A meadow for a collection called Love: Patrick McDowell SS27

What should a London Fashion Week florist create for a collection called Love? Something untamed. A meadow, left to grow wild through a whole summer: nothing in a straight line, nothing too sharp-edged, colour and height erupting in every direction, the way a heart does when it wants something.

Photography @knauerfoto

In the hours before a show starts, a runway stands in anticipation of what it’s about to reveal: months of work, held back until the exact minute a collection is finally shown. The lights are set, the seats are empty, and the only signal of what’s coming is the atmosphere building.

A designer authors more than the clothes for a show like this: the space is built to hold the same idea as the collection, so the audience arrives already inside it, before a single look comes out.

For Patrick McDowell’s SS27, at the end of the runway, sat a meadow: grasses caught mid-movement, a run of yellow through the reeds, the first sign of a collection called Love. The hands behind it were ours.

It’s the third time we’ve worked as the London Fashion Week florist for Patrick. What connects us to him is the same thing that runs through his work each season: a designer who still insists on the hand over the machine, who builds a collection threaded with five hundred hours of embroidery. That’s the language we speak too.

Patrick is a designer who asks us to bring the same instinct for craft, worked in a different material.

Reading the collection

Love, the collection, took its inspiration from 1960s American socialites and Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love. What Patrick took from that film wasn’t the story so much as a device: the same silhouette recurring on the same woman throughout, its print and colour shifting with the tone of the scene.

He translated that into hand-painted silks, tulips, roses and freesias painted across the fabric, the shapes held constant while the surface changes underneath it. Flowers were a central part of the collection before we were.

As a London Fashion Week florist, what we recognise in Patrick is a designer unwilling to let a season move faster than the work deserves. Three looks were hand-embroidered with Pandora jewellery in his London atelier: over five hundred hours, fifteen hundred individual pieces stitched into place one at a time. Each one a small, stubborn insistence that some things still can’t be rushed, or faked, or made by anything other than a person sitting with a needle.

For us, reading the collection meant thinking through how to answer it. If we’d lifted those same tulips and freesias off the fabric, it would have felt like an illustration rather than a response. We needed to match the same level of detail Patrick had threaded through the collection.

Photography @knauerfoto

Building the landscape

The walkway ran three metres wide and fifteen long, a mirrored floor at its centre. It called for a landscape, much more than a border: dense and dramatic where the first look would appear, then extending either side toward the audience as it travelled the length of the room.

Photography @knauerfoto

The mirrored floor stayed completely clean, uninterrupted, so the reflection could do its own work: doubling the meadow’s height without doubling its footprint, so that every model appeared to walk not past the field but through it.

“This collection was about love, and I love flowers. We had a mirrored runway and wanted to juxtapose this with a very natural and organic meadow arrangement. Something to make the two worlds join together in harmony. It worked so well and provided the most beautiful walkway for the models.” – Patrick McDowell

Planting the meadow

Height and movement came from stipa gigantea, golden oat grass, its seed heads never still, catching light and turning with the smallest change in the air around it. A real meadow never holds one shape for long, it shifts under its own weather. It was that freedom of movement, that pull back to long summer days spent somewhere half-wild, that felt closer to what Love was about than anything static could. We planted it close to where the models would pass, so the whole install kept moving even while everything else in the room held its breath.

Two crocosmias ran through the planting in different reds, Lucifer and George Davidson, giving the meadow a line of colour no grass alone could hold.

Panicum virgatum Northwind added the one disciplined note in the planting, upright and columnar, its blue-green foliage staying rigid against the looseness everywhere else. Andropogon gerardii Blackhawks did the opposite work, running from green toward a near-black, maroon, the darkest material in the piece, giving the meadow realness.

Heliopsis Asahi carried the only true yellow, its quilled, spidery petals closer to a

firework than a daisy. Euphorbia fulgens Sunstream ran alongside it in warm coral, slender stems lined with small flowers that read from a distance as a single soft colour rather than individual blooms.  kangaroo paw: felted, claw-shaped flowers in yellow, the one flower in the meadow giving rigid structure.

London Fashion Week brings some of our favourite briefs of the year. Where a collection becomes a brief, and a brief becomes a landscape.

This one asked what love looks like when it’s left to grow on its own, and on one morning in September, at the end of a runway in Bloomsbury, we think we answered it.

With thanks to the whole team behind this show: Patrick McDowell as creative director, Pandora for the jewellery, connected by CERTILOGO, bags by Aspinal of London, creative direction from BHP.TV, production by TIAGI, set design by Nyk Mensah, movement direction by Harry Price Projects, lighting direction by Harry Burner, musical direction by Dave Chase, casting by George Raymond Stead, photography by Knauerfoto, videography by Duck Productions, make-up by Theczarisalive using Lisa Eldridge, hair by Laura Chadwick, PR by Purple PR, flowers by Blooming Haus, hats by JT Millinery, and shoes by Manolo Blahnik.

With special thanks to the Patrick McDowell team who made this possible, and to London Fashion Week, the British Fashion Council, High Fashion Group, and Parker and Bailey.