Hard Graft, Nomadisms & Balletic Longings

For its 25th year, Fashion East stakes a claim not to nostalgia, but to evolution. The SS26 presentation, held under the auspices of its anniversary exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, feels less like a look back than a sharp, searching moment: three emergent designers each channel their personal histories, urban realities, and artful subversions. The show makes clear: incubator, institution, and innovator are roles that can — and must coexist.

This season's Fashion East line-up unites two returning voices and one new one: Louis Mayhew (Mayhew), Cameron Williams with Labembika (Nuba), and Jacek Gleba. Each work is not just in garments, but in a story: personal, communal, and symbolic. Mayhew, with a collection titled Hard Graft, mines his identity as a craftsman-painter & decorator, giving rise to clothes that are a protest through material; objects literally found, refashioned, dirtied, and stitched back. It's workwear transposed onto the runway, the language of stains, zip-ties, crocodile clips, paint smears, and mud-larking relics.

Nuba (Williams + Labembika) returns with Solid, a subtler politics. There is nomadism—movement, migration, and multiple geographies, such as London and Africa, in dialogue. Eveningwear collapses into sportswear; translucence, texture, and deconstruction are used to subvert expectation rather than shout it. Jacek Gleba, newcomer, folds in ballet and yearning. His collection, It's True, draws from dance, including Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun, as well as the body in motion, rehearsal spaces, costume fragments, and diaries. Handkerchief-draped pants, hook-and-eye detailing suggest both exposure and protection, performance and vulnerability.

Fashion East SS26 is overwhelmingly about texture, cut, and the intersection of trial and tradition. Mayhew's garments include paint-spattered tees, zip ties, stain smears, and bits from mudlarking, as well as objects clipped or tied on. These are not accessories, but essential to the shape and the message. Nuba's shirt silhouettes and inner bodies often feature sheer overlays or deconstructed elements, contrasted with sharply cut trousers or evening gowns.

The result is tension between what is visible and what is built to last. Gleba's dance background is evident in silhouette: split hems, handkerchief panels, and fabric that flows; tailoring that echoes the warmth of warm-ups and the movement of bodies. Even the ballet shoe references, journal pages pinned to backs, all underscoring that clothes here are breath, effort, longing.

Colour palettes throughout the three voices shift, but share a preference for contrast and interplay: the pulled-back with the vibrant, the muted with the sharp interjection. Mayhew's dirty tones (muted, earthy), stain marks, paint splashes — trade minimalism for grit. Nuba works with monochromes and soft plays of light and translucence, allowing texture to create drama rather than overt colour. Gleba floats between soft tonals, pastel and neutral blocks, and intimate, deeper shades—the emotional spectrum from rehearsal room to stage lights.

Each designer stands apart, yet the trio feels more than the sum of its parts. Their personal references—childhood, culture, geography, and craft—ground the experimental in felt reality. Working with found objects, deconstruction, unfinished hems, visible patchwork, diary pages — Fashion East this season isn't polishing; it's revealing. There's beauty in imperfection. Despite their differences, the show feels curated, with a deliberate placement of looks, pace, and contrast. The ICA setting, combined with a retrospective exhibition and the runway, gives the sense of lineage and growth. Fashion East isn't just launching new talent-it's marking a generational archive.

The practicality vs spectacle divide remains. Some of Mayhew's more object-laden looks, or Gleba's theatrical cuts, might challenge wearability. With many poetic impulses, the risk is dilution: when too many metaphors (handkerchiefs, journals, found objects) are layered, the message may blur for those less attuned. Financially and commercially, the route from runway to client is often the most challenging for such experimental work. These voices may need to find a balance between art and market.

At its quarter-century mark, Fashion East reminds us of the power of talent incubation that doesn't ask emerging labels to compromise artistry for commerce, or at least not entirely. SS26 feels like renewal: the incubator is not merely celebrating past successes, but embedding risk, diversity, autobiography, and craft into its promise for the future. The young designers here are not echoes; they are directions.

Fashion East SS26 isn't a show of designers ready to play it safe. It's a testament to what fashion can be when it lets the messy, the personal, and the in-between have space. Mayhew dirties his hands; Nuba carries culture in fabric; Gleba dances with longing. Together they ask: what is the beauty of becoming, of labor, of identity in motion? Fashion East answers with clothes that don't just dress bodies, but frame stories.