UK Fashion News: British Fashion Council takes Fashion Britain beyond London with nationwide September programme

The British Fashion Council (BFC) is taking its fashion agenda beyond London this September with the launch of Fashion Britain, a nationwide initiative designed to broaden participation in the UK fashion industry and strengthen regional creative economies. 

The move comes against the backdrop of a wider political push to rebalance economic and cultural activity beyond the capital, following the Prime Minister's announcement earlier this summer of plans to establish a new government base in Manchester, dubbed “No10 North”. In this context, the BFC's decision to take fashion into cities and creative communities across the UK reflects a growing recognition that the country's creative and economic potential extends well beyond London.

UK long-standing retailer Marks & Spencer will unveil its debut London Fashion Week (LFW) collection to a global audience in September 2026, as it celebrates 100 years in the fashion industry. Image: Marks and Spencer Inc.

The Fashion Britain programme will bring more than 1,000 cultural events and experiences to cities across the UK, including London, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Bristol, as well as Edinburgh and Dundee in Scotland. The initiative forms part of the BFC's new BFC 2030: Access, Creativity and Growth strategy and is intended to decentralise fashion by creating greater opportunities for designers, creatives, businesses, educators and audiences outside London.

Rather than positioning London and the capital's established fashion infrastructure as the sole centre of British fashion, Fashion Britain seeks to connect the country's different creative communities and highlight the contribution of regional talent to the industry's cultural and commercial landscape.

The September programme will combine public designer conversations, exhibitions, cultural collaborations, retail activations, live performances and other fashion-related experiences. More than 100 BFC designer members are involved alongside cultural institutions, retailers and other partners, underlining the Council's intention to make fashion a more accessible and geographically representative industry.

A central element will be the National Designer Panel Series, developed in partnership with ELLE UK. The series will bring designers and industry figures into direct conversation with audiences in different cities, providing insights into creative careers, regional identity and the development of fashion businesses.

Among the announced panels are a conversation between Nicholas Daley and Charles Jeffrey at V&A Dundee, an appearance by Aitor Throup at Manchester Art Gallery, and a London panel featuring Saul Nash, Clio Peppiatt and Luke Derrick at the National Gallery. In Liverpool, designers Patrick McDowell and Talia Byre will discuss their connections to the region and their creative journeys at the Walker Art Gallery.

The initiative represents a significant shift in the BFC's role. Announcing Fashion Britain in July, BFC Chief Executive Laura Weir said that participation in British fashion had for too long been concentrated in too few places. She described the initiative as a move towards recognising British creativity as a national asset and creating opportunities "wherever it exists" across the country.

Building the industry's regional infrastructure

For the fashion industry, the significance of Fashion Britain extends beyond a month of public events. The BFC says the longer-term objective is to strengthen local creative economies, develop the next generation of talent and establish pathways through which designers and creatives can build sustainable careers in their own cities.

This approach also reflects a broader effort by the Council to combine talent development with commercial resilience. Its recent programme of financial and business support has included the BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund, which awarded London-based designer Bianca Saunders £150,000 in June, alongside bespoke business mentoring and professional services. Saunders' label, launched after her graduation from the Royal College of Art in 2017, is recognised for its reinterpretation of menswear through a diasporic perspective rooted in her British-Caribbean heritage.

In June, the BFC also announced the 2026 recipients of its Fashion Trust programme: Clio Peppiatt, Conner Ives, Nicholas Daley, Paolo Carzana, Patrick McDowell and Tolu Coker. The grant-giving programme is designed to support designers at pivotal stages of business growth through financial investment and tailored industry guidance. Since its launch, Fashion Trust has supported 59 designer businesses with more than £3 million in funding.

The Council is simultaneously pursuing a stronger international commercial platform for British designers. In May it announced a four-year commitment to expand LONDON show ROOMS in Paris, with the programme designed to give British designers greater access to international buyers, press and markets during the Paris fashion calendar. Confirmed dates extend through 2026 and 2027, covering both menswear and womenswear periods.

Taken together, these initiatives point to a two-track strategy: widening the domestic foundations of British fashion while strengthening its international commercial reach.

Fashion Britain therefore arrives at an important moment for the UK industry. As London Fashion Week prepares to take place from 17–21 September 2026, the BFC is simultaneously seeking to broaden the definition of where British fashion happens and who gets to participate in it.

For regional designers and creative businesses, the test will be whether the September programme can translate visibility and cultural engagement into longer-term opportunities — including education, networks, investment, retail access and sustainable business growth. If it succeeds, Fashion Britain could become more than a nationwide celebration around London Fashion Week: it could represent a structural shift in how the UK's fashion ecosystem is developed and connected.

For Fashion Britain full programme, click HERE.

Interiors: Where Fabric Meets Form: Planted and Sgrinhouse Celebrate British Craft

British upholstery house Planted has collaborated with hand screen-printing studio Sgrinhouse to create Alice, a chair in which the fabric is not simply a covering but a defining element of the furniture's design.

Planted, the British upholstery house built on old skills, has launched the Alice chair
 made in collaboration with hand screen-printing studio Sgrinhouse.

The collaboration brings together two complementary craft disciplines — traditional upholstery and hand screen printing — resulting in a piece that demonstrates how textile creativity can influence furniture form as well as surface.

Named after Sgrinhouse founder Alice Smith*, the Alice chair is upholstered entirely in Sgrinhouse's hand screen-printed Stripes design, including its legs. Printed in a rich rust colourway, the pattern creates an uninterrupted visual surface around the chair, emphasising its sculptural silhouette while retaining the irregularity and character associated with a handmade textile.

The Alice chair - named after Sgrinhouse founder Alice Smith  - is upholstered entirely in the studio’s
hand screen-printed “Stripes” design.

Planted, the British upholstery house built on old skills, has launched Alice — a new chair made in collaboration with hand screen-printing studio Sgrinhouse.

For Planted co-founder Daisy, it was the quality of the fabric that provided the starting point for the collaboration. She first encountered Sgrinhouse at Chelsea Harbour in London during its Focus on Design event and immediately recognised a shared approach to craftsmanship.

“The fabric was clearly hand-printed — you could see straight away the difference that quality makes,” she says. “We recognised the same standard in each other’s work immediately.”

Fabric as a starting point for furniture design

The partnership developed as Planted was working on a contemporary, armless bedroom chair. Rather than beginning with a fully resolved furniture form and subsequently selecting a fabric, the company allowed the textile to influence the design itself.

“The fabric gave us the answer,” says Daisy. “Simple from the front, with a hidden detail in the side shape — the print shaped the proportions, right down to covering the legs.”

This approach places the textile at the heart of the design process. The scale, rhythm and repeat of the Stripes pattern become part of the chair's architecture, rather than functioning as a decorative layer applied once the furniture has been designed.

For the upholstery market, it is an interesting distinction. Patterned fabrics are traditionally selected to complement a furniture shape; in Alice, the relationship is more integrated, with the printed textile helping determine how the furniture is conceived and ultimately experienced.

Developing a fabric for upholstery

The collaboration also required Sgrinhouse to adapt its textile practice to the technical requirements of furniture.

Both studios trace the collaboration to a shared belief in traditional skill, applied with a modern eye.
See Alice chair being hand-built, from screen-printed cloth to finished chair on the Planted x Sgrinhouse collaboration page.  Click HERE.
 

The studio developed a new heavyweight fabric specifically for upholstery, while adapting the positioning of the pattern pieces to minimise waste as the chair took shape. The result is a closer relationship between textile development, cutting and upholstery than would normally be possible when working from an existing roll of furnishing fabric.

Sgrinhouse describes its approach as bringing “craft and modernity together” to create durable, timeless textiles, with designs developed and hand printed in-house.

The Stripes pattern draws on the work of artists including Anni Albers and Agnes Martin, while its rust colourway reflects the maritime landscape that informs the wider collection. In the finished chair, the graphic simplicity of the stripe provides a strong contrast with the tactile construction beneath it.

Sgrinhouse founder Alice Smith was recently recognised by Homes & Gardens as its “Best Newcomer in Fabric”, underlining the growing profile of a new generation of British textile designers working across traditional printing techniques and contemporary interiors.

Traditional upholstery meets made-to-order production

Every Alice chair is hand-built to order in Planted's Cotswolds workshop. Rather than producing furniture for stock, the company makes each piece only after an order has been placed.

Every Alice chair is hand-built to order in Planted’s Cotswolds workshop.

The construction reflects Planted's emphasis on traditional upholstery and natural materials. Each chair uses a solid FSC-certified beech frame, hand-tied springs and a natural filling incorporating latex, wool and coco fibre. Polyurethane foam and chemical treatments are excluded.

The upholstery is built from the frame upwards, with each upholsterer signing the finished piece.

“Each upholsterer builds a piece from the frame up, and signs their name to it,” says Daisy. “That’s the accountability we build every piece on.”

The approach also makes the chair suitable for future reupholstery. Rather than treating the finished product as disposable, Planted designs Alice to be recovered and passed on.

There is, inevitably, a trade-off. Producing a bespoke chair around a hand-printed fabric is slower and more costly than purchasing an existing stock fabric and manufacturing furniture to a standard production specification. But it also gives the designer considerably greater control over the relationship between textile, construction and finished form.

In this case, the amount of fabric required is determined by the chair itself, rather than the chair being designed around an existing industrial production system.

A wider British craft movement

The Planted/Sgrinhouse collaboration sits within a broader UK interiors landscape in which hand-printed textiles and traditional upholstery are being brought together to create highly individual furniture.

Pukka Print Linen, for example, has collaborated with British furniture maker Boura & White, whose sofas, armchairs and footstools are crafted in the UK. The partnership places Pukka Print's hand block-printed linens and woven fabrics directly onto the furniture, demonstrating how a strongly crafted textile can alter the character and visual language of an upholstered form.

Another example is Bonfield Block Printers, whose West Dorset workshop produces furniture upholstered in its own hand block-printed linens. The company combines the printed textiles with traditional upholstery techniques and natural materials such as horsehair and calico, producing highly individual pieces rather than standardised furniture.

At a larger design-house level, Soane Britain similarly brings furniture, upholstery and textile design together. Its fabrics are produced in British mills and workshops using traditional techniques including block and screen printing, while its custom service allows designers to commission fabrics for specific projects.

The UK also retains a small but significant network of specialist textile printers. Rapture & Wright, for instance, is among the British studios continuing to use hand-printing techniques for interior textiles, while Thorp of London produces hand screen-printed fabrics in small batches from its Norfolk workshop, alongside woven jacquards produced in Suffolk.

For designers and specifiers, such practices offer something increasingly valuable: textiles with a visible relationship to the hand, rather than anonymous surfaces produced solely for volume manufacture.

For Planted and Sgrinhouse, the significance of Alice ultimately lies in the connection between the two disciplines.

For an industry increasingly interested in provenance, materiality and the value of skilled making, Alice illustrates another important proposition: when textile design and furniture design begin with each other rather than operating separately, the fabric can become the architecture of the product.

* Sgrinhouse founder Alice Smith was named “Best Newcomer in Fabric” by Homes & Gardens in 2025 for her textile design work.

 

Exhibition: A Century of Style: Queen Elizabeth II’s Exhibition in Buckingham Palace Extended by Six Months

A landmark exhibition celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s enduring influence on British fashion, that opened at The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace in London in April 2026, will now be extended till 18 April 2027, due to popular demand.

Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style has been presented as the most extensive display of the late monarch’s wardrobe ever staged, featuring around 200 items—half of them making their public debut. Tickets are on sale via the Royal Collection Trust website.  Due to ongoing high demand, visitors are encouraged to book tickets well in advance as no tickets are held back for on the day walk-ups.

Queen Elizabeth II on Princess Margaret’s Wedding Day, Cecil Beaton, 1960.
© Cecil Beaton / Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Hat worn for the wedding of Princess Margaret, Claude St Cyr, 1960.© Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust. Photographer: Paul Bulley

Three leading British designers—Erdem Moralioglu, Richard Quinn and Christopher Kane are featured, each contributing a piece inspired by the late Queen’s distinctive style. Their works, drawn from previous collections, are shown alongside related garments from the Queen’s archive. All three designers also provide reflections for the exhibition’s official publication, Queen Elizabeth II: Fashion and Style, which includes a tribute by Dame Anna Wintour and an essay by Professor Amy de la Haye of the London College of Fashion.

Exhibition curator Caroline de Guitaut said the retrospective demonstrates the “symbolism, tailoring and British craftsmanship” that defined the Queen’s wardrobe. 

The exhibition charts Queen Elizabeth II’s attire across all ten decades of her life, from couture evening gowns to the tailored countrywear that became synonymous with her off-duty style. Many of the garments—now part of the Royal Collection—are accompanied by original sketches, fabric samples and annotated design drawings, some bearing notes penned by the late Queen herself.

Ensemble worn for the wedding of Princess Margaret, Norman Hartnell, 1960

Highlights include an apple-green Norman Hartnell gown worn at a 1957 state banquet for US President Eisenhower, and the blue crinoline-skirted gown and bolero chosen for Princess Margaret’s wedding in 1960.  Items from her private wardrobe are also featured, such as a 1950s Harris tweed jacket and Balmoral tartan skirt, as well as the green coat designed by Angela Kelly and worn in her later years.

Transparent rain coat, worn over a patterned silk day dress and coat, both by Hardy Amies, 1970s.© Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust. Photographer: Jon Stokes

One of the more unexpected pieces on display is a clear plastic raincoat created by Hardy Amies in the 1960s, considered a precursor to the Queen’s later transparent umbrellas edged in colour to match her outfits. Amies would go on to produce futuristic designs for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Evening gown by Norman Hartnell, 1957. Worn for a state banquet given for President Eisenhower at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Here displayed in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle. Credit: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust. Photographer: Paul Bulley

A previously unseen Hartnell sketch for a silver lamé dress designed for a 1972 State Visit to France is also shown, bearing the Queen’s handwritten note indicating that it was later re-worn for the opening of parliament in Canberra—evidence of her long-standing practice of repeating outfits.

The silver lamé beaded shift dress is shown in photo below.

Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style is at The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace,  extended until 18 April 2027.

Royal Collection Trust will offer £1 tickets to visitors receiving Universal Credit and other named benefits, alongside concessions for young people aged 18 to 24, as part of its commitment to widening access to the Collection.