After a brief interval post-New York Fashion Week, London Fashion Week began with a royal cameo: on Thursday afternoon, King Charles III attended the A/W 2026 runway show of British-Nigerian designer Tolu Coker (in a show of fashion force, British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir was joined by designers Stella McCartney, McQueen’s Seán McGirr, Roksanda Ilinčić and Martine Rose as the monarch’s seatmates).
On Friday morning, Weir – who is in her second season as the BFC’s CEO – struck a hopeful tone as she laid out her ‘designer-first’ approach in a speech which marked the event’s official opening, promising ‘to be clear, focused, and purposeful… [to] put designers first and define the ecosystem required to support British fashion not just for a season, but for the future.’ Proferring a message of community, she concluded: ‘This is a city of ideas. This is an industry of resilience. This is a community of extraordinary talent.’
Indeed, London continues to be defined by its breadth of designers – from those straight out of fashion school (or, indeed, in the process of graduating – Central Saint Martins and London College of Fashion both held MA shows on Thursday) to those well-embedded in British style, like Simone Rocha and Erdem (both London-based brands will show on Sunday afternoon). Then there is Burberry, which remains the week’s final act, with Daniel Lee showing his latest collection for the heritage house in a no-doubt blockbuster show on Monday evening, before fashion month moves onwards to Milan on Tuesday.
Here, reported from London, Wallpaper* brings you the standout shows and highlights from London Fashion Week – as it happens.
Jack Moss is Wallpaper’s Fashion & Beauty Features Director, reporting for the magazine’s digital and print editions – from international runway shows to profiling the style world’s leading figures.
Hannah Tindle is the former Beauty & Grooming Editor of Wallpaper*. Now a regular contributor, she writes about fashion, beauty, arts and culture.
Fashion East unveils its new class of designers
Nurturing emerging talent since its founding in 2000 by Lulu Kennedy, Fashion East remains one of London Fashion Week’s most anticipated shows. With previous participants including the likes of Craig Green, Simone Rocha, JW Anderson and Roksanda, season after season, an eagle-eyed audience remains on the lookout for the designer who might shape the industry’s future. On Friday afternoon (21 February 2026), said onlookers assembled on wooden benches inside Manor Place, a recently renovated 19th-century swimming bath nestled off Walworth Road in South London.
With support from Nike, the space has now been transformed into a community-led skate park-meets-football pitch by the founders of Palace Skateboards, Lev Tanju and Gareth Skewis, alongside London-based design studio JAM. ‘Lev and I wanted to try and create something new, something that’s really community-based. That’s a word that is often bandied about without any real meaning behind it,’ Skewis told Wallpaper* upon its unveiling in October last year (2025). ‘I want Manor Place to be somewhere safe and friendly where people can skate, play football and discover new things – all just down the road from where Palace was founded.’
(Image credit: Fashion East)
A fitting runway location, then, to digest the sophomore collections of Fashion East’s current ingénues Jacek Gleba and Mayhew, alongside a first offering from Traiceline Pratt’s Goyagoma. Gleba opened proceedings with a collection titled Salome. Drawing inspiration from Aubrey Beardsley’s 1893 illustrative interpretation of the Oscar Wilde-penned play, the Central Saint Martins alumnus continued his exploration of the ‘balletic body’ (a theme of his graduate collection), with a nod to a costume created by Russian artist Serge Sudeikin for prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina in 1913. Bodysuits with hook-and-eye fastenings, held onto shoulders by fine spaghetti straps replete with lingerie-like sliders, met cropped jogging bottoms, knee-high sport socks and heeled slippers. Though, as the show notes by Wallpaper* contributing editor Dal Chodha add, Gleba’s clothes are ‘a game of tightness and looseness’: pieces of chiffon in the palest pink breezed behind legs clad in marl grey, while a track jacket – usually worn to keep dancers’ muscles warm during rehearsal breaks – was put through a shredder, constructed with airy ribbons of fabric.
(Image credit: Fashion East)
Next, Traiceline Pratt, founder of label Goyagoma, debuted ‘chapter two’ of his proposition Something to Wear, to a soundtrack featuring the voice of Tracy Chapman. In November 2025, he had presented ‘a wardrobe for the first 12 hours of the day’, so at Fashion East A/W 2026, the London-based designer put a nocturnal slant on established silhouettes. This included a trench coat belted around the thighs in chocolate brown croc-print suede rather than cotton, and bomber jackets with faux-fur collars blossoming into sculptural boleros and scarves, paired with vintage-wash double denim. Pratt’s CV features a stint working on Phoebe Philo’s design team, and the ‘Philo-isms’ certainly seeped through – though always with his own personal slant, informed by ‘the women that surround him’ and his Bahamian heritage.
(Image credit: Fashion East)
Closing the show was Louis Mayhew, who based his A/W 2026 collection, Come on Over, around Burn, a dreamy, almost otherworldly track from Blue Eye Soul’s 1980 album You Ain’t No Weight. As he notes: ‘The song asks, “I’ve got a four-leaf clover, won’t you please come over?” From the first time hearing this, it touched me and pushed me to encapsulate the attached feelings within this collection.’ Mayhew’s search for the divine in the mundane, via chance encounters with objects unearthed during mudlarking, foraging and digging through building sites, was realised through a pleasing hodgepodge of materials – faux fur, tweed, denim, wool, cotton, fleece, feathers, felt and leather – collaged into garments. Found objects, such as rope and glass bottle necks, made their way into the fastening of a jacket; stones and spools of cotton formed necklaces; and a dyed microfibre cloth embroidered with pearl buttons hung from a trouser loop as though its wearer had picked up treasure along with the dirt. Hannah Tindle
KNWLS unveils ephemeral concept store and Aidan Zamiri-shot collection
KNWLS ephemeral store at the The Painting Rooms, London
(Image credit: KNWLS)
After decamping to Milan Fashion Week last season, Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault chose to return to their home city this season to set up shop – albeit temporarily – at the Painting Rooms in London’s Soho. Following a recent trend of local, designer-first retail (see: Jake’s, which won a Wallpaper* design award for ‘Best Retail Therapy’, or the recent Kiko Kostadinov opening in Hackney), the ephemeral store, say the designers, is a ‘blue-sky expression of what a KNWLS store could look like’. Cue vintage furnishings by Altar, a series of works by artist Shaan Bevan, and masked figures by Anousha Payne, as well as a library of books curated by Flora Gau’s Studio Nocturne (which itself recently opened its own Mitchell + Corti-designed store in London’s De Beauvoir, selling ‘Spells, Books, Art Objects’). Showing a ‘calmer, concerted’ side to the brand – which is known for a tough, sculpted vision of womanhood – Knowles and Arsenault hope shoppers linger in the store, where they can purchase pieces from the S/S 2026 collection. ‘We realised that outside of the clothes in our wholesale partner’s stores, digital media and shows, people have never been able to interact with our world. So this felt like a really interesting thing to do,’ the pair told Wallpaper*.
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Alongside, a series of images by the Scottish photographer and filmmaker Aidan Zamiri gave a preview of the brand’s A/W 2026 collection, which is titled ‘Ballistic’ (Zamiri is himself having a big week, having premiered his Charli XCX-starring mockumentary The Moment earlier this week at Picturehouse Central). Continuing to hone what the pair call a ‘self-possessed femininity – sensual, elegant, soft, severe’, the collection is designed to replicate the eclecticism of a wardrobe, from leather jackets with dramatic gigot sleeves (the sculptural effect is achieved through bonding lambskin to neoprene) to scuba tracksuits, signature leather corsets and slinky going out attire, cinched with sporty toggle fastenings. ‘There’s an innate hanger appeal,’ say the designers of the collection, which is displayed, gallery-style, in the space. Jack Moss
KNWLS London pop-up is open at The Painting Rooms, 1–5 Flitcroft Street, London, WC2H 8DH until 23 February 2026.
Stay tuned for updates from London Fashion Week A/W 2026.