In London, Patrick McDowell debuts digital product passports and ready-to-wear on the runway. Plus, Chopova Lowena scales subculture, and eBay pushes resale.
At London Fashion Week, Patrick McDowell is rewriting what it means to scale a British fashion brand in 2025.
For Spring 2026, the designer staged their most personal show to date inside Battersea Power Station’s Control Room A, an Art Deco space rich in British industrial history. The show, titled “The Lancashire Rose”, was a tribute to McDowell’s late grandmother, who inspired their earliest design instincts.
“She was born in 1923, a fabric weaver in Lancashire,” brand founder Patrick McDowell said before the show. “I learned to sew on her machine. She’s the reason I do this.”
That sense of closeness extended beyond the silhouettes. For the first time, every look included a scannable digital product passport (DPP), stitched into the label using technology developed with Certilogo, a connected technology company. The integration arrives just months ahead of the E.U.’s phased rollout of mandatory DPPs for textiles starting in 2026. All brands selling in Europe will have to comply with the regulation. But McDowell’s version is more than a regulatory exercise — it’s also part of the brand’s emotional storytelling, they said.
“You scan it and get access to everything, like the story [tied to the show], the material journey, the number of pieces made,” McDowell said. “We can even update it later, so if something new connects to the piece, the client finds out first. It’s a way of keeping in touch, even when the client can’t be in the room.”
That “room” of the brand’s seasonal collection showcase, until now, has been McDowell’s bespoke studio. The Spring 2026 show also marked a new chapter, with the launch of ready-to-wear and a rebranded logo and website. After seven years focused on made-to-measure and couture, McDowell is scaling, albeit carefully. Every piece in the collection is still produced in extremely limited quantities of 5-60 units each and priced with intentional transparency. A pair of tailored flared trousers starts at around £500 ($615), while eveningwear and handcrafted outerwear push into higher brackets.
“The world doesn’t need another bizarrely priced fashion brand,” they said. “So everything is priced in a way that reflects what it costs to make. We’ve tried to make it as accessible as we can while maintaining a luxury product.”
That logic also guided McDowell’s retail strategy. The RTW line will debut through trunk shows and fewer than 10 international wholesale partners, including Joyce in Hong Kong. “We’ve always known we had clients in Asia, including Hong Kong, China, Japan and Korea,” they said. “It felt right to meet them where they are.”
The brand hosted a show at a British designer showcase in Hong Kong in September and has plans to scale its physical presence based on client behavior data from the DTC site. “It’s not about growth for growth’s sake,” McDowell said. “It’s about connection. We know where she shops. That’s where we’ll be.” The data from the DTC site has been the most important when deciding which regions to show up next.
McDowell’s Spring 2026 collection is layered with callbacks to McDowell’s family archive. A corset is covered in vintage chrysanthemum brooches “because my grandma’s wedding bouquet was chrysanthemums,” they said, while one gown with silver discs is actually covered in thimbles upon closer inspection. A recreated version of his grandmother’s 1923 passport was used in the show’s immersive digital experience, which was used to showcase the DPP. McDowell’s private client base not only attends shows but also arrives wearing past seasons’ pieces and bespoke looks.
In the accessories lineup, a new collaboration with London bag brand Aspinal of London saw McDowell revisit a personal purchase from over a decade ago. “I bought a pair of their slippers when I was much younger,” they said. “Last Christmas, I told the founder, Iain Burton, about them, and that conversation led to this entire collection.” The resulting bags, scarves and redesigned slippers celebrate a range of British crafts, from damask weaving to goldwork embroidery. Each bag corresponded with a runway look.
The Aspinal collaboration reflects a wider revival of U.K. craftsmanship. Brands like knitwear company John Smedley are investing in local mills and artisan partnerships to meet rising demand for British-made products and shorter, traceable supply chains. According to data from the U.K. Fashion & Textile Association (UKFT), since late 2024, inquiries for local U.K. sourcing have risen by about 35% compared to the previous year.
But for all its sentiment, this season’s collection is also technically ambitious. McDowell worked with London-based DyeRecycle to develop a red satin dress dyed using pigment recovered from textile waste. And a gown and cape developed in collaboration with Circ, a fiber-to-fiber recycling tech company, showcased one of the most advanced closed-loop textile innovations currently on the market.
“We’ve worked with Italian mills to create recycled georgette, which is still quite rare,” McDowell said. “It’s important to push what’s possible, not just what’s expected.”
That ethos has been consistent since the beginning, but the momentum has changed. This year, McDowell received the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design, presented by HRH The Princess of Wales. “The award was night and day for brand visibility,” they said. “It’s made a huge difference.”
The show marked a return to the runway after the brand hosted a more intimate client dinner last season. “Our clients love a runway show,” McDowell said. “And this space, Control Room A, was perfect. It’s from the same era as my grandma. It’s literally runway-shaped. It just felt right.”
At a moment when many fashion brands are still drafting sustainability statements or debating whether to embrace E.U. regulations, McDowell has already built DPPs into their brand’s creative DNA. If most digital product passports feel clinical or compliance-led, here, they feel human.
“We’re still telling stories [with the brand],” they said. “We just want our clients to feel closer, even if they’re halfway around the world.”
Dispatches from the runway: Chopova Lowena
Chopova Lowena, one of the biggest LFW exports, is proving that subculture can scale. At London Fashion Week, Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena showcased their brand’s “Cheer Lore” collection in a branded American football gym venue, complete with mascots serving crisps and their fragrance drifting through the venue.
The show built on growing momentum: The duo won the £150,000 ($185,000) BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund in 2024, and their 3-year-old e-commerce site is now nearly as profitable as its wholesale business, according to the brand.
TikTok creator and fashion commentator Mandy Lee (@oldloserinbrooklyn, 606,000 followers) noted the brand’s important shift to an annual fashion show. “One year instead of six months is a much better amount of time to perfect the story you’re trying to tell [with the brand],” she said in an on-site interview following the show.
On the runway, emo cheerleaders wore upgraded takes on house signatures like carabiner skirts and chunky knits. “They wanted guests’ senses to be overwhelmed, and they definitely achieved that,” Lee said, pointing to the debut of Chopova Lowena’s first fragrances in January of this year. The fragrance is sold through independent retailer Dover Street Market for £96 ($118). “It was one of the only scented runways I have been to,” said Lee.
Commercial expansion was also in focus, with the runway featuring two new Sony headphone bags, perfume bottles in leather holders and a Chilly’s water bottle collaboration. “They make great clothes their customers want to buy, but they’re also able to innovate on the original ideas that got them those buyers,” Lee said.
At LFW, resale is rewriting the rules — and eBay isn’t alone
London Fashion Week is seeing a marked shift: Alongside Oxfam’s charity-focused secondhand runway show and Vinted’s first fashion week outing, eBay had a presence via what it called Endless Runway.
The London edition, following New York earlier this month and set to travel to Milan and Paris, was styled by eBay’s pre-loved fashion director, Amy Bannerman, and hosted by comedian and YouTube star Amelia Dimoldenberg, the company’s pre-loved fashion ambassador. It featured looks from Erdem, Ahluwalia and Conner Ives, all available to buy live on eBay, with proceeds benefiting the BFC Foundation. Over 9,000 viewers tuned into eBay Live during Endless Runway at LFW, where standout sales included Amelia Dimoldenberg’s vintage crystal earrings worn on her “Chicken Shop Date” episode with Andrew Garfield, which sold for £105 ($130). Other top lots included a Louis Vuitton Pleaty Mini Monogram denim shoulder bag from 2006 for £800 ($985), Gucci men’s Kaveh leather loafers for £136 ($167) and a Prada Re-Nylon backpack for £280 ($345).
The business case for resale’s growing presence is strong. Vinted, Europe’s largest online resale marketplace, based on sales, grew its revenue 36% to $882 million in 2024, with its net profits rising more than 300% year over year. LVMH, by contrast, reported organic revenue growth of just 1–2% in the same period.
EBay is leaning on scale. “Forty to fifty percent of what we sell is already refurbished, secondhand or imperfect. … More than 15 million items have been through our authenticity guarantee [process],” said Kirsty Keoghan, eBay’s global gm of fashion.
Dimoldenberg called pre-loved “a status symbol,” while Bannerman added, “Secondhand doesn’t have to mean second best.” And LFW shows resale’s popularity is picking up pace in Europe.
Listen in to the NYFW recap
On this special New York Fashion Week edition of the Glossy Podcast, senior fashion reporter Danny Parisi, editor-in-chief Jill Manoff and international reporter Zofia Zwieglinska break down the week’s biggest takeaways.
They highlight the shift toward smaller, more intimate shows — often hosted in stores, cafés or over brunch — along with standout trends like pared-back color palettes and unconventional sponsorships, including Christian Siriano’s Capri Sun tie-in. Memorable moments ranged from Zankov’s bursts of color to Off-White’s playful use of New York Liberty mascot Ellie the Elephant on the runway. Listen here.
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