In London, for its Autumn/Winter 2026 collection, the heritage brand looked to historic secret climbing societies as it toasted its 100th anniversary.
You don’t usually associate shirts, ties, and tailoring with hauling yourself up buildings. But for Kent&Curwen, the British brand celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, that’s what was on the mood board for its centenary show.
You might be wondering how a heritage label founded in 1926 wound up here. “Obviously, it’s our centenary, so it’s 100 years for the brand. It’s very important to look back, but to try and see it through a new lens, through new eyes,” says Creative Director Daniel Kearns speaking to Man About Town ahead of the show. That means 100 years of making kits for Henley rowers, rugby kits for Eton boys, and college ties for Oxbridge students. “[I’m] trying to see it from a different point of view, but still celebrate [heritage]. And for me, it’s always about the reverence and the irreverence and the misfits that are kind of in that world, in this society that we all know that is the benchmark that Britain has grown up on,” Kearns says.
That different point of view led the designer to the clandestine climbing societies of Britain’s prestigious universities (even in today’s social media age where nearly everything is public, active members conceal their activities). The 1937 book written under the pseudonym Whipplesnaith (to avoid detection), The Night Climbers of Cambridge, was his starting point. So were images captured by photojournalist John Bulmer, documenting the city’s climbers circa 1959.
On the runway, Kearns translated these nocturnal athletes garb into high-necked leather jackets, trench coats, and cropped field-style outerwear cinched at the waist, as if to offer incognito protection from the elements, which were recreated with smoke machines inside the halls of London’s Westminster School. Graduation gowns were re-proportioned into Professor Snape-like capelets. Then came bomber jackets and Canadian tuxedos for the more experienced climbers, less concerned with blending in and more focused on harder sends.
Skinny ties punctuated streamlined three-button suits (some with the lining removed for a more scarf-like appearance). These were primed for the ascent, styled with collars flying from the lapel, paired with skull-hugging watchcaps, which felt like a fitting nod to the suited-up daredevils captured by Bulmer. Eton-style tailcoats and cricket jumpers, on the other hand, presented a more done-up uniformed side to these rooftop rebels – perhaps during the day-time. “We always liked this idea of the mixed characters that you can imagine within somewhere like Cambridge, whether it’s a professor, a teacher, or the more academic kids,” says Kearns, who also nodded to Ian Macdonald’s Eton photobook, documenting the elite school’s pupils from 2006-2007, as the institution’s artist-in-residence. “It’s the person behind the illusion of the dress code, that’s what, for me, is so intrinsic to what we’re trying to represent,” he says.
Sure, the collection celebrated the past, but it all felt very current, too. It’s easy to see the streamlined striped ties on today’s leading men, worn dishevelled and undone on a continent-hopping press tour, given menswear’s current thirst for all things preppy. And those sleek suits mirror the sharper, slimmer, swing seen across the Autumn/Winter 2026 shows, notably at Michael Rider’s Celine, Prada, and at Jil Sander. Sometimes these garments were presented in uniforms, sometimes they weren’t. But they were clothes for doing and living, rooted in heritage while still feeling now – fitting then, for the London label’s 100-year anniversary collection.
“In Britain, we have rules and codes of dress, but we like messing with them, like punk or mod or Teds – they’re so unique to [the country],” says Kearns. “And there’s a reason for that. Because we have that incredible cultural heritage. And we have this vocabulary that we can flip, which I think is unique, and Kent&Curwen is all about that. I think that is why we are still as relevant now as we were [one hundred years ago], when we were dressing these students.”
