Liza Keane In Praise of Wrong Women
“I make clothes for sensitive people who don’t want to look sensitive.”
Liza Keane made her debut runway presentation at London Fashion Week, introducing a body of work defined by heavily manipulated textiles and raw emotional weight. The emerging designer delivered a striking Spring/Summer 2027 collection that reframes physical damage as an intentional design language. Keane calls the exterior treatments armour, and the name fits in the most literal sense, chiseled surfaces built to hold a shape no matter how you move through the day.
Underneath, contrasting seams of fine, delicate textiles run through the collection, held together by precision stitching that keeps something tender intact beneath all that hardness. It’s the kind of contrast that only makes sense once you hear her talk about why she builds clothes this way in the first place.
Continue reading for our interview with Keane to hear about her dream muses, Playbody collaboration and why she believes that armor is the ultimate love language for the sensitive.
Why was now the right time for you to show at London Fashion Week?
Joining NEWGEN with the BFC was a big part of it. Since graduating I’ve wanted to do shows, that’s how I see my work presented. Film is something I enjoy, but it’s secondary. Shows are also brutally expensive, not something you can just save up for unless your business has already reached that scale. With BFC, there was finally a real window to do it.
I missed a year of doing it, did two seasons as films instead, always meaning to show properly, but it kept falling through. This time I just went for it. I have two years left of NEWGEN support. Once I leave, I want the business somewhere I couldn’t have reached alone, and that takes big steps, not slow growth. This is the moment to do something drastic that gets the brand seen differently, because that chance won’t come again once I’m out of the program.
Have you used any new techniques or material innovations for this collection?
I’ve developed things I already work with, same chemicals and materials, used differently. The flashiest is a mud effect that isn’t mud: it looks exactly like wet mud but is dry, wearable, and doesn’t fade. It’s a re-evolution of the wet-look finish I’ve done before. I’ve been upcycling and working with offset hides. After graduating I liked soft, buttery leather. Now I’m drawn to cowhide and buffalo hide, thick, closer to what you’d use in cars, furniture or belts.
Do you have a dream muse for these designs?
A lot of the women I think about for this collection are film characters, two of the leads from Martyrs, especially the opening sequence, and Lilya 4-ever, the real story behind the film. They’re all women who are “wrong” in some way, not sympathetic in a straightforward sense. Lilya 4-ever is fairly sympathetic to her, but the real story is that she was a victim of a horrific crime, and yet people might say, “of course that happened to her,” which I find tragic. Still, something about that wrongness draws me to them.
Lars von Trier’s women share that quality, they don’t present themselves in a PR-friendly way, aren’t trying to be beautiful or to offend. There’s a nonchalance, a genuine effortlessness. It’s not that I aspire to be like them in the traditional muse sense, I identify with them. It’s less “you should look like this” and more “I get this, I’m like this, this is what I want to present.” If you like it, here you go.
Tell us about your collaboration with Playbody. How did it come about, and why did it feel like a strong fit?
I went to one of their parties on my birthday, a friend who’s a photographer there invited me, and I’d never heard of Playbody before. The atmosphere and energy were incredible. My boyfriend called it “Last Days of Rome.” There was a sense of danger to it, but everyone was tender with each other regardless of how you looked or were dressed. A lot of that comes from Joel, who runs it, hard and professional, but also the kindest person.
I told him, “Call me tomorrow, I need to speak to you.” He came to the studio, I told him the story of the collection and where my head was at, and we talked about my intentions for the catwalk. My brief was simple: bring that Playbody energy to whatever we do, be surprising, no boundaries beyond budget. It turned out we shared the same references without ever having spoken before, like we shared a brain cell. I trusted him completely and told him to run with it. Once we started, it came together quickly, and then it was just a matter of working out the execution.
There’s been an increase in collections describing clothing as armor, which feels apt for today. Why have you chosen armor as a vernacular for your product?
I make clothes for sensitive people who don’t want to look sensitive. I’ve noticed that reference too; people wanting to communicate a fierce quality through their clothes. I don’t make medieval armor, but I replicate the body in a hard way, like hard shells you put on. There’s a sense of separation; your soft, vulnerable body is obscured and protected by this chiseled, perfect shell. You can sit, squat, do whatever you want, and your body looks the same. Like an armored piece, it makes you feel protected from people’s gaze, ready for any angle.
You’re essentially putting on plastic surgery. But inside, it’s soft, silky, flexible; there’s no corsetry involved. The point is to give you agency: you’re comfortable and warm inside, but externally you project “don’t f-ck with me.” I think that’s what makes me comfortable too; physically at ease, not tugging at my dress or worrying about pinching, and mentally free because I know I don’t need to worry about how I look.
