The Aaron Esh AllSaints collection lands internationally today, an autumn/winter 2026 debut that TheIndustry.fashion reports also introduces a new logo and graphic system, with the brand’s Ramskull repositioned across product, imagery, and editorial projects.
If you’ve been following fashion’s ongoing experiment in pairing established designers with high-street muscle, this one has been circled on the calendar for a while. Fashion Network confirmed Esh’s title as chief creative officer, effective 3 November 2025, a notch above the ‘creative director’ label that initially circulated, and a hint at how seriously AllSaints is taking the mandate.
How the Aaron Esh AllSaints Collection Came Together
The origin story is almost too good. Esh and CEO Peter Wood happened to be seated next to each other at the Fashion Awards in London in 2024. No formal interview, no agency pitch: Esh wrote Wood a manifesto. ‘I wrote him this manifesto for the business, saying it should be “real life not runway.” It’s for a new tribe of people, a mixture of age and body type. It’s not about being stick-thin in Paris,’ he said.
Wood, who joined AllSaints in 2010 as chief financial officer before becoming CEO in 2018, has form for ambitious bets. Under his tenure, AllSaints expanded its group to include John Varvatos and posted record group revenue of £458 million for the year ended 3 February 2024, a 36% increase on the prior period, according to Business of Fashion reporting. The most recent financial year to 1 February 2025 told a more complicated story: Drapers reports total group revenue of £441.3 million, a 4% decline driven by a deliberate pullback on promotional activity. Pre-tax profit, though, rose 55% year-on-year to £28.2 million, and pre-operating exceptional EBITDA edged up 1% to £69.5 million, a record EBITDA performance. Wood was named Leader of the Year at the 2025 Drapers Awards; make of that what you will about how fashion trades judge a revenue dip paired with a margin improvement.
One footnote worth flagging: the snippet places AllSaints’ founding in 1997, but TheIndustry.fashion dates the brand’s London heritage to 1994. Separately, the snippet references 300 stores internationally; Drapers puts the current network at 252 directly managed stores plus 34 franchise locations, operating across more than 150 countries with a global team of over 2,000 employees.
The Clothes, the Muse, and the Fanzine
Esh, a born Londoner and Central Saint Martins MA graduate who launched his eponymous brand in 2020 and is part of the 2025/26 BFC NEWGEN cohort, has spent months rigorously re-fitting what already existed at AllSaints rather than burning it down. Working closely with Katy England, who began her career as Alexander McQueen’s stylist in 1994, the pair have built a wardrobe Esh describes as ‘as much for a 50-year-old woman as an 18-year-old boy.’
The product range moves from satin slip dresses and velvet bias-cut cuts (almost all under £200) through patinated leather A-line skirts and zip-jackets to a purplish strapless leather dress. On the menswear side, a long double-breasted grey herringbone coat at £495 is the standout. ‘And that’s a lot of coat for £495!’ Esh says, and it’s hard to argue.
‘To me, it was when Kate Moss was going out with Pete Doherty, that time. AllSaints was really prevalent in British culture on the high street then,’ Esh says. ‘It’s a very British sensibility, but not about whimsy and the countryside. It’s a brand that’s authentic to London.’ That cultural memory is the brand equity he’s spending.
The campaign, shot by photographer Alasdair McLennan in inter-generational portraits, lands alongside The Ram, a printed fanzine named for the brand’s ram-skull logo, designed for customers to pick up in-store. Physical, tactile, analogue. In 2026. Genuinely rather charming.
The Bigger Pattern Behind the Aaron Esh AllSaints Appointment
Esh’s move sits squarely in a wave: Clare Waight Keller at Uniqlo, Zac Posen at Gap, and now John Galliano, whose partnership with Zara begins in September 2026, with collections guided by a couture process released seasonally, according to WWD. Jonathan Saunders has also joined & Other Stories as chief creative officer, another designer crossing into mass-market territory. The pattern is consistent enough now to call it a structural shift rather than a trend: the economics of running an independent luxury label are brutal, and a brand doing hundreds of millions in annual revenue offers design leverage that a small-batch collection simply cannot.
‘It’s how the economy and the market’s going. To me, to be able to make that kind of change at a high street brand is way cooler. In America, we’re put next to Coach and Rag & Bone,’ Esh says. With AllSaints doing roughly half its sales in the United States, that positioning matters. The autumn/winter 2026 collection is the opening argument. The jury, as ever, is the shop floor.
