LONDON — London designers are on the move, leaving their home city for various reasons to seek their fortunes in Paris, Milan, Berlin and Copenhagen.
In July, David Koma chose Berlin to showcase his new men’s collection, and online chatter about Berlin replacing London as the new fashion capital sparked a heated debate throughout the summer.
For the spring 2026 season, Knwls, the London-based brand cofounded by Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault, is heading to Milan to present the collection. The duo called the move “a strategic and fitting moment for where the brand is.”
Fellow London-based Kiko Kostadinov will stick to its slot on the official calendar of Paris Fashion Week. The brand has been showing outside London since 2020.
In the eyes of Olya Kuryshchuk, founder of the 1 Granary, a fashion media, networking and consultancy platform born out of Central Saint Martins 12 years ago, some designers are no longer finding the platform they need in London Fashion Week.
Others appear stuck. “What horrifies me most is that I don’t see most London designers breaking away from the traditional London Fashion Week trajectory,” she said.
“Despite countless case studies clearly demonstrating that the current emerging designer pipeline is fundamentally broken, the majority persist in following the exact same, doomed route. They’re addicted to the applause, the validation of the runway moment, even when the business fundamentals are nonexistent,” Kuryshchuk added.
She believes that emerging designers today should be investing time in developing their foundational infrastructure, cultivating industry relationships, and understanding their customers before considering a runway debut.
“I believe it’s time the industry says ‘no’ more often, and creates space for designers to develop properly before throwing them into a system designed to consume rather than nurture emerging talent,” Kuryshchuk continued.
Chopova Lowena fall 2025
Courtesy of Chopova Lowena
A growing list of designer brands, such as Chopova Lowena, Ashish and Ranra, a London- and Reykjavik-based label founded by Arnar Mār Jōnsson and Luke Stevens, are staying put but exploring alternatives to the runway, and forging their own paths, which are not tied to the traditional fashion cycle.
Chopova Lowena has been following the one-show-a-year formula for quite some time. The designers have been able to spend more time working on more meaningful projects, like a ‘zine starring Chloë Sevigny, and expand into new categories such as handbags and fragrances.
Last year, the brand was picked as the winner of the British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund, taking home a cash prize of 150,000 pounds, or $204,000, for “fearlessly marching to the beat of their own drum, challenging conventional fashion system rules.”
For Ashish Gupta, who is set to unveil a multiseason democratic range with Debenhams on Monday as part of his main line’s spring 2026 show, London Fashion Week still plays a key role in helping the brand reach a global audience, but he no longer believes that runway shows are the only path to success.
“I think social media has changed everything. I also think that there’s a power in drawing back and using other media to communicate. I just think people should do shows when they want to do them, and they feel like it, when it’s exciting, when you have a story to tell,” Gupta added.
Ranra spring 2026 presented during Copenhagen Fashion Week.
Ranra is another example of a new generation of London-based brands doing things entirely at their own pace. The label was rebranded from the more designer-focused name Arnar Mār Jōnsson to Ranra in 2022, in a bid to create a stronger visual identity to communicate with its audience.
The label focuses on outerwear and footwear offerings that balance craft and technical performance. Scandinavia and Germany are two top-performing regions, and the brand is gaining momentum in Japan and the U.S. this year. It has around 70 stockists globally.
Ranra staged a show during Copenhagen Fashion Week over the summer. The duo said the city aligns closely with how they want to work. The brand was awarded the Zalando Sustainability Award in 2022 during Copenhagen Fashion Week.
“Copenhagen has become a space where you can present work with freedom, and where sustainability and experimentation are a part of the system. For us, showing in Copenhagen was to show a bit more of the world we are creating with the brand, and we felt that doing that specific show there felt right,” they said.
Both of them were trained at the Royal College of Art in London and had some level of engagement with the British fashion industry. Stevens made his London Fashion Week debut in 2017 as part of Fashion East.
As for what London can do to stay competitive, the duo said there needs to be a deeper investment in long-term brand development, not just spotlighting new names for a season or two. They believe that there are more ways of building a career in fashion that don’t require burning out or chasing overnight success.
“London has the creativity, but it needs to build the frameworks that allow brands to sustain themselves beyond the first breakthrough. Infrastructure, financial support and creative freedom are key; otherwise, the city risks losing the talent it nurtures to places where support structures are stronger,” they added.
Thousands of fashion students graduate each year in London, but few of them are truly prepared for the market reality. One can argue that it’s particularly due to the general absence of adequate business skills taught in their courses at fashion schools in London.
Ranra founders Luke Stevens and Arnar Mār Jōnsson
Cozette McCreery, an educator, consultant and cofounder of the knitwear label Sibling, believes London is currently in a cycle of cause and effect that is going to be quite hard to get out of “without some support, changes or downright bloody-mindedness from creatives.”
She thinks that London designers should start small and build up, and keep their distance from the star-making machine until they are ready.
“There’s this urgency to graduate and then get Newgen and arrive, which I advise any graduates or fashion students I meet to be wary of doing. For me, it has always been about building a strong foundation and finding your own crew,” McCreery said.
The designer revealed that she recently had a long conversation with the BFC’s chief executive officer Laura Weir about talent support revamp, as well as her thoughts on shaking up the BFC mentoring program and supporting alumni.
“London Fashion Week is so focused on the new that those who perhaps are less so are often sidelined,” McCreery added.
In an interview, Weir acknowledged the changing relationship between the brands and fashion week, and said the BFC is ready to reflect and address these changes under her leadership.
“It’s not just about wholesale anymore. It’s about [direct-to-consumer], about new and innovative ways to showcase collections. You’ll see that from the schedule this season, which has appointments, film, digital and catwalk. Times have moved on, and we’re at the beginning of this new era, so I’m really excited about how my background in understanding retail can support the journey,” Weir said.
A major part of her vision for the BFC, revealed in July, is to “put designers at the heart, to make mentoring and business skills central to our offer, and to ensure our funding models result in long-term impact for the British creative economy.” To begin with, the BFC has waived fees for designer members showing physically this London Fashion Week.
Weir acknowledged that London is losing design talent to other cities because of a lack of infrastructure to support the designers to make, create, show and, importantly, to scale in this country.
With more brands moving away or opting for sporadic showcases, Weir said she’s walking a “delicate parallel track” between recognizing how brands and designers want to show up while also continuing to promote the creative and cultural relevance of fashion week.
Weir said she’s looking closely at “the pathway, the journey of funding” for designers and fashion industry workers in the U.K.
It starts, she said, with early-stage Breakfast Club creative events, moves on to the Fashion Assembly schools program, and then to scholarships. For graduates, there are programs such as Fashion East, Newgen, the Vogue/GQ prize and The Fashion Trust for more established designers.
Weir also knows there’s a cliff-edge when a brand reaches 600,000 pounds to 1 million pounds in annual turnover, and that needs to be remedied.
“I think there is also a broader conversation about scaling businesses. What does that pipeline look like? It’s all part of the strategic work that we’re doing,” she added.
Overall, Weir believes fashion week organizers in Europe have a collective responsibility to keep the fashion ecosystem thriving, and that’s about “recognizing the important role that London plays in that ecosystem.”
