Appetite for Disruption: Leigh-Anne Pinnock makes sensational statement at London Fashion Week

Welcome to the PR jungle.

This is a new monthly column from Jo Chappel and Ollie Edwards, creatives at VCCP Roar, exploring the power of ideas to disrupt an expectation or norm, shift behaviour and influence culture.

Each month, we’ll pick one idea we think is genuinely disruptive. It’s a loaded word — one that has scarred many a PR creative who’s been told “we want a really disruptive idea” by a risk-averse client at a deeply conventional brand. So we’re setting our own lens: an idea that challenges the status quo in the message, the medium, the execution, the media strategy or a combination of all four. Something that shocks, provokes or makes you see something differently.

It’s subjective, of course. But as we fight our way through AI slop and the algorithmic flattening of ideas, we want to champion what still requires imagination, bravery and human craft.

We’re kicking off just after London, Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks, where shock and sensationalism have always been part of the spectacle.

This year was no exception.

At London Fashion Week in September, Leigh-Anne Pinnock closed Di Petsa’s “Holy Milk” Spring/Summer 2027 show wearing a sculptural white lactating bra that sprayed streams of milk-like liquid across the runway.

In recent years, plenty of campaigns have made breastfeeding more visible and helped destigmatise it — from Tommee Tippee’s Boob Life to Elvie’s #FreeTheFeed, which sent model and mother of two Valeria Garcia down the catwalk actively pumping breast milk. But Di Petsa took the idea somewhere more fantastical: dramatising and celebrating lactation rather than simply depicting its practical realities. 

Breastfeeding became a spectacle. The stunt was built to travel — not just spray and pray.

Leigh-Anne teased it herself, calling it something she’d wanted to tick off her bucket list, while fashion media picked up the designer’s more poetic intentions. Then came the reaction cycle: commentary, headlines, debate.

That matters because London’s runways this year also felt like a reaction to the return of extreme thinness elsewhere. As Paris and Milan returned to a familiar, ultra-skinny aesthetic, London designers including Karoline Vitto, Sinéad O’Dwyer and Phoebe English continued to put diverse bodies at the centre of their shows.

Was it as strategically developed or purposeful as the campaigns that came before it? No. But the point wasn’t to build a comprehensive breastfeeding campaign; it was to create an image that made Di Petsa impossible to ignore.

The sensationalism was the strategy. 

In a fashion landscape where women are once again being asked to take up less space, putting a pregnant Leigh-Anne Pinnock on the runway—proudly, visibly and literally taking up space—felt (sadly) like an act of rebellion. 

Sometimes disruption isn’t about having the deepest campaign platform. It’s about finding the idea, image or moment that makes people stop, look and talk. And that’s the holy milk of PR.