This weekend marked the beginning of the spring/summer 2025 season, though you would be forgiven for having been unaware. London Fashion Week June – a rebranded format of 2012’s buzzed-about London Collections: Men and 2017’s London Fashion Week Men’s – played host to a reduced number of shows organised around a cultural programme of panel talks, pop-up stores and press dinners. Though noble in its attempts to broaden the cultural scope of fashion week – an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts celebrated the contributions Black, South Asian and queer communities have made to fashion – most of the capital’s design talents still choose to debut their collections in September and February when international guests are more likely to travel to London while en route to Milan and Paris. Does the industry need another standalone fashion week?
“We are spotlighting culture to highlight London’s point of difference during men’s fashion month,” said the British Fashion Council’s CEO Caroline Rush in an interview ahead of the event. “This is a city of unparalleled creativity and culture, and we want to honour the designers, brands and communities that make a rich and significant contribution to the British fashion industry.” That much is obvious: Charles Jeffrey’s open-air spectacle at Somerset House was evidence of the success that London designers can experience when talent, community and financial support converge. Laura Andraschko’s presentation at Wormwood Scrubs Pony Centre – a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the Sloane Ranger archetype with “My Boyfriend Went To Eton” slogan tees – was just as spirit-raising. I hope she can continue to make clothes that end up in Lotta Volkova’s mirror selfies.
Here is a cheat sheet on everything you might have missed from this year’s London Fashion Week June.
Craig Green
Some designers have of course chosen to remove themselves from the seasonal grind altogether. Among them is Craig Green, who staged his first catwalk in two years a couple of days before fashion week had even begun. “I was trying to avoid talking about it because I thought it was maybe sentimental,” he said of the inspiration behind this collection. “But it is quite about my dad.” The designer lost his father at the end of 2023 and explained that he had been thinking about the masculine expectations that fathers place on their sons and vice versa. That tension was expressed through polo shirts printed with naive cartoons of cars and trucks, deconstructed biker jackets, woven leather belts duplicated into stomach-crunching corsets, while old man handkerchiefs and domestic tea towels had been reconstructed into tendrilous ponchos. Sarah Burton, Simone Rocha, Martine Rose, Steve McQueen, Michèle Lamy and Adrian Joffe watched from the front rows as Green worked through these strange feelings from his own studio in Silvertown.
Charles Jeffrey
