Molly Goddard was all about texture and silhouette for AW24

Each season, we break down everything you need to know about the new collections in The Fashion Week Cheat Sheet. After speaking to the designers about their inspiration, their hero pieces, the faces on the catwalk and the names on the front row, we present your complete guide to autumn/winter 2024.

This season was all about texture and silhouette for Molly Goddard, who let her initial experimental fitting pave the way for the entire collection.

Working with vintage pieces, archived samples and toiles from previous collections, autumn/winter 2024 became about: “shapes on top of shapes; garments combining — pulling in, pushing out, smushing. Matching textures, blobs on blobs, two become one.”

Her signature bright colours, trademark tulle and beautiful satins were layered together to create interesting and voluminous shapes, while there were also touches of Western influence and vintage polka-dot prints throughout the collection.

Theme and inspiration

“We started with the first fitting this season, where we were using old samples and making shapes out of fabrics and pieces and scraps that I had – and we spent a few days working like that, which was a really is often a big part of my process but this season, it kind of felt like a biggest part of the process,” Goddard explained to me in a pre-show interview. “Those images stuck in my head and they formed a big part of what the collection became.”

“It’s quite hard to explain, but it’s a lot to do with texture and shape and even shapes on shape. So textures combining, pushing in pushing out, squashing everything so it is sort of fuzzy and blurry. Honing those silhouettes and textures was definitely the starting point, and that then became the base of the collection.”

“But as always, there are lots of other references too – and this one had a lot of Western touches, which came from an eBay watch list that I had. This was one of my very original ideas for the collection because I had all these kids’ Western clothes on it, lots of colourful combinations and this combined with the different colours and textures we worked on, is how the collection came together.”

In her show notes, Goddard also added a number of other references that she came across through the process of designing the collection, which included 1960s’ Cristobal Balenciaga and Christian Dior gowns — “elasticated, rather than corseted, for a modern wearer” – as well as abstracted silhouettes, blurred edges, curved seams and bubbles.

Hero pieces

“I am actually really excited about the bags for this season – we did bags that were very in-keeping with the dresses, and the techniques used in the collection. They’ve turned out to be quite, almost like mountaineering kind of techie bags, but with frills and gathering and elastic combining. I’m always like drawn to quite technical outerwear bags with toggles and things like that. So there’s that in there alongside the dress techniques that we do.”

Molly Goddard AW24

The setting

“We chose Cecil Sharp House – we just thought it was quite a fitting space. It’s got this amazing mural, which is quite abstract. This season, I actually sort of wanted the show space to be a bit of a blank canvas, but this still had character. It has these enormous windows, really great daylight, and a nice seating arrangement. So we definitely chose it for quite practical reasons, but we thought it was a really good fit.”

Molly Goddard

Who was there?

Rosamund Pike, Edie Campbell, Kaya Scodelario and Pixie Geldof were among the names to sit on the front row.

Molly Goddard show

Catch up on more from a very exciting London Fashion Week here.