Adam Raillard: From bedroom to London fashion week at 19 years old. SøEdited Team Article: Kellie Neilson SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe At 19, Adam is already moving at a pace that would exhaust most established designers. In the space of months, he has gone from teaching himself how to sew in his bedroom to presenting two runway shows at London Fashion Week, building a distinct visual identity and laying the foundations for his streetwear brand, The Kong Is Dead. For Adam, though, this still feels like the beginning. “This year has been really cool because I can actually see how the whole brand has been building itself brick by brick,” he says. “From learning how to make a pair of trousers to doing two shows in six months, it’s pretty crazy.” Those early months were about experimentation: understanding his own taste, developing a brand identity and learning what worked through trial and error. Now, his focus is shifting towards something more commercial. All whilst in his 3rd year at London College of Fashion. “This year is going to be more business-focused,” he explains. “Actually getting the clothes out to people, starting to sell and having a proper ready-to-wear collection.” At the moment, Adam still makes much of the clothing himself, working from his room with a sewing machine. It is a setup that has helped shape the brand, but one he knows cannot last forever. “The way I work now isn’t exactly scalable. The goal is to have production with a manufacturer, while I make the designs, and then we can ship it out like a normal brand would.” The point at which The Kong Is Dead began to feel less like an experiment and more like a genuine career came when Adam committed financially to his first runway show- Minus one. “When I sent the money, I thought, now this is getting serious,” he remembers. “I’m pretty deep into the business now. I have to make it work.”
That investment also changed the way he thinks. Every pound spent on fabric, content or a show now comes with a bigger question: could that money work harder somewhere else? “I don’t go towards things head-on anymore. I really think about the options and try to be much more strategic.” His second runway show- Wounds in Blue, tested that mindset further. Adam was in Korea when he received a call asking if he could take part, leaving him with only a few weeks to prepare. With no certainty that the show would even happen, he began sketching the collection during the flight. “I basically drew up the whole collection on vomit bags with a broken Sharpie on the plane,” he laughs. Once confirmed, the pressure intensified. He had to pull together a team, source shoes, create a soundtrack and adapt existing pieces for the runway. Then, just two days before the show, another model became available. “I had to make a seventh look in two days,” he says. “It was very, very intense.” The experience taught him that strong individual looks are not enough. For his next collection, Adam wants a clearer story running from beginning to end. “I want to have a proper story throughout the looks instead of visually strong looks that are super different from one another.” That sense of impact is central to The Kong Is Dead. Oversized silhouettes, exaggerated proportions and statement pieces are designed to create presence rather than quietly blend in. Adam describes the feeling he wants to create in far more emotional terms. “I want someone to get goosebumps looking at themselves in the mirror. Like, ‘I can look like that. I can feel this way.’”
His own connection to clothes started early. He remembers the confidence of wearing a new pair of Jordans to school and feeling completely transformed. “That’s what I want to give people. Clothes that they can feel like a superhero in.” Despite two runway shows, growing recognition and the momentum surrounding the brand, Adam is reluctant to call himself successful yet. “From the outside, it looks glamorous; models, people clapping , but I’m very far away from considering myself successful because I don’t live off my brand,” he says. “When I can live off it, then I’ll consider myself successful.” For now, ambition remains the driving force. The next step is a small ready-to-wear release, potentially beginning with around 50 hoodies before scaling upwards. Further ahead, Adam imagines physical stores in cities such as London, Paris and New York. He is determined to make The Kong is Dead a household name in Streetwear- sitting alongside Trapstar, Cortiez and Supreme. Adam also sees his clothing as a credible choice for Music artists looking to lead the way with a unique style- not just following the mass production of the other brands. But perhaps the most revealing part of his ambition is not where he wants the brand to end up, but his determination to stay with it long enough to find out. When asked what his future self might be proudest of, his answer is simple. “Not giving up.” The Kong Is Dead may already have reached the runway, but in Adam’s eyes, the real story is only just beginning. The SoEdited team agree- The Kong is Dead is set to become the Streetwear brand of choice. Images courtesy of @flair.fashionofficial
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SøEdited Team Article: Kellie Neilson SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe Photography: Oscar Foster-Kane For his London Fashion Week debut, Taylor Thompson turns 5000’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection into a meditation on belonging, inheritance and the difficult freedom of becoming someone new. There are certain questions that sound simple until you actually have to answer them. For Taylor Thompson, founder and designer of 5000, one of them was: What is your definition of home? His answer came through Gil Scott-Heron: “Home is where the hatred is.” It is an uneasy place from which to begin a fashion collection, but discomfort is precisely where 5000’s Spring/Summer 2027 story takes shape. Presented during London Fashion Week, Thompson’s latest work approaches home not as a sentimental fixed point, but as something unstable and a place of shelter and confinement, belonging and exclusion, love and violence, inheritance and burden. For Thompson, the question has become newly personal. Having recently relocated from Oakland, California, to London as Designer in Residence at the Paul Smith Foundation. Thompson’s arrival in London carries institutional significance too. His first London Fashion Week presentation arrives during a period of geographic and creative displacement. Oakland is the place that formed him. London is the place he has chosen. Somewhere between the two, 5000 asks whether home is something we inherit, something we leave behind, or something we have to construct for ourselves. That tension runs through the intellectual framework of the collection.
Three works sit at its centre: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. Together, they form an unlikely but coherent emotional architecture for the season. From de Beauvoir comes the question of freedom: how free can we really be when our lives begin inside circumstances we never chose? From Scott-Heron comes escape: what happens when the place we return to is also the place capable of hurting us? And from Baldwin comes redemption, with home tied intimately to faith, family, shame, history and the possibility of transformation. For Thompson, these ideas are less academic references than different routes into the same problem. We are shaped by where we come from, but we are not necessarily condemned to remain there — geographically, emotionally or psychologically. That is where 5000’s interest in becoming begins.
HOME, RECONSIDERED Fashion has always been preoccupied with reinvention. A new season proposes a new silhouette, a new identity, a new way of presenting oneself to the world. But 5000 pushes at a more difficult question: what has to happen internally before transformation can actually take place? Leaving home does not automatically free us from it. Memories travel. So do habits, family histories, belief systems and wounds. Distance can change our relationship to the place we came from without severing it completely. Thompson’s move from Oakland to London becomes, in this sense, more than biography. It becomes a lens through which the collection examines the distance between origin and identity. Is London home because Thompson has chosen it? Does Oakland remain home because it shaped him? Can a person belong simultaneously to the place they left and the person they are becoming somewhere else? 5000 resists giving a clean answer. Instead, Spring/Summer 2027 moves through a series of contradictions: leaving and returning, freedom and responsibility, inheritance and reinvention. Home can be the place that gives us language, memory and identity. It can also become the thing against which we define ourselves. Freedom, in Thompson’s world, does not necessarily mean erasure. It may require confrontation.
SOUND AS GEOGRAPHY That idea extends beyond clothing. The collection’s London presentation takes place at 180 Studios, inside the Devon Ojas Listening Room, with music curated by Zakia Sewell. Sound is not treated as atmosphere alone, but as another form of memory- a way of transporting one place into another. It is an especially fitting dimension for a collection whose roots reach back to Thompson’s first encounters with London. Around 2013, during his first trip to the city, Thompson found Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man in a Soho record shop. He already knew “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” but discovering the album physically, in London, transformed it into something more personal. The record became attached to place. Years later, returning to Scott-Heron for his London Fashion Week debut creates an unexpected loop: London is no longer simply the city in which Thompson once discovered an album. It is now the city in which that album helps him interrogate his own relationship to home. Music becomes archive and map simultaneously. A record can locate us in a room, a city, a period of our lives. It can travel with us long after the geography itself has disappeared. In 5000’s universe, sound becomes evidence that home does not always need walls. Sometimes it is stored inside memory. Taylor Thompson is the recipient of the inaguaral Paul Smith's Foundation x CFDA Designer-in-Residence, Thompson has recieved complimentary studio space by Projekt, as well as mentoring from industry leaders and business planning training, in the center of London after being chosen by a panel of industry leaders. He will be joining the second cohort of 6 UK-based designers; Harri, Joyce Bao, Renata Brenha, Petra Fagerstrom, Masha Popova and Eden Tan. All designers were chosen by their idiosyncratic perspective, design atheistic, focused vision and intent for the program.
Credits: Public Relations: Lindsey Solomon- Linsey media 5000 Team: Rodrigo Strazds Shannae Plummer Yana Elif Dede Founder and Director: Taylor Thompson PAUL SMITH FOUNDATION @paulsmithsfoundation Lookbook Photographer: Oscar Foster-Kane
SøEdited Team Article by: Astrid Kearney SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe Photography: Rebecca Maynes AGRO Studio: GLASS BODY With Glass Body, their Spring/Summer 2027 collection, George Oxby and Angus Cockram took London Fashion Week below ground and showed that a bespoke atelier can hold its own on the official schedule. Some labels arrive fully formed. AGRO Studio unfolded slowly, seam by patient seam. George Oxby and Angus Cockram founded the brand in 2021 as a bespoke atelier, an intimate studio where pieces were made first for themselves, then for a growing circle drawn into their world. Both graduates of London College of Fashion, they came to their craft through years spent in its many rooms, in styling, tailoring and set work, embracing every opportunity that came their way, from dressing musicians to creating garments for film. That generosity of spirit gave AGRO its character: romantic yet grungy, irreverent yet fiercely crafted. It also earned them a following among pop's boldest names, with Charli XCX among those who have turned to the studio for custom pieces. Their language is one of collision. Couture gowns meet British school shirting, leather meets tulle, and shearling meets technical fabric. Beneath the provocation sits real handwork: traditional corsetry, leather craft, and beading done by hand in the studio. It is chaos, but chaos that has been properly fitted. For Spring/Summer 2027, the duo made their solo debut on the official London Fashion Week calendar, opening the season. Glass Body was shown at Collins Music Hall, a subterranean brutalist space whose severe lines framed the clothes like a stage set. The setting suited a collection concerned with structure, one that took the proportions we think we know and quietly rebuilt them.
Menswear and womenswear moved through the space as a single conversation. References travelled freely across centuries, setting the discipline of historical dress against the ease of 1980s sportswear, each borrowing from the other until neither was quite itself. The result read as a fantasy stitched together from many wardrobes: part archive, part street, wholly AGRO. What made Glass Body persuasive was its sense of control. The title hints at fragility and at a body on display, yet the clothes carried conviction. A year on from their first London catwalk with Fashion Scout, Oxby and Cockram now show like a house that knows exactly who it is dressing, and why. Beauty Beneath the concrete, the faces glowed. Skin was prepared with Weleda for a lit-from-within radiance, luminous and alive, as though each model carried her own small source of light down into the dark. Around the eyes, violet was washed on like dusk settling over glass, then glazed so it caught every flicker of the room. The lips followed the same tender logic: a whisper of purple, sealed beneath a high, wet gloss. The effect was fragile and precise at once, beauty that seemed to shimmer on the surface of the body, as the collection's title promised.The hair was pure romance, held in perfect discipline. For the women, it was swept back from the face, sleek and elegant at the crown, before loosening at the nape into deep Pre-Raphaelite waves that fell like something from a painted dream. The men wore theirs slicked back too, the lengths left free to settle into waves of their own. Every line was tailored and precise, and quietly beautiful, as carefully cut as the clothes themselves. 
CREDITS Styling: @luke_jefferson_day Makeup Designer: andrewgallimakeup @weledauk @brandstandcomms Lead Hair: @adamreedhair
SøEdited Team Article by: Astrid Kearney SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe Photography: Rebecca Maynes For Spring/Summer 2027, Susan Fang carried her weightless world to the water's edge at the Barbican, spinning a story of love, fantasy and the dreams we build around one another. Some designers make clothes. Susan Fang makes atmospheres. Born in China and a graduate of Central Saint Martins, she founded her label in 2017 and has spent the years since refining a language entirely her own: garments that seem to float, drift and breathe, as if gravity had been politely asked to step aside. Moving between London and Shanghai, she has become one of the city's most quietly enchanting voices. This season, her muse was M. Butterfly, the celebrated tale of a French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer, a love story woven from illusion. Fang, who is designing costumes for a new production at La Monnaie / De Munt in Brussels next spring, was drawn to its tender paradox: that something born of fantasy might still hold real love. She called the collection Air.Illusion. The setting was a first. Fang staged her show beside the lake at the Barbican, the first fashion show ever held there, with towers of mirrored silver balloons rising around the runway and models crossing the water on stepping stones. Against the Brutalist stone, the effect was otherworldly, softness set against concrete, reflection against weight.
The show opened in red, a dress alive with fluttering floral appliqués, the colour of seduction and of a bond too strong to break. From there, the collection unfolded through transparency and play. Blue-and-white florals and porcelain-inspired details nodded to Chinese ceramics, while layers of sheer fabric shifted between revealing and concealing. A qipao fell in long beaded strands, broken porcelain was hand-painted into new life, and petal-like earrings were made in collaboration with a Beijing jade master. Tradition met the future with ease. Pieces made on a 3D printer sat beside embroidery and handwork, never replacing it, and a new Crocs collaboration, Echo Blume, bloomed with metallic flowers grown from Fang's signature fractal system. It was a gentle reminder that technology, in thoughtful hands, can still make something wondrous. Beauty The skin was fresh and dewy, with the soft, untouched glow of a child's face after a morning spent outdoors. Nothing sat heavily; the complexion simply seemed to breathe. On the lips, the faintest strawberry kiss, a whisper of natural rosiness, as though colour had risen there on its own after an afternoon of play. It was innocence rendered in the lightest of touches, the kind of beauty you notice only when you look twice. The hair held a quiet fragility. Delicate plaits wound across the front and sides of the head, woven with care yet left gently undone, with small strands escaping here and there as if a child had braided them mid-game and run off to play. Elsewhere, the crown became a place of treasure: fragments of blue-and-white crockery set into the hair like pieces of a broken dream, carrying the collection's porcelain story from the clothes to the head. It was romantic and a little wistful, beauty that felt found rather than made, and all the more precious for its imperfections. 
 CREDITS PR: @purplepr Styling: @victoiresimonney Makeup Designer: @erngrn Hair Lead: @annacofone @authenticconcept Casting: @emileastrom
SøEdited Team Article by: Astrid Kearney SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe At London Fashion Week, the German-born designer of Iranian heritage stopped being silent about where she comes from. For years, Sarah Regensburger said little about her Iranian family, fearing it would cost her acceptance. On the opening day of London Fashion Week, she said it all. Diaspora: The Art of Belonging, her Spring/Summer 2027 collection, asks what it means to belong to two worlds and be fully accepted in neither. A Sufi dance opened the show, and DJ Kiki's soundtrack carried the voices of young women in Baluchistan answering one question: what does freedom mean to you? With each look British elements were entwined with Persian. British tartan suiting arrived hand-stitched with Iranian coins. Vegan banana leather jackets carried paisley embroidery and Baluchi needlework made by young women in Baluchistan, through the charity Loug Chokan. Catsuits drew on Persian poetry, one model carried a book of Hafez, mirror work echoed Tehran's Golestan Palace, and Bandari masks were styled over tailoring. Everything, as always with this house, was vegan with perfect circularity. "It became a clash of cultures," Regensburger said, "and that clash is exactly what the show celebrates."
Backstage ,the beauty answered in kind. Skin was luxe and velvety, eyes smouldering with a tight black line and lashes were rich and smouldered. Lips were bathed in a swathe of henna, and cheeks bloomed from the apples, bleeding down towards the jawline. Hair was bound with silks and embroidery ,tied plaited ,looped and held close, with rawness and reverence. Re styling the looks Rebekah Roy said “I understand the world Sarah wants to build. The emotion ,the energy, the music , the casting and the movement all come together in one moment on the catwalk to bring it to life’ The heart of the collection is its smallest detail. In Persian script, the numeral five, panj, resembles an upside-down heart. Her grandmother brought her coins bearing it as a child; it now names her new sub-brand, PANJ. The final T-shirt carried the symbol on the front and 1962, her mother's birth year, in Farsi on the back. At the finish Regensburger walked out with her mother, both in matching leaf-print suits. A tender close, less a bow than an embrace. "This is my own story of never fully fitting into one culture," she said, "and finding a home in the in between."
Credits: Stylist: Rekekah Roy rebekahroy_ Show PR: Aristos Patsalidis 1080p24 Makeup Designer: Astrid Kearney @astridkearneymakeup @ardellbeauty_uk Henna: @huqthat Hair Lead: Chrystoph Marten @chrystophmarten @beautickofficall Backstage Beauty photography: Astrid Kearney @astridkearneymakeup Show Photography: Lauren March @laurenmarchphotography |
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