Edward Crutchley (Q2989)
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Edward Crutchley is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Edward Crutchley |
Edward Crutchley is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
“I know this is not the most commercially viable collection. I kind of don’t care,” declared Edward Crutchley post-show. He added: “It’s what I want to do. And I do my best work when I do what I want.” Shortly before, Crutchley had taken his bow from the mezzanine balcony of Ironmongers’s Hall, cheerily flipping his audience the bird with both hands as he did so.Exactly 10 years after his first show was thrown in this very venue, Crutchley has built up a portfolio of work for grand luxury houses—“I have other things in my diary too,” as he put it—that he is in the position to develop his own line as a passion project. The result is a label in which Crutchley is truly free to follow his personal inclination for historical textiles, extreme silhouettes and a healthy dose of libido.Be-hatted in Stetson-esque Stephen Jones designs, his models wore NFL-shaming, super-wide shoulder pads (“as wide as we could go”) from which hung regally lush fabrics based on a pan-cultural spectrum spanning Borneo, Byzantium, Egypt, Morocco, Turkmenistan, England and beyond. That cowboy aside notwithstanding, the bold-shouldered volume of these super-sized, pimped-up historical tapestry coats recalled the magnificent portly vastness of Henry VIII: Perhaps it was just the Tudoresque architecture of the gilded hall around us that conjured that impression.Almost as elaborate as the hall was a mermaid dress in hand-crochet laser cut latex segments: This looked ceremonially kinky in front of its stained glass backdrop. A startled Dionysus gawped forth from bacchanalian bouncer bomber jackets. A medievally-strapped hose and jerkin were fashioned by Crutchley collaborator Oliver Haus in more black latex: The result was one for the Dark Ages. Further crocheting was crafted by Shannon-Jaide Hyland in Lurex-edged dresses. Backstage, my elevator pitch for this collection was: “Doctor Who travels across time and space collecting fabrics and inspiration before returning to London with a bunch of hard-partying companions for a serious session at the seminal 1990s night, Kinky Gerlinky.” This time, Crutchley gave the thumbs up.
16 February 2024
Edward Crutchley sees AI as a tool, not a threat. For this collection he prompted his intelligence of choice to research the brief “Medieval people on a fashion photoshoot in the style of Steven Meisel.” Crutchley then developed the resulting images into this collection, which included some prints generated directly by AI. He said: “I find machine learning and machine creating fascinating. Not in a way that it’s all I want to use. But it is a really interesting tool to place within my process.”The result was presented to aHey Nonny Nomeets easy listening Gabba soundtrack in a gorgeous Marylebone church. The AI generated body images were transferred to silk blouses, wool coats, and ingeniously printed mohair sweaters. To meet past requests for more consistency in his output, Crutchley continued the medieval-meets-now dialectic of last season, sprinkling in some slouchy ’90s-influenced silhouettes paired with hosiery bunched sulkily at the ankle.Very old-school liripipe hats were reimagined as hoods. Harlequin diamonds were fractured into printed shards on easy-wearing tiered ruffle dresses and separates. Monochromatic popper-fastened sportswear in coated poly material played against broad-shouldered, dynamically forward-skewed tailoring, really excellently cut. The closing looks featured latex pieces by Oliver Haus, whose graduate show from London Metropolitan University Crutchley had been blown away by. The more established designer said: “That closing dress took him only a day and a half to make, and the precision in the work is insane. When you encounter someone that young, with that care for detail, you just want to encourage them. And it’s great for me too!” Artificial Intelligence and emerging talent both served to enrich, but never overwhelm, Crutchley’s own distinct design identity in a collection that gently advanced the state of his art.
15 September 2023
The codpiece bra and codpiece-codpiece will certainly stimulate the social media reaction to this Edward Crutchley collection. Less clickbaity but more enduringly arousing was how clearly engorged with thought these pieces were.To inform his modernity Crutchley turned to the pre-modern: that seismic period where enlightenment ethos enabled Europe’s transition from medieval to renaissance. He looked atThe First Book of Fashion, an illustrated record of 40 years worth of fits worn by a pair of 15th century father and son post-feudal hypebeasts. To add graphic emphasis to the extremely old school silhouette glitches (good ones) this generated, he added in illustrations of a bawdy, vaguely Chaucerian looking cast of characters recast in the manner of a 1920s/30s cartoon.Tracksuits and draped tailoring came cut with oppositional panels of monochrome, reminiscent of the early military/sporting uniform, vaguely harlequin in style, that you can sometimes see historical re-enactors flaunting in Florence. A smidgen of structure was delivered by a series of v-neck knits in a mohair mix that reproduced those far-gone fops in various compromising positions. A lovely ivory ruffle pant in silk taffeta and its accompanying black dress were another reminder of history’s shifting position on gendered expressions of frou-frou, and contemporary lack of perspective. Bucket hats and wrapped scarfs and headpieces sometimes teamed with shades added a Cardin-meets-Castlemorton twist, emphasized by the banging Computer Overlords. The roomy Armani-on-steroids shoulders featured on some tailoring added a gently heroic aspect. And then came the codpieces. “You’ve got to have a matching set,” observed the designer backstage. This was a picaresque, episodic collection that was full of fascinating characters.
17 February 2023
Edward Crutchley invoked the ancient Greek sea god Proteus as he was thinking through his spring collection. “Even though it’s about ancient Greek mythology, there are no references. We’re not seeing a toga coming down the runway,” he began. “But it’s very much based around Proteus and how he cannot be caught, because his body is always in flux.” There was the rise of a more symbolic and furious drift in the designer’s voice.Proteus is so powerful that a derivation of his name is alive in the English language. Protean: the ability to change, or to be “fluid” in thinking. “And I think that’s a very pertinent thing to be talking about now,” Crutchley said. “Especially with the hideous take that our new prime minister (Liz Truss) has on people’s bodies and their right to own their own bodies. She has already said that a trans woman is not a woman.”And so: Against the rising tide of conservatism, Crutchley wove protean sea tropes into his always non–gender specific collection. “Beauty. I always think that’s the best way to protest. Make something beautiful that expresses your sentiment. That’s the way to win people around to show them what you believe, in the most beautiful way possible.”He conveyed that materially in gauzy semitransparencies, ripples of shimmery holographic sequin embroideries, deep sea blue taffetas, and body-clinging knit dresses with bubble-form holes engineered into them. A vivid composite digital print was collaged together from rippling images of shavings of mother-of-pearl “but gone a bit psychedelic.”His classical-modern sea nymphs arose from the deep, stealing the scene in crystal-adorned thongs and cupless bras. “This is the representation of queerness that I’ve been trying to do in the last couple of seasons. It’s going back to that point of owning the beauty of your own body,” he said.Crutchley is probably one of the luxury fashion industry’s leading experts in fabric sourcing and development—he has worked with Kim Jones for many years, at Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, and now Fendi couture. But the point for him with this collection was to channel what he believes in, on his own British turf: the glorifying of the openness of a tide of positive change that cannot be turned back.
16 September 2022
As categories go, ’80s-goth-luxe is both pretty nice and pretty niche. Either way, Edward Crutchley owned it convincingly this afternoon. It’s not often you observe echoes of Giorgio Armani, Romeo Gigli and Rick Owens in the same collection, but all were in-spirit elements here in a show that contained just 21 looks (and some metaverse-ready versions too) and covered a panoply of characters.United by their nipple-clamp earrings and hardware-studded, Roker platforms in red black or white upcycled leather, Crutchley’s cast ran a gamut from muscular boys in frayed knit bodies to wispy girls in finely draped lavender soft-shouldered tailoring. Enjoyably loaded were paneled ’80s sportswear pieces in crushed purple and pink velvet, an intricately fine-gauge knit tube dress spotted with carefully placed Swiss cheese holes, and the attractive goth-to-grunge mothwing pattern mohair cardigans that were moodily worn under another knit heaped at the waist to create a languid echo of a bustle.The scene-stealing looks, however, were the gowns. Two handsomely played dogtooth check skirts against floating recycled polyester bustiers in abstract chine warp-print pattern (according to Crutchley’s copious notes). And two others were huge-skirted wearable dramas, one in a Como-sourced purple-patched pink fil coupe in recycled polyester Lurex and bouclé and another, the closer, topped with a fraught broken tiara by Stephen Jones for maximum prom-gone-wrong vibes.Crutchley provided a 14-text reading list with this collection that majored on the intersection of queerness and the gothic via a diversion back to medieval dress. But you didn’t need to a PhD to parse what was writ on his runway: this was a celebration of fabulous otherness in multiple forms that came finely garlanded with garments that harked in part back to a decade where a virus left the gay community both mortally at risk and subject to demonization. The addition of goth—an aesthetic that comes loaded with self-declared societal marginalization—added an extra layer of angst.
18 February 2022
What a delight it was to see Edward Crutchley bookending his sumptuously textiled show with two 18th century gowns. In one way, that couldn’t be more contemporary, following as it did on the heels of the Met Gala where such manner of outrageously expansive gender non-conforming dressing practically passed as the new norm with the VIP celebrity set. But on the other hand, Crutchely—an English designer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of fabric who’s worked for years with Kim Jones both at Dior and Louis Vuitton before that—had a whole other dimension of deep British history on his mind.“A lot of the thought process was around queerness and queer spaces, particularly in London,” he declared after the show. “In the 1720s, there were more queer spaces and coffee houses per head—it would’ve been the equivalent of 200 gay bars in 1970. The literature is there, over four hundred years. Queer culture has been part of London life for centuries. Now is the time for queer people to talk about this. I think the world is not becoming a better place. So it’s really important for us as queer people to speak, to show what we can do, and show beauty from our perspective.”There was a time in the London club nights of the 1980s and early ’90s—the Blitz Club and Kinky Gerlinky—when such competitive, historically-referenced costume dressing was also an underground norm. That culture included such luminaries as Hamish Bowles and Stephen Jones. Mr. Jones himself was at hand to conspire with Crutchley over his pearl-bedangled caps and fabric-wrapped topknots. Thus is the London solidarity of gender non-conforming fashion exuberance joyfully relayed from one generation to the next.The point of difference with Crutchley is the level of Parisian know-how in materials that he’s bringing to a London audience. All of his bronze-glinting exploded leaf-pattern jacquards and matching knitwear exude luxury house quality. As one of the fashion industry’s most experienced and knowledgeable experts in materials (his title is Director of Fabric for Dior Men), he’s in a prime position to push forward the development of sustainable practices in manufacturing, and he’s using it. The decadent-looking brocade was woven using recycled polyester, for example: “The idea was let’s do it, without any compromise over the quality and the way it looks.
” The knitwear is made from traceable merino that Crutchely sourced at a mill in Yorkshire that not only certifies the wool, but traces it back to the farm it came from.All this was documented in his collection show notes, an exemplary explanatory and educational way of setting out a press release. Along with the material content, Crutchley also posted snippets of historical information: the exact definition of the ‘Robe a l’Anglaise’ and a tantalizing London news report, hot from October 1728. “On Sunday Night last a Constable with proper Assistants, searched the House of Jonathan Muff, alias Miss Muff, in Black-Lyon Yard, near Whitechapel Church, where they apprehended nine male Ladies, including the Man of the House. They were secured that Night in New Prison.”As for the definition of who he designs for? Crutchley says he’s moved beyond the term gender neutral. “I make clothes—they’re clothes! I put them on a rack, and then buyers buy for who they think.”
18 September 2021