Emilia Wickstead charts her Spring Summer collection through archive and craft
The designer sat down with Caroline Issa at Selfridges' private members' club to reveal how archival references, fabric studies and mood boards shaped the Spring Summer 2027 collection.
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The evening unfolded not as a presentation but as a conversation, intimate and generous, within the cream and gilt interiors of Selfridges’ private members’ club at 40 Duke Street. Emilia Wickstead sat with Caroline Issa before an assembled group of club members and private clients, talking through the architecture of creation, the impulses that guide her hand and the visual language of the Spring Summer 2027 collection.
What made the evening particular was not the polish of the occasion but its transparency. Pieces from the collection hung alongside the scattered evidence of how they came to be: archival photographs pinned to the wall, their tones deepening from sepia to rust; mood boards layered with clippings and fabric swatches in yellowed and burnt orange; drawings and colour studies mapping the conversations between inspiration and realisation. The archive references moved across decades and disciplines, each one speaking to a different thread in Wickstead’s design language, each one a quiet argument for why a certain silhouette matters, why a particular cut of fabric holds meaning.
The collection itself emerged not as novelty but as refinement, a deepening conversation with the lexicon Wickstead has built across her career. Structured tailoring held its ground, rendered in muted and saturated tones. The proportions were precise, the finishing meticulous. What moved through the evening was a sense of intention, each garment the product of deliberation rather than whim, each decision traceable to something seen, something felt, something discovered in the work of others.
The film that accompanies the collection continued this thread of visual storytelling, carrying forward the mood and method that had animated the evening itself. Here was design practice laid bare, not as mystique but as craft, as the slow accumulation of references, the patient testing of ideas, the belief that every detail earns its place.
Imagery courtesy of Emilia Wickstead (@emiliawickstead).
