Serina Lee at Fashion Scout Ones To Watch Edition 02. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Fashion Scout.

Before a designer becomes a name, there is a room like this one. The floor at Protein Studios is bare except for light, chairs, and the path a model is expected to hold. A few minutes earlier, the same runway belonged to another visual language. In a few minutes, it will belong to somebody else. For now, the audience waits, and a young designer's work stands at the edge of public knowledge. Fashion Scout has spent twenty years working inside that unstable interval. Martyn Roberts and John Wolford founded the platform in London in 2006 around a practical problem. Emerging designers may have a collection, but a professional catwalk requires production, timing, styling, casting, hair, make-up, photography, communication and access to an industry audience. Talent can begin alone. Visibility is built by many people. The anniversary figures are large. Fashion Scout says it has supported more than 1,500 designers from over 70 countries. Its September 2026 program brought more than 40 designers from 15 countries into London Fashion Week through Ones To Watch catwalks, individual presentations, an international exhibition and an anniversary showcase for Taiwanese talent. Yet its history is best understood through smaller events that changed what a designer believed was possible.
David Koma received the Merit Award in 2009, just after graduating, and has described the support as the confidence he needed to present at London Fashion Week. Eudon Choi entered Ones To Watch with courage and no roadmap, then returned for three solo seasons. Phoebe English traced her company's beginning to Fashion Scout's showroom, where she placed her first wholesale order. Each memory records a different threshold: validation, repetition, a buyer's attention, a business formally beginning. Leaf Xia remembers receiving her Ones To Watch news over Skype in a downtown New York bedroom. She spent the following summer knocking on factory doors in Midtown, asking for help sewing her first capsule collection. The glamorous image arrived only at the end. Before the runway came an unanswered question at a factory door and the willingness to ask again. Roberts calls Fashion Scout's most exciting point the moment before everybody knows the name. That moment can sound romantic from a distance. For the designer living through it, it is often crowded with doubt, cost, and unfinished technique. A platform cannot remove those conditions. It can make the work visible at the point when visibility might still alter its direction.

The decisive point is the moment before everybody knows the name.

The twentieth anniversary season treated discovery as an active verb. Ones To Watch expanded across the official evening schedule, placing designers before the London Fashion Week audience without asking their work to resolve into one house style. Edition 02 moved between inherited craft, digital image-making, handwork, tailoring and material reuse. The sequence below gives each designer room to be encountered individually.

ACIDSIIIA at Fashion Scout Ones To Watch Edition 02. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Fashion Scout.

ACIDSIIIA: Kyiv-born Anastasiia Pozhydaeva reinterprets Ukrainian craft through sculptural womenswear. In this look, a pale fall of fiber begins at the throat and descends almost to the ankle, interrupting the body's familiar outline. Black gloves and a dark hem sharpen the contrast. The garment appears soft from a distance, yet its scale gives softness an architectural authority.

GAMI LEW at Fashion Scout Ones To Watch Edition 02. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Fashion Scout.

GAMI LEW: GAMI LEW builds the look through accumulation. Metallic cloth, dark translucent layers, patterned borders, and a fitted headpiece meet without collapsing into a single surface. The body is neither concealed nor simply displayed. It becomes the structure that lets contrasting textures move together.

Label Astha Garg at Fashion Scout Ones To Watch Edition 02. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Fashion Scout.

LABEL ASTHA GARG: Label Astha Garg brings narrative detail close to the body. Small embroidered figures travel across a dark halter dress and gather densely at its border, while a rigid wooden bag introduces another scale of craft. The silhouette stays direct, allowing the eye to move toward the miniature scenes stitched across its surface.

Sanjana Ghosh at Fashion Scout Ones To Watch Edition 02. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Fashion Scout.

SANJANA GHOSH: Sanjana Ghosh treats pale fabric as a material that can hold an edge. A sleeveless top opens into an enlarged collar, while translucent panels extend from the skirt like fragments of folded paper. Against the blue runway image, the look feels light without becoming fragile.

SERINA LEE: Serina Lee, winner of the Harper's BAZAAR Asia NewGen Fashion Award, brings Chinese ink painting into dialogue with digital technologies. Black marks travel across a field of white cloth that widens from the body like an opened scroll. Painting is not applied as a quotation. Its contrast, gesture, and emptiness are rebuilt through silhouette.

StyledbyZK at Fashion Scout Ones To Watch Edition 02. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Fashion Scout.

STYLEDBYZK: Lagos-based StyledbyZK transforms Aso-oke and Adire into pieces intended for contemporary movement. Here, long coloured threads fall from the body while a woven hood expands into a textured shoulder line. Handwork remains unmistakable, but it is not held at ceremonial distance. It moves with the person wearing it.

Shuwen Song's SONGSONG at Fashion Scout Ones To Watch Edition 02. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Fashion Scout.

SHUWEN SONG SONGSONG: SONGSONG makes construction visible. White bands cross the torso without pretending to form a seamless surface, and the trousers shift into irregular fields of brown, beige and muted rose. The look holds refinement and incompletion together, as if the assembly process has been allowed to remain part of the finished image.

Tyler Von Greenston at Fashion Scout Ones To Watch Edition 02. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Fashion Scout.

TYLER VON GREENSTON: Tyler Von Greenston, a UK semi-finalist for the R Elan Circular Design Challenge, reconsiders British tailoring through zero-waste principles. A close, pale bodice opens into a rough accumulation of textile fragments. Waste has not been hidden or disguised as perfection. It has been given an active place in the garment's meaning.

RENATUS by Haus of McLees. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Haus of McLees.

HAUS OF MCLEES: Across Edition 02, culture behaves as a working method rather than a stable archive. Chinese painting changes scale. Ukrainian craft meets a contemporary silhouette. West African textiles move into everyday motion. Tailoring reconsiders the pieces it usually leaves behind. The designers do not use heritage as permission to repeat the past. They use it to argue with the present. Haus of McLees carried that argument into RENATUS, a collection concerned with the journey through darkness towards light. McLees Mantegazza first encountered traditional beadwork through time spent with her grandfather on the Wind River Reservation. Beads, crystals, and semi-precious stones gathered across mesh and sculptural silhouettes in black, white, silver, and gold. The work made vulnerability visible without making it passive.

Hand-beading gives RENATUS its surface and structure. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Haus of McLees.

THE ATELIER: The house has grown from a one-woman operation into a small Notting Hill atelier. The runway may center a founder, but RENATUS was also the work of manager and assistant beadwork designer Brent Heighton, assistant designers Coffee Lum and Ariel Chow, and design intern Bella Conner. Their names interrupt one of fashion's most persistent illusions: that a collection appears because a single creative figure imagined it clearly enough.

Beyond Limits Polish Visionaries. Photography by Henry Morgan De Witt, courtesy of Fashion Scout.

BEYOND LIMITS: Beyond Limits moved the season away from the catwalk and into the slower attention of an exhibition. Twelve Polish fashion and jewelry creatives filled the three-day program with wearable art, reconstruction, contemporary jewelry and upcycling. The exhibition's strength lay in its refusal of a national uniform. Polish identity provided a context, not an aesthetic instruction. Individual expression remained the more difficult requirement. FJU Talents marked another anniversary within Fashion Scout's own. For ten years, the Department of Textiles and Clothing at Fu Jen Catholic University has brought emerging Taiwanese designers to London. The platform made distance crossable.

Near the Haus of McLees finale, colour opens across white fabric. Photography by Chris Yates, courtesy of Haus of McLees.

THE THRESHOLD: Visibility can open a door while leaving the cost of walking through it with the designer. Access still has limits. A successful show does not guarantee orders, stable funding, or the time required to build another collection. Visibility can open a door while leaving the cost of walking through it with the designer. Fashion Scout's value lies in making the threshold real, not in pretending that every person who crosses it has reached safety.

At the end of a show, the runway empties quickly. Clothes become photographs, invitations become keepsakes, and the room prepares for another name. What remains is not a promise of fame. It is a record of being seen at a formative moment, when the work was still close to the uncertainty that produced it. Twenty years on, Fashion Scout continues to build a room around that moment and then lets the next designer step into it.

Article by Aayush Aggarwal, Contributing Editor, PhotoBook Magazine
Tearsheets by Daniel Lopez, Art Director, PhotoBook Magazine

Fashion Scout: Before the Name Is Know