No stiff upper lip for London fashion
London Fashion Week, which ended Saturday, has never been about marquee names or trend-setting. But it has a plucky spirit. The stiff old labels that suddenly turn chic, the young designers who will try anything, the overall experimental nature that makes New York seem timid by comparison make the shows worth checking out every few seasons.
After all, it was here at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design that John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and Phoebe Philo got their starts. And the eclecticism that nurtured them is still alive, which might explain that show in the old dungeon beneath the London Bridge.
What other city’s fashion week would have you taking in the couture-like creations of a Serbian designer at a sumptuous restaurant, hours before getting lost in a Bangladeshi neighborhood trying to find the grungy parking garage where a Scottish designer was showing red-carpet dresses?
The contrasts make for a rich experience and tell you a lot about the city, where Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown is reaching out to all its diverse groups and appealing for a common idea of “Britishness,” a topic on everyone’s lips this week.
Besides being Fashion Week, it also happened to be midterm school break. That meant kids on the loose -- lots of them -- which made for an odd confluence at the Natural History Museum in Knightsbridge, the main fashion show venue. Families lined up around the block for “T. Rex Returns,” while fashion editors stomped around looking for a way into the tent out front.
A lot of fuss was made over Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, who attended the London shows for the first time in several years to drum up support for the May “AngloMania” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. She posed for pictures with fans, gave TV interviews, she may have even signed an autograph or two. Then she took her Manolos to the dungeon for Basso & Brooke, where one half-expected Jack the Ripper to jump out of the clouds of dry ice.
The label, a collaboration between English illustrator Christopher Brooke and Brazilian designer Bruno Basso, is based around deliciously subversive, goth-meets-psychedelic textiles. In greens, purples and reds, this season’s prints were shadowy and floral or vaguely scientific, with engineering diagrams and an eerie face peeking out here and there. They covered a club-ready chiffon blouse belted over a miniskirt, a waistcoat worn with leggings and a top hat, and one fabulous strapless gown, the sheer green striped skirt edged in black crystals. If rock stars aren’t wearing these clothes, they should be.
Glasgow-born Jonathan Saunders is a textile designer of a different stripe. He was in L.A. last month trying to get a Golden Globe nominee to wear one of his gowns without any luck. But this collection could change all that. After several seasons of kooky bodysuits and leggings, Saunders has matured. For fall, he stuck to classic silhouettes in a palette of black, white and gray. He showed several versions of the shift dress trimmed in a shaded block print, and airy chiffon gowns that displayed his penchant for optical illusions. One, in nude, was scored with tiny tears, making it move like a sea creature. Another, a strapless design in white chiffon, was printed with black stripes that converged at the waist, only to fan out again on the billowy skirt. The effect was mesmerizing, like a pinwheel.
Giles Deacon is another hot name in London, known for his signature ladylike style and for being able to recruit top model friends to walk for him. But this season, he presented a new vision of modernism with Day-Glo colors, prints and stripes that popped when compared to everything else we’ve seen so far this season. A painted gold knit tunic with rolled-up sleeves looked smart over slouchy black pants, and a black beaded poncho was instantly covetable. An abstracted Leopard-print shift was on trend, and the cube-heeled patent-leather shoes and fuzzy surfboard-shaped hats were pretty cool too.
Paul Smith retreated into tailoring, his comfort zone. The bulk of his success has been in men’s suits, so this season he launched the ironically named Men Only line of suits for women. Inspired by Katharine Hepburn, the collection featured cropped trousers, skinny trousers, pleated trousers and boxy jackets, but not an ounce of sensuality -- the quality that makes Giorgio Armani’s suits the gold standard for women.
Other designers stuck with the well-worn girlish aesthetic. Over breakfast at Bibendum, the Art Deco landmark and former tire showroom, Serbian designer Roksanda Ilincic showed elegant silk dresses with back details such as vertical pleats and fragile bows. Less compelling were unwieldy blouses and coats with tiers of ruffles, which brought to mind the portly Michelin Man himself, captured in the restaurant’s stained glass window.
Show-goers have Nicole Farhi to thank for bringing them to the Royal Opera House’s newly restored, glass and iron Floral Hall at sunset. The collection was full of the kind of feminine classics that make Farhi’s line a top seller here -- soft cashmere cardigans with blousy sleeves, tweed shifts embellished with painted flowers, rounded shearling jackets and elegant black velvet gowns with jewel-tone bows or sashes.
Aquascutum is the latest British heritage brand attempting to forge an identity beyond the fox-hunting set. So the collection by Michael Herz and Graeme Fidler had less to do with raincoats and signature check and more to do with a 1950s-era, lemon-yellow mohair trapeze coat and Empire dress in the tradition of Cristobal Balenciaga. (A Balenciaga retrospective opens at Paris’ Musee de la Mode in July, and the Spanish designer has been a popular reference point this season.) Some of it was a snooze, but there was enough to pique the interest of pretty young things.
And then there were the Gallianos of tomorrow, designers such as Gareth Pugh, a Central Saint Martins grad who garnered attention last year when a balloon dress from his first collection was featured on the cover of style magazine Dazed & Confused. He continued the theme this season, with gold and black harlequin puffer coats over Latex pants, pencil skirts with ballooning hips, pasty white faces and pompom hairstyles. He even bounced oversized black balloons into the crowd before the show. Silly, yes, but fun. In London, you’d expect nothing less.
