The Dress Of Summer 2027 Is Already Set

I first noticed the trend at London Fashion Week, when a painterly minidress sauntered into the Dunard Fund Life Drawing Studio at the Royal Academy of Arts. She was sheer, save for splashes of red tulle to preserve the model’s modesty and, said its maker Steve O Smith, inspired by “a return to joy and almost childlike drawing”. From then on, eye-wateringly short dresses skipped down the city’s runways, from Talia Byre, who said school-coded collages pushed her into more experimental, creative territory, to A Letter, which saw Matt Empringham and Freddy Coomes take on their runway debut with girlish A-line pieces inspired by an archive St Michael’s pattern.

The mini that raised the most eyebrows was Mulberry’s cheek-grazing leather confection crafted from Bayswater flaps stacked together. The first to come out of bodycon wunderkind Christopher Kane’s studio, as he revamps the sleepy bag brand with his sister Tammy, the most micro of looks was a spunky city take on the town-and-country aesthetic the Kanes are leaning into. Styled with the new Chop shoulder bags, which symbolise cutting a (Mulberry) tree to promote growth, it felt like a fresh step forward that really has legs.

Because – as proven at Miu Miu and Marni, Loewe and Courregès as the season rumbled on – it’s impossible to take oneself too seriously in an abbreviated hemline. “When I look back at the clothes I designed then, it’s fairly clear that they signalled great high spirits,” Mary Quant, miniskirt doyenne, once said in an interview with Vogue. “They celebrated youth and life and tremendous opportunity. They had a kind of, ‘Look at me’ quality. They said, ‘Life is great’.” Today’s news might suggest otherwise, but fashion, particularly British fashion, is at its scrappy best when backdropped by less than tremendous circumstances.

It’s worth looking back to the greats – Jean Shrimpton, Anita Pallenberg, Pattie Boyd – when it comes to styling the new mini that’s sometimes boxy and modish, other times flippy and flirtatious. This is not an extension of the celebrity-driven naked trend. Or summer’s boho redux. It’s about an attitude, born from the confidence to wear just one excellent piece of clothing well. Look at any of the runway pictures here, and it’s the simplicity of the outfits that sing. In a season that saw Prada base an entire show around the skirt, designers are doubling down on a core message. In London, it’s that – against all odds – the defiance and playfulness of a minidress can’t be dampened.