The stereotype is that today’s young people are a sexless, teetotal generation of wellness ascetics, whose wildest indulgence is the collecting of loyalty stamps at their local matcha café. Natasha Zinko—who just so happens to run a thriving matcha bar out of her London flagship—remembers her own youth differently. “I’d party all night and turn up to an exam the next morning still in the same clothes I’d worn out,” she said of her student days in 1990s Odessa, Ukraine, during a walk-through of her latest collection. “I didn’t take a single Pilates class, and guess what? I survived. It’s important to be a mess sometimes,” she added. “I still am a mess!” So that was her manifesto for spring 2026.
And where better to bring it all to life than at Soho’s The Box—a place where anything can, and usually does, happen—on a tableau of cig-smoking bon vivants stumbling through the debris of a night well had. Such as: sheer slips pocked with cigarette burns; low-slung sweatpants bearing the stains of the club floor; and inside-out, doubled-up polos with crooked plackets pulled apart in the heat of the moment. From deadstock came a series of upcycled plaid shirts—remember when men wore shirts to go dancing?—and a tartan skirt wrapped with its own extraneous sleeve, as if someone had been caught off guard and hastily covered up with a lover’s jacket. Eveningwear played a larger role: raw-edged LBDs, crinoline mini dresses in permanently crumpled lace, and boned puffball numbers with exposed bra cups that called to mind Sloane Rangers spilling out of the King’s Road in their heyday. “Despite all our efforts,” Zinko said, “the best outfit is the one we’re left with at the end of the night.”
If the designer set out to dismantle culture’s downward spiral into puritanism, she found her muses in pop culture’s greatest sleazoids: Johnny Depp’s Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, whose aviators were recreated in a permanently askew fit, and Nicolas Cage’s Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart, his iconic snakeskin jacket reimagined with torn-out panels. (A collaboration with flip-flop brand Havaianas only added to the loose spirit of it all.) But there was also the influence of Daliah Spiegel, Zinko’s new stylist, whose arrival ushered in a livelier palette—golden yellows, pale pinks, mint greens, and ice blues—than we have recently seen of Zinko. “All these clothes I see online,” she said. “So beige, so nothing.” This reporter left smelling of cigarette smoke.
