Christopher Kane (Q2777)
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Christopher Kane is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Christopher Kane |
Christopher Kane is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
The ever-present bat squeak of sexiness in Christopher Kane’s work is turned up wickedly in this resort collection. Seeing its deadpan gleefulness in real life is quite a sharp-intake-of-breath situation. How, you are forced to wonder, does someone come up with the geniusly simple idea of dropping a giant bow onto the hemline of a short, tailored shift? Or pop a pair of powder-puffs into the dangerously-draped neckline of a slinky petrol-blue jersey slip dress? And exactly what kind of mind thinks of cutting circles out of the knees and elbows of a black trouser suit, and then trimming them with marabou?It may be hard to see all of it in the blurry lookbook, but take it from an eyewitness: This collection is packed with chic-funny-simple evening ideas that look like a joy to wear. Should you detect a ’50s/’80s post-punk New Wave-ish vibe coming off it, you’re not wrong.Kane and his sister Tammy had their elliptical reasonings for ending up here. As ever, behind every brilliant Christopher Kane party-trick, there lies something darker. This time, the siblings had been watchingAll the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the documentary about Nan Goldin that weaves her groundbreaking ’70s and ’80s photography into footage of her campaign of protest against the Sackler family’s sponsorship of major museums and galleries. (The Sacklers own Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company whose main drug is the opioid Oxycontin.) It struck them that the connection between the forces of super-wealth at one end of society, and the most deprived at the other were stingingly present—in the clothes.It was the sight of the cocktail dresses, lingerie, and scrappy gowns worn by Goldin’s penniless junkie LGBTQ friends that resonated. “The reason they looked so amazing in their poverty is that they were wearing second-hand and discarded clothes thrown out by the wealthy—couture, designer clothes from the ’40s and ’50s. “For them, that fit with their childhood and teenage memories of seeing the deprivation of communities in the post-industrial Glaswegian conurbation they grew up amongst. “The poorest people are the best-dressed. We’ve always said that.”It took them back to remembering the glamour of the neatly-dressed barmaids serving in Working Men’s Clubs in the mid-to-late ’80s—another source for the sexy synthetic fitted dresses they conspired on in this collection. The subversive references they use aren’t at all visible, of course.
What Kane always does is to turn the brew of associations into relevant fashion. Sometimes there’s a clue in the name, though. He’s called a gold fan-pleated evening dress “The Gold Bullion.” Now, as it was in the New York of the ’80s, the rich are always with us.
12 June 2023
With Christopher Kane’s show, we can say this for certain: bustles are back, and we’re going to want them. To qualify for accuracy: they may also be front-loaded frill-deep on a slick red vinyl pencil skirt. His opening look announced that. But what you can’t perceive from the photographs here is the impact of being glued to the sight of the bouncing, incendiary chic action that was happening in the back as so many of his plain black looks walked past.Sexuality is a constant hum in the background of what Kane does. This time, it was amplified as a recording of a cat purring filled the air, a sensual metaphor for female pleasure and self admiration if ever there were one. Go on—just preen yourself in how great you’ll look and feel in these clothes, he seemed to be saying.Animal instincts, biology, his working class Glaswegian school days, and—surprisingly—artificial intelligence are all wrapped up in the matrix of Kane’s imagination. At a moment when it feels as if fashion ought to be going towards something cleaner and sharper, there he was, cutting plain gray ‘school uniform’ shifts, but with stiff geometric upstanding collars that he later alarmingly called “chopping boards.”Then, his grappling with nature wasn’t all it seemed, either. There were pretty micro-flowers and solitary daisy embroideries he attributed to his championing of ordinary urban plants that “grow through concrete,” of the sort he saw growing up in a working class conurbation outside Glasgow.And then, there were his animal prints—overlapping hyper-real images of chicks, piglets, and rats—on stretch jersey body-con dresses. It turned out, when quizzed backstage, that Kane had designed them with AI. “What you do is speak to it, give very specific descriptions, and then it comes up with it.”There are always some things in Christopher Kane’s work which feel a bit covertly disturbing or off-center—it wouldn’t have its weird originality if it didn’t. What’s for sure, he’s never someone who concocts things for the sake of instant public notoriety and clickbait. What he’s really about is being a designer of hot clothes that give women the chance to have a really great time with fashion. He’s always thinking of an angle that nobody else has come up with, like those incredibly naughty but sophisticated bustles.
19 February 2023
Buckle up! Christopher Kane’s spicy-chic pre-fall collection is heading this way. The incendiary devices he makes in the form of clothes always sound almost innocently pragmatic when he talks about them. “We got a buckle from a supplier and started to play with it,” he remarked, quite nonchalantly, in his East London studio. And there they were: broad, buckled straps bound around the shoulders, necks, and hemlines of mini-shifts and coats. In one case they formed the entire upper body of a dress. “Extreme, but clean,” he added.Bondage and fetish might be the words we’d automatically reach for here, but not so fast. To Kane, the heavy-duty strapping, combined with reflective yellow, neon green, and orange fabric is more bound up with “uniforms, security, police women, and school lolly-pop ladies.” (British for school-crossing marshals.) Needless to say, the results are miles away from utility or street-wear, yet (excuse the pun) highly arresting in all manner of other ways.Heart-racing visual impact is quite literally Christopher Kane’s great party-trick. This season he’s devised it with circular cutouts as well as straps and buckles. Circles roll through the naked waist of a long black column, and then wickedly expose two half-moons of flesh above a built-in bra. These two are clearly sisters of the slick, black latex ‘Bat-dress’ that Kane memorably custom-made for Tommy Dorfman at last year’s Met Gala. Another near relation has manifested in the spirit of Wednesday Addams for pre-fall: long, black, off-the shoulder, with a bandeau-buckle neckline and sleeves filled in with lace.Kane points out that the collection will start dropping in April, so he’s also found room for “clothes to wear to weddings, cocktail parties, the things you need for summer.” There are little white dresses decorated with hand-drawn micro-flowers, patchworked from organic-shaped “blobs.” Flounced skirts in highlighter orange or lime have hems which can either be buttoned up in front, or left long. All-in-all, it’s a collection that covers a lot of bases, yet still looks inimitably Christopher Kane. By now, he’s accumulated a big playbook to draw on. Not forgetting the slinky chainmail mini disco-dresses that are where he began. They’re here, present and correct and just as relevant now, only this time, buckled on at hip and shoulder with those big, black straps.
13 January 2023
How great it was to experience the buzz of seeing Christopher Kane back—showing a collection that was, forgive the pun, a body of work. It was a work about the body—there was even an explicit anatomy lesson being read on the soundtrack. “I’m dissecting a woman. Dissecting her in the best possible ways. It’s forensic. In a good way!”And it was definitely about his own body of work. Here were Christopher Kane’s clinical obsessions, his taste for dodgy materials mixed with sweet-and-innocent ones, his chainmail and cup-cake shapes and his frank praise of sexuality, all metabolized in new ways.As usual, he pushed viewers’ heart rates up with the sight of the unexplainable: dresses with clear vinyl body-brace straps with inset lace bra cups, for a start. Really pretty pastel organza and white lingerie-lace edged skirts, doubled up into loops. Then bouncy little mini-crini dresses of a Kane kind, suspended from geometric panels he described as “sliced with a scalpel.” Scottish cashmere cardigan-capes. Patent kitten-heel pumps with bunny-ears.He’s printed a nurse’s dress and sheer twinset with pink roses. Was that an echo of the floral stickers he’d used 10 years ago, in his brilliant show of spring 2012? Well yes, but no. “Flowers are symbolic of love and death. It was all these things: celebration or condolence.” That is life. One of the flower-embedded vinyl dresses had a cutout pair of medical-illustration hands wrapped around its middle as a belt, a woman creepily turned into a human plastic-covered bouquet.There was a minute’s silence for the Queen at the beginning of Kane’s show. He marked his respect for her death. But the flip side of his ‘forensics’ this season—a reminder that we’re all human—is to enjoy our bodies while we’re in them. After all, Kane was the designer who first shook up fashion with his pulse-racing body-con debut collection. Now that body-con’s back and hot again, Kane’s ideally positioned for a whole new generation that’s going for it for the first time. The strange kinky-chic of his inhibition-free world is completely cut out for them.
19 September 2022
Welcome back, Christopher Kane. Given that he’s the one designer who’s always talked frankly about sexual display as a driving motive behind fashion, the digital landing of his new collection in the middle of the surging youth demand for body exposure could hardly be better timed.“Sexual selection” is what he called it, Zooming in from his London studio. Coded references to mating behavior in nature—plants, animals, humans—have always been embedded in his work. This time, he drew a comparison between bird of paradise plumage and the blue-red-yellow of the tulle strips he draped into semi-sheer dresses—one of them had a black harness—with bodices laid over the breasts in the same material.That’s just for starters on Kane’s menu of fetish-y, sensual fashion play. He did it with outright skill in slick, black, wipe-clean cutaway dresses—pointy bras and gathered skirts suspended on matrixes of gold snake chains. Hard to beat, if a girl happens to be comparison-shopping among the sexy dresses that are appearing right now.There’s a fine line between sophisticated hinting at something and blatantly putting it out there. Wearers of Christopher Kane have appreciated his skills in that direction for ages. In these 34 looks, he’s done his thing—using double-take materials like wool faux fur, slinky gold chain mail, and white net drapes in all kinds of wicked ways.Underpinning the lot is, of course, Kane’s Scottishness—here a kilt, there a crocheted cushion cover—recognizable signatures, but always renewed and re-cast in fresh ways. For girls who are coming of age in a time when they might not be old enough to realize what this designer did for their big sisters, mothers, and aunties, now’s a great time to get their mid-noughties on with Christopher Kane.
21 February 2022
Christopher Kane must be laughing. If there’s one designer who’s always embedded sexual attraction, kinkiness, botanical reproduction and everything about Doing It into his collections from day one, that’s him. He’s always taken an honest and clear-eyed attitude towards the role of fashion in the mating game—the hot topic which has suddenly risen again in these new days of pandemic-liberation fever.So if you want sexual tension with an injection of sophistication, Kane is your man.For spring he shot a show in a darkened London warehouse a couple of months ago. It opens with strong, black patent: straight to the point of a furious kind of erotic chic. Kane girls don’t necessarily want to serve things up on a plate: His talent is for designing ways that play wickedly with all kinds of covert suggestions. Right through the collection there are devices for revealing skin—necklines in little black dresses that hint at fetish but are banded with protective metal; unconventional slits or port-holes in otherwise perfectly proper, covered-up dresses; a sporty crystal mesh miniskirt with a zippered slit.Kane experiments with form, too—and that leads to all kinds of modern-looking techniques. One this season is his play with corrugated shapes—like a scarlet bra top and matching skirt armored with zig-zaggy 3D geometric frills. The thing is, you never quite know where Kane’s references come from—but his career-long insistence on short, leggy going-out dresses means a glut of choices for original-minded girls who are finally, finally out and about at parties and whatnot.One of the inspirations he did allude to is the life of ’50s sex-bomb Jayne Mansfield. She of the overspilling breasts—a controversial star who blatantly flaunted her sexuality and incredible body at a time when all that was highly disapproved of. You glimpse her energy behind a diaphanous dress with a pink satin bra formed into sharp geometric satin points: provocative, yes, but also armored with self-confidence.
1 October 2021
People’s true colors have been coming out this London Fashion Week. Now that the shows are out and what personal contact possible with designers reduced to carefully managed COVID-secure appointments, there is nevertheless a better opportunity for honest conversations and understanding where designers’ creativity stems from. In Christopher Kane’s case, it’s been reverting to painting with multicolored glitter as he did as a kid that’s got him back to who he is.His flagship in Mount Street was turned into an exhibition space today, filled with easels and canvases and imagined portraits of girls that he’d made obsessively during lockdown. Grouped around on mannequins were vibrant prints that made the jump from pictures to coats, dresses, shirts, and T-shirts.“I haven’t painted for 14 years,” he said. “You know, in (the pace of) business, it’s chronic. At the beginning of lockdown, it took me a good month to say, I can’t sit here watching TV all day. I needed to do something. So I went out in the garden and just started painting, not caring whether what I was doing was crap or not. And then I started enjoying myself.”In a video which Kane uploaded today, we see him in action, spreading glue on paper, sprinkling glitter on it, going at it with a palette knife and brush, using his fingers. Before long, he was bulk buying glitter from the internet. He laughs that buying glitter was easy but that paint supplies had run out because thousands were taking up art at home.He made paintings of “brats—the girls I love, who’ve always inspired me,” gouaches of his nieces Bonnie and Tippi, and a more abstract impression in sage green sparkles of his sister Tammy. The idiosyncratic technique goes straight back to when he started making drawings in glitter pen of his mum at home in Newarthill, outside Glasgow, at the age of 14. Christine Kane encouraged both Christopher and Tammy, her youngest children, to be as creative as they liked at home. Instead of getting mad at them when their hours of painting and gluing on the sitting-room floor ended up ruining her best carpet, she just removed the carpet and let them get on with it.Going back to that feeling of making for making’s sake, without the pressure of thinking he was designing for any prescriptive outcome, was freeing. He began forming abstract shapes: “circles, voids, mouths” from whirling layers of acrylic paint and glitter. “Then I came up with a process of combing the paint. And then adding stripes.
They became like my mindscapes.”In the end, having thought at first they didn’t want to make anything at all, Kane and his sister began transferring some of the work onto duchesse satin, Tyvek, and cotton, and a small summer collection began to take shape. Out of the big pause came something humming with energy, revealing a side to Christopher Kane’s creativity he might never have had time to rediscover and which he’d probably never have shared.As one of the restarts of the season, it felt intensely personal—something speculative, self-reliant, and not meant for endless reproduction. “From now on,” said his sister, “we’re streamlining, editing before we decide to put something out into the world.”
21 September 2020
Sex, subversion, fashion: One way or another, Christopher Kane always works within that triangulation. “And this season it became all about triangles—I don’t know why,” he exclaimed with a laugh. “But it started with us looking at triangle bras, saucy underwear, and went from there.” Kane and his sister Tammy don’t sit around in their studio waiting for inspiration to hit them out of the blue. They play instinctively with shapes and forms, see what interests them, and then the symbolism tends to pile on later.Their geometric satin patchworking of coats in colors reminiscent of the ’70s was just the start. There were black lace lingerie tops and also triangles appearing as glittering bows and as slightly clerical cutouts in the bibs of white cotton shirts.Next thing, Kane said, he discovered that “the triangle is the most powerful, strongest shape in nature. And all of a sudden—this was after we’d designed everything—the eye of God came into it.”The triangular Christian Eye of Providence symbol was duly superimposed over a Cranach image of the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden on the Kane T-shirt of the season. That’s quite heavy, when you think about it—yet all that religious disapproval of sex is exactly what makes it illicit and exciting. It’s the idea behind the burgeoning popular status of the Christopher Kane More Joy brand, as well as the erotics visible—or implied—on the runway. There was a plethora of party dresses, sheer knitwear smothered in paillettes, and harnesses with jewels and bulbous plastic.There was also something slightly darker and more intense about it all this season; Kane surmised that the models looked as if they might be members of “some kind of cult.” Still, it’s a collection that touched on the wide span of Kane signatures, which encompass white shirts with isosceles triangles of black patent inserts, animal prints, substantial duffle coats, and loads of oversized knitwear—plenty to buy and plenty to keep people staring at the oddness that lies within.
18 February 2020
Hmm...is that actually a sporran plunked in the middle of that black velvet tuxedo coat? Albeit a sort ofglitterysporran, slightly displaced upwards, with a sparkly cascade of dangles? It’s like this, when one’s looking at a Christopher Kane collection, holding your head this way and that as you try to fathom exactly what itisthat something’s reminding you of. You wouldn’t put it past Kane to slip in a surrogate sporran as a wink to his Scottishness, after all. So it might be sporran-y, but it also might just be a startlingly original visual placement of a decoration with no particular reason behind it.And truthfully, that is the tantalizing essence of Kane: the seesawing between chic and suggestiveness that goes on in his clothes. “Ha!” he laughed. “We always do sex differently here.” There’s even quite a lot of it going on in the white shirt, which has frontal slits edged with ruffles, when you think of it. And that’s the thing—Kane does enjoy catching you out, thinking of it.He named this particular collection “Technosexual,” and shot it in a metallic tunnel of love—well, actually an aircraft hangar in Suffolk. Since Spring 2018, when Kane made his collection about the suburban bordello run by Cynthia Payne, the apparently infinite variables of fetishism have become a fascination running through the seasons. This time, it’s “people who have sex with robots” and—rather bogglingly—with hand-tools. “You can look it all up on the internet,” he offered, cheerfully.Some of this comes out in slogan sweatshirts, and a lot is channeled into the Kane logo sub-brand product (pajamas, baseball caps, mugs, sleep masks) that is stamped with the wordsMore Joy,Sex, andSpecialand is all over Instagram.But otherwise: The aircraft hangar is the backdrop for a capsule of Kane’s holiday party dresses. This is a see-now-buy-now collection, with all its familiar-yet-different Kane signatures. More of the variations on sparkle, which moves to epaulettes on sweaters and then an entire dress “like Liberace.” His pleated lamé skirts and dresses. And a particularly slinky black chainmail camisole dress, edged in chantilly lace. Lust and fashion really do walk hand in hand, sometimes.
14 November 2019
Christopher Kane could not host a presentation this season due to the coronavirus pandemic. In these extenuating circumstances, Vogue Runway has made an exception to its policy and is writing about this collection via photos and remote interviews.“Naturotica. It’s a word we came up with when we were designing this is in December,” says Christopher Kane, “because it goes back to what I’ve always been interested in: science and nature.” Everything we look at that occurred pre-pandemic seems weirdly changed from the perspective of locked-down domesticity. Kane, working at home in East London with his partner and Bruce the dog feels no differently, but the fact is that this collection was designed and made before the horror took hold, and now it’s safely delivered to his e-commerce site—with a cameo appearance from Bruce.Back then, Kane was already thinking about making “a stripped-back collection,” true to his own repertoire of “sharp tailoring, flounces, bell skirts, and chain mail.” It never had a show of its own, just a few turns on a model in his shop during one-on-one appointments in the depths of last winter. And who knows? This may be one of the ways forward for fashion designers: just producing a condensed number of looks they believe in, when they’re good and ready and up for offering it.The enforced pause has made Kane think even harder about that, while painting and drawing in his non-Zooming hours. “This is a chance to break free,” he thinks. Old formulas of performing to the demands of seasons and markets, of producing shadow collections watered down from previous shows are fast becoming a thing of the past. And creatively, that can only be a good thing for independents like Kane, and for the reinvention of what fashion is meant to be throughout the industry.
8 May 2020
More joy! Christopher Kane and his sister, Tammy, newly independent, are constantly celebrating their coded complicities on their Instagram feeds and in their collections these days. The slogan they’ve adopted, drawn from the title of the 1970s Masters and Johnson sex manual, has spun off to mean everything from pure spontaneous enjoyment of life’s little moments to the key to their design methods—which always embed a surreptitious sexual motive somewhere in their designs. Eco-Sexual was the title of the Spring collection. “It’s about people who love nature,” declared Christopher. “Making love in nature. Being in touch with the earth. Sleeping with the stars! We’ve had a lot of fun coming up with words for it in the studio.”One of the starting points was a photograph they’d taken this glorious summer of a re-wilded area of their local park, London Fields. Blown-up images of wildflowers were projected on the walls of the show space and used as prints at the opening of the presentation. The reproductive forces of nature—whether in botany or human behavior—have always been an obsession for the designer. As far as he’s concerned, the pleasure principles that drive us to want to dress up are on that seamless continuum—he has no taboos, whether it’s about what goes on behind suburban closed doors, on disco floors, or indeed in the sublimated desire of a woman to magnetize a room with the power of her chic.All these facets from Kane’s encyclopedia of the erotic were on display here. A black cage dress with petal-like cutouts, bolted together with silver studs. Frills and flounces suspended from thread-fine straps. Nature as captured in classic paisley patterns and floriform white eyelet dresses and blouses reminiscent of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Art Nouveau. A comeback of the sheer neon lace dresses and the slinky silver chain mail Kane made girls lust after at the beginning of his career. Just as pulse-racingly hot today.High fashion that sends out irresistible but covert seduction signals is really the genius of Christopher Kane. On that kind of wavelength, it would be hard to beat the impact of, say, the combination of a black tuxedo jacket with matching rectangular crystal brooches on either lapel, shrugged over a floor-length cerise lace dress with a plunging neckline. Throughout Kane’s career, his female fans have testified to the fact that his work doesn’t date—separates such as these will likely be kept and worn again and again.
But loving the planet? Giving that as a topical message for our times begs an obvious question. How much care does Kane take over minimizing the environmental impact of his company? Since leaving the Kering group, Kane says he’s absorbed the sustainability standards of the corporation (which are some of the best in that echelon of the industry) into his own company. Over time, he and his sister will make sure they continue to improve on that front. Otherwise, there will quickly be no more joy to be had from lying in wildflowers with a lover and looking up at the sky.
16 September 2019
Christopher Kane hotfooted it back to base camp in London after showing Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirke a good time at the Met Gala—you surely clocked the pair in his “Rubberist” and “Looner” fetish shifts—to present his Pre-Fall collection. Here you see it, photographed in and around the utilitarian stairwells and loading bays of the Edwardian ex-industrial building in Shacklewell Lane where Kane, his sister Tammy, and their team have worked for nearly a decade. Instead of taking his audience off on a fantasy resort trip, this one is basically a stay-at-home experience. Albeit one with a lot of surreptitiously naughty fantasy emanating from behind those closed doors.Sexual symbolism and playful perviness have been visibly playing through Kane’s shows since he invoked the suburban Madam Cynthia Payne in Spring 2017. With this one, he’s teased out his obsession with Marilyn Monroe, whose voice he used in a recent catwalk show, saying, “Sex is part of nature. I go along with nature.” That’s how he arrived at the Monroe with a kitten print on a pink duchesse satin top—“because she was known as an animal lover”—and then a flurry of coded references to ’50s cliches, from hand-drawn polka dots and boudoir negligees to ladylike pearls.The cleverness in Kane’s collections is how many shades, from chic to simple, they manage to contain without losing continuity or identity. There’s a quite amazing amalgam of a dress that flows down through black lace and a gold chainmail bodice into a gathered satin polka dot skirt. The pearls colonize a white shirt, dripping from the collar and cascading down the front; loops of them trickle onto tailored pantsuits (substituting for the highly successful crystal trimmings he’s been running recently); and fringes swish on toeless pink pumps. It’s that odd glamour, running the gamut from wearable utilitarian everyday pieces to the extreme—a “grunge” green latex puff-sleeve dress—that keeps things “special,” as Kane likes to term it.He is not one of those who insists on stoking up desire while insisting on deferred gratification, though. The first pieces from Pre-Fall are dropping on his online store today.
14 May 2019
Sexuality in fashion is a Christopher Kane specialty subject. “We always do sexy in a different way from other people. Not obviously, but there’s always an undertone,” he said backstage. “Me and Tammy, that’s what we do.”In the era of #MeToo, this is a topic many designers are shying away from, but as far as Kane’s concerned, the sex drive is part of human nature—and if we’re honest with ourselves, isn’t the ability to code a tiny frisson of kink into the way we dress one of the great pleasures of fashion?Kane said he and his sister have spent an eye-opening time researching into fetish worlds—people with a sexual interest in balloons, rubber, food, liquid. A couple of the terms were spelled out as slogans: “Looner” and “Rubberist.” Closer inspection showed the siblings at work channeling erotic electricity into the details in all the different, subtly suggestive, double-take ways that make up the Christopher Kane story of “Oh!”Look twice, and look again at the crystal chains outlining necklines, at the lines of silver snaps, the deployment of slinky chainmail, the configurations of lace and the free-ranging use of latex—from an entire black rubber raincoat to scarves to lapels on black tailoring, to the dark green elbow patches and cuffs on a very chic pale pink satin coat. This is the point: By Kane’s fetishistic alchemy, the sleazy and the cheap are always elevated into clothes and accessories, which are inarguably chic. That goes as much for his on-point use of duchesse satin, his “cupcake” flounced minidresses, or the flounce on the hem of a coat as it does for the very clever way he can transform something as simple as a one-sleeved white T-shirt by implanting it with a single line of crystals. Voila: objects of desire which will leave fashion fans fully satisfied, at many price points.
18 February 2019
Glitter against gloom: Christopher Kane saved up his Resort collection photos to pitch directly into the holiday season. “We shot it while we were on a research trip in Tokyo. I thought it would be a nice surprise,” he says. “And I loved that cityscape.” Well, it feels right for now—graphic strips of crystal, slithery chain mail, lace trimmings, tailored black leather, and all.The point about Kane is the way his design walks that nighttime tightrope between the sexy and the sophisticated on which every girl hopes to find her balance. For the past few seasons, he’s been talking frankly about the power of sexuality as an underlying force in fashion—mention of which has generally been shushed in the current climate of modest dressing. In Kane’s clothes, there’s opportunity to provoke—the short lengths he’s been doing since he started, bra tops, fetishistic buckled choker collars, and rouleau black leather bows. Clothes for having a good time, despite it all? That’s what hisShit Happensslogan seems to say.
31 October 2018
A woman’s options for sexy dressing are at a pretty low ebb right now, what with the dominance of high necklines, full-length sleeves, and ankle-grazing dresses, and the continuing impacts of #MeToo. Christopher Kane is a lone outspoken voice in that wilderness, an advocate for the empowerment of women and girls through clothes. Last season, his collection drew on the ’70s manualThe Joy of Sex, and the one before that was inspired by the suburban brothel owner Cynthia Payne. This time, it was David Attenborough’s films on the mating behaviors of wildlife, and Marilyn Monroe. That explained—at least partially—Kane’s opening sequence of strappy black lace dresses, and tulle petticoats, suspended (in a manner not seen before) from structured T-shirt tops. “People who dress in Christopher Kane don’t do it for anyone but themselves,” he asserted after the show. “Me and Tammy (his sister and cocreative director) don’t do ‘sex’ like anyone else. It’s intellectual. It’s subversive.”Kane has been attuned to thinking about aiding and abetting the primal forces of attraction in clothes since he was a student. For Spring 2019 he’d switched channels—to Discovery—and called the show Nature and Sex, merging subliminal fragments of Attenborough’s running commentaries on mating and Monroe’s thoughts about being a sex symbol on the soundtrack.This time it was an accessory that Kane found in a sex shop in Tokyo that triggered the extraordinary boned lace dresses, shoulder straps, and the stand-up tongues on shoes. “A piece of lingerie used by women of the night and strippers,” as he described it. The object in question—a triangle of lace—was a crotch- or pudenda-cover, though no one who goes for the lovely white shoes with distinctive 18th-century tongues need suspect their origin. They’re just extremely chic and desirable.Not all of it was overtly sex-obsessed. Kane pushed power-shoulders in tailored jackets, linebacker new wave ledges on T-shirts and on crisp white cotton Edwardiana leg-of-mutton shirts. Then again, the T-shirts did bear Kane’s drawing of a praying mantis and the slogan “Sexual Cannibalism.”What can be criticized is the drab brutalist background of the show, and the harsh light cast on the young models, with their tied-back hair. Kane’s design work is exceptional: There was a red lace midi with a crystal bodice, coming to a point at the front amid separate strands of sparkle lying along the arms and ending in handcuffs.
But sometimes you wonder if, for all his supporting of sexual freedom, he might be afraid of curves.
17 September 2018
In our hypersensitive time of #MeToo, who dares talk about sex in fashion? Christopher Kane broached it in his Fall collection—but, then again, his work has long had a frank undertow of interest in sexual drives. “I’ve always looked at it from the point of view of human behavior,” he said. Kane’s last collection went into suburban behind-closed-doors kinkiness. Going back, he’s used his school memories of being taught about reproduction in nature and life-drawing classes for his Lover’s Lace collection. This time, despite the current charged atmosphere around who has permission to do what to whom, Kane said he and his sister, Tammy, considered it and felt they wanted to go ahead: “We thought, ‘No, what’s wrong with it?’ We wanted to look at it from the joy point of view—to empower and strengthen that female force.”The Joy of Sex, the 1972 illustrated manual of positions and techniques by Alex Comfort, which became a publishing blockbuster in the age of sexual liberation (and which remains ever-popular in its more recent updates), was the starting point. Kane gained permission to reuse one or two drawings by one of the book’s original illustrators, Chris Foss, as prints. But really? Let’s talk about it: This was a show that centered on the coded sublimation of sex women play around with when we dress ourselves with the aim of tantalizing others with our excellent tastes in clothes.Kane’s joys of fashion can certainly go there with a skimpy red lace body dress and the pulse-raising set of laminated, plasticized, marabou-edged suggestions he made at the, ah, climax of the show. But with his experience and design development prowess, there is always a broad and chic spectrum on his runway, too. Black leather turned up as a mere accent on coat lapels, or cut into tabards and diamanté-fringed minidresses. Paneled, vertically zippered dresses put the possibilities of displaying or concealing into the hands of the wearer, according to mood.“More Joy” said a slogan printed on a black sweater. Whether you recognize that as a sly reference to the book or just as a simple demand to bring back some spontaneous fun in life scarcely makes a difference. In these complicated times, it’s Christopher Kane’s fashion temptation strategy: Let yourself go; live a little.
19 February 2018
Peer into this crystal-dripping, leather-and-feather–trimmed, lace and Lurex, knit and neon collection, and you’ll see how Christopher Kane is smashing it. Part showgirl, part cozy; strong on tailoring, stunning on dresses; and irresistible on accessories—this is one of those seasons where Kane’s undercover-kinky glamour shines.Granted, he may not have made it easy to see at first glance—what with the odd setting of his Pre-Fall lookbook shoot, which turned out to be a ceramics heritage museum in Stoke-on-Trent, the center of the English pottery industry. Kane went there as part of his extension studies from his hit Spring collection, in which he peeked behind the suburban net curtains of Cynthia Payne, the proprietor of a squeaky-clean brothel in South London in the 1980s. Here, Kane’s girls stand among galleries of precious china, a subject linked with his curiosity about the status symbols and fetish objects that furnish ordinary British domestic life.One creative idea leaped directly out of the cabinets and onto a couple of clutches and a sweater printed with Staffordshire figurines titledPrincessandRomance—future Christopher Kane collectibles. But really? A spot-the-reference guide is hardly needed as an added attraction. There were so many desirables—the dress with one white and one black trumpet sleeve, the patent boots and shoes with sparkling fringe, the jewelry, the chic coats—that the whole lot might well trigger a mass smash-and-grab raid.
29 January 2018
Cleanliness is not necessarily next to godliness—it’s frequently a polite, plastic cover for absolute filth. This is the covert paradox of perve that Christopher Kane was gleefully probing in his Shacklewell Lane studio a couple of days before his collection went on the runway today. “It’s about the perfect wife with a cleaning habit,” he laughed, sliding his eyes toward his mood board, where, alongside an array of duster cloths, mopheads, and trash bags, there were photocopies of the biography of Cynthia Payne, a South London brothel keeper who was famously busted in the ’80s for entertaining Members of Parliament and other gents of the British establishment behind the squeaky-clean frontage of a suburban terraced house. Middle-aged men in suits would line up obediently to receive 'personal services' in the upstairs bedrooms and be treated to a nice cup of tea and cake in the sitting room afterward. It was a national tabloid sensation, disapproved of and enjoyed by all.The retreat to domestic, private life has, one way and another, been a theme of the season, but never yet has it taken such a surreptitiously kinky turn. The British find comedy in sex behind closed doors. Kane had a lot of fun with it, sending out a collection that co-opted the makings of supermarket cleaning paraphernalia, naughty underwear, frilly ornaments, and gentlemen’s tailoring to his inimitably subtext-laden brand of chic.It started so you couldn’t read it, with a floral wallpaper-print coat, with wide black satin lapels, and jewel-embroidered mesh kitten-heel shoes. In Kane’s mind, that tailoring represented the arrival of the establishment chap, perhaps deviating to Mrs. Payne’s on the way home from his Mayfair club. On second glance, the girl had fringed earrings made of cotton mop strands. And she was wearing a tight red crystal choker. Promises, promises...The tropes of the sex shop and fetish club have long been appropriated by fashion, but Kane’s version of hidden suburban eroticism avoided the crude reek of outright vulgarity. The sheer floral dresses, with their jeweled buttons, were pretty but for the side glimpse of a thong. The wipe-clean, dominatrix nature of the black patent leather coat was politely ameliorated by its crisp doily-white collar and cuffs. (Until you thought about the maid angle, that is.) Virginal eyelet met black rubbery frills in a way that wouldn’t get a party girl arrested on her way to an event.
It was the soundtrack, with its subliminally mounting noises of vacuuming, flushing, and spin-cycle washing machine, that suggested both the frenetic activity of a cleaning obsessive and an orgiastic heart beat. Suspended yellow dusters became diamond-shaped decorations; pink scouring pads became sparkly sweatshirts; pegs took the place of buttons; a black trash bag turned into a coat with its yellow plastic streamers as ribbon fasters; the mop fringing circled pointy ankle boots.So it went on, until the “caged” woman came out in her glittery, fondant-pink sweet confections for evening. They’d literally started as the icing on Kane’s imagined post-party cakes, he said. You don’t need to know any of this, really. When presented spick and span in stores, the sexual and the ingeniously silly undercurrents in this collection will simply scrub up as a huge variety of Kane-brand trophies.
18 September 2017
There are Scottish threads running through all of Christopher Kane’s work if you look hard enough, but this time his collection was wholly woven from them. Finally, Kane found himself able to look clearly at the turn of the century Glaswegian architecture, furniture, and textiles of the genius Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, and the results were prolifically pretty and inventive. First, though, there was a hurdle to cross. The Mackintosh heritage industry is so much part of Scottish culture that “it was always rammed down our throats in school,” Kane said. But pushing aside the mental block built up by the tourist merchandising, he and his sister Tammy found another level to engage with the Macintoshes. “They were outsiders in their day. He was celebrated in Paris, everywhere, but not here.” The Kanes identify with outsider-y feelings, and love the satisfaction of co-opting things which are deemed common. And so, the Mackintosh trip began.Kane gained permission to shoot the collection at Hill House, Mackintosh’s domestic masterpiece in Helensburgh. All the echoes are there, merged with Kane’s own family album of work over the past 11 years. A key was a photograph of the Mackintoshes, with Margaret and her friends in Edwardian flounced blouses and puffed sleeves, which sent Kane back to the suspended frills he designed in an early collection, and to reiterate his biker jacket in white lace, with a deep frilled collar. A beautiful long white lace dress was embroidered with snake’s head fritillaries, straight from Margaret Macdonald’s stylized drawings. A black grid-pattern tunic, covered in bugle beads and decorated with roses, was a direct homage to the design of the chairs in the famous Willow Tearooms in Glasgow. “And look,” Kane laughed, “there’s a tablecloth skirt with it!” A white cotton piecrust collared blouse and matching frill-trimmed skirt was, in his mind, “the waitress.”Going fully Scottish led to plenty of Kane side narratives, a whole storybook of ideas for everything from the basic everyday thing, like a Royal Stewart tartan mini-kilt, to the elaborate white patchworked dress for “a ceilidh!” There was a tangent which went punkish, involving “Angel-wing” angora knits, marabou feathers and silver chains worn as chokers, earrings and—quite brilliantly—adapted as the chain-link handle on a tartan bag.
Finally, there was the autobiographical quirky bit—the “Cleaner” subplot, with domestic sponges attached to patent shoes (a continuation from Fall, but now also bedazzled with crystal jewels on the toes), and the gingham taffeta smock and pants Kane attributes to seeing his mother’s cleaning overalls as a child. She wore those “when she went out slaving in schools to keep us all going. I suppose that’s why I’ve always liked gingham.”Still, none of this was obvious as an open scrapbook of literal inspirations from all those layers of Glaswegian history, personal and national—well, except for theScotlandsweater, and the one with the red Scottish lion rampant, from the royal banner. Kane is a designer rather than a cut-and-paste image appropriator. What’s important to him is that his sources are “genuine and authentic to us,” he said. “And people really respond to that.”
16 June 2017
“Process. Process. Process,” a female voice-over repeated on the Christopher Kane runway. It had an automated, machine-age ring to it—and indeed, there was a description of Kane’s interest in factory workers and lab technicians in the press release. Really, though, what Kane was hinting at was the primacy of his own creative process, an inexplicable firing of the synapses which can decide he likes traditional pink damask one minute; oatmeal sweaters and plasticky holographic fabric the next; and pointy, strappy heels decorated with strips of spongy gray foam after that.In his studio in Shacklewell Lane last week, Kane was discussing with his sister and deputy creative director, Tammy, how neither of them particularly felt like making statements about “a girl” this season, and how they were “just enjoying being spontaneous about choosing shapes and fabrics.” Kane’s interest in “blobs and jagged edges” was one of the things which had been floating to the top of his mind. The language he was using was far removed from the autobiographical insights into the Scottish Catholic high school upbringing he’s given recently.There was nothing loosey-goosey about the execution, however. The damasks, which are by Gainsborough Silks, woven in England since 1903, and more often applied to furnishings, were graphically precision-cut into neat coats, skirts, and dresses. Shot taffeta in peacock blue became a roomy-shouldered New Wave coat and matching shirt, and several of the whooshing sunray-pleated skirts which have become a Kane signature. Improvising where his eye took him to, he picked up 3-D haberdashery sequinned flowers and dropped them on the patch-pockets of plain cotton drill A-line skirts and a beige raincoat, and scattered them on paillette-embroidered chiffon.The effect—lots of variety here—was of an edgy glamour with an industrial aura about it. The spaceship prints have a story of their own. They proved to be reproductions of the work of the New York outsider artist Ionel Talpazan—a product of a kind of naive, obsessional futurism. Perhaps it was that which set Kane off on another idea for marketing which no designer has thought of before. A Christopher Kane handbag launch, coinciding with the show, literally launched a neon lemon clip-bag into space. The resulting video, one of the oddest and funniest fashion commercials ever, shows the Christopher Kane bag orbiting Earth before crashing into a field.
Viewers can find the bag on the Christopher Kane website, where it, and other accessories from the show, lie in wait to buy now.
20 February 2017
Christopher Kane’s discovery of outsider art began on the Internet, and then it got real. He flew to Vienna to shoot his Pre-Fall looks at the nearby Art Brut Center Gugging, a psychiatric institute that became known for its artistically talented residents. The trail that led him there was his stumbling across the work of Johann Hauser, a Gugging artist who died in 1996. “He had drawn a woman in a yellow dress that was so close to the Princess Margaret on Acid collection I did in 2011,” he said. “It freaked me out!” Kane visited Gugging last summer, met the artists who work in a studio converted from a schoolhouse, and donated to the institute before designing a collection that references some of their art. A big, naive smiley face on a sweater signed “Reisenbauer” is one; the glittery flower prints set out in rows on organdy are inspired by another resident.The lookbook was shot in the gallery (which is open to the public and funds the institute), the studios, and against the surrounding country landscape. If there’s something Kane is saying here, it’s probably to do with getting back to spontaneous creativity and the value of nurturing it. Whatever, the end result is far from dark and angsty. There’s a playfulness in the sparkly flowers; a touch of ’30s eccentric elegance in the long lines of pleated midi skirts and the puffs of ostrich feather; a dash of brilliance in the metallic and plastic cut-outs that become collaged earrings or dingle-dangle trims. The more Kane allows his mind to wander and free-associate, the more curiously compelling his work becomes.
6 February 2017
“Look where we are—in the Tate gallery, this incredible building, which still has pock marks from the bombing in World War II,” saidChristopher Kane. “It’s part of being British that we pull through.” The title of his collection was Make Do and Mend, also the name of a 1940s British government pamphlet of how-to tips for women about adapting their clothes to last longer in times of rationing. As always, women especially cared about keeping up their appearances, even at a time when walking out of their homes meant taking on the risk that they might never come back again. As we do today.That said, of course, Christopher Kane didn’t have anything like a ’40s collection in mind. The recycling here had to do with trawling through his own past, both as a kid in the small Scottish town of Newarthill and as a designer who today celebrates his 10 year anniversary of showing inLondon Fashion Week. He pointed out a coat printed with souvenir Polaroids and backstage shots as his “patchwork of memories,” a tag that could be a subtitle for this collection as a whole. But despite this nostalgic framing, it was hardly a sentimental, loving-hands-at-home character that Kane put on the runway. With her greasy hair and her feet jammed in Crocs—surely the least redeemable of footwear as far as fashion sees it—she was a definite oddball, perhaps touched with Catholic guilt but, as Kane put it, also “radical, sexy, a real predator.”He would be delighted if this girl makes people feel queasy, or at least uneasy, with her leopard-spot latex raincoat, slit pencil skirts, and her propensity for going out in a black leather coat with punched faux broderie anglaise edging—and nothing underneath except a covering of sheer black stocking. That divisive sense of shock accompanied his first collection—the lacy, frilly, body-con dresses that he reprised in a couple of iterations today. In 2006, the riskiness and risqué-ness of those dresses was tutted over by an older generation who initially dismissed them as vulgar. But younger customers ran toward these pieces with girlish laughter, finally recognizing in them something designed for their age group—the perfect thing for dancing, fun, and teasing boys.The situation is very different for Kane in 2016. He proved himself to be a young designer who was never limited to one look or, indeed, the youth market.
On the runway today, his ability to appeal to sophisticates—say, the daisy-form lace coats; the liquid, pleated metallic lamé dresses; the really pretty tiered pink lace dress, veiled in black net—was plainly on display, balanced with the subversive undercurrent of something not-quite-right.The thing Christopher Kane is most afraid of is complacency and self-congratulation. “Looking back to go forward” is the way he’d rather put it. Revisiting the recesses of childhood always brings up new things for us all—in Kane’s case, part of it, this season, was thinking about the Catholic grotto of Carfin in Scotland, and the iconography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the patron saint of his school, Taylor High. The ideas, the “alchemy,” which happens when old ideas are seen in new ways, led him, somehow, to picking out rocks, crystals, and semiprecious stones to be set as dangly earrings and necklaces. They added yet more to the hoard of materials and memories that will go into his mental archive as he passes this career milestone. And no doubt they also stoked the lusts of Kane collectors the world over.
19 September 2016
“Everyone is a target, when it comes to grief, or theft,” saidChristopher Kane. Last night, he posted a rainbow watercolor on his Instagram account (handle:@kanechristopher82) with brokenhearted sympathy for the victims of Orlando, and the caption #NOTOHATECRIMES. He was standing in his store in Mount Street with his sister Tammy in London today, explaining how they had grown up in Scotland in the ’80s and ’90s surrounded by a culture where football hooliganism, sectarian Catholic-Protestant gang tensions, and standoffs with the police were a regular part of life. That is how the idea of graphics used by British police for shooting-range targets ended up on his parkas and bags in the men’s collection he was previewing. “I’ve been working on it for four months. It’s about our childhood near Glasgow, and what we saw then; that is what I always do.”The sensations of fear experienced in Kane’s teenage years are always shot through his work somewhere, but this time, all too obviously, the imagery has accidentally accrued a traumatic overlay of topicality. The unintended contextual perception on this day, of all days, is painful—but then again, it links back to the terror of male violence that Kane has seen with his own eyes and abhorred since childhood. Perhaps he will be judged for making a poor judgment here, but more fairly, should not the judgment be on the enduring scourge that makes this subject one ever more unavoidable in our culture?Anyway, the subject of gangs and subcultures per se is one of the wellsprings of menswear, and hardly a divergent source. With Kane, it’s specific: the working class—or rather, unemployed class—of neds who Tammy Kane remembers meeting for pitched battles in Motherwell on a Saturday afternoon after Celtic-Rangers soccer matches. “You knew to keep out of the shopping center on match days.” Neds, though? “Non-educated delinquents!” she translated. “Even though they were poor, mind you, they were always immaculately dressed, with clean socks and wearing Stone Island,” her brother chimed in. “And Versace Jeans Couture—and Galliano and Westwood!”Well, what lad would guess at this backstory when approaching a store rail with pieces of this Christopher Kane collection hanging on it? Whether he’s attracted to the giant pansy-pattern sweater or the pink cotton T-shirt that reminds Kane of prison-inmate uniform, or the reflective techno thread in the stay-pressed pants, no matter.
It’s only clothes, though definitely not ones to go looking for a fight in.
13 June 2016
“Pansies are a symbol of freethinking! I like that. I never want to follow trends,”Christopher Kanesaid, with a glint in his eye. “Pansies also look like they’ve got cheeky laughing faces. And they’re all these colors because they’re crossbred. And that’s what I’m doing now—crossbreeding my ideas.”All these reasons lay behind the botanical strain that popped up in his Resort collection: as huge printed gazar flower-heads, collaged into dresses, as cutout leather bags and scattered in miniature form all over tomboyish ankle boots. The press release suggested a more rebellious, or perhaps stubbornly rooted, personal meaning too: “It’s not about referencing or marketing. It’s about doing what you think is right, ‘working instinctively.’ ”Kane was showing his Resort on the runway for the first time, or rather in his shop in Mount Street, to an audience, which, conveniently for him, is enjoying a gap day in London between the Dior and Gucci extravaganzas. Kane-ologists, who’ve been following his collections for almost a decade (it’s 10 years in September), will be quick to recognize, or half-recognize, the new hybrids here. The flowers are reminiscent of the hit “scrapbook stickers” collection, the gingham checks from his “Lolita” show, the randomly patchworked Lurex-shot mohair cardigans a carryover from his “crash and repair” season. Still, what’s far more important than the game of “spot the back catalog” is Kane’s ability to seed desire in a potential customer—the feeling that springs up when he cuts that fine line between something chic and something just a touch suspect.Did he do that this time? Twice, at least. There are the innocent gingham dresses that turn out to have sheer netting inserts between the school girlish pleats (and a more sophisticated party version in pearly iridescent sequins). And there’s the way he styled his strappy satin dresses with long leather opera-length gloves. Never has the potentially drippy slip dress seemed so subversively sexy.
1 June 2016
“Our mum used to embarrass us when she picked us up from school wearing one of those plastic rain hats,” said Tammy Kane,Christopher Kane’s sister. The very private world of the Kanes and their memories of growing up outside Glasgow in the ’90s will always inform Christopher Kane’s work. The Kanes suffered the loss of their mother a year ago, so the salute to Christine Kane was there at the beginning of the show, transformed into tied-under-the-chin plastic rain hats—the work of Stephen Jones. But searching for a linear trail of clues to make sense of how Kane processes ideas into clothes is never all that helpful. Briefing a crowd of journalists after the show, the designer spoke about reclusive hoarders, an outsider point of view, somebody living behind her own psychological bars. “She doesn’t know how to get out. She’s stuck.” Kane finds beauty in that manic predicament. “Things are so normal these days,” he shrugged. “So why not think out of the box?”Really, the thing to watch a Kane show for are the creative fusion points where he produces something we’ve never quite seen before, trophies of fashion that you know on sight you’d urgently like to make your own. To this pair of eyes, that electricity hit halfway through this collection. The section of asymmetrical black tailoring, jackets, and scarves fringed with ostrich feathers in red, green, and faded pink had an off-hand elegance that would cause a mayhem of envy walking into any room. There would be no regrets spending the money on one of these: They had the quality of long-term classics a woman could—yes—hoard in her wardrobe to bring out again and again.What else? Nearly ten years on from his neon body-con debut collection, which consisted of one tight (in both senses) statement, Kane is backed by Kering and has many commercial categories on the go and to show. The tubular Swarovski sparkle-mesh “bolster” necklaces the Kane siblings made for thatoriginal 2006 showcontinued as lanyards dangling sunglasses, or were whipped into whorls as big glamorous brooches around faceted stones. Crystal-dangling alphabet charms were pinned along necklines and scattered across skirts. A part of the show that involved haberdashery ribbons and scraps of fabric samples was also available in the form of one of Christopher Kane’s zip-top envelope clutches. All these came under the heading of little accessible things young girls can afford to show off with.
A new gothic-type “K” logo on a beige sweater also seemed aimed at keeping a young audience engaged, which Kane needs to do to keep his brand hot.Treading that line between reasonably affordable novelty and luxury is a really tough balancing act now—and obviously, that doesn’t just apply to Christopher Kane. On the elevated side, he can do a gray mink coat now, and the complex party dresses he’s made a name with are just as weirdly sexy—like the ones made from alternating stripes of tan pleather and sheer black lace that started the show. But the pressure to encompass it all, all the time, is a strain for every designer when the whole fashion environment is in upheaval. The underlying narrative of a woman in a disturbed mental state that came through Kane’s show today is easy enough to link with so many of this season’s other creative excursions into surrealism. It’s a mad world out there.
22 February 2016
The literal incorporation of motifs you see on the streets into clothes made to be worn on them is a path well beaten, most recently by Anya Hindmarch and Jeremy Scott. TodayChristopher Kanefollowed this road too, but went at it in entirely his own direction. Well, not quite entirely: Kane’s creative ignition was first turned by the automobile assemblage of John Chamberlain.The mangled, angled vortices of impact explored by Chamberlain were adapted by Kane as plastic zigzag trims on the pockets of mid-thigh hoodies, the outline of chest panels on double-patterned shirts, and a navy-on-gray sweater. A great concatenation of time-lapse lightning bolts juddered in white down a black tracksuit, and in black up a white mac—a serious look. A montage of jumbled, disordered shapes, like Chamberlain’s work up close, was applied as pattern to knits and intarsia suiting.Other, non-Chamberlain, street-sourced details included T-shirts dripped with grids of high-visibility green. Dark denim and some fine shearlings—loose, and some of them a touch ’80s—were licked with more lurid shades from the palette of driver awareness. The underside of Kane’s coats’ cuff straps came lined with the type of reflective fabric favored by wary cyclists—one parka was coated in aluminum so rigid when manipulated as to so be sculpt-able by its owner. The silhouette was more freeway than street: Trousers were wide and straight and styled with asymmetrical turn-ups; outerwear verged on the cocoonish. Nylon bombers (very, very well-made), pants, and tees were printed with a great illustration of Chamberlain’s crashed cars. Having not scoured Kane’s rails for a little while, it was a pleasant surprise to see how his once-afterthought menswear output has broadened into a carefully balanced, pretty-much-complete offer.
11 January 2016
There's a truism about the malleability of memory that each time you try to tell a story from your past, it's bound to come out slightly differently. That's definitely the case with Christopher Kane's Pre-Fall collection, whose reveal today, with its ruffles and reshuffles of his major hits, falls on the brink of the year of his tenth anniversary. “Yes, these frills,” he remarked, looking at a wickedly chic, off-the-shoulder short black dress hanging in his studio in the East End of London. “I did them in my first show in 2006, remember?”Well, yes, but at that time the frou-frou trimming was synthetic and sourced from a street-market (Kane was onlyjustnot a student), and now it resembles something more chiffon-y and dark in a Catherine Deneuve–meets–Marie Antoinette sense, though it's young, too (there are frilled pockets to plunge your hands into, to retrieve an iPhone for nightclub selfie moments). Selfies hadn't even arrived in 2006, remember? And before, there weren't the clear Perspex earrings and the pin-on squiggly patterns which ramp up this delicious look to the peak of desirability, either.Experts in Kane-ology will likewise spot the tiny gray body-con bandage dress in this collection which is another direct throwback to his first show. They will also be able to parse the rewritten visual sentence which has what looks like strips of plastic gaffer tape criss-crossing the surface of a dress in fluorescent acid yellow, and chopped up randomly over a pair of elbow-length black leather gloves. The neon is a flashback tohis "Princess Margaret on acid" collection, and the tape—which also appears in a different guise on jeans—is from his Frankenstein show, a few years back.The thing about being a tender, very young designer, full of fast and furious creative ideas, is that you rarely have the chance to benefit from them at the time. Things move too quickly to go into a product in depth, and it's all hand-to-mouth survival. Now, with the backing of Kering, Kane has the capacity to build a world out of the cached memories he has stored up—and now, they pop out again, reconfigured in everything from sweatshirts to tailoring to cashmere sweaters to long evening dresses.They're recognizable, reminiscent, fully realized as a wide commercial collection, but that doesn't make them make them literal reissues. Doing that might be read as cynical or just lazy—two things Christopher Kane would probably rather give up than be described as.
He is still young, and rethinking his past collections (which all come, in turn, from his childhood and teenage memories) can still fuse ideas together in thrillingly new ways. This season he did that with a black cutaway dinner jacket overlaid with two fans of transparent pleated fabric—ineffably elegant, sophisticated, sexy, and unforseen. Not the work of an ingenue, but of a grown creative force coming into his own.
4 January 2016
“Last season, she discovered sex” saidChristopher Kane. “Now she’scrazyin love!” Kane’s work is always about who he is, where he comes from, and what he’s experiencing at the time. And some of the creative connections he makes are through language. The word “crazy” is the one with the emotional double meaning which set him off this time. “Our life has been a bit of a car-crash recently,” he remarked, in a preview at his studio. He did not spell out why that is, but he and his family have been dealing with the recent loss of their mother and of Christopher’s mentor in the past year or so. Thus the imagery of car-wrecks, fractured shapes, jagged cutouts, and spray-painting filtered into his dresses and tailoring.Perhaps it was his raw state of mind that led him to look at the instinctive, unfiltered nature of outsider art, a train of thought that led him to apply naive hand-stitched motifs to sweaters and leather coats, and to apply frayed white chiffon frills to collars and pockets. Another sideways leap made Kane think about mental institutions and medical science, hence the woman in the blue shirt, banded with wipe-clean plastic cuffs and a strict skirt: “Like a nurse who’s going to give you a lethal injection!”Belaboring explanations is never the way to “understand” Christopher Kane, though. Getting him is always a case of whether you appreciate his electric fusion of weirdness and chic. There were jolts of that sort of current running through the details—narrow plastic “restraint” tags on black silk dresses, worn as chokers and decorating bags; a reprise of Kane’s signature neon lace in even sicker combinations of orange, yellow, and lime; and funny envelope clutches cut in the shape of cartoon explosions. Fun, odd and elegant by turns, this was a show which covered a lot of bases. No matter what life has been throwing at him, it proved that Christopher Kane is a solid designer.
21 September 2015
Christopher Kane's menswear lives quite comfortably in the shadow of his more prepossessing women's collections, but it plays a valuable role in that it often renders his current fascinations more direct, especially when the silhouettes of menswear are so familiar. If his collections for men miss the eerie quality that infuses much of his womenswear (when he talks about an influence as unlikely as the cultists of Jonestown, it somehow makes perfect sense in the light of the clothing), they make up for it with an upbeat, boyish accessibility.The key word there is "boyish," like the flolloping puppy-dogness of Kane himself. That meant the peachy tone that is a Kane standby could look fresh in a man's trenchcoat where it might occasionally look clammy in, say, a woman's sheath dress. The bolster detail (long broken strips of color borrowed from the necklaces Kane made for his graduate collection) had a rave-y verve that, toned down in a bomber over a matching top, will look particularly good on boys and girls (same with those irresistible aqua sneakers). And maybe it was the hearts all over Resort that made you think of surgery when you saw the sutured stitching, but for men it was a straight windowpane graphic, red on black, black on red.And yet, Kane is definitely edging his menswear into more complex country. The molecular printed tweeds—matching coat, shirt, and pants—were quietly forceful. The designer's own favorite piece was a jacket in a jacquard silk taffeta with a decay print. A little dark, a little decadent, a little look into the future.
15 June 2015
Affairs of the heart have consumed Christopher Kane of late. "I'm always falling in love," he said blithely while presenting his new collection this week. But there was also the heartbreak of his mother's death earlier this year, just before he showed a Fall collection with an explicit, erotic "lover's lace" motif. That's a whole gamut of emotions right there, and Resort suggested Kane is still running it.He made the heart his focus, as a symbol of love, of life, and of something stranger. There were traditional love hearts embroidered and printed on skirts and dresses, and then there was aqua lace and liquid silk stitched together with what looked like the surgical suturing that would follow a heart transplant. The emotional and the clinical, the sensual and the scientific, classic Kane contradictions, but no more classic than the face-off between innocence and experience that he was also talking about. For innocence, there was an outfit he called a "gospel dress," properly mid-length, with a big Quaker collar, and another dress in pleated georgette printed with little hearts that would suit a Sunday school teacher just fine. But it's nothing as basic as old-time religion with Kane (even though he and sister Tammy were raised Catholic in Glasgow, Scotland, near a spot where the Virgin Mary made one of her miraculous appearances). He is obsessed with cults, particularly the one that surrounded Jim Jones, so it's faith gone bad that underpins some of those proper looks of his. And that sounds properly ambiguous, which probably accounts for why innocence doesn't always work for the designer. It can turn sickly sweet, like the tulle princess dress with the little molecule pattern. (Mind you, the very notion of sickliness is probably magic to Kane. He nurtures the extreme response.)No such problems with experience. Counterpointing the pale aquas and lilacs and Kane's favorite shade of nude was a hellaciously worldly red, ravishing in a full-length sheath of red lace hearts. The "Elizabeth Taylor" dress was an off-the-shoulder black sheath decorated with black lace hearts and chunky heart-shaped crystals. (One of Richard Burton's gifts to Taylor was the Taj Mahal diamond, the same size and shape as Kane's crystals.)The same decorative element was used as the closure on a devilishly chic cutaway tuxedo jacket, a new emphasis on tailoring being one side effect of Kane now having a more direct pipeline to his customer through the store he just opened in Mayfair.
He said the longer lengths were also the result of customer feedback. The ladies of London asked, Kane answered, with a gorgeous pleated sundress falling to mid-calf, or a sinuous lace thing in sober navy, which the designer topped with a lab coat made of Swiss lace sandwiched between two barely there layers of plastic. This curiously clinical touch was echoed in the red leather elbow gloves with the black heart appliqué that Kane paired with the pleated sundress. "Dr. Love and Dr. Death," he said cryptically. And maybe that's his own version of Alexander McQueen's touchstones, beauty and horror.
12 June 2015
Christopher Kane's interest in the sciences has helped shape his utterly original voice. It has, at times, brought a bold, sexual undercurrent to his work, never more so than with the mesmerizing collection he showed today, in which it was nothing short of the molecular rationale for human desire that he was seeking to express in his designs. Clothes are often described as "sensual" or "sexy," but Kane's were unabashedlysexual. According to the show notes, the dynamic zigzag that bifurcated a sheer lace dress represented the current of anelectric orgasm. The last looks were made of Swiss lace—not pieces but whole panels—depicting a tangle of anatomically correct nudes. The same writhing figures were traced in glitter on a sheer tulle dress that, in silhouette at least, was otherwise as high-necked-and-below-the-knee proper as any church dress.And that was the startling crux of the collection: the way that Kane counterpointed high necks and long sleeves and sensible skirts and ladylike ruffles with suggestive sheerness and cutouts and huge safety belt buckles used as a leitmotif on tops where they "sexually slotted into place" (imagine show notes written by Masters and Johnson). Opening with what could be considered his version of Le Smoking—the jacket zapped with a hot red lapel—Kane moved onto simple velvet pieces with naked silhouettes that were starkly beautiful, then sinuous chiffons and variations on snake prints, the common theme in them all the idea of seduction (the Serpent being the original seducer). But seduction is a dangerous game, and Kane allowed disorder to intrude in looks whose asymmetrical, unfinished randomness suggested the heedless nature of desire. The story got more lubricious as it unfolded, culminating in those pieces made from "lovers lace," duplicating the sketches that Kane and his team made during life drawing classes in his studio. The show closed to the Andrea True Connection's "More, More, More," an anthem from disco's hedonistic heyday. It sealed the feel that the collection was about things that happen at night. We all look better in the dark, after all.
23 February 2015
Christopher Kane has found himself a very workable formula for his men's collections. He launches them in complementary tandem with his women's pre-collections, the message of one compounding the impact of the other. Here, for instance, there was a rather gorgeous extemporization of the peek-a-boo detail in the women's Pre-Fall collection. The way in which the fabric was folded back, autopsy-like, in the womenswear was echoed for menswear in a pattern of 3-D cubes that was straight out of an eye-teasing Escher drawing. It began as a mathematically precise pattern on a sweatshirt or blouson, then gradually broke apart, first as a jacquard in a suit, then as a shattered graphic on an oversize tee. (Pair that with track pants, and you had an outfit that serviced Kane's hip-hop constituency.)Kane is a quick study. This collection was tightly edited, very clean, very linear, with a strong accessories range attached. His first shop will open in London in a month or so. It will carry his menswear. Smart move —there's a real breadth evolving here.
8 January 2015
Christopher Kane is fashion's master of the remix, giving old ideas a new spin, although with his new Pre-Fall collection the most striking idea was only as old as his Fall '14 collection. That show's stunning finale, leaves of organza fluttering like the pages in a book, was revisited here in dresses with cutouts folded back like sheets of paper. Given that the exterior was black, the interior pink lent the effect the visceral impact of a fashion autopsy. Kane was enchanted by such a disturbing notion.Also coming around again were the floral embroidery on patent leather (Fall '10) and the cute little stickers (Spring '12) applied to oversize cashmere coats in pink and navy. The body-consciousness with which Kane made his name reemerged in high-stretch bandage dresses, in figure-hugging knits limned with zippers, and in wide straps of black patent leather that bound jackets and frocks. (Once upon a time, he tried for the same look with gaffer tape. Guess everything gets bigger with success.)What really stood out was how canny Kane is at commercializing his own creativity. Wearability is his mantra with his pre-collections, which means they present themselves as more linear, maybe morecoherentthan his main lines. Even so, there was no sense of holding back with these clothes. Flourishes of "mechanical Art Nouveau," bonded with leather and vinyl, yoked and collared dresses in silvery lace lamé. A black patent-leather biker jacket exploded with a curly sheepskin lining. And then there were the more subtle touches. Look closely at a decorative intarsia and it was more a weed than a precious flower. Further testament to Kane's remix mastery: Nothing was quite what it seemed.
6 January 2015
Professor Louise Wilson's death has had a profound effect on the students whose lives she shaped. We've seen a slew of tribute collections. But Christopher Kane's today may have been the deepest. For some time, he's been inclined to probe his own past, and reanimate ideas he never fully explored first time round. Back then, when he was a student at Saint Martins, he designed pieces using ropes and cords, like those in the bondage images of Nobuyoshi Araki, one of his favorite photographers. Here, the central motif of the collection was again ropes and cords, but they had a symbolic weight, tying Kane's past and present together, linking Louise Wilson and the legacy she's left in designers like Kane, even, on the most basic level, tying together the beginning and the end of this particular show.Kane's collections tend to veer vertiginously, challengingly between sets of themes, but this one was comparatively straight-ahead. That meant it was scarcely the most exciting thing he has ever shown, but that was balanced by the fact that it was the most sophisticated. Which, he insisted, is exactly what Louise Wilson would have expected from him. There was something extremelyproperabout the color palette, based on Kane's school uniform. Same with a Chanel-like twinset, or a silvery, pleated slipdress, or a pantsuit in black duchesse. But each of them was subtly unhinged—maybe by the leather track pants Kane showed with the twinset, or the casual tie closing on the jacket of the pantsuit.Another old idea, the "controlled explosion," offered up some of the best looks of the show, with tulle breaking out from underneath collars and hems. Kane has always been expert at suggesting a new life lurking under the surface of his clothes. It may simply have been the respectful tone of this collection which meant it wasn't quite as challenging or vibrant as usual, but even on mute, Kane can still leave you with a heightened sense of the peculiar in fashion.
15 September 2014
Christopher Kane loves his Resort collections. He cherry-picks his past for inspiration (like the embossed leather he presented for Fall 2012, or the sheer looks here, which he called his MA-isms because he first visited them in his graduate show at Central Saint Martins). He indulges his appetite for the glamorously grotesque: last time snakeskin, this time leopard, in fuchsia or a yellow lurid enough to remind him of the grittier stretches of Hollywood Boulevard (he's just been on holiday in L.A.). And given that he is constantly fizzing with ideas, Kane uses Resort as a pressure valve, a way to get stuff out of his system, overload on it, so that he starts Spring with a clean slate. For this collection, that meant neon.Lotsof it.Like his fellow Saint Martins grads, Kane had his late professor Louise Wilson on his mind this week. "'There's no such thing as bad taste,'" he quoted her. "'It's justdifferent.'" Where do you even start with the differences in a Kane collection? It pushes technical boundaries as much as it fearlessly pushes limits of taste. It turns the shouldn't-work into a triumph. Sensational star of this particular show was "Decades," a sheath shaped from a farrago of neon lace patterned after a century's worth of floral motifs hand-drawn by the designer in the style of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, psychedelia, and more. The neon-and-lace combination was the collection's gleefully extreme cornerstone. Brassieres were showing in his lace-trimmed "X-ray" dresses. There were underwire lace cups on other dresses. "There's a definite emphasis on boobs," he said. But those neon lace flowers also trimmed denim cutoffs and formed knee patches on oversize boy pants.The extraordinary creativity, workmanship, and brash life in these clothes give cause for regret that they are recorded only in the pages of a lookbook. But such is Kane's profligate genius that it's hard to imagine exactly what means of transmission would do his work full justice. 5-D?
18 June 2014
The hyper-sophisticated graphic sense that sparks Christopher Kane's womenswear translates brilliantly to men's T-shirts. No irony there. Spring 2015 showed why. The fabulous 3-D flipbook effect from Fall's finale was strikingly reinterpreted for knits and shirts, as well as T-shirts. Then Kane pushed it into the tailoring that is an increasing strength in his menswear, though here, too, it was a suit from his Fall 2012 collection for women that dictated the silhouette.Maybe that hint of reuse was one of the things he had in mind when he was talking about the "economy" of his men's collections, but that wasn't to suggest that he was skimping in any way. The oddities that are such a distinctive part of Kane's design personality have now worked their way into the bloodstream of his designs for men. One sweatshirt rendered the turning-page motif in a collage of screen-printing, flocking, and metallic foil. Reversible outerwear, a new development for the designer, flipped pinstripe and neon. Ah, yes,neon. Between his Resort collection and this one, Kane well and truly exercised—and maybe exorcised—his love of fluoro shades. But here's hoping he never loses his appetite for bad taste: Polos woven in harlequin or checkerboard knit were, he said, "shirts for darts players." Exactly. And only Kane could get away with that.
15 June 2014
"She's a girl named Kate who thinks she's really great, but she's not." The wonderful song that soundtracked Christopher Kane's show today was by Chandra Oppenheim, whose single, edgy 1980 release has become a lost nugget of post-punk gold. Chandra was 12 at the time, which surely qualifies her as a child prodigy. That's a category in which Kane can match her, on one level at least (although he'll be a great big kid forever). His huge new collection was yet one more geyser of creativity, a spill of ideas that prodded fashion forward in unanticipated new ways. And if the spill was toxic at times, that was simply a measure of his limitless imagination. For every light, there's a shadow. And vice versa.There was a lot of that in this collection. The vice was humble black nylon; the versa, lustrous mink. Together—fur lining a nylon coat, for instance—they made the most provocative statement about the fetishistic heart of fashion that we've seen in many a dark moon. Kane toys with desire in ways that unsettle. You'll hear women talking about howimpossibleit is to resist his clothes. His recent collaboration forLovemagazine with Japanese eroticist Nobuyoshi Araki possibly infected this collection. The nylon was initially used as an almost military accent—there was even a quilted nylon "life preserver"—but it transmogrified into something more perverse: a ruffle on a skirt, a harness-like bodice, a lace-trimmed petticoat. A chunk of black PVC in the middle of it all was like a huge exclamation mark, adding heft to the elevation of nylon.But the thing about Kane is that his collections are never just aboutthis.There is alsothat…andthat…andthat.As one story was poking you, another was insinuating itself, the nylon hybridizing with guipure lace and fur; a linear scattering of crystals running like LED lights up and down a gorgeous double-breasted coat in ice pink; knits that were oddly evocative of an uptight Victorian blouse, except that they were in the sickest shades of yellow or Pepto-Bismol pink. One of Kane's signatures is mad science. The reproductive botanicals of his Spring collection were echoed in the lenticular imagery that he slotted into tops and skirts. This effect alone was so peculiar that you couldn't even imagine itoccurringto any other designer. It was promptly followed by pieces whose "sleeves" looked like sinuous Plasticine forms into which the models' arms were inserted. The creation of new forms is a challenge for designers in any discipline.
Kane leaves us with indeliblenewimages from every collection.This time, he saved the best for last. Kane said he'd been looking for a different way to treat organza. His solution? Dresses composed of fifty dark-trimmed leaves of the fabric, ruffling like the pages of a book in a dulcet breeze. Sculptural, ethereal…there may have been a hint of the unsung Roman couturier Roberto Capucci. But the vortices created by the dresses in movement were pure, mad-scientific Christopher Kane.
16 February 2014
At Christopher Kane's collection there were still the oversize tees and elastic-waist pants that have proved such a hit with the hip-hop community (this season, printed with the molecular design that the designer has adopted as the scientific motifde la saisonfor his women's Pre-Fall and his men's Fall), but what immediately stood out about the designer's new menswear wasstructure.Proper tailored suits and coats, in jacquards textured like snakeskin, instantly linked the clothes to his Pre-Fall collection, a celebration of the serpent. Also connecting to his womenswear was the use of black as the building block. But where Kane's men's collections will always diverge from his womenswear is their infusion of the quality he calls "super-boyishness": He can't help inserting his own playfulness. So here there were adorable cabled angoras in royal blue, orange, and the extraordinary toxic green that was so striking in Pre-Fall. There was a blue vinyl parka, a simple pleather mac, and a sleek black thing Kane called "an opera coat for boys." And, of course, those money-in-the-bank tees and sweats, deliciously squirming with serpentine molecules. Kane's menswear has turned into a serious business, but—structure or no—it is still spurred on by his sense of snake-fearin' mischief.
5 January 2014
Christopher Kane is not too proud to name his shame. He's an ophidiophobe—he's terrified of snakes. But, just like the song lyric goes, fear is a man's best friend. From the very beginning of Kane's career, snakes have slithered through his collections to great effect. He claims it's got something to do with his Catholic upbringing: Adam and Eve, original sin, sneaky serpents in Eden. Fact is, everyone should be so lucky as to have such a creative outlet for their manias and phobias, especially when snakes have so much to offer in terms of texture, pattern, color, sinuous silhouette…All four distinguished Kane's Pre-Fall collection as one more sterling addition to a repertoire that continues to hypnotize as effectively as, well, as a hooded cobra. Except that this time, it was the boa constrictor that Kane had his eye on. It made its presence felt in huge, elasticized, snake-printed bands as wide as a wrestler's belt. Kane used one to put the squeeze on a dress that was little more than a huge square of satin. The result—a bit like belting a Hefty Sak—didn't work as well as the tightly wrapped biker jacket, though it did highlight the risks Kane likes to take with his silhouettes. They tend to pay off. Those tricky falling-apart dresses he first showed last fall? They were huge sellers. This season, he added zips, for a little more structure.Where Kane makes his riskiest moves is often in the shadow land between propriety and vulgarity. A lesser talent might trip over a detail like the frill of snake-printed chiffon that spilled from seams, or the denim pieces, also snake-printed and trimmed in black leather ("It makes the snake even more evil," Kane exulted.) Or the goat-fur jackets, luminously tipped in a near-toxic serpentine green or blue. (The designer thrilled to the prospect of them paired with high heels in fuchsia snake.) What marries good and bad taste in a Kane collection is his unique, unholy, alchemical ability to transform the monstrous into the glamorous. He'd call it "weird science." It was responsible for his latest visual motif: a molecular structure that cropped up on football-jersey tops, as fastenings on a snaky jacquard shift, and as jewelry with a double-helix flavor. This time next year, you can expect to see the Kane molecule going viral.
5 January 2014
He stands alone. There is simply no one else whose postshow rationale could run a gamut from peekaboo cutouts based on "sterilized petals" (his words), to the equivalence of the female anatomy to a flower, to inspiration derived from the process of photosynthesis, to the inadequacy of high school sex education. All of those elements were present in the collection Christopher Kane showed today, but, as fearsomely academic as at least some of them sound, the overriding impression was enchantment. It was a joy to see Kane take a sweatshirt and satin skirt—gorge grunge—and make the outfit quizzical by slicing out one shoulder and trimming it with the same crocodile clips he used to pin back skirts like he was dissecting them. Same thing when he applied those sterilized petals (they looked like metal teardrops) to a long, mint green tank dress. So much exposure, so little revelation. Genius.Spring '14 has gone furiously floral in London, but there was a primal fierceness to Kane's use of flowers. "I never like to do anything like anyone else," he said (mild understatement). "We live because of flowers and trees," he said. "They produce oxygen. But we take them for granted." His effort to redress that situation involved an emphasis on flowers' reproductive capabilities—and their inevitable correlation with women. If they weren't quite as graphic as Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings, Kane's spreading blossoms still managed a lush physicality. Some of the most startling pieces in the show featured magnetic, silvery images of reproductive organs, trimmed with cellular filigree. The staging of the presentation—acres of mirrors—created a cloning effect as the models walked, which offered another unanticipated kind of reproduction.Science and medicine are Kane's wellspring. He lifted the arrow motif that was a graphic feature in the collection from a textbook describing the oxygen-out-carbon-dioxide-in process of photosynthesis. And he said the last dresses were "like huge textbooks blown up." The presentation suggested he wasn't happy with the way school taught him science, never mind sex education. "Another Brick in the Wall," Pink Floyd's classic of classroom disaffection, soundtracked the finale. But what a spectacular way to redress childhood injustice. Yep, he stands alone.
15 September 2013
"I love science," declared Christopher Kane in his studio the other day as he paraded a Resort collection inspired by the kind of digital imaging that defined the dawn of computerized special effects. Remember wire frames of landscapes, torsos, and heads slowly revolving to suggest three dimensions? Kane does. He re-created the effect in Swiss lace and inserted the result so successfully throughout his collection—from a sweatshirt to an evening dress—that he was left with a feeling of frustration. "I couldkickmyself that it can't be main line."The lace was delicate, sensual, and slightly sinister, almost like a viral web. That's exactly the kind of mixed message he excels at. Fall 2013 was such a sprawling summation of his career to date that it suggested this collection, his first since he signed with French fashion behemoth Kering (formerly PPR), would be the opening page in a brand-new chapter. That didn't happen. Kane is so original a thinker that there'll always be the shock of the new (here, the lace), but Resort's most instantly irresistible looks—sheath dresses snared with "paint smears" of transparent tape—were actually throwbacks to the body-consciousness of his first collection seven years ago. And the huge diamond buttons reappeared from Fall 2010. They worked equally on a chambray jean jacket or a little peplumed item in puppytooth.Which is always the way that Christopher Kane covers the waterfront, from casually girlish to precisely adult. In between, he allows himself experiments that defy taste and logic, becauseweirdscience is what compels him in his quest. It's thrilling to think he might just be getting started.
16 June 2013
Christopher Kane's collections for men can't help but look like something of an afterthought when ranked against the often-startling breadth of his womenswear. It's an impression he would seem to be compounding by transposing elements from the women's collections in a more basic way. But you can't shortchange Kane over this. As his Spring menswear confirmed, a more "basic" approach to the substance of his womenswear actually yielded a strikingly graphic variant on it. Here, the wire framework of early computer imaging was reproduced not in lace but in jersey and intarsia knits. Stark wire heads were right off the sleeve of a Kraftwerk greatest-hits package some years back. A luminous wire landscape undulated eerily across a matching trio of coat, shirt, and shorts. Head and landscape merged in what looked like a pattern of isobars that resolved itself into a huge face. If you're looking to wear a techno-shaman on your chest next spring, Kane's your man.Still, it's inescapable that there is something pretty elementary about Kane's clothes for men. Tees, sweats, shorts, slacks—that's about it. He began to address the shortfall by adding a couple of tailored pieces for Spring, but it's pretty obvious where the sales action is going to be when next season rolls around.
13 June 2013
Dr. Frankenstein has become something of an unwitting mentor to Christopher Kane. The monstrous new life of Kane's Spring offering was matched by the starting point of his latest collection: an MRI of a healthy human brain, pulsing with consciousness. It was reproduced on a handful of streamlined items late in his show today, just before a final group that was intended, claimed Kane, to represent the brain exploding, literally fizzing with creativity. And that made one sharp metaphor for a collection which—fueled by French luxury conglomerate PPR's recent investment—marks the start of Kane's liftoff into the fashion stratosphere.The fizz of this definitive moment in his career was captured by the exuberant excess of a 60-look show. Too much, carped the odd critic, but it was diverting to imagine that the point of the profligacy was to underscore the scope of Kane's abilities for PPR honcho François-Henri Pinault, parked in the front row with his wife, Salma Hayek. Hence, a presentation that embraced the rich sobriety of a navy coat-dress trimmed in luxuriant fox, the punky directness of a black-leather-and-camo-kilt pairing, and a dress formed from elegant swirls that suggested the Art Nouveau motifs of Glaswegian design icon Charles Rennie Mackintosh.Kane has already visited some of these ideas, such as camo and kilts, in the past. Today he revisited his archive to reanimate a whole lot more: gothic velvet; detached hems; the appliquéd flowers from Spring 2012, echoed here in the rosettes of feathers that studded Jourdan Dunn's sweater-and-sheer-skirt set; and, always, the punky nonchalance of the bad girls he remembers from his childhood. They may, in fact, be the presiding spirits of his career to date, and if this was Kane's way of saying "Goodbye to All That," clearing the slate for a glittering future that will look quite different, it was a spectacular envoi—for him, for us, and for them.
17 February 2013
When Christopher Kane noticed that guys were buying the Frankenstein T-shirts from his last collection for women, it was a no-brainer to add monsters to his new season's offering for men. Not just Frank, but Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. They fitted perfectly with the pop-goth sensibility that is one of the tentpoles of the extraordinary Kane design ethos. Color it black and purple ("Always relevant for me," said the designer) and dress it up with animal prints: a leopard scarf, a jaguar-print shirt. Add electric blue velvet pants, a dress shirt trimmed with goatskin, a sweater in a 3-D knit chenille, and you've got yourself a proposition as outré glamorous as Lux Interior's psychobilly band the Cramps. Kane sealed the deal with velvet slippers, embroidered with flowers, appliquéd with monsters, and all the footwear you could wish for the undead man in your life.
7 January 2013
Now that Christopher Kane has shed his outside obligations, his focus on his own brand has intensified. First fruit of the new focus: his first pre-fall collection. And what a way to start! Kane isn't one of those designers who uses a pre-collection as a test for the upcoming season. Instead, he'll resuscitate old ideas that didn't make it into the main line (here, there were some revisited prints) or refer back to favorite shapes and fabrics. It's a smart move, because Kane is coming up with so many ideas for each collection that it takes more than one season to truly come to grips with them. Spring's monster mash came 'round again, this time with Dracula and the Creature From the Black Lagoon on T-shirts, and the specter of the Werewolf lurking behind shredded denims and refined dresses with patches of silk thread designed to fray at the touch of a claw. "I like the look of things worn in," said Kane, knowing full well it will be a triumph to translate such a notion at retail.Kane has always been a master of the macabre and here, beyond the trad monsters of Hammer horror movies, he was equally tuned in to monsters of the mind. There was a creepy old Hollywood vibe, like Norma Desmond or Baby Jane holed up in their shadowy mansions on Sunset Boulevard. Maybe it was the combinations of tulle and velvet, or those unsettling little details that Kane is so good at. Gazing upon a long skirt in a gray floral print with a weird splash of fluoro, the designer shuddered. "Long and floral freaks me out." He topped that skirt with a sweater in chenille with the greasy nocturnal luminosity of a black panther. The incontrovertible truth is that these excursions into the vaguely unacceptable are what give Kane's clothes their irresistibly eldritch glamour. A bustier dress in a jaguar-printed goatskin trembled on the brink of a taste so bad it was have-to-have-it good. (There were slip-ons to match.) Swarovski's contribution to the collection—crystal necklaces mimicking DNA's double helix—underscored the fact that Kane is generating new fashion lifeforms. Dr. Frankenstein, I presume.
1 January 2013
At first glance, the early parade of pristine white on Christopher Kane's catwalk felt like a direct reaction to the sinister darkness of his Fall collection. Then reason asserted itself. There is nothing direct in Kaneland. The vision of polished elegance he presented today was as underpinned by strangeness—maybe even a hint of horror—as all his work is. You didn't even need a guest appearance by Boris Karloff (Frankenstein on a T-shirt) to get that, though Frankenstein helped to clarify clothes bolted together with big plastic wing nuts. After all, the good doctor also attempted to bolt together new life from a handful of unlikely, even unpromising, ingredients, and that's a reasonable metaphor for the ambitions of the average fashion designer.Kane's scarcely average, of course, and it's highly unlikely he imagined himself down in the lab making fashion monsters. But he certainly revels in unlikely ingredients. There were cocktail dresses here seemingly concertina-ed from a hundred plastic shower caps that, given the free associations the designer usually makes after his collections, took the overactive imagination toPsychoor that hotel bathroom inThe Shining.In which light, didn't the elegant folds of fabric that draped Kane's dresses look a little like hand towels? And what to make of all the pieces delicately constructed from a filigree of injection-molded rubber? In fleshy pink, it quivered slightly clammily. "Girls love a bit of rubber," Kane said blithely. His coup de grâce was a finale of dresses in palest organza appliquéd with crystals and white lace seemingly held down by random applications of black gaffer tape.Some of the propositions felt like an upmarket evolution of ideas Kane visited in his resort collection. The safety belt closings, for instance, here reconfigured as bowed belts that snapped shut. The gaffer tape could have been a re-definition of the earlier collection's splashes of punk. Kane's own description of his palette was "colors that make you feel a bit sick."He's super-self-aware like that, and gleefully fearless with it. As beautiful and sophisticated as the clothes he showed today were, he's happy to drop a tragic, misbegotten monster into the mix. That dichotomy is where his enchantment lies. What were the words Screamin' Jay Hawkins was wailing while the audience filed out? Oh, yes. "I put a spell on you."
16 September 2012
God made Woman from Adam's rib. Christopher Kane, not being a major adherent to the sanctified status quo, flipped the formula for his new men's collection. He took the rib from his womenswear. The roughed-up prints, the flowers, the floral-painted twinsets scarcely reeked of testosterone, but it was a mark of Kane's astuteness that he knows why a guy would be drawn to his clothes. Oh yes, he revisited the tracksuit, icon of the hardscrabble council estates in Kane's hometown of Glasgow. Oh yes, there were ass-kicking Chelsea boots with zings of fluoro. There were jeans, too, because that collaboration with J Brand denim is sailing along nicely. But in the end, it was Kane's sly, languid subversion of boot-kicking butchness that lingered longest in the mind.
26 June 2012
Christopher Kane took a pragmatic, cheeringly un-precious approach to his new Resort collection. "The buyers are drawn to what wedid," he said at his Paris presentation. Emphasis on the past tense. But the oldies were still the goodies: fabulous little crepe dresses with panels of knife-edge pleats, fashion details like safety buckles and belt clips, the slightly sickly baby blues and pinks, the cracked leathers, even the pool slides from last summer. And never forget the Versace-referent chain mail, with which the Kane story began so spectacularly in 2004, with his graduate show at Central Saint Martins.Kane delved even further into his own back pages with a section based on antique photos, which he bastardized with punky splashes of pink. "It felt good to do prints again," he said. "Good not to be sotechnical." The result had the slightly skewed whiff of perversity that adds magnetic appeal to almost everything Kane does. But he said a flat "no" to the suggestion that the same weird whiff might be hanging around the new-looking fluffy knits. Sister Tammy, majordomo, sounding board, and everything else to Kane Inc., has just had a baby, and her kid brother was feeling broody.
24 June 2012
Given his track record to date, Christopher Kane could probably retire the award for Most Arcane Influence. His latest was a career best: Al Pacino's gay serial-killer thriller,Cruising, which inflamed the early eighties. Kane imagined the kind of girl who might infiltrate the lurid sex clubs depicted in the film, quietly playing voyeur. She'd have to be a very odd bird, indeed—and a pretty tough cookie, maybe like the girl in a photo from Joseph Szabo'sTeenageseries, another personal favorite of Kane's.Anyway, all of that—the lurid, the sinister, the scandalous—came together in a collection that used extraordinary technique to induce visions of darkest sin. Kane reveled in it. He took to moiré, for instance, because it reminded him of "the inside of a coffin." He compared the red he used to "a vial of blood." It was one component of a morbid, synthetic palette—black, purple, hectic blue—which, when it shaded florals or leopard print or that moiré, brought to mind Baudelaire'sThe Flowers of Evilor Huysmans'Against Nature, masterpieces of nineteenth-century decadence. The big black blooms flocked in black velvet on purple tulle mesh said all that and more. The thick black leather cording that belted and hemmed sheathlike dresses implied more up-to-date transgressions.The collection couldn't have been more of a 180-degree from Spring's mesmerizing airiness, but the lacquered, oily artifice of these clothes exerted its own kind of attraction, at the same time as it daringly courted revulsion. Once again, Kane beaded and embroidered flowers, but where they were heavenly last season, here they were hellishly tangled and clotted, paired with cashmere knits densely threaded with wire. Maybe that was a mad mirror image of the pinstripes that opened the show. And weretheya subtle evocation ofWall Street, another New York-in-the-eighties benchmark—and another world where bad things happen?
19 February 2012
The models on Christopher Kane's catwalk today were such a devastatingly lovely confluence of clothes, hair, makeup, and genetic benediction that you could only crave illumination as to how it all had come together. Then Kane gave you the background—how he'd randomly come across some photographs of girls in grim council-estate bedrooms, the paper peeling off the walls behind them, their stickers and scrapbooks nearby—and you were quickly enlightened as to how the very best designers are actually alchemists, capable of transmuting the most marginal, even unpromising material into pure gold. Because that's what Kane's collection was.The characters he was thinking of were, he said, "the girls you hate at school," hanging out together, bullying boys as much as other girls. It's a curious vision of feminine strength, to say the least, but it's hardly the first time Kane has taken such a dark, tricky tack. And ultimately, what counts is what he does with it. From that initial spark, he sits and draws and draws… and draws some more, until what's in front of him is a universe away from his original inspiration. That's what happened here. If the girls in their cricket sweaters and short skirts might have echoed the sporty sorts Kane remembered from his own gym classes (jiggling while they jumped, to the boys' delight), the way he articulated dress seams, folding and spreading fabric, was almost unearthly, suggesting the wings on which kids in hard times wish they could fly away. In a spirit of uplift and optimism, Kane made his opening dresses from Lurex yarn and brocades (inspired by the peeling wallpaper in the photographs) so they glistened richly. The flowers he appliquéd might have been derived from the cutouts in a schoolgirl's scrapbook, but he floated them in a trim of sequins. It was all about intense, focused craft.Another, even more extraordinary group was cut from "ghost fabric," 70 percent aluminum organza, so fine it was practically invisible. Four layers were used in a dress, and still the effect was elusive, even when it was anchored with more floral appliqués in a ravishing combination of colors. The unlikely inspiration for a final passage of richly beaded pieces was the decoration on an old patch pocket Kane found at a flea market. Cutoff denims (the fruit of a collaboration with J Brand) were also encrusted, as were the pool sandals that were the show's sole shoe.
Yes,pool sandals, the flat footwear called into play when Kane decided to make everything shorter. They helped ensure that the attitude of the clothes was energized and, in some skewed way,real. They also underscored the fact that Kane is an utterly original talent, a maverick mind who finds beauty where others don't even begin to look.
18 September 2011
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
30 June 2011
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
26 June 2011
Christopher Kane's latest collection was a weird, wonderful, and distinctly grown-up journey, but at its dark heart there might have been something as sweet and simple as childhood memories. The crochet that opened the show was the kind of traditional craftsy throw you might see on a rec room sofa; the extraordinary plastic trims that arrived to infect severe black shift dresses were inspired by the squidgy pencil cases filled with glitter and colored liquid that were a schoolkid craze at some point in the Kane infancy. The sequins at the finale reflected the carbonated fizz of a SodaStream, another kids' fancy.According to Kane's sister and collaborator, Tammy, the collection's starting point was a simple challenge: Let's find a textile that's never been used. That's where the idea for the plastic filled with encapsulated liquid came in. The fluid itself was actually a mix of vegetable oil and glycerine. As it warmed on the models' bodies, it began to bubble its way up through its plastic casing. The designer loved the echoes of a scientist's lab. "Sterile, medicinal," he enthused. It's always the way with the Kanes—clothes with, in this case, an almost stern sensuality sparking associations that border on the twisted. The crochet, for instance. Its cozy domestic associations were blown to smithereens when it was shown in somber shades in a revealing skirt that would do a B-movie bad girl proud.As far as technology went, the collection was some kind of breakthrough for the designer. The mood was as hard as the plastic breastplate that topped a black wool pencil skirt. There was a dare-you edge of confrontation in the plunging necklines, the veiled breasts and bared midriffs, the sequined sheerness that slithered like scales over skin. As with last season's vinyl-coated fluoro leather lace, Kane fearlessly courts bad taste. It's a fascinating tightrope walk, but watch out, world, when hereallylets the dogs out.
20 February 2011
Wasn't it only yesterday that we were in Princess Margaret's apartment in Kensington Palace for the Acne show? She was the Rihanna of her day, the good girl gone bad, and clearly she's struck a chord for Spring 2011, because today Christopher Kane was name-checking this royal muse."Super-sophisticated," he called her. His sister Tammy nailed the essence of the latest Kane collection as "Princess Margaret on acid." A more contemporary spin, and a drug more relevant to the lurid fabulousness of the clothes, might be Margaret on meow-meow (a.k.a. cheapo ecstasy substitute mephedrone). An opening passage of fluoro lace was actually perforated leather with a vinyl coating, to make it "pleather-esque," Kane said. The notion of converting something as organic as an animal hide into a synthetic looky-likey hints at the twisted soul of Kane's work. This time, he had in mind the Cyberdog crew in Camden Market, pop pioneers of fluoro fashion. "Neon gets me going," he declared. "Every other color is so banal." But imagine neon in a pintucked dress in dotted tulle. Or picture the same eye-searing shades in a princess-worthy jacket, blouse, and box-pleated skirt falling to just below the knee, the most sensible length known to womankind.The queen's designer, Norman Hartnell, was a reference point, except that he never worked in pleather. And it's highly unlikely he ever had much to do with theyakuza, the Japanese gangsters whose tattoos provided Kane's print motifs (in a twinset, of all things). The whole package—classic substance, futuristic surface, tribal interruption—had something ofBlade Runnerabout it, but Kane resisted the association. "Cyberdog," he insisted. Either way, we were looking at a very particular and uncompromising vision of the future.
19 September 2010
"I like to be as focused as possible," says Christopher Kane, which is why his collections always have such a strong, clear quality. Resort was no exception. Following on from last Spring's bomb motifs, he opted for flaring nebulae, as seen by the Hubble telescope. He explained that he liked "the idea of explosive outwards expansion" (a nice metaphor for what's happening with his business), but all that cosmic hyperactivity also yielded some great prints (translating beautifully into silk cashmere knitwear, too), with plenty of the interplay between light and darkness that's a Kane signature.Nothing showcased that kind of contrast better than a biker jacket in chiffon with a frilled skirt attached. Kane offered the same piece in black leather, an accent carried over from Fall in high-waisted shorts, a bustier, or the bodice attached to an organza gazar skirt. Gazar also featured in a long princess skirt, gathered at the waist so it flared out. Mid-thigh, it zipped in half to become a skating skirt. Same with the halter-necked version, which Kane called a "housewife dress," though it was anything but suburban in its fiery print of cosmic catastrophe—a desperate-housewife dress, perhaps?Those full, flaring lengths and the palazzo volume of the pants were experiments with new silhouettes for Kane, perhaps not entirely successful in comparison to the Barbarella-sleek line of his baby dolls and drop-waisted T-shirt dresses, where his focus was steely. By the way, Kane named his shoes for Barbarella—maribou-trimmed Zanotti platforms, ironic bordering on camp, and a joy to behold.
11 July 2010
The first sight of what Christopher Kane does always entails a kind of sick stomach lurch, that slight vision-changing nausea brought on by witnessing something cheap and tasteless being transformed into fashion at speed—and not being able to tell quite how you're going to feel about it. This season, it was black leather embroidered with flowers patterned after parochial Women's Institute craftwork that did the queasy job. Spliced together with black lace and tailoring into a peculiarly Kane construct of prim and perverted, it was, in his words, "about a delinquent teenager." But then again, it always is, round here.The identity of this young woman shifts slightly each season, of course. This time, she started off as a schoolgirl Scots-lassie gone to the bad, a wearer of kilts (a Kane take on the A-line skirt with a flat front and swishy pleats in back) and tarty platform-soled gillies. In the second half, she assimilated the attributes of Priscilla Presley, the 14-year-old bride, decked out in dresses paneled in patent leather studded with multicolored jewels. Looked at closely, the starburst embroideries had double-edged resemblances to Elvis' show costumes on the one hand and church reliquaries on the other. Kane laughed about that: "Well, she was a good Catholic girl, you know!"As ever, all the references here somehow tie back into Kane's provincial Scottish Catholic upbringing and his bond with his sister Tammy, who he loved to dress to go out when she was a teen. Together, they're now running a mini-brand that already has recognizable staples: short, flirty party dresses; seasonally updated cashmeres (made in Scotland, by Johnstons); and an established heroine item in the reworked biker jacket—this season's is a totally stunning black patent flower-embroidered version with a white shearling collar. That's mighty impressive for a young designer—then there's the fact that he now also designs Versus for Donatella Versace and a line for Topshop. Still, he's at an age where he can stretch and experiment, and for all his focus and business acumen, Kane needs to be mindful not to get trapped in his own short-and-sexy formula. Fashion needs brains like his to move things on.
21 February 2010
Pretty yet perverted, innocent yet disturbing—with its gingham chiffon, fan pleating, puff sleeves, and thigh-split dresses, Christopher Kane's Spring collection walked the fine line between good and bad taste that has made his clothes such a phenomenon. The repetition of the central idea—complex, pieced dresses with inserts of pleats; pastel pink, baby blue, and navy or brown checks; bra cups; and panels of white rose-beaded embroidery—became relentless, mesmeric.At 27, Kane has already developed his own way of building emotion in a room. This time, it was to the compelling, melancholy sound of gospel and spirituals—such an odd choice that it had members of the audience pushing backstage to find out what was going on in his head. "I saw a documentary about the Jonestown mass suicides in Guyana in 1978, so I started thinking about religious cultism," he said. "But that only happened at the end. I was also looking at a photo of Nancy Reagan on the White House lawn, and the movieLolita. I loved Jeremy Irons' tailored vest in the remake. So that's where the suiting came from."Putting aside whether Kane's view of America will stir up a furor, the product, in all its detail, is quite brilliantly produced. That goes as much for the slash-shoulder cashmere sweaters and checked crop tops as it does for the dresses, which are made in London. That precision, and the whiff of something disturbing running under the charming surface of this collection, means Christopher Kane has scored yet again.
20 September 2009
At first sight: pretty. Second glance: loaded with visual aftershock. The dresses in Christopher Kane's first-ever pre-collection radiate instant-appeal commerciality in just enough of a subversive way to be interesting. "I wanted something natural, but I'm so fed up with florals," he explained in his London studio. "And then I came across these images of nuclear test explosions from the fifties to the seventies on the Internet. I like the crazy-bright chemical colors. The way they're sinister—but beautiful."The hyper-colored mushroom-cloud prints, sourced from free public-access photos on the U.K. Ministry of Defense Web site, are placed on innocent-looking suspended cutout baby-doll and georgette T-shirt dresses and some of Kane's signature soft biker jackets. "I wanted clean, sexy shapes that are quite easy to wear," he said. Most are short, but the newest-looking—possibly a direction for next season—is a mid-calf dress cleverly draped to catch the waist without clinging. The collection is further fleshed out with Kane's made-in-Scotland cashmeres, a "Shrapnel" organza dress decorated with grosgrain tabs that shimmy with movement, and crinkly washed leather jackets.All this, in addition to a mega-successful new T-shirt line (the latest have the explosions in black and white), an expanded collection for Topshop timed to drop in September, and his avidly ordered Fall collection for Versus: Is there no limit to Kane's prodigious growth? Well, maybe. The wedges in these pictures aren't for sale. "We didn't have any shoes, so we cobbled them together ourselves with gaffer tape and whatnot in the studio," he admits. "But I liked it, sort of walking on clouds!"
7 June 2009
"She's a bit of a twisted sister, I suppose," said Christopher Kane of the girl he had in mind while designing his collection, thinking over the somber colors and theNatural Born Killerssoundtrack that played through his Fall show. It was a slightly disconcerting shift to see the young designer who first hit headlines with a rainbow of neon-bright sexy dresses turning to gray and black, flat lace-ups, and tartan cashmere, and even apparently referencing the black-and-white grid patterns of fellow Glaswegian Charles Rennie Mackintosh in his graphic, ribbon-appliquéd dresses. Yet young designers are meant to surprise and change. If there was a new sense of street reality in the shearling-and-leather motorcycle jacket, the boyish trousers, and the first appearance of Christopher Kane tailoring in charcoal cashmere, he made it look refreshing. It was as cool as any hip girl could want, yet in that short opening passage, Kane also widened the collection to include other, more grown-up women who are always on the lookout for a perfectly tailored classic jacket (especially if it has Savile Row credentials, as this one does, courtesy of a collaboration with Norton & Sons).As for the dresses, Kane can apparently do no wrong either technically or in the eyes of the audience he's attracting, whatever the cost of the handcrafting involved. What he achieved in appliquéing this collection's stripes on organza, making the geometry intersect in blocks or spiral around skirts and sometimes break into vertical ripples in hemlines, is extraordinary. (For the record, Kane said Rennie Mackintosh never entered his head while he was designing; it was more the stripes on a blank TV screen that started him off.) Most interesting, though, is the point Natalie Massenet of Net-a-Porter was making outside his show. The organza scalloped dresses from Kane's Spring collection sold out on her site three times within a couple of weeks of delivery. "What we're noticing is that women who like Oscar de la Renta are also happy to buy Christopher, because they like its femininity and quality," she said, "as well as the cachet of discovering someone new." Somehow, Kane's creating a crossover product that is going places no one would ever imagine a young London designer could reach.
21 February 2009
It takes a unique mind to watchPlanet of the Apesand use it to start a fashion collection, but that's where Christopher Kane jumped off for Spring. He liked the apes' leather tunics. "It was that, and thenThe Flintstones, Raquel Welch inOne Million Years B.C., and then Dian Fossey and her gorillas," he said. And, like all little boys, Kane loved playing with toy dinosaurs. Hence, the stegosaurus shoes.Even his sister Tammy was incredulous at first. "When he started saying 'prehistoric,' I said, 'What? I don't know what you're talking about.'" But then the pair started work, and what emerged was an obsession with scales, which somehow morphed into half-circle 3-D geometric cutting in organza or leather, and even a bit of menswear fabric. Then he worked in bright animal-spot "Flintstone" cashmeres (made at Johnstons in Kane's native Scotland), photo-prints of Digit the gorilla, and finally, some suggestive marabou trimming on chiffon—a late thought about Peter Bogdanovich'sVoyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Womenfor that special borderline-tacky touch that always puts the finishing stamp on a Christopher Kane collection.Overall, it was a deft move forward for a young designer who needs to cement an identity and prove something more than an ability to come up with a novel idea each season. The circle cutting, which held echoes of Cardin or Capucci, looked young and modern—and provided a direct link to the giant paillettes Kane used last season. When the scallops stood out to frame a shoulder line or run up and down a pair of skinny pants, they looked head-turningly new, though when they turned into conceptual bundles, the wonder wore off. The sweaters continued his signature in a bright, accessible way, and the gorilla prints, though patched into two structured cotton dresses on the runway, will also be available as easy-to-wear and well-priced T-shirt dresses. Kane's still a designer who can hit fashion sideways with a new idea, but there are signs that he's beginning to think of how to turn what he has into a brand.
15 September 2008
The declarations that were flying through the air after Christopher Kane's Fall show ranged from "poetic" (a dreamy young editor) to "commercially sellable" (a store buyer) to "Virginia Woolf'sOrlandomeets John Everett Millais'Ophelia" (from a newspaper headline hound). It opened with a charcoal cashmere poncho knit, wended its way through khaki Aran tabards, and built up into shivery plastic paillettes on organdy contrasted with stud-embellished cashmere sweaters.In other words, no sound bite or literal theme adequately describes the way Kane's collection turned out this season. The manner in which he and his sister Tammy design is a kinetic process given to many changes. Witness: Two months ago he was thinking about the Queen, Barbara Cartland, and Big Bird. What they came up with, in essence, is a pretty contribution to party dressing involving veiled panels of sequins on dresses and a wispy suggestion of a longer hemline (transparencies were left to waft below the knee without constriction). Weirdly, if there's a criticism, it's in the fact that the frisson of vulgarity that was central to Kane's attraction in his first three seasons was somehow absent. On the other hand, maybe that's OK. At this point, Kane, like any young designer who wants to make it, needs something to sell without upsetting customers. And this Fall, the Glaswegian fashion prodigy may have put himself in a better position to survive.
11 February 2008
If Christopher Kane and his big sister Tammy hadn't had a bad babysitter in the eighties, their Spring collection might have looked very different. "It was the pair of us sitting on the sofa watching late-night horror films likeCarrie," said Kane. "AndCrocodile Dundee." The two movies set him off thinking about chiffon and eerie suspended ruffles on the one hand, washed-out denim and snakeskin vests on the other. Then he bought a camouflage T-shirt on Dalston market. And because it was summer, Tammy was working in a giant £5 T-shirt dress from Primark. And so it went.All these domestic details are material to the development of one of the most-watched young designers in the world. The Kane siblings work so closely their thought processes are virtually indivisible, to the point that the models in the show with their long, straight hair are dopplegängers for Tammy. Together, the duo can reinforce an odd combination of ideas until they walk the line between trashy and internationally elegant. One slip, though, and it'd be over.This time, the snakeskin prints, western shirts, and stonewashed denims flirted with what Christopher calls the "dodge" side, but it was the loosened, floaty nature of the silhouettes that caused more surprise. Instead of thigh-grazing, body-gripping shapes, there were flyaway chiffon ruffles, some in Christopher's camouflage print, as well as slouchy T-shirting pieces developed from Tammy's work dress. After many reiterations that included a beautiful long white dress with ruffles banded in snake, their casual-western-romantic message had fully registered. As the VIP audience left the building, the noise of discussion was deafening: Is this collection a watershed in the mood of fashion? Will Kane confuse customers by moving on so quickly, or is he smart to outpace his copyists? Will the chiffon mills of Italy go into overdrive overnight? Quite possibly, the answer to all these questions is yes.
16 September 2007
Scarlett O¿Hara; Rambo; Elvira, Mistress of the Dark—and a giant set of Swarovski-crystal bathroom knobs. These were just some of the rich and potent components that went into Christopher Kane¿s second collection. But they don¿t begin to describe what came out: circle-skirted dresses decorated with corrugated ¿ammo¿ bands, gorgeous velvets spliced together with tough leather, huge crystal studs in place of buttons, wicked-witchy calf-length stretch dresses, and heavy-duty chrome-ringed belts.¿It¿s Paul Delaroche¿sThe Execution of Lady Jane Grey—and vindictive, man-eating women!¿ Kane rasped backstage, half-dead with exhaustion. It was a triumph, both for the designer and his sister Tammy, who is the chief muse, in-house model, and general egger-on in this remarkable sibling enterprise.Kane managed to confound skeptics who wondered whether he¿d be able to move on from the ultrayoung, ruffly neon-and-nylon-lace collection with which he made his mark last summer. He did, with a giant step into tough black and oxblood leather, sumptuous burnt orange, scarlet, and emerald velvet (tear down the drapes!) and an intensely creative sequence of work that patched fluid Versace-esque crystal mesh over a base of matte-black knit.Some caviled that at first sight it was reminiscent of Azzedine Alaïa, and (in the Elvira moment) the drapey stretch silhouettes of Romeo Gigli. But neither Alaïa nor Gigli used fabrics or combined colors this way. Kane¿s energy derives not from looking at fashion history but from the sheer enjoyment of working in a nonstop creative fury with his sister in their rented house in Dalston. The level of polish and accomplishment in this collection was precocious; you could put the show on a runway in Paris, and it would still shine. Kane¿s the strongest talent to have emerged in London in a decade—and more remarkably, his clothes are selling. Twenty-two dresses flew out of the London store Browns within two days of delivery, confounding the chorus of critics who called his first collection vulgar. Just one year out of Central Saint Martins, this young designer is an extraordinary star on the rise.
12 February 2007
Even before his first vivid-orange, elastic-bandage micro dress hit the runway today, 25-year-old Scot Christopher Kane was an international sensation in the making. In the six months since delivering his award-winning graduate Central Saint Martin's show in March, he has not only snagged a consultancy with Donatella Versace, but also found time between trips to Milan to whip up a further 50 fluorescent, frilled, crystal-trimmed, ring-jingling, zip-spliced dresses for his official debut.What is this look? Certainly the most intense and best-articulated example of the Versace/Alaïa nineties mania coming out of the London club scene. Driven by lust for eye-socking color and allover decoration, it zings with an amazing new energy and optimism. Or as one wag in the audience put it, "Oh! Hervé Léger meets disco poodle!"Virtually every dress featured the same body-clinging shape and the same length. But Kane had the conviction of thought to run through extraordinary color combinations—red with pink, lime with beige, royal blue with black, flesh-on-flesh, violet with green—not to mention dozens of pattern variations, encompassing stretch lace, chain mail, crystal mesh, brass rings and boudoir ruffles. All this had been accomplished in Kane's rented living room in the East End with his sister, model, and business manager, Tammy—and a little help from Donatella. Before the show, a consignment of shoes arrived from Versace with a massive bouquet wishing him every success. Looks like he's going to get it.
19 September 2006