For years, the fashion world has been locked in a high-stakes game of musical chairs, with creative directors leapfrogging from house to house in a cycle that feels more corporate than creative. But in 2025, the spotlight is beginning to shift. Instead of tracking the latest power move at a heritage house, the real energy is in the studios of emerging designers, those building new systems, new aesthetics, and new ways of working from the ground up.
Enter ALETTA, the brainchild of London-based design duo Freddy Coomes and Matt Empringham. Friends turned collaborators since their Central Saint Martins days, the pair built a quiet momentum over the past five years by doing things their own way. Not through the usual runway debut or press circuit, but through tactile experimentation, unexpected commissions, and an Instagram presence that first caught the attention of celebrity stylists and eventually, stars like Sienna Miller and Emma Corrin.
Freddy Coomes and Matt Empringham bring a kind of boyish inventiveness to their work, equal parts playful and precise. At Central Saint Martins, their graduate collection stood out for its surreal visual twists: oversized coats that looked like rolls of gift wrap, scarves frozen mid-gust, and faux suede knits made from synthetic car-seat textiles. The work felt like a sartorial illusion, leaning into optical tricks and trompe l’oeil gestures, but with a grounding in rigorous craftsmanship. The pair honed this off-kilter visual language under the guidance of Jonathan Anderson, working at Loewe and JW Anderson respectively. “But it was totally unwearable,” Empringham admitted during a preview of ALETTA’s debut at Sarabande. “The past six months have been about channeling that spirit into commercial looks that aren’t made from, like, polystyrene.”
Aletta AW25 Paper cotton brogues.
Their early designs were deceptively playful, garments appearing two-dimensional, scarves veering off at uncanny angles, coats that looked like paper dolls with hands in drawn-on pockets. But behind the whimsy was a rigorously material-driven process: textiles came first, ideas second. For Sienna Miller’s 2024 pre-Met Gala look, a deep green mini dress adorned with oversized floral appliqué, the designers eschewed suede in favor of a technical fabric used in luxury sports car interiors, highlighting their knack for making the unexpected feel intuitive.
Now, they’ve made it official. In January 2025, Coomes and Empringham soft-launched ALETTA with a capsule collection for Dover Street Market. The offering—ten reimagined polo dresses in structured silk, sliced into stripes and styled with surreal ease—was photographed by Matt himself and modeled by familiar faces from their university archives. These weren’t hired hands but part of their creative circle, muses in motion.
With their AW25 collection now out in the world, ALETTA continues to challenge expectations. Structured denim pieces, sculptural accessories, and surrealist silhouettes come together in a lineup that feels both offbeat and sharply wearable. It’s a collection that affirms the brand’s instinct to blur boundaries, between concept and commerce, play and precision.
As more independent voices rise on the AW25 calendar, ALETTA stands as proof that the future of fashion might not lie in legacy, but in reinvention, from designers rewriting the rules on their own terms.
