Mulberry Fixed Its Books Before It Let Christopher Kane Loose on the Archive

Mulberry put a ready-to-wear collection back on the London Fashion Week schedule on September 20, its first appearance there in years. The label's own catalogue explains the longer story: its last ready-to-wear collection, full stop, was Johnny Coca's autumn/winter 2020 range, presented as the pandemic was emptying out runway calendars everywhere. This one, staged at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster, was also a debut — the first public work from Christopher Kane since Mulberry named him creative director of women's ready-to-wear in March.

Kane spent 2006 to 2023 running his own label, part of the Kering portfolio from 2013 until he bought it back a few years later, and picked up four British Fashion Awards along the way before closing it. He's a Central Saint Martins graduate whose sister Tammy has run the label's business side since the start. Mulberry is the first house job of his career — the appointment reads as a bet that an independent designer with a shuttered label still has more to offer a heritage brand than another safe hand.

Mulberry

The collection, titled "City, Town, Country," treats Mulberry's own archive as raw material rather than a mood board. Leather panels built off the Bayswater bag's construction show up on coats and skirts; the Postman's Lock hardware that fastens Mulberry's bags turns up as belt buckles and shoe hardware instead; the house check gets distorted and reworked across the range. Kane also revived a 1990s Mulberry sweatshirt with only minor changes.

None of that would matter much if Mulberry were still losing money. It isn't. In the fiscal year ended March 28, 2026, sales rose 5.7% at constant currency, with UK like-for-like sales up 13.7% in the second half and broader gains across the EU, US and Asia Pacific. CEO Andrea Baldo, who joined from Ganni in 2024, credited the turnaround to a strategy the company calls "Back to the Mulberry Spirit" — pulling back on discounting and rebuilding full-price demand.

That ordering is the actual story here. Mulberry didn't hand a struggling brand to a designer known for testing what a fashion house can get away with and hope the creative jolt would fix the balance sheet. It fixed the balance sheet first, then spent the resulting credibility on a runway comeback and a designer whose own label had just failed commercially. It's a more conservative version of a pattern playing out across fashion this year — Gucci, Fendi, Marni and Balmain all swapped designers hoping a new name could reset the business — except Mulberry ran the sequence the other way around, with the numbers already turning up before Kane arrived.

Kane said in a statement that it was an honor to return to London Fashion Week with Mulberry, thanking the British Fashion Council and the fashion community for their support since the appointment was announced. The collection arrives in stores and online in January 2027, which gives Mulberry a full quarter to see whether Kane's version of the brand sells as well as Baldo's spreadsheet did.