Sinead Gorey SS27
Recently at London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2027, up-and-coming designer Sinead Gorey makes the bedroom the starting point for an after-dark coming-of-age story, where lingerie escapes its usual supporting role and becomes the entire show.
Any party girl knows that a particular kind of chaos happens before a night out. Half-dressed on the bedroom floor, someone is borrowing your lipstick, someone else is changing for the third time, music is too loud, and the taxi is already waiting downstairs. It's messy, intimate and somehow way more exciting than wherever you are actually going. They say the journey is always the best bit, right?
This season, Gorey turns that tradition into the entire premise of Awakening; a collection about getting dressed, getting undressed and figuring out who you want to be. Awakening follows Gorey’s girl from the bedroom to the dance floor, charting the moment where getting ready stops being preparation and becomes performance. The display plays with the closeness of dressing in front of your friends, then gradually pushes that privacy into the open.
“The collection is about reconnecting with your sensuality and confidence,” Gorey says. “It’s that feeling of getting dressed with your girls, trying everything on and slowly becoming the person you want to be that night.”
Lingerie is pulled firmly out from underneath the clothes and given centre stage. Trompe-l’œil bras and knickers, corsetry, suspenders, lace and rosary beads appear alongside sheer jersey, body-conscious dresses and barely-there separates. Slips obviously become party dresses. Corsets obviously become tops. Shapewear is worn unapologetically.
It's deliberately provocative - but it never feels like exposure for exposure’s sake. Instead, Awakening treats vulnerability as something you choose to wear. The things traditionally concealed become armour.
That idea extends into the fabrics themselves. Heat-reactive materials record the evidence of a night out. Fingerprints and handprints bloom across their surfaces, then gradually disappear. It is fashioned with a memory, albeit a temporary one. Touch leaves its mark, then vanishes.
Elsewhere, delicate pointelle holes expose flashes of skin against more sculpted silhouettes, while lace meets liquid chainmail, feathers, sheer layers and polished hardware. Romantic materials are given a darker edge, twisted into pieces that feel as though they have survived several hours of dancing and questionable decisions we are all familiar with.
The collection’s collaboration with Ann Summers makes immaculate sense. Gorey styles some of the British lingerie brand’s most recognisable pieces alongside her own designs, tapping into the cultural memory of buying your first lingerie set, experimenting with fantasy, and discovering the confidence that can come with it.
The presentation itself takes place inside a Sinead Gorey house party already in full swing. Models, friends and dancers move through bedrooms and front rooms before the action descends into a dark downstairs club. The environment mirrors the collection’s narrative: private becomes public, innocent becomes provocative, getting ready becomes going out.
The bedroom is a dressing room, a confessional and a dance floor all at once.
Words by Izabel Rose
