London Fashion Week has decided it is too parochial to be called London Fashion Week. The solution: rebrand it as a global initiative that happens to be headquartered in London, which is still London, but spiritually larger.
This is what happens when a city’s most famous cultural event realizes it can’t actually leave the city and decides to leave the city’s name instead. The initiative launched this year to demonstrate that LFW is “bigger than London”—a statement that immediately raises the question: bigger than London in what sense? Revenue? Attendees? Ambition? The answer is none of these things, but the gesture was made anyway.
What’s truly remarkable is the logical inversion at work here. London Fashion Week has been London Fashion Week for decades, drawing designers, buyers, and press from everywhere because it was unambiguously London. That geographic specificity was the entire brand. Now the event wants to signal globalism by… keeping everything exactly the same but changing how it talks about itself.
The fashion industry has always been obsessed with transcendence—the idea that style exists above geography, beyond borders, in some ethereal realm of pure aesthetics. Turns out that realm still has an address: Brewer Street, London, England. You cannot actually displace a city from a city-based event, no matter how many press releases you issue about your expanded vision.
The real insight: fashion weeks don’t get bigger by shedding their identity. They get bigger by being so good at their identity that everyone else shows up. London didn’t need a rebranding. It needed London to keep being London.
The initiative launched anyway.