Waiting over an hour outside a South London church hall while a gospel sermon shakes the floor beneath your feet might not sound like the prelude to a fashion show—but that’s exactly what it is. Upstairs at Longfield Hall, Ellen Poppy Hill prepares to unveil her second collection, “No Point in Making Myself Comfortable,” and somehow, the Sunday sermon soundtrack only adds to the moment.
There’s no step-and-repeat, no PR choreography, no assigned seating—just a crowd of queer creatives, art school friends, and just two stray fashion editors (myself and British Vogue’s Daniel Rodgers). Also in attendance: Fabio Piras, director of the Central Saint Martins MA Fashion course and Hill’s former tutor—a quiet yet weighty endorsement from the institution that shapes London’s brightest. The rest of the industry that proclaims to support young talent was missing in action—and missing out.
“I want you to feel something,” Hill tells me before the show. “Whatever it is—I just want you to come and experience it. If you miss it, you’ve missed it.”


























Those of us there were so locked in, we didn’t miss a thing. First, the piano begins. Then, the lights drop. Finally, the models appear, not strutting so much as inhabiting the space like performers breaking the fourth wall of a play only they understand. These aren’t blank runway faces, they’re characters. Some whimsical, some sultry, some gently deranged—performing, dancing, laughing, gliding. One twirls in a bubble skirt stuffed with fabric swatches and feathers, topless and beaming. Another marches proudly in a sculptural two-piece—short-sleeved top and skirt—ingeniously constructed from brown paper bags, held together with intention and attitude. “I’m obsessed with people,” Hill says of her casting. “Each look is built for someone. Their personality informs the silhouette.”
The clothes themselves are unmistakably hers. They’re hand-painted, joyfully pieced together from surplus and secondhand fabrics, styled with irreverence and intent. A coat in painted checks is worn over lace-layered shorts. Paneled jersey slips in earthy tones skew delicate with raw edges and asymmetry. Sheer lace blouses have buttons scattered in all the “wrong” places—a recurring Ellen Poppy signature. One silky baby blue blouse (so sheer it may as well be mist) is paired with pantaloons and a shoe horn held at the ear.
There’s humor, but there’s also rigor. Low-rise belts cinch midi skirts punctuated by peekaboo cutouts at the front and sides. Elizabethan-esque blouses pair with ruched pencil skirts. Tiara-topped mini dresses layered with talismanic necklaces. Later, comes gowns: one beaded and body-hugging, another plunging to the navel in cream knit. The final look—a sheer white mini with an outrageously long train—is camp and gloriously romantic. The model dances, flirts, and performs for the crowd, blowing kisses as she glides across the hall—the perfect, cheeky crescendo to a show that never takes itself too seriously.
























What unifies it all is a fully formed world—one Hill has been building, piece by piece, since long before her first show. Raised in West Norwood, she grew up surrounded by costume, theater, and constant creative energy. “Our house is full of people—lodgers, artists, weird friends of my parents. Everyone dresses up. That’s just how it was.” At 15, she started working in a local vintage shop. She was fired twice (once, she says, for being too early). When her high school canceled the textiles course, she convinced them to let her write her own syllabus.
She later studied at Central Saint Martins—both BA and MA—and graduated in the thick of COVID. With fabric stores closed, she put out a call for donations. Strangers mailed her bags of clothes, which she transformed into her graduate collection. “That really stayed with me,” she says. “The idea that beauty can come from things that were meant to be thrown away.”
That ethos remains central to her work. “It’s not just sustainability,” she explains. “It’s emotional. I don’t want to remove myself from the process. I want to feel the fabric. I want to build something new from something old—and make you forget what it was before.”






















This season, her reference point is Claude Cahun’s surreal, cryptic autobiography Cancelled Confessions. “There’s a line that hit me: ‘No point in making myself comfortable,’” she says. “That phrase became a kind of anchor. It’s not about defeat. It’s about persistence. If things are going to be hard anyway, then I want to make something worth doing. Something joyful. Something real.”
Which is exactly what this show is. Joyful. Real. Intimate, expansive, and deeply personal. Produced on a shoestring budget with the help of close collaborators like stylist Lulu Bullock, it draws you into a world that doesn’t ask for approval—just presence. “It’s hard, honestly,” Hill says. “The financials, the favors, the pressure. But I think people can feel that we’re building something together. That it means something.”
The energy in the room is electric—not performative, not transactional, but sincerely alive. The audience claps, shouts, beams. You can tell who knows someone in the cast. You can tell who’s simply happy to be here. And you can tell, instantly, that this is not a typical London Fashion Week affair.


























Afterward, Hill reflects on the difference between her first and second show. “This one’s a lot more confident,” she says. “I really want it to say something.” And what is that, exactly? She smiles. “That I’m still here. That I’m going to keep doing it, even if I have to make it out of paper bags and feathers.”
It’s that tension—absurdity and precision, sincerity and theater—that makes Ellen Poppy Hill one of the most vital voices in London fashion right now. The same weekend, the press turned out in full for Martine Rose and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy. But somehow, they missed this. Blink again, and she’ll be miles ahead.
Ellen Poppy Hill’s Collection 2—“No Point in Making Myself Comfortable”—is available to shop at Twos Care in Hackney from Friday.