Prepared Piano: LOVERBOY’s Daring SS26 Collection Is a Sonic Happening at Abbey Road Studios
By PAGE Editor
In a radical departure from traditional runway norms, Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY transformed London Fashion Week SS26 into a multisensory, sonic happening inside the hallowed halls of Abbey Road Studios.
Titled Prepared Piano, the collection isn't just inspired by music—it is music. A declaration against fashion’s empty pageantry, the show is an open-ended love letter to creativity, to queerness, and to the process of making, in all its raw, analog glory.
Where Fashion Meets Frequency
"In 2025, fashion for fashion’s sake feels vulgar," says Charles Jeffrey. That thesis pulses through every stitch, soundbite, and silhouette of Prepared Piano. Not content to merely reference music, LOVERBOY collapses the boundaries between fashion and sound, conceiving a collection that emerges from the same tactile experimentation and rule-breaking ethos that defines Abbey Road’s legacy.
Drawing from a trove of archival footage and photography from Abbey Road Studios, the team unearthed a diverse cast of studio archetypes: lab-coated engineers, flamboyant '70s rockers, sharp-suited execs, and no-nonsense technicians. These figures—at once real and mythic—became the foundation for LOVERBOY’s fashion laboratory.
Yet Jeffrey doesn’t stop at nostalgia. Prepared Piano updates the cast list for the present: Gen Z bedroom producers in fuzzy eared beanies and mammoth hoodies; precise, obsessive creatives in reengineered lab coats; rockstars draped in trumpet-flared hems and sleeves. It’s equal parts sci-fi glam and lo-fi grit.
Garments as Echo Chambers
At the collection’s core lies a potent question: What does fashion sound like? And what might sound look like? This synesthetic curiosity guided every decision, from sketching and color theory to tailoring and casting.
Just as John Cage’s prepared piano technique disrupted traditional performance by inserting bolts, rubber, and cutlery into a grand piano, LOVERBOY’s garments are lovingly disrupted—echoes of themselves, distorted mutations that laugh in the face of symmetry and orthodoxy. Shirts come with phantom sleeves tied at the waist like belts. Trousers feature trompe l’œil belts sewn into their very DNA. Sunglasses ripple like they’ve melted under stage lights.
There’s a sense that nothing here is finished, and that’s the point. Each garment hums with a note of improvisation, the kind that comes not from chaos but from rigorous, playful experimentation.
Abbey Road Becomes a Squat for Genius
Instead of a catwalk, the presentation unfolds like a living installation. Models and muses sprawl across Studio One, thrashing instruments, spilling coffee, lounging on mixing desks like seasoned session musicians. A live band—featuring Tom Furse, Raven Bush, Victoria Smith and others—scores the space while artists contribute spontaneous performances ranging from ASMR-like sonic experiments to diaristic spoken word.
The cast reads like a who’s who of LOVERBOY’s technicolor universe: Francesco Risso, Lyas, Marc Forne, Genesis Webb, Planningtorock, Taahliah, and Allie X all transform the studio into a playground of style and subversion.
This communal performance culminates in an EP featuring the day’s recorded experiments, plus a free VST plugin crafted from samples played by Charles himself across Abbey Road and the LOVERBOY studio. The project doesn’t end with clothes—it expands into a toolkit for global music-makers, democratizing the creative spark that sparked the collection itself.
Fashion as a Time Capsule, Not a Product
The documentation of Prepared Piano—shot by Ladislav Kyllar, styled by Anders Sølvsten Thomsen, with art direction by Bunny Kinney—reads like a visual jazz riff: raw, immediate, unfinished in the best way. Models drift in and out of character. Light flares. Sound bleeds. Fashion becomes something lived, not posed.
As Jeffrey explains, “Abbey Road Studios is not just a music icon; it’s a laboratory of dreams.” Like the Fluxus movement or Yoko Ono’s participatory experiments, Prepared Piano blurs the line between process and product, fashion and philosophy.
This is not a brand leaning on legacy—it’s one building new ones, rooted in radical queer joy, sound design, and anti-perfectionist rebellion.
A Sonic Wardrobe for a Queer Future
LOVERBOY’s SS26 collection refuses passive consumption. It asks you to listen, to play, to remix, and to step into the wardrobe like stepping into a sound booth. It’s fashion that remembers—that garments were always meant to be worn by real people with real lives, spilled drinks, broken zippers, late nights, and brilliant ideas.
Prepared Piano is more than a collection. It’s an invitation to treat the studio not like a museum, but like a squat for genius. That’s where the real work happens—and LOVERBOY has thrown the door wide open.
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