Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY has released the documentary and lookbook for its Spring Summer 2026 collection, titled Prepared Piano, created in collaboration with Abbey Road Studios. The collection documents music-making, specifically its experimental, analogue, and tactile dimensions, as its core subject.
Creative director Charles Jeffrey frames the collection’s intent directly: “In 2025, fashion for fashion’s sake feels vulgar.” The Spring Summer 2026 collection responds to that sentiment by grounding itself in the process of making music, the kind that Abbey Road Studios has practiced and made possible for decades.
To develop the collection’s visual language, LOVERBOY drew from Abbey Road’s archives, studying photographs and film material to identify recurring character types. Three archetypes emerged from that research. Authoritative executives appeared in crisp tailoring and wide-lapelled suits. Musicians from the 1960s and ’70s let formality unravel in favour of function and flare. Engineers occupied the studio in white lab coats, working across recording equipment like scientists absorbed in their experiments.
LOVERBOY then re-imagines each archetype for 2026. The Gen Z bedroom producer appears in a fuzzy ears beanie and an oversized hoodie. The IDGAF rockstar wears sleeves and hems that bell out like trumpets. The obsessive technician shows up in a supersized lab coat cut from heavy-duty shirting fabric.
The collection takes its inspiration from the innovators who came before them, the figures who passed through cultural institutions like Abbey Road, challenged existing conventions, and defined modern music in the process. The new generation of producers, LOVERBOY argues, owes a debt to those predecessors.
The Prepared Piano documentary and lookbook capture these ideas as a live “happening” inside Abbey Road Studios, using the space itself as both context and collaborator. Abbey Road’s own future-facing approach to innovation and experimentation runs through the collection’s DNA, connecting the studio’s historical archive to LOVERBOY’s vision for what music-influenced fashion looks like in 2026.
