From Ayrshire to the Arches

The Ayrshire Creatives led by Leanne Cairns Millinery
Who Captivated London Fashion Week

There are fashion weeks, and then there are fashion weeks that feel like folklore in the making — the kind where a place, a family story, and a handful of makers and creators from the same patch of Scotland suddenly thread themselves into London’s brightest spotlight.

For Autumn/Winter 2026, that spotlight swung decisively toward Ayrshire, led by the sculptural hand of Leanne Cairns Millinery — a multi-award-winning Scottish milliner who creates from her studio within Centrestage, Kilmarnock.

Cairns, talking about the collaborative partnership with Hector Maclean, said: “My work has always carried that distinctive duality of modern and traditional millinery at its best: composed and elegant at first glance, then quietly radical in silhouette and construction — the sort of headwear that doesn’t simply finish a look, but authors it. When this opportunity to work with fashion designer Hector MacLean London came about, I was over the moon he chose me to help create his standout collection. It was brilliant as he loved the Scottish connection to his heritage on show here and was happy for me to challenge the idea of shape, construction and form while using delicate fabric and couture techniques. It expanded my creative boundaries and freed me from the somewhat restrictive imagination I can sometimes get with commissioned Wedding Hats. I was able to take the brief and run wild. I loved researching this time in Polish history too and took inspiration from the military style Rogatywka hats and movement of eagles, stags and swans.”

This season, Kilmarnock-based milliner Leanne Cairns took her signature language of quirky Avante-guard to London Fashion Week when collaborating as part of Hector Maclean London’s AW26 collection, Escape, while helping secure sponsorship from the last remaining lace mill in the Irvine Valley who supplied lace for both collections of hats and clothing. If Cairns provided the crown, Ayrshire supplied the cloth — in the form of MYB Textiles, the historic mill who produce worldwide lace – and was staged in the storied, euphoric underworld of Heaven Nightclub beneath the Waterloo arches. If ever there were a venue to collapse high society and high drama into one pulse, it was Heaven: neon-lit, culturally iconic, and perfectly suited to Maclean’s taste for “riotously fabulous” theatre with a message.

The front row, predictably, reflected the show’s gravitational pull — with names including Aweng Ade-Chuol, Bree Runway, and Isobel Richmond among those drawn into Maclean’s orbit. Yet the collection’s heart wasn’t celebrity. It was lineage, heritage and a stark look at the effects of war.

Both Tatler and TheIndustry.fashion magazines centred the same compelling source: Maclean’s tribute to his Polish grandmother Leocardia, displaced during the Second World War, who rebuilt her life while falling in love with Donald, a Scottish soldier, over the simple ritual of him visiting her fruit stall. (Maclean has spoken of that family history as rooted in Scotland; family accounts place the couple’s later life in Kilwinning — a detail that lends the story an especially poignant Scottish address and his choice to work with Ayrshire creatives.)