Covid checks, major absences, and a dissipating FROW: This is London Fashion Week after a pandemic

“Isn’t it wonderful to be back?” calls a street style photographer as I head into the Bora Aksu show. “It’s lovely,” I reply. “We had no idea how long it would take! We’re so excited!” they add, darting between the crowd, vying for their next snap. “Anyway, have fun!”

In the six years I’ve been going to London Fashion Week, this is the first time a stranger has made conversation with me. To the uninitiated, this might sound odd. But as any seasoned fashion week attendee will tell you, this is not a crowd that is famed for its pleasantries. That is unless you have something to offer, be it industry clout, prestige, or 500,000 Instagram followers.

But we’ve been through a lot, these past 18 months. The pandemic has united many of us in grief, loss, and illness, experiences that have shifted our priorities and given all of us a new lease of life. As a result, that veneer of insouciance that might have once prevented one person from chatting to another has splintered. And that’s how I made my first friend at London Fashion Week.

Of course, this is just one of the many ways the pandemic has affected the biannual trade event. Like with many industries, coronavirus has had a seismic impact on fashion. In July 2020, the British Fashion Council urged the government for financial support, claiming that the recession could hit the industry twice as hard as the UK as a whole.

The organisation released data from global forecasters Oxford Economics which claimed that the pandemic could “wipe out” the “above-average growth achieved by the industry in the past 10 years”.

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No brand, it seems, has been immune to these effects. This season, some of the UK’s biggest brands – Burberry, JW Anderson and Christopher Kane – are absent from the LFW schedule. known for their blockbuster runways, these labels have foregone a fashion show and instead chosen to debut their spring/summer 2022 collections digitally.

Other major labels, including Molly Goddard and Victoria Beckham, have continued with their pandemic format: releasing a short film and offering a small number of one-to-one appointments with press and buyers as opposed to staging a catwalk.

The benefit to this, though, is that space has been made for emerging brands, with newcomers like Harris Reed, KNWLS, and Nensi Dojaka, who have taken centre stage on the LFW lineup this season. These shows will most likely attract the starriest crowds, with Sabrina Elba, Edward Enninful, and Dina Asher-Smith all pictured at Dojaka on Friday afternoon, while The Crown’s Emma Corrin is expected to be in the FROW for Reed, with whom they are close friends.

But with the absence of shows like Burberry and JW Anderson, this season’s front rows will be arguably less star-studded than before. Where are the Hollywood actors? The global pop stars? The supermodels?

In previous years, LFW has attracted the likes of Kate Moss, Lady Gaga, Sienna Miller, Kanye West, and even The Queen. Would they still attend to see an up-and-coming brand? More importantly, can they even get to the UK in time? Travel restrictions imposed by coronavirus are ongoing, which will have likely limited the number of A-list stars able to fly over for the proceedings. Not just because of the logistics, but also the added cost of multiple PCR tests that would be required not just for the celebrity, but for their entire team.

Financial strains aside, it’s not hard to see why brands are choosing to avoid the traditional runway format altogether this season. Firstly, in this post-pandemic landscape, there are a huge amount of health and safety precautions to consider. All productions on the LFW schedule are required to adhere to the step four events and attractions government guidance, which imposes restrictions on venues (they must provide adequate ventilation) and the number of people that can attend – several brands have informed me that they are working at a third of their regular capacity this season.

In short, this means that the most Covid-friendly way to stage a runway is to do it outside. But this poses a wide-range of further issues when it comes to sound and seating, all of which will need to be set up especially in many instances, thus increasing the cost. Bora Aksu’s show, for example, took place in a garden behind the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall – the sound system was nestled in the bushes. Mark Fast, meanwhile, debuted his SS22 collection on top of a central London car park, where one suspects electrical supplies were somewhat limited.

Given all of the checks on the door – every guest is required to show either proof of double vaccination or a negative lateral flow test as per the BFC guidelines – it also takes a lot longer to get everybody into a show. And even though any LFW attendee knows that things always run late, this season, they seem to be more delayed than ever before, which, again, may raise the financial stakes.

Masks, however, were not required – though many (myself included) still chose to wear them. Nor were they referenced on the runways themselves, like they have been in previous pandemic seasons. It seems that everybody, including fashion designers, is keen to move beyond Covid as quickly as possible as opposed to dwelling in its shadowy past. It’s a feat easier said than done, though. Because while it would be easy to glide from one show to the next, thinking that everything is back to normal, evidently, it isn’t. It’s not even close.