The Fashion Awards Shortlist Puts Uniqlo in the Same Category as Bottega Veneta

The British Fashion Council published the nominees for the Fashion Awards 2026 on September 16, the day before London Fashion Week opened: twenty nominations across four designer categories, eighteen names between them, with the ceremony set for November 30 at the Royal Albert Hall. A day earlier the BFC had said Sandra Choi, creative director of Jimmy Choo, will take a Special Recognition Award on the night.

Designer of the Year is the international list: Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent, Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen for The Row, Haider Ackermann for Tom Ford, Matthieu Blazy for Chanel, Michael Rider for Celine, and Sarah Burton for Givenchy.

The British Womenswear category is the one worth reading twice. Clare Waight Keller is nominated for Uniqlo, against Louise Trotter for Bottega Veneta, Sarah Burton for Givenchy, Erdem Moralıoğlu for Erdem and Simone Rocha for her own label. The BFC's wording for the award asks for "significant impact on the global fashion industry in 2026" — a standard that says nothing about price, and a mass-market Japanese retailer clears it on reach alone.

Put Uniqlo on a shortlist with Bottega Veneta and you have quietly conceded something the industry has spent a decade arguing about: where a designer's work reaches people counts as much as what it costs them. Waight Keller has run houses at the top of that market — the nomination is for what she is making now, at the other end of it.

Two names, twice

Simone Rocha is up in both British Womenswear and British Menswear, for her own label in each. Sarah Burton is also nominated twice, for Givenchy, in Designer of the Year and British Womenswear. The menswear list otherwise stays close to home: Foday Dumbuya for Labrum, Kiko Kostadinov, Nick Wakeman for Studio Nicholson and Simon Holloway for Dunhill.

The Vanguard award — for "a designer at the forefront of a new wave in British fashion" — is between Conner Ives, Ellie Misner, Steve O Smith and Tolu Coker. Ives spent last week in New York, staging his first show there on September 12 after building the label out of London, where he has shown since February 2022 — which makes him a nominee for the new wave in British fashion on the strength of a season he showed 3,000 miles from it.

The process is two-stage: a jury of 18 critics, editors and buyers picks the nominees, and a voting committee then chooses the winners in a confidential ballot. The evening is the BFC Foundation's primary fundraiser, and took £1 million in 2025.

Read the lists together and the shape of the London industry is plain enough. Three of the five British Womenswear nominees do their headline work for houses based elsewhere — Paris, Italy, Japan — while the menswear list is made up of labels still run out of London. The trophies get handed out on November 30. The shortlist has already said most of it.