Marques’Almeida

Marques’Almeida is a London-based womenswear label founded in 2011 by Portuguese designers Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida, who met while studying at Central Saint Martins. The brand gained early attention through Fashion East and built its reputation on denim treated as a fashion fabric, using fraying, abrasion and deliberate rawness to reshape familiar youth codes into runway clothing.

In 2015 the duo won the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, consolidating the label’s international profile. Collections continue to orbit denim and its offshoots—cut-offs, patchwork, washed surfaces—while extending into dresses, tailoring, knitwear and occasion pieces that keep the same “unfinished” edge. The aesthetic often references club culture and 1990s attitudes, but the construction is precise, with proportion and engineering used to make distortion feel intentional.

Sold through a mix of global retailers and direct channels, the label positions itself between street-derived impulse and atelier-level making, treating experimentation as a constant rather than a seasonal theme.

Marques’Almeida frames fashion as a reflection of real life, drawing on subcultural dress and the beauty of clothes that look lived in. The brand’s signature “raw finish” operates as both technique and stance: value is placed on character, movement and individuality rather than perfection.

At the same time, the label’s work argues for rigour beneath the surface. Distressing, fraying and imbalance are engineered, not accidental, and are used to question what luxury can look like when it refuses polish. Community is part of the brand’s language, with casting and styling often emphasising plurality and attitude over a single ideal. The result is clothing that treats rebellion as craft—an insistence that emotion, humour and rough edges can coexist with disciplined making, and that self-expression is a legitimate form of refinement.

It also resists rigid categories, moving easily between daywear and eveningwear, and between softness and abrasion within the same look.