Timisola Shasanya & Ella Douglas at HI:FI London SS26

East London warehouses aren’t new terrain for fashion week, but HI:FI London managed to keep it current. — part catwalk, part manifesto. After Maximillian Raynor’s runway show, the space cracked open again, spilling into two presentations that couldn’t have been more different yet spoke the same language of defiance: Timisola Shasanya’s Runners and Ella Douglas’s grease-stained dream of business casual.

Timisola Shasanya: Runners

From CSM to the warehouse floor, Shasanya wasted no time announcing herself. Runners felt like a bridge of memory & momentum: sharp tailoring parallel with textile experiments that carried her biography in the fibres. Waxed cottons and silks against tarpaulin bags salvaged from her father’s farm; broom bristles and leathers from Kano were reworked. Even the footwear, hand-built in Lagos by a local cobbler, came charged with reason.

Styled by Karen Binns and finished with Vanya Sundari’s jewellery, the collection was dark. More than clothes, Runners felt like a motion: restless, vulnerable, and unafraid. 

Ella Douglas: Office Couture, Grease-Stained

Then came the PVC curtain, Ella Douglas dropped guests into the in-between: an office wedged inside a lesbian-owned garage, half admin hub, half engine bay.

Her clothes picked up the rhythm of that world. The collection wasn’t parody; it was reclamation. Against glamour belonging only to the glass towers of Canary Wharf. Within the collection, polish met grit, femme power claimed the shop floor, and business casual stripped down & reimagined.

HI:FI

Both presentations carried the urgency of HI:FI London itself, a non-profit programme born from the city’s rising pressures, reinvesting commercial profits into the moments when young designers are most at risk of disappearing.

What unfolded in that warehouse wasn’t just fashion week spectacle. It was something raw & something the city needs to hold onto.