Allie X & Charles Jeffrey – Selfridges Summer Of Sound: Music Talks
Friday, 25th July – Fresh from Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY’s Spring/Summer 2026 showcase in June at Abbey Road Studios – where musician Allie X walked the runway – the pair reunited at The Cinema at Selfridges for Eyes Without A Face – a discussion on music, fashion and how they shape an artist’s visual identity. Hosted by broadcaster, DJ and creative director Lagoon.
FASHION THROUGH SOUND, SOUND THROUGH FASHION
This season, music isn’t simply the inspiration–it’s the output. As LOVERBOY creative director Charles Jeffrey says, “In 2025, fashion for fashion’s sake feels vulgar.” Thus, SS26 is shaped by the process of music-making, specifically the experimental, analogue, tactile kind as long practised at and made possible by Abbey Road.
Charles Jeffrey shows LOVERBOY’s distilled archetypes from the characters who emerged across the myriad photos and film material discovered within Abbey Road’s archives. The many collaborators featured across this imagery were often captured during in-between moments, coded by style. There are the authoritative execs in their crisp tailoring and wide-lapelled suits, the musicians for whom formality unravelled in favour of function and flare across the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the engineers in their white lab coats, mixing like mad scientists across the various recording tools within the studio.
In keeping with Abbey Road’s pioneering, future-facing commitment to innovation and play, these archetypes are reimagined for 2026 in the LOVERBOY collection documented here: the Gen Z bedroom producers swallowed up in their fuzzy ears beanie and oversized hoodie, the magnetically IDGAF rockstars adorned in sleeves and hems belling out like trumpets, and the exacting, obsessive technicians in their supersized labcoat made of heavy-duty shirting.
Indeed, it’s these very music makers for whom the collection takes its chief inspiration. Not simply the future superstars making music on their laptops in their teenage hideaways, but the true innovators to whom this new generation are indebted, who came before through cultural institutions like Abbey Road and subverted stuffy conventions in order to define modern music as we know it.
A SYNESTHESIC DIALOGUE BETWEEN SOUND AND GARMENT
At the heart of the collection lies a pair of inverted questions: What does fashion sound like? How might sound be worn? These provocations fuel the collaborative process behind SS26—a synesthetic dialogue between sound and garment, warped through experimentation and play.
Charles first began sketching while listening to music recorded at Abbey Road, letting the melody inspire colour and form. In tandem with his design team, creative decisions were made like sonic remixes—layered, looped, reversed. From this process came the season’s central visual motif: simulacra. Not quite copies, not quite originals—these garments are echoes, imitations, ghost forms. Classic tailoring is distorted, a collision of tradition and subversion: shirts with extra sleeves that tie around the waist like a belt; trompé l’œil belts already stitched into trousers, shirting with ties pre-attached and askew, sunglasses gone wiggly and weird as if melted by the sun. The result is a collection of mutated staples that demand a second look.
The collection’s name itself, Prepared Piano, nods to John Cage’s 1940s technique of modifying the instrument with bolts, rubber, and cutlery, transforming it into something raw and unpredictable. LOVERBOY applies this logic to garment-making: formalwear is tampered with, lovingly warped away from its origins. Each garment hums with the energy of interruption. Like a prepared piano, nothing quite sounds (or looks) the way tradition intended.
The collection’s name itself, Prepared Piano, nods to John Cage’s 1940s technique of modifying the instrument with bolts, rubber, and cutlery, transforming it into something raw and unpredictable. LOVERBOY applies this logic to garment-making: formalwear is tampered with, lovingly warped away from its origins. Each garment hums with the energy of interruption. Like a prepared piano, nothing quite sounds (or looks) the way tradition intended. WE DON’T TREAT THE STUDIO AS A MUSEUM. WE TREAT IT LIKE A SQUAT FOR GENIUS.
A live band thrashes in Studio One. Cables curl across the floor like improvised staves. Models lounge like they’ve been here for weeks— feet on mixing desks, coffee on tape machines, laughter echoing off parquet floors. This is a space alive with possibility.
In lieu of a catwalk, LOVERBOY gathers artists, musicians, designers, cool kids, and the behind-the-scenes creatives who make up its technicolour world for a day of open-ended chaos and creation. Friends of the brand, including Marni creative director Francesco Risso, superstar stylists Genesis Webb and Marc Forne, musicians Planningtorock, Taahlia, Tom Rasmussen and Allie X, and viral Tik Tok commentator Lyas, band together to turn the space into a performative playground.
Inspired by the playful irreverence of 1960s conceptual art scenes such as Fluxus and artists such as Yoko Ono and Claus Oldenberg, each contributor stages their own mini-performance. These range from offbeat sonic rituals (recording the sound of footsteps, swinging air, or spontaneous screams) to diaristic monologues and impromptu solos. The final output? Not just a collection, but an EP containing all the day’s experimentations, alongside an exclusive sampled instrument that triggers a library full of beautifully strange sounds performed by Charles at both the LOVERBOY workshop and at Abbey Road. This will be made available as a free plugin for music producers across the world to explore and play with upon the release of the collection. The resulting documentation is a living time-capsule: raw, strange, unrepeatable.
Says Charles Jeffrey of the collaboration: “Abbey Road Studios is not just music icon; it’s a cultural hub, a laboratory of dreams. LOVERBOY has always aligned itself with institutions that celebrate culture, from the British Library to the V&A. Partnering with Abbey Road, a place that fosters innovation and creativity, felt like the perfect fit as I explore new dimensions in music and fashion. Our project ‘Prepared Piano’ 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.