For Spring 2027, Charlie Constantinou looked to his Cypriot heritage, exploring the sartorial traditions of the island during its transition from Ottoman rule to British colonial rule. Drawing from The Cyprus Museum’s digital archives, he became particularly interested in the late-19th- and early-20th-century period when Ottoman dress began taking on distinctly Western influences.
One archival image became a key reference: Cypriot men wearing voluminous linen vraka—traditional pleated culottes—with tailored wool jackets and crisp shirting. Constantinou translated the combination into a contemporary wardrobe, opening with a coffee-toned blazer with a notched sailor collar paired with sharply pleated charcoal-linen Bermuda shorts.
The womenswear developed the same idea through pleat-front tunics, military-inspired shirts, and silhouettes designed with greater attention to body proportion. Rather than separating the collections strictly by gender, Constantinou approached the clothes as a shared wardrobe, recutting familiar forms to create a more defined feminine shape.
Despite its historical foundation, the collection avoided becoming costume-like. Instead, Constantinou used the past as a starting point for a larger question: what might the traditional dress of the future look like? His answer was a wardrobe that carried traces of Cypriot history while remaining firmly rooted in contemporary London.
The result felt less like a reconstruction of heritage than an exercise in imagining how today’s clothes might eventually be remembered. Through tailored proportions, pleating, fluid shirting, and reworked traditional references, Constantinou proposed a modern form of dress shaped by both history and the future.
Charlie Constantinou Spring 2027 Ready-to-Wear Collection
