London Fashion Week delivers the best of British dressing

It’s not an easy time to be a fashion designer in old Blighty, but there were shades of keeping calm and carrying on – not to mention a certain creativity and resourcefulness – at London Fashion Week.

At London Fashion Week Burberry added star power and skewiff British style – with ample doses of glamour – dominated.

There were shades of keeping calm and carrying on – not to mention a certain creativity and resourcefulness – at London Fashion Week.

After all, it is not an easy time to be a fashion designer in old Blighty. Or indeed anywhere, really. This can be attributed to the sucker punch of designers abandoning the London schedule for Paris or Milan, the lingering effects of Brexit on the British fashion industry, the axing of the tourist VAT tax and the collapse of multi-brand luxury retailer Matches Fashion, which had implications for many independent brands.

This included the likes of The Vampire’s Wife, the brand founded by Susie Cave, wife of musician Nick Cave, which closed in mid-2024, despite Vogue once calling its much-loved Falconetti dress “the dress of the decade”.

Simone Rocha AW25. Picture: Ben Broomfield

Roksanda Fall RTW 2025. Picture: Getty Images

This season there were several notable absences, including JW Anderson, Molly Goddard and Wales Bonner. Some, such as Conner Ives, now chose to show annually rather than biannually. Others jettisoned London Fashion Week for Paris (Victoria Beckham, Alexander McQueen) and Milan (Martine Rose, Dunhill).

Still, London Fashion Week must go on, and on it did with new, slightly twisted and pleasingly traditional takes on British dressing.

Curiously, too, there was a real trend toward glamour. As though in the art of donning a smart skirt suit, nipped-in waists, rich colours and embroideries, bold florals and infallible cocktail dresses, we are far more ready for anything our athleisure could provide. Glamour as armour? Or at least a mindset.

Indeed actor Florence Pugh at the Tate Modern for Harris Reed’s show really set the mood with a monologue espousing “the art of dressing up”.

A Erdem Fall RTW 2025. Picture: Getty Images

Simone Rocha AW25. Picture: Ben Broomfield

Speaking of actors, the UK’s biggest luxury brand, Burberry, pulled out all stops when it comes to Rule Britannia casting. This included Richard E. Grant (pictured right) and Lesley Manville walking the runway to ultimate Lothario Rivals’ Rupert Campbell Black (Alex Hassell) perched front row.

Creative director Daniel Lee – who along with new chief executive Joshua Schulman has work ahead in righting the brand’s recent sales slump – told British Vogue of the starry casting: “It’s through them, and the characters they’ve portrayed in so many classic British television programs and films, that we know so much about the etiquette of dressing. And, of course, those interiors you’ll see folded into the clothes they wear.”

Roksanda Fall RTW 2025. Picture: Getty Images

A look from Erdem at London Fashion Week. Picture: Getty Images

It’s clear too these past few seasons that Burberry is leaning back into its heritage after flirtations with more avant-garde fashion. There was sturdy outerwear as well as quilted floral skirt suits. Practical and fanciful. The Burberry tartan is fully back too, even in kilt form, and worn on the front row with gusto by the likes of Brooklyn Beckham – son of Posh and Becks – and wife Nicola Peltz-Beckham, and model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (pictured left).

Another brand to explore tropes of Britishness was SS Daley, where designer Steven Stokey-Daley was a last-minute addition to the schedule. He told The Guardian before the show that London Fashion Week had a bit of a “damp spirit”.

Still, his show was nothing short of an uplifting of the spirits with tributes to British culture in everything from the Pet Shop Boys soundtrack to the logo jumpers paying tribute to the late Marianne Faithfull.

The clothes also paid close attention to that particularly British sense of madcap dressing, with everything from trench coats to duffel jackets, checked suits and kooky prints. Overall, the sense was, as Vogue UK’s Sarah Mower noted, of “cheerful, useful” clothes.

The sense of clothes that were both useful and cheerful, beautiful and wearable, permeated other collections shown this season.

SS Daley Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2025-2026. Picture: Getty Images

A look during the Emilia Wickstead Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2025-2026 fashion show. Picture: Getty Images

Irish designer Simone Rocha can be trusted to add a twisted, trailing take on ideas of femininity, and this season she toughened it up with leather separates and faux fur pieces including fluffy bralettes Wilma Flintstone would surely have her eye on. Lest it all get too aggressive, it was softened with chunky cardigans, chintzy floral bodysuits and powder-pink beribboned dresses. The celebrity factor was added here too with guest appearances from ultimate British “It” girl Alexa Chung and actor Fiona Shaw, who is Irish but known of course for many quintessentially British roles.

That especially skewiff take on style – see also the return of Bridget Jones’ chaotic style and life on our big screens this month – could be spied in the slightly unravelling ladylike femininity found at Emilia Wickstead. The brand has long been favoured by royals and those in need of looking perfectly put together, but in this collection – inspired by Albert Hitchcock’s The Birds – there was a sense of the elegantly undone. Such as a red dress and slouchy grey flannel top sliding off the shoulder.

“I was thinking about how to bring a feeling of dishevelment without actually taking a garment to pieces, and I wanted to create this effect that it was almost falling off the body,” Wickstead told reporters backstage at the show.

Erdem Moralioglu is another designer known for examining Britishness in designs for his namesake brand. Previous collections have taken inspiration from the likes of Deborah “Debo” Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (spring/summer 2024) and poet and novelist Radclyffe Hall (spring/summer 2025). This time, however, Moralioglu collaborated with British painter Kaye Donachie using her watercolour portraits of Moralioglu’s own mother and abstract florals on a polished and pulled-together collection.

Resourcefulness could be viewed at Roksanda Ilincic, who used offcut materials from previous collections for her signature unusual colour combinations and sculptural gowns, some crafted from a foam material. Her pieces are often worn by members of royalty and high-profile women across politics and the arts.

Ilincic was one of several designers to stress the importance of London Fashion Week. As Emilia Wickstead said on the Fashion People podcast ahead of London Fashion Week, there is still no better way to showcase the “world” of a brand. That and in the case of Burberry, gather quite so many celebrities in one place.