40 years of London Fashion Week

London Fashion Week celebrates its 40th anniversary

This week London Fashion Week (LFW) celebrates its 40th anniversary as a host for all things British fashion.

Throughout the decades LFW has showcased established and emerging British talent in the fashion industry, giving a platform for innovative art pieces to come to life on the catwalk. To celebrate this milestone in the British fashion scene, we look at how Bath has contributed to fashion history, research and innovation. 

In 1984, Lynne Franks founded the first London Fashion Week, taking the smaller showrooms and disparate exhibitions of the time and giving them an event that would mark London’s international presence in the fashion industry.  

“We were not on the international calendar at all," Lynne told The Evening Standard, "I thought, if they can do it, why can't we?"  

Franks currently lives in a town south of Somerset, just 30 miles outside of Bath, a city full of a similar dedication to business, fashion and sustainability. 

Many Bath-based creative individuals are making a difference in the fashion industry, and one such person is Bath Spa’s own Professor of Fashion and Sustainability, Tamara Cincik. 

Professor Cincik has been involved in London Fashion Week for much of its 40-year life span. Thinking back to its conception, she writes: 

“Over the years we have seen brands rise and dive, locations come and go; my personal favourites were those early years at the Natural History Museum when Lynne Franks launched London Fashion Week.” 

It is Professor Cincik’s mission to embed sustainability practices within the fashion industry, with “more brands using dead stock fabrics, reducing down to one collection a year, moving to made to order to avoid waste, [...] and with the support of Make It British using UK produced textiles”. 

Having founded the creative think-tank Fashion Roundtable as well as involvement in the National Centre for Fashion and Sustainability project, Prof Cincik has an active and vibrant presence in the Bath Fashion scene. She will be hosting ‘In Conversation with Clare Press’, an evening designed to show insight into Press’ work and showcase her newest book: Wear Next, Fashioning the Future, on Tuesday 20 February 2024.  

Many of our BA Fashion Design students and graduates achieve brilliant things in the fashion and beauty space.  

• Recent BA Fashion Design graduate Anna Kalifatidou celebrated winning the prestigious British Fashion Council Student Fabric Initiative in 2023 in a sustainably led competition.
• Alumna Francis Bayliss, who graduated in 2012 with an MA in Design (Textiles) has a successful bag and accessories business called tea green which sources its materials in Somerset, England. 
• Alumna Laura Mallows graduated from the BA Fashion Design course in 2015 and went on to forge a six year career in the fashion industry before founding Mallows Beauty in 2020. 

If you’d like to make your mark in the fashion industry, take a look at our BA Fashion Design course. To follow the progress of our world-leading fashion and sustainability project, follow us on Instagram, X and Linkedin.