MOTHERHOOD, MEMORY, SUSTAINABILITY
There is a particular kind of intimacy that runs through the best fashion presentations, the sense that you have been let into something private rather than merely shown something beautiful. ANCIELA’s SS27 show at Regent Quarter achieved exactly that, and it did so by asking a question that felt genuinely urgent: what do we owe the people, and the planet, that made us?
Founded by Colombian-Chilean designer Jennifer Droguett Espinosa in 2019, ANCIELA has always operated at the intersection of fashion and something harder to name, somewhere between memory, folklore and ecological conscience. For SS27, she turned to the mother-daughter relationship as her central metaphor, that charged, layered bond defined equally by tenderness and tension, by knowledge passed down and wounds carried forward. The collection mapped that complexity onto our relationship with the natural world, and the result was fashion that felt like it meant something.
The clothes themselves were quietly radical. Adjustable panels and detachable sleeves allowed silhouettes to shift and transform across the body, garments that adapted to movement rather than demanding the wearer conform to them. Layers tied, knotted and interconnected, producing a fluid, living quality that felt less like dressing than becoming. The tailoring had real precision beneath all that softness, which is the ANCIELA signature: rigour disguised as instinct.
The materials told their own story. Vintage silk donated by artist Allegra Hicks and rescued wool suiting from sustainable fashion pioneer Orsola de Castro sat alongside next-generation innovations that felt genuinely new. AlgaFila, a fibre derived from seaweed, air and nanotechnology, gave the knitwear and padded pieces a weightlessness that belied their warmth. Savigne by Planet of the Grapes, a plant-based leather alternative pressed from the skins, stalks and seeds left over from winemaking and sourced from organic vineyards in Provence, produced accessories with a quiet, earthy elegance. Abstract fern motifs, inspired by the layered darkness of deep forest, were rendered in a black bio-based pigment developed by synthetic biology platform Octarine. Each material collaboration felt considered rather than performative, a genuine extension of the collection’s ideas about inheritance, regeneration and the exchange of knowledge across generations.
The presentation extended well beyond the runway. A live performance directed by filmmaker Marie Lanna with artist Luzmira Zerpa moved through three acts exploring ancestry, transformation and regeneration, with guests invited not merely to watch but to contribute, becoming part of the work rather than its audience. An accompanying installation allowed direct engagement with the material innovations, closing the distance between idea and object in a way that conventional shows rarely attempt.
In a season that has seen spectacle prioritised over substance in too many places, ANCIELA offered something more considered: a collection that wears its ethics as lightly and as beautifully as it wears its seaweed fibre and grape-skin leather, and asks you, gently but insistently, to think about what fashion is actually for.
Photography: Marcus Hartelt
