At first glance, a lace-patterned plastic tablecloth and a sheet of leather ask for opposite kinds of attention. One protects a table and can be wiped clean. The other is cut, fitted and expected to age with a body. In Joshua Ewusie's Spring 2027 collection, In Lieu of Flowers, the pattern of the first appears in the second. He laser-cut leather into a lace-like surface, then braided pieces of the actual tablecloth material with leather for a dress and trousers. The move did more than import a domestic pattern into fashion. It asked why one surface is called cheap while another gains status through weight, craft and cost. The designer made that question tactile.
Ewusie is a London-born designer whose work draws on his Ghanaian family and the city where he grew up. The British Fashion Council identifies his London-based womenswear label, Central Saint Martins MA training and residency at The King's Foundation in partnership with Chanel. In a first-person account of his MA work, he describes himself as Ghanaian-British and explains how leather, Ghanaian cloth and garments that can be worn more than one way entered his practice. The point is visible in the clothes: the same material can be turned, pierced, rebound or positioned somewhere other than its expected place.
The front room offered a new arena for that experiment. In Vogue's report on Spring 2027, Ewusie recalled the carefully arranged rooms of his grandmother and other family members, with artificial flowers and patterned plastic coverings. He also looked to Michael McMillan's The Front Room, a study of Caribbean migrant interiors in Britain. These references did not become a printed collage of domestic objects. They became questions about surface, shape and taste, worked through garments someone could actually wear.
Leather learned to act like lace
The Spring 2027 collection takes a familiar decorative motif through several materials. A vinyl tablecloth's lace-like pattern was translated into laser-cut leather. Actual tablecloth material was dyed, cut and braided with leather, giving a dress with a pintucked front and a pair of trousers more structure. The distinction between these two operations matters. In one, the pattern travels while the substance changes. In the other, the original plastic travels too, but its scale and behavior change when it is cut into strips and joined to another material.
The leather is no longer simply a solid, protective skin. Its cuts let light pass through, and its open pattern recalls the delicate effect of lace. The plastic, normally spread flat over a table, gains enough density in combination with leather to sit around a body. Neither result is a joke about a household furnishing. Ewusie tests what the two materials can borrow from each other: the permanence associated with leather, the pliable pattern of a table covering, and the labor needed to turn both into clothing.
Other garments carried leather more quietly. Vogue describes dresses piped in the material, a gold dress cut with the decorative motif, and a deconstructed tuxedo jacket whose shifted collar made the lapel resemble a petal. A piped edge can give a light dress definition without making the whole piece leather. A collar can be moved far enough to disturb tailoring's expected symmetry while leaving the jacket recognizable. Ewusie repeatedly works at these points of recognition. He wants a viewer to know what a tuxedo, a nightgown or a tablecloth is, then to feel its outline changing.
The collection's softer references came from nightwear. Curved necklines, satin bindings, lace trim and small rosebud details entered the clothes. The Strand account of the presentation notes a scoop neckline with a green lining taken from a particular nightgown Ewusie remembered. The detail is modest compared with a laser-cut leather flower, but it shows how a private garment can survive in a new piece as an edge, a color or a line around the neck. Domestic memory becomes a patternmaking choice rather than a slogan on a label.
This collection also changed his palette. Vogue reports lime piping against an aubergine silk skirt and acid-colored flashes at necklines and inside linings. The color can interrupt a garment without occupying all of it. An exposed edge moves as the body moves; a lining appears only when a jacket or skirt opens. Those placements make color a timed event. Ewusie called the combinations odd, and the word fits the design better than an easy claim of harmonious mixing. He lets colors meet where they can surprise.
What was inside the pouffe
The previous collection, Autumn Winter 2026's Cut From the Same Cloth, began with a different domestic object. Ewusie told i-D that he had long known leather pouffes in his family home but only later asked what was inside them. His mother told him she had stored clothes there when she returned to London in the 1980s. Her wardrobe had mixed West African prints with pencil skirts and other clothes for city life. Ewusie found an archive that had been supporting daily life in a literal way, hidden inside furniture.
That discovery risks becoming a story more memorable than the clothes made from it. The resulting garments deserve close attention. 10 Magazine's collection report describes a midi skirt shortened to a mini, a vest strap rebound in leather, and wool panels fused with leather to create compact shapes. These are specific interventions. The skirt's new length changes the proportion of the body it shows. Binding a strap in leather can strengthen a small edge and make it more visible. Joining wool to leather changes the feel and weight of a panel. The family archive gave Ewusie a reason to recut, but the alterations are where a memory becomes design.
The collection also continued his interest in woven leather. A WWD report describes the technique entering pencil skirts and dresses after appearing in an earlier set. Weaving changes leather's behavior: strips can bend relative to one another and reveal the handwork that joins them. The technique allows a material often treated as smooth and continuous to carry a patterned surface. In the context of his mother's office clothes and West African prints, a woven pencil skirt can suggest both familiar workwear and an entirely different rhythm of construction.
Ewusie spoke to i-D about his mother arriving from Ghana and wearing West African prints with pencil skirts. He was interested in how a person's dress could communicate an identity without a speech. The 2026 collection did not need to reproduce her outfits exactly. It could work with their contrasts: an office silhouette made more sculptural, a formal piece interrupted by leather, a familiar garment shortened or shifted. The result belongs to his present practice and to the person who will wear it now.
He said he designed that season for his mother, but also for a busy woman whose working life does not resemble a conventional office. The question changes the reading of the pencil skirt. A garment associated with desk work can become a way to move between meetings, performances, friendships and other forms of labor. The cut retains its recognizably formal line while the woven leather changes its surface and flexibility. Ewusie was not dressing an abstract professional woman. He was considering the women around him and the mixture of composure and improvisation that their days might require.
For Cut From the Same Cloth, he chose a gathering at the Farringdon listening bar Space Talk rather than a runway show. He told i-D that he wanted the women he dressed to interpret the clothes in their own company. The choice matters because this collection began with garments his mother had kept, worn and eventually hidden inside a pouffe. A static image could show the recut hem or leather-bound strap; a social room let the new pieces acquire other associations. The presentation was part of how the designs met an audience, even as the clothes still had to work beyond that one night.
The work before the collections
During his MA at Central Saint Martins, Ewusie was already looking at the relationship between leather and familiar objects. His first-person design account describes laser cutting and etching leather in reference to upholstered furniture and objects known in West Africa. He also describes Ghanaian Kente cloth and ways of dressing with generous lengths of cloth as starting points for shapes that can be worn in more than one way. The wearer, he wrote, should have a choice in how a garment is arranged.
That statement helps explain why his later leather experiments are rarely only decorative. Cutting a sheet into an open lattice changes its flexibility. Braiding strips of PVC and leather changes how a surface holds together. Rebinding a vest strap or moving a jacket collar changes the decisions available when the garment meets a body. A designer can make a look from an unusual material; Ewusie is more interested in what happens when its use changes.
The BFC profile places his practice between craft in the UK and West Africa while naming the London diaspora as a central interest. That is a broad description. His own recollections are narrower and therefore more illuminating: a mother's work clothes, a pouffe filled with them, a grandmother's front room, a tablecloth pattern. These details show one person's experience rather than asking a garment to stand for all Ghanaian or migrant homes. He selects from that experience and then tests it against the possibilities of cut and material.
In The Observer's profile, he described the Ghanaian and Western mixture of his family life as a culture of its own. The account also noted laser-cut leather pieces and indigo fabrics sourced from Ghana. This is one reason it would be misleading to treat his work as a simple combination of two national wardrobes. The clothes arise from a household that had already made its own choices about what belonged together.
What a bag can hold
Spring 2027 brought Ewusie's first bag. Vogue reports that he developed about five prototypes, which went to friends and family, before settling on a braided leather form intended for daily use. The object extends a textile experiment into a different relationship with the body. A bag is carried, set down, opened and handled repeatedly. If the leather changes with wear, those marks become part of its value. The same question behind the garments returns in a smaller scale: how does a worked surface become useful rather than merely impressive?
The exhibition setting for In Lieu of Flowers widened the conversation again. Ewusie and collaborator Cynthia Igbokwe brought the collection into contact with work by emerging artists whose practices considered diaspora and migrant aesthetics. The clothes were shown among sculpture and painting rather than isolated on a conventional runway. The arrangement invited people to consider objects and garments together, a fitting context for a collection that began with a room. It did not erase the garments' practical demands. A braided bag still needs an opening and a strap; a PVC and leather dress still needs enough give and structure to be worn.
Ewusie's first bag also draws a line between the two recent collections. Weaving was already changing the surface of skirts and dresses in 2026. In 2027 it became the structure of an object meant to be picked up every day. The sequence does not require a grand claim that he has solved the problem of luxury. It shows a designer testing whether one method can serve distinct jobs. A woven skirt must bend as its wearer sits and walks. A woven bag must bear what is put inside and endure repeated handling. The same handwork can be judged against two different forms of use.
There is no need to resolve whether plastic tablecloths are good or bad taste. Ewusie's Spring 2027 clothes make the category unstable. The tablecloth can offer a lace pattern worthy of laborious translation. Leather can be pierced until it approaches lace. A nightgown can contribute a neckline, a rosebud or a sliver of lining to tailoring. Taste changes when a surface moves from table to body, but the designer does not rely on that shift alone. He gives each move a material form.
The little collar adjustment on the tuxedo jacket may tell the story best. A lapel slides toward a petal without turning the wearer into a flower. The garment remains a jacket, while its familiar authority softens at the edge. In that small displacement, Ewusie shows how a domestic reference can alter the way tailoring sits on a body. What belonged to the front room goes out into the street, carrying its pattern, its humor and a new way of being worn.