When the British-Nigerian designer (and British Vogue cover star) Tolu Coker was working on the guestlist for her spring/summer 2025 show in central London, she told her closest friends to bring their mums along too. “My collection wasn’t just about one story,” Coker says of her forthcoming spring offering, which she dedicated to her wildly stylish mother, Olapeju, who had no idea about her daughter’s celebratory theme until the day the show took place. “It’s also the stories of so many other mothers who have experienced the notion of displacement and fostering a sense of new community,” explains the designer, whose mother grew up in Lagos before emigrating to west London and building a new circle of African, Caribbean and Irish immigrants from her living room. “Seeing my mum’s joy [at the show] was like seeing the joy of unseen others… it was a special moment for mothers and matriarchs to feel seen.”
Mum, it seems, was quite literally the word on the spring/summer 2025 catwalks in London, where a whole host of designers explored the concept of motherhood – be it the notion of matriarchal lineage or motherly metamorphosis – within their collections. Chet Lo dedicated his collection to his mother Ma-Wah Cheung, a trailblazer in the computer sciences industry in New York in the ’90s, who went on to be CIO of television broadcasting behemoth Univision before finally turning to painting and teaching. The collection allowed Lo to recalibrate his label from something synonymous with club-kid wear and 3D spiked knits into something more C-suite chic. “This was me trying to elevate the brand, and say something that’s really elegant,” Lo told Vogue.
Elsewhere, who needs a changing bag when you could carry Chopova Lowena’s multi-pocketed “mommy” bag, a playful collaboration with Hellman’s featuring plasters, a rattle, a toy car, a fish-and-chips-friendly jar of mayo and an emergency antique spoon? The brand’s subterranean spring/summer 2025 show was staged soon after co-founder Laura Lowena-Irons gave birth to twin girls, and included the suitably subversive style dictums she intends to pass down to her daughters. These included: “Show your knickers because they are ruffled and laced up satin bloomers. Spill your guts on an emotional hoodie printed with poetry and verse. Wear your heart on your sleeve, wear it on your shoe, your bag, your necklace…”
At Chopova Lowena’s recent sample sale in Deptford (which saw carabiner-clip skirt obsessives queueing in the dark from 3am), Lowena-Irons could be seen greeting friends and family with a twin on each hip. Mothers have long been key to the South London-based brand: it’s Emma Chopova’s Bulgarian mum who sources the second-hand textiles for the label’s signature skirts, like embroidered aprons and tartan blankets – pieces that would have formed part of a bride’s dowry up until the mid-19th century. “There would be a weaving loom in every household and mothers would work on these dowries from the moment their daughters were babies,” Chopova previously told Vogue. “It’s an incredible thing to be able to repurpose, because once traditional dress stopped being worn, these textiles would often be thrown out or forgotten about in old cedar chests.”
For spring/summer 2025, emerging designer Ellen Poppy Hill – who presented her “Constant State of Repair” London catwalk debut to an intimate audience in Borough – was also drawn to the art of repurposing. In her poignant show notes, Hill writes: “I’ve stolen a fair amount of my mum’s clothes. Only the ones that have been so worn that they feel sucked on like a teething baby. Many of them were my mother’s as a teenager, time has passed so far from a memory of her wearing them, that I no longer see her in the mirror when I dress myself. I feel a presence of her mother, her upbringing in Yorkshire and how much she sacrificed for me to be here, how many things she had to sell, but these, she kept.”
Hill grew up surrounded by second-hand clothing, as her mother, costume and set designer Kerry, accumulated treasures she had been gifted or sourced from FreeCycle or on the street. “People would come to our house and say it was like a museum,” Hill smiles. “Everything was fake… the table was from the National Theatre prop store, we had loads of clocks that didn’t work… the house felt like a theatre set.”
Hill’s pieces revel in a sense of undoneness. The designer writes of the paint-splattered jeans that her mum wore the day she met her dad on stage at a rehearsal, and how she excavated them as a costume from a dressing up box to be reworn today. (When Hill’s mother read her show notes, many tears followed.)
Athens-based Dimitra Petsa, meanwhile, is a designer who has focused on the physicality of motherhood since her eponymous label’s inception. Her brand’s signature wet look dresses are often styled on pregnant bodies on the runway, the draped fabric clinging to every bump and bulge. “I think the physicality of pregnancy is really interesting,” Petsa explains. “[Pregnant] women are rarely presented in a sexy way… I like to play around with that idea.” For spring/summer 2025, Petsa renewed her focus on the female body in its many guises, with prints that nodded to the bodily fluids associated with menstruation and masturbation. The Greek designer also featured a lactating breast print on a skintight bandeau top and tube dress, positioning leaking nipples as something to celebrate, rather than hide.
Di Petsa’s dresses are among the pieces currently on display in M&OTHERS, an exhibition at Modemuseum Hasselt in Belgium. Co-curator Eve Demoen explains that “almost nothing” has been written on the history of fashion through the lens of motherhood. “This was really the trigger for diving into a theme that is so omnipresent but has been looked into so little,” she says. The exhibition explores aspects such as the influence of idealised mothers on male designers, from Christian Dior to Yves Saint Laurent to Simon Porte Jacquemus (the designer has said of his mother, Valerie, who died in a car crash when Simon was just 18, “even when it is not about her, it is about her”). The exhibition also examines the presence of pregnant bodies on the runway, and the professional impact of motherhood on female designers.
The revered Phoebe Philo, for example – whose £3,000 sellout “MUM” necklace also features in the exhibition – skipped a collection season while she was creative director at Chloé in 2005, in order to take maternity leave. In an industry that is not exactly known for being accommodating of personal lives, M&OTHERS celebrates other notable contemporary takes on matrescence, like Simone Rocha’s spring/summer 2022 collection, which followed the birth of her second daughter, Noah Roses, and featured white dresses inspired by christening gowns and nursing bra-esque layers with crimson beading.
Tolu Coker’s love letter to her own mum stretched to recreating her parents’ west London living room to serve as her immersive – and utterly uplifting – spring/summer 2025 show set. In her bid to create accurate interiors, Coker took objects and ephemera from her mother’s home, and studied family photographs from the late ’60s and ’70s in order to replicate how they were arranged at the time. “It was about breathing new life into vivid objects that had been collecting dust,” Coker says. “Our living room felt like a sacred space.” For spring/summer 2025, the relationship between designers and their mothers is equally sacrosanct.
