The rain felt inevitable, but this season Bora Aksu seemed to plan for it. Instead of braving another windswept courtyard, we were ushered into the soaring calm of St Paul’s, my first time inside the church, its gilded altar and stained glass now shared with a different kind of ritual: a fashion‑led concert. As musicians stepped out in Aksu’s own looks, guitars and strings in hand, the show didn’t so much start as swell into life, hymns traded for live vocals and a low, insistent rhythm that wrapped itself around the clothes like a second spine.
Rooted in an 18th‑century English ghost story, Autumn Winter 2026 is Aksu at his most haunted and his most tender, an elegy for Suki, the young barmaid whose betrayal and death in the Hellfire Caves still lingers in local folklore. Structured echoes of working dress – corseted bodices, apron shapes, laced fastenings – are softened by clouds of tulle and silk organza, the silhouettes hovering somewhere between living girl and remembered spirit. A muted spectrum of chalk, ivory and worn porcelain speaks directly to Suki’s fabled white dress, while layers of fine voile and lace seem to catch the air like breath, then disappear just as quickly.
One of the collection’s most quietly devastating looks arrives in tiers of ghosted ivory, a dress built from sheer, weightless ruffles and latticed lace that trickle down the body in soft cascades. Voluminous chiffon sleeves balloon at the wrists, framing a torso almost corseted in negative space: appliquéd fragments and trailing bows that feel less like decoration and more like the remnants of a gown worn, loved, and left behind. It is bridal, certainly, but there is something resistant in the way the dress moves – less altar‑ready, more runaway apparition, pacing the nave in borrowed time.
Elsewhere, Aksu’s instinct for contrast finds a new register in a deep‑navy look that splices armour and intimacy. A plush, almost cocooning jacket, padded and precise, sits above a knitted skirt traced with undulating white lines, like waves lapping against a midnight shore. A frill of pale tulle peeks out from the hem, underscoring the collection’s fixation on what is hidden and what is revealed; the outfit reads as a uniform for a heroine who has made it out of the story alive, carrying the memory but no longer trapped inside it.
The show’s most immediately romantic moment comes in a dress that appears to have been claimed by the forest itself. A cascade of sheer ruffles is overgrown with surreal crochet florals and trailing green tendrils, petals picked out in chalky white and washed‑out pink, each leaf outlined as if sketched in mid‑air. It’s pretty, of course, but there’s a faint unease in the density of the embellishment, as though nature has continued to grow long after the wearer has gone – beauty shaped, as the press notes suggest, by darkness rather than in spite of it.
As the models gathered on the steps for the finale – a line‑up of veiled figures, spectral brides and ink‑black counterpoints framed by candlelight – the narrative snapped into focus. Aksu isn’t simply retelling Suki’s story; he is clothing the spaces between fact and myth, between the girl who lived above the George & Dragon and the spirit that refuses to fade. In a season crowded with nostalgia, this collection stands apart for the way it treats memory not as an aesthetic moodboard but as a responsibility, proving that romance can still cut deep when it refuses to look away.
