Liberty London's new head of design talks balancing heritage with contemporary evolution

Luxury department store Liberty London is continuing efforts to solidify the foundations of its in-house fashion category with the appointment of Sinead O’Brien as its new head of design.

O’Brien had previously worked under Vivienne Westwood before taking up consultancy roles at brands like Erdem and Roksanda. At Liberty, her first collection will be released in spring 2028, with two main collections and two pre-collections planned for each year.

Her appointment comes as Liberty renews its focus on ready-to-wear and textiles as a whole, having recently expanded its fabric department by 140 percent and revealing plans to further grow its womenswear selection.

Its AW26 collection, ‘Modern Reverie’, serves as a glimpse of what is to come, particularly for print, a signature element of Liberty’s design values that takes on a more immersive, architectural role for the line. The team’s exploration of an extensive archive is also evident in the use of heritage motifs, like the Eva Belle, and historical references that take on a contemporary twist.

The collection’s launch ushers in a new era of design led by O’Brien, who spoke to FashionUnited on her vision for the coming period at Liberty.

What about Liberty drew you to the head of design position? How would you like to see Liberty’s design proposition develop?

Since I began studying fashion, my interest in the relationship between past and present has always been a real focus - an obsession. My thesis looked at how fashion uses the past as a method of feeding the future. At Vivienne Westwood, I learned how to work with a fashion archive and began to understand brand codes and how to use layered referencing to give a collection a strong sense of identity. The incredible archive and rich history of print and design that is unique to Liberty is what drew me to the role.

As I begin to work on the collection, I’m exploring how our print language and RTW silhouettes can evolve. I would like to see us expanding into new categories to create a more complete womenswear and menswear offering, while bringing the language of our interiors and scarf designs into RTW. Things naturally influence one another in our studio environment, and I want to really lean into that.

With a history spanning over 150 years and an archive of more than 65,000 pieces, how will you balance Liberty’s heritage design language with the need for products relevant to today’s customer?

The Liberty archive is the ultimate source of inspiration to me, and it holds endless possibilities. Being curious and searching for the unexpected is important because I want to find something new - perhaps presenting what is unseen alongside the archetypes we already know from Liberty. I want to take the archival prints on a journey through the design process and through the collection, deconstructing elements, reworking them and developing new techniques.

Following the expansion in fabrics and haberdashery, are there any other categories where you see potential for expansion or reimagining?

I think there is a huge opportunity to continue evolving the fashion proposition and to explore how Liberty’s design language can move across different categories. There is a lot of potential in taking the codes people associate with Liberty and finding new ways to express them.

What role will new collaborations, materials and manufacturing techniques play in evolving Liberty’s design identity while maintaining its craftsmanship roots?

Craftsmanship is really important to us both in our manufacturing and in the design studio. We recently started working with a great British knitwear company, Albion, and with Manteco, an Italian woollen mill, who we have worked with on our first collection of coats for womenswear.

We really value our collaborations and look to our mills and printers for their expertise as we push the boundaries of how we work. We have some very long-standing relationships, and it’s exciting when they come to us with a new technique, print or weave they’ve been developing and it starts to inform our process in the design studio. That feedback cycle is vital, and for me, it’s the synergy of both sides striving to discover what’s possible that makes collaborations so valuable.

How will evolving consumer tastes influence Liberty’s approach to colour, pattern, materials and product design, and where do you see the biggest shifts in demand?

People who love print feel very comfortable in our iconic, colourful, designs, but we’re also interested in developing the artworks into more tonal and textured fabrications, offering another way into the world of Liberty. Having moments of ‘breathing space’ in these tonal variations is important within the collection and it speaks to a different customer who wants to wear pattern in a quieter way - there a richness and level of sophistication to that too.