OUTSIDE THE SHOWS
*That’s London Fashion Week AW26
written LE MILE
Beyond the curated cadence of catwalks and official showrooms, London Fashion Week AW26 played out on its streets, in the lively interstices between presentations and the unchoreographed gestures of a city steeped in creative flux. This season, the capital’s mood carried equal parts resilience and reinvention. Established houses revisited heritage with renewed focus, emerging voices amplified cultural narratives, and design vocabularies were re read through lenses of inclusivity, texture, and urban poise.
In the in-between moments — arriving guests, impromptu clusters at side streets, front-row departures and post-show conversations — London’s style set assembled its own dialect of expression. Classic British tailoring appeared alongside bold colour juxtapositions; sculptural coats and ballet-flat combos shared pavements with purposeful layering, kitsch accoutrements, and subcultural inflections. Rain-ready outerwear, unexpected colour duos and inventive accessories punctuated everyday movement, revealing how personal style reflects and disrupts the season’s formal narratives.
Captured by Ian Kobylanski in the heart of London’s fashion-week flux, Outside the Shows turns its gaze toward the characters who populate these spontaneous spaces — individual storytellers forging distinctive looks from the season’s fragments. Seen and documented across late winter streets and show day thoroughfares, the series traces style in motion, observing how fashion is performed, adjusted and recalibrated beyond the frame of the runway.
all visuals
(c) IAN KOBYLANSKI
London Fashion Week FW26, February 2026
