Argentinian-born, London-based designer Lucila Safdie knows how to conjure familiar scenes and spirits of girlhood: all its pinky swears, literary idols, and moments of staring at one’s own reflection in hopes of catching something deeper. With her Spring/Summer 2026 collection, these are all the things that make up the feeling of being a girl in your bedroom.
Four doomed princesses, clad in neon pinks and stacks of pearls, dress each other up and down. Their tower takes the shape of a bedroom, full of antique furniture, books, and microshorts strung across twin beds. They whisper secrets to each other, inaudible to an audience, but we don’t need the specifics to understand what they’re talking about.
While many designers have explored fantasy and girlhood in their various facets, Safdie’s presentation replaces the castle with a teenage bedroom and ghosts of long-ago sisters with Tumblr-scrolling aesthetes. Below, Teen Vogue spoke with the designer on her SS26 collection, growing up online, and how a lifelong love of cinema continues showing up in her work.
Lucila Safdie: I got into reading about the sisters through online blogs: how these princesses shared a room, wrote letters to each other and to their family members, and all the rituals they did together in their space. I thought it was so beautiful, yet sad, how their girlhood was doomed. They never got to grow up.
I tend to start researching through the internet, blogs, and Tumblr. And I know my friends do the same — sometimes we compare what each has been into — so I thought it would be interesting to do a collection based on the idea of sisters today who [might] learn about the Romanov girls through the internet.
LS: Since it was my first time presenting, I wanted to bring the brand’s world into reality with a performance — a story — instead of a show. The idea was to create a set that was a bit of a bedroom, an art installation, a liminal space, with pieces of different eras and mirrors for the models to look at themselves in as they played with their clothes and tried on different outfits.
We just did two rehearsals: one the night before when we cast the girls and one before the performance. Because getting ready with each other, dressing up, reading, and looking at ourselves are all familiar rituals, I think it felt natural for the model-performers. I was super happy with how it ended up translating to reality.
LS: “May It Be” by Enya. I was listening to her a lot when I was making the collection, as well as Bjork’s “It’s All So Quiet.” For scent, maybe wood and lychee — there’s this kind of old, but fresh feeling to them. For a book, Picnic At Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay.
LS: Coming of age is the foundation and the core. But I’m interested in different topics depending on the time, what I’m reading and watching, which exhibitions I’ve seen, and what I’m discussing with my friends. When I feel a spark [from] one of these, I start building on it, but everything is through the lens of girlhood.
LS: I love Addison, I’ve been listening to her album on repeat, and Lana is one of my favorite singers in the world. So when I saw the email I was like, “what the hell?” It wasn’t out that Addison was opening Lana’s show yet, and I was on my way back from the studio. My best friend, muse, and housemate Marley was home and I was like, “Marley, oh my god, this is the best thing to ever happen to the both of us.”
Everything happened in just a few days. My team and I combined some pre-existing styles with new references and decided on the design in a day, then had a week to make the looks. Marley, my other housemate and best friend June, and I ended up going to the show together. We were in the VIP area, then we turned to the side and Rob Grant — Lana’s dad — was there. That was the most starstruck I’ve ever been in my life.
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LS: At a point, I realized this stuff I was into really influenced me and made an impact on how I see the world. Now I embrace it. I never stopped using Tumblr, to be honest, it’s always been a good starting point of research for me.
I guess when you grow up, you don’t want to talk about what you were interested in when you were 16. But when you’re older you’re like, “Okay. I read The Bell Jar at 15 and it made me depressed.” Now I can see how funny yet amazing that experience was.
LS: I went to a film high school and had to analyze movies, write scripts. [Though] I’ll never want to be a filmmaker, I just want to be inside the story. I think movies and clothes are maybe the things I love the most.
My friends Marley, June, and I go to all the small cinemas in London, and sometimes this one 16mm film club. And I thought, “I really want to have my own film club.” June was like, “me too.” And I was like, “oh my god, let’s do a film club together.” We reached out to Genesis Cinema, an independent theater in east London, and they were down to host us.
LS: There are some girls who come to the brand’s pop-ups, then to the film club wearing our clothes and headbands. We chat about what they thought of the movie or which movies they would like to see next. It just becomes a conversation between friends that doesn’t feel forced, not like some kind of networking situation.
We just wanted to see these movies on the big screen and hoped other girls would too. The club is one of the things I love most about the brand: it’s about creating something I’m interested in, creating for a girl that I am or my friends are, and then seeing other girls connect with it too.
LS: I would love to design for an actual Romanov girls movie — if Sofia Coppola ever did that and made them rock and roll. I would also love to work on a horror movie, maybe Rosemary’s Baby. But maybe not with Polanski.
LS: I’ve realized there are so many 20th-century women directors who I’ve never watched. Doing that research influences my design because I discover so many new ways of communicating visually. The last one we screened was Girls of the Night, a Japanese drama movie from 1961. The characters’ dresses, hairstyles, and energy were all so great. It’s like, this is a collection on its own.
