Best of London Fashion Week 2025

London Fashion Week A/W 2025 highlights: Erdem to Simone Rocha

Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss picks the best of London Fashion Week A/W 2025, from Erdem’s collaboration with artist Kaye Donachie to Simone Rocha’s return to school.

(cover photo: London Fashion Week A/W 2025 highlights: Erdem to Simone Rocha) – via Wallpaper

Despite some notable absences from the schedule – among them Molly Goddard, Chopova Lowena and JW Anderson – London Fashion Week A/W 2025 arrives in the city with a busy five days of presentations and runway shows, buoyed by the energy of its stalwart names, from Simone Rocha to Erdem. There is plenty of new talent, too: Fashion East showcased its latest class of emerging talent on Friday evening (21 February), while Talia Byre, Paolo Carzana and Jawara Alleyne each have intriguing perspectives, and are ones to watch. Though with many younger designers choosing to show only once a year, September looks set to be a busier edition.

Elsewhere, Burberry will prove the week’s biggest draw, with Daniel Lee choosing to show his latest collection for the British heritage brand this evening (24 February 2025) with a no-doubt blockbuster show (an invitation arrived in the form of a personally monogrammed check scarf). Meanwhile, other brands are choosing new ways to present their collections: Marco Capaldo revealed his 1980s-inspired A/W 2025 collection for 16Arlington at an intimate dinner on Saturday evening at Almine Rech Gallery, while Stefan Cooke hosted a presentation at its east London studio (complete with an enormous cake). Roksanda, Kent & Curwen and Conner Ives round out the schedule.

Here, reporting from London, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss picks the best of London Fashion Week A/W 2025, as it happens.

Erdem

Erdem Moralıoğlu’s latest collection, presented in the atrium of the British Museum, was centred around a collaboration with the Scottish figurative painted Kaye Donachie. Moralıoğlu and Donachie had attended London’s Royal Academy of Arts at the same time, but a more recent connection – Moralıoğlu commissioning the artist to paint his late mother’s portrait – provided the impetus for this new collaborative venture. Inspired by the ‘poetic licence’ that Donachie took while painting somebody she had not known, what followed was a collection that was not only adorned with the artist’s work but also captured the ephemeral ‘veil between imagination and reality’ that defines her oeuvre. As such, the collection became one of free-flowing ideas and looks that appeared like apparitions, from garments overlaid with lustrous sheer layers of organza to sculpted-waist gowns and swathes of glimmering spike-shaped paillettes. The collection was presented with a quote from Virginia Woolf – ‘and as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past there’ – which speaks not only to Donachie’s ability to conjure the past in her paintings but Moralıoğlu’s own impulse to continually reimagine historical silhouettes in vibrant and contemporary new ways.

Simone Rocha

There was something stripped back about Simone Rocha’s A/W 2025 collection, which despite its typical flourishes of romance (a delicate beaded eyebrow, pearlescent tortoise-shaped clutch bags, rabbit-shaped stoles, and, as ever, smatterings of pearls and crystals) had a feeling of directness, encapsulated in the primitive slices of faux fur and slashed pleats that became motifs throughout. In part, this came from memories of her time at school in Dublin, a period of sartorial experimentation albeit confined by uniforms and rules. Gathered gowns were pierced through the neckline with bike locks (a reference, Rocha said, to going ‘behind the bike sheds’ with a teenage crush), while rugby shirts, school scarves and ‘twisted twin sets’ were all references to school days, twisted and adorned in Rocha’s signature style. The show – which was also partly inspired by the fable of The Tortoise and the Hare, a nod to Rocha’s working at her own pace after 15 years in business – was presented on a cast of both models and actors, among them Minha Kim, Bel Powley, Andrea Riseborough and Fiona Shaw, who played the role of domineering headmistress in typically arresting fashion.

Roksanda

The voice of late sculptor Phyllida Barlow provided the soundtrack for Roksanda Ilinčić’s A/W 2025 show, held for the second time on one of the circular upper floors of Space House, a Richard Seifert-designed brutalist office building in London’s Holborn (as such, the show’s backdrop was an impressive 360-degree-view of the London skyline). ‘Space is malleable, it’s a material, it’s not just an empty vacuum,’ said Barlow on the recording, ‘And I suppose for me, sculpture, whatever sculpture is, it isn’t just the object; I think it’s a sentient physicality of something that replaces us with our own physicality.’ Ilinčić, who has long referenced artists – particularly women artists – in her work, said she drew inspiration from Barlow’s exploration of ‘fragility, impermanence, and physicality… creating work that feels in constant motion and transformation’. This was perhaps most evident in the collection’s closing looks, a series of gowns constructed from a bouncing collage of cut-out neoprene, their shapes inspired by the offcuts made when cutting pattern pieces from fabric (Barlow was known for her use of discarded objects). This exploration of tactility and experimentation ran through the collection, whether in the enormous paillettes (some of which became masks to conceal part of the face), delicate wisps of tulle, or the colourful, unruly painted strands of raffia that captured the dynamism of Barlow’s work. Among the more dramatic show pieces, elegant tuxedo-inspired tailoring, silk bias-cut dresses (in typically painterly hues) and cocooning knitwear will no doubt cater to her devoted clientele.

S.S. Daley

Steven Stokey-Daley’s A/W 2025 show came with something of a delay: originally slated to show in Paris during the city’s menswear week this past January, a last-minute switch saw him stick with his adopted home town, opening proceedings on Friday morning (Stokey-Daley is originally from Liverpool, but has lived and worked in London since graduating from Westminster University’s fashion course in 2020). The show, which was set to the soundtrack of Pet Shop Boys’ 1986 hit ‘West End Girls’, continued Stokey-Daley’s interrogation of Britishness and its dress codes, with several of the looks riffing on heritage outerwear, from the duffle coat to the donkey jacket (the latter came with a cocooning rounded shoulder and enormous front patch pockets). Other pieces continued to explore the uniforms of the upper classes – Stokey-Daley has long used the trappings of high society as a jumping-off point for his collections – seeing black-tie dressing warped with enormous elongated shirt collars, ruffled-front blouses, and feathers that emerged romantically from beneath blazers.

The show’s palette and prints, meanwhile, were drawn from the work of the Scottish Colourists – particularly Francis Cadell’s portrait Ioana Croft, which was replicated on a felted trench coat – an artistic group Stokey-Daley chose for their synonymy with ‘craft, textiles and forms’ (indeed, elements of beading and intricately printed organza spoke to a greater focus on make this season). Though it was the late British musician Marianne Faithfull who was the spiritual figurehead of the collection, with Stokey-Daley noting how her ‘willingness to experiment and explore different genres of music, poetry and spoken word helped pave the way for other artists to push boundaries’. One sweater was scrawled with ‘Stay Faithfull to Marianne’, while her 1979 song ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ – originally recorded by Dr Hook & the Medicine Show earlier in the 1970s – soundtracked the finale, providing an emotive final refrain.

Fashion East

There was a surprising mood of restraint at Fashion East this season, the Lulu Kennedy-led fashion incubator that has usually swayed more towards the unconventional and the outlandish. It was no bad thing: all three designers, Olly Shinder, Louther and Nuba offered clever proposals for real-world dressing nonetheless instilled with elements of subversion – like a pair of trousers from Nuba with pockets on the crotch, as if the model’s hand was stuffed into their underwear. Nuba is led by co-creative directors Cameron Williams and Jebi Labembika, and in their second outing at Fashion East they talked about conjuring the feeling of waking up from a dream, figured here in cocooning forms constructed from ribbed knitwear or soft-to-the-touch wools, which felt more gentle in approach than their debut last season (the designers called the pieces ‘cross-seasonal’ and ‘foundational’, an exploration of ‘functionality, environment and desire’). If occasionally the collection called for a little more refinement in cut and finish, Williams and Labembika are developing an intriguing vision: here, it was captured in an unexpected colour palette of slate grey, deep brown and cooler moments of cyan blue, the last inspired by the hospital scrubs one might see when waking up from a coma.

Louther, which is led by German designer Olympia Schiele, worked closely with the Polish visual artist Helena Minginowicz this season, whose own dreamlike works have been called ‘ambiguous’ and ‘ephemeral’. With this collection, Schiele was particularly inspired by the idea of illusion in Minginowicz’s work, here evoked in an interplay of textures (trousers appeared flocked across their surface; various gauges and weights of knits were stitched together on a single cardigan; flourishes of faux fur came in dual-tone colours) and hazy, airbrush-effect motifs, a signature of Minginowicz’s oeuvre. Silhouettes, meanwhile, were largely generous and oversized, reflecting Schiele’s roots in street and skatewear (though here, that sense of volume called to mind labels like Lemaire, as one editor remarked). It made for a collection of clothes with real-world appeal, and was a definitive push forward from her debut last season. So too was Olly Shinder’s latest collection, his best as part of Fashion East so far (the collection was his fourth, and presumably final, with the incubator). Shinder is inspired by queer clubwear and corporate attire, often mashing them together; this season, he found a new sense of clarity, moving away from overt expressions of fetish towards a more subtle undercurrent of perversity. Consider a pair of trousers sliced across the back with a panel of sheer fabric – evoking a pair of women’s tan tights – or a terrific raincoat in black wipe-clean rubber.

Jack Moss – Jack Moss is the Fashion Features Editor at Wallpaper*, joining the team in 2022. Having previously been the digital features editor at AnOther and digital editor at 10 and 10 Men magazines, he has also contributed to titles including i-D, Dazed, 10 Magazine, Mr. Porter’s The Journal and more, while also featuring in Dazed: 32 Years Confused: The Covers, published by Rizzoli. He is particularly interested in the moments when fashion intersects with other creative disciplines – notably art and design – as well as championing a new generation of international talent and reporting from international fashion weeks. Across his career, he has interviewed the fashion industry’s leading figures, including Rick Owens, Pieter Mulier, Jonathan Anderson, Grace Wales Bonner, Christian Lacroix, Kate Moss and Manolo Blahnik.

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