London Fashion Week A/W 2025 highlights: S.S. Daley to Fashion East

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, 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 on Monday evening 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 will reveal his A/W 2025 collection for 16Arlington at an intimate dinner on Saturday evening at Almine Rech Gallery, while Stefan Cooke is hosting a presentation at his East London studio. 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.

London Fashion Week A/W 2025: the best of

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 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 which 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 which 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 that 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 latter 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. Like 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.