Ladies and gentlemen, ready your seats: Fashion East has announced its new designer line-up for London Fashion Week, and TBH we can’t hold in our excitement. Alongside the return of ASAI and Supriya Lele, relative newcomer Charlotte Knowles will be making a catwalk debut, while Symonds Pearmain is a special guest on the runway.

Delving into the nuances of his British-Chinese-Vietnamese cultural heritage as a second generation Londoner, CSM grad A Sai Ta’s label explores intricate textiles and exhaustive details, mirroring the designer’s appeal to disrupt familiar visual codes. Meanwhile, Supriya Lele explores the female form via a personal dialogue between her Indian and British cultural identity. Focusing on re-interpretation and re-contexualisation, Lele subverts established notions of Indian fabrications through unconventional materials, creating a lo-fi and dynamic approach to luxury.

For Charlotte Knowles’ catwalk debut (she was part of Fashion East’s static showcase for SS18), the designer will showcase a preoccupation with culturally constructed codes of femininity (the aforementioned SS18 collection looked at underwear forms). And finally, the usually off-schedule Symonds Pearmain arrives on schedule, having established a creative and conceptual dialogue working with likeminded creatives within the fashion and art world. A fashion brand by designer and artist Anthony Symonds and stylist Max Pearmain, it operates on the fault line of art and fashion, exploring the economic and progenitive potential of this increasingly problematic distinction.

“This may be our most provocative and definitely my favourite line-up ever,” reflects founder and director, Lulu Kennedy MBE. “Each talent has a unique cultural and intellectual perspective visible in their work, they are informing and moving industry conversations forward. The addition of our very special guests Symonds Pearmain, with their instantly necessary clothes and excitingly relevant discourses, is a real honour and of course, very fun.”