POET-LAB built its latest London Fashion Week collection around the idea that memory is the last thing conformity can't take from us. Creative Director Giuseppe Iaciofano carried that concept through the clothes themselves, right down to the seams.
The London-based label returned to London Fashion Week this September with 'REMEMBER', its SS27 collection. Iaciofano built the line around a single question: what happens to identity once a person stops carrying their past forward?
Albania, Reimagined in Concrete and Cloth
The collection started with a person, not a fabric swatch.
Muse Elton Ilirjani, born in Albania, gave 'REMEMBER' its emotional core, and the country's landscape runs through the collection like a second signature. Brutalist buildings, raw concrete, and industrial skylines translated into oversized volumes, asymmetric tailoring, and sculptural, genderless shapes.
One look drenched the body in cascading silver fringe over sheer mesh, suggesting armour built from something soft. Another paired a simple silver shift dress with an unexpected burst of hot pink tulle beneath the hem, proof that a collection about resistance can still leave room for mischief.
Colour stayed deliberately restrained throughout, letting proportion and construction carry the visual weight instead, a restraint consistent with POET-LAB's recurring dialogue between strength and vulnerability.
Silver Fringe, Sheer Lace and a Splash of Pink
That's really the trick of this collection. Every look on the runway seemed to be having a small disagreement with itself.
Sculptural gowns draped asymmetrically off one shoulder sat beside oversized, unfinished-looking silhouettes. Sheer black lace kept appearing worn loose beneath heavier tailored layers, exposed one moment and shielded the next.
Nothing was decorated for decoration's sake. The construction did the talking instead, with seams left visible rather than tucked away, and sculptural, branch-like headpieces reading less like styling and more like something grown rather than put on.
Is Fashion Allowed to Be This Political?
Whether a runway collection can genuinely carry the weight of resistance, or whether that's simply the language fashion reaches for when it wants to feel important, will likely divide opinion long after the models have left the runway.
POET-LAB clearly believes the clothes can hold that weight, and the casting backed the claim. Models of noticeably different ages shared the runway in the same uncompromising pieces, including a silver-haired woman in a sweeping black wrap dress who commanded the space just as fully as anyone younger beside her, a choice that said something about who the brand believes memory belongs to.
The Man Behind the Message
Iaciofano's own biography describes his path as moving 'from Milan's glamour to New York's pragmatism,' and from overcoming cancer to turning discrimination into strength.
As he has put it himself, 'Inclusivity-ethical, for me, is one word. Everyone can wear Poet-Lab with no judgement of who can wear what.' That philosophy runs straight through 'REMEMBER'.
As the brand put it in its SS27 presentation, memory is the only luxury that cannot be replicated, and the freedom to remember is the freedom to remain yourself.
Genderless tailoring pushes back against tidy dress codes, while repurposed deadstock fabric keeps reinvention, not waste, at the centre of the brand's thinking. No amount of money buys back a memory once it's gone, and 'REMEMBER' seems built to make sure nobody in the audience forgets that.
