Even if you’ve only been half paying attention to the fall 2025 shows, you’ll know by now that super wide swaggering shoulders, strong in fashion speak, are the story of the season in Paris, and a pretty strident one at that. Yet not at Margaret Howell, oh no. In that brilliantly counter-intuitive way of hers, Howell’s shoulders were more laidback and relaxed than ever: dropped, to use yet more fashion speak—softly rounded, tailoring impeccably worked to look easy, and better yet, feel easy. It’s a gesture of conspiratorial solidarity with those that wear her clothes. No better example of that than her generously proportioned textured wool coat in a shade of dark gray you might call storm if you happened to be looking at a British sky one rainy night. The coat was lightly cinched with a sliver of a leather belt, with a swathe of black shearling at the neck, a scarf made from off-cuts of the pelts: the same story for all of the collection’s sheepskin accessories, like the cozy snap caps. (Even mid-calf black leather moto boots came lined in shearling.)
At a time when it can feel like fashion is still choosing fleeting spectacle over something that can actually be worn in the real world, Howell continues to embrace the joy to be had from the latter. (To emphasize that, she shot this collection on models as they walked, catching them mid stride, so they wouldn’t look static, frozen; we move through life, so why shouldn’t we see her clothes doing so too?) That coat of Howell’s was lifted from one she designed for a collection in 2023. But she modified it, refreshed it to be loosened and boxier after listening to customer feedback, and those relaxed, ever so slightly exaggerated proportions informed so much of her fall. Her listening is eminently sensible really, but these days, strange to say, a pretty radical thing to do.
It is, though, an approach that is classically Margaret Howell: as in, let the design be in the service of connection; acknowledging that the act of creating clothing is in some ways always about intimacy. There was so much of that here, evident in both her women’s and men’s looks. The way she cut the guys’ suiting to be softer and easier too, and—another example of listening to the people who live in her clothes—rendered in flannel as soft as a whisper, or a crisper, weightier wool which hails from an Italian mill that specializes in reproduction military fabrics. The suiting might be worn with shirts which were vegetable dyed in shades of tan and brown, or layered up with a car coat which also hailed from a bygone collection, or a chunky zip-front cardigan which started life as a women’s piece.
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