost like sculpture,” raves Kennedy. “Foam and silicone, push-up bras. It felt a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it was so different to anything else on show.”
After toying with the idea of pursuing his own practice, Arsenault decided to join forces for their Fashion East debut. From the outset, their collections were acclaimed for their recontextualising of garments historically associated with the restriction and objectification of women’s bodies – corsets, bodices, boned lingerie. Their status as protagonists of the underwear-as-outerwear trend was set. “When we started putting our work on Instagram, we immediately saw this barrier lift,” Arsenault says. “It was clear that there was an audience of people who felt in control of how they wanted to show themselves, and weren’t afraid to be judged for it.”
The timing feels like kismet. Seemingly overnight, every online It-girl of repute was papped in the brand’s bleached check flares or toting a jagged Fang bag. “Kylie Jenner, Em Rata, Bella and Gigi Hadid: they’ve all been wearing it since the start,” Kennedy notes. “And they weren’t doing all the gifting in the world. Those women and their stylists were going and buying it.”
Caroline Polachek, the London-based American musician, first got in touch with Knowles in 2018 after seeing photos of her graduate collection. “It had all the intellect of Comme or Margiela, but a sex appeal that felt very cool and new… It was hot. Slinky, diva, hi-tech, maybe a bit evil,” she says. “In a good way.”
“Knwls is the ultimate London brand that creates modern classics,” agrees Isamaya Ffrench, superstar make-up artist and day-one brand collaborator. “It’s everything: comfortable, flattering, makes you feel sexy and feminine but it’s so easy to wear.” It’s a truth owed to Arsenault and Knowles’s obsession with craft in making really good clothes. As Kennedy shrewdly observes: “When you look at a lot of Charlotte’s early work, a lot of it is basically a high-fashion interpretation of sportswear.”
When I stop by the studio, they’re more than a month and a half out from show day. “It’s very slinky warrior, filtered through a prism of futurism and Victoriana,” Arsenault says of the broader spring/summer 2026 mood, highlighting pieces that take cues from the Nike collection’s dynamic flair: sculptural corset dresses crafted from skived, silvered leather bonded to neoprene – the sort of thing Joan of Arc might wear on the Battlestar Galactica; cold-washed, scuba-like cotton jersey separates; lacy babydoll tops with sporty contrast trims.
Though a joy to witness Knwls’s ascent, at a time when Britain’s fashion scene is caught in a changing tide, it’s bittersweet that one of their most important moments to date won’t be happening here. They aren’t abandoning ship, though. “We’re thinking of showing in London again,” Knowles says, citing the British Fashion Council’s recent waiving of show fees. “We’re still operating from London. We’re still providing jobs in the industry and still part of the community.”
“We’re also seeing this season as a breaking point,” Arsenault adds. “We’ve been doing things in a certain way for eight years now. With this finally coming out, it feels like the end of a chapter and hopefully the beginning of a new one.”
Ever innovating, the future is theirs. “Let’s see if shows even make sense for us,” Arsenault says, smiling.