Looking Back at Olivia Black at LFW: Serendipity, Collected

Serendipity

On Friday 19 September 2025, Olivia Black staged her London Fashion Week catwalk at The Dixon on Tooley Street, turning a familiar hotel address into something closer to a gathering point: drinks first, show second, conversation after. The pacing felt deliberate, like an invitation to meet the world around the clothes rather than rush past it. 

The collection, titled “Serendipity”, frames itself as seasonless and personal, less a neat chapter than a collage of the people and places that have carried the designer forward. In a fashion calendar obsessed with newness, Black’s message lands differently: growth is rarely linear, and style can be a record of chance encounters, community energy, and the quiet consistency of those who keep you going.

If “Serendipity” has an emblem, it is the magpie.

Not as a literal motif, but as a method. The collection pulls from the bird’s stark black and white colouring and its instinct to gather shiny fragments, translating that impulse into a wardrobe built on contrast, precision, and flashes of metallic light. Gold accents appear like small discoveries across looks, signalling richness not as excess, but as connection and meaning. It is the idea of treasure reframed: memory, craft, and shared history, worn close to the body. 

The silhouettes stay grounded in what Black does best: elevated basics and enduring classics that do not need loud theatrics to feel intentional. Tailored blazers and coats carry the line’s backbone, supported by trousers, dresses, skirts, and shirts designed to live beyond a single season’s mood. This is not minimalism for the sake of restraint. It is clarity, the kind that lets fabric choice, cut, and styling do the talking.

Sustainability here is not a slogan dropped into a press paragraph.

The pieces are constructed in the UK by local makers, built from sustainably sourced materials, including natural fibres and carefully selected deadstock fabrics. The result is a collection that reads as considered, both in its ethics and its finish: fashion that treats longevity as a design feature, not an afterthought. 

Then there is the detail that ties the emotional narrative to the visual identity: the brand’s recurring safety pin logo. It appears throughout as a symbol of community and connection, and as a nod to a seamstress lineage rooted in Black’s Nana, positioned as the heart of the label’s story. The safety pin is a simple object with a loaded history, practical, protective, a fix when you need one. In this context, it becomes a signature that feels earned rather than imposed, a reminder that clothing is often held together by people as much as by thread.

At a moment when “gender fluid” risks becoming a catch-all

Olivia Black’s approach is more foundational: a wardrobe designed with inclusivity in mind, shaped by craft, conscience, and storytelling. The brand speaks to a growing community described as The Evolved, a name that fits the collection’s central thesis: identity is not static, and style can be a way of honouring that motion without losing your centre. 

“Serendipity” ultimately succeeds because it does not chase spectacle. It leans into what many emerging designers are relearning, sometimes the sharpest statement is commitment: to local production, to materials that already exist, to silhouettes that last, and to the relationships that make the work possible. In a week where noise is plentiful, Olivia Black’s show makes a case for the power of the collected and the kept.

Show notes

Presented at The Dixon, 211 Tooley Street, London SE1 2JX as part of London Fashion Week, Friday 19 September 2025. 

Photographer: @tommarshak Videographer: @elizabethclare.edit

Venue: @thedixonlondon

Key makeup: @jmac_mua Makeup team: @xalicemakeupx, @yasmin_heinz, @shivikafacepaint

Key hair: @makeupbyrossino Hair team: @g.e.o_designs, @hmuabyzoeosborne, @krisstigrehair

Key nail artist: @lahmua_uk Nails team: @cnailsbyla, @janelgrantnails, @theenailtherapist

First assistant: @iriseclair Assistants: @ellen_bird_, @miazekm.art.a, @mingfeixuofficial, @khaosinraggedthoughts

Lead stylist: Yasmyn Ntege (@yasmynfw) Stylist assistant: @marika_stylist_london

Bling/Accessories: @accessoriesofold, @annabel.b.jewellery, @kk_jwlr