Most fashion shows ask you to sit still and look forward. H&M’s latest London Fashion Week show was not especially interested in either.
Titled H&M&YOU&I, the night brought H&M together with legendary image maker Nick Knight and SHOWstudio, with Labrinth handling the music. A 40 metre runway ran through the space, surrounded by curved mirrors, shifting visuals and an audience that became part of what was happening around them.
Brazilian ballerina Ingrid Silva opened the show, using her movements to activate the lights before Alex Consani arrived in the first look. Paloma Elsesser, Karen Elson, Lila Moss, Archie Renaux and more followed, moving through H&M’s Autumn 2026 collections as the room kept changing around them.
The clothes moved between romance, sharper tailoring and sculptural shapes, but this was not really a show where you only watched the clothes. Imagery created by Nick Knight and SHOWstudio reacted to the models and guests in real time, making it difficult to tell where the physical runway ended and the digital one began.
Nick Knight has spent his career questioning how fashion should be photographed, filmed and shared, so giving him a normal runway was never going to happen. The technology could have easily become a gimmick, but it felt much more about pulling people into the experience than showing off what was possible.
Speaking to Outlander about working with Knight, H&M Chief Creative Officer Jörgen Andersson described it as “the idea of liberating fashion, and that’s why it’s so exciting.”
That idea ran through the whole night. Members of the public were invited through a social ballot, the build up was streamed from backstage and the red carpet, and parts of the collection were available online straight after the show. Fashion Week can still feel like a closed conversation, so making the room slightly easier to enter felt important.
We wanted our coverage to follow the same thinking, so we hired two young photographers from the Outlander community to shoot the campaign and interpret the night through their own eyes. If the conversation is about opening fashion up, that should include who gets the opportunity to create the images around it too.
When we asked Jörgen how H&M takes creative risks at such a huge scale, his answer was simple: “You have to forget about the scale.” He followed it with an even better one: “Fear is the worst enemy of creativity.”
The show closed with Consani and Renaux performing a spoken word piece inspired by “I Want To Know What Love Is,” before Labrinth appeared on the runway to perform the song live. Quite a lot was happening, but somehow it all held together.
Fashion loves talking about breaking rules, even when plenty of shows end up looking the same. H&M&YOU&I felt genuinely curious about what else a runway could be. For one night, H&M forgot about the scale, gave Nick Knight room to experiment and let the idea lead. Turns out Jörgen had a point.
