Mulberry SS27: The Future Has Sharp Edges

Mulberry returned to the London Fashion Week runway for the first time since February 2017. Christopher Kane, meanwhile, had spent three years outside the rhythm of his own label after closing it in 2023, aside from a one-off Self-Portrait Residency collection in 2024 that briefly brought his particular brand of provocation back to London. Spring 2027 therefore placed two comebacks on the same stage.

Kane called the collection City, Town, Country, but its most memorable object came from somewhere far more elemental. Looking to the mulberry tree itself, he imagined the act of pruning as a way of making room for new growth. “The axe is very fundamental to the collection,” he said backstage. Its geometry migrates into hems, collars and panel lines, while the Bayswater flap is reduced to a pair of notches that recur almost like punctuation. On Mulberry SS27, those cuts become the first visible marks of Kane’s hand on the house.

Sharp Edges, Quiet Future

The opening silhouettes seem designed with a ruler and a blade.

Leather holds long coat shapes in clean vertical planes, while rectangular interruptions and notched openings break through otherwise severe surfaces. Jackets sit squarely around the torso, skirts stay controlled through the hip, and the recurring Bayswater-inspired geometry cuts into hems and fronts with the precision of an industrial component. What reads from afar as minimalism becomes more intricate the closer the eye gets.

Smooth gray and white surfaces avoid the visual heaviness traditionally associated with leather outerwear, allowing coats and separates to look almost modular. Instead of sculpting through excessive volume, he lets a well-placed incision reorganise the entire silhouette.

Kane’s handling of leather keeps that structure surprisingly light in appearance. The neutral surfaces avoid the visual heaviness traditionally associated with leather outerwear, allowing coats and separates to look almost modular. Instead of sculpting through excessive volume, he lets a well-placed incision reorganise the entire silhouette. Clean shifts, graphic seams and geometric openings start to recall the discipline of mid-century futurism, while the empty space around those gestures keeps the construction legible and precise.

Cut-outs expose small sections of skin without disturbing the overall line, turning negative space into part of the pattern. Heritage has been reduced to shape, then sharpened until it looks strangely new.

Ready for the Listening Party?

Kane has always understood the cultural importance of a very small dress, though his Mulberry party girl seems to have turned the volume down.

Minidresses stay close to the body while horizontal leather tiers create a subtle armour-like rhythm through the torso and hip. Square necklines and clipped hems keep the proportions graphic, with the familiar sexiness of Kane’s early work translated into something cooler and more composed.

The party mood never needs sequins screaming from every surface. Mini silhouettes borrow the crisp, graphic attitude of the Space Age ’60s, relying on sharp proportions, clipped hems and clean geometric interruptions to let the body carry much of the attitude. Kane keeps the energy playful but tightly edited, turning the classic mini dress into something cooler, sleeker and more controlled than outright spectacle.

They retain flirtation, but the silhouette has been edited until each interruption matters. A layered hem, one cut-out or a slight shimmer can carry the whole look.

No doubt it is a party. The music just happens to be playing through very expensive speakers.

Spring, With a Winter Hangover

Spring may have reached the calendar, but part of the wardrobe is still refusing to surrender its coat. One orange look even recalls Kenny from South Park, with its enveloping shape and unmistakably winter-coded colour, turning a familiar cold-weather silhouette into something almost cartoonish.

Outerwear keeps substantial presence throughout the collection, carrying winter’s protective instinct into lighter weather. Dark leather holds close to the body in cropped jackets and fitted dresses, while croc-embossed surfaces give otherwise spare silhouettes a harder, more tactile authority. The shoulders remain sharp, the lines controlled, and the black leather sections bring a welcome severity to all that pale futurism.

Elsewhere, heritage checks appear across an oversized trench coat rendered in translucent PVC. The pattern belongs firmly to Mulberry’s British country vocabulary, yet the material pulls it somewhere stranger, turning familiar rainwear into a ghost of itself.

Kane seems especially comfortable in that contradiction. Protection and exposure share the same garment language; traditional outerwear codes are preserved just long enough to be disrupted. One coat remembers the countryside, another looks ready for a city several years ahead of us.

Winter still has a key. Kane has simply renovated the house around it.

The Ordinary Gets Iridescent

Casual dressing enters almost anonymously at first. Cashmere brings the collection back to something familiar and tactile, its softness giving the sharper Mulberry vocabulary a quieter pause. The sweater keeps the silhouette relaxed through the upper body before the irregular hem interrupts that ease, preserving Kane’s instinct for cutting even within the most comfortable part of the wardrobe.

Then sweater weather gets its own little adventure.

Knitwear brings the collection back to something familiar, almost casual, before iridescent organza shifts the mood into stranger territory. Worn together, the two materials let everyday ease brush against a more futuristic sheen without making the contrast too obvious. Kane has always been good at letting the ordinary wander into something unexpectedly precious, and here even sweater weather gets its own little adventure.

Organza pushes the idea further. In the iridescent shift, its crisp hand preserves a straight, architectural silhouette even while translucency introduces a faint sense of fragility. Light moves across the surface in watery blues and purples, making the dress appear almost digital from a distance before the fabric reveals itself as something far more tactile.

Mulberry’s future suddenly looks softer around the edges, though only for a moment. Kane keeps the silhouette precise, letting the iridescence work through the fabric itself while the cut remains in control.

Mulberry SS27 Is Only the First Cut

Christopher Kane’s appointment was always going to carry unusual expectations. Mulberry needed a persuasive return to ready-to-wear, while Kane was stepping back into a system that had spent several years without one of London’s most recognisable design voices. Mulberry now gives that instinct a heritage house, a leather archive and a far larger commercial vocabulary to work through.

Spring 2027 gives the partnership a credible first language. Christopher Kane finds usable symbols inside the house instead of treating heritage as something untouchable, then cuts those symbols into clothes that carry his own eye for geometry, tension and slightly perverse proportion. Even the axe makes sense as more than a visual joke. Pruning becomes an editorial act.

A debut can only establish the first terms of a relationship. Kane himself described the tone as set: “She’s cool, she’s modern. But she’s also got that country in her.”

The opening cut looks clean enough. If Mulberry SS27 is only the first one, how far can Christopher Kane take the new growth from here?