Fringe, florals and acid green: 7 trends from London Fashion Week SS27

London Fashion Week has wrapped for another season, bringing with it the return of British fashion heavyweights McQueen and Mulberry, a handful of unexpected runway moments and, of course, plenty of new trends.

Across the SS27 schedule, designers revisited 1980s, Noughties and 2010s dress codes while pushing romantic florals, exposed construction and lingerie details in more theatrical directions.

Here are seven of the trends to emerge from London Fashion Week...

Sky blue

This very light, almost powdery shade of blue appeared across collections including Erdem, Patrick McDowell, Talia Byre and Bora Aksu, offering a softer counterpoint to the season’s more acidic brights.

Paul Costelloe also worked touches of sky blue into an otherwise restrained palette of navy, cream and white. Across the week, the colour moved between sharply cut tailoring, translucent fabrics and more romantic dresses, showing its range as both a grounding shade and a delicate accent.

The business-casual blazer

Fashion’s ongoing love affair with past decades showed little sign of slowing, with fitted and strongly structured tailoring returning across the schedule.

McQueen’s elongated suiting featured exaggerated shoulders and high, narrow waists, including three bespoke menswear looks made with Savile Row tailor Huntsman. Paul Costelloe revisited the shoulder pads and pussy-bow blouses of the house’s 1980s archive, while Roksanda loosened the formula through oversized coats, wide-leg trousers and pinstripes.

Together, the shows positioned the blazer less as a standalone officewear revival than part of a broader reworking of power dressing, spanning cinched proportions, sculptural shoulders and deliberately oversized alternatives.

Applique flowers

Florals for spring? Groundbreaking... but rather than relying only on traditional prints, designers turned flowers into three-dimensional surface treatments, sculptural motifs and exaggerated adornment.

At Burberry, delicate floral embellishments appeared across a powder-blue organza trench coat. Simone Rocha scaled her signature roses up dramatically, framing faces, covering the upper body and decorating leather lapels and exposed briefs. McQueen took a different route, placing acid floral prints across reflective organza and allowing embroidered and jacquard blooms to fade into sheer fabrics.

KNWLS

The motif also became a vehicle for material experimentation. Vin + Omi covered a sheer white gown in hundreds of three-dimensional flowers made from recycled plastic, while KNWLS pressed crushed roses onto bullhide dresses, skirts and clutches.

Fringe and loose threads

Frayed hems, exposed seams and distressed fabrics returned across the SS27 schedule, but designers pushed the idea beyond a straightforward 2010s grunge revival.

Roksanda

Roksanda’s collection, inspired by Françoise Grossen’s braided and knotted rope sculptures, covered garments in loose threads and added shaggy fringed scarves and accessories to oversized tailoring. KNWLS explored a more precarious kind of deconstruction: torn lace, sliced denim and slips hanging from waistbands and hems made garments appear to be unravelling or caught mid-dress.

Other designers using fringing included Labrum, Maximilian Raynor, Mark Fast and Argo Studio, among others. Dreaming Eli broke and layered silk, cotton and gauze, with ripped and hand-cut sections revealing the fabrics beneath. Elsewhere, Keburia applied oversized fringing across clothing and accessories, while Mithridate used exposed suspender clips, tulle and theatrical, feather-covered bodices to give its New Romantic references a similarly unfinished energy.

Underwear as outerwear

Underwear as outerwear is hardly a new concept, but this season it became one of LFW’s clearest tools for exploring exposure, vulnerability and the act of getting dressed.

Simone Rocha

At Simone Rocha, sheer floral dresses revealed red underwear, while briefs decorated with fabric roses were paired with a cream jacket and enormous floral collar. Rocha also exposed tailored trousers beneath dresses and left jackets open, making the styling feel deliberately personal and unfinished.

Elsewhere, Yuhan Wang layered lingerie beneath striped polo jersey, paired lace stockings with boxer shorts and stacked briefs in lace, check cotton and jersey. KNWLS built exposed bra details into corsets and lace camisoles, while Mithridate combined micro shorts, sheer hosiery, tutus and exposed suspender clips in its take on New Romantic excess.

The idea also crossed into the commercial end of the schedule: Marks & Spencer drew on its lingerie heritage for camisoles, lace bodies and underwear-as-outerwear looks in its first LFW runway show.

High-low skirts

The fitted blazer was not the only silhouette to revive the 2010s. The high-low skirt - cut shorter at the front and longer at the back - also returned, following an appearance at Michael Kors during New York Fashion Week.

In London, McQueen, Patrick McDowell and Mithridate each used the uneven hemline to bring movement and drama to skirts and dresses. The runway treatments ranged from relatively restrained asymmetric midis to more theatrical shapes, turning a once-ubiquitous partywear silhouette into one of the season’s more unexpected revivals.

Acidic green

At the opposite end of the palette from powder blue, acidic green cut through several of the week’s collections.

McQueen folded washed neon shades into a collection built on contrasts between religious imagery and underground London, while acid floral prints appeared across reflective organza. Roksanda moved from black, ivory and chocolate brown into lime green, turquoise, yellow and hot pink, often combining several brights in one look. The colour also appeared at Ahluwalia, Erdem and Patrick McDowell.

Chopova Lowena supplied the week’s most surreal interpretation: a tiny dog was carried down the bowling-alley runway in a bright green inflatable coat, extending SS27’s appetite for jolting colour beyond the human cast.