Beneath silver paper chains and chrome balloons, an elder couple affectionately dance around two tables adorned with multi-tiered checkered and leopard print birthday cakes.
Mist whisps around them and across a runway lined with faded pub carpeting, creating a theatrical atmosphere of drama and storytelling – trademarks of his shows.
The couple disappear behind plush red velvet curtains, and I’ll Cry If I Want To – the collection’s title – begins to play.
What follows is a haunting soundtrack of songs meticulously chosen to create a cinematic dreamscape of a birthday party attended by the ancestors and ghosts of Raynor’s past.
Models drifted out in looks that felt half family photo album, half séance -grandmother’s houndstooth coats colliding with leopard-print shirts and twinsets that had been exhumed and reanimated, reknotted, resized, for one last dance under the strip lights.
The palette was lurid and hyper-saturated – everything gleamed with a retro, candy-coloured kitsch until the undertow of tragedy dragged the whole thing somewhere darker.
What began as childhood party games morphed into a nightmare family reunion. A barrister’s wraith stalked the runway, followed by a spectral figure whose story ended in destitution and infanticide, a reminder that history is never just nostalgia, but also scar tissue.
The genius of this season’s collection lies in this collision of the ghostly and the glamorous, woven together by uncanny threads. It wasn’t a collection so much as a séance – a hallucinatory ode to the extraordinary, ordinary lives that built Britain – and Raynor – from factory floor to family kitchen.
In the end, Raynor didn’t just present clothes—he conjured memory itself, dressed in shimmer and shadow. This was fashion as haunting, where the past refused to stay buried and the future strutted out wearing its ghosts proudly.
