LFW schedule announced: a bumper season with Tisci debut at Burberry, Victoria Beckham's first UK runway and multiple innovations

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Jul 13, 2018

London Fashion Week revealed the schedule for its September catwalk season and it looks like being the most charged runway week in eons, in the penultimate UK season before Brexit next March.

The global season’s most important debut anywhere will without doubt be in the UK, with Riccardo Tisci due to stage his debut for Burberry. Tisci, whose lucky number is 17, has chosen a slot at 5 p.m. on Monday, September 17.

Though the five-day calendar opens on Friday, Sept. 14 morning with Richard Malone – part of the Newgen 2018 lineup, the British Fashion Council talent identification scheme - and ends after some 80 listed events and 55 official shows on Tuesday evening, Sept. 18.

London will also herald the UK runway debut of Victoria Beckham, after a near decade-long decampment to New York. Her show will also be the first since private equity fund NEO Investment Partners, managed by David Belhassen, acquired a 30% stake in her house. Also returning to London, Delpozo, the most critically acclaimed Spanish house this decade.

While Christopher Kane will present his first show since the news emerged that his former partner, French luxury conglomerate Kering, would be ending their alliance.

Expect a huge turn out as well for Alexa Chung, the model, presenter and fledgling brand builder, who will unveil her fifth collection for her eponymous label on a catwalk. Previously, she had staged presentations.
 
Unlike Milan, London has not been in a mad rush to stage Co-ed shows, amalgamating menswear and women’s clothes on the same catwalk. Nonetheless, J. W. Anderson – the city’s most successful young designer, and first designer to win both the menswear and womenswear designer of the year in Britain – will debut his first joint boys and girls show on Saturday afternoon.

 MM6 Maison Margiela, Paris' conceptualist house, and Nicholas Kirkwood, the LVMH-financed shoemaker, will both present full runway collections for the first time in LFW. Other names to watch include Molly Goddard, winner of the 2018 BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund, who will show on Saturday afternoon; Mary Katrantzou who celebrates her brand’s 10th anniversary; and Richard Quinn, whose print-driven collection last season was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, no less.

Fresh from dressing both America’s First Lady and the Duchess of Sussex in one week, French-born-but-London-based Roland Mouret should be in an ebullient mood from his show on Sunday, as should Irish-born Simone Rocha, whose debut collection for Moncler Genius Project was greatly admired.
 
Other new additions to the schedule include Gayeon Lee, a graphic star from South Korea, Nabil Nayal – a LVMH finalist show who sold a bonded top to Karl Lagerfeld at that competition (a present from Karl to Amanda Harlech) and RIXO London, the grown-up, bohemian, vintage-inspired label.
 
In a city still suffering under the penumbra of forthcoming Brexit, a remarkable feast of international talent from an industry which almost universally detests the idea of leaving Europe.