ANCIELA SS27 Explores Motherhood and Material Innovation at London Fashion Week

London-based womenswear label ANCIELA presented its SS27 collection at Regent Quarter on 17 September during London Fashion Week, bringing adaptive tailoring and experimental materials into a wider exploration of motherhood, memory and environmental responsibility. Rather than treating sustainability as an abstract theme, designer Jennifer Droguett Espinosa built the collection around specific choices: vintage and rescued textiles, adjustable construction and next-generation materials derived from sources including seaweed and winemaking by-products. The presentation was supported by The Mills Fabrica and Endurance Land.

Motherhood as a Framework for the Collection

For SS27, ANCIELA uses the relationship between mother and daughter as its central narrative. Care, protection and inherited knowledge sit alongside tension and trauma, with the brand extending that relationship into a metaphor for humanity’s connection with the natural world. The collection moves across past, present and future, asking what can be inherited, what needs to change and what might be carried forward.

Those ideas are translated most directly through the clothes. Adjustable panels and detachable sleeves allow garments to change, while interconnected layers can be tied and knotted around the body. Adaptability therefore becomes part of the construction rather than an additional styling device: pieces are designed to respond to movement and different configurations instead of remaining fixed in a single form.

The approach gives the collection a practical counterpart to its broader argument about resilience. If the narrative considers how inherited structures can be reconsidered rather than simply discarded, the garments themselves follow a similar logic through adjustment, reuse and transformation.

Vintage Textiles Meet Next-Generation Materials

The SS27 material palette combines existing resources with newer textile technologies. Vintage silk donated by artist Allegra Hicks appears alongside rescued wool suiting from Orsola de Castro, deadstock cottons, certified Tencel and recycled cotton.

ANCIELA also worked with several material developers. According to the collection notes, AlgaFila — described as a fibre produced using seaweed extract, air and nanotechnology — is applied to knitwear and padded garments. The brand positions its lightweight, thermally insulating properties as an alternative approach to conventional padding and yarns.

Garments and accessories also incorporate Savigne by Planet of the Grapes, an animal-free material made from grape skins, stalks and seeds left after winemaking and sourced from organic and biodynamic vineyards in Provence. This is joined by a black bio-based pigment developed by synthetic biology platform Octarine, used to create abstract fern motifs inspired by the layered darkness of jungle and forest environments.

What connects these collaborations is not the promise of a single substitute capable of solving fashion’s environmental impact. Instead, ANCIELA places different approaches next to one another — recovered materials, established lower-impact fibres and emerging technologies — making material experimentation part of the design process itself.

Beyond the Garment

The Regent Quarter presentation extended beyond clothing into installation, sound and performance. At its centre was ANCIELA’s interactive Upcycled Sound Cocoon, constructed from reclaimed foam, wadding and fabric offcuts accumulated in the studio over five years. The installation, first presented at the Design Museum in 2025, was accompanied for SS27 by a new sonic composition from artist Yasmin Rai.

A three-act live performance with artist Luzmira Zerpa explored ancestry, connection, transformation and regeneration, continuing ANCIELA’s practice of positioning fashion alongside other creative disciplines rather than treating the collection as an isolated product presentation.

Founded in London in 2019 by Colombian-Chilean interdisciplinary designer Jennifer Droguett Espinosa, ANCIELA has developed its work around experimental tailoring, migration, South American folklore and childhood memory. For SS27, those personal and cultural concerns intersect with a more technical question: how garments can evolve not only through silhouette, but through the materials they are made from and the ways they can be adapted over time.