Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY presents its Spring Summer 2026 collection, titled Prepared Piano, as an open-ended experiment inside Abbey Road Studios. The project moves beyond a traditional show format and instead unfolds as a day-long happening, inviting artists, musicians, and collaborators to contribute in real time.
Rather than source inspiration from music, the collection treats music as its final product. Charles Jeffrey and his team built the SS26 pieces around the act of sound-making, drawing from analogue methods long associated with Abbey Road. Jeffrey explains his approach bluntly: “In 2025, fashion for fashion’s sake feels vulgar.” SS26 builds from that stance, tapping into the studio’s legacy of experimentation and using it as a design method.
The team dug deep into Abbey Road’s archives, looking through photographs and footage that captured artists in unguarded moments. Each figure, the sharp-suited executives, the nonchalant rock musicians of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the white-coated sound engineers, provided the building blocks for new characters. LOVERBOY reinterprets them for the present: Gen Z bedroom producers in oversized hoodies and fuzzy beanies, disheveled rockstars with flared hems and sleeves, and obsessive sound technicians dressed in oversized shirting cut like lab coats.
This approach leads to a wardrobe full of altered archetypes. Shirts gain extra sleeves that wrap around the waist like belts. Trousers arrive with trompe l’œil belts sewn directly in. Sunglasses distort as if warped by heat. Ties tilt off-center, already stitched into the shirts they supposedly accessorize. Charles Jeffrey and his team worked like musicians producing a track: sketching while listening to music recorded at Abbey Road, remixing traditional forms through loops, reversals, and layering. The garments look familiar and unfamiliar at once, simulacra that echo familiar types but refuse to settle into any original.
The title Prepared Piano refers to John Cage’s method of altering a piano with foreign objects to produce unexpected sounds. LOVERBOY applies the same principle to design. Suiting isn’t deconstructed, it’s tampered with, offset, and interrupted. Nothing behaves exactly as expected. Every outfit carries the energy of interference, as if sound itself left a mark on the cut and shape.
LOVERBOY doesn’t treat Abbey Road as a monument. Instead, Jeffrey turns it into a living studio, a squat for genius, as he puts it. There’s no runway here. Instead, models sprawl across mixing desks, sip coffee near tape machines, and dance barefoot in the recording booths. The clothes come to life not through choreography, but through participation in an improvised gathering of artists, stylists, and musicians.
Friends of the brand, including Francesco Risso, Genesis Webb, Marc Forne, Planningtorock, Taahlia, Tom Rasmussen, Allie X, and TikTok voice Lyas, join in the happening. Each contributor builds their own moment: recording footsteps, screaming into the room, or delivering unscripted monologues. These acts feed into a final output that goes beyond clothing. SS26 includes an EP featuring sounds collected during the day, as well as a downloadable plugin for producers, filled with odd samples recorded by Charles Jeffrey both at Abbey Road and in the LOVERBOY studio.
The collection doesn’t end with garments. It opens into an archive of live chaos, filtered through joy, absurdity, and play. As Charles Jeffrey puts it, “Abbey Road Studios is not just music icon; it’s a cultural hub, a laboratory of dreams.”
