> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.alcyne.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Missing Middle of Fashion - URL: https://www.alcyne.com/the-missing-middle-of-fashion/ - Published: 2026-09-01T13:09:57.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-24T18:39:38.000Z - Author: ALCYNE - Tags: Fashion *Aaron Esh’s first AllSaints collection arrives today. The more interesting question is whether a brand like AllSaints can restore something fashion has spent years hollowing out.* The old AllSaints shop did a lot before you reached the clothes. The light was low. Singer sewing machines filled the windows. Leather, iron and grey timber made a branch in a shopping centre feel faintly illicit. It was retail theatre, but it also established something that has become increasingly rare: you knew whose world you had entered. Aaron Esh’s first collection as chief creative officer goes into AllSaints stores and online today, and the scale of the reset is clearer than the usual language of a relaunch suggests. The old pattern blocks have gone. Three decades of them. Leather jackets, shearling, denim and knitwear have been cut again around fit, fabric and proportion rather than lightly updated. Even the Ramskull has been redrawn, using old military stamps and handwritten archive marks as references. The point seems to be neither reinvention nor restoration. Esh is keeping the things that make AllSaints recognisable while questioning almost everything about how they have been made. The campaign extends the same idea. Alasdair McLellan photographed seventeen portraits, mostly street-cast Londoners, styled by Katy England and art directed by Jamie Reid. An 80-page magazine, printed in 10,000 copies, is arriving in stores around the world at the same time. American retail once had a useful word for the part of the market between designer fashion and mass retail: bridge. Marc by Marc Jacobs sat below Marc Jacobs. DKNY sat below Donna Karan. These brands gave customers access to some of the language and authorship of designer fashion without requiring mainline prices. Over the past fifteen years, fashion became increasingly polarised between businesses chasing luxury margins and those chasing mass-market scale. Both ends became extremely sophisticated. Zara could translate a runway mood almost instantly. Uniqlo could make exceptionally competent clothes for millions of people. Luxury houses, meanwhile, became ever more complete cultural machines. What became harder to find was the thing in between: a brand that was accessible enough to buy regularly but specific enough to mean something. At AllSaints, a leather jacket cost less than one at a fashion house, but that was the least of it. The brand offered a complete proposition: music, nightlife, Britishness, sex, a particular amount of damage. You could find the whole thing embarrassing, seductive or both, but it was difficult to mistake it for anybody else. The clothes carried the atmosphere of the place selling them. Mid-market stores today are calmer. The trousers fit. The cashmere is respectable. The references arrive quickly. A customer can now dress extremely well without forming much attachment to the name on the receipt. Perhaps this is why established retailers have started importing designers who would once have seemed destined for fashion houses. Clare Waight Keller became Uniqlo’s global creative director after Givenchy and Chloé. Zac Posen oversees creative work at Gap. John Galliano is working with Zara. Francesco Risso left Marni for Fast Retailing’s GU. Esh at AllSaints belongs to the same movement, but it is a good test because AllSaints already has the remains of a world for him to work with. He has spoken about wanting someone to be identifiable as “very AllSaints” without seeing a logo. That sounds like a simple branding ambition until you consider how few mid-market fashion labels could plausibly say the same thing. Luxury understands this instinctively. Miu Miu sells skirts and The Row sells coats, but each offers proximity to a highly controlled idea of a person. Fast fashion offers something else: speed, variety and access. AllSaints has some experience of what happens when that identity weakens. The company came close to collapse in 2011 after its Icelandic investors failed, before recovering under Lion Capital and eventually reaching record revenues. For a brand built as much on atmosphere as product, creative identity has never been entirely decorative. There is still an obvious reason for caution. Everything available so far is campaign, preview and interview. The public has barely had the chance to touch the clothes, let alone live in them. A beautifully photographed jacket can still be a bad jacket. Esh is being asked to do something fashion once considered perfectly normal: give an accessible brand a recognisable author.