Charles Jeffrey Loverboy SS26 at London Fashion

Charles Jeffrey Loverboy SS26 / Spring/Summer 2026 at London Fashion. A love letter to music-making, captured as a ‘happening’ inside Abbey Road Studios.

Charles Jeffrey Loverboy stages its Spring/Summer 2026 / SS26 collection as a live, unscripted happening with the legendary Abbey Road Studios. This campaign—an alchemical fusion of music, art and fashion—is a tribute to the creative process, in partnership with London’s most iconic and inspiring music studio.

FASHION THROUGH SOUND, SOUND THROUGH FASHION. This season, music isn’t simply the inspiration–it’s the output. As LOVERBOY creative director Charles Jeffrey says, “In 2025, fashion for fashion’s sake feels vulgar.” Thus, SS26 is shaped by the process of music-making, specifically the experimental, analogue, tactile kind as long practised at and made possible by Abbey Road.

LOVERBOY distilled archetypes from the characters who emerged across the myriad photos and film material discovered within Abbey Road’s archives. The many collaborators featured across this imagery were often captured during in-between moments, coded by style. There are the authoritative execs in their crisp tailoring and wide-lapelled suits, the musicians for whom formality unravelled in favour of function and flare across the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the engineers in their white lab coats, mixing like mad scientists across the various recording tools within the studio.

In keeping with Abbey Road’s pioneering, future-facing commitment to innovation and play, these archetypes are reimagined for 2026 in the LOVERBOY collection documented here: the Gen Z bedroom producers swallowed up in their fuzzy ears beanie and oversized hoodie, the magnetically IDGAF rockstars adorned in sleeves and hems belling out like trumpets, and the exacting, obsessive technicians in their supersized labcoat made of heavy-duty shirting.

Indeed, it’s these very music makers for whom the collection takes its chief inspiration. Not simply the future superstars making music on their laptops in their teenage hideaways, but the true innovators to whom this new generation are indebted, who came before through cultural institutions like Abbey Road and subverted stuffy conventions in order to define modern music as we know it.

A SYNESTHESIC DIALOGUE BETWEEN SOUND AND GARMENT. At the heart of the collection lies a pair of inverted questions: What does fashion sound like? How might sound be worn? These provocations fuel the collaborative process behind SS26—a synesthetic dialogue between sound and garment, warped through experimentation and play.

Charles first began sketching while listening to music recorded at Abbey Road, letting the melody inspire colour and form. In tandem with his design team, creative decisions were made like sonic remixes—layered, looped, reversed. From this process came the season’s central visual motif: simulacra. Not quite copies, not quite originals—these garments are echoes, imitations, ghost forms. Classic tailoring is distorted, a collision of tradition and subversion: shirts with extra sleeves that tie around the waist like a belt; trompé l’œil belts already stitched into trousers, shirting with ties pre-attached and askew, sunglasses gone wiggly and weird as if melted by the sun. The result is a collection of mutated staples that demand a second look.

The collection’s name itself, Prepared Piano, nods to John Cage’s 1940s technique of modifying the instrument with bolts, rubber, and cutlery, transforming it into something raw and unpredictable. LOVERBOY applies this logic to garment-making: formalwear is tampered with, lovingly warped away from its origins. Each garment hums with the energy of interruption. Like a prepared piano, nothing quite sounds (or looks) the way tradition intended.