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Last season Ashley Williams set about rescuing provinciality from the prosaic; for fall 2026, she was consumed by it. Quite literally, her cast of characters became the domestic scene they previously inhabited: plasticky headboards cinched tulle skirts, toilet paper bangles encircled wrists, silky and scalloped bedspreads beckoned from the bellybuttons of quilted cardigans and shift dresses. Williams referenced Carol Anne from the 1982 horror movie Poltergeist, in communion with the spirits through household appliances.
The London designer was also inspired by ’80s bedrooms and retro dreamhouse-y children’s furniture—covetable, fantastical. Concurrently, the kinds of make-believe we take with us into adulthood, like the performed self in work, social settings, and outside of our homes. “I am always interested in a person’s different ‘versions’ and how that shows up in physical spaces,” William said.
All of these whorling ideas, set in a coagulating color palette like a smeared VHS tape from three decades before, played out in a series of character studies. There was the nurturing grandparent in a faux-fur lined houndstooth jacket and a girl dressed for a ballet recital in skull and crossbones mittens and acid yellow and baby pink tulle skirts. Giggly, off-kilter prints abounded, of course (Williams’s enduring “I <3 ME” print has been a London uniform staple for years) on hospital gowns, tracksuits, drop-waist dresses, and house coats. They included an upholstery-style floral, sleeping cats, centaurs in a woodland, some pills. Other signatures, like the “bedtime trousers,” were cast in lace-lined, cough syrup-colored satin. Minidresses were done in a sweet crinkly mint fabric from the same mills as Prada—“our poshest one,” said Williams. Alongside these more luxe textures and heavy wool, Williams reveled in the familiar embrace of synthetic fibers, like shiny polyester of ’80s lingerie, fleece, and reflective strips.
Styling by Danny Reed kept up the weird and whimsical fever dream, and accessories revealed more as you gawped at them: velcro cut-out go-go-boots-cum-orthopedic-slippers over thick socks, and blue-rinse shag wigs, a continuation of the toy-like jewelry and hair accessory collaboration with YVMIN clipped to bangs and caressing shoulders. Following a collaboration with Starface pimple patches, Williams and her cast of characters will pull a sicky and play hooky, skipping out of London for a Paris showroom and onward to Shanghai for fashion week.
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