Knwls

KNWLS was founded in 2017 in London by Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault, a British-Canadian designer duo who met at Central Saint Martins. The brand's foundational thesis was specific: produce a womenswear vocabulary that drew explicitly on 1990s-2000s 'going-out' nightclub culture — the body-conscious cut, the sheer-and-lace combinations, the deliberately revealing-but-tailored silhouette — rebuilt at a contemporary luxury level with high-grade Italian and Japanese-mill fabrics. The KNWLS vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: body-conscious leather and technical-fabric corsetry and bodysuits, sheer-and-lace combinations layered with knitwear, deliberately cut-out and asymmetric jersey dresses, the brand's iconic stretch-jersey leggings with knee-cap construction, and a colour palette anchored to washed-black, oxblood, soft-pink, and the brand's recurring use of latex-finish and lacquer-finish fabric treatments. The brand has presented at London Fashion Week since 2019 and won the LVMH Prize semi-finalist position in 2021 and the BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund in 2023. The brand is independent and held by Knowles and Arsenault. KNWLS operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, Net-a-Porter, MATCHES, Mytheresa, Lane Crawford, Dover Street Market, and a curated set of luxury specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the more culturally legible London womenswear debuts of the post-2017 generation, with the body-conscious nightclub-aesthetic specifically anchoring the brand inside the contemporary luxury-streetwear conversation that has been continuously rewritten since 2020.