(London) Often overshadowed by its prestigious neighbours Paris and Milan, London Fashion Week is taking the spotlight for its launch on Thursday at an evening event at the ready-to-wear giant H&M, in the presence of the summer star Charli XCX.
The programme for the spring-summer 2025 fashion week, scheduled to run until Tuesday with 48 shows, was shaken up by the arrival of the Swedish “fast fashion” brand a month before the start of the shows, creating excitement and turning the spotlight back on London.
“Forget the fancy shows: it doesn’t matter if you’re in the front row. The only ticket anyone wants is the one for the H&M party,” the newspaper claims. The Standardwhen the daily The Timeshe assures that “this concert in the east of London is the most coveted event” of the week.
The only certainty regarding this evening, the program of which remains relatively mysterious, is that the British singer Charli XCX, one of the faces of the fall-winter 2024 collection launched Thursday evening by H&M, will perform there two days before the launch of her sold-out world tour.
His hyper-pop album Bratan ode to chaotic parties and a reflection of a generation’s questions, set the tone for the summer – renamed “brat summer” for the occasion. The neon green of its cover art adorned the outfits, ad campaigns and even the X account of American candidate Kamala Harris.
In addition to the hand-picked guests, a handful of fans and customers of the brand also managed to secure entry to this free evening.
It’s an “exciting” collaboration, says Caroline Rush, director of the British Fashion Council (BFC), which organises Fashion Week and works to keep London on the fashion map as star British designers such as Stella McCartney and Victoria Beckham show in Paris.
“Second hand” fashion
While the excitement of the party has somewhat overshadowed the usual Fashion Week schedule, celebrities, buyers and influencers will return to the runways on Friday morning, with fashion veteran Paul Costelloe and hot young designers like Di Petsa and Bora Aksu.
In total, 72 designers, emerging or renowned talents such as JW Anderson, Richard Quinn, Erdem or the British house Burberry, will present their spring-summer 2025 collections during this second edition celebrating the 40th anniversary of the event, an anniversary already celebrated in February during the fall-winter 2024-25 Fashion Week.
By indirectly partnering with these designers, the world’s number two clothing retailer H&M is demonstrating a desire to make a place for itself in a more upscale market, in the face of aggressive competition from “ultra fast fashion” chains like Shein.
However, some influencers have complained on TikTok that this change of image is not accompanied by “real progress” on quality. H&M had recently assured, for its part, that it was making efforts to “reduce its dependence on polyester”, a synthetic artificial material derived from oil.
By a coincidence of the calendar, the eBay platform and the charity Oxfam, in collaboration with the second-hand sales site Vinted, are both organizing fashion shows exclusively with second-hand clothes on Thursday evening.
The NGO Collective Fashion Justice points out in a recent report that only 3.39% of the 206 member brands of the British Fashion Council (BFC) have set a target to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.