M&S's First London Fashion Week Show: Half the Collection Under £50

Marks & Spencer put on its first ever catwalk show at midday on Friday 18 September 2026, at the Design Museum, on the official London Fashion Week schedule. It was the retailer's first London Fashion Week show, and it marked 100 years since M&S began selling clothing in 1926. The format was see-now-buy-now, with half the collection priced under £50. The womenswear and menswear were designed by M&S's in-house teams; the company employs 116 UK-based designers.

What walked

M&S lists 41 womenswear looks, in 184 options, and 16 menswear looks, in 77. The references came from the M&S Archive at the University of Leeds, which holds more than 72,000 items: the 1960s twinset reworked as knitted sets, wide-leg jeans after 1970s shapes, 1980s velvet tailoring in the menswear, and a black tuxedo with a crisp white shirt taken from the tailoring Christy Turlington wore in M&S campaigns in the 1990s. 'This is a collection built on our heritage but brought bang up to date,' said chief executive Stuart Machin.

M&S's show page lists Jodie Kidd, Erin O'Connor, Karen Elson and Lennon Gallagher on the runway, with hair by Sam McKnight.

What it costs

The whole collection went on sale from the show, online and in 10 flagship stores across the UK and Ireland, three of them in London: Marble Arch, Pantheon and High Street Kensington. The Guardian put the most expensive piece at £450, for a leather coat. Hello!'s shopping edit listed leather straight-leg turn-up trousers at £199, a tweed herringbone blazer at £85 with trousers at £58, a polka-dot funnel-neck midi shift dress at £48 and faux fur mittens at £20.

Catwalk clothes at high-street prices, on sale the day they walked.

The verdict

The Guardian's Jess Cartner-Morley headlined her review 'Marks and Spencer's first LFW catwalk gamble pays off with compelling looks at affordable prices'. She counted 310 guests, including Ian Wright and Jamie Carragher, with Joan Collins and Kemi Badenoch among the front row; M&S's own page puts the audience at 360. For the Guardian, the message that catwalk style is for everyone 'is a win for London fashion week', which it says has struggled to feel relevant to real lives as designer prices have soared.

Womenswear director Maddy Evans summed up the pitch as 'fashion with a small f, not a capital F', and told Reuters the show was 'about broadening our audience'. The Guardian reports that M&S now ranks second in style perception, behind Zara. 'That's exactly where we want to be,' Evans said.

There is a business case behind the runway. Reuters describes M&S as one of Britain's biggest high street names, with more than 10 per cent of the country's fashion market, and reports that Machin is targeting a doubling of online sales in fashion, home and beauty over the long term, from about £1.4 billion in 2024/25. John Lyttle, managing director of Fashion, Home & Beauty, said the show 'is not an end point'.

M&S was not the only high-street name to sell straight off a London runway that week. On Thursday 17 September H&M staged a show directed by Nick Knight and SHOWstudio at Kensington Olympia for about 700 guests, and put the first drop of its Autumn 2026 womenswear and its H&M Atelier menswear on sale online from 9pm CET.