Pretty Is Getting Weird Again

London’s best Spring 2027 collections didn’t choose between romance and strangeness. They gave us flowers, lace, lingerie then made sure something about them felt slightly wrong

For a while, fashion became remarkably good at explaining itself in a single word. Minimalist. Romantic. Gothic. Sexy. Ladylike. Bohemian. Quiet. Each aesthetic arrived with its own recognizable wardrobe, references and increasingly its own social-media identity. You could choose the woman you wanted to be, learn her palette, buy her shoes and arrange the appropriate objects around her. Even rebellion became remarkably well organized.

London spent much of Spring 2027 making those distinctions considerably less useful. Some of the week’s most compelling collections were undeniably beautiful, but their beauty rarely arrived intact. Simone Rocha gave romantic dresses the appearance of having been touched, crushed or interrupted. KNWLS constructed femininity around lingerie that seemed to be slipping away from the body. Roksanda stretched elegant clothes into sculptural proportions and allowed braids, threads and painterly surfaces to interfere with their polish. Bora Aksu began with unabashed prettiness and gradually introduced something darker beneath it, while McQueen put angelic tailoring, corsetry and eveningwear somewhere between a chapel and a rave. London did not reject prettiness. It simply seemed suspicious of anything pretty that behaved too well.

At Simone Rocha, that tension was particularly precise. Rocha had been looking at the rediscovery of Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, which spent decades hanging misattributed in a Dublin Jesuit house before its true authorship was recognised in 1990. Rather than translating the painting into a straightforward historical narrative, she became interested in the collision between the extraordinary and the ordinary, then carried that contradiction into the clothes. Rose embellishments framed velvet dresses and leather coats, organza slips seemed muddled around the body, and voluminous taffeta forms could be bent and manipulated by the wearer. Familiar outerwear appeared among all that magnificence, including a scarlet Harrington and practical-looking anoraks whose surfaces and proportions prevented them from remaining entirely ordinary.

The important idea was not romance alone but romance disturbed. Rocha’s flowers did not sit politely where decoration was expected to sit. Her dresses appeared handled rather than perfected, and she described wanting the collection to feel physically pushed and touched. That small degree of interference is what kept all the taffeta, organza, roses and volume from becoming sweetness. The clothes could be beautiful without becoming precious.

KNWLS approached the same problem from the opposite end of femininity. Where Rocha began with romance, Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault began with undress. A corseted camisole appeared with a sheer skirt suspended from garter clips over cotton briefs. Powder-blue jersey twisted around the body to expose lace-trimmed underwear underneath. A dusty rose satin slip was wrapped with jersey that exposed the stomach, while dresses assembled from lingerie pieces were attached to near-invisible tulle so that they appeared to be falling away from the wearer. Even a blush and peach lace gown seemed to peel open across the body rather than simply sit upon it.

None of this is particularly surprising territory for KNWLS. The label has spent a decade examining a femininity that is sexy without being polished into conventional bombshell glamour. What felt particularly relevant this season was the sense that the clothes had been caught somewhere between getting dressed and getting undressed. Lingerie was no longer merely something exposed beneath clothing; it became part of the architecture of clothing itself. Femininity looked less like a finished performance and more like something being assembled in public.

Roksanda offered another version of the same tension, beginning not with romance or sexuality but elegance. Roksanda Ilinčić’s clothes have always understood the pleasure of color and volume, but Spring 2027 allowed those familiar signatures to become slightly stranger. Inspired in part by the monumental knotted and braided work of textile artist Françoise Grossen, braids travelled down dresses, loose threads escaped from surfaces and chunky ropes pulled tailoring into new shapes. Silk scarves printed with Ilinčić’s own paintings of women’s faces became tunics and dresses, while sculptural skirts expanded around the hips and monumental gowns transformed the body into something closer to an abstract form.

What made it work was that none of this destroyed the elegance underneath. Roksanda still gave us beautifully cut tailoring, fluid silk, extraordinary color and clothes intended to make women feel magnificent. The strangeness arrived through proportion and interruption: a familiar silhouette pushed wider than expected, a braid running like a spine down an otherwise elegant gown, threads deliberately left trailing, an enormous shape appearing where conventional ideas of flattering the body might have demanded restraint. Even the collection’s more everyday clothes carried small disruptions, whether through jutting sleeves, unexpected color combinations or accessories doing considerably more work than decoration.

Bora Aksu began somewhere almost aggressively pretty. Models arrived through the Victorian church of St Cyprian’s in puff sleeves, lace-trimmed ruffles and broderie anglaise, looking at first like inhabitants of an unusually romantic pastoral fantasy. Then the picture began to shift. Trench coats and tailoring interrupted the softness, bib-like harnesses appeared over delicate clothes, apron ties and tightly cinched sashes complicated the silhouettes, and the palette eventually descended into deep oxblood. Exposed corsetry emerged beneath dresses while strands of yarn crept across bodies like roots. The prettiness remained visible throughout; Aksu simply refused to let it remain innocent.

That distinction is important. Aksu has never needed femininity to mean sweetness, and Spring 2027 demonstrated how little intervention it can take to destabilise something beautiful. Lace becomes more interesting beside a harness. A pastoral dress changes character when its corsetry is exposed. A ruffle feels different once the palette turns almost Gothic. Rather than abandoning romantic dressing, Aksu introduced just enough darkness to prevent it becoming nostalgic. It is perhaps the most wearable version of the idea London kept returning to this season: pretty does not have to stop being pretty in order to become strange.

McQueen pushed the same broader idea toward aggression. Seán McGirr’s London homecoming placed Savile Row tailoring, religious imagery, corsetry and eveningwear against the memory of rave culture. Angelic shoulders appeared alongside hair referencing Keith Flint, formal clothes encountered bondage-like collars, harnesses and leather, while the setting of Lincoln’s Inn Chapel made the friction between ceremony and club culture impossible to miss. There were diaphanous dresses and enormous evening silhouettes, but their beauty existed beside something darker and harder.

Put these collections beside one another and London’s proposition becomes clearer. This was not a return to romance in the conventional trend-forecasting sense. It would be easy to photograph the lace, flowers, lingerie, sculptural dresses and dramatic gowns and announce that femininity is back, as though it had temporarily gone somewhere. The more interesting shift is in what designers are doing to femininity once they have it in their hands.

They are messing it up, but not for the sake of destroying it. Rocha crushes the rose without losing its romance. KNWLS lets the slip dress come apart without surrendering its sensuality. Roksanda distorts elegance without sacrificing beauty. Aksu lets darkness creep into the pastoral fantasy. McQueen puts the angel in a harness and sends her dancing. The beauty survives every intervention. In many cases, it becomes more convincing because of it.

Quiet luxury was perhaps the ultimate expression of aesthetic clarity. It offered a remarkably coherent idea of taste built from excellent materials, controlled palettes, restrained styling and clothes whose sophistication depended partly upon refusing obvious spectacle. Its influence is not disappearing, nor should it. But fashion rarely tolerates a single definition of sophistication indefinitely. The eye eventually begins asking for interference.

London provided plenty of it.

That does not mean maximalism has replaced minimalism, or that everyone will suddenly spend Spring 2027 wearing sculptural gowns and exposed corsetry to buy coffee. The useful takeaway is smaller and considerably easier to wear. The most interesting styling increasingly happens when something interrupts the obvious conclusion of an outfit. A romantic dress does not necessarily need the romantic shoe. Lingerie does not need to remain delicate. Elegance can tolerate an awkward proportion. A flower can become strange through scale or placement. Eveningwear can sit beside something sporty, severe or slightly ugly. The goal is not chaos for its own sake, but tension.

It also explains why London’s best collections this season felt so alive. They allowed women to be beautiful without requiring beauty to be the end of the conversation. Femininity could be romantic and dishevelled, seductive and imperfect, elegant and peculiar, delicate and aggressive. The categories stopped behaving as opposites.

That freedom may be one of London’s most persistent contributions to fashion. The city has never been particularly interested in leaving good taste alone. Punk dirtied it, the New Romantics overdressed it, rave culture sweated through it, and generations of designers have continued finding pleasure in whatever happens when something proper encounters something that isn’t.

Spring 2027 simply found a particularly appealing version of the formula. Fashion can have the lace back. It can have the flowers, lingerie and beautiful dresses too. It can be romantic again, and sexy, and feminine, and even unapologetically pretty. It just looks considerably better when something about it is a little strange.