Ahead of his London Fashion Week presentation, Man About Town grabbed a coffee with the emerging designer to chat about his Spring/Summer 2026 collection, British boys, and making things useless.
Geordie Campbell is weirdly calm for a designer a week out from a London Fashion Week presentation. The frantic, creative-on-a-deadline stereotype is nowhere to be found when we meet for coffee near his North London studio. He’s wearing one of his own Asterisk T-shirts; the bold graphic translating his boyish design language. It’s faded from wear, paired with work pants, and black loafers worn with white socks. Hair: a grown-out buzz cut that lands somewhere between ’90s heartthrob and military recruit, softened by an assortment of gold rings on his middle and pinky fingers. He’s the full embodiment of his brand’s playful confidence.
The designer is showing digitally, as part of the British Fashion Council’s Discovery Lab programme. “I applied online and then it was silent until I got the email of acceptance, which is pretty stressful. Since then it’s been all guns blazing, trying to knock out the best collection we’ve done so far to make it great on video rather than just photo,” he says. “The smallest movement of a knee or an elbow, or [can change] the fall of a garment. So I think it’s looking at that and looking at how something drapes.”
Even during busy periods, he sticks to his schedule, having coffee at 9:30am and 1pm (double shots), arriving at the studio early and leaving by six o’clock in the evening. “That small sense of routine helps me deal with the stress of quite an overwhelming time in the industry. So as long as I have those breakfast, lunch, coffee, those sorts of staples, I can kind of work the madness around those pillars,” he says.
Campbell’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection is titled “The Inconvenience of Differences.” If that sounds confusing, that’s kind of the point. “The themes behind that are looking at how far you can take an item, object, or a piece of clothing [and] turn it into something completely useless,” says Campbell, who looked to artworks such as Rachel Whiteread’s “HOUSE,” (a concrete-filled house installation in Bow, east London, erected in 1993 and later demolished in 1994) and Méret Oppenheim’s Le Déjeuner. “She [Oppenheim] made a fur teacup, and that element of turning something useless was one of our main points.”
This season, that inconvenience plays out across tiny athletic shorts in a checked suit fabric with an open hem; teacup prints nodding to Oppenheim’s work; and a home-inspired cardigan, building on the window themes seen in the designer’s previous collections; and a double-placketed short-sleeved curtain shirt, cut in half cotton, half damask curtain fabric.
“It’s a great continuation from my SS25 collection, where I did the window shirts and the window vests. So we have a bit of a continuation, but this time, it’s the curtains, not the window,” says Campbell, who doesn’t pigeonhole his brand to having a fixed aesthetic while leaning on a few brand mainstays: a schoolboy aesthetic, and a soft toughness that “finds the balance of trying to prove yourself while trying to figure yourself out,” he says. “When I first started Geordie Campbell, it was a completely different game. I hadn’t defined who I was as a designer. I just wanted to start. I just wanted to make the mistakes early and make it a bit of a journey, rather than setting myself down in concrete.
“The pillars that I’ve been focusing on, which are ever true to myself as a person, as a designer, and the people I surround myself with [are] about queer agenda and coming of age, and how you grow up being slightly set apart from traditional society.”
The launch of his latest collection feels like a gear shift. This year, Geordie Campbell has been worn by Anson Boone, Yungblud, and Ben Hardy. Post-digital presentation, he will present his SS26 collection to buyers in Paris, introducing the brand to a wholesale market and delighting at the idea of his British aesthetic being adopted internationally. As for who he wants to see in his latest collection, Campbell keeps things closer to home. “Jason Isaacs,” he says. “He’s British and a bit of a classic.”
