Sometimes an item of clothing can stalk you. You see it everywhere, like a paranoid obsessive who keeps seeing the same face. A leopard print vest here, a quilted jacket there, a pair of balloon trousers everywhere.
Luckily, street style spotting in London right now feels easier than ever. Three brands have emerged from the past year as obvious victors of the scene, so openly coveted and ubiquitous that you almost wonder if they’ve secured a brand deal with half the city’s population.
First, there was the undisputed champion of the festival season – as pervasive as the fashionable football shirt and fluffy bucket hat combo, if not more. Peachy Den, the London-born womenswear brand beloved by the likes of Mia Regan, Princess Nokia, and Maya Jama.
It’s rare that one individual look by a brand can rule festival season, more often it’s a style which can be replicated by many brands (i.e bubble skirts), or a general trend (i.e the coquette look). But this summer, the Peachy Den ‘Cindy’ set – a simple, skin tight co-ord made up of a shirred gingham top and shorts – had the stylish London crowds in a clear chokehold.
“I think Olivia Dean performing The Cindy Set at Glastonbury last summer established it as the go to festival look,” says Peachy Den founder Isabella Weatherby, who set up the brand in 2019 in pursuit of creating “clothing that my friends and I wanted to wear”. “Product wise,” she says, “I couldn’t find a brand that was making high quality trousers with the fit that I wanted – form fitting but with a straight leg and celebrating a peachy derriere.”
Before the Cindy set, there was the Kernel Jumpsuit. “[That] really put us on the map,” says Weatherby. “We found something special there, she was our ‘viral moment’ luckily coinciding with the boom of Tiktok. The product did its own marketing, the sheer amount of UGC shared in the Kernel jumpsuit has been amazing. We’ve built our story around limited clothing drops meaning we are able to tell within a few minutes of a drop how our customer has responded to the product offering.”
And the Peachy reach is only going to get bigger: the brand exclusively revealed to The London Standard that it’s launching in Selfridges and Liberty’s next month (it currently only has one physical stockist, the Peachy Den store in Brick Lane) and will be introducing two new product categories next year.
A similarly viral brand comes in the form of Damson Madder, who you may know from their quilted jackets and playful patterns. In particular, the two-tie leopard print “Tilly” Gilet, a mainstay on London women’s wishlists, has become so popular that one is snapped up the second it makes it onto Vinted, as if by vicious clothing piranhas. Indeed, many of Damson Madder’s leopard print items have become wildly popular across the capital, so much so that it feels like the brand has become the main flagbearer for the current leopard print renaissance (well, them and Wales Bonner – no one can deny the influence of those Adidas Sambas, regardless of the Rishi Sunak effect).
Funny, then, that this particular leopard gilet feels so current when it was first made more than two years ago. “We launched the Tilly gilet in leopard print and our oversized embroidered collar blouses and dresses, the Romeo and the Mimi, in 2022,” says Damson Madder founder Emma Hill. “These were the styles that really solidified the cult design handwriting that customers come to us for to this day. Fearne Cotton wore the Romeo blouse in pink and suddenly I started to see that blouse popping up on the tube and around my local area which was quite incredible.”
Now, Hill says she sees Damson Madder items on the street “most days”, a surreal experience that “never stops being exciting”. “There is still that magic feeling of spotting another ‘Damson Girl’ out and about,” she adds.
And that leopard print? Almost never existed. “Funnily enough when we first discussed working with leopard print, there was some debate within the design team as to how we could make it new, and if we should do it at all,” Hill says. “We never intended to hit on a particular trend, or to be part of the revival of leopard as a print story but it does feel like we have been in a way. Leopard print styles remain in our bestsellers every week even now which is amazing to see.”
But not all women go in for the whimsical prints or snug fits that are so typical of Damson Madder and Peachy Den items. This is where the third horseman comes in: a refuge of forgiving fits, high quality materials and low-key colourways. Mediaeval peasant-core, but make it chic. I am of course talking about Toast. A relatively more established clothing company, Toast was originally founded in 1997 as a mail order pyjama brand, before it was sold to Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen in 2018. It was after then that Toast started gaining prominence, as well as an ultra-loyal following of customers who swear by the brand above all others.
The Toast customer is also typically more diverse in age, according to CEO Suzie de Rohan Willner. “[The Toast woman] has a real appreciation of timeless design and values items with texture: emotional, cultural, sensual or historical,” she told Forbes in 2020. “I often find myself meeting mothers and daughters or grandmothers and granddaughters in our shops, enjoying a shared passion for individual style. There is something about wearing a Toast piece that slows you down and makes you aware of the details – you notice the skill that has gone into hand-weaving the cloth, or the way the pockets have been lined in a striped fabric.”
Whether you’re distinctly aligned to one, or all three, there is no avoiding this triad. They’ve reached complete and total Londomination.
