Marques’Almeida Spring 2026 Ready-to-Wear
Most designers take a while to develop their brand universes, but with Yaku, the universe comes first. “Our collections follow a family that’s based on my own family,” explained designer Yaku Stapleton during a preview of his spring collection. “It’s like a group of characters who are exploring and navigating a limitless world that’s inspired by the online RPG I used to play when I was young—as well as our own human and natural history. It’s a combination of all these influences through the prism of fashion design.”
Stapleton graduated from the Central Saint Martins MA program in 2023 and is currently a designer-in-residence at the Paul Smith Foundation. He introduced his game-infested world to London Fashion Week in 2024, and has been slowly but steadily garnering buzz as well as good will for his performance-heavy presentations, as well as his stegosaurus shoes, dino-print trousers, modular hats, and fabric swords and daggers.
Last season, which was the brand’s second time showing at LFW, Yaku’s characters finished training on a Tutorial Island—the digital space where you learn how to play before entering a video game. “They built their own skills to a point that they’re now ready to go and face real- world challenges,” said Stapleton of his characters. “They also want to go and see what the wider world has to offer. And I think as a team who has largely been working together for two years, we are ready to take a bigger step forward this time.”
That step forward was realized by way of a performance that took place throughout the day at 180 Strand and saw his characters enter this new world and meet a tribe called the Télavani. “I always think of function: Things need to look good and work even if you wash them all the time. That is my entry point into fashion and why my collections are streetwear heavy,” said Stapleton. “For the Télavani, who are meant to be more rooted in the land, we wanted to manipulate the silhouettes that have been the base of the brand the last two years. We elongated the torso and the arms and added more fastenings and pocketing details.”
How did the Télavani come about? “We began this exercise as a team, where we started looking at our family histories. And in doing my own, I came across people I hadn’t before, like the Maroons or the Garifuna of Jamaica and Saint Vincent, who resisted colonialism over several wars. It was crazy to have the lineage that I understood extended by hundreds and hundreds of years. So I wanted to reference those people through Afrofuturism. To kind of rerealign what could happen if a people came to somewhere new and, rather than trying to conquer, disorganize and displace, they looked to learn and collaborate. That’s where the Télavani came from. I wanted them to feel humanoid but almost superhuman,” Stapleton explained.
While all this is great in theory, it also makes sense in practice. Stapleton runs the company with his partner, Nas Kuzmich, who has taken on the more operational part of the gig. She says the plan is to gain more independence by becoming primarily direct to consumer. They’d like the Télavani line to be their DTC play. Apparently, the idea for it only took form after they had fulfilled their wholesale orders.
Last season, Yaku also introduced a merch stand to the presentation, which repeated this time around. At £30 for a T-shirt and with certain styles and sizes selling out by the second show, it was a savvy move for a developing label.
This was only Pauline Dujancourt’s second runway show, but she has already built an impressively realized world around her brand. First, there’s the French-born, London-based designer’s backstory: having learned to knit from her grandmother as a child, she picked her needles back up during the pandemic and undertook a knitwear MA at Central Saint Martins, which led to Dover Street Market snapping up her spring 2024 collection and a short-listing for the LVMH Prize. (It was this that prompted her to give up her side hustle consulting on knits for the likes of Simone Rocha and Molly Goddard and devote herself to her own brand full-time.) Second, there are her powerful instincts as a storyteller: Previous collections have taken their cues from traditions as wide-ranging as the votive tablets found at Shinto shrines in Japan to the flower of a plant passed down to her family from that very same grandmother—but all folded into a graceful and lightly Gothic aesthetic universe that feels distinctly Dujancourt.
Her ability to spin a yarn—in every sense of the term—was plenty visible at tonight’s show on the Strand. As attendees filed into a dark, cavernous basement, knitted brooches in the shape of birds were handed out; scattered around the seats were towering rows of dried crop stalks, to eerie effect. The first look out, to a soundtrack of rippling synth arpeggios, was a dress painstakingly crafted from delicate strips of lace, tulle, and featherlight knits, floating in the spectral wake of the model’s click-clacking white pumps and knee-high lace hosiery. There was a deliberate narrative arc to how the looks unfolded from there. Cycling between white and black at first, the outfits were inspired respectively by Dujancourt’s mother’s wedding dress and traditional mourning garb. Next, splashes of blue began to emerge, first through a handful of deep navy gowns; then a punchy royal blue cropped up across clutch handbags and skirts, before saturating a series of swirling, sculptural gowns. It was a brilliant showcase of Dujancourt’s ability to transform knitwear into something almost impossibly light and ethereal.
This time around, Dujancourt also took cues from a more literal form of storytelling: the theater, and more specifically, the character of Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, the play’s doomed but formidable heroine. (Dujancourt played the character while studying theater in Paris many moons ago.) To wit, there was a recurring motif of feathers, whether subtly embedded in the fluttering strips of fabric sewn into coats or woven across dresses in a diagonal pattern inspired by a pair of knit archetypes Dujancourt admitted she’s previously been “repelled by”: argyle sweaters and crochet “granny squares.” In Dujancourt’s hands, though, these heavy sartorial tropes became delicate, even sensual. “It’s revealing, but it’s never too sexy,” she said. “I don’t want to speak for every woman, but I’m definitely more interested in sensuality rather than sexiness. That’s really important to me.”
Yet even with the technical know-how that underpinned each garment, what felt most striking about Dujancourt’s work this season was its soulfulness. It turned out those crochet birds showgoers were pinning to their outfits weren’t just a lovely gesture to welcome them into her world, but a tribute to a friend of Dujancourt’s who passed away during the process of her making the collection. Along with the show notes was a poetic extract from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that chronicles the narrator’s longing for a lost friend or lover to return, as the natural world continues to cycle around them—a powerful, evocative expression of grief that Dujancourt’s collection artfully matched. “It takes up my whole life to run this brand, and it’s a choice, but I love it,” she said. “Even though I was grieving, I couldn’t stop: I had a collection to deliver. It’s a different sort of life, and it can be tough. So I wanted to explore that contrast between the beauty and the ugliness of it all.” Dujancourt may have a well-earned reputation as London’s preeminent knitwear wiz, but she also proved that her technically complex designs can carry a powerful—even profound—depth.
Mains Spring 2026 Ready-to-Wear
Ahluwalia Spring 2026 Ready-to-Wear
Baro Lucas Spring 2026 Ready-to-Wear
The stereotype is that today’s young people are a sexless, teetotal generation of wellness ascetics, whose wildest indulgence is the collecting of loyalty stamps at their local matcha café. Natasha Zinko—who just so happens to run a thriving matcha bar out of her London flagship—remembers her own youth differently. “I’d party all night and turn up to an exam the next morning still in the same clothes I’d worn out,” she said of her student days in 1990s Odessa, Ukraine, during a walk-through of her latest collection. “I didn’t take a single Pilates class, and guess what? I survived. It’s important to be a mess sometimes,” she added. “I still am a mess!” So that was her manifesto for spring 2026.
And where better to bring it all to life than at Soho’s The Box—a place where anything can, and usually does, happen—on a tableau of cig-smoking bon vivants stumbling through the debris of a night well had. Such as: sheer slips pocked with cigarette burns; low-slung sweatpants bearing the stains of the club floor; and inside-out, doubled-up polos with crooked plackets pulled apart in the heat of the moment. From deadstock came a series of upcycled plaid shirts—remember when men wore shirts to go dancing?—and a tartan skirt wrapped with its own extraneous sleeve, as if someone had been caught off guard and hastily covered up with a lover’s jacket. Eveningwear played a larger role: raw-edged LBDs, crinoline mini dresses in permanently crumpled lace, and boned puffball numbers with exposed bra cups that called to mind Sloane Rangers spilling out of the King’s Road in their heyday. “Despite all our efforts,” Zinko said, “the best outfit is the one we’re left with at the end of the night.”
If the designer set out to dismantle culture’s downward spiral into puritanism, she found her muses in pop culture’s greatest sleazoids: Johnny Depp’s Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, whose aviators were recreated in a permanently askew fit, and Nicolas Cage’s Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart, his iconic snakeskin jacket reimagined with torn-out panels. (A collaboration with flip-flop brand Havaianas only added to the loose spirit of it all.) But there was also the influence of Daliah Spiegel, Zinko’s new stylist, whose arrival ushered in a livelier palette—golden yellows, pale pinks, mint greens, and ice blues—than we have recently seen of Zinko. “All these clothes I see online,” she said. “So beige, so nothing.” This reporter left smelling of cigarette smoke.
In the 16Arlington studio in London earlier this week, a mood board was laid against the wall—covered not with reference images, but dozens of Post-It notes, each scrawled with short, snappy sentences. “We often start with these boards that are usually completely covered in words, and as the season goes on, we take them away,” designer Marco Capaldo said. “Then, we’re left with the mood of the collection.”
This season, a trio of bright yellow Post-Its stood out in particular: “British irreverence,” “New York slick,” and “Italian gloss,” neatly reflecting the trifecta of influences that tend to inform Capaldo’s collections. (The designer was raised in England within a large Italian family, and his collections often take their cues from the grit and glamour of Manhattan after-hours dressing.) Yet while the designer amusingly described the spirit of the collection as “Rachel Green meets Elvis, and everything in between,” the element that shone most brightly was a very British brand of eccentricity—clothes for outlandish London It girls with outsize personalities, unafraid to sling a studded leather scarf around their neck, or to step out in a sheer crystal-studded top with just an explosion of feathers hanging from carabiners down the front to protect their modesty. “She’s not a follower of fashion, necessarily, but somehow always turns out to be the most fashionable person in the room,” said Capaldo.
This layered approach offered a marvelous sense of discovery: turn up the sleeve of a crisp white button-down, and you find rows of punky studs fixed underneath; pick up a dress covered in yellow, lozenge-shaped paillettes and dangling strands of crystals and you’ll enjoy a full-on multisensory experience, with its gently percussive rustle and a surface reflecting the light like reflective road markers. (You’ll need to watch the videos of the collection in motion on 16Arlington’s social channels to experience the full effect.) As always, the clothes were impressively well made: a skirt and dress made from layers of leather, richly sequined silk, zebra print pony hide, and embroidered tulle could have easily felt a little “everything and the kitchen sink,” were it not for its meticulous construction and pleasing heft they carried.
With its deliberately maximalist, decade-hopping approach—lace-trimmed lingerie dresses that recalled the 1920s, the exaggerated collars of ’70s shirting, and yes, some ’90s pencil skirts that you could easily see on Rachel Green during her New York fashion executive era—it felt like a timely reminder of 16Arlington’s overall appeal. Quiet luxury, this is not: these are statement pieces that women are unlikely to have already in their wardrobes. (Which, based on the anecdotal evidence of what my female friends have told me, is exactly the kind of thing they’re shopping for right now.) “I just wanted it to be really fun, really fast, really emotional, just based on instinct,” Capaldo said.
A delightful final look paid a more direct homage to Elvis with its head-to-toe optic white, pointed and oversized collar, and marabou pom-pom boa—“my Little White Chapel moment,” as Capaldo described it. “I wanted to really celebrate that fine line between good taste and bad taste, because that’s where I think the essence of true magical style really exists,” said Capaldo. It was exactly that spirit of playfulness and humor, and a willingness to veer into the realm of “bad taste,” that gave it lift-off. The idea of the British eccentric might conjure images of Miss Havisham-style kooks wandering the halls of their crumbling mansions, or the rakish tweed and tartans of Withnail and I, but Capaldo proved that a high-octane party girl can be just as much of an oddball too.
Before Isabel Wilkinson Schor was making fashion, she was covering it. She left her job at the New York Times’s T Magazine just before Covid struck, and founded Attersee in 2021. “The need,” she said, “came from always struggling with what to wear and having a functional wardrobe that would take me through all these different lives I felt I was leading as an editor: office, after, running around town, meetings—and wanting a polished wardrobe where the quality was there and the comfort was there and the ease was there.” Price is key too, Attersee clothes range from $450 to the low $2,000s.
Naturally, fellow editors were among her first clients, and word spread quickly. The office space Wikinson Schor rented on East 64th Street was soon converted into a by-appointment salon, and in fairly short order, that salon turned into a store. “We now have to staff it six days a week and people just buzz—it’s mostly walk-ins.”
What makes Attersee so popular? The market is filling up with women-led brands trying to milk the white space left vacant by too-expensive high fashion. Some of them have become must-see shows at New York Fashion Week. As a rule, those women all have design studio or design school experience; Wilkinson Schor came up through news rooms. If the brand’s success is something of a marvel, Wilkinson Schor isn’t taking it for granted. In addition to the 64th Street salon store, she keeps an office in the Garment District, and 70% of the clothes are made locally. Every day is still a hustle, but, she says, “it allows us to quickly action recuts, make more really quickly for clients, make custome orders in a nimble way.”
The spring lookbook opens with an all-white look, as many shows did in New York this season, but there are other distinguishing features that differentiate Attersee. An appealing athletic streak runs through pieces like an anorak with an industrial zip front pocket and a dress with drawstring pull cords at the waist, while others indigo pieces like a handknit sweater and a nubby stripes shirtdress have a zen-like Japanese quality. As a writer, Wilkinson Schor said, “I was always so inspired by makers and creators, and the risk of putting something out in the world. I had so much respect for it.” She’s come a long way from the easy, oversized cotton-linen shirt she started with.
Spending time in nature does wonders for putting things in perspective. Lauren Manoogian and Chris Fireoved live a nomadic life between the mayhem of New York City and the gentler pace of Peru, where they spend a lot of time in the countryside with artisans: maybe this contributes to the sense of serenity that is a hallmark of their brand. In addition, the use of age-old hand techniques and geometric patterns (whether they relate back to the horizontal panels of traditional ponchos or the T construction of the kimono) creates a sense of continuity with the past.
“Disappearing into nature,” was the starting point for spring—and the idea of hiding from the world seems especially tempting at the moment given the headlines. Intrigued by the “really crazy abstract patterns” you can find in nature, Manoogian created some of her own. Each of the splatter painted cottons was hand done and thus unique. The bark-like pattern, seen in the second look, was created with a “chaos” stitch. It was surprising to discover that the backs of hand-cut fuzzy garments (as in look 6) were neatly geometrical.
In a sense the whole collection was about order and irregularity. The strong shouldered V-silhouette seen in many of the looks was created, Manoogian said, by layering them over the single-button vest top (look 16). This outfit’s neatness contrasted with the asymmetry of an ivory knit dress (look 20), pieced together like a minimal Piet Mondrian. A knit woven with regular squares and cut in a square shape fell in an undisciplined drape; parachute pieces were irregular in their tautness, and Manoogian took advantage of the natural roll of some knit fabrics. The idea, explained Fireoved, was “embracing the imperfections of what handmade actually means.”