Art School (Q2715)
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Art School is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Art School |
Art School is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
The forward march of diversity and representation in London continues in undaunted unison under the all-inclusive umbrella of Eden Loweth’s Art School. This season, pandemic notwithstanding, he managed to muster a vast COVID-secure recording of a runway show at London’s cavernous Truman Brewery space. Out of the fog walked Ascension, a collection organized with an expansive cast of members of London Trans+ Pride; Loweth’s close band of fashion industry women friends; and two nonbinary stars ofRuPaul’s Drag Race U.K., Bimini Bon Boulash and A’Whora.Loweth is taking his position of trust as an activist figurehead who elevates the visibility of marginalized communities even more seriously in this time of trouble. Having met Lucia Blayke and Emily Crooked of London Trans+ Pride earlier last year, they made a joint decision that it was right to go forward with a show of strength. “We need this to be a message of hope,” Loweth said in an earlier Zoom call from his studio. “This doesn’t only put money in the pockets of people who are modeling, it’s showing people in our community that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Trans people and people of color have been hit hardest through this past year. There’s a huge issue of violence against trans people, especially trans women in America.”The positive action at the heart of the showing was equaled by the Art School clothes. In the short space of the season since Loweth has been in sole charge of the brand, the collection’s focus has zeroed in on a vision of the tough elegance he has to offer for all. There’s drama, certainly—but if ever there were a worry that performative costuming might be getting in the way of real clothes, that’s now been decisively cleared up. “The clothes need to be something people can wear and spend their lives in—actual, practical life things,” said Loweth. On the one hand, there are the coats and leather pieces; on the other, iterations of dresses, either voluminous or bias cut. His attention to designing for different body shapes now extends to floor-length linen smock dresses with a grand, haughty simplicity about them. Good all-round for day or evening, those.Part of this learning has come from listening to feedback from customers—Loweth has been hearing from mentors Natalie Kingham of MatchesFashion.com, Cozette McCreery, and Mimma Viglezio, who all walked the runway. When the going gets tough, the tough rally round.
Coming out of a time of such extreme vulnerability, it could be that Art School and all that it says about community and equality will emerge stronger than ever before.
21 February 2021
Just to be clear: The Art School show took place on August 24, a safe, socially distanced occasion held in the gardens of Waterlow Park in that euphoric gap before more restrictions were imposed in the U.K. On that day there were only a few of us, six feet apart, with masks on, lounging on a grassy bank to see Eden Loweth’s models walk down a path.It was emotional to watch. “I’ve thought long and hard about everything I do,” Loweth said about surviving these turbulent times. “I want to take this to a new stage.” He meant it not just in terms of centering his certainty in what he wants to design, but also about further widening the liberation from prejudice his company stands for, and extending the space that Art School has created for LGBTQ+ identities to flourish.A feeling of collective strength, pride, and equality radiated from the 35 people of differing ages, genders, colors, sizes, and abilities who emerged from the house to walk in a show of human unity. “Isolation was difficult,” Loweth said. “I wanted something that set out that I’m a sewer and a cutter. I did everything myself. But I could not have done it without all the amazing people who called and checked in every day. I’ve named the collection Therapy. I wanted to do something that felt more like a community, to get everyone together who is supporting me.”The message came through loud and definite in the quality of the clothes—an impressive focus on tailoring, coats, and the glamour of Art School dresses, which kept on coming in successive waves of blue-gray, khaki, and black. For the first time it was really possible to break down the components of what Art School offers in terms of garments: high-waist trousers, leather jackets, corseted bustier dresses, raincoats, trench coats, bias-cut slip dresses, and A-line gowns.But the much bigger question that Loweth took on—and answered—during his time of introspection is who does fashionseewearing such clothes? Art School thus far has successfully normalized nonbinary self-expression as a right; so much so that Loweth has been co-opted as an expert contributor to a paper on diversity and inclusion that is being prepared by the Fashion Roundtable organization. The realization that widening participation policies within fashion still fail to recognize people with disabilities? “It changed my life,” he said.
Fashion Roundtable introduced him to Zebedee, a specialist talent agency based in London representing models, actors, and performers of varying disabilities, appearances, and trans/nonbinary identities. And so alongside the friends who have come with Loweth since his Acid Rave days, and the group of wise women that buys his clothes and mentor him, were seven people from Zebedee’s community. “When they came to the casting, they really lifted us up,” Loweth said afterward. He’d just received a text from one of the participants, who wanted to say how much it meant to appear on a fashion runway for the first time. “What he said to me sums up everything: Life only stops when you stop trying,” said the designer. “More than ever I feel a real purpose. And for the first time, I feel I have the power to say that.”
19 September 2020
Slow, proud, and graceful, they emerged from the smoke-licked back of the runway. Their feet were bare but for powdered chalk, their eyes painted red or contact-lensed to be pupil-less. A piano’s soaring chords were engineered for emotion. One model in a pair of high-rise tailored trousers had his chest hair artfully styled to spell out Art School.I hadn’t seen an Art School show since back in its boundary breaking MAN days in 2017, and on the face of it this one was consistent with its original Theo Adams–choreographed formula of unrepentantly celebratory dramatics: We’re LGBTQ+ and if you don’t like it, bad luck. Personally, I like it; however, between 2017 and now it feels like representation of non-cis sexualities—thanks much to Art School and others—is rightly well established in, if not the wider world, then certainly in the narrow realm of runway fashion. The ceiling that Art School once railed against has been rightfully shattered.This means that the inherent subversive tension that imbued the original shows feels diluted. Thankfully, the real business of this business—you know, clothes—was well served when you looked beyond the chest hair. The press release spoke of a collaboration with the wonderful artist Maggi Hambling, but sadly this was hard to detect. Yet what did uplift were some of the garments: The slashed outerwear was tempered by some quite beautifully executed non-razored pieces that were transgressive in this context for being clothes that any unreconstructed norm with a sense of taste would, could, and should rightly hanker after. The same applied to the button-up dress that both prefaced (in black) and postscript-ed (in white) the show.
5 January 2020
A spectral, slow-moving procession of milky-eyed, glam zombies filed toward a ritual ring of salt at the end of the Art School show. “The idea was that they were queer deities, archangels, witches,” said designer Eden Loweth. “We always want to present our models as if they are Naomi Campbell, but this season we wanted to echelon them even higher. This season we cast more transpeople than ever before, and we wanted to show each one, give them a voice.”Loweth and codesigner Tom Barratt said they meant to “cut through the performance” this time, but they still managed to stir up theatrical sensations of otherworldly angst using minimal devices. Barratt, who walked—or rather, deliberately staggered—in kitten heels and a strapless dress, is a member the PlayStation generation who formed an affectionate fascination for plunging through Silent Hill, the Japanese horror game launched in the 2000s. “I think Silent Hill speaks a lot to the world today,” said Barratt. “For queer people it can often be a battle and scary, mentally intense and almost dystopian.”Thus, the repulsion of the pupil-less contact lenses, the instructions to participants to slow down the pace, and the fact that Loweth’s childhood singer-songwriter idol, Anna Calvi, was playing her guitar live at the end of the runway, standing in the ritualistic circle of salt.For all the creepsome emotional atmosphere, the staging was also a deliberately courageous act to cut out frenetic action and slow it down so that critical audience gaze had to linger on every individual and their look—the long silver shimmery coin-pailletted gowns, the button-through “nurse” dresses, the tight leopard-spotted painted leather cocktail minis, and the cut of the brown Lurex tailoring. It paid off: The collection was very together, well-edited, and as punctuated with tailoring (like sober jackets minimally knife-slashed in the back) as it was with sparkly party gowns.Loweth and Barratt are a highly responsible pair who nurture and represent the nonbinary community of all ages and shapes in London through the public space of fashion shows. “We are voices for this community—that was bestowed on us; we didn’t seek it,” said Barratt. “But this is our work. We don’t constantly tweet about it—we’re too busy making.
” Simultaneously, the designers also have a responsibility to each other and their employees to show they can improve their fabrics, quality, and focus of their collection, and that they are seriously motivated to be a credible fashion-making company rather than creators of costumes and performance organizers.Nevertheless, their expertise in fitting trans bodies is a market opportunity in itself, Loweth says, picking out the example of bustier tops “which are cut on the bias, so a trans body can be comfortable.” The designers have also worked out grading systems in which an identical dress can be cut to fit a man or a woman—or whatever the customer identifies with in between.
8 June 2019
The crescendo of the Art School show was a tableau of people hugging, holding hands, and caressing one another’s hair. The central player—who had just stood on the runway, shaking, in a tailored jacket, blonde wig, and stilettos—was picked up, and held aloft by surrounding friends. That physical gesture of support is key to the Art School dynamic—it’s about a movement as much as the clothes. “There’s a sense of community within the show itself,” said Eden Loweth, who, with Tom Barratt, has been instrumental in rewriting the language of fashion in London over the past two years.It’s hard to compute that it was only in 2017 that Art School placed gender-nonbinary performance presentations in the fashion domain with their first Fashion East show, which was choreographed by Theo Adams Company. They’ve since been part of the collaborative wave of expression of LGBTQI identities in London fashion that was initially formed by the caravan of creative people led by Charles Jeffrey with his Loverboy shows.This time Art School were out on their own, flown the Fashion East nest for their first stand-alone show. Perhaps that’s why they reached for a posh, grown-up, establishment idea: a night at the Opera, rather than Vogue Fabrics, the Dalston club night that is second home to the young queer culture of London. Quite a good trope to cover the fact that Art School’s chief thing has turned out to be eveningwear, whether glittery dresses or tailoring.The termglad ragscould have been coined for it. There were developments of their asymmetrical bias-cut dagger dresses, new skirts in giant gold paillettes, a gold-foiled belted safari suit, and big-skirted cotton gowns. The ragged bit? Fragmentary velvet dresses with jagged holes, and cutaway T-shirts. On heads: What might have read as off-kilter top hats were actually constructed by Shiori Takahashi from old boots and other trash can detritus. In fact, as a program note told us, they were “found objects . . . created from disregarded, repurposed lost property from queer spaces across London.” Each work comes with a label indicating the area from which it was inspired.So, that’s progress, then. There is at least one more welcoming place, now: catwalk fashion, an arena in which Art School has brought the termsgender nonbinaryandtransinto mainstream discussion. Remarkable that this has happened in the space of only 24 months.
Fashion always looks forward, but that’s a cultural milestone which has been passed, and which matters.
5 January 2019