Christopher Shannon (Q2778)
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Christopher Shannon is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Christopher Shannon |
Christopher Shannon is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
At 6 p.m. sharp—the start time forChristopher Shannon’s presentation—Edie Campbell and a crew jumped the queue and asked for entry. The door staffers were still working out how to use their iPads. “I’m dying for a bevvie,” offered a member of clan Campbell in a bad faux-Glaswegian accent. “Will there be nibbles and drinks?” asked another in totally fluent urban-hipster yah. The iPads blessedly fired into life. “None of us have RSVP’d!” said the nibbles-curious clanswoman triumphantly.Up the stairs and past the bar, Christopher Shannon was chilled. This event, he explained, was more fragrance launch than collection presentation. That fragrance, unimaginatively called Christopher Shannon Eau de Parfum, smelled zingily good. More than a year in the making, it has been produced by Shannon in collaboration with the nose Mark Buxton, whose back catalog of fine fragrances goes from Cartier to Comme.Shannon said: “This season I didn’t really want to do anything. I was just going to make some images and skip it. Then I thought, ‘How do I get people to smell my fragrance?’ And that’s what started it off—the fragrance. When they first came to me, it was great because I’d wanted to do one for ages. We had to have lots of intense meetings where I told them about my first emotional response to different scents. It’s like therapy.”And the clothes? Well, the lookbook was only just shot and there wasn’t much to see. Around the corner were four models slumped on a sofa next to a pile of comedy DVDs—the immortal Lee Evans was featured in their most recently watched—taking turns to play Halo on a game console. The pieces visible in the gloom included a T-shirt printed with “Sweet Tender Hooligan”—Shannon reported proudly that he wrote to Morrissey for permission and received it—worn under a tight cropped track top. Other pieces included reworked ruffled denim. “It’s more capsule-y than catwalk-y,” observed Shannon. “Going back to some favorites.” He added that he enjoys doing a quiet exhalation of a season sometimes because “it freshens you up.”
15 June 2017
“The onegoodthing about fashion is that it is international—you get to work with people from everywhere.” Christopher Shannon, the Liverpool-born, London-based designer, was briefing us about his response to the chaotic uncertainties of the post-Brexit, pre-Trump world, the inevitable factors that are the main subject hanging over the first cycle of fashion shows of 2017. Liverpool, like London, voted to remain in Europe, just as New York and California voted Democrat. “I’m proud of that,” said Shannon, but his own response to the creative predicament that poses is to be down-to-earth. “I made a promise to myself, a rule to be quite straightforward. I want to make clothes, not drama.”Shannon’s reaction was to deal with reality and stay with the lads, starting by looking around at the young men he’s surrounded by every day in the polyglot East End of London, where international money is still being poured into construction work. “The builders and couriers, their hoodies and tracksuits, the faded soft neons they wear. You pass them and hear all these different accents and languages being spoken,” he said. That’s an attitude the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, would heartily endorse. He opened London Fashion Week Men’s with a pledge to back creativity in the capital—which crucially involves defending the city’s thriving diversity, as championed in the #Londonisopen campaign, which city hall launched immediately when the Brexit threat to immigration reared its ugly head last summer.Shannon’s pragmatic remedy was a brightly patchworked, color-blocked sportswear and manual labor–inflected collection—jean jackets, painter’s overalls, nylon cycle tops, and padded jackets, spiced with unmissable shots of his mordantly subversive Liverpudlian sense of humor. Shannon’s continuing line in T-shirt slogans delight in not mincing words. He slyly mimicked brand logos—his own initials, CS (rather than CK), subtitled “Constant Stress”; a Timberland-like font became Tumbleweed; and a tracksuit was mock-branded LOSS International. And of course, there was plenty of ambivalence about the social disenfranchisement of the post-industrial globalization that has hit swathes of the north of England, causing the anti-European vote to bite. Some of the models’ faces, plastered in shredded remnants of nationalistic flags, said that—as did the Pete Wiley and KLF electronica soundtrack, with its naming of northern towns and industrial background noise. Yep, Shannon’s no Pollyanna.
All’s certainly not right with the world, but this was a cheerful fightback in the face of a tough situation. “Yeah, it’s sad,” he concluded. “But I didn’t want it to be miserable.”
7 January 2017
Christopher Shannonis a dazzling, ingenious, infuriating, and unpredictable designer. He’s possibly one of the best menswear designers in the world; he’s certainly high up there in London. What Shannon does is astoundingly clever—using the humdrum, the everyday, the plain naff, to create something inventive and progressive. He generally uses the language of streetwear—T-shirts, sweatshirts, his signature tracksuits—rethinking both appearance and function, making things that are complex and simple simultaneously.For Spring 2017, Shannon turned his attention to denim—you can’t get more humdrum than that. After seasons experimenting with tech textiles, he said backstage, he wanted to get back to something more basic, in terms of fabric but certainly not design. Denim isn’t just a textile, but a loaded cultural talisman. Think of denim and you could wind up anywhere from James Dean to Elvis Presley to Jason Priestley, with a swerve into the machismo sexuality of Marky Mark in his Calvin Kleins. Today’s outing reminded this reviewer of no lesser talent than DameVivienne Westwood, who in the early ’90s used denim as a proletarian palimpsest to express her cultural affiliations at that particular moment. A Trojan horse, to not only get the message to the people, but to get the idea on to their backs, printing pieces with rococo masterpieces, or shredding them in imitation of Renaissance dress. There were shades of all of those in this show, but for Shannon himself, denim took him back to his 2008 Central Saint Martins MA graduation collection, to rethinking some of those propositions with almost a decade of experimentation behind him.Shannon did just about everything imaginable with denim, except what you’d expect. In four hues from palest chambray to deep indigo, he patched it into tightly fitted sweatsuits or cut it into generous track jackets, and made lots of pairs of jeans and jean-jackets that were worn to tatters about the crotch and rear or dissected with riveted buttons to detach into shorts or a bolero. A couple bristled with belt-loops, like a denim-fur hybrid. Mutation was an underlying theme, in the cotton T-shirts (a rare denim deviation) that, as models turned, revealed an entire additional garment dangling from the hemline as decoration, or via drawstrings weaving through seams to enable the wearer to distort and distend the clothes as they wish. Jeans came with layered waistbands (more Marky) and a hop-along wide-skinny-leg hybrid.
Twisted normalcy is a good summary for what Shannon does. His desire this season was to “get back to focusing on the design and fabrication of garments.” In short, he stripped off gimmicks, so we could see what Shannon can really do, and what his label really stands for.What was on good display this season was Shannon’s acerbic wit. A series of graphic sweatshirts, toying with the logo of British activewear retailer Sports Direct, were an in-joke that plugged into the culture-jamming logo appropriation characteristic ofVetements. Shannon was cleverer. He had a message—“No Ideas Guaranteed” was plastered down one sleeve, which could be read as a succinct critique of so many other designers’ approaches.Or maybe it was a sarcastic, paradoxical label Shannon chose to affix to this innovative, excellent collection. A mark of his breathtaking confidence. Maybe Shannon was just taking the piss—because he knows the one thing that we can expect at a Christopher Shannon show is ideas. Lots of them. Great ones.
12 June 2016
“Comfort and Horror” wasChristopher Shannon’s theme for Fall. Pretty weighty words. But Shannon has always been one to imbue his designs with more than immediately meets the eye. London has many purveyors of pumped-up, jumped-up streetwear—some of whom sneeringly refuse to acknowledge the label, getting caught up in semantics when they should be devoting time to designing better clothes—but Shannon is the oldest. And, I reckon, the best. He’s the heir apparent to Kim Jones, and his shows throb with the same clash between brash, working-class machismo and high fashion.Until Fall 2016. Because, for Fall 2016, Shannon showed via an installation rather than on the runway. Hopefully it was a one-off thing, as the chutzpah of Shannon’s shows would be sorely missed—and, indeed, was today. His show was staged in the Alison Jacques Gallery in central London, and was inspired by a recent collaboration with artist Linder Sterling on costumes for a performance with the Northern Ballet Company. Although the stasis of the presentation gave you plenty of time to admire Shannon’s adept design skills, it simply wasn’t the same.When Shannon chose “comfort and horror” as the title and the inspiration for this outing, he was thinking about the suburbs of Liverpool, the northern English city he grew up in—the comfort of home, but the horror of being trapped there. The towering wooden structures at the center of the presentation came replete with PVC-framed windows. They wound up resembling the bare timber bones of a semi-detached home, the sort built in the much-repudiated mock-Tudor style by British construction firm Barratt. Those crop up on otherwise green and pleasant lands across the whole of the north of England—a comfort, and a horror.The dwellings house ordinary folk—who are also at the root of Shannon’s clothes. Not just for this season, though this outing was especially persuasive in extolling the obscure appeal of men’s boxer-short poplins in candy-color stripes and checks; chopped-up hooded jackets and track-pants sliced apart down the seams; and gold-chained medallions and earrings that were dandyish displays of the trappings of wealth.The cleverest bit of Shannon’s clothing is how simple it all is to understand. “I was thinking back to the boys who went out with my babysitters,” he said, Shannon’s being the second collection of the day to talk about blue-collar heroes.
You don’t need the deep backstory, nor to have visited Liverpudlian suburbs, to get a twisted sense of small-town life (and, indeed, pent-up teenage sexual frustration) from his clothes. They riffed on the preppy pastel palette, reminiscent of mass sports chains Esprit and Benetton in the patched, zippered wind cheaters and sweatshirts and varsity shapes.Those are also tropes Shannon has offered time and again, remixed and reimagined each season, a tight-knit web of garments in seemingly constant reinvention via his always-fertile imagination. It was pleasant to take time out from the runway rat race and admire his handiwork sedately for Fall—and it felt like Shannon pushed himself out of his comfort zone in doing so. But one hopes Shannon’s dynamic verve returns to London’s runways for Spring: The city undoubtedly benefits from his energy, and he irrefutably rates as one of its very finest.
9 January 2016
"That thong th-th-th thong." By closing his show with Sisqó, Christopher Shannon surely scooped most unlikely tune of the season—on day one!—plus simultaneously semaphored his increasingly refined brand of slyly knowing subversion. The whistles, the foam that was mashed into the models' hair, plus the occasional super-trash bikini top looped like a trophy around their necks all spoke of boorish package holiday hedonism: leering lads on tour hammered on 1 euro shots. Beneath that shtick, though, it was the lads who came packaged for leering at. Shannon's shirts were sheer; tracksuits and bombers came sliced apart and not altogether taped up again or featured vertical full-length zippers for every-which-way undoing. A white foam jacket had been vigorously rent asunder.There was a new-season section of signature Shannon pub-essentials knitwear, which this time came fine gauged and featured lighters: The Clipper was "Needy"; the corner-shop disposable was "Damaged"; while the Zippo got "Shannon" in honor of his latest commercial collaboration. (Press release quote from the designer: "I've long held an affinity for Zippo lighters since seeing my brother own one.") Another collaboration, this one with Cat Footwear, has birthed an excellently remixed 16-year-old sports-utility sandal. This was podium-ready hedonist sportswear.
12 June 2015
Spare us, please, another dose of Derelicte. Thankfully Christopher Shannon's carrier bag hoods heralded something more thoughtful than that. Outside the 1 percent-inflated bubble of central London, much of the United Kingdom is having a rough time of it right now. Broke and decried by some as broken, Britain is not in the best condition. So there's a context for a politically touched fashion statement—something not seen here often since Katharine Hamnett back in the 1980s. But where Hamnett's sloganeering was direct, polemical, and campaigning, Shannon's commentary is sideways, observational, and played for laughs: a portrayal reminiscent of Keith Talent in Martin Amis'London Fields.The blue and white stripes of a carrier bag emblazoned with "Save Me" in red lettering knitted onto a sweater echoed the "value" (aka cheapest) food range of Tesco, the U.K.'s largest supermarket chain (which is itself suffering a radical management-led downsizing). The "broke" slogan on a Coca-Cola-esque can and the "Thanks For Nothing" on the side of a generic corner-shop bag sweater decoration projected Pound Shop rage still further. Despite the slogans, however, Shannon's chief dialect is sportswear: oversized, popped apart, cinched by odd corsetry, or applied with a slick shine and teamed with chains, gel, and a scowl. Still, a real chin-stroker could work up a hypothesis about the designer representing a faceless, prospect-starved generation cast adrift on high streets awash with shuttered businesses. Yet whether this angers Shannon or amuses him is unclear.
9 January 2015
Christopher Shannon dedicated his show tonight to his mentor at Central Saint Martins, the late Louise Wilson, and it could have been her speaking when he complained that "no onedoesanything anymore." By which he meant that young designers now tend to resort to the ease of the Internet, putting things together onscreen, whereas the graphic collages that gave his new collection its personality were made by hand, bit by bit. Professor Wilson, always a staunch critic of digital convenience, would have been proud.But that's Shannon all over, bucking the trends, contrary by nature, shy and retiring to a fault. Which makes it all the more remarkable that his specialty is a brash, exaggerated, even sexy take on the sportiest of sportswear: sweats, shorts, anoraks, and layers of oversize tees. Tonight was no exception. Ground zero for his collection was apparently an emo teen's bedroom. Shannon mentioned scrapbooks and sticker books and the random collages on a teenager's bedroom wall as references pointing toward the careful construction of an adolescent identity. It was an endeavor that Raf Simons might recognize and, as with Simons, there's often something poignant in Shannon's work. Youth inevitably passes. But there's also an undercurrent of tongue-in-cheek slyness that runs through his presentations, last season's cigarette-packet knitwear being one example. This time there was a black onesie that zipped all the way up the spine. Surely you'd need an Other to do that for you. The same curious vulnerability was on display in shirts and shorts with random patches cut out to reveal the body beneath.Last week, Shannon was the recipient of the first BFC/GQDesigner Menswear Fund, with its pot of 150,000 pounds. It was wonderful that he was the winner, and the money will obviously grease the wheels of his business, but it's hard to imagine that such recognition from the nabobs of the mainstream will draw Shannon into the fashion fold. OK, for the first time ever, he took a bow at the finale. But it lasted a derisory millisecond.
14 June 2014
Christopher Shannon had two downbeat images in his mind when he started work on his Fall collection. One was a glimpse through the window of a derelict building into a room where floral wallpaper peeled forlornly from the wall. The other was a schoolboy walking home from football practice in the pouring rain. It's not like Shannon is one of those wide-eyed wonderers who finds beauty in everything. He's more the kind of mordant reactionary on whom Brit pop culture feeds with glee—Morrissey à la mode, if you will. And, just like Moz, the extent to which Shannon is drawn to inspirations that sound positively depressing, even grim, is determined by how much he hates the shiny, shallow way he feels things are now. "Raw and rough" is his ethos.And yet, it never quite reads that way in Shannon's clothes. The peeling wallpaper, for instance, became a surprisingly appealing floral graphic that "peeled" down shirts and pants, and loaned a curious kind of fragility to big sporty puffas. There was a little of Warhol in the idea of transforming such unpromising source material into something so artful. Even more so with the cigarette-packet knits which opened the show. "Ciggies are gross, but they look fabulous," Shannon chortled. His certainly did.Shannon placed his mental pictures of wallpaper and sodden schoolboy in the seventies. He wasn't around to experience those years firsthand, but they tug at his heartstrings for what he calls their "vibrancy amid melancholy." More significant for his career, it was also the decade that saw the birth of the tracksuit as casualwear. Like his mentor Kim Jones before him, Shannon has mastered the alchemical knack of turning the brass of basic athletic gear into the pure gold of a singular fashion statement. You could see the kid walking home in the rain in any of the models on the catwalk today. "Kitted, like a football team," was the way Shannon described their look. But the kit was completely transformed: a cagoule in peach leather, sporty knits flipped and elongated to the ankle, and tracksuits sprouting extra sleeves and tails like Siamese twins were all radical reinterpretations of painfully familiar everyday items. Same with stylist/jeweler/legend Judy Blame's oddly delicate assemblages of chains and pins and money, which Shannon draped around his boys' necks. "Raw and rough" may be his goal, but his sensibility is much finer than he lets on.
7 January 2014
The Christopher Shannon collection youdidn'tsee this afternoon had something or other to do with Mexico. "But I've never been to Mexico," Shannon said just before the show today, "and it's nothing to me." So he scrapped it and looked to an inspiration more personal: the club landscape of the north of England during the late nineties, when he began escaping teenage drudgery through parties. "As soon as I discovered clubs, I didn't go to school anymore," he said.Channeling the wild excess of party culture, and the defiantly unnatural clothing that was its unofficial costume, was a way back to an earlier era for Shannon. "I got into Central Saint Martins and got very serious and forgot that I'd ever been ridiculous," he said. Returning to his clubbing days in a spirit of glittery-haired celebration, he added, "felt very personal to me."Shannon's showsarepersonal. He styles them himself; he casts them himself. He expresses surprise that any designer wouldn't do it that way. It's a risky proposition, but his instincts are good. His clothes are genuinely salable; even the new materials his club inspiration licensed, like PVC, rubber, and vinyl, didn't lead him too far afield from the realms of the wearable. While many around him whirl into oddity (and its frequent attendant, obscurity), Shannon's feet stay on the ground. But as he proved here, that doesn't mean they can't move to the beat.
17 June 2013
Christopher Shannon insisted on "muckiness" and "dirtiness" as guiding principles. "I'm always around sportswear references, and they're quite clean," he sniffed. So he'd been casting around for new inspirations and watchingHoardersand the like in his off hours. Eureka. "Sometimes what you're looking at becomes your reference," he said with a laugh. "There's a fine line between art and mental disease."So stitch it in, pile it on. Many of the Shannon pieces were actually multipieces: jeans collaged from various fabrics, knits cobbled from bits of knit, part cabled, part flat, part… SpongeBob, was that, grinning from the upper right? They were a hoot. As before, Shannon acknowledged that commercial concerns were high on his list of priorities, so nothing odd was too odd. He'd expanded his repertoire, adding leather for the first time, in long-tailed shirts and jeans. It's canny to suggest your wares are hoardable, and that desire spares no one—so a group of girls hit the men's catwalk, too. The real surprise here, the shirtsleeves hanging on by a zip notwithstanding, was how clean and well arranged it all wound up looking.
7 January 2013
On the invitation to Christopher Shannon's Spring show was an image from James Pearson-Howes' series "British Folk," about, in the words of the photographer, the "darker, more obscure cultural traditions that persist in the U.K." In the picture, a man kitted out like some kind of Abominable Scarecrow trips through a scad of normally dressed locals in a U.K. town somewhere or other. "I think that guy's called the Idiot," Shannon said by way of explanation backstage after the show. "It's basically a drunken race."The shapes of the pieces themselves were rather conventional, as Shannon admitted backstage. They're elasticized shorts, collared shirts, polos, and jean jackets, kept simple, he insisted, because he wants them to be worn so. And according to one of his retailers, seen grinning his way out the show, that, for all their manic energy, is what keeps them selling briskly. His boys may have lost their heads, but he's got his.
15 June 2012