To Do
All The Good Stuff Not to Miss — May.
By Söstter
May 2026
A considered edit of what is worth leaving the house for this month. Not everything. Not a list. Just the things genuinely worth your Saturday — and one or two that are worth taking the day off for.
The Week That Earns Its Place In Your Diary.
London Craft Week returns from 11 to 17 May. Over 1,000 makers, designers, brands and galleries from around the world, scattered across the city in exhibitions, talks, workshops and open studios. Free and ticketed. The single most important week of the year if you care about how things are made and who is making them.
Two highlights inside the wider programme. Future Icons Selects takes over three industrial arches in Shoreditch with 40+ British makers across craft and design — its longest edition yet. And The Invisible Made Visible at Blackdot Gallery (14–16 May, 9 Caledonian Road) is a group show built around the unseen labour of design — jewellery, ceramics, glass, textiles, furniture. The kind of show that makes you look at the things in your own house slightly differently on the bus home.
11–17 May 2026. Across London. Free and ticketed.
The Designer Who Treated Clothes As Sculpture.
Elsa Schiaparelli was not really a clothes designer. She was a surrealist who happened to work in fabric. The V&A's first-ever Schiaparelli retrospective traces the house from 1920s Paris through to Daniel Roseberry's current chapter — hats shaped like shoes, chokers of golden pinecones, collaborations with Dalí and Cocteau, lobster dresses and shocking pink. The kind of exhibition you leave saying very little, because there is, frankly, nothing useful to add.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art. V&A South Kensington. Until 8 November 2026. From £28.
Bronze, Botanically Speaking.
Thirty of Henry Moore's monumental bronzes are being scattered across Kew Gardens this summer, with another 90 smaller works — sculptures, drawings, sketchbooks — in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery. Moore called his approach "thinking through nature", and there is genuinely no better setting in the country to test the theory. Plan a long lunch. Read nothing. Look at things.
Henry Moore at Kew. Opens May 2026. Tickets via Kew Gardens.
The Sisters Who Made Liberty Look Like Liberty.
At the Fashion + Textile Museum, a celebration of Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell — the sister act behind some of Liberty's most recognisable prints, and a great many besides. They did not just design. They ran the manufacturing themselves, which in the 1970s was considered slightly mad and is now considered slightly heroic. A proper study in independent makers doing the unglamorous bits properly. Söstter's kind of show.
Paint! Pattern! Print! Fashion + Textile Museum. Until 13 September 2026. £12.65.
That's our considered edit for the month. Markets, frocks, sculpture, fabric. Choose two. Tell us how you got on.
Until June.
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