Luxury

4 Trends You’ll Want To Wear From London Fashion Week

As Brexit looms, London's designers have turned nostalgic. Wearable grown-up glamour, that won't look out of place in the office, was the order of the day.

By Harriet Armstrong

Luxury

As Brexit looms, London's designers have turned nostalgic. Wearable grown-up glamour, that won't look out of place in the office, was the order of the day.

By Harriet Armstrong

Naysayers will say fashion trends aren’t relevant with the uncertainty of Brexit looming. But, if the £26-billion industry responsible for punk, mini-skirts and Kate Moss, knows anything it’s how to change the conversation – and that’s exactly what London’s designers did for spring/summer 2020.

While London Fashion Week is famed for pushing the boundaries, this was the year that fashion in the UK’s capital grew up. “London’s fashion stars turned to the familiarity in which they find comfort at the London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2020 shows,” British Vogue surmised as the shows drew to close. That meant recycling and repurposing key pieces from the archives in different colours, rather than ripping up the sartorial rulebook. And, with the onus on shopping sustainably by investing in forever buys, that can only be a good thing.

High-voltage colours Fashion’s lover affair with black appears to have rescinded, with even Victoria Beckham championing colour for spring/summer 2020.

“I only used to wear black when I was younger, and I never understood when certain people used to say they didn’t like you wearing black,” Beckham told US Vogue. “But then I got it—colour is so much more flattering!”.

Big dress energy Slinky slip dresses will soon be relegated to the back of the wardrobe as big, voluminous dress are set to reign supreme next summer.

Oversized silhouettes that feature ruffled shoulders and feminine, floral prints will dominate if Erdem and Richard Quinn are anything to go by. Make like the models on the catwalks by keeping hair, make-up and accessories minimal and wearing flats.

Logo loss A trend that, thankfully, looks like it is on the way out for 2020 is logo-mania. In recent years, runways have been crammed with t-shirts, bomber jackets, bucket hats and bags adorned with more brash logos than a Times Square billboard. Next season, though, you can look forward to toned-down branding.

Burberry’s Ricardo Tisci, now in his third season for the British fashion powerhouse, perfectly exemplified this by sending models down the runway in oversized shirts that tastefully featured the brand’s logo on the collar and utility wear decorated with slick monochrome symbols.

The new 9-5 Emilia Wickstead’s new take on workwear is just what your black AMEX ordered.

The New Zealand-born designer – who counts Melania Trump, Kate Middleton and Poppy Delevingne as clients – has the solution to tricky summer office dressing with fitted rompers that feature elegant cutouts, wide-legged trousers in sky blue, lime and tangerine and lightweight trenches in candy pink.