Ashley Williams Spring/Summer 2027

For Spring/Summer 2027, Ashley Williams turns the familiar objects of home into a playful wardrobe of nostalgia, isolation and the strange comfort of staying inside.

At London Fashion Week, Ashley Williams imagined what happens when the world outside disappears and everything you need is already inside the house. The collection took its starting point from What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, particularly Bonnie Grape, the film’s isolated matriarch, but approached the character through a deliberately childlike lens. Dirty-blonde bob wigs, identical pink lipstick and an almost doll-like cast gave the collection an uncanny sense of people who had stepped out of a family photograph and into the runway.

The house itself became the real muse. Satin babydoll dresses were printed to resemble wooden walls, while floral dresses made from bedding and curtain-like fabrics felt pulled directly from a grandmother’s bedroom. Torn tights stuffed with bunnies and knitted teddy bears pushed the domestic references into something more surreal, while shirts and cropped capes made from cotton sheets featured hand-drawn scenes of people reading books and eating apples. Across the collection, the ordinary became slightly absurd — and somehow more sentimental for it.

Williams has described the collection as being about accepting battles that cannot be won, finding a sense of transcendence in that powerlessness and recognising the value of small pleasures. That idea gives the clothes an unexpected softness beneath their humour. Rather than treating the home purely as a place of confinement, Ashley Williams SS27 finds comfort in its rituals, memories and objects: the things that surround us when nobody else is watching.

The accessories continue that collision between childhood, nostalgia and eccentricity through Williams’ ongoing collaboration with Chinese experimental jewellery label Yvmin. A faux-porcelain belt closes with two Siamese cats curled around one another, while a chunky wristwatch takes its cues from a mechanical music box, complete with a tiny dancing ballerina. It is a fitting conclusion to a collection that finds fashion in the most unlikely places — proving that sometimes the most interesting wardrobe is the one hiding inside the house.