Known Source’s Modern Muse Brings Archive Womenswear To NW1 Exchange

After the intensity of London Fashion Week, the conversation around clothes does not have to stop when the shows do. As the city comes down from another season of presentations, dinners, parties and street style, Known Source is turning attention back towards something that often sits underneath it all: fashion history. On Saturday 26 September, Modern Muse arrives at NW1 Exchange, bringing together archive womenswear across generations and creating a space to look at where contemporary fashion comes from.

Known Source has built a strong run of archive focused events, with its 5 September House of Heritage event bringing together heritage pieces from fashion capitals including London, Paris and New York. That event featured names spanning Chanel, Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, McQueen, Prada, Versace and Vivienne Westwood, alongside talks, archive displays and live tailoring. Modern Muse continues that conversation, but narrows its focus towards womenswear and the designers who have shaped its visual language.

The idea behind Modern Muse is to move through fashion history era by era, with more than 2,000 archive pieces spanning apparel, eyewear, handbags and footwear. The selection brings together designers including Miuccia Prada, Katharine Hamnett, Rei Kawakubo, Donatella Versace, Vivienne Westwood, Coco Chanel, Fendi, Isabel Marant and Sonia Rykiel. For anyone who has spent the past week looking at new collections, it offers a chance to trace some of those ideas backwards and see the garments, silhouettes and designers that continue to inform fashion today.

That historical perspective is what makes the event particularly relevant after Fashion Week. Trends often arrive presented as new propositions, but fashion rarely works in isolation. Ideas travel through decades, get challenged, reworked and eventually return in different forms. Archive allows those connections to become tangible. A garment from a previous generation can reveal where a contemporary silhouette came from, while a designer's older work can offer context for the references appearing across today's collections.

The experience extends beyond the dealers, with archive displays, panel conversations and live tailoring and alterations forming part of the programme. Known Source describes the event as an opportunity to meet, connect and learn from its wider community, giving the day an educational quality alongside its shopping element. There will also be a conversation with Dilys Williams FRSA, Director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, and designer and archivist Francescka Luther King, bringing questions around fashion, heritage and preservation into the room.

For those who want to engage with craftsmanship directly, Nattie Jewellery will host a hands on wax carving workshop. Participants will learn traditional carving techniques and create their own wax ring model, introducing another side of fashion history through making. The event will also include nail art and tattoos, adding contemporary forms of self expression to a programme fundamentally concerned with how personal style develops and evolves.

There is also a wider social dimension to the day through Pop Up 38, a charity boutique supporting Lapis Lazuli Schools in Kabul. Its inclusion connects fashion and collecting with a tangible contribution towards education, while reinforcing the idea that an archive event can hold more meaning than the transaction of buying another piece. Fashion history is ultimately built around people, communities, makers and the stories that survive through what we choose to preserve.

Modern Muse arrives at a useful moment in London's fashion calendar. After a week dominated by what is next, Known Source is asking us to spend a day looking at what came before, and why it still matters. With thousands of archive pieces, designers spanning generations, industry conversations, live craftsmanship and dealers coming from across the UK, Europe and Tokyo, it is an opportunity to step away from the LFW rush and spend time with the clothes themselves. Modern Muse takes place at NW1 Exchange on 26 September, from 10:30 to 18:00.