For the second consecutive season, Pentagram has created the visual identities for the British Fashion Council’s three showcase events.
London Fashion Week and London Fashion Week Men’s offer the industry a look at upcoming women’s and menswear, while London Fashion Week Festival provides the general public with a unique shopping experience. Held twice a year at the iconic Store Studios on the Strand, the events are among the highest profile of their kind and exhibit the best of British fashion design to an international audience.
Built around the campaign idea of ‘discovery’, Pentagram’s work for Autumn/Winter 2018 celebrates British fashion’s extraordinary new talents, contrasting the emergence of their voices against London Fashion Week’s prestigious history. As with the Spring/Summer 2018 campaign, a repeating motif was used to create a linking graphic system and evoke a sense of shared DNA across the series.
To do this, Pentagram translated the campaign idea into a typographic treatment: bespoke and contemporary typefaces were drawn out and juxtaposed against the subtle calligraphic detail of the traditionally-inspired Ogg typeface. Applied consistently across the three identities, this device united the events in a powerful typographic tribute to the diversity of Britain’s fashion ecosystem.
The heavy curves of LFWM’s bespoke monoline typeface constantly agitate the neighbouring Ogg letterforms, producing a overlapping aesthetic that has a sense of three-dimensionality. Whereas the harder typeface that Pentagram drew for LFW and LFWF combines unwaveringly straight lines with dramatic angles—delivering a dynamic italic style that cuts its way into the surrounding shapes and space.
The identity that Pentagram designed for London Fashion Week Men’s uses artworks and motifs from emerging men’s designers to create an irreverent collaged-aesthetic that pays homage to their creative processes. In contrast, London Fashion Week’s brutalist construction delivers a modern aesthetic that confidently expresses itself within the space it occupies. And finally, London Fashion Week Festival’s identity uses the same graphic language as the womenswear showcase to inject a contemporary couture aesthetic to the consumer facing festival. A suite of behind-the-scenes imagery was integrated into the festival’s visuals to provide the identity with both an aspirational and inclusive feel.
Designed with animation and digital environments in mind, the identities were brought to life on digital wayfinding systems and banners that dominated the event space. In addition to this, Pentagram designed collateral such as bespoke invites, event passes and information guides where—in line with the British Fashion Council’s Positive Fashion initiative—an emphasis was placed on digital production.
