Capsule #88 ft. Ellen Scott

Hello hello!

This week’s issue is your London Fashion Week debrief. If there’s anything you’d like to get from fashion week coverage that isn’t already here, do let me know. 🫶

Scroll for your weekend recs and a great Hot & Not from Ellen Scott. Excited to see who picks up the Oscars and crucially what they are wearing…

Holly x

🇬🇧 Reflections on London Fashion Week 🇬🇧

Before LFW properly kicked off, I kept reading updates about which designers would and would not be showing this season. Some were slimming down to one show (Knwls, Karoline Vitto, Ahluwalia, Chopova Lowena), others were opting out of formal runway shows for something more intimate. Aaron Esh and 16Arlington hosted dinner parties, allowing a smaller group of guests to spend more time with the clothes and get proper face time with the designers. Above all, there was a general sense that fashion week is hard to keep up with (it is), that doing so might bankrupt smaller designers, and the whole industry might be demanding too much in order to keep itself going.

This, combined with the stats about how interest in LFW pales in comparison to Milan or Paris, set expectations pretty low this season. I saw tweets applauding the dedication of anyone “that bothers with London” and had kind of accepted that it would be a low-key affair and that’s okay.

But as often happens, when your expectations are low, the reality ends up being pretty good. Stuff happened across a five day period in London that shifted the narrative from “why even bother?” towards something more like “oh that’s why we’re here.”

Some highlights for you…

🪡✂️ Tolu Coker brings us into the process ✂️🪡

I’ve been trying to get to a Tolu Coker show for the past couple of seasons, and this week I finally got to go. I’m pretty sure that’s because she opted for a presentation rather than a traditional runway, opening the doors for two hours to allow a flow of more people to come and see her work. The strategy is also a good one for a ascending designer — more press, more buyers, more influencers, in theory, more opportunity to make a splash. I did a quick walk through of the experience here:

Tolu chose to use the space to share the design process with us all. The centrepiece was a live atelier, complete with a cutting room table, sample products, and mannequins with WIP designs. At a time when luxury sales are struggling, this was a moment to showcase just how much work goes into the final product - months and months of craft, by specialists who have trained and worked for a long time, at a high level, to produce the stuff we usually see for a few seconds on a runway. I think it was a smart move to showcase this aspect, the type of thing that high street fashion simply cannot replicate. This is what you are paying for.

Tolu and her team were present, which meant I got to interview her. That was really cool, because she’s great, and also because I’m sure she’s going to grow into one of the greats in terms of talent. (Last week Tolu Coker was announced as a semi-finalist in this year’s LVMH Prize, one of the industry’s most prestigious accolades.)

Tolu said in an interview with Vogue that people always assume that she is a sportswear or streetwear designer because of her race. In reality, her designs showcase a version of Black Britishness that is informed by migration — her Nigerian roots are present in looks fit for Aladura churches and Sunday best prints, but her clothes also have a strong sense of European tradition in their tailoring. The end result is nuanced, fresh, and as I kept saying to my colleague as we looked at the presentation, made through the lens of admiring women. Tolu has talked before about inheriting fashion and being inspired by her mum, and you feel that warmth with every look she puts out.

📈👔 Corpcore continues 👔📈

At NYFW and the men’s shows, we looked at the continued corpcore trend and how different designers were adding their own flourishes into the genre. We saw that too in London, with designers playing with grey suits and buttoned shirts, and even in some settings: SRVC hosted their first ever runway show in London’s BT Tower.

I think this year will be the peak of this kind of stuff before we move on to something else.

🐆 (Faux) fur 🐆

The return of fur has been a big conversation in fashion over the past year. And while real fur production has declined a lot over the past decade, Gen Zers are pushing the resurgence through second hand sales. Last year we called it “Mob Wife”, this year it’s just a standard part of a lot of the AW25 collections. It’s worth pointing out that all the fur at London Fashion Week is fake. There’s still real fur used in other fashion weeks, but London was the first to ban it in 2023. I think there will be more fur to come in Milan and Paris — though the iconic Miu Miu fur jackets from last season were faux.

🖤🎸 A turn towards rock and roll 🎸🖤

An overcorrection from cute girlhood culture? Or just a reflection of how we actually want to dress during winter? Either way I loved the grungier looks this season. Black leather, lace ups, buckles, frayed edges, messier hair. This one is for the girls who struggle with pink. And if Beyoncé’s third act is rock as lots of people are speculating, it’s really going to pop off.

👀 Other bits worth seeing 👀

A bunch of stars at Burberry. It’s like they heard everyone calling LFW irrelevant and decided to wheel out all the stars to be like: we got this. Worth seeing: Lauryn Hill wearing a lot of wool and needing a hand-held fan, Kim Cattrall being her radiant self, and the mystery knight we keep seeing on Burberry’s socials.

Maybe the most unique thing on the runway this season: this tattoo dress at Dilara Findikoglu, which was tattooed by her boyfriend. Would die to see it on the Oscars red carpet this weekend even though that turnaround is insane.

@thefacemagazine

Did you know it was tattooed by her boyfriend, Jonah? @Dilara Findikoglu #dilarafindikoglu #lfw #leather

And a new Conner Ives slogan tee, which will be used to raise money for trans rights.

And finally…

News you may have missed from fashion and pop culture this week:

• Timothée Chalamet held a (Cartier-sponsored) poker night to celebrate his Best Actor nom. Kylie beat him

• The Beyoncé x Levi’s ad is actually here

• Rihanna spilled some tea to Harper’s Bazaar

• Hailey Bieber’s FILA collab launched — the campaign image is very “evidence of life” as we talked about last week

• This pop star is set to go to space with Jeff Bezos

• Doechii opened and closed the DSQUARED2 show in Milan

• Print resurgence news: a Pitchfork quarterly zine

• Guess who is the voice of Shrek and Fiona’s daughter in Shrek 5

• And for those who this speaks to: NYT Cooking actually made lemony garlicky gochujang miso brown butter gnocchi 

This week, Ellen Scott popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Ellen is the digital editor of Stylist magazine, and is currently writing fiction. She also writes about work on the Working On Purpose Substack and her debut non-fiction book hasn't officially been announced yet but is available to pre-order. 👀

📺 Watching: The Last Showgirl in the cinema. Also this weekend: the Brits and the Oscars. I guess this would be a good time to watch The Brutalist or A Complete Unknown or Anora if you haven’t already!

📖 Reading: This article exploring how useful it is to spend a lot of time thinking about yourself, off the back of the infamous Jemima Kirke advice quote “I think you guys might be thinking about yourself too much”.

🎧 Listening to: Rarely Do I Dream, the new Youth Lagoon album. Plus ‘Flood’, the new Little Simz song, ‘Seattle’ by ella jane, and the latest episode of Nymphet Alumni on ‘Losercore’ — an aesthetic of the late 90s and early 2000s that celebrated the awkwardness of young adulthood and the sartorial idiosyncrasies of social outcasts.

People have been saying cow print is the new leopard print and while Fudge agrees it’s not as timeless, the Google search data doesn’t lie… “Cow print” is the top trending print over the past week, and the top trending items are “adidas cow print samba SL72” and "cow print belt”. No clearer sign that this trend is in right now, if you needed encouragement.

If you’d like to adopt Fudge or one of his friends, click here to learn more.

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See you next week 💋

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