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charles jeffrey loverboy ss26 | prepared piano

If there’s one designer who knows how to orchestrate chaos with style, it’s Charles Jeffrey. For Spring/Summer 2026, the LOVERBOY founder traded the catwalk for cables and soundboards, staging his latest collection inside the legendary Abbey Road Studios. The show played out as a live ‘happening’, where fashion, music, and performance collapsed into one another in real time. But beneath the anarchic surface, SS26 reveals some of Jeffrey’s most considered design to date.

“Our project embodies that spirit of experimentation, blending the sound of our creative process with the iconic legacy of Abbey Road, offering a 360-degree experience of what LOVERBOY is all about,” says Jeffrey.

Named Prepared Piano after John Cage’s technique of modifying instruments into unpredictable sound machines, the collection treats garments much the same way: re-tuned, interrupted, and reimagined. Jeffrey pulls from Abbey Road’s visual history and archetypes, such as studio execs, shaggy-haired musicians, lab-coated engineers, and filters them through a distinctly LOVERBOY lens. That means sharply tailored suits warped into trumpet shapes, oversized hoodies fuzzed out like bedroom beats, and shirts with extra sleeves that double as makeshift belts. Ties come pre-attached, sunglasses wiggle like soundwaves, and trousers are already belted (for those too busy mixing tracks to bother with a buckle).

The concept is rich with art-school references (John Cage, Fluxus, Oldenburg) but there’s nothing academic about the execution. Think of distorted classics that feel lived-in, slightly melted, irreverent. As the name implies, these are garments ‘prepared’ like Cage’s piano — tampered with, bent out of shape, made unpredictable. A white coat becomes architectural; a rockstar flare is pushed until it’s absurd. Banana-yellow boots peel at the sides.

There’s an intimacy to this process too. Jeffrey and his team designed to the rhythm of Abbey Road recordings, treating silhouettes and details like samples to be looped, layered, and remixed. That experimentation continues with the show itself: performances from friends and collaborators including Planningtorock, Allie X, Francesco Risso, and Tom Rasmussen blur the lines between audience, artist, and model. The show culminates in an EP built from the day’s live recordings and a free sample plugin that will be available to music producers globally.

“In 2025, fashion for fashion’s sake feels vulgar,” Jeffrey says. So instead, he gives us fashion as dialogue, fashion as noise, fashion as unfinished experiment.

Find out more here.

photography. Ladislav Kyllar
words. Gennaro Costanzo