Last week, Kiko Kostadinov hosted an intimate off-schedule show in the brand’s new East London headquarters. Invites declared the show’s title as Dante, soon revealed to be a tribute to the designer’s Lakeland terrier of the same name. Guests were invited upstairs to the studio, greeted by glasses of natural wine and shortbread shaped like dog treats and shown to a miscellaneous selection of chairs in the office space with desktops pushed to the sides and paperwork hidden beneath desks. Despite the show’s low-key nature, Kostadinov still managed to draw some A-List names with Steve Lacy and Celeste cutting incognito figures on the Bulgarian designer’s front row.

As the brand approaches its ten-year anniversary, the show felt like a homecoming. Since launching his namesake label in 2018 after graduating from Central Saint Martins, Kostadinov – alongside womenswear designers Laura and Deanna Fanning – has become a fixture of the Paris schedule. With flagship stores in Tokyo and Los Angeles, this seminal moment also marked the opening of Kostadinov’s London flagship, located just a few floors below the studio in Haggerston. Returning home inspired a focus on British dressing – part traditional countryside eccentricity, part contemporary subversion – with Dante, naturally, at its centre.

For the first time, the brand presented a co-ed collection. Menswear took notes from familiar wardrobe codes – rugby shirts, cashmere overcoats, Japanese tweed suits and corduroy blousons – while the Fanning sisters’ womenswear delivered riding suits with leather detailing, argyle cashmere knits, wool slip dresses and apron-esque blouses. The work of philosopher Donna Haraway and her study in The Companion Species Manifesto was referenced in the show notes, exploring the notion that “dogs, and the people that live with them, continually shape one another through an ‘unending dance’ of encounters.” That idea of mutual influence ran through the collection, inspiring a modern take on the stereotypical dog walker uniform: heavyweight Japanese jersey co-ord, traditional parkers cut from lightweight cotton, and a series of denim pieces from the new Levi’s x Kiko Kostadinov capsule made their runway debut.