What: Liberty has appointed Sinead O'Brien, formerly of Vivienne Westwood, Roksanda and Erdem, as head of design to build an archive-led in-house fashion and accessories collection, starting with spring 2028.

Why it is important: With own-label already accounting for half of its sales, Liberty is treating its archive as a brand platform rather than a merchandise source, a model that gives department stores margin and exclusivity that third-party brands cannot.

Liberty has appointed Sinead O'Brien as head of design to build its in-house fashion and accessories collection around the store's fabrics and interiors expertise. O'Brien, who began her career under Vivienne Westwood before senior consultancy roles at Roksanda and Erdem, joined in September and will deliver her first collection for spring 2028.

Liberty will follow the fashion calendar with two main collections and two pre-collections a year, moving beyond dresses into a full wardrobe of layering pieces, outerwear, knitwear and separates with a romantic feel. Designs will remain rooted in the archive while drawing on interiors and menswear fabrics beyond the familiar florals. The second-floor womenswear space will be enlarged to showcase the offer, including accessories.

The current "Modern Reverie" collection reworks archive patterns into dresses, coats, blouses and handbags, priced from 495 pounds for the Gala maxidress to 625 pounds for the Burlington bag.

The push follows the 2023 launch of eight Liberty-branded fragrances, now also sold at Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Bluemercury and C.O. Bigelow. Over the summer, Liberty expanded its clothing fabrics floor by 140 percent, and in September it opened a Fashion Jewellery Gallery, with jewelry sales up 20 percent year-over-year.

IADS Notes: Liberty's move into a full in-house fashion wardrobe builds on an own-label business that already accounted for half of its sales at the time of its 150th anniversary, when the LBTY fragrance line was singled out as a driver of category growth and North American expansion (Fashion United, October 2025). The archive has become the common thread across categories: the same print heritage underpinned the 140% expansion of the dressmaking fabrics department around exclusive Liberty prints, a move that ran against the wider department-store retreat from fabrics and haberdashery (Fashion Network, July 2026), as well as the Bayeux Tapestry collection developed with the British Museum in Tana Lawn cotton, silk scarves and home accessories (Fashion Network, September 2026). Floor space is being reallocated in line with this logic, with the Fashion Jewellery Gallery deliberately placed beside the womenswear rooms that the new collections will now help fill (WWD, September 2026). The strategy echoes Marks & Spencer's revival of its historic St Michael label through an archive-led capsule with Aries, another example of heritage private-label equity being converted into contemporary fashion product (Fashion Network, September 2026).

Liberty names Sinead O'Brien head of design to build in-house fashion offer