Season after season, Flair Fashion’s collective runway at London Fashion Week functions less as a curated aesthetic statement and more as a platform for multiplicity: that the future of fashion is not one conversation but many happening simultaneously, each shaped by a different cultural memory, material instinct or creative urgency.
This season’s UNFOLD lineup of designers spans the world and its wonders: from couture built to carry collective grief to silk chiffon weighted with the generational memories of womanhood, these designers reveal a tender vulnerability through bold creative expression.
BELSIZE25 // @belsize25_official
Diana’s Bath takes one of Rome’s most privately beautiful rooms, the frescoed bathing chamber of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, and asks what it would feel like to wear it. Belsize25 answers in silk chiffon and fluid satin, building silhouettes that move the way water moves: with apparent effortlessness and considerable internal complexity.
The collection’s palette traces the Bagno di Diana’s signature blues through aquatic tones that shift across the body as the light shifts across a surface, while nude satin and delicate sequins in the evening looks suggest the luminous quality of skin seen through water. The fresco’s painted women become floating silhouettes.
The droplets left behind after bathing become shimmering surface detail. It is a collection about immersion, the particular intimacy of a privacy, and what it means to translate a painted moment into something worn on the body.
JULIENE COUTURE // @julienecouture
Some collections carry a weight that the world outside of artistry struggles to hold adequately. 20,000 Stories, One Memory is one of them.
Founded by mother and daughter Luljeta and Ylberine Lushtaku, Juliene Couture has built six looks that respond to the conflict-related sexual violence endured by women and girls during the 1998-1999 Kosovo War, the estimated 20,000 survivors recognised in public memory, and the unknown number beyond that.
The collection does not recreate violence. It gives form to its lasting presence: concealed silhouettes that gradually open toward visibility, chains and crystal fragments against tulle and silk, rubberised lycra sitting against soft fabrication in a language of contrasting textures that moves, deliberately, from burden toward dignity. The craftsmanship is exceptional and the intention behind it is serious. This is fashion functioning as collective memory, as an act of recognition for those the official record cannot fully name.
NESSE’S AURE // @nessesaure
Regrounded traces one of the most elemental of human experiences: forced departure from home, and the long journey back. The Kosovo War’s mass displacement sits at the collection’s centre, translated into a visual language of luggage, torn fabric, old letters, keys and stamps, objects that carry place memory when the place itself has been taken away.
Six looks follow a deliberate emotional sequence from separation through to reconnection, with roots, literal and symbolic, representing what persists even across distance and years. Nesse’s Aure works in corsetry and structured silhouette, and the tension between that structural rigidity and the fragile, memory-laden symbols woven through the collection gives it a quiet power. These are clothes about finding your way back to yourself.
HAYAL COUTURE // @hayalcouture_
The name means dream, and the collection begins there: in the gap between what was inherited and what can be imagined from it. Unseen Heritage moves between the cobblestone streets of Albania and the rain of London, carrying cultural memory across that distance not as fixed inheritance but as living material to be questioned and transformed.
At its centre is Oya, a delicate handmade craft passed down through generations of women, its intricate softness set in deliberate tension against leather, metal, eyelets and sculpted corsetry. The contrast is the argument: that heritage is neither fragile nor rigid but holds both qualities simultaneously, depending on whose hands it is in.
SSLB // @sslb_embroidery
SSLB works in hand embroidery with the patience that craft demands and the ambition that makes craft matter. This season’s nine looks extend an ongoing dialogue with nature by following the lotus through its full cycle: summer bloom, autumn fade, the sculptural beauty of the spent flower, and renewal.
The feitian embroidery style, rooted in classical Chinese visual tradition, captures movement and weightlessness in a medium that is inherently still, which is its own kind of paradox. The collection closes with the peacock, a symbol dense with meaning across multiple Eastern traditions, bringing vitality and splendour together in a final image that earns its drama. Nature, as SSLB repeatedly insists, is never still. Neither is the thread.
FOR POEM @forpoem.official
The Interbloom series takes Japanese graphic artist Hidetoshi Mito’s brushstroke aesthetic and asks what it would look like resolved into clothing. Founders Leah Fu and Pan work in quietly considered silhouettes, letting feather-trimmed lapels, crochet flower fringes and delicate fabrication carry the collection’s painterly sensibility without overstating it.
Traditional Chinese motifs run through the construction, but the result sits closer to wearable mark-making than to cultural citation: each look feels like a considered gesture rather than a complete statement, which is precisely the register the brand inhabits best. For a label whose name translates as poetry or beautiful things, the clothes are refreshingly unshowy about their beauty.
GG CHENN // @ggchenn__official
Gigi Chen’s debut collection does something that debut collections rarely manage: it arrives with a fully formed emotional logic. Embodied Memory explores femininity as inheritance, tracing the expectations of duty, care and deference passed from grandmother to mother to daughter across the experience of growing up between countries.
Sheer layers and rigid metal frames inspired by her grandmother’s jewellery build a recurring dialogue between softness and structural constraint, between what is given gently and what is imposed. The generational weight is present in the materials themselves, each garment carrying traces of a history that was not chosen but was nonetheless formative. For a first collection, this is work of unusual clarity and genuine feeling.
