Rory William Docherty SS27
What Ties Us Together
Writer: Lily Egleton
Rory William Docherty’s SS27 presentation arrived at London Fashion Week with an idea that felt simple yet turned out to include so many varied layers: connection. Presented on Saturday 20th September as part of the official LFW schedule, What Ties Us Together explored the physical and emotional act of binding, considering what we hold onto, what we carry with us, and the quiet things that connect us to one another.
It is a fitting and sentimental premise for a designer whose work has always resisted the idea of clothing as something confined to a particular season, gender or occasion. Docherty’s practice moves between the poetic and the practical, creating pieces from original artworks, considered textiles and fluid, sculptural forms. The result is clothing that feels personal rather than prescriptive: familiar enough to live in, but strange enough to invite a second look.
For SS27, this tension was expressed through the recurring language of the knot. The motif became both decoration and metaphor, appearing across the collection in subtle, tactile forms rather than as an overt statement. There was something particularly compelling about this repetition; the knot is inherently functional, but it also carries an emotional symbolism: an object used to secure, join and hold things together.
The clothes themselves maintained the looseness that has become central to Docherty’s vocabulary. Relaxed tailoring, fluid shirting and softly structured silhouettes allowed the garments to exist somewhere between masculine and feminine, formal and undone. This is clothing designed around the person rather than the other way around, with the body given room to move through it rather than being forced into a predetermined silhouette. That unisex sensibility is central to Docherty’s wider approach, where pieces are intended to transcend traditional boundaries of age, gender and season.
There was also a sense of intimacy to the collection that made its conceptual elements feel less like intellectual exercises and more like extensions of everyday life. The idea of tying, wrapping and connecting was translated into texture, construction and proportion, allowing the clothes to communicate without demanding attention. In a week often dominated by spectacle, this restraint felt deliberate.
Perhaps this is where What Ties Us Together becomes the most interesting out of its collection. Rather than portraying connection as something grand or sentimental, Docherty finds it in the physical language of clothing. Docherty’s commitment to seasonless design makes the collection feel almost inherently nostalgic: garments are not conceived to be discarded when the next collection arrives, but to accumulate meaning through wear.
In that sense, SS27 felt less like a collection about clothing and more like a collection about attachment. The knot became a quiet visual reminder of the relationships, memories and experiences that give our possessions their meaning. Docherty’s clothes may be understated, but their intention is not: they ask us to consider why certain things stay with us, and what - or who - we choose to hold onto.
