Marks & Spencer makes London Fashion Week debut with shoppable runway

Marks & Spencer is taking a shoppable womenswear and menswear collection to London Fashion Week this September, putting the high-street giant on the same runway calendar as luxury and designer labels for the first time. The show will stream live, and the clothes will be available immediately online, in UK flagship stores and across key international markets, turning the catwalk into a direct sales engine.

The British Fashion Council has set London Fashion Week 2026 for Thursday 17 September to Monday 21 September, and M&S is using that slot to mark 100 years in the fashion industry. The retailer is leaning hard into the “see now, buy now” model because the point is obvious: the faster the product lands, the less time a customer has to talk themselves out of it.

Stuart Machin said the company wants to “showcase its designs on fashion’s global stage” and push its “style, quality and value” message in front of a wider audience. That is the smart part of this move. M&S is not trying to pretend it has become a new luxury house overnight. It is borrowing the mechanics of luxury fashion, the runway, the live stream, the immediate drop, to give mainstream clothes a more urgent, more desirable frame.

The scale behind the stunt is real enough. M&S says it serves nearly 30 million customers every year and employs about 63,000 colleagues. It has also announced more than £90m of investment in London stores, including 17 new and renewed stores and six new food halls, so the runway debut sits inside a much broader push to make the brand feel sharper, more modern and more visible across the capital.

The timing matters too. Just days earlier, M&S staged a fashion show at Silverstone in a working Formula One pit lane, a setting that looked more like a spectacle machine than a traditional retail presentation. Put that beside London Fashion Week and the message is clear: M&S wants heritage, accessibility and a little adrenaline in the same frame.

Whether this reads as a real reset or just a highly polished visibility play will come down to the clothes. If the collection feels fresh enough to earn the runway slot, M&S can claim a genuine shift in perception. If not, it will still have bought itself a lot of attention, which, in fashion, is often the whole game.