Welcome to The Telegraph fashion team’s coverage of London Fashion Week. The capital’s designers are showing their latest collections – some will be available to buy immediately while others will be released in spring 2027.
There’s a packed timetable of events, with the likes of Barbour and M&S joining the schedule for the first time. Christopher Kane will be making his much-anticipated debut as creative director of ready-to-wear at Mulberry and McQueen will return to London Fashion Week after years of showing in Paris. There will also be shows from familiar favourites including Erdem and Roksanda.
London Fashion Week will culminate on Monday evening with Burberry’s show.
Day one
Sienna Miller and the Princess of Wales make the case for the posh and practical British coat
By Bethan Holt
It would seem unlikely that there could be a link between litter picking on a remote beach in Scotland and the first day of London Fashion Week. And yet, the Princess of Wales aptly wore a trench coat by Burberry to carry out her good deed at almost exactly the same time that a new display celebrating the iconic design – The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon – opened at the V&A, where Catherine happens to be royal patron.
Later in the afternoon, Barbour – Britain’s other pioneer of posh but practical coats – unveiled its first foray into fashion week, celebrating its brand tartans and the three waxed jacket designs – the Bedale, the Beaufort and the Border – which are hung in boot rooms up and down the country.
Guests including Sienna Miller, who stars in the cosy new autumn campaign set in the Highlands, arrived at the takeover of the Saatchi Gallery – which will be open to the public on Friday and Saturday – to be greeted as if they’d rocked up at Balmoral, with a piper playing the bagpipes and decked out in a kilt.
Dressed in a long suede coat and tartan skirt, Miller epitomised the modern spin on trad style which Barbour is evidently intent on capturing.
The Barbour family’s commitment to tartan was underscored with a room dedicated to the various takes on the historical pattern which have been created in partnership with Kinloch Anderson over the years. It felt like the Barbours – now helmed by fourth-generation Dame Margaret and her daughter, Helen, who is vice chair of the brand – were cementing their dynasty’s place as British fashion power players, emphasising Scottish links going back to 13th-century Ayrshire.
Next came the autumn/winter collections, styled on mannequins to show clashing plaids, kilts galore, cosy Fair Isle knits layered over yet more knits and riffs on Queen Elizabeth’s favourite country styling trick, the headscarf tied under the chin. Each look was as posh as it was punk.
Designs by a group of students, winners of the British Fashion Council’s Barbour Reimagined exhibition, had taken the South Shields-based label’s coats and given them makeovers. Sunny Ivanov, an MA fashion design student at the University of Salford, observed people wearing Barbours in his home town of Altrincham, inspiring an oversized take on the wax jacket, in an overblown tartan pattern pieced together from panels of waxed cotton.
“I wanted a coat that you could wear from the morning dropping the kids off at school to going to the market and to the pub in the evening,” he said. “I spoke to a lot of people who wear Barbour. Most of them wear it for dog walking so it has big pockets. I wanted to create something that could be forever.”
Aristocrats with a trusty Bedale they’ve owned since finishing school and have no intention of replacing will enjoy the Barbour for Life part of the exhibition, where there were live re-waxing and upcycling demonstrations. The late Queen Elizabeth famously preferred to have her Barbour re-waxed rather than replaced.
If LFW ever struggles to stand out amidst the high octane glamour we’ll see in Milan and Paris later in the fashion month, then the message on day one was emphatic – the other cities can keep their designer logos; we’ve got our practical coats steeped in heritage and stylish muses like the Princess of Wales and Sienna Miller to show the world how to wear them.