"London’s Fashion Week Shrinks While Its Designers Expand Elsewhere"
It’s the opening day of London Fashion Week, and a prime time slot on the schedule sits ominously blank:
J.W. Anderson, one of LFW’s reigning provocateurs, is nowhere to be found.
The designer’s absence lands like a missing note, throwing the rhythm of the week off balance; if even London’s enfant terrible is skipping town, what does that say about the state of LFW?
"Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe Autumn/Winter 2025 collection marked the designer’s continued pull away from London Fashion Week"
As it turns out, Anderson’s no-show isn’t an anomaly, but a bellwether.
This season, a wave of London’s key designers: Molly Goddard, Supriya Lele, Nensi Dojaka, opted out altogether; while others, like 16Arlington, KNWLS and Ahluwalia, stayed on the schedule but abandoned the catwalk in favour of digital lookbooks and filmed presentations.
It’s a slow motion retreat that raises difficult questions about LFW’s future.
The odds have been stacked against London for a while: Brexit’s logistical chaos, dwindling sponsorships, and the gravitational pull of Paris and Milan have chipped away at the city’s once ferocious creative energy.
The result is an industry that still punches above its weight creatively, but struggles to translate that into the infrastructure and financial stability that keeps fashion capitals running.
LF, itself, has visibly shrunk.
The schedule now runs just four days (roughly half the length of Paris) with fewer major shows to anchor it. Even London’s standalone Men’s Fashion Week has been absorbed into the co-ed schedule, a pragmatic consolidation that speaks to a broader thinning out. Where there was once a stacked lineup of established British talent and rising stars, now there are gaps (literal and figurative) where designers have either closed up shop, left London entirely, or scaled back their ambitions.
"Behind the scenes of Molly Goddard's Autumn Winter 2023 show held in her London Atelier. Photography: Arthur Williams"
The problem, as always, is money.
A modest runway show costs well into five figures, a spend that fewer designers can justify in lean times.
“Many designers have closed their doors or simply can’t afford to splash out on a show,” The Guardian reported, bluntly acknowledging the financial pressures many brands face.
When the calendar itself has shrunk from five days to four and British giants are MIA, the absence feels deafening.
The exodus isn’t just about prestige, but also about access. Post-Brexit, showing in Paris means being closer to European stockists, suppliers, and luxury buyers; many of whom have deprioritised London in recent seasons. Designers who manufacture in Europe face delays and import duties bringing their collections into the UK to show, sometimes leading them to just present in Paris where their goods (and many of their stockists) already are.
British fashion designer Alice Temperley even opened a warehouse in Italy post-Brexit to avoid shuttling inventory back and forth at great expense, a sign of how convoluted the supply chain has become for UK-based brands.
British designers also face additional tariffs, paperwork, and costs to bring their collections into the UK for LFW, adding yet another reason to bypass the city altogether that make producing and showing collections in London more onerous; and logistically, Brexit also complicated travel and work visas for international models, editors and buyers, adding friction to what used to be a fluid circuit. Even for those who stay, the reality is that Paris offers more resources, more international buyers, and a bigger stage.
Behind these facts lies a tale of two cities’ investment in fashion: staging a fashion week show is notoriously expensive, and in London the funding well has been running dry.
“Shows are very expensive; you can do a show on a shoestring for £30,000, but even then you’re calling in a lot of favours,” notes designer Patrick McDowell. “Right now, sponsorships just aren’t there like they used to be. A lot of marketing budgets have been reallocated, and that’s made it harder for smaller brands to justify the cost.”
The resulting budget squeeze is felt by designers: many must cobble together multiple small sponsorships (a haircare brand here, a gin label there) to afford a runway show, or else they scale down their ambitions. “Brands once relied on sponsorship deals to help fund their shows, but those partnerships are dwindling,” McDowell recalls. “Drinks companies, hair brands, textile innovators; they all wanted to be part of fashion week. That’s just not happening at the same scale anymore.”
Some, like emerging designer Feben, have chosen to show abroad, securing better sponsorship deals and more lucrative opportunities under incubator programs in Milan or Paris.
"FEBEN Spring Summer 2025 Digital Lookbook"
Even established names are fleeing; major British brands such as Victoria Beckham, Stella McCartney, and even Vivienne Westwood’s eponymous label, now show in Paris, a move that feels less like a snub and more like an economic necessity.
In recent years, London has lost its biggest draws, leaving Burberry as the last true heavyweight; and even Burberry’s creative director, Daniel Lee, has reintroduced old-school British motifs into the brand’s visual language, an implicit attempt to reignite London’s cultural relevance.
This contraction is stark when compared to Paris.
Paris not only hosts a jam packed women’s week, but also dedicated Men’s and Haute Couture weeks, drawing an international swarm of editors, buyers and enthusiasts. London, by contrast, struggles to attract the same volume of global industry attendees.
"British fashion designer Patrick McDowell collaborated with Katharine Hamnett on the 'Help' collection, highlighting the negative effects of Brexit on the UK's fashion industry."
In 2017, LFW drew about 5,000 guests from 49 countries for 51 shows; today those numbers have stagnated or fallen, with top tier buyers often opting to skip London altogether in favour of Milan and Paris.
Steven Stokey-Daley, a young British designer, admits “a lot of our most important buyers don’t come to London”, as many brands find they gain more orders by focusing on the later stops of fashion month. Some London designers have even experimented with showing outside the UK; Stokey-Daley planned a Paris show this season, only joining the LFW schedule last-minute when Paris didn’t pan out.
All of this raises an uncomfortable question that fashion insiders are now asking aloud: is showing physically London Fashion Week losing its relevance?
"Ahwualia Spring Summer 2025 Digital Lookbook"
LFW has historically relied on corporate sponsors to underwrite everything from venues to VIP transport, but those deals have been dwindling. Big longtime sponsors (beauty brands, automakers, brewers) have scaled back or pulled out; most notably, Diet Coke, once LFW’s biggest sponsor, didn’t renew its contract for future seasons after Spring 2024.
The British Fashion Council (BFC), which organises LFW, has warned it “may no longer be able to offer cars” for guests as automotive sponsors retreat; a who’s-who of brands once eager to attach their name to LFW (Canon, Topshop, Mercedes-Benz, Vodafone, MAC Cosmetics) has thinned out to a much shorter list today.
By contrast, Paris enjoys a far more robust support system: deep pocketed luxury conglomerates like LVMH and Kering call Paris home, and while they don’t directly sponsor the whole week, their presence means more capital and glamour invested into shows. Moreover, the French government actively courts the fashion industry.
In the wake of Brexit, President Emmanuel Macron famously rolled out the red carpet, literally hosting a gala at the Élysée Palace for designers, to send the message that “France [is] open for business” and to entice fashion creators to choose Paris. France also has institutional support like Le DEFI, a governmental organisation that reinvests a special tax on clothing sales into young designers and fashion events.
In other words, there’s public money flowing to ensure Paris retains its fashion crown. Tamara Cincik, head of industry advocacy group Fashion Roundtable, bluntly stated that “for France, Brexit was a gift… a business-savvy [French] government saw an opportunity” to capture what London lost.
The UK government has offered comparatively little relief. In fact, a policy change in 2021 eliminated tax free shopping for international visitors, making London markedly more expensive for luxury tourists; a move the BFC says undermines the UK’s competitiveness and has directly hurt high-end retail spending in London (In late 2023, despite international visitor numbers being back to pre-pandemic levels, retail spending in London’s West End was down 15%, a drop attributed in part to the lack of tax-free shopping for foreigners.)
British fashion insiders are lobbying hard for the government to restore such incentives and to create grant or loan programs to help designers produce collections, but until that support materialises, London designers face a tough financial landscape.
As Caroline Rush, outgoing chief of the BFC, diplomatically put it, “Sponsorship is pulling back from some events… I’ve seen it before… it will come back. For now, it’s about making sure our designers are supported”
"President Emmanuel Macron hosts a gala at the Élysée Palace, honouring French fashion designers and showcasing governmental support for the industry."
These hurdles raise a pointed question: will London be able to maintain its relevance as a global fashion capital in the long term?
Some in the industry worry that if one or two more linchpin brands decamp or if another recession hits, LFW could risk sliding into “regional fashion week” status. The once “Big Four” might effectively become a Big Three (Paris, Milan, New York) in influence, with London a distant fourth.
Beyond raw numbers, part of Paris Fashion Week’s power is its seamless integration into the city’s cultural fabric. During PFW, Paris itself feels like it’s in fashion mode; the energy spills into the streets, cafes, and nightclubs.
From the lobbies of hotels like Costes, the Ritz or Soho House (overflowing with style insiders and celebrity entourages) to the crowds of fans and photographers camped outside show venues, Paris embraces fashion week with a festive fervor; impromptu street parties and city sponsored events often coincide with the shows.
A vivid example is the annual Fête de la Musique every June 21st. In 2023, Paris’s menswear fashion week overlapped with this citywide music festival; leaving a palpable and scorching synergy with many artists, influencers and tastemakers who were in town for the shows spending their evening hopping between free concerts in the streets.
Even the fashion shows themselves leaned into the musical mood: after debuting his Louis Vuitton collection on the runway, designer (and musician) Pharrell Williams brought out Jay-Z for a surprise late-night performance that turned a fashion show into a public concert, kicking off the music festivities in style.
Brands routinely stage shows at Paris’s historic landmarks: Dior at the Musée Rodin or Saint Laurent by the Eiffel Tower; blurring the line between high culture and high fashion. Big maisons host grand after-parties at iconic clubs, and the vibe extends to gallery openings and boutique events timed to fashion week.
In short, Paris during fashion week feels alive with creative energy, offering organic “viral moments” at every corner.
London, for all its cultural dynamism, has a harder time turning the city over to fashion week in the same way.
There is certainly excitement in pockets, parties in Soho here, street-style photographers in Shoreditch there; but it’s more fragmented:
The average Londoner might not even realise it’s Fashion Week, whereas in Paris it’s impossible to miss.
In fact, LFW often makes headlines not for celebratory revelry but for protesters on its doorstep, from environmental activists staging demonstrations against fashion’s waste, to feminist groups calling out issues which, while important, cast a different pall over the event’s atmosphere.
The contrast was especially clear in 2022: London Fashion Week’s September edition was largely muted out of respect during the Queen’s funeral, whereas Paris that season closed fashion month with a flourish of bold headlines and celebrity packed shows.
So, is this the beginning of the end for LFW’s reign, or just a transformative crossroads?
Not necessarily.
The city’s fashion DNA still brims with originality and edge; London has long been the revered incubator of superstar designers, from Galliano to McQueen to Phoebe Philo, and that creative reputation remains its ace card.
As The Guardian noted, British fashion leverages a kind of soft power: the world looks to London’s design schools (Central Saint Martins, for one) and its emergent labels for the next big thing. In fact, British trained talent currently helms major houses in Paris and Milan; recent appointments include Brits taking over at Givenchy and Lanvin in Paris, and at Bottega Veneta in Italy.
This means London’s influence is sometimes exported, even if the major runway moments happen elsewhere. Creativity is one currency London still trades in richly, even if financial capital is lacking. There is also a sense of community and national pride at LFW that designers cite as a reason to stay, a feeling that London is worth fighting for, even if it demands new strategies and a rethink of what a fashion week can be.
KNWLS, known for its sculptural corsetry and subversive take on femininity, opted out of a live show this season, instead launching its AW25 collection Baby as a digital release starring Iris Law.
"KNWLS AW25 Digital Lookbook 2025, 'BABY'"
It follows a pattern seen across the schedule, with brands like 16Arlington, Ahluwalia, FEBEN, Supriya Lele experimenting with lookbooks and intimate presentations rather than traditional catwalks.
Ahkeke, a Nigerian-British label gaining traction for its tailoring, also chose a showroom experience, focusing on craftsmanship and detail rather than spectacle.
Meanwhile, Wanni Fuga, a brand synonymous with contemporary African luxury, presented its latest collection in a setting that mimicked a working hair salon. Guests were invited into the space to watch models casually interact, a subtle nod to the social and cultural significance of salons as community hubs.
India Day and Pearl Academy introduced South Asian talent through a series of movement based performances that combined textile draping, live styling, and choreography; blurring the lines between fashion, culture, and storytelling, offering an alternative to the rigid structure of a standard catwalk.
Samantha Siu took a similarly immersive approach, staging an intimate showcase where models moved through a set designed to resemble a Parisian apartment.
Designers are becoming more selective, choosing when and how to present their work in ways that prioritise longevity over hype.
The British Fashion Council is supporting these approaches through programs like NEWGEN, offering financial backing and mentorship to emerging designers. London is operating on tighter margins, making innovation a necessity rather than a luxury.
LFW still serves as a vital platform, not just for established names but as a space where ideas can develop and emerging voices can cut through the noise. Sustainability, diversity, and digital engagement remain central to its identity, positioning it as a testing ground for what the future of fashion might look like.
If London can marry its undeniable talent and creative energy with better funding and just that bit of that Parisian style showmanship, it may yet close the gap.
For now, though, the contrast remains striking: Paris is the blockbuster finale of fashion month, while London is striving not to be relegated to the footnotes, determined to rewrite its story in seasons to come.
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