Ewuise SS26
In a city where summer isn’t defined by sunshine but by the slow drench of humidity, Joshua Ewusie finds poetry in the downpour. Making his London Fashion Week debut as a NEWGEN recipient under the British Fashion Council, the designer unveiled “Torrential”. EWUSIE’s SS26 collection is an evocative tribute to the unrelenting rhythm of a London summer and the women who dance within it.
From the first look, there’s a duality at play, exhaustion and euphoria. The grit of wet concrete and the freedom of a midnight breeze. Ewusie doesn’t romanticize the chaos, he reworks it into movement, balancing tension and tenderness through meticulous fabric play and fluid form. His woman isn’t paused by the storm but propelled by it, her pace guided by rain slicked streets and early morning light.
Born of the restless months following his MA graduation, Torrential revisits Joshua’s childhood summers in West London. A world of damp pavements, elusive sunshine, and wild urban greenspaces that once offered refuge. Those textures reemerge through the collection’s tactile contrasts; structured leather softened with silk jersey, sheer mesh layered over woven vinyl. Liquid satin catching flashes of turquoise and midnight black like light reflected from pooled water.
Key pieces narrate the EWUSIE woman’s unrelenting pursuit. The Nsubura Edit translates West African Kente and Ankara motifs into cosmopolitan geometry; bold yet fluid, heritage disguised as futurism. The Lewisham Tee, printed with abstracted palms and warped typography, toys with notions of faux tropicalism, while the label’s signature woven leather, now worked into belts, laser-cut bags, and cropped bodices, blurs the boundaries between armor and adornment. It’s a material language Ewusie uses deftly, equal parts grounded and sensual.
For Joshua, Torrential is more than aesthetic, it’s archival and introspective. Inspired by Joy Gregory’s “Shining Lights” and the images of photographers like Eileen Perrier and Sukta Biwas, he acknowledges the overlooked women behind London’s cultural narrative; Black and South Asian creatives whose identities layered, intersected, and shimmered in quiet determination. Their stories illuminate his own and through this collection he reframes them in motion. Still, there’s humor threaded through the intensity, a distinctly EWUSIE irony. Models moved not in solemn procession but in syncopated rhythm, their looks shifting from daywear discipline to hedonistic release. It felt less like a runway and more like a city exhaling; collective, chaotic, alive. The palette of deep azure and inky black seemed to pulse with heat, exhaustion, reprieve, then revival.
At its heart, Torrential is both love letter and survival guide, a meditation on how women navigate London’s demands with humor and grace, and how fashion, when sincere, can mirror that persistence. Joshua Ewusie has not only staged a debut, he has choreographed a feeling. One that lingers even as the rain subsides.
