Oscar Ouyang: London Fashion Week's rising star

“It’s always going to be about the young, cool London kids on the street,” Oscar Ouyang says, sitting in his Hoxton studio. “That’s our surroundings. You come in every day, you people-watch — we take a lot of inspiration just from taking pictures of them.”

Meet Ouyang, 27, who most insiders would enthusiastically point towards as one of the hottest names to enter the London Fashion Week canon in recent years. A knitwear specialist — he studied BA knitwear before graduating from Central Saint Martins’ MA fashion course in 2023 — he founded his gender-neutral label with Yibo Chen, an RCA MA fashion womenswear graduate.

His first two shows have proven him to be as capable of commercial clothes as fantastical showpieces: feather-smothered looks alongside ready-to-wear cardigans, fine silk knits and his own spin on the Napoleonic military jackets enjoying their latest moment in the sun.

His runway debut last September, titled Don’t Shoot The Messenger, “was about making a statement, and we might have got a little bit carried away. There were too many showpieces — boom, wow moments,” he says.

‘Our runway debut was about making a statement’

The second, The Last Party, shown in February, demonstrated increasingly assured world-building alongside pieces you really wanted to bag. Ouyang transformed the usually chilly concrete subterranea of 180 Strand into the aftermath of an aristocratic country-house blowout and his designs mixed youthful playfulness with sensuality: fur-trimmed cardigans worn with masquerade masks, takes on Russian ushanka hats and charming Fair Isle pullovers. Proof of its appeal comes via prominent stockists including Selfridges and Dover Street Market.

Some of The Last Party’s most playful details — party-hat headwear and metallic rosettes — appear to have caught the eye of the Coach design team, whose SS27 show in New York last week included strikingly similar ideas. Ouyang posted on Instagram: “@coach will be sending my invoice.”

His spring/summer 2027 collection, which will be shown on Friday at the old Victorian Rochelle School in Shoreditch, has something of The Virgin Suicides about it, and has been informed by heirlooms passing through families. This manifests in “a lot of silverware and metallic elements in the knits, in the crochets”. It’s all he will give away.

Born and raised in Beijing, Ouyang was first drawn to fashion as a kind of coping mechanism when “you’re a little bit different to the rest of the class, and you get bullied,” he says. “For me fashion was a world that you can just kind of escape into, a world of glamour.” Keep an eye on where those ideas take him this week.