‘REMEMBER’
“Memory is the only luxury that cannot be replicated. And the freedom to remember is the freedom to remain yourself.”
Giuseppe Iaciofano, Creative Director, POET-LAB
Staged in a raw, open-air London courtyard, the stone and brick backdrop absorbed POET-LAB’s S27 collection into something that felt less like a runway show and more like an act of excavation.
Remember, built around the personal history of the label’s muse Elton Ilirjani and their Albanian roots, asked a question that ran through every garment: what does it mean to carry where you come from in your body?
The collection’s visual language drew from Albania’s industrial architecture, brutalist forms and raw geometry translated into clothing with real structural ambition. Oversized asymmetric tailoring sat against fluid, draped volumes, the tension between rigidity and softness giving the show its emotional charge. Where the construction was hard, the drape softened it. Where a silhouette opened up, the tailoring held it in place. The dialogue between strength and vulnerability, which has been consistent across POET-LAB’s previous work, felt more fully realised here than in any prior season.
The palette was largely restrained: blacks, whites and silver carrying most of the visual weight, which had the effect of pushing attention toward proportion and construction rather than colour. A white oversized shirt, draped and knotted across one shoulder and worn with a metallic pleated skirt and a textured black chain bag, was among the most precisely judged looks of the show. The details mattered: spiked nail accessories, wet-slicked hair and a recurring use of sheer lace built across multiple looks reinforced a mood that was cool and studied without tipping into coldness.
The collection’s most arresting moments came from its use of silver tinsel-like fringing, worn in two very different registers. One moment it formed a voluminous, head-to-toe cocoon, theatrical and almost totemic in its scale. In another, clusters of the same material were applied to a sheer mesh skirt and crop construction, architectural and precise. The material reads differently each time, sometimes as armour, sometimes as celebration, which is exactly the kind of productive ambiguity good fashion should sustain.
Elton Ilirjani’s presence at the centre of the collection gave it a personal gravity that collections built purely on concept rarely achieve.
As a collection, Remember was an argument that the fluidity of memory, carried forward rather than looked back upon as a singular structured form, is both a design principle and a form of identity.
Images: @MARCUSHARTELT
