September has a habit of reorganising fashion’s attention. New collections arrive almost continuously, established houses dominate the schedule and a handful of emerging names suddenly seem to be everywhere at once. By October, some will feel considerably less unfamiliar than they did a month earlier.
This year, several designers are entering that period with unusual momentum. The finalists of the 2026 LVMH Prize will meet the jury in Paris on September 4, only days before New York begins another fashion month, while the latest ANDAM results have already pushed a new group of independent labels further into the industry’s view. Recognition alone, however, is not what makes these designers interesting.
The five names below are developing remarkably distinct languages, from clothes built through geometry to garments carrying the memory of disappearing craft traditions. Some are already familiar within fashion circles. Others are only beginning to reach a wider audience. September may change that.
Marie Adam-Leenaerdt
Marie Adam-Leenaerdt is not exactly arriving unnoticed. The Belgian designer was a finalist for both the LVMH Prize and ANDAM in 2024, only a year after launching her label. This July, she returned to ANDAM and won its 2026 Grand Prize, receiving €300,000 and a year of mentorship from Ami founder Alexandre Mattiussi.
Her clothes explain why the attention has lasted. Adam-Leenaerdt works with familiar pieces, tailoring, shirts, skirts and wardrobe staples, but rarely leaves their logic intact. Proportions shift, construction is exposed and seemingly ordinary garments become slightly strange without losing their usefulness. There is intelligence in the work, though it does not need to announce itself loudly.
That balance is increasingly important. Independent designers are often expected to produce an immediately recognisable visual signature, something that survives the speed of an Instagram scroll. Adam-Leenaerdt’s approach is slower. The interest often lies in how a garment has been cut or displaced, and in the small distance between something recognisable and something unexpected.
The ANDAM win gives her label considerably more room to develop that vocabulary. After three years spent refining it, September will offer a useful indication of what happens when an emerging designer moves from proving her potential to deciding how far her world can expand.
Zane Li
At 25, Zane Li has already accumulated the kind of year that can alter the trajectory of a young label. His New York-based brand Lii won the 2026 Fashion Trust US ready-to-wear prize, reached the finals of the LVMH Prize and was selected for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. The label itself is not yet three years old.
Yet Lii is interesting precisely because the clothes rarely look as though they are trying to prove anything.
Li begins with recognisable forms and strips them back before introducing a disruption. A seam moves somewhere unexpected. A familiar piece is skewed through geometry. Sports fabrics appear in clean, almost severe shapes, while strong colour can turn an otherwise economical silhouette into something far less predictable. Vogue has described essentialism as central to his work, an apt term for a designer whose clothes often reveal their complexity only after the first impression.
Menswear has become part of that development too. For Spring 2027, shown by appointment in Paris in July, Li worked through high-contrast black and white, softer pastels and precise colour while continuing to experiment with the construction of everyday clothes.
There is something refreshing about a young designer building recognition without relying on excess. Lii’s clothes can be quiet from across a room and peculiar up close. That tension has become one of Li’s most convincing signatures, and with both the LVMH Prize and the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund now surrounding the label, the next few months could be decisive.
Julie Kegels
Julie Kegels approaches clothes differently. There is wit in her work, sometimes sensuality, occasionally something slightly absurd, but rarely a sense that fashion needs to become solemn in order to be taken seriously.
The Antwerp-trained Belgian designer has spent recent seasons playing with the unstable relationship between clothing and perception. Spring 2026 looked at underwear escaping the garments intended to conceal it, with slips and lingerie disrupting otherwise familiar pieces. For Fall 2026, she turned to the idea of the aura, manipulating tailoring and silhouette to explore the difference between how someone feels and how clothes allow them to appear.
A rounded sleeve could create the impression of a hand resting confidently on a hip even when the wearer’s arm remained straight. Skirts were distorted through the shapes cast by shadows. The collection carried a darker mood than some of Kegels’s earlier work, but the humour remained.
That combination has helped take her to the final stage of the 2026 LVMH Prize.
Kegels belongs to a generation of designers who seem comfortable allowing conceptual fashion to be desirable at the same time. The idea does not have to overwhelm the garment, and the garment does not have to become basic in order to sell. Her work occupies the much more interesting space between the two.
September will bring greater attention, but the reason to watch Kegels is simpler. Her clothes make you want to look twice, partly to understand what has happened to them and partly because they appear to be enjoying the confusion.
Galib Gassanoff
For Galib Gassanoff, fashion begins somewhere far from the usual machinery of an emerging label.
The Georgian Azerbaijani designer founded Institution in 2024 after leaving Act N°1, the label he had co-founded with Luca Lin. His new project draws deeply from the communities, histories and craft traditions of the Caucasus, working with artisans in Georgia and Azerbaijan while resisting the expectation that every promising fashion business should eventually become enormous.
The clothes carry that philosophy physically. Traditional rug-making techniques have entered skirts and sculptural surfaces, shoelaces have become structural material and tailoring draws on garments such as the Georgian chokha without slipping into straightforward historical reproduction. For Fall 2026, Gassanoff worked with women weavers in the Caucasus on hand-knotted textiles while exploring the history of Peri-Khan Sofieva, recognised as the first Muslim woman elected to a self-governing body.
His momentum has been considerable. Institution became a finalist for the 2026 LVMH Prize after winning Copenhagen Fashion Week’s Zalando Visionary Award earlier in the year. The latter brought Gassanoff back to Copenhagen this August for Spring/Summer 2027, where he presented a collection rooted again in Georgian and Azerbaijani craft before returning to Milan in September.
What makes Institution particularly compelling is that growth does not appear to be the only measure of success. Gassanoff has spoken about building a considered business capable of sustaining artisans and preserving knowledge rather than pursuing expansion for its own sake. In an industry still obsessed with scale, there is something quietly radical about knowing how large you do not want to become.
Petra Fagerström
Petra Fagerström arrived at London Fashion Week in February with an unusual advantage. She already understood performance.
Before studying fashion, the Swedish designer spent much of her childhood and adolescence as a competitive figure skater. Her first solo London Fashion Week collection returned to that history, translating memories of the sport into clothes that moved between protective outerwear, decorative surfaces and the peculiar combination of force and grace demanded on the ice.
It could easily have become a collection built around autobiography alone. Instead, Fagerström used that experience to establish a broader tension in her work. Heavy outerwear sits beside shine and delicacy. Practical garments meet elements that feel decorative or exposed. Strength does not necessarily look hard, and femininity does not need to appear fragile.
Her emergence has been rapid. Fagerström graduated from the Central Saint Martins MA in 2025, joined Paul Smith’s Fashion Residency, made her on-schedule London debut in February and is now one of the nine finalists for the 2026 LVMH Prize.
There is still plenty we do not know about what her label will become, which is part of the appeal. With only one collection currently covered on Vogue Runway, Fagerström remains at a genuinely early stage. September therefore feels less like the continuation of an established trajectory than an opportunity to watch a design language forming almost in real time.
Before the calendar fills again
None of these designers needs to represent the future of fashion. Perhaps emerging talent has suffered enough from that expectation already.
What connects them is something less grand and more interesting. Each has begun to develop a point of view that remains visible beneath the attention of prizes, institutions and fashion weeks. Adam-Leenaerdt finds possibility inside familiar clothes. Li reduces garments until a small disruption changes how they are understood. Kegels uses wit and perception as design tools. Gassanoff treats clothing as a carrier of cultural memory. Fagerström is still discovering how far her own contrasts can travel.
September will inevitably bring other names into focus. The LVMH Prize will produce its winners, New York will introduce several designers to its official schedule and the European fashion weeks will begin another cycle of debuts, returns and increasingly crowded calendars. The temptation will be to decide quickly who has broken through.
These five are worth knowing before that happens. Not because fashion has already decided what they will become, but because it hasn’t.
May