Anya Hindmarch (Q2693)
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Anya Hindmarch is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Anya Hindmarch |
Anya Hindmarch is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
2002
shoe designer
2019
managing director
A three-bedroom detached house with a garage in London SW1? You’re having a laugh! Brexit might have spooked sterling and hiccupped housing, but the center of this city remains ruinously expensive to live in. This morning, though, Anya Hindmarch wanted a house. So she did what the government doesn’t and built one. We were in the middle of town in a grand old hall opposite a field of whimsically uniformed prep school boys playing their Sunday soccer matches and just down the road from Westminster Abbey. Yet it was clear from the shape of the house on the runway—plus the Pet Shop Boys on the PA—that Hindmarch wanted to evoke the sleepy outskirts of the city: suburbia.The lights above dimmed as the contours of Hindmarch’s pad were illuminated by lines of LED. The opening model slouched out in a hoodie with arms of lime-green leather and a body in quilted lime and lilac. She was also wearing a matching headband. Her sides and soft, tubular bag were in upholstery-esque, pillow-like beige nappa leather. What followed was a procession of Hindmarch housewives and daughters in housecoats and hoodies—and sometimes fringed shirtdresses, minidresses with fluted arms or cutaway shoulders, or long-sleeved tees and knickers. There was a lot of sickly pretty color combinations in wallpaper-inspired brocade and patchwork fabrications. The shoes, which ranged from lettered sneakers and great snake slingbacks to slides with eyes and glitterball mid-heel sandals, were excellent. And, of course, the handbags. Like the clothes, they were an ironic play on the outskirts of naffness: Totes featured a fabulously serious-looking cat and a brace of budgies. Another in blue shag pile had Cookie Monster eyes. There were quite a few bags with faux–sofa stud dimples or reimagined as soft cushions. It was all good fun—Dot Cotton does Miu Miu—and at the end, Hindmarch threw in that holy grail of suburban life: a loft extension. The roof was raised and from it dangled an enormous glitterball. You don’t get that in Zone 5.
17 September 2017
The set of this season’s Anya Hindmarch show was built upon the collection’s central motif of kurbits, a Swedish folk art style, whose symmetrical two-dimensional fronds and florals featured on bags and outerwear. We were heading north, bound for a mountain hewn from vectors of plywood. From high on the summit glowed a faintly mystical triangular orange portal—thevetrValgrind to Anya’s handbag Asgard.Hindmarch’s hygge-and-hot Scandi sirens scaled and descended the hairpin runway in high shiny bloomers and Nordic knits or pastel cable-knit romper suits. Over these was outerwear in felt and wool—often paneled with grids of shearling—with shearling collars and kurbits motifs in cut leather panels. Below, clog mules with Gucci-esque shearling inner soles represented a foot flexing challenge on descent. On high, white shearling headpieces and Cutler and Gross’s pastel-strapped spectacles emanated analog mountaineer.Bags were garlanded with leather paper chains, dragonflies, and leaves. There were modular handbags and handbags that looked like an assemblage of six or seven purses (with six or seven zippers to match). Hindmarch’s excellent smiley backpack reappeared in a golden lurex finish. There were sliders and bags with furry eyes staring back at you. Like the Norse folklore Hindmarch’s notes said she’d been thinking about, not every story on this mountain felt especially new. Yet Hindmarch—who appeared at the end to wave down from her mountaintop—told them well.
19 February 2017
“It’s all about beautiful maths,” said Anya Hindmarch this morning in advance of her Spring runway show. “I’m horrible at math, but as an art form, that’s what I care about.” Circular geometries, leveled planes, burrowing nautili, and floating discs all informed the designer’s thinking. The inherently clinical property of mathematics may surprise some—after all, Hindmarch is beloved for Pop-fun shtick (this is a woman who has created fur versions of sunny-side up eggs)—but the balance of left-brain logic and right-brain creativity was nevertheless engaging.“It started with the power of the circle,” she said, “It’s a rather spiritual sort of shape.” A platform, lit in James Turrell-like saturations, lifted to expose a spiraling pit, from and around which models rose and lapped. Hindmarch called out coats—she’s producing clothing now, and the “summer neoprene” outerwear was a big focus in today’s case—many with trendy cut-out shoulders, and all featuring leather pieces that formed banded pattern strips (around the lining of a deep pocket; arcing over the shoulder; shooting down the sleeve). “Those accents are made without stitching,” she said, “It’s a traditional technique, actually—they're held together by heat pressing.”But as is her forte, Hindmarch’s accessories were the solution to her equation. She may not be strong at math, but she’s damn good at dreaming up handbags. The designer proposed a new shape, dubbed The Stack, with multiple compartments that were color-coded in an ombré scheme. Stack styles will come with a handle on both sides of the body, so they can be flipped as needed. Additionally, more of those leather shape-bands were also applied to neat fold over top handles and “Barrel” duffels, some of which were rendered in glitter. Fans of Hindmarch’s novelty won’t be left scratching their heads, either—see fur smiley face shower slides, emoji-smattered high-top sneakers, and little fur keychains of cherries and rainbows.
18 September 2016
You never quite know whatAnya Hindmarchis going to pull out of her bag of tricks next. Merry-go-rounds and flying teacup rides have been part of her presentations in the past, and today the set for her show was made to look like the inside of a video arcade machine. With her quirky English sensibilities, Hindmarch was among the first to jump on the emoticon trend, and her popular smiley face tote was rendered in green calf hair for Fall 2016.The most dominant icons in her play box this time around were throwbacks to a time before social media and SMS messaging, specifically the characters of 1980s video games such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders. The pixelated blue and yellow creatures were blown up big across the flaps of utilitarian satchels—though they appeared more charming when they were scaled true to size, as the dinky locks on structured lady bags or embellished patches along the straps of messenger bags.That discreet use of computerized witticisms felt most effective across the board, like the googly eyes on the back of a pair of black Chelsea boots or the fuzzy Rubik’s Cube key chains. Hindmarch has started to produce some of the clothes in her shows now, too, and the statement coats with fried egg–shaped fur patches for pockets were obvious street style catnip. As with her accessories, it was the subtler inside jokes that worked best on the outerwear, however, and the black coat with asymmetric racing stripes that opened the show had a winning streak.
21 February 2016
Anya Hindmarchlikes to pack her shows full of very English fun and games: She has been known to build magic teacup rides into her runways, and once bussed in a full chorus of male choir singers dressed as road workers for her traffic-themed presentation. Hindmarch’s fondness for all things British led her to the high street this season, and she incorporated the branding of some of the U.K.’s best-loved stores into her tongue-in-cheek designs.If you grew up in London in the ‘80s, you might have recognized the saying emblazoned across a tote bag that read “Never Knowingly Undersold” as the tagline for the famed department store John Lewis. A pair of leather knee-highs was cleverly stamped with the logo for Boots, England’s answer to Duane Reade. Hindmarch showed that those cultural witticisms could be used in subtler ways, too, and the letters WHS (short for WHSmith, the popular British newsagent and stationery store) were repeated in a cool graphic pattern, which made for an unexpected take on logomania.The humor in those everyday references will likely be lost on Anya Hindmarch fans outside of British borders, though. Still, the designer didn’t lose the smiley faces from her handbags altogether. The bite-sized additions to the collection, like mini soda-can key ring purses, will surely tickle the fancy of accessories fanatics the world over.
22 September 2015