The LFW Want List: Margaret Howell and Paul Smith AW15
London Fashion Week has always occupied a peculiar and beloved space in the global fashion calendar. It is not the spectacle of Paris, nor the commercial machine of New York, nor the refined editorial precision of Milan. London is something harder to define and therefore far more interesting — a place where craft and rebellion share the same runway, where a quiet revolution in tailoring can feel just as urgent as a riot of colour on the street outside. The autumn/winter 2015 season confirmed everything that makes London’s fashion identity so enduring, and nowhere was that clearer than in the collections of two of its most respected and longest-standing houses: Margaret Howell and Paul Smith.
Both designers have spent decades building something rare in fashion — a genuine point of view that evolves without lurching, that stays loyal to its own aesthetic without becoming stale. Their AW15 collections arrived at a moment when the industry conversation was dominated by disruption, by fast fashion, by the question of what luxury even means anymore. Howell and Smith answered that question in their own separate ways, and both answers were worth paying close attention to.
Margaret Howell AW15: The Quiet Authority of Restraint
There is a particular kind of confidence that does not announce itself. It does not need to. It simply exists, and you feel it the moment you enter a room or, in this case, the moment the first look walks down a runway. Margaret Howell’s autumn/winter 2015 collection had that quality in abundance. It was a masterclass in restraint that never tipped into austerity, a study in proportion that never became academic.
Howell has always operated according to her own internal logic, one rooted in the traditions of British workwear and utility clothing but filtered through a sensibility that is unmistakably modern. For AW15, she returned to those foundations with particular conviction. The silhouettes were generous without being oversized in the fashion-week sense of the word. These were clothes built for warmth and movement, for real weather and real life, but cut with the kind of precision that elevates utility into something approaching art.
The colour palette was a signature Howell meditation on the muted and the earthy. Warm creams sat beside camel and biscuit tones, interrupted by a deep charcoal and the occasional unexpected note of dusty rust or faded olive. These are not colours that photograph dramatically under studio lights, which is perhaps why Howell’s work often photographs less explosively than it deserves to. In person, and in the context of wearing, these colours do something extraordinary: they make you look like yourself, only better. They work with skin rather than against it. They age beautifully, in fabric and in the eye of the beholder.
The outerwear was particularly strong. Long coats in heavyweight wool struck a balance between the boxy and the precise — structured at the shoulder, falling with quiet authority to just below the knee. There was a nod to the officer’s coat and to the working fisherman’s jacket, two very different British archetypes, but Howell found the thread connecting them: the idea that clothing should protect you, should stand up to the world, should last. Lapels were clean and wide without tipping into costume. Buttons were functional, not decorative. Pockets, crucially, were real.
Knitwear played a central role, as it always does in a Howell collection worth discussing. The chunky-ribbed sweaters and roll-necks felt simultaneously ancient and contemporary, the kind of pieces that could have existed fifty years ago or fifty years from now. There was a wonderful tension between the weight of the knits and the lightness of some of the layering beneath them — fine cotton shirts visible at collar and cuff, soft-collared blouses that added a moment of femininity without disruption.
Trousers continued Howell’s ongoing conversation with the wide-leg cut, offered in heavy flannel and in a more refined wool-blend that moved differently, draping rather than holding. These were trousers that asked you to slow down slightly, to walk with intention. The footwear — sturdy brogues and low-heeled boots in polished leather — grounded everything without heaviness.
What Howell achieved with AW15 was something fashion talks about but rarely manages: coherence. Every piece in the collection felt as though it belonged to the same world, could coexist in the same wardrobe, could be mixed within the collection itself without creating visual noise. This is partly a product of her restrained palette, but it is also the result of a designer who genuinely understands how clothes are worn, not just how they are made. There is a deep practicality to a Howell collection that is never in conflict with its beauty. In AW15, that marriage felt particularly well-struck.
The show itself — always intimate, always thoughtful in its staging — reinforced that sense of considered living. Howell does not traffic in narrative spectacle. She trusts the clothes. For a season when so many designers were competing for the most arresting theatrical moment, that trust felt quietly radical.
Paul Smith AW15: Joy as a Design Philosophy
If Margaret Howell is the quiet room, Paul Smith is the bookshelf in the corner of a brilliant friend’s living room — the one where you keep finding things you didn’t expect and can’t stop looking at. His autumn/winter 2015 collection was a reminder that fashion can be genuinely joyful without being trivial, that colour and wit and detail are not the enemies of craftsmanship but its closest allies.
Smith is often discussed in terms of his famous stripes and his magpie eye for unexpected detail, but what can get lost in that shorthand is how seriously he takes the foundations. The tailoring in his AW15 collection was impeccable. The suits — and there were magnificent suits — were built on a Savile Row sensibility translated into something far more wearable, more personal, less bound by occasion. Jackets had a slight softness through the chest that made them feel lived-in from the first wearing rather than requiring months of breaking in. Shoulders were natural, never exaggerated. The trouser legs tapered correctly, neither the drainpipe of a decade earlier nor the full wide-leg that was appearing everywhere else that season.
But it was what Smith did with colour and pattern on top of that solid technical foundation that made the collection sing. The opening looks played with rich, jewel-toned checks — burgundy and forest green, navy and amber — the kind of patterns associated with traditional British country dressing that somehow felt utterly modern through the Smith lens. These were not heritage pieces dressed up as contemporary; they were contemporary pieces that happened to understand their heritage. The distinction matters enormously.
As the collection developed, Smith allowed himself to become progressively more playful. Coats appeared in vivid jewel tones, electric blue and deep violet that should by all rights be difficult to wear and were instead completely irresistible. There was a rust-coloured leather jacket that produced the kind of visceral want in the viewer that good fashion often aims for and rarely achieves. A series of knitwear pieces incorporated unexpected graphic elements — geometric shapes, surprising colour-block combinations — that felt genuinely fresh rather than trend-driven.
The accessories told their own story. Bags in beautifully grained leather were finished in contrasting colours, the kind of detail you notice only once but then cannot stop noticing. Scarves introduced prints that suggested Smith had been raiding a personal archive of found images and joyful ephemera, which — knowing Smith — he quite possibly had. Shoes moved between the classic Derby and the more robust boot, always in leather of evident quality, often finished with a detail that rewarded close inspection.
Womenswear in the collection played with similar themes while finding its own particular notes. There were wide-legged trousers in extraordinary fabrics, a silk trouser suit in a slightly unexpected dusty pink that managed to feel both luxurious and practical, and a series of dresses that used Smith’s print sensibility to spectacular effect. Nothing in the womenswear felt like an afterthought or a feminine adaptation of a masculine base. These were clothes designed for women who know their own mind, which is to say, women worth designing for.
What makes Paul Smith consistently interesting over what is now a very long career is that he has never confused wit with whimsy. The jokes in a Smith collection, and there are always jokes, are the jokes of someone who also knows exactly how a buttonhole should be finished and which weight of wool performs best in which cut. The playfulness is earned by the seriousness beneath it, and the seriousness is made bearable — made delightful — by the playfulness above it. AW15 demonstrated that equilibrium at its best.
The show was staged with Smith’s characteristic ability to make a fashion presentation feel like an invitation to a party you actually want to attend. There was energy and movement and colour, but it never felt like it was trying too hard. The best parties never do.
Why These Two Collections Belong Together on Any Want List
At first glance, Howell and Smith might seem to occupy opposite ends of a spectrum. One is quiet, the other is loud. One reduces, the other accumulates. One strips colour back to its essences, the other embraces the full range. And yet they are more alike than they are different, and understanding what connects them tells you something important about what the best of British fashion actually represents.
Both designers make clothes that are fundamentally about the person wearing them. This sounds obvious — all clothes are worn by people — but it is less common than it should be. Much of what appears on runways exists primarily as image, as editorial content, as the raw material of a campaign. It is designed to be photographed rather than worn. Howell and Smith make things that reveal their value in the wearing, in the fourth or fifth time you reach for that coat or those trousers, in the way a well-made piece adapts to the shape of its owner over time.
Both designers also have a deep and genuine relationship with British craft traditions without being prisoners of them. Howell’s work draws on the vocabulary of British workwear and countryside dressing, Smith’s on Savile Row and the vibrant subcultures of British street style, but neither uses tradition as a museum piece. They use it as a living language, something to speak in rather than to preserve behind glass.
For AW15 specifically, both collections spoke to something that many people were feeling that season without quite knowing how to articulate it: a desire for clothes that were genuinely good, that would last, that would not embarrass you in five years’ time, that rewarded the investment of real money. Fast fashion had trained a generation to think of clothing as essentially disposable, and there was — and remains — a growing counter-reaction to that. Howell and Smith are natural homes for that reaction, because they have always made the opposite argument, that a few exceptionally well-made pieces are worth more in every sense than a wardrobe full of the provisional and the forgettable.
The Pieces to Covet
From the Howell collection, the must-have pieces were the heavyweight wool overcoat in camel — a masterpiece of proportion and warmth — and the chunky ribbed roll-neck in undyed natural wool that managed to feel simultaneously ancient and contemporary. The wide-leg flannel trousers were a close third, cut with that characteristically Howell understanding of how fabric moves when you are actually walking somewhere rather than standing still for a photographer.
From Smith, the rust leather jacket was the talking piece, the thing that people mentioned when they came away from the show, the thing that lingered. But equally desirable were the jewel-toned check suits, which managed to be the kind of thing you could wear to a meeting and then straight to dinner without feeling you had made a compromise in either direction. The print scarves were the perfect gateway piece — accessible in price relative to the ready-to-wear, and overflowing with that characteristically Smithian sense of wit and surprise.
The Enduring Case for Both
Fashion has a tendency to celebrate the new and the disruptive while quietly relying on the established and the consistent. Margaret Howell and Paul Smith are, in the best possible sense, institutions — designers whose longevity is not a sign of stagnation but of the depth and sustainability of their original vision. For AW15, both designers proved again that having a clear point of view, held over many years and refined with each collection, produces something that no trend-chasing or conceptual posturing can match: clothes that people genuinely want to own and wear and keep.
London Fashion Week needs its provocateurs and its newcomers, its conceptual designers and its commercial powerhouses. But it also needs Howell and Smith, the designers who remind the whole circus why clothes were invented in the first place — to protect us, to express us, to make the business of moving through the world a little more beautiful. The AW15 collections from both houses did exactly that, and they belong at the top of any honest want list from that season.
If you walked away from LFW AW15 thinking about a camel wool coat and a rust leather jacket, you were paying attention.
