London Fashion Week autumn/winter 2025 highlights: as independent brands rethink the runway, Simone Rocha shifts its aesthetic, and Burberry brings stars from The Crown and Bridgerton to its front row

The main takeaway from the latest round of London shows, autumn/winter 2025 – which ended on Monday evening with Burberry, the only big brand on the schedule – is that independent designers are reconsidering their priorities and questioning the benefit of holding a show.

In recent years British-based brands in particular have had to deal with issues including the downfall of luxury online retailers such as Matches and Farfetch; Brexit, which has made it harder for them to export their products and source materials from continental Europe; and the end of the VAT tax refund, which has made the UK, and London especially, less appealing to overseas shoppers.

These are just some of the matters – let’s not forget the pandemic – that Caroline Rush has had to deal with during her 15-year tenure as chief executive of the British Fashion Council, as she explains in an interview in London.

“We’ve become just so adept at dealing with crises,” says Rush, who is leaving her post this year. “We’ve been sort of in a combative mode, really, in trying to be there to champion the industry and help designers figure out how to navigate all of this.”

As for the many “no-shows” this season, Rush explains that not holding a show is not necessarily a bad thing. “It’s really important for designers to think about their collection and how they want to communicate,” she says. “Sometimes the media and the retailers see [not having a show] as a lack of confidence in what they’re doing, but we just see it as actually good business sense if they’re focusing on the product and what they can deliver.”

She adds that designers can significantly decrease the cost of producing a runway presentation by using spaces provided by the British Fashion Council and taking advantage of the resources made available to them by the institution.