FORGET the front row – the real story of LFW SS27 was happening in the smaller venues, the ones with queues around the blocks and the understanding that what comes next begins with the young designers. This season’s emerging class weren’t interested in playing it safe; they raided archives, found inspiration from AI errors and turned childhood nostalgia into knitwear that isn’t boring.
Britain’s next generation of designers are proving that the future of London Fashion Week is less about being polished and more about being personal.
Here is GLASS’ SS27 Watchlist.
Oscar Ouyang’s Cygnet is interested in the peculiar ordeal of growing up: the moment when handed-down clothes, manners and objects become the raw materials to begin inventing yourself. Shown at Rochelle School in Shoreditch, the Spring/ Summer 2027 collection turns the family wardrobe into a dressing-up box, but with considerably sharper instincts.
Ouyang starts with recognisable codes – tweed, waistcoats, dinner jackets, military tailoring, Fair Isle and argyle – then, the design duo loosen their rules. Duchesse satin becomes a narrow, frilled skirt; a tuxedo loses its sleeves; pleated chiffon bloomers and tiny running shorts puncture the seriousness of tailoring. Knitwear, the brand’s greatest strength, is pushed into lighter territory: silk and linen, metallic yarn, silver-threaded motifs, ruffles and little knitted swans.
The mood is romantic yet not precious. Antique jewellery, domestic silver and heirloom references suggest a teenager trying on adulthood, while skin, abbreviated proportions and gender-fluid styling keep the inheritance from becoming costume. The brand’s achievement is to make tradition feel available rather than authoritative: the past remains visible, but its instructions have been quietly ignored. An experimentation in adulthood: awkward, elegant, and sometimes a little funny.
On the roof of The Truman Brewery, Geordie Campbell staged his debut runway collection, titled 15 Steps. The Spring/ Summer 2027 collection was built from cruising-coded vocabulary: multi-hued trims, exposable sailor trousers and insinuating prints. The premise is drawn from a Mansfield, Ohio sting operation, its title borrowed from the steps down to a surveilled public toilet, where over the course of three weeks, 79 men were arrested for ‘indecent acts’.
Across 24 looks, the biggest to date for the young designer, the references ran rife: Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, Jarman’s Sebastiane, Tom of Finland’s graphic bravado. The silhouette leans towards the eighties: Georgie Michael filtered through low boat-cut tees, oversized military coats and abbreviated athletic shorts, sleeves rolled to flash garish linings.
Materials stay luxe – cashmere, silk-wool and organic cotton – with over 92% made in Britain, championing small studios and makers. With the bigger names on the schedule naturally gaining more traction, Campbell’s offering is not one to ignore. This is a designer on track to become a household name at LFW.
George Trochopoulos closes a chapter with SS27, looking back to look forward. Disillusioned by the gap between the future once promised and the one delivered, he returned to retrofuturist design and to his own beginnings.
Circling back to the striped dresses first sold fresh out of university, the collection started by channelling that early naivety and then evolving it into something more assured. The palette is unapologetically joyful: lime, racecar red, melon yellow, in combinations built to shock those with a taste for neutrality. Knitwear dominates almost entirely, punctuated by reworked jeans and hand-drawn floral jersey. Necklines do the arguing while knit bikinis surface under low-scooped sheer coverups, and last season’s bubble skirt relaxes into a fluid petal shape.
Made in-house by a team never larger than three, the collection reads as intimate proof of Trochopoulos’s craft and a euphoric marker of growth.
Petra Fagerström’s fourth collection, Swedish Summer, arrives off the back of an LVMH Prize finalist nod, and pushes further into the question she’s asked since Central Saint Martins: who is the woman this brand is for? Here, that means her sexuality: caught between hyper-visibility and a creeping conservatism about how women ought to dress.
Fagerström’s answer is structural rebellion: 1940s and ’50s couture silhouettes, glitched from within. Her interpretation of Dior’s Bar jacket reappears in fitted leather; a parka balloons at the back while staying close at the front. A trench, born from a flaw in an AI-generated image, is cut to hang permanently open over embroidered leather.
Concealment does the real work throughout – sliced leather baring skin, sequins catching light like latex – culminating in her famous lenticular pleating: a hand-stitched technique that lets one garment hold two images, a tweed suit dissolving into lace as the body moves. The result sits between restraint and seduction, never wanting to settle.
by Imogen Clark