Joan Collins gave Marks and Spencer at London Fashion Week a brisk front-row verdict: the coats were “very chic”. The retailer’s first ever London Fashion Week catwalk show ran at the Design Museum on Friday, and the clothes were on sale as the show began.
Half of the pieces were priced under £50, while the most expensive item was a leather coat at £450. Maddy Evans, the M&S womenswear director, said the style message was “fashion with a small f, not a capital F” and summed up the chain’s position bluntly: “Zara are the cutting edge of fashion, and we are fashion for everybody.”
310 Guests At Design Museum
The show was held for 310 guests, with Kemi Badenoch set to snap up a classic black tuxedo jacket and Joan Collins eyeing an ivory evening dress with caped shoulders. Ian Wright and Jamie Carragher were among the guests, while Lennon Gallagher wore a classic grey office suit from the menswear line.
That guest list and casting did some of the commercial work for the brand. Models of a broad range of ages and body sizes were chosen to reflect M&S’s 23 million customers, so the runway looked less like a closed fashion-week circuit and more like a retail pitch aimed at people who actually shop the label.
Sharp Kilts And Slouchy Denim
The collection leaned on sharp kilts rather than flouncy tiered skirts, low-rise slouchy denim instead of mom jeans, and a twinset reworked as a cardigan over a knitted camisole. There was also a sage-green lace two-piece set that nodded to the history of M&S lingerie, plus faux fur stoles and Charli xcx-adjacent sunglasses.
There were sharper edges too: a very short skirt and the odd semi-visible nipple pushed the presentation beyond plain high-street merchandising. The show was pitched as fashion for everyone, but its catwalk styling still used the kind of theatre that can sit far from everyday shopping.
Fashion For Everybody
Second place in style perception, behind Zara, is the more important scoreboard here. Before Friday, M&S had already built momentum with suede loafers that could pass for Saint Laurent and a sellout collaboration with Bella Freud, and this runway debut pushes that run into a higher-visibility format.
Smoked salmon finger sandwiches and champagne on silver trays after the show signaled the brand’s entry into fashion-week manners as much as fashion-week clothes. The real test is whether the debut turns browser traffic into basket adds; the sale started on Friday, so the first purchasing signal arrives in the immediate sell-through, not the applause.
