The season’s hero motif, the rose, appeared as precision-perforated leather, hand-appliquéd detailing and sculpted floral relief soles
ENGLISH ROSE: Jimmy Choo has cast flower farmer and model Alfie Nickerson as the face of its fall 2026 men’s campaign, “Wild Rose,” pushing the brand’s recurring floral codes into rougher, more rural terrain via an English countryside backdrop.
The imagery tracks Nickerson moving between his own land and a bare studio set, a split the brand described as reflecting “the constant dialogue between the multiple worlds the Jimmy Choo man calls his own.” Nickerson is not a professional model by trade — he founded Burnt Fen Flowers in 2019 on his family’s land in Norfolk’s Fens, growing British stems for wholesale and events, a background that gives the casting a documentary logic a studio-only talent wouldn’t carry.
Sandra Choi, creative director at Jimmy Choo, framed the collection as a return to a house constant. “Britishness is always at the root of the brand,” Choi said, adding that the design team looked to “country gardens for inspiration” this season, with the English rose read for “the beauty, the formation, the resilience and strength” it could lend a men’s line. Choi was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in King Charles III’s 2026 Birthday Honors for services to fashion.
The rose motif ran across the collection as a construction technique rather than a print — precision-perforated leather, hand-appliquéd florals and soles cast with sculpted floral relief. Core silhouettes carried over in eel-printed leather and stone suede. The campaign’s key pieces included the Wilder boot and a new Wilder loafer, both finished with laser-cut rose appliqués, alongside the Rowan derby boot and Vine lace-up, positioned as the sharper, tailoring-facing end of the range.
Casting a working farmer rather than a fashion-circuit model is also a continuation of a pattern for Burnt Fen Flowers, which has built out a client list among fashion houses well beyond this campaign — prior collaborators include JW Anderson, Loewe and Anya Hindmarch — making Nickerson something closer to an established name in London’s design-adjacent flower trade than a newcomer to it.
Images Courtesy of Jimmy Choo
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The Material Language of the Wild Rose Collection
The fall 2026 menswear collection translates the organic architecture of the English rose into a rigorous vocabulary of texture and construction. Rather than defaulting to surface embellishment, the design team under Sandra Choi treated the flower as an engineering challenge, deconstructing its geometry across three distinct material applications. Precision-perforated leather panels mimic the intricate venation of petals, allowing breathability while maintaining structural integrity in the Wilder boot and loafer. Hand-appliquéd floral motifs, cut from contrasting leather and stitched by artisans in the brand’s Italian ateliers, create a dimensional relief that catches light differently with every step. Most technically ambitious are the sculpted floral relief soles, where the tread pattern itself is cast as a stylized rose window, merging grip with brand signature.
Core materials ground this botanical experimentation in commercial reality. Eel-printed leather introduces a subtle, almost reptilian scale that references the brand’s heritage in exotic skins without the ethical weight, while stone suede provides a matte, mineral counterpoint to the floral gloss. The palette remains deliberately restrained: burnt umber, charcoal, aged oak, and a single accession of deep crimson reserved for the Vine lace-up’s interior lining. This discipline ensures the collection reads as a cohesive wardrobe proposition rather than a runway gesture, positioning the rose as a permanent house code rather than a seasonal flourish.
Alfie Nickerson and the Cultivation of Burnt Fen Flowers
Alfie Nickerson’s trajectory from agriculture to ambassador illustrates a shifting dynamic between British craft industries and the luxury houses that increasingly rely on their authenticity. Founded in 2019 on his family’s reclaimed fenland in Norfolk, Burnt Fen Flowers began as a response to the floristry trade’s dependence on imported stems flown in from Kenya and Colombia. Nickerson focused on field-grown, seasonal British varieties – dahlias, sweet peas, cosmos, and heritage roses – harvested at dawn and delivered to London wholesalers and event designers within hours. The operation now spans twelve acres, employs a small team year-round, and supplies stems to the Royal Horticultural Society shows, high-profile weddings, and the flower rooms of Mayfair hotels.
His client roster reads like a index of London’s creative directorate: JW Anderson’s runway installations, Loewe’s boutique floral programs, Anya Hindmarch’s village shop activations. These relationships developed organically, rooted in a shared vocabulary of British eccentricity and material honesty. For Jimmy Choo, Nickerson represents more than casting verisimilitude; he embodies the collection’s central thesis – that resilience grows in heavy soil. The campaign’s split setting, toggling between his mud-booted reality and the sterile studio, mirrors the dual life of the modern creative entrepreneur: one foot in the furrow, one in the front row.
Campaign Aesthetic and the Grammar of British Countryside
The visual strategy for “Wild Rose” was executed by a compact creative unit led by Choi, with photography that refuses the glossy idealization typical of luxury menswear campaigns. Images were shot on location in the Norfolk Fens – a landscape of vast skies, drainage ditches, and black peat soil – and in a white-box studio stripped of context. The countryside frames are deliberately unromantic: Nickerson appears in workwear layered with the collection’s key pieces, the Wilder boot caked in fen mud, the Bar holdall resting on a galvanized water tank. Light is flat, northern, and diffuse, rendering texture without drama. Studio frames isolate the product against seamless white, clinical but for the occasional petal or stem placed as a quiet echo.
This duality reflects a broader shift in British luxury communication, where heritage is no longer performed in stately homes but in working landscapes. The campaign film, directed by a rising British documentarian, intercuts Nickerson pruning roses in polytunnels with slow-motion close-ups of laser-cut leather appliqués. Sound design layers the hum of greenhouse fans with the click of a last being hammered in the Marche factory. The effect is cumulative: a portrait of a brand that still makes things, in a country that still grows things, speaking to a customer who values both.
