Even if you’ve only been half paying attention to the fall 2025 shows, you know by now that superwide swaggering shoulders, strong in fashion-speak, is the story of the season in Paris, and a pretty strident one at that. Yet not at Margaret Howell, oh no. In that brilliantly counterintuitive way of hers, Howell’s shoulders were more laid-back and relaxed than ever: dropped, to use yet more fashion-speak—softly rounded, tailoring impeccably worked to look easy and, better yet, feel easy. It’s a gesture of conspiratorial solidarity with those who wear her clothes. No better example of that than her generously proportioned textured wool coat in a shade of dark gray you might call storm if you happen to be looking at a British sky one rainy night. The coat was lightly cinched with a sliver of a leather belt, with a swath of black shearling at the neck, a scarf made from offcuts of the pelts: the same story for all of the collection’s sheepskin accessories, like the cozy snap caps. (Even mid-calf black leather moto boots came lined in shearling.)
At a time when it can feel like fashion is still choosing fleeting spectacle over something that can actually be worn in the real world, Howell continues to embrace the joy to be had from the latter. (To emphasize that, she shot this collection on models as they walked, catching them mid-stride, so they wouldn’t look static, frozen; we move through life, so why shouldn’t we see her clothes doing so too?) That coat of Howell’s was lifted from one she designed for a collection in 2023. But she modified it, refreshed it to be looser and boxier after listening to customer feedback, and those relaxed, ever so slightly exaggerated proportions informed so much of her fall. Her listening is eminently sensible, really, but these days, strange to say, a pretty radical thing to do.
It is, though, an approach that is classically Margaret Howell: As in, let the design be in the service of connection—acknowledging that the act of creating clothing is in some ways always about intimacy. There was so much of that here, evident in both her women’s and men’s looks. The way she cut the guys’ suiting to be softer and easier too and—another example of listening to the people who live in her clothes—rendered in flannel as soft as a whisper or a crisper, weightier wool that hails from an Italian mill that specializes in reproduction military fabrics. The suiting might be worn with shirts that were vegetable-dyed in shades of tan and brown, or layered up with a car coat that also hailed from a bygone collection, or a chunky zip-front cardigan that started life as a women’s piece.
For her women’s, Howell used black velvet—another request from those who love her clothes—for a pantsuit with a higher buttoning jacket and straight-cut trousers, or a side-button skirt with an ever-so-slightly oversized ivory sweater. Howell has the most incredible knack of making it all look so effortless even if things are not: the complexity of the pleats worked up into a black knitted skirt, say, which was paired with a black cashmere sweater with an outsize collar, a look inspired by 1930s ice-skater garb. Another standout sweater, in creamy white cashmere, was knitted in one go, a mind-boggling technical achievement that belied its simple appearance.
And in a perfect encapsulation of Howell’s ability to present a compelling and unified vision of how we might want to dress, this collection included her third collaboration with Barbour. There was a trench, a bellows pocketed jacket, and a fisherman’s vest cut from a slightly less waxed version of the traditional cotton and envisaged without any gender distinction. That these could sit so convincingly with the likes of a black cotton voile shirt, a bow tie at its collar, and a matching skirt, both whimsically scattered with white polka dots, underscored another of Howell’s great strengths: that believability is really everything.
