A week and a half ago, Charles Jeffrey wasn’t sure he was going to do a Paris fashion week event, he revealed tonight. Tariffs and the unraveling of the wholesale model made for a challenging last quarter of 2025. In the end, though, a persuasive colleague and Jeffrey’s own belief in the rightness of his nearly dozen-year-old Loverboy project changed his mind.
“What Loverboy stands for,” he said as his friend’s band Baby Berserk finished sound check and before the line of people outside started pouring in, “is this sort of queer, Scottish, pagan, availablism…” Availablism, Jeffrey explained, “is from the 1970s no-wave movement in New York; it means finding beauty in things around you. Localism, basically. What we’ve done here,” he continued, “is what we used to do; I used to have a club night back in the day, when I was at Central Saint Martins.”
Anybody looking for an antidote to the excesses and indulgences of the luxury fashion industry after almost a week of runway shows (and there are many) had come to the right place. Jeffrey wrapped a sub-basement of Dover Street Market Paris’s Marais headquarters in floor-to-ceiling canvases he painted himself, and invited his friends to model the clothes and capture content. There was no proverbial velvet rope, no step-and-repeat. With a strobe and not much else in the way of lighting, there was a real after-hours vibe, even though the clock had not yet struck 6pm.
This lookbook was photographed earlier in London and while it doesn’t capture the kinetics of the presentation, it showcases Loverboy’s post-punk bona fides: the joyfully messy layers; the warping, morphing silhouettes; uncontrolled color; tattered patch-worked knits; tourist shop trinkets; and a proprietary Scottish tartan developed in-house. And all at prices that can only be described as a steal compared with most other labels this week. Naturally, there were also plenty of the animal ears-beanies whose popularity provides a dependable source of revenue for the brand.
So, in the end, was it the right move to bring the collection to Paris and put on a show? The problems plaguing independent designers aren’t going to miraculously dissipate, but if security remains in short supply, Jeffrey has no shortage of conviction. “It’s important for a brand like ours to show that we can make it through. That’s why the name of the collection is Thistle, because it’s about resilience.” A runway show 45 minutes across town kept this editor from watching Baby Berserk actually go berserk, but if resilience isn’t something to dance about, what is?
