A Look Around London Design Festival and London Fashion Week Where Art and Design Collide

The city of London is back in action, its famous gray clouds have returned to the city’s skyline for fall coinciding with the London Design Festival and London Fashion Week this month and Frieze Week in October. In a unique crossover, the artists and designers all strived for softness and calm to counteract the hustle and bustle of London.

To kickstart the London Design Festival, French artist Vincent Dubourg opened his exhibition “Blue Weather” at Carpenters in West London last Thursday, presenting a series of designs including chairs, cabinets, tables, and an ottoman stool. Taken together they offer a meditative state on the global political turmoil.

Dubourg’s references are wide-ranging. The Stonehenge Armchair and Stonehenge Ottoman, for example, took their cues from Stonehenge in England with their mismatched shaped blocks to form the objects using bronze and upholstery. The most impressive pieces, however, were two bronze tabletops, Between Two Storms and Vibration Core, that Dubourg had manipulated so they appeared like Rubik’s cubes that had been shuffled and never put right.

“The composition and decomposition is my observation of society, where civilizations have appeared and disappeared,” Dubourg told ARTnews during a preview. When asked if the fragmented pieces of his work represent France’s current political landscape, the artist said that he wants to convey poetry and peace in the narrative arc of his work but getting to that stage also involves violence and war.

On the second floor of Carpenters, Dubourg toyed with water and fire, pushing the two elements against each other to create a body of work that acts as a call for hope: Vibration Core is covered in a hard grainy texture in a deep sea blue hue with blushes of bronze.

“I see blue as color of the energy of the body and it’s a way to reconnect with yourself. Our bodies are an architecture that’s hosting our spirit,” said Dubourg. He continued that contrast between water and fire in table pieces like Organic Table, Himself 1 and Himself 4, which are covered in a reflective white bronze. The artist used curved edges that mimic the shape of a lake for the tables, but with each piece there’s a volcanic eruption taking place to balance war and peace.

A 20-minute drive away, at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge, London Fashion Week’s hot ticket was the Harris Reed runway show. The London-based demi-couture brand celebrated five years with a sculptural collection that featured 10 white looks with erected shoulder pads and oval shapes. That sculptural feel was intentional as Reed looked to the larger-than-life-size bronzes of Henry Moore as a starting point for blowing up the shapes and proportions of his designs; the paintings of John Singer Sargent and Francis Bacon also informed the collection.

“The all-white [color palette] for me was about the collection looking like a blur and there was an essence of Bacon’s blur in his paintings, but juxtaposed with the [women painted by] Sargent or Degas,” the designer told ARTnews, adding that he visited the National Portrait Gallery as part of his research process for the collection. Reed also used white as a clean canvas to then decorate with lace and sequins depicting Japanese screens and natural landscapes.

This season London’s designers didn’t just take inspiration from the canvases, they made sure the venue of their shows added to the narrative. The Serbian-born designer Roksanda Ilinčić took over the National Theatre’s terrace, which was designed by Brutalist architect Denys Lasdun in 1976. Ilinčić’s show borrowed the delicate ropes of octogenarian textile artist Françoise Grossen weaving them into dresses, skirts, bags and belts.

“I’m from Serbia and Brutalist architecture is so important there, so it’s something very close to my heart. The collection symbiosis of something quite stark and Brutalist against something quite fragile and feminine” interested him, the designer told ARTnews backstage. “I wanted to take the epic scale of Françoise’s work in museums and put them into the everyday.”

For Erdem Moralioglu, the London-based Canadian designer, who has been showing his collections at the British Museum for the past few seasons, it was time for a move amid the chaos of the Bayeux Tapestry, which is currently on loan to the museum and has seen long lines queuing up to glimpse the textile during its short return to England.

For his Spring 2027 runway show, Moralioglu relocated to the Roundhouse, a performing arts and concert venue that has seen the likes of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. At each show the designer places a small photo book mapping out his muse for the season; this time he spotlit the 20th-century American aerialist and female impersonator Barbette, who was often photographed by Man Ray and served as one of Jean Cocteau’s muses. Moralioglu opened the show with a look that shared Barbette’s duality—the top half a crisp tuxedo shirt paired with a pair of bejeweled briefs.

“It was all about the tension between male and female. Androgyny in the purest sense,” he told journalists backstage.

At London’s historic courthouse Old Bailey, Simone Rocha’s collection was fit for a criminal. The Irish-born designer used Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ (1602), which is housed at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, as the foundation of her collection. The Italian painter’s dramatic tenebrist composition and rich hues were translated into shiny bomber jackets and cocoon dresses recalling the couture eras of Cristóbal Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent.

New Zealand–born, London-based designer Emilia Wickstead also picked up a paintbrush for her collection, looking for inspiration to the art and life and Lee Krasner, who is the subject of the exhibition “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, opening October 4. The Abstract Expressionist’s color palette—bright pink, eggshell blue, yellow—has been reinterpreted for a short film she presented at her store.

“I love the idea that I can control the narrative, build out the world and this persona throughout the collection,” Wickstead told ARTnews, pointing out that the tweed pieces look as if the pop of colors from Krasner’s work have been pulled out directly from her paintings. “When I think of Lee Krasner, I think of splashes of colors on canvas.”