Danielle Scutt (Q2873)
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Danielle Scutt is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Danielle Scutt |
Danielle Scutt is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
2005
fashion designer
Danielle Scutt has a strong, sui generis design point of view. Actually, she has two of them: There's the Scutt who showed up on the Spring 2012 runway, all slouchy denim and rudegirl attitude, and then there's the Scutt of this season's forties-inflected collection. What unites the two is a lack of prissiness: Whether in her tomboy mode or tapping a vein of glam, Scutt is a designer with a commitment to conveying female strength through her clothes. That's almost enough of a through-line to stave off whiplash. Still, it's hard to look at the new collection—a tightly edited group mainly comprising well-wrought, full-skirted dresses—and not wish that it had been infused with Spring's streetwise sneer. Just so, last season you found yourself looking in vain for some of the effortless womanliness in plain view here today, and in Scutt's collection for Fall/Winter 2011. If and when Scutt manages to bring the womanliness and the toughness together, she'll be a force to be reckoned with.
21 February 2012
Danielle Scutt returned to the London runways last season with a collection of soigné, sexy, womanly clothes. This season she did a 180, treating her collection as a platform for the exploration of male youth subculture. The funny thing is, it wasn't hard to find the through-line between the two shows. Scutt's integrity as a designer is based on her commitment to her own present preoccupations; she can go from being consumed by the challenge of looking glamorous to listening to Tupac and reflecting on the influence of hip-hop and skinhead aesthetics on her own sense of style. Her collections have a stream-of-consciousness quality about them: Though disciplined in terms of craft, they are weirdly unedited.So this season it wasThug Lifeand suspenders and tartan that were on the designer's mind. She veered between being very literal with her references and being refreshingly unbeholden to them. On the one hand, there was a T-shirt that actually said "Thug Life," and a few fantastic, fresh-looking pairs of dark, low-slung jeans. On the other, Scutt took her rude-boy cues and made cropped, crisp white blouses with sculpted sleeves and tartan ruffles, and she closed the show with a fitted, ruffled dress that appeared to be made out of old RIP Tupac tees.Elsewhere, Scutt roamed further afield, sending out several excellent looks in glitter-polished voile that she draped into dresses and skirts, and a few more challenging pieces that incorporated densely pleated silver lamé. Generally speaking, she was pretty thorough as she explored this collection's key ideas, but here and there one got the sense that she might have done more. To wit, there were the other denim initiatives, such as acid-washing and borderline-tacky ruffled denim, that could have been better extrapolated. You got the sense that Scutt was just at the beginning of her thought process with those pieces when this collection came due; maybe she'll continue to work out those ideas in her next one. Providing, of course, that she hasn't moved on to other preoccupations by then.
19 September 2011
Welcome back, Danielle Scutt! Showing today for the first time in three seasons, Scutt sent out a forceful collection that confirmed her assertion that she's spent the past year doing some growing up. Certainly, the looks here were polished: Scutt has that rare ability to make really sexy clothes look sophisticated, thanks to sharp tailoring and wit in the design. On the understated end of things, there were her knee-length pleated wool skirt, slit up to there, and sleek knit jumpsuits with diving necklines, both looks for high-IQ vixens. Scutt's body-hugging crushed-velvet dresses were nervier—a little louche, yes, but not crass. That's a fine line, and Scutt kept the dresses modest enough to stay on the right side of it.The designer's riskiest idea this season was to craft a wide mesh from pieces of silk, and then drape it like cloth. The mesh appeared in a host of winning garments, including a skinny suit in black and a hot pink pencil dress with dramatic pouf sleeves. The craft here was breathtaking, and it was refreshing, too, to see looks redolent of old-Hollywood glamour that weren't narrowly referential of it; Scutt just conjured the mood. She also did well with her outerwear, in particular an adapted trenchcoat that draped at the back. The silhouette was dramatic, but its oversize proportions gave it a nice, shrugged-on feeling. This was glamour re-spun as cool.An additional note, about the jewelry: Freedom, which produces costume jewelry for Topshop, collaborated with Scutt on the statement pieces worn in the show. "Statement" might not go far enough in describing the impact of the shoe clips, chain belts, chokers, and frankly wackadoodle earrings, comprised of teakettle, ear, and lipstick charms, but it will have to do. At first the jewelry seemed nuts, and then it struck you that maybe that kind of fun is the whole point of costume jewelry. Girls who want to indulge can do so this spring: The Scutt jewelry goes on sale April 1 at Topshop.com, and will be available in select Topshop stores starting in May.
18 February 2011
Something's going on with squiggles and ruffles and frisée-edge frills this season, and one way to diagnose the influence is to point the finger at Zandra Rhodes—Marc Jacobs, for one, has already quoted her. Danielle Scutt certainly appeared to have taken a shine to the odd Zandra-ism when her Amazonian women turned up in a mixture of prints with black wiggle graphics and upstanding chiffon lettuce ruffles outlining the leg-of-mutton sleeves of a few tight-waisted peplum jackets and puffing out the shoulders of a flounce-skirted housecoat. Backstage, though, the designer came up with a different reason for the wavy lines and not-far-off-flamenco ruffles. "It started when I was looking at seventies souvenir postcards with pictures of ladies with flounced polka-dot skirts collaged on in fabric," she shrugged. "Zandra Rhodes was not in it."True, there were draped tube and flippy skating dresses, too, and other details (strange translucent aprons, for example) that didn't fit the Zandra thesis. Still, in the case of a designer with antennae as finely tuned as Scutt's, trend atmospherics are bound to impinge, if unconsciously. Her collection is an indication of which way a certain strand of fashion is going.
18 September 2009
It's not fair to thrust an eighties theme on a designer who didn't intend one, but that's what happened to Danielle Scutt after her show. Where others saw something Mugler-esque in the black suit with dramatic red cutout lapels and skirt detail that opened Scutt's show, she saw…prize cockerels. "The red shape's from the coxcomb they have," she insisted, shrugging that the eighties mean little to her: "I was only born in 1981."Nevertheless, Scutt's woman, with her manipulated feather-print bodysuits and strong shoulders, is an unmistakably feisty bird who is now bent on survival. Scutt said she'd returned to her obsession with decorative poultry breeds—a theme she's explored before—because she wanted to do something intense and condensed in a tough financial season. "What I like about cockerels," she explained, "is their plumage and their pride. And because I could only do a small show, I started remembering everything you have to do to stand out when you're graduating from Saint Martins: Make the strongest statement you can in a few outfits." Still, Scutt used her airtime on the runway to prove that she's come a long way from a student mentality in some ways—the dramatic swing-back coat and a re-embroidered printed jersey tunic dress had the hallmarks of a growing sophistication.
21 February 2009
Danielle Scutt wasn't lying idle while she took a break from showing last season. In her time out of the tungsten glare, she developed a thing for print and chiffon, and went to the West Coast of the U.S. for the first time on aWshoot with Bruce Weber. That set her off on an Americana-derived creative trail that had her hand-painting images "inspired by a vintage Norma Kamali dress, Andy Warhol'sInterviewcovers, Helmut Newton shoots, and hairstyles in eighties U.S. _Vogue_s."The result: checked, floaty georgette A-line dresses accessorized with beaded bandana necklines, towering updos of multiple knotted headscarves, side braids, hard lipstick, shades, and gold hoop earrings. Softer and more wearable this might be than Scutt's original tourniquet-tight collections, but it's still an image with a dangerous power about it: Unmistakably, this woman in her orange chiffon flying suits and cutaway bathing suits is no one to mess with.
17 September 2008
She's a twenty-first-century female gladiator of the lost tribe of Glamazonia, battling for supremacy against a pride of lions. As over-the-top as it sounds, that's a bit of what Danielle Scutt seems to be about, if we're to judge from the uncompromisingly fierce collection she sent out in her first solo runway show. In fact, her neo-feminist power vixens in their patent bondage-strapped animal prints aren't really debutantes. Scutt has shown twice with Fashion East, and some of her signatures, like her red-hot touch with denim, are becoming recognizable.Her most salable pieces are short knife-pleat denim skirts and the high-waisted, fifties-inflected jeans she's been working on since she left Central Saint Martins. Other dresses in variations on zebra stripes look destined for plenty of magazine editorial shoots. Scutt still has a way to go with her edit, though. Short and sweet is probably not quite the right motto to recommend to a kick-ass designer, but anyway, some advice: She needn't have killed herself to put out quite so much in the way of swimwear and commercial pieces.
15 September 2007
The Fashion East show has come to be like a tasting plate in one of London's most original restaurants: Turn up, and what you're offered are three flavors of the best up-and-coming talent. The exercise of rendering each collection down to 12 looks only improves the intensity, and this season, it was Danielle Scutt's fifties-meets-seventies power vixens who knocked the audience sideways. Done up in stiffly towering quiffs, red lamé cocktail skirts, and animal prints made into bodysuits and skintight denim, Scutt's women were not for the tame-hearted—and that's exactly how she wanted it. "I'm proud to be a woman. I'm not one of the boys. I think clothes should be empowering and sexy," said this recent graduate of Central Saint Martins. Among the chorus of voices being raised in praise of glamazon style in London, hers is the first that is female—and the difference shows. Fierce shapes she may have, but the odd vivid-red print shirt and piece of leopard-spot denim made it apparent that this is a girl who also thinks about stuff you could imagine wearing.
17 September 2006