I wasn’t expecting KNWLS to make me think about romance.

Honestly.

KNWLS, in my head, has always lived somewhere between a corset, a motorbike and the slightly dangerous feeling that something might come apart at any second. Skin. Straps. Hardware. Leather. The body held together and pulled apart at the same time.

And then this collection walks out in powder blue.

Excuse me?

There are flowers. There are little bows. There are Peter Pan collars. There are these almost prairie-like silhouettes floating through the collection in grey, sand and black. And suddenly I’m standing there thinking: wait, is KNWLS getting soft?

Well… sort of.

Because underneath all that softness, the house is still doing what it has always done.

The body is still the battlefield.

What makes this collection so interesting is that KNWLS doesn’t abandon its language. It stretches it. Corsetry is still everywhere, but now it sits beside delicate florals and romantic draping. Exposed hardware still cuts through the softer pieces. Straps, D-rings, drawstrings and zips keep reminding you that this is KNWLS, even when the clothes start flirting with something sweeter.

And I love that contradiction.

Actually, I LOVE it.

The opening looks already tell you where we’re going. Legs wrapped in fabric like bandages. Knots. Layers being pulled around the body rather than simply placed on it. Dressing becomes an action.

And that idea keeps returning.

A trench becomes a skirt.

A corset becomes outerwear.

A slip dress becomes something to be lifted, opened, revealed.

The clothes don’t really want to behave like finished clothes. They want to show you how they got there.

That’s the bit that stayed with me.

Because fashion loves pretending that everything just magically arrives looking perfect. You put on the dress. You zip it up. You walk out. Done.

KNWLS seems much more interested in the moment before that.

The pulling.

The wrapping.

The tying.

The exposing.

The little bit where you’re still figuring out what the hell you’re wearing.

And then comes the colour.

Sage. Powder blue. Ivory. Soft grey. Blush. Rose. Tan.

There is a gentleness here that we don’t normally associate with KNWLS, and for a while it feels almost strange — like watching someone you know very well suddenly speak in a completely different accent.

The rosettes are probably the clearest example.

They appear as three-dimensional fabric details, on bags, across dresses and as appliqué. They’re not just decoration. They become one of the collection’s connective threads, moving between hard and soft, utilitarian and romantic.

And then there are the florals.

Tiny. Delicate. Almost innocent.

Almost.

Because put them on a KNWLS body and innocence doesn’t quite survive.

That’s what I kept thinking about.

The collection seems to be asking whether softness can exist without becoming weakness.

Whether romance can exist without becoming pretty.

Whether a flower can live next to a harness and somehow make both of them more interesting.

And sometimes it works beautifully.

Sometimes it feels like KNWLS has discovered another side of itself.

And sometimes — I have to be honest — I wasn’t completely convinced.

The prairie-inspired looks are beautiful, but after seeing them repeated in different colourways, I started wondering whether I was looking at a new chapter of the KNWLS vocabulary or a separate idea that had wandered into the wrong show.

The blush, rose and tan section has a similar problem. Individually, the looks are gorgeous. Together, the repetition slightly slows the collection down.

But then KNWLS does something wonderfully reckless.

At the end, a model literally lifts her own dress.

Not subtly.

Not metaphorically.

She pulls it up and shows us what is underneath.

And suddenly the whole collection clicks again.

Because that’s the KNWLS trick.

Look underneath.

There is always something underneath.

The softness has another layer.

The romance has hardware.

The pretty dress has a body underneath it.

The trench isn’t just a trench.

The skirt isn’t just a skirt.

The clothes aren’t really finished until you understand how they’re holding themselves together.

And maybe that’s why the softer pieces don’t bother me as much as I initially thought they might.

Perhaps KNWLS isn’t becoming romantic.

Perhaps it’s asking what happens when romance is forced through the same machinery that created its harder, more exposed world.

That is a much more interesting question.

And I don’t think the collection completely answers it.

Which, honestly, is probably why I’m still thinking about it.

Because maybe the next step isn’t choosing between the KNWLS we already know and this new, softer version.

Maybe it’s figuring out how much softness you can introduce before the teeth disappear.

And looking at these clothes?

I don’t think the teeth are going anywhere.