Aaron Esh is casting for chemistry. A few days before his spring 2027 show, Esh and his team had seen hundreds of models, and many more would pass through before they were done. The question wasn’t simply whether somebody could wear the clothes, but, “Who are they snogging?” Esh asked, speaking during a preview from his new space that’s attached to head office of AllSaints, where he is now also chief creative officer. It was a pithy, provocative introduction to a collection titled Laws of Attraction.
Attraction, for Esh, is distinct from conventional sexiness. For his namesake label, he was interested in the instinctive pull of things before taste has had time to intervene: something a little ugly or warped, and all the more alluring for it. That translated into queasy colors and strange surfaces: a frenetic red slip dress that opened the show; a nude leather blazer like taut skin; a Harrington jacket covered in a micro-dot print that melts the longer you stare at it. Proportions were similarly skewed, with languid lapels, exaggerated ribbing, Bowie-esque little-jacket-big-trouser ensembles, and tailoring in soft, schlubby fabrics. “I like things to look a bit grubby, but up close when you touch it, the craft feels major,” Esh said.
That push and pull ran through the construction, too. A stand-out moment was a fluffy, deep purple organza coat that read as shearling and required more than 100 hours of work, its fabric cut into strips, brushed into strands, re-embroidered, and finished with leather. Washed-silk military coats were left unlined and satins flashed under Esh’s signature tailoring in odd colors—migraine yellow, gray-violet. Leather abounded, of course: croc leather, fleshy leather, quilted and cutaway and cuffing bootcut jeans. Minis—like one particularly fab hot-pink feathered skirt under a gray jersey zip-up—were shorter and more deliberate than the fluid, asymmetric dresses Esh has previously favored, and nothing quite sat where the eye expected it to.
A sense of deepened assurance came from knowing his characters better. Designing for AllSaints, with its far broader demographic, has sharpened the distinction. “This is a very specific boy and a very specific girl,” Esh said of his own line. When developing his new footwear as part of a forthcoming On collaboration, Esh’s question was essentially: if Lux Gillespie would never normally wear trainers, what would make them believable on him? The answer was a structured and shiny, low profile anti-sneaker.
Esh described spring as the first step out of the opening chapter of his design language. His signatures were still there—leathers and louche tailoring, a body caught between bravado and vulnerability—but the ideas felt more primal. “Things don’t need to match. They need to attract,” as he put it.
