For most of its hundred-year history, Marks and Spencer occupied a quiet, reliable corner of British life — the place for sensible knitwear, not cultural conversation. Last Friday, the retailer stepped onto a London Fashion Week runway for the first time, a gesture that crystallized something already underway: a deliberate, patient reinvention aimed at a generation that had long dismissed the brand as their parents' domain. In an era when fast fashion is losing its grip and younger consumers are reaching for quality over novelty, M&S has found itself — perhaps improbably — on the right side of