What To Shop From Five Of London Fashion Week’s Most Exciting Designers

Instead of the usual catwalk show, the designers gearing up for this weekend’s digital-only London Fashion Week had to come up with an entirely new way to showcase their work from the past few months in lockdown. What they’ve managed is, frankly, quite astounding, from fashion documentaries to live conversations to podcasts to virtual parties to the launches of new labels. What’s already clear is that the coronavirus has brought conversations - about sustainability, the behaviour of big retailers, the rights of garment workers, the importance of brand transparency - into the open, where they can no longer be ignored. We speak to five designers on the schedule about their creative process during lockdown and why their industry needs to change.

Teatum Jones

For Catherine Teatum and Rob Jones, the coronavirus has forced the fashion industry to discuss changes that were seriously overdue. ‘The industry has sat up and realised that the system really is as broken as many of us have been saying it is’ says Catherine. Although working under lockdown conditions has presented obstacles (such as juggling childcare and homeschooling with creative thinking and design time) it also means extremely focused Zoom calls. ‘Everything is measured in, ‘How much time do we have left?’’ They’ve also stepped up their speaking commitments, with panels on sustainability and inclusivity, subjects that relate to their submission for this week’s digital-only London Fashion Week. ‘We have created a conversational film with our community discussing our Re-Love Part 1 collection,’ says Catherine, which involved sending garments to the twenty people who star in the film - a logistical nightmare when one’s studio is technically closed - and teaching them basic filming techniques. ‘Once we got past the initial stickiness, we realised that the power of these films was in the honest, raw and unfiltered nature of their filming. Something powerful happened by allowing each and every person to be a director, capturing their answers from the safe space of their own environment.’

Watch: 13 June, 6.50pm

Christopher Raeburn

Christopher Raeburn is launching a new arm to his sustainable business, Raestart. Its tagline? ‘What could be more radical than making nothing at all?’ ‘We aim to inspire a new approach to waste, mass production and our need for consumption,’ says Christopher. Raestart’s long-term manifesto will be revealed on Sunday, but, for now, Christopher says the pandemic has highlighted the industry’s problems. ‘What we do as an industry doesn’t make sense; a race to the bottom where overproduction and consumption are symbiotic. The repercussions for people and the planet are devastating.’

Watch: 13 June, 6pm

Hill & Friends

Hill & Friends co-founder Emma Hill grew up watching black and white movies with her mother so knew she wanted video to be the brand’s chosen medium for London Fashion Week. ‘We came up with the idea of repurposing a previous film we made, the theme of which felt bizarrely lockdown perfect, with the premise being that the Hill & Friends factory is deep in the basement of my house!’ While it was strange not to experience the usual pre-show ‘intensity’, lockdown presented a golden opportunity to work in a more sustainable way, reworking something they already loved instead of making something new. ‘I think that initiatives like this will be so important, way after lockdown finishes, as part of our industry's continued sustainable efforts.’ Although her work-life balance has suffered, and her lockdown creative process reminds her of ‘back-to-basics student days; nocturnal working hours alone in the kitchen’, Emma remains hopeful that the lessons learned will be long-lasting. ‘I think that there will be a return to valuing craft, skill and experience, and a move to caring more about provenance,’ she says. Here's hoping.

Watch: 13 June, 3.20pm

Marques’ Almeida

Marques’ Almeida is using its platform at London Fashion Week to launch a new label. Well, kind of new. reM’Ade might be an addition to the family, but it’s made exclusively with deadstock and recycled fabrics. ‘By using our own waste,’ says Marta Marques, ‘[We’re] challenging prevailing fashion power structures: the number of collections per year, minimum orders for production, opaque supply chains and, more recently, the way in which global retailers cancelled orders amidst a health crisis.’ The brand partnered with Agency for the Reality of Things, a documentary practice focused on design and research, to produce a film about the making of this collection to shine a light on the manufacturers, the suppliers and the teams that don’t usually get much air time in fashion. 'It was an effort to be completely transparent, to show our process and that we're still learning and there's a space to improve and to give credit to those who deserve it,' says Marta.

Watch: 12 June, 6pm

Charles Jeffrey Loverboy

Charles Jeffrey is promoting causes close to his heart as part of his London Fashion Week offering. The ‘Loverboy’ refers to the infamous club night that the designer used to host - and, on Saturday at 7pm, it’s coming back for an encore, with the proceeds raised from the virtual party going straight to UK Black Pride. He’s also releasing a 20-piece capsule, which will drop at the end of this year, with proceeds going towards Kaleidoscope Trust, the organisation supporting LGBT+ activists around the world.

Watch: 13 June, 7pm