Where else can you find Jerry Hall, Romeo Beckham, Prue Leith, Barbara Hepworth, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lucy Bronze and Marina Abramović all in one place? For an eclectic cast of characters, London fashion week is hard to beat.
Hall starred as a “diva psychic”, using clairvoyant powers to hawk bracelets in a short play by Laura Waldren staged by jewellery brand Completedworks, while Beckham and Leith made their London catwalk debuts, for H&M and Vin + Omi. Hepworth and Mapplethorpe came along for the ride in spirit, on the moodboards at Roksanda and Emilia Wickstead respectively, while the England footballer and the performance artist had front row seats.
The through line of the current London fashion scene is female creativity and leadership. While Milan and Paris are dominated by male creative directors, London fashion week is a matriarchy. The headline acts of the weekend were all women: Simone Rocha, Emilia Wickstead, Roksanda Ilinčić and Edeline Lee.
“I can’t believe I’m still here,” said Ilinčić, backstage at a show that celebrated a landmark 20 years as a designer, after teetering on the brink of administration in 2024. “It is bittersweet, because so many of my incredibly talented peers did not make it. But I’m very proud.”
Roksanda dresses are worn by Michelle Obama and Cate Blanchett but Ilinčić’s heart, like the core of her loyal clientele, belongs to the art world. Her collections often take inspiration from little-known female artists, but “for this landmark season I thought, let’s go with a superstar,” she said.
“Barbara Hepworth was a pioneer at a time when the world didn’t really believe in women as artists, and the Hepworth museum in Wakefield is one of my most favourite places.”
There was a direct line from Hepworth’s monumental organic sculptures, with holes that frame the landscape on the other side, to sheath dresses with shapes bitten out at the torso to show the body beneath.
“Her shapes are pebbles, and hills, but they are also futuristic,” said Ilinčić, who turned pebble forms into cocoon coats, and the River Calder that flows past the Wakefield museum into dramatic leather fringing.
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At the last minute, Ilinčić had decided to throw her brand a 20th birthday party, and the collection was sexier and more va-va-voom than recent seasons, with slinky dresses outnumbering the ethereal and floaty.
Wickstead’s show in her London flagship store crowned a busy week in which she dressed the Princess of Wales for Donald Trump’s state visit and made an Audrey Hepburn-inspired gown for actor Marisa Abela’s wedding.
Her catwalk collections are where Wickstead, a society fashion favourite, gets to express her edgier side, and true to form, this season’s muse was Mapplethorpe. Not so much the “strappy, sexual” moments, she said backstage, but “the level of intensity, of romance” in his portrait photographs of Susan Sarandon, sleepy-eyed and sheet-wrapped, and of designer Carolina Herrera reclining in a hammock.
So we got choker-wrapped silk ribbons instead of leather bondage straps. Her brand is usually “quite buttoned up and perfect”, so she had fun kicking back with double denim – “I was thinking of Patti Smith as well, and the whole Chelsea hotel gang” – as well as florals hand-painted on to pre-creased fabric.
Rocha’s trademarks are bows, pearls, ribbons and lace, sugary symbols that feel ever more loaded as a progressive fashion era celebrating fluid identities regresses, in line with the zeitgeist, into traditional gender roles.
Rocha’s femininity is “definitely not conservative”, she insists. “I like to take feminine tropes and twist them, manipulate and play with them, push them.”
Sunday’s catwalk had chunky Croc sandals made cute with diamante Mary Jane straps, and a garden-party-sweet rose printed cardigan shrugged over a black sequin bra top that could have danced at Studio 54.
Rocha has built a buzz that could hold its own on the bigger stage of Paris fashion week. “I will always show where I feel I can do the best show. Today I still feel I can put on my best show in London,” she says.