For young labels, times are tough. Season upon season, the press shouts about end times and mourns an industry it sees as fading fast. For good reason: names that were once stalwarts on the circuit, like Christopher Kane and Molly Goddard, are one-by-one dropping off the calendar. Amid dwindling sales and rising production costs, others are trying to save their skins by downsizing. But enough with the doom and gloom: maybe it’s time we tried to find some light.
Despite the odds stacked against them, this season a host of young labels showed that fashion, even in its darkest moments, lives on – even on a shoestring budget. Instead of lamenting the (very real) economic difficulties faced by independent designers right now, we spoke to eight brands who are pushing through the financial pain. The breakout brands of SS25 prove that it’s worth it.
1. Gabe Gordon
New York knitwear designer Gabe Gordon’s first ever runway, titled ‘Horseplay,’ made us yearn for a bit of rough and tumble in the barn. The designer, however, had a different kind of tumble in mind. “I wanted to bring the audience into a fictitious teenage dream of an 80s horseback riding competition where the only male rider is thrown off his horse into the bushes,” the designer explains of the premise behind the collection.
Models emerged with exquisitely tousled hair, topped off with bits of wayward straw, wearing the figure-hugging knitted pieces that Gordon is now known for. Artisanal woven leather pieces – a real labour of love – punctuated the show, a testament to the designer’s dedication to craft. “The show,” says Gordon, “was a study of the tension that lives between traditional Americana and queer dystopia.” Shapely knitted football jerseys, complete with plumped-out shoulder pads, gave the collection a distinctly Midwestern feel – cropped, of course, for a queer twist.
2. Ifeoma
Ifeoma, Nigerian for ‘a thing of beauty,’ is the name that LA-native, Tbilisi-based designer Reva-Ifeoma Ochuba’s dad calls her. It’s also the name that she decided to bequeath to her label. This makes sense – she is her own fitting model and when designing, likes to interrogate her own experiences and emotions, imbuing them into the collection. For example, SS24 was Ifeoma’s last full collection, centred around the question, ‘Why am I getting dressed?’. The pieces all fit into one suitcase – a testament to the designer’s own history. Having lived in seven different cities over the 27 years of her life, she’s familiar with the needs of the jetset.
SS25 however, marked a change. For Ochuba, the form of travelling that inspired this season was more spiritual than it was physical. Living in Tbilisi, Ochuba began to miss her former home of London. A loose trench coat with a large, dropping cowl and a geometrically-tailored skirt suit in earth-tone satin embody the mood. They feel almost familiar – nearly quotidian, but not quite. “Perhaps my transitional thoughts are apparent in the work,” Ochuba explains. ”It’s rather liminal, designed in a metaphorical place rather than a real one.”
3. Mainline:RUS/Fr.CA/DE
Even though London-based brand Mainline:RUS/Fr.CA/DE – brainchild of Alexandra Vincent and Zarina Bekerova – is technically not a new kid on the block, until this season they had never put on a runway show. But for SS25 the duo wanted to celebrate half a decade of the brand’s success. “We were always putting a lot of pressure on ourselves to deliver a big show in a huge space, but we realised that we mainly wanted to do it for ourselves, our friends and the people we work with,” Vincent explains. The show was hosted at Twos, a vintage boutique on the seventh floor of a tower block with sunset views over East London. To the pleasant surprise of attendees, the collection’s golden hues, range of pinks and peachy orange tones were a perfect colour-match with the setting.
Vincent and Bekerova’s vision was, as always, laced with wit. Known for interpreting clothes in a distinctly modern way, previous collections have featured trousers that are ruched as though one has been sitting for hours on end, while tops and shirts were constructed to appear permanently crumpled. They’re as much influenced by pop culture, however, as they are by the tactility of wearing clothes. Italian footballer Mario Balotelli, who in 2012 was photographed multiple times with an LV monogram cosmetic bag under his arm, provided inspiration for the bulky oversized clutches. Elsewhere, a dress shirt was reinterpreted as potential sportswear. The standout piece, however, was the backless closing gown decorated with coins, painstakingly applied by hand and represenative of the collection’s conceptual underpinning: cold, hard cash.
4. Ellen Poppy Hill
“I ended up being so nervous and emotional that I kind of froze like a possum,” Ellen Poppy Hill recounts of her paralysing first-show jitters. “Fashion week is the foundation of the industry and a runway is the most exciting part.” Having graduated from Central Saint Martins just last year, SS25 was Hill’s first runway as a graduate. When asked why she decided to put on a runway show so soon after leaving university, she cites her love of “performance, character building and storytelling. An in-person show is the best way to experience all elements of my world.”
The designer’s show notes were a touching, self-written paean to the much-loved, damaged clothing in her life. This set the scene for the collection which was, in her own words, an “ode to my shame of not being hasty to fix my own clothes.” These damaged garments were reimagined in the collection as a pastiche of our most worn clobber: larger-than-life squishy ‘zips’ that made up large panels of felt jackets and dresses, for instance, as a respectful nod to all the broken zips in our past. The collection was topped off with appropriately off-kilter headpieces made by Madeleine Thornalley of Hurtence, whose work also foregrounds the beauty of the broken and coming-apart, while ‘shoe-box-shoes’, little box-like covers made for the toes of models’ stiletto heels, were crafted from the shoeboxes the heels had actually arrived in. Altogether, Hill’s debut was an earnest reminder that all of our clothes exist in a state of constant flux.
5. Torishéju
For Torishéju Dumi, the designer behind the semi-eponymous label Torishéju, SS25 was, in part, an attempt to make sense of the chaos unfurling around her. “The collection embodies a sense of disorder, echoing the complexities we face today,” she explains. Conceptually, she drew inspiration from the Hieronymus Bosch painting La Nef des fous (‘The Ship of Fools’) which depicts a group of people engaging in the biblical deadly sin of gluttony. The collection was Dumi’s interpretation of aristocracy upon a sinking ship. The evening wear was ripped, unfurling and distressed; in a more literal reference to the painting’s title, subtle nautical references were also threaded throughout. Taking things one step further was the padding visible through sheer layers: its conceptual cue taken from the Titanic’s faulty life jackets.
“This season reinforced my belief that community is essential,” the designer explains. For Dumi, community extends beyond the marketing ploy oft-used by brands to sell more clothes. “It’s important not just for the brand, but as a fundamental aspect of being human.” SS25 marked a year since the London-based designer has shown her collections in Paris. It’s a place where, finally, she feels she has found her own community. “Paris Fashion Week felt like the right stage to present my work and engage with an audience that appreciates the depth and narrative behind it,” the designer explains, “Paris is starting to feel like home.”
6. Edward Cuming
This season Edward Cuming, the Australian designer who’s made his home in Madrid, released a series of photographs with his long-term collaborator, photographer Cristina Stolhe. You’d be forgiven, though, for not realising that the photos are intended as a fashion campaign. A brocade patch peeks through striped, frayed denim; an open shirt just about frames a hairy chest; a crouched woman becomes a billowing sea of white, polka-dot satin, all shot with the distinctive blown-out crispness of a Stolhe image. Relax your eyes for a moment and you might not even register that these are photographs of clothes.
“This season we wanted to push the idea of the clothes being the protagonists in the shoot, with hyper-cropped angles that highlight the texture and colours of the fabrics,” Cuming explains of this visual and conceptual framing. The designer’s creative vision stems from “seemingly mundane moments in life,” mimicking the sensation of passing a well-dressed person on the street or watching the back of someone’s head wishing for them to turn around. The design, as a result, is informed by our perception of clothing in real life – how we see it and experience it on the street.
7. Shame
Shame, the New-York-via-Chicago label headed by Ramona Beattie, is only in its third official season. Already, though, SS25 marks the brand’s second ever runway – no mean feat for a young designer. “For me it’s a necessity, even if I can only show yearly,” Beattie says. The collection, titled ‘Lumpen,’ boasted chainmail-like jockstraps and skirts constructed from pull-tabs rescued from discarded cans. Itty-bitty bandage bras and barely there scarf-like halter tops provided the mainstay of the show. “I was focused on my vision of androgyny,” Beattie explains. “I want to reject the idea of ‘oversized’ and ‘androgynous’ being synonymous in fashion.”
Beattie found her fashion footing when she got involved with Lucky Jewel, a shop-cum-gallery-cum-label that made its name supporting young designers in fashion, textiles and furniture. The ethos is about creating physical space for like-minded people to find each other and exchange their handmade wares. With Shame, Beattie is doing something similar. “There’s no better way to bring people into the world of a brand than to physically bring them to one place to experience the clothes,” Beattie explains of her emphasis on showing the clothes in real life. “It’s magical!”
8. Indépendantes De Coeur
Valeriane Venance, the London-based designer behind the label Indépendantes De Coeur, was thinking about destruction for SS25. Not the wear and tear of a garment, but breaking down and reimagining the act of dressing itself. The collection, titled (rather poetically) ‘Onlookers in the Ruins of Splendour and Broken Systems’, featured looming silhouettes rendered in denim, wool and leather. To put them on, however, told a different story. Designed to be worn or styled in multiple ways, they can be reimagined over and over by the wearer. “With ties you can create a different cleavage, or snap the buttons of the trousers and you create a different leg fit,” Venance explains of the various functions.
For SS25, Venance decided to forgo showing on the runway and shoot a video instead, which screened at Dover Street Market. Shot by Eddie Whelan, the idea of destruction was rendered quite literally. Models moved around a set surrounded by cameras in their own personal showspace, and sculptures wrapped around models’ torsos were torn apart, as though the models were escaping from a plasterwork cage.
Text: Eilidh Duffy