The organizing principle of Harry Pontefract’s spring 2026 collection—a dress-up party—provides a framework that unites his disparate characters and demonstrates to best advantage the evolution of the brand and its pillars. These are story-telling, “exploration into the body and proportions,” and mind-blowing technique. Take look 19, a suit that was, hour after hour after hour colored in with pencils and then hand-burnished with a spoon to “smooth the layers into each other,” the designer said on a call. The Joan of Arc-like character in look 21 is wearing a dress made of wire filaments “finer than hair” that was cut by a hairdresser and then brushed with magnets.
Even the simplest looking designs are simple in the slightest. The “nun’s” habit (the designer wants the viewer to assign roles to the figures) is made with a circular pattern. The “harlequin” bodysuits are made of diamond-shaped pieces of hosiery. Each garment is like a party unto itself, celebrating craft and imagination, memory, and the body. A lumpen-looking t-shirt is filled with microbeads that allow it to be manipulated into different shapes; the shoulders of an oversized blazer lean forward; and the “gilded” looks achieve the “living sculpture” aspect Pontefract was after.
You’ll note that this review is posting after the season. The lag is deliberate because, as the designer said, Ponte is “its own kind of beast in a way, because it’s not fashion, it’s not art, it’s not one thing or the other.” What it is is extraordinary. Every season Pontefract pushes the limits of what is possible in terms of make. The hours that go into the garments are like those that go into couture pieces. Yet there is, despite it all, a down-to-earth Englishness about the work.
“Maybe I’m dreaming,” mused Pontefract, “but for me I see them as really wearable pieces. That’s why we put a lot of work into them. I mean it’s nice to escape . . . . Click[ing] through a series of pieces, it’s always like, ‘what’s going to be the next person and the next one and the next one and the next one?’ It’s a nice surprise. And I think I’m starved for things like that. You want to be surprised. And because next season maybe we will do just 30 suits . . . .” If so, they’re sure to break the mold. Masquerade or not, Ponte is always building bridges between this and a dream world.