Completedworks SS26
When Completedworks stages a show, you know it will be conceptual, poetic even, but The Gift, presented for SS26 at London Fashion Week, leveled up the art of storytelling into full blown performance. Just when you think Completedworks could not possibly outdo itself, it produces Jerry Hall. I was convinced that I had just passed away. The icon, Jerry Hall, doing a full monologue for Completedworks.
The performance opened like a séance, with Hall embodying a psychic who took us through a reading that was part fortune telling, part satire, and part metaphysical infomercial. The story unfolded object by object; each piece of jewelry, vessel, or trinket projected in magnified close-up on a large screen so every audience member could drink in the detail. Very well done, by the way. Then came the twist... an audience member chosen at "random" for an emotional reading. It was raw, unscripted, and devastatingly good. For a moment, we forgot this was a fashion presentation at all. There were moments of tears (I almost joined in), before reminding myself it wasn’t quite real, but the illusion was seductive.
Creative Director Anna Jewsbury described the collection as an exploration of “fluidity and precision, first blurred, then contorted by elemental forces.” The pieces, delicate yet disrupted, felt shaped not by hands but by nature’s own will. Earrings titled Yet Another Strong Westerly Gust dangled and twisted like sheets caught mid breeze. Leather goods collided with metals, stones, and resins. Furniture moved into wild, sculptural territory. The objects that seemed both alive and ancient, as if unearthed after a storm.
“After a very windy trip,” Anna writes in the collection notes, “I liked the idea of imagining pieces carved by elemental forces, the passion and vehemence of a gust rushing across an archipelago.” It’s that tension between control and chaos, fragility and endurance that defines Completedworks’ SS26 vocabulary.
At its heart, The Gift was more than just a fashion presentation, it was performance art about our relationship with objects and how we project stories, emotions, and illusions onto the things we buy, wear, and cherish. Hall’s monologue made you question whether the possessions we love hold memories of their own. And in a world of overconsumption, that felt sharply relevant.
Jewsbury’s pieces don’t just adorn the body, they reflect back on our own desires. Objects as mirrors of both vanity and vulnerability. The Gift is a séance and a satire, but it’s also a call to awareness. Completedworks invites us to treat fashion not as disposability but dialogue, a conversation between what endures and what blows away with the wind.
