Raise a glass, everyone – we made it! Yes, after about 10,000 fashion shows (well, not quite, but feels like it!), the autumn/winter 2025 season has come to a close. And what a season it’s been. While it goes without saying that the collections we’ve seen will set the style agenda for the next year or so to come, it’s hard to emphasise quite how significant a shift in the fashion landscape they’ll prompt.
Across the board, we’ve seen a definitive departure from quiet luxury, with designers bursting out of their muted cashmere cocoons to deliver collections steeped in decadent textures, vibrant hues and bold, thought-provoking silhouettes. Speaking of thought-provoking, it’s also been a season in which the challenging global sociopolitical climate – while generally not directly broached – has been intimated at through collections that have grappled with themes including the precarity of feminine expression, migration as the precursor to cultural wealth, or wilfully turned a blind eye to all that’s going on – a statement in itself.
Boiling down a whole season to a single, defining show may seem a needlessly tough exercise, but it’s one that we’ve decided to set ourselves. So here you have it – the British Vogue editors’ favourite shows of the season.
Sarah Burton’s debut for Givenchy was nothing short of remarkable. Six months in the making, she delved into the archives, drawing inspiration from Hubert de Givenchy’s 1952 debut. Reimagining the house’s signature silhouette, she balanced heritage with modernity, laying the foundations for the brand’s future codes. Sharp tailoring took on a subtly rounded form, featuring exquisite detailing. Draping appeared in liquid leather, while evening wear embraced a contemporary approach to embellishment. One stand-out dress captured the poetic, historic moment of de Givenchy’s original muse dropping her bag in the atelier – her make-up compacts shattering on the parquet floor – transforming it into an intricately embroidered minidress. Another was the closing look: a stunning, citrus-yellow tulle strapless dress. Wearable, forward-thinking and utterly refreshing, the collection marked a bold new chapter for Givenchy. Laura Ingham, deputy director, global fashion network
Ok, bending our own rules here, but I refuse to kill too many darlings. The grounds for the selection of my two stand-out moments, though, are one and the same. The first is Loewe, who forewent its typically high-budget, high-concept show format to stage a presentation in a grand, Left Bank hôtel particulier that once belonged to Karl Lagerfeld. Granted, they hardly skimped on the budget or concept, though – across a sprawling suite of gilded salons, the house presented what I overheard described as a “scrapbook of memories” from across Jonathan Anderson’s decade at the helm of the house.
The clothes themselves were expectedly outstanding – innovative reimaginings of some of Anderson’s most memorable pieces (think: outlandishly chunky, gold-buttoned knits; sculptural silk-wool tailcoats; every sort of garment imaginable constructed in the most sumptuous leather). But what really made them stand out was how they were presented. Not only did their mounting on jauntily posed mannequins mean that you could get an up-close eyeful of the painstaking craft invested in their making, but the fact that they were presented around and in relation to artworks (typically found in the brand’s blue-chip gallery tier stores) encouraged you to look at them in the same light – or at least to contemplate how Anderson has managed to both nuance and blur understandings of the relations between fashion, craft and art.
The other moment that stands out in my mind was executed on a far more humble budget, but was no less impactful. For her presentation in London, Tolu Coker built an installation that both prompted reflections on how taken-as-given perceptions of British luxury have typically overlooked the vital contributions of migrant communities to its contemporary status, and invited the audience into a detailed recreation of her studio – complete with pattern-cutting tables and industrial sewing machines. In doing so, she gave us a full immersion into the conceptual wealth, commitment to craft and, above all, warmth and generosity that underpins her practice. At a time where fashion can feel so easily compressed to the measures of a screen, these were moments that you felt lucky to be there for. Mahoro Seward, acting fashion features editor
I want to be draped in a million layers at all times – scarves and sleeves that hang endlessly, never quite arriving anywhere. I want my shoulders to be a hostile environment for a tote bag. Sacai delivered on this front. Where does a top end and a jacket begin? We will never know. Would it be a nightmare to take off? Absolutely. But I love the Russian nesting doll approach to dressing – peeling back one knitted layer to reveal, what’s this? Yet another slither of fabric, somehow fused with the last. I want to be tangled in knitwear, cloaked in half a leather jacket complicatedly buttoned to a silk shirt. The Sacai woman doesn’t pack a suitcase; she’s prepared for everything, yet ill-equipped for anything, her seams growing from unexpected places, a Frankenstein of tailoring and marabou trim. Embrace the monster within.
On the other side of the coin, Courrèges offered clean lines and slivers of skin – a sexier take on sculptural silhouettes. Nicolas Di Felice’s melting point of space-age simplicity is everything I want in a collection: simple but never dull, one sleek piece and you’re ready to tackle a dystopian future on the planet Venus in a pair of visor-style sunglasses. Nicolas, please let me on your spaceship.
A final word on footwear: respect must be paid for the belted boots at Sacai. And while not strictly footwear, I’m not yet willing to renounce quiet luxury, despite how collectively browbeaten we are by the phrase. What could be quieter and more luxurious than padding around on a plush carpet in tights at The Row? Olivia Allen, fashion writer
There were just three months between the end of spring/summer 2025 and the beginning of the autumn/winter 2025 season, a stretch that lasted 55 days between MM6 Maison Margiela’s presentation on 14 January and finished with Saint Laurent on 11 March. Immediately I found myself questioning: a) why we subject ourselves to this interminable churn of stuff and things, and b) whether fashion had (once again) reached the point of excess.
Most of the collections I witnessed – though some were beautiful – lacked emotional depth. Which is fine, I guess, and perhaps in another period of time I would have sat back and enjoyed the clothes on an aesthetic or cerebral level. I would have thought that, yes, I too would like to move around the world like that model in that outfit, and how interesting that so and so included a reference to that artist, and wasn’t that an impressive technique being used. But for whatever reason I wasn’t looking for a mood or intellect or savoir-faire. I needed fashion to prove that it was capable of doing more. That designers weren’t just creating for the sake of creating. That there was, somewhere, a sense of difficult feelings being unsurfaced.
The collection that achieved that, for me, was Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, which began with an explicit message from Rei Kawakubo – “To hell with war” – and continued with the plaintive march of teenage boys in deconstructed field jackets, patchworked military regalia, tartans, violently upturned boots and helmets covered in hopeful (or funereal) blooms. There was relief and resistance, too, in the work of Paolo Carzana, who unveiled 15 looks – each of them hand-wrought from poignant whorls of organic fabrics dyed in logwood, turmeric, madder and cochineal – in a historic tavern in Clerkenwell with no more than 50 guests seated on window ledges and wooden barrels; and Roísín Pierce, who suspended snowflakes and winter buds onto dresses made from precious accumulations of embroideries, crochet and needlework. “It’s just a lot of feelings dancing,” she explained backstage. If only more designers were like these three, and created not from the head, but straight from the gut. Daniel Rodgers, fashion news editor
The British-Yemeni designer Kazna Asker’s autumn/winter 2025 presentation was an ode to family, community and migration. She conjured a buzzing souk as the backdrop for her designs – a mash-up of traditional Middle Eastern thobes and keffiyehs with the sportswear that was an ubiquitous part of her growing up in Sheffield – complete with Persian rugs, jewellery stalls and cans of Palestine cola. This impressive young designer’s creative and lovingly conceived celebration of her culture was a reminder of how, so often, fashion is about much more than simply clothes.
From emerging London designers to the big beasts in Paris, I was won over by the sheer glamour of Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent collection, all jewel tones, sheer lace and preposterously exaggerated shoulders, with some fabulous ball skirts and a Bella sighting thrown in for good measure. Kerry McDermott, digital director
It’s been an interesting season, to say the least, considering so much is in flux – from creative director changes that are still on-going to the state of the economy. In London, there was much discussion about the pared-back schedule, which included a large number of absences, from JW Anderson to 16 Arlington.
Still, it’s been pleasing to see young, independent designers take a different approach this season. While not technically a show, Talia Byre’s intimate presentation during London Fashion Week was one of my stand-out moments, with the designer talking guests through her collection, inspired by schoolgirls and her great aunt Lily. Paolo Carzana’s show in a pub was also one of my favourites – as his models, draped in layers of hand-dyed fabrics, weaved their way through the tables, it was difficult to not feel moved.
Then there was SS Daley’s last-minute show, which celebrated all things British – from the trench coat to Marianne Faithfull. As Pet Shop Boys’s “West End Girls” blasted from the speakers, it was the feel-good moment we all need right now. Emily Chan, senior sustainability & executive fashion news and features editor
For all the high-minded posturing and pontificating that can so often stifle the fashion month runway collections, I’ve always held space for brands that can deliver clothes that I, well, actually want to put on my body. Of course, in recent seasons there has been a sort of algorithmic regression – a flattening of visual language, if you will – that has befallen certain brands that have placed too much pressure on their creative directors to immediately deliver on the bottom line; the result being generic yet overpriced clothing that neither offends nor delights. To clarify, this is not what I mean when I speak of “wearability”.
Rather it’s names like Stefan Cooke, who staged a low-key drop-in presentation and preorder event at London Fashion Week, who understand that, sometimes, people just want a beautiful, well-made jacket from a brand with a strong design DNA and clear point of view. Then there was Louther, a brand that presented under the Fashion East flag, that brought a similar spirit to its autumn/winter 2025 collection, with expertly layered outerwear and tailored separates spliced with elbow-length leather gloves and cinching belts. Coats, tailoring, knitwear – I wanted to buy it all. Surely the highest praise a designer can receive? I think so anyway. Joy Montgomery, shopping editor
