You’d think the schizophrenia of the London Fashion Weekschedule would make for a hot mess. But while we now go back and forth between emerging designers and super brands several times a day, I found this London season to be as feisty as ever. In fact, the presence of the establishment, some of whom were visiting from afar – Emporio Armani, Tommy Hilfiger and Versus – only served to highlight the infectious nerve of our young designers. In a Brexit world, the British fashion industry cemented a strong message of defiance this spring/summer 2018 season: at London Fashion Week there’s room for everyone. Fur protesters, too.
After a sequins-centric New York show run, on Saturday in London, Michael Halpern could finally claim the influence his way with sparkle has had on the season. Watching the turnout for his show held at the Palladium it’s incredible to think that the American designer is only on his second season. “Michael! There are sequins everywhere! This is all you!” I insisted after the show, which saw him develop his trademark sequins with new ideas of surface decoration – now on top of the sequins. “I think maybe other people are feeling the way I am?” a blushing Halpern answered bashfully.
What I loved about Saturday was that the excitement I felt at Halpern – that feeling of experiencing something new – was echoed at Burberry later that night. The way Christopher Bailey is rediscovering himself as a designer and phases in Burberry’s history once deemed taboo felt both authentic and emotional. Not least because he turned the volume up on the Pet Shop Boys’ Go West, which has new meaning in a Brexit world. Embracing the football community’s appropriation of the Burberry check, which took place some two decades ago, Bailey had many of us scrolling through his online store that evening, where the collection was already available to buy.
This was after we had made our way through the rather aggressive fur protest outside – even that felt rather kicky. The degree of verbal hostility (and reported spitting) towards fashion guests, however – even those not in furs – felt more like a demonstration against the fashion industry itself than its fur-using designers. The protesters re-emerged the next day at the Versus show, but Donatella Versace wasn’t in a furry mood. “What I think of young people today,” she said, “is they don’t feel a need to be over-dressed – just to play with their personalities.” When I spoke to 83-year-old Giorgio Armanibefore his show, he didn’t quite agree.
“Last night, I was having dinner at a very nice restaurant, Cipriani, but there was a group of women who came in, who were dressed impossibly,” Mr Armani said. What were they wearing? “Le tutto!” Everything. “And it didn’t really fit.” He argued that the fashion media encourages young people to overdress – and offered his Emporio Armani show that evening as an antidote. “I know what Mr Armani means because sometimes I see people – not necessarily in London, but everywhere – overdoing it. And I think less is more,” Tommy Hilfiger reflected when I put the question to him before his and Gigi Hadid’s show on Tuesday evening.
“Maybe there are people in London and all over the world, who dress like what they think they’re supposed to and what’s based on social media, and not necessarily what makes them happy,” Hadid observed. “I think Londoners dress for themselves, and I still see those people around London.” With her ghetto grunge collection for Hilfiger, she flew the nostalgic millennial flag that seems to hover over this season wherever we go, as exemplified in Burberry reclaiming its chequered past loved by the social media generation. Who are these elusive youngsters, and what do they want? Look at Hadid’s proposals and you might find the answer.
Or, head over to Molly Goddard, who opened her show with another millennial spokesgirl, Edie Campbell, who trotted down the catwalk with a drink and a cigarette in hand. Girly Goddard captures the free-spiritedness of her generation, and this season she framed it in more than supersized tulle skirts, making that all-important leap for a young London designer: moving it on. Her show reflected another source of excitement at London Fashion Week: the joy of seeing with our eyes the evolution of these new-generation designers we so support.
Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi of Preen are the original example of the London success story, which a designer like Simone Rocha – with her young but highly lucrative business – now embodies. This season they all proved that authenticity and a beating heart gets you further in fashion than the industry’s reputation might suggest. Preen offered a poignantly political collection inspired by The Scarlet Letter and The Handmaid’s Tale, campaigning for a less suppressive world for their two young daughters to grow up in.
“We’re living in an anarchy time when people have lost faith in leaders and society,” Thornton told me. “We want women to deconstruct their own femininity and reconstruct it so they can be whatever they want.” Simone Rocha was doing it for the kids, too, in a collection based on the china dolls she grew up playing with, now inherited by her toddler daughter. And the play for childlike innocence didn’t stop there – Mary Katrantzou presented an entire collection adopting kids’ crafts in couture techniques. “That nostalgia is kind of your building block for where you are today,” she said.
No shows imprinted themselves more in my mind this weekend, however, than Richard Quinn and Erdem. Here, it was the subtext that did the talking. Quinn was given his first-ever show by Liberty, who made their heritage prints available to him for the exertion of his severely subversive approach to florals, gimp suits in tow. It was a proper London show: early and intimate and underground – a little fetish in the morning, with prominent attendance, too.
Erdem is used to the royal treatment, and this season he turned it around in one of his best collections ever (big words for this original fan), which imagined a swap of roles between Queen Elizabeth and Dorothy Dandridge in the Fifties. How could he get the sexual tension between the two poles so right? This was Erdem flexing his sub-textual muscle at its strongest, fusing the dainty glamour of the royal wardrobe with the seductive lure of Harlem’s jazz clubs. It was intensely beautiful. “We live in such weird times and I think this exchange between two different worlds felt really beautiful,” he said after the show, summing up his collection and the entire London Fashion Week in one sweeping sentiment.Read more at:http://www.sheindressau.com/backless-wedding-dresses-au | http://www.sheindressau.com/wedding-dresses-perth
