When business is good, Emilia Wickstead goes bold.

The New Zealand-born designer just returned from the U.S. and a source close to her revealed that it’s her biggest market and that her fall 2025 collection has been her strongest to date.

So, how does Wickstead celebrate such good news? By diving into her pile of books and inviting her guests to her second home, her store on Sloane Street. 

This season she chose to spotlight American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. She elegantly interpreted his erotic floral photographs and some elements of his bondage imagery.

A white denim suit with a neat black necktie featured flower blooming; harness straps had a softer edge as they sneaked their way into dress collars and shoulders, and a geometric miniskirt came layered with a cage in the same print.

The Wickstead woman cares about sex, but she’s just more ladylike about it in a Hitchcockian way, a reference that the designer has previously cited.

“I dived into his world and community, as well as his radical sensuality. He had a masterful control of femininity and his botanical imagery, when he shot it, was at the same level of intensity as his human subjects. There’s nothing flimsy or romantic about them,” said the designer.

Some of the best and alluring pieces in the collection were the daywear pieces: a long-sleeve polo shirt with contrasting colors, jeans with a single pleat, and tube tops connecting the bust and the neck with lacing.

Wickstead said that she wanted to move with ease this season — for this she looked at Mapplethorpe’s longtime partner and friend Patti Smith, who he shot for her album cover “Horses.”

The designer’s commitment to Mapplethorpe was strong, down to the casting of models; making them wear flat shoes from Russell & Bromley and playing Maria Callas’ “Vissi d’arte” from the opera “Tosca.” Smith famously listened to the aria when her friend died and contains the lines, “I lived for art, I lived for love.”