M&S on the Catwalk: What It Means When the High Street Walks at London Fashion Week

A hundred years of selling Britain its knickers and now a runway slot, and I have thoughts about both the business and the cardigans

M&S at London Fashion Week: The High Street Takes Its Bow

I have spent a good part of my working life explaining to people at dinner that fashion week is a trade event and not a party to which they have been cruelly not invited. This season I had to revise the speech. The shop where my mother bought my school socks has had a show.

It was on the official calendar. When the British Fashion Council announced the provisional schedule for London Fashion Week September 2026, running from Thursday 17 to Monday 21 September, it said that Marks and Spencer would make its debut with its first exclusive runway collection, a “see now, buy now” range of womenswear and menswear, celebrating the brand’s centenary year in the fashion industry. The council presented this as reflecting the growing role of retail and consumer engagement within the week.

Why This Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds

For those outside the trade, a quick explanation. Fashion week traditionally shows clothes six months before they reach shops. Editors and buyers look, orders are placed, factories get to work. The public sees pictures and waits.

“See now, buy now” removes the wait. What walks down the runway is in store, or online, almost at once. It is a model built for retailers with stock already made and a customer who wants the thing tonight. Luxury houses tried it a decade ago and mostly retreated, because their production cycles could not keep up. A retailer of M&S’s scale has no such difficulty. It has been delivering jumpers to every town in the country for generations.

One preview of the season called it perhaps the biggest surprise of the schedule, with the show set for Friday 18 September to mark a hundred years of fashion at the company, and read it as another sign that London Fashion Week is becoming increasingly consumer-facing.

The Business Logic

I think the logic runs both ways, and I find both halves interesting.

For M&S, a place on the schedule is a statement. The company’s clothing arm spent years being described, kindly, as dependable. Recent seasons have been better, with sharper buying and collaborations that sold out. A runway show says: we are a fashion business, not only a place to buy a three-pack of vests. It also generates the kind of imagery that a marketing department would otherwise pay handsomely to manufacture.

For the council, the appeal is plain. London’s fashion week has always been strong on talent and light on money. It nurtures brilliant young designers who then struggle to fund a second collection. Big retailers bring budgets, audiences and attention. If the week is to hold its place against Paris and Milan, it needs both the art students and the people who pay for the lights.

The Awkward Question

Here is the honest worry, and I would be a poor journalist if I left it out. Every slot given to a retailer with tens of thousands of staff is attention not given to a designer with three. Fashion week is a finite number of hours. Editors have a finite number of feet. There is a version of this trend in which the catwalk becomes a rather elaborate shop window and the experimental work that made London’s name is pushed to nine in the morning in a car park.

I do not think we are there. The same schedule had new names and returning support for emerging talent. But it is the thing to watch.

What I Make of the Clothes Question

I am not going to review a show from a press release, and I would distrust anyone who did. What I can say is what I would want from a centenary collection by a company that dresses the nation. I would want it to be proud of what M&S is good at: a proper coat, knitwear that survives a wash, tailoring that fits a body with a lunch in it. The temptation on a catwalk is to prove you can do “fashion.” The braver move is to make the everyday look desirable.

My test is simple. If a woman on the 73 bus would wear it on Monday, it worked.

A Small Moment of National Comedy

There is something very British about the whole affair. The French send couture houses down their runways. We sent the place that sells the nation its sandwiches. I say this with love. M&S occupies a spot in the national affections that no luxury label will ever reach. People have opinions about its hosiery the way other nations have opinions about wine.

It is the only retailer I know where customers speak of being let down by a cardigan. Not by the shop. By the cardigan. That is a relationship.

What It Tells Us About London

The wider point is that fashion week is changing its idea of who it is for. The old model addressed a few hundred professionals. The new one is talking to the customer directly, and the customer has a phone and a debit card. Whether that is a dilution or a democratisation depends on your seat.

From mine, somewhere towards the back with a decent view of the shoes, it looks like both. And I would rather the high street were inside the tent, learning to be better, than outside it copying what it saw.

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