Mulberry returns to London Fashion Week with Christopher Kane debut

Mulberry will return to the London Fashion Week schedule on 20 September with Christopher Kane’s first womenswear collection for the house, turning the runway into a test of whether a heritage leather brand can rebuild fashion heat. Titled Mulberry by Christopher Kane, the show will reach stores and online in January 2027, marking the label’s first womenswear outing after a six-year absence.

Kane arrived at Mulberry in March 2026 as creative director of women’s ready-to-wear, and the assignment gives the brand a designer with real runway authority at a moment when it needs more than handbags to command attention. He was a fixture on the London Fashion Week calendar before closing his namesake label in 2023, and he has four British Fashion Awards to his name, including Womenswear Designer of the Year.

The move sits inside Andrea Baldo’s Back to the Mulberry Spirit strategy, which aims to restore performance and return the business to sustainable profitability. The target is annual revenue of more than £200 million and a 15 percent adjusted EBIT margin, a tall order for a company that reported revenue of £120.4 million for the year ended 29 March 2025, down from £152.8 million a year earlier.

There are signs of recovery, though the picture is still fragile. Mulberry said total sales rose 5.7 percent in the 52 weeks to 28 March 2026, with UK like-for-like sales up 13.7 percent in the second half of that period. The brand is also coming off a period of strategic retrenchment: it last showed a ready-to-wear range for autumn/winter 2020, and it ended its clothing and footwear licence with Onward Luxury Group in 2020 during the pandemic-era cutbacks.

That makes the September show more than a return date. Mulberry says it now has more than 1,000 employees, two factories in Somerset, nearly 100 stores across the UK and internationally, and a digital flagship, a scale that still makes it one of Britain’s most visible luxury names. Its core commercial business remains leather accessories, but the company has been building out ready-to-wear as a complementary category, and this show is the clearest sign yet that it wants clothes to do more of the cultural work.

London is the right stage for that reset. Baldo has framed the city as a global platform for creativity and culture, while British Fashion Council chief executive Laura Weir has welcomed Mulberry’s return as part of a push to bring iconic British brands back into the schedule. The council said London Fashion Week in February 2026 featured 90 designers and organisations, up 11 percent year on year, and Mulberry’s comeback gives that renewed energy a commercially important name to carry. The first real test comes in September, when Kane’s version of Mulberry steps onto the runway.