Why Paolo Carzana’s back-garden show was LFW’s hidden gem

Late Monday evening, on the final day of London Fashion Week, a tiny group of friends, family and press descended on Clapton in Hackney for a special kind of fashion event. This wasn’t some cavernous warehouse or grand ballroom, but an altogether more personal kind of space for the final stretch of evening. “Please note that the show will be very intimate and will take place at Paolo’s house,” read invitations mailed out before Paolo Carzana’s SS25 show. Hailed as a modern day fashion svengali – and drawing hefty comparisons to the likes of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen – Carzana has been crafting sublime clothing for fairytale travellers since before his LFW debut in 2022, picking up fans in Zendaya and Michaela Coel in the process. A 2024 LVMH finalist, Sarabande artist-in-residence, and BFC NEWGEN recipient, Carzana is undoubtedly one of London’s brightest stars, and opening up his own home, by design, felt like a momentous occasion on that star’s ascent.

As guests made their way into Carzana’s very neat flat, glasses of orange wine were served before the crowd were ushered through the door at the back of the house. Descending the steps into the patioed garden below, you could instantly see why the Welsh designer wanted to keep things closer to home. For previous seasons, Carzana has shown in more conventional settings, like central London’s Old Selfridges Hotel, but it turns out that this was an altogether better match for the romance of his clothes. Thickets of lush greenery wound around an arched trellis in the middle of the garden, one that some guests walked through to reach their seats, while others sat closer to the back door around a raised brick pond, a mound of moss growing in its middle. As guests chatted and dusk fell on the scene, an incognito Coel quietly swept in to take her place on the wooden benches lining the garden’s perimeter.

From there, hidden floodlights propped up in trees and pointing from bedroom windows thwacked into life, and the first model appeared at the top of the stairs in piles of Carzana’s pilgrim-coded clothes. Wearing a cropped white shirt and undulous, frayed trousers, the model slowly danced his way to the pond and considered his own reflection for an opening performance that lasted a couple of minutes, before the runway proper began, and more models appeared in worn, streaked jackets and hacked-at tops, resembling a curious rabble of Lost Boys. After the first section of nine men’s looks came the same number of women’s, with models bundled in antique bed sheets, organza blouses below and whimsical headdresses on top. A palette born from organic dyes like orange spice, black tea and onion skins gave the collection an obviously earthy appeal, each piece a one-of-a-kind due to the unique colouring process.

After the show had ended, and Carzana appeared for a fleeting second to whoops and cheers, the models then made their way to the street outside for an impromptu photoshoot, cars beeping their horns as these inexplicable fashion apparitions spawned to block their way. With the absence of show notes, it was initially up to guests to interpret the scene how they felt – that was until the next day, when Carzana made his intentions clear in a lengthy, written note.

“I find myself writing this, just after waking up from a long deep sleep (the first sleep in some days and weeks) in my bedroom, that last night became the dressing room for the show,” said the designer. Carzana then went on to explain that his starting point for the show was the myth of Narcissus, “specifically the Caravaggio masterpiece for visual reference, but most importantly the story.” After visiting the original painting in Rome, that tale of narcissism forced Carzana to think about how “the world is heading back to this horrible sense of vanity, this desire to care for oneself more so than others.”

In Carzana’s version of the tale, however, his opening model “does not fall in love with his reflection or himself, he reverses, washes away his reflection and turns away, and lights the path for others to follow in his way.” For Carzana, the actions of this new Narcissus are about looking inward and recognising our own role in societal problems, and only after understanding that we can then move forward. It’s quite evident that the designer is always thinking deeply about the world around him, and this SS25 collection showed that there are still endless depths to plumb when it comes to his own creativity. “I think that if we all worked together to understand what it is that hurts us,” concluded the designer, “what it is that causes us pain, then again, we could learn, we could move forward, we can return from the pond of our reflection.”