This season, Natasha Zinko did something both totally wild and completely obvious in hindsight: she hired her parents. Oleg and Margharita. Both in their 70s. Full-time, last-minute, no pressure contributors to the collection. In the usual West London studio chaos—machines humming, fabric everywhere, someone always asking where the scissors went—you could find them screwing hardware onto platform combat boots and crocheting sock-boots literally 24 hours before the presentation. Meanwhile, her son Ivan was nearby, putting the final touches on the show notes. Three generations. No boundaries. Very on brand.

For Zinko, this isn’t some cute gimmick. This is the origin story. Her first real brush with fashion happened as a teenager in post-Soviet Odessa in the ’90s, making jeans for her family to sell at street markets. “Those were challenging, complicated times,” she said—understatement of the century. There were no factories, no access, no shortcuts. You wore what you could make. Full stop. “It taught me there are no limits to what you can achieve with your hands.” Which sounds inspirational, sure—but also exhausting. And deeply formative.

Denim didn’t dominate this season (just an acid-wash jacket here, a squiggly-seamed pair of jeans there), but the idea of family was stitched into everything else—especially through the make-do-and-mend construction. Grandpa’s plaid shirt got stuffed with crinoline and turned into a tutu-skirted dress, then reworked again as cargo shorts. His leather jackets became body-con dresses, styled with neon pink push-up bras. Tailoring was pulled apart and rebuilt into column dresses, waistbands flopping up around the neck like they were still deciding what they wanted to be. “The Wonderbra was huge when I was a teen,” Zinko said, “so I had to mix them in with the wider family wardrobe.” Obviously.

But the real goldmine was Grandma’s vintage mink coats. Those got doubled into two-in-one pieces, reshaped into corsets, or sliced up for trims on a brocade opera coat and a spaghetti-strap chiffon slip. “There was a period of ten years where my mom wore—and altered—her mom’s coat,” Zinko said. “She was upcycling before it was a thing.” Before it was a buzzword. Before it was virtuous. It was just… necessity.

Family energy carried onto the runway, too. Cheers erupted when Mel B appeared alongside her daughter Phoenix Brown in the maze of Victorian tunnels that doubled as a catwalk. But Zinko herself was more animated talking about her ongoing collaboration with Havaianas—which, frankly, tracks. There was a sensible court shoe rendered completely unhinged by a flip-flop thong fanning across the toe, plus stacked sandals wrapped in trompe-l’œil leather parcel tape. Utility meets chaos.

That same wink ran through vinyl skirts shaped like upside-down reusable shopping bags and sleeveless skirt sets made from tea towels—because, as Zinko put it, “family business always happens in the kitchen.” Even the belt buckles got weird: cast from resin-coated bubble gum she’d spent days chewing herself. Which… wow. Commitment. “It’s trashy!” she said, proudly. “And trendy!”

And honestly? Trying to figure out where one ends and the other begins feels kind of beside the point.