Fashion East (Q3105)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Fashion East is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Fashion East |
Fashion East is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
supported by
2010
debut at London Fashion Week
2008
participant
Before we settled in for this season’s triple-bill Fashion East runway show, there were two presentations and one open bar to enjoy. The first presentation was from newcomer Positive Energy Flows Again by footwear designer Kitty Shukman. The models sat in or around a gnarled model tree as chakra bass hummed. Some wore prosthetic angel wings or raised crucifix and wing temporary body augmentations. There was a healer in the room to ensure our energy stayed cleansed.This was Shukman’s way of shaping a contextual terrain upon which she wanted her footwear to tread. That was a slide presented in six colorways of EVA called the Infinity, which corkscrewed around the foot in an attractively WTF sculptural spiral. The highly impressive and technically challenging 3D yin-yang shoe design was evidently, as Shukman said afterward, in part the product of her spiritual practice.Upstairs and past the Bistrotheque’s heaving bar stood a happily chatting line of models wearing pieces by Sosskyn, which was represented here for the second time. Artist Samara Scott and curator Tayah Leigh Barrs created this venture together from their studio in Dover. A standout detail: One of the upcycled garments that Scott had used as a canvas for her intensely patterned reliefs in latex and other materials was a moth-eaten Loro Piana knit that had been donated by her grandmother. You could imagine Scott in the studio adding layers of texture and pattern to her wearable surfaces with as much glee and passion as she exhibited while relating that process of making.It took a while to clear the bar, but the benches eventually filled. This was Olly Shinder’s third and final appearance on the Fashion East roster, and he signed off by showing his first-ever womenswear looks. He’d designed them over the summer, an experience of which he said: “I think it made me realize that the girl is no different from the guy.” That’s because the rules that Shinder sees and subverts are less related to gender differences than they are to an indifference to all facets of individuality that forms of uniform work to exert. By both amping up and camping up the strictures of uniform, he hands the authority of self-image back to the wearer, alongside the power to evoke archetypes of sexual fantasy. As for the future, he said: “I just want to try and have fun and make the best work that I can.”
13 September 2024
Lulu Kennedy is on a roll at Fashion East, what with two of her recent Fashion East alums, Karoline Vitto and Michael Stewart of Standing Ground, contending in this year’s LVMH Prize—and Maximilian Davis having been springboarded straight from her runway into the creative directorship of Ferragamo.This season, it was Johanna Parv’s third bite of the cherry on the runway, and Olly Schinder’s second. A third designer label, Sosskyn by Samara Scott Studio was introduced in the form of a slide-projection of an upcycled textile and print-led collection. She’s one of those new-era designers who are making sustainability sexy.The originality of Johanna Parv’s slick collection is that it doesn’t look particularly like outdoor performance-wear, but that’s how it’s designed to function. “Techy tailoring” is a term she’s nailed for women who cycle and power-walk across cities—increasingly the best option for getting about as urban planners nudge populations out of cars. For winter, Parv’s tonal layered wardrobe pieces have built-in technicalities transposed “more from ski-wear” for winter, she said. She pointed out out “lightly-insulated” mini skirts (“I call them bum-warmers!”) and a couple of bags made to double as muffs. Essentially, her ideas smooth out the clunky annoyances of carrying stuff and battling unpredictable weather: efficient harnesses for carrying bags, capes to drape over hand-held ones, jackets with adaptable vents which can be thrown over a backpack in a downpour.Olly Shinder is designing for another type of city-navigation reality. His own uniform for street and BDSM club scenes shares the language of homoerotica with designers of his own, and older, generations: Ludovic de Saint Sernan and Raul Lopez to name but two. Shinder’s nipple-baring black leather aprons, latex-lingerie body-wear, waders, and four-fingered gloves are eye-magnets, right enough. “We just wanted an obscene neckline this season,” he said. “Something sexy, rubbery, and latex.”Shinder’s strength—becoming more visible in his sophomore outing—is that he’s also making pragmatic clothing, based on workwear tropes with technical details like jigsawed snaps, shirts cut with built-in ties, and (new this season) a crinkle-textured pseudo-army camo fabric. It all holds together as a sellable proposition—remarkable at such an early career stage.
That’s no doubt helped by the down-to-earth mentoring and retail realism of Adrian Joffe, who supports Shinder (and a clutch of other young indies) in the Comme des Garçons showroom in Paris. Shinder produces the clothes himself, Joffe said backstage, but it’s providing the space, the endorsement, and feedback that’s ever more invaluable for young designers in this cold climate.
17 February 2024
Just when they said subversive young London underground club creativity is dead in cost-of-living depressed Brexitland, along comes Olly Shinder. Just as you’d never suppose a young Londoner could hone a vision of evening elegance, there’s Standing Ground by Michael Stewart. Just as you might have assigned athletic wear to a non-fashion sub-category—along comes Johanna Parv, powerfully fusing function, feminism and chic in ways the top brass at sports brands have never been capable of imagining.Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East show is where these three distinctly different London-based designers made their personal worlds visible today.Olly ShinderQueer cultures have been a primary source of fashion creativity in London for generations. Lee Alexander McQueen formed a good part of his incendiary design identity in the gay pubs and clubs of ’90s London; before that, there were the Blitz club and Taboo in the 1980s. Olly Shinder, the Fashion East newcomer, made his own 2020s immersion in queer night spaces and subcultural community values manifest, joined by a roster of queer collaborators and artists—including Wolfgang Tillmans, who mixed his sound track. “We all party together. I wanted to capture what it is to be a part of that in London now,” said Shinder.British fashion education culture has also bred a new generation of graduates who are speaking about their heritages in their work. London-born Shinder opened his collection with snap-trimmed shorts that distinctly smacked of the shape of lederhosen and a Bavarian red gingham shirt. “My identity is Jewish and German, and I have just got my German passport for the first time,” he said. “For my family I’ve been learning German, I love the language.” That consciousness was hybridized and intersected with classic homoerotic clothing archetypes—an upside down white singlet, zipper slashes (one open to way below a butt), doubled, cutaway running shorts, hi-viz utility jackets and looped shower hoses. “We’ve basically taken the workwear world and turned it into a real fantasy,” he said. “All of this is me putting myself into it in so many ways.”Standing Ground“I wanted them to have this almost menacing sensuality,” said Michael Stewart of the third collection of sinuously attenuated silhouettes he’s shown at Fashion East. His sculpturally fluid aesthetic, tied into the ancient standing stones and landscapes of his native Ireland is not inspired—he wanted to make it clear—“by hocus-pocus spirituality.
I’m really into science and fact, and learning about geology and learning about continental drift and evolution and the development of the earth.”
15 September 2023
Fashion East, Lulu Kennedy’s non-profit umbrella for young designers, has a reputation for giving the world blasts of raw talent. Well this season, the sit-up-and-take-notice factor was that the trio of designers were shockingly… sophisticated.Watching the very distinct, very different clothes presented by Michael Stewart for his Standing Ground label, by Johanna Parv, and by Karoline Vitto, there was a rising sensation that here were three skilled people applying their intelligence to carving out new perspectives on women’s lives in the modern world. That their individualistically complete wardrobe systems might’ve struck the audience as avant-garde is surely a reflection of how much womenswear design has stagnated—or at least coasted same-ily along—in the last few years, overshadowed by far more progressive thinking in the menswear field.But not now! The resurgence of designers who are addressing female bodies, psyches, and lifestyles suddenly seemed real in the space of one London morning, with this trio, added to strongly feminist collections from Sinead O’ Dwyer and Di Petsa.Michael Stewart (the sole male amongst this cohort) led the Fashion East show with a couture-like obsession with bringing modernity to the concept of the spare, long, slim evening dress. “I wanted a soft smooth roundedness,” he said. “Everything is molded by hand by me.” The near-flawless monoliths of his single-color structures—such as the sensationally simple-seeming pink strapless jersey dress which opened his sequence—made an impressive impact in a time when busy, giant volumes have swallowed up so much of the attention in red carpet dressing.It takes a perfectionist to dare show this kind of apparent simplicity, which involves a whole lot more than cutting out a front and back and sewing up the side seams. Stewart’s engineering involves invisible corsetry, and subtle hip-pads—even under his strictly tailored donegal tweed coats. Meanwhile, the sculptural nature of his work means that it flows around the body, creating interesting side views and back drapes (the one in pink devoré velvet was particularly good). In other words, a smartly studied alternative answer for women who want to stand out on a red carpet.Johanna Parv has researched another neglected subject in modern women’s lives: design solutions for getting from A to B as an urban commuter.
Her collection, at the cross-roads of athletic wear and powerful elegance, comes from her personal knowledge as a cyclist and runner. “It’s really important to have the opportunity to talk about functional or technical outdoor-wear from a woman’s point of view,” she said.
17 February 2023
Lulu Kennedy’s 22-years-young incubator supreme, Fashion East, headed west a bit this edition to a sustainability innovation hub named Mills Fabrica. As per, there were three designers showing, one as a presentation and the others on a skylit runway. Two were making their debuts, while the last was sailing into the sunset at the climax of his three-season Fashion East tour. So here, in the order we got to see them, is the who, what, and why of this season’s almost entirely deadstock selection.Designer Michael Stewart’s label Standing Ground delivered its first Fashion East installment in a static presentation (shown in looks 27 onward in the Vogue Runway gallery). The heroically bearded young Irishman, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, arranged his models in pairs, each standing on either side of one of the supporting pillars that ran the length of this roughly unfinished room. The stillness of the subjects and that rawness in the surroundings spoke quite nicely to Stewart’s central preoccupation. “It’s a modern iteration of eveningwear that is inspired by ancient culture, artifacts, and landscape,” he said. “And it’s twinned with notions of the futuristic and imagined… I love how something super ancient can also seem very futuristic.” Stewart’s initial inspiration came from the ancient standing stones that are mysteriously scattered around the landscape where he was raised.The invited sightseers trooped through to observe Stewart’s newly evolved brand of fashion monumentalism. This saw his models in full-length swaths of variously colored cotton jersey, over which were etched heavy-looking (but not) decorative runes. These included molded foam, figure-following jersey-clad bands that Stewart described as “gestural,” an inset-beaded panel in ridged concentric spirals inspired by Neolithic carvings, and metallic-finished fiberglass frame pieces. Tailoring-rooted canvassed insertions at one hip, adorned by one of those bands, created a sense of bias-enhanced motion, even in stillness.This was a finely fashioned and deeply researched collection inspired by the ancient and immovable. Next season, said Stewart, he is hoping to show in runway format—and it will be interesting to see how human movement animates his pieces.
Movement was central to Brazilian-born Karoline Vitto’s collection (looks 1 to 12), through which she sought to place front and center elements of the female form that are often sidelined or marginalized by an exclusionary aesthetic hegemony. Or, as she put it, “Sometimes we feel conscious about, you know, the area under the arm, or the little bulge of flesh on the side of the breast—or under the breast. So for me, this collection is really about celebrating these areas that we might feel self-conscious about, that we might otherwise try to hide.”
16 September 2022
Jawara AlleyneAt Fashion East—the umbrella showcase founded by Lulu Kennedy—it was refreshing to see a generation of emerging designers more focused on technique than styling. Their methods may be under construction, but at least they’re approaching fashion from a dressmaking perspective rather than a purely theatrical one. Take Jawara Alleyne, who presented his first runway show at Fashion East after last season’s static presentation. Born in Jamaica and raised in the Cayman Islands, he employed his distinctly Caribbean relationship with the sun as his premise for both the technical and philosophical aspects of his collection.“When I was growing up in the Caribbean, the sun was referenced everywhere. What does that mean for me as someone who now lives in London?” he pondered during a preview. Alleyne draped his fabrics as if it they been baked by the sun, and made repurposed vintage garments and deadstock fabrics look as if they’d been aged by too much sunlight. He referred to those sustainable choices as “circular,” applying the idea of circularity to the way he cut his collection, too. He safety-pinned squares of fabric into circular shapes that twisted around the body, played with the draping and pulling of skirts, and made circular incisions on old T-shirts.“I’m obsessed with presenting something that feels like it has a life,” Alleyne said. “Gravity, the way fabrics hang, the way garments age…” His obsession made for a raw, slashed-up sensibility, which did sometimes become a bit too repurposed; a little too far-reaching and messy. But Rome wasn’t built in a day. Come his second turn on the Fashion East runway, maybe Alleyne will already have evolved his technique to a new stage.Chet LoFor his second runway show at Fashion East, Chet Lo continued his investigation of the spiky fishing wire knitwear technique that got him the slot in the first place. Explored the right way, a young designer has a fair amount of seasons to riff on the same idea, and in this case, repetition didn’t breed boredom. Lo’s icy, saccharine, spiky treatment of little dresses and shrunken interpretations of wardrobe staples like the puffer and the miniskirt were magnetic in a way that echoed how some of us feel about parts of theEuphoriawardrobe department: it’s possibly very bad taste, but like synthetic candy, it’s oddly moreish.
20 February 2022
MaximilianThe term ‘hot girl summer’ has been thrown around a lot over the past few months of post-lockdown sunshine and re-opened borders. But if you asked the young talents at Fashion East—which nurtures the designers of the future—sexy, scanty, sizzling fashion isn’t simply about revenge travel and thirsty selfies. It’s a far more significant symptom of current youth mentality. Maximilian Davis, who presented his third collection under the umbrella showcase (and his first-ever runway show, looks 1 to 24), referred to his swimwear-inspired collection as “pose-wear”—the kind you strut around in by the pool—but founded it in poetic references from his family’s native Trinidad.Pictures taken by the nature photographer Nadia Huggins of teenagers swimming in the Caribbean evoked memories of Davis’s own childhood holidays in Trinidad. “The sensuality and freedom these kids had reminded me of carnival, which is an expression of freedom,” he explained during a preview. It shaped a collection suspended between the properties of swimwear and the ‘sailor mas’ costumes of Trinidad’s carnivals, projected in the image of Bond girls such as Ursula Andress, who carried that torch in Dr. No, which was filmed in the Caribbean.Davis employed his water sports motif in sensual tailoring sculpted like wetsuits but constructed in fine crêpe, and in sailor jackets that played with the eternal allure of men (and women) in naval uniform. Slithery, slippery, seedy red nylon fabrics and some highly subversive devoré—the latter a nod to his grandmother’s sofas in Manchester—added a certain mischief to the proceedings, albeit through Davis’s persistently glamorous lens. Asked about the sex appeal of his work, he said that his take on post-pandemic déshabillé is about a new empowerment. “As a Black person, there’s a lot I have to go through day-to-day, and it makes me more confident with who I am. I think confidence is part of sexiness, if that makes sense.” —Anders Christian MadsenChet LoIf the monumental events of the pandemic—and the summer of 2020 in particular—have fuelled a freedom of expression conveyed in a stripped-to-the-core, flaunt-what-you-got take on dressing, Fashion East newcomer Chet Lo (looks 25 to 38) is on the right path. The American designer, who interned for John Galliano at Maison Margiela and has already dressed Kylie Jenner, showed a collection devoted to “unabashed sexuality,” as his press notes would have it.
He expressed that through a spiky, sheer fishing wire knitwear technique applied to aquatic fluorescent vacation-wear and some rather fabulous bags and sandals that had to make you smile. Lo had named a skirt built around a knitted lifebuoy “the life-saver skirt,” which sounded ever-so appropriate for the current climate.
20 September 2021
Lulu Kennedy gathered even more young designers under the sheltering tent of Fashion East than usual this season. “I felt it important to keep pushing through rather than sit back,” she said. The necessity to shift online has had the effect of opening up “space” for her to platform five designers rather than the three she could logistically manage on her runway, what with all the backstage mayhem of models and hair and makeup, and the small consideration of keeping a time-pressured fashion horde of several hundred on bleachers out front. More to the point: As counterintuitively evidenced right across London Fashion Week, the combined phenomena of COVID isolation and Black Lives Matter have thrown motivating fuel on the fire of resourceful young people who have burning things to say, zero distractions, and tons of time to develop their work. One other unforeseen upshot: This is a long, long-form fashion review.MaximilianBlack elegance, high ambition: Maximilian Davis has absolute certainty about his mission in fashion. In his second showing at Fashion East, he’s putting down a vision of chicly sexy tailoring and brand intention to go with it. Davis is a designer with an already distinctive melted-graphic logo to his name, and a compelling motivation to elevate his vision of Black British culture to its rightful place on the fashion map. His ’60s futurist collection features a confluence of inspirations: bringing together the smart dressing traditions of his Trinidadian background and the evidence of what he saw when studying Paris haute couture at fashion school. “When people like me are doing research we ask questions,” he says.On one side, there’s his experience of dressing in his Sunday best to go to church—and the equivalent dressing-up occasion for himself, his sisters, and friends: clubbing. “I wanted to look more into my grandma’s story; [she] emigrated from Trinidad to Manchester in 1965. I looked at the cocoon and batwing jackets and fascinators they were wearing, and at Malick Sidibé’s photos of young people dancing at clubs in Bamako in the ’60s.”But how did he feel being a Black designer looking at the 1960s work of Cristobal Balenciaga and Courrèges? “The photographs are all of white women. It made me want to take that imagery, that tailoring, and rewrite the narrative.
” Cue the proud, celebratory Black elegance of Maximilian, 2021: a collection that blends psychedelic prints brilliantly made from his own exploded logo, echoes of space-age miniskirt couture, Balenciaga hoods, and beach-to-club skin-baring glamour of the sort he saw his sisters wearing on family holidays in Trinidad. Topped off with diving goggles made for him by Nasir Mazhar, it reaches high. He has a lot of followers for this. “I’m so happy that things are changing,” he says. “But at the same time, it’s important to say what happened in history. The things that get overwritten or erased.”
24 February 2021
The 20th anniversary celebration of Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East falls this year. Thanks to her talent incubator—which got its name as an antiestablishment upstart when London Fashion Week was losing its relevance—countless designers have taken their first steps on whatever runway she managed to secure at the time. Among the many who owe her thanks are Roksanda Ilincic, Gareth Pugh, Simone Rocha, Marques’Almeida, Matty Bovan, Art School, Nasir Mazhar, Stefan Cooke, and Mowalola Ogunlesi.The latest four, kept under her wing even at the height of the pandemic, say with one accord that Kennedy is their motivator in chief. “I admire her fire,” said Saul Nash, speaking for an entire community.MaximilianMaximilian Davis, Fashion East’s newcomer, has stepped onto Lulu Kennedy’s platform with the confidence and energy of someone who’s certain that the time is right for what he has to say. “Black people must be in charge of their narrative. I see them in such a regal way. I do elegant clothing and tailoring. I want to take people out of the idea of wearing streetwear because that’s not how I see them,” he said on a Zoom call. “That’s a message I want to put across, and that’s what I want to stick with for the duration of my career.”It’s uncommon, to say the least of it, to see a young designer with the forethought to articulate such a long-term purpose. He spelled out why. “Race has been such an issue for years, but I feel that only now are people wanting to learn more about it and are willing to support different races and try to make this world a better place. And I think now is the time to share my vision, to help support and educate people.”Davis comes armed with skills and experience and is surrounded by the elevating support system that the Black creative community has put in place in British fashion. Born in Manchester, he studied at London College of Fashion and worked for Grace Wales Bonner and then in luxury retail. Wales Bonner, he said, “set a tone and a level I want to be at.”His debut collection, J’ouvert, is an ambitious mission to bring sophisticated modern fashion to the fore, while simultaneously uplifting the history of Trinidadian Carnival that is intrinsic to his identity. “My grandmother passed away this year,” he explained. “She came to England from Trinidad and became a nurse. We went there every year. For me as a child, I saw Carnival as one big celebration, but I wanted to look more into the reason we were celebrating.
I discovered that in Trinidad enslaved people were set free in 1834, but before that, they had performed for their slave masters. Carnival came out of their liberation. I wanted to put that imagery into my tailoring, comparing 19th-century history with the cutout garments [that] are worn at Carnival today.”
21 September 2020
Lulu Kennedy fielded five designers at the Fashion East show this time. She combined her men’s and women’s shows and continued to support an installation by the shoe upcycler Ancuta Sarca. But will—or should—this project turn into more of a festival of fashion innovation where people can meet and speak to designers? Just a thought, because Kennedy has staged really great immersive exhibitions before now, in men’s seasons. It’s problematic, as an audience, to focus on a crowd of unknown individualists from the distance of a runway. And anyway, at least two of this year’s contenders, Gareth Wrighton and Saul Nash, are born members of the generation to whom both digital and performance art are first nature.And when it’s good, that’s what we want to engage with. Saul Nash proved how much potential there is in more expressive formats when he choreographed a powerfully moving piece with dancers, his friends from all over London, to show his collection. Nash is a London Royal College of Art–educated designer of sportswear for men and an equally talented dancer and movement director. He’s grown up experiencing what it means to be a black youth moving through London when gang culture and knife crime are taking lives every day. A mayor’s report in 2018 stated that minority teenage boys are disproportionately affected, both as perpetrators and victims. The work Nash showed spoke about the tension between fear and stereotyping, enacting it with a brotherly tenderness that took the breath away.To start, sections of the runway were taken up by knots of boys in Nash’s black and white sweatsuits, instantly evoking the kind of street corner gatherings that strike forbidding social assumptions. Gradually, a stream of lone individuals walked toward them, heads bowed, body language fearful—that terrified no-eye-contact saunter recognizable as a youth self-preservation measure everywhere. And then, yes, they were set upon, but instead of an attack, they were gently lifted by Nash’s “gang,” arms reaching to unzip and unfold sections of their clothing. And then they were settled back on their feet, to walk away, heads held high.“They approached them in an aggressive manner, but what they actually did was liberate them and uplift them,” said Nash afterward. “Feeling the presence of other guys can feel scary, yes. I do menswear, and there’s a whole spectrum of masculinity.
I think it’s my job as a designer to demonstrate that spectrum—maybe a man is represented in one way, but he might subvert your expectations.”
16 February 2020
The darkness and blatant perversity in Gareth Wrighton’s work is the direct result of having been brought up online. For his graduation project from Central Saint Martins, he was the first fashion student to design a computer game instead of a collection. Now, he’s got around to showing clothes, and his themes are inevitably about the internet—in this instance, the case ofJessi Slaughter, the online handle of an American who has obsessed him since 2010 when she was 11 years old. “It was the early days of YouTube—a really early case of cyber-bullying, which should have been a warning, but it was never heeded. She was a troll, and she was trolled. She was put into care and her father had a heart attack because of it.” Hence the uncomfortable watching—the Lolita dresses, the sexual and anti-predator slogans, the T-shirts with what looked like prints of gaping gunshot wounds in them.Really, Wrighton is a knitwear specialist, and that’s where his strongest pieces were: a cardigan decorated with hair clips, another made entirely from bells. What’s puzzling is Wrighton’s need to utilize a regular runway for what he wants to say. He’s an image-maker and a storyteller for sure—but the backstory and its implications and accusations become more legible as he speaks about them. One or other of the digital platforms he was brought up on would seem far more of a natural medium for exploring his ideas.Yuhan Wang shared the Fashion East runway with Wrighton. The Chinese graduate of Central Saint Martins MA continued with the drapey, shirred, lacy dresses and wonky picture hats that she’s shown for three seasons. “Beauty with weirdness, softness, delicacy, and sensibility,” she calls it—a Chinese way of looking at western romantic tropes. She’s done well in picking up stockists in her first couple of seasons—her clothes are in Dover Street Market in New York and Los Angeles, and H. Lorenzo this fall. Meanwhile, she’s applying for a visa to be able to stay and work in the U.K.The talent pool is not inexhaustible in Britain—as witness, the fact that Lulu Kennedy could only find two designers who were ready for runway shows this season (typically Fashion East hosts three). Probably many have been deterred from going into business because of mounting levels of student debt—and possibly the feeling that the standard runway show isn’t the best way of starting up. Whatever’s behind it, the situation points to the fact that the U.K.
should be making an effort to retain the talent it has educated. Yuhan Wang should be one of them—she can go further in developing this collection if she’s given time to concentrate on it.
13 September 2019
“All these different guys coming together and moving in a space. Strength in unity.” These words, spoken off-the-cuff by Saul Nash, the newest of the designers to come into the fold created by Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East could be taken as a boilerplate statement for the diversity that’s rising through London’s young creative community. As set against the horrors of the social divisions that Brexit has brought to the surface, the trio brought together under this long-standing not-for-profit organization consists of one black British male designer, Nash; an Irish woman designer, Robyn Lynch; and the Nigerian Mowalola Ogunlesi. All very different talents—yet all Londoners, and all products of British art schools.Saul Nash is a dancer and choreographer from North London who gained a scholarship to explore his interest in performancewear at the Royal College of Art. His opening section of a group of dancers consisted of friends and peers, there to demonstrate the innovations Nash has in development; clothes designed to enhance freedom of movement through his system of curved zippers and mesh. “There’s a lot of technical fabrics that I’m progressing—I see it that way, as opposed to scrapping things every season and starting again.” Above and beyond that, the point for him in having a runway show was to be able to share something about masculinity and emotional bonds. “They’re all really strong dancers. I cast them because each one brings a sense of himself. For me, movement can say a thousand words.”Lynch also designs out of personal experiences—in her case, reminiscing about old-school sport uniforms as they used to be worn in Irish communities in the days before sports-kit had anything to do with fashion. She had a thorough-going vision, reiterating hitched-up shorts, T-shirts, regular trousers, and fragments of Aran knitting in waves of top-to-toe color.It was Ogunlesi‘s second outing at Fashion East, and she had huge audience appreciation for it. Building and strengthening what she did at Central Saint Martins, she concentrated on using slick colored leathers to make halter-necked suits, with tight pants and belts buckled with sacred and profane symbols: a cross, a religious icon, the Stars and Stripes, the wordssexyandm-ther f-cker. “I base it on what I’m going through—I’ve just fallen in love for the first time; I feel as if no one talks about the horrific side, the dangers of love, of losing control of your emotions and feeling like you’re crazy.
It’s like how I see a horror movie!” she related. “So this is as if I’m in a black Woodstock Festival, and someone has been murdered.”Her picture of glam hyper-sexual carnage—including gunshot wounds and bloodied hands—is strong stuff, evidence of a kind of club scene that runs between London and Lagos. That the British fashion scene continues to give room for all these disparate voices makes a positive stand for inclusivity in dark times. Credit to Kennedy for that.
9 June 2019
Fashion East showcased three very different designers this season. Newcomer Gareth Wrighton had subversive things to say about America and the parlous state of the fashion industry. Then there were Yuhan Wang, with her curiously undone prettiness, and Charlotte Knowles, who is in her last season with Lulu Kennedy’s scheme. Both showed women with very different points of view on the politics of being young and female.Knowles has pursued her interest in outlining female genitals and breasts with cut-out corsets and pubic-zone strappage since she graduated from Central Saint Martins. It’s a divisive look that makes women onlookers either feel uplifted by feminist sensations of empowerment—or oppressed and depressed by it. Whether you identify with this brand of sexual exhibition or flinch from it, one thing’s for sure: Knowles’s signature flies in the face of the modest covered-up-ness which has submerged so much of the body of women’s fashion recently. All one can fairly say is that the worst thing of all is fashion as orthodoxy—and needless to say, there can be plenty of feminist unease about issues related to “modesty” too.Heigh-ho, the female body is ever the site of enraging politics, and now it’s the turn of millennials to figure it out. Still, an ineluctable fact of life remains: To operate as a fashion designer, you need to attend to the problem of selling garments. Knowles, at least, has some dresses, coats, and jersey tailoring on offer to cover her butt on her way into the cold world of commercial reality.Yuhan Wang is dealing with a whole different febrile, self-directed vision of pretty-pretty femininity. Her pastel, floral midi dresses, ruched and draw-stringed around the body, look as if they might have been constructed from synthetic loose covers and lace curtains torn and made by a fan of a Jane Austen television series, which was exactly the effect Wang was after. “I framed the story of a woman’s indoor world,” she said. “A woman hesitating and hiding her thoughts and emotions, but unintentionally expressing her feelings anyway. I looked at curtain drapes and watercolor drawings of women in the 1800s.”Thus the charming, wonky picture hats, tendrilous hair, and vine-leaf jewelry. For a small collection, it was complete and compelling—with a point of view diametrically opposed to Knowles’s: on the one hand, a woman consumed by the anxiety of showing herself to the world, and on the other, a woman determined to bare almost all to it.
Which is preferable? Discuss.Gareth Wrighton had a whole other set of contradictions and tensions on his mind—the state of the United States, the place of handcraft in the age of digital technology, surveillance, festivals, and the purely absurd things people get up to. There were big-country, landscape-cropped hand-knits, and a jacket embroidered with guitar plectrums in honor of Bob Dylan. “I’ve never listened to rock and folk until recently, but I like it!” he said. The “military” stripes on the outside legs of the black trousers were, in fact, appliquéd dog leashes which spelledSECURITYandNERVOUS. He also got references to Chelsea Manning and Courtney Love in there, too. Age of weirdness, stabs of irony, fear, and hilarity: It’s all there in fashion’s great, fractured black mirror—if you look long enough.
20 February 2019
How aboutblatant glamouras a phrase to get the pulse racing? Is this not what we’re all after, in one way or another? Stefan Cooke and his partner, Jake Burt, didn’t exaggerate when they dropped those words into the description of their collection—it was one of those occasions when mouths gaped open at the skill and originality of a fully formed, completely desirable vision of fashion walking by.Just take it from the bright white torso-hugging, zipped-up leather shirt that seemed as if it might be a ribbed knit at first, but turned out to be made of vertically slashed strips of leather with delicately serrated edges—and which also seemed to be connected to a white fringed peplum. But then that again was an eye trick, being in fact a wraparound print on the top of a pair of trousers. Whoa to Look 31. And whoa to the rest of what Cooke and Burt did: argyle knits that left peepholes in the lozenge patterns; seamlessly fitted jersey trousers made in that vertically slashed leather; silver chain-mail stoles casually flung over tailoring; ingeniously slashed English dad coats—the lot of it, actually.But how did they do that? Backstage, Cooke and Burt were bubbling over with irrepressible glee in describing how they came up with the leather technique—the last look, a red coat, was concertina-ed across the musculature of the model’s back, to show bare skin in a diamond pattern. “Well, it was finding an old Chelsea boot from a charity shop and looking at its worn-out strips of elastic,” Burt began. “And then we got this Lycra and applied the leather on top,” said Cooke, “and then we sliced it all through with rotary pinking shears!” Presto! The discovery of a technique that invents incredibly chic male leggings (meggings?) and other garments that stretch to show either a different base color, or skin, as they move.It didn’t for a second read as a textile-geeky gimmick. These things sometimes do. Nope: The amazing surface effects were trained to engineer an impressive, sexy, classy sense of the way a young man would kill to look.Cooke came out of the Central Saint Martins M.A. program in 2017 and got together with his school friend Burt to start presenting his body-hugging trompe l’oeil preppy-classic silhouettes on the Fashion East runway. The challenge with coming up with a brilliant idea over five years in college is: What will be your next trick? Some people only have one.
Cooke and Burt proved with this collection that they have the rare dynamic talent to keep coming up with new ideas, while twisting and twirling around their original ones—like minimizing, exploding, or cutting out their argyles, or messing about with chain mail in unique ways.
6 January 2019
Fashion East’s group preview of London’s newest contenders contained three this season: Charlotte Knowles, Yuhan Wang, and Asai. As it happens, they’re all alumni of Central Saint Martins’s M.A. program, which has a longtime reputation of coaching—nay, demanding—individual points of view from students. No copying. People from that program who have passed through Lulu Kennedy’s exemplary—and philanthropically funded—runway finishing school include Roksanda Ilincic, Simone Rocha, and Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida. Before calling judgment on this new crop, it’s only fair to recall: Back in the day, each one of those successful fashion entrepreneurs was also regarded as “promising” yet debatably raw. Plenty of eyes have been rolled in the past about some who are now considered to be among the best.Sure enough, this crop was raw, too, each in their own way. Knowles is focused on a female-gaze eroticism that crosses sci-fi and computer gaming. That doesn’t stop it being difficult to look at models’ crotches being picked out by ribbon-strapped slings under checked cutaway bodysuits. She had more covered-up things, too—coats and ruched dresses suspended on toggled ropes. Where could she go? Maybe her fascination with futuristic lingerie would make her a candidate for Victoria’s Secret?The newcomer in the pack, Wang, has a different proposition about femininity. This Chinese graduate has a feeling for pretty, semi-sheer, pastel-print dresses, a look topped by boned, floppy hats. It was delicate but not saccharine, a combination of elements we’ve never seen presented this way, which puts her in that promising category.Asai’s A Sai Ta is working through personal narratives about his British-Chinese-Vietnamese heritage in his collections. His show had a lot going on: interesting handmade textiles, tie-dye, camouflage print, deconstructed army uniform derivatives. There’s something fierce, technically complex, and resolute in his creativity.The applause for all of them came from their peers, classmate helpers, and professionals in the audience. In this day and age, it’s brave—and expensive—for young people to put themselves out there. Kudos to those who dare.
16 September 2018
The designers under Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East umbrella put on startlingly polished, individualist collections today. Without knowing any of their backstories, the fashion quotient spoke for itself. Asai: highly worked woven and tufted textiles, layered over subversive “lady” tropes. Charlotte Knowles: edging toward something sexy from a female point of view. Supriya Lele: ’90s minimalist values, filtered through a young woman’s lens. Symonds Pearmain: a whirl of wantable graphics dealt out in sporty-casual mode.But the backstories count, as does the surrounding context of the system in which these designers find themselves. Compared to only a few years ago, the picture here shows a widening of perspective. Take Supriya Lele’s deft use of her British-Asian family identity—her layering of sari fabric, Indian-influenced jewelry, and madras check onto her own obsession with the techno-nylon and tailoring of the school of Helmut Lang. “I wanted it to look more elevated than before,” she said. “Quite luxurious, modern, and grown-up.” The synthesis is the message, reinforced by Lele’s insistence on casting mainly black and South Asian models: “Really strong, beautiful women. We wanted to represent those who are still not represented enough.”Designer A Sai Ta, with his second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese heritage, is another representative of today’s diverse London creativity. He mentioned the word “assimilation” in his notes, suggesting crossing borders—the latticed, hand-fringed knits and intensely frayed denim may be hinting at detritus picked up on a long journey. He took a satirical look at English upper-class attire: Ladylike handbags were weaponized with Chinese martial arts nunchucks as handles, and a headscarf came spiked with studs. At one point, a pair of beaded cowboy boot cuffs had been assimilated into a pair of jeans—quite genius.Symonds Pearmain is a duo—one half Anthony Symonds, who first cropped up with his eponymous label on the London scene in the early aughts; one half the young stylist Max Pearmain. The pair really know how to pull off a compelling look—all stripes and checks, occasionally gilded with gold leather curlicues. But after Symonds’s experience in the art world, he knows he is making a re-entry to the runway at a time when fashion startups are facing a tougher-than-ever retail landscape.
Like the other hopefuls of Fashion East—and independents the world over—he realizes they will have to carve out a limited-run partly hand-made-to-order alternative to mass manufacturing and boom growth. “I’m not going to try to mend the machine,” he said. “I’m interested in trying to slowly develop, along with everyone else, a model that has some sort of sustainable potential. The idea of scaling it up massively—who wants that? I don’t. It’s dead, and I don’t want to deal with it.”
18 February 2018
The work of today’s youngest designers is a running commentary on the state of the world and the rise of identity politics. The three who Lulu Kennedy currently has under the wing of her not-for-profit Fashion East organization have been chosen, as always, because of their individual talent—and in London, where being different and non-derivative is the unwritten entry-point to fashion approval, that would suggest that Supriya Lele, Asai, and Matty Bovan have little in common. Not so, when you start talking to them.Supriya Lele is a British-born graduate of the Royal College of Art who is looking at the clash of tradition and modernity in India, her family’s country of origin, as it’s developing into a tech-driven superpower. Sai Ta was born in southern London to Chinese refugees who fled Vietnam, and he stated in his press note that his Asai collection is dealing with “the concept, and perhaps the fear, of China’s strength.” Their results may be ambivalent, but in both cases, the designers are using personal, cultural filters to observe major issues of our times.In Matty Bovan’s collection, the impact of world events was there, too: His work is one person’s response to the dystopian situation faced by people coming of age today. His is a shredded, falling-apart, messy creativity that somehow finds cheerfulness in the midst of the darkness. He has an almost perverse insistence on the handmade, the spontaneous, and the amateur over the machine-perfect, mass-reproducible consumer product.Supriya Lele’s collection, her first runway show, was a promisingly slick combination of sari-influenced asymmetric drape, madras-print T-shirts, tailoring, and technical fabrics sparkled up by minimal deployments of Indian jewelry in the shape of slim crystal belts, armbands, and drop earrings. “I went back to India for the first time in eight years and was astonished to see this rampant boom going on; super-fast internet, buildings going up everywhere,” she said. “But then, they’re being constructed with bamboo scaffolding, and workers free-climbing up these concrete high-rises.” The history of fashion is studded with designers who’ve been taken by Indian culture, but Lele’s view is filtered through her Englishness, and the fact that she’s only motivated by relating her design back to what her friends would wear and to “myperspective, what I feel about my own body,” she said.
Lele’s casting, including several South Asian girls like herself, dynamically articulated an intelligent sense of British modernity from an angle we’ve not seen before.Asai messed with Chinoiserie fabrics and tattered edges as he challenged stereotypes. Both Ta and Lele brought in their friends of multiple shapes, ethnicities, and heights to walk for them. Matty Bovan, on the other hand, has supermodels. With the help of Katie Grand, he’s flying at a level where he can open his show with Edie Campbell, Jean Campbell, and Winnie Harlow. Let’s see where that internationally visible support takes him. The reality is that it’s a long road to being able to make a living as an independent ready-to-wear designer today. But whether or not the end goal can still be “making it,” the things that voices like these are saying are markers of the times we’re living in, and that is valuable in itself.
16 September 2017
The luxury fashion industry has gotten way too good at killing its young over the past few years. Need we rehearse the ills: the demoralization which comes from seeing talented people hired and axed within months, the demands stores put on indie-designers to produce and deliver as if they were brands, their firing if they don't “sell through” immediately? Well, the writing is on the wall now. A system may only put down a generation for so long before it rises up in defiance. If anyone has feared that despair and the surrendering of dreams would crush the ambitions of the creative fashion kind, then—hallelujah—they are wrong. The alternatives are emerging now. Rather than throwing themselves haplessly into the machine (or wasting their lives shouting at it), the newest and most talented kids are steadily turning their backs, cooperating, and doing things according to their own ethical and aesthetic instincts. The common law that is growing against the processes of churned-out, globally available “luxury” is this: Small is good, handmade is the nicest, and friends and families are the best. And by the way, let it be fun!London’s poster child for this consciously “apart” countermovement is Matty Bovan, in his second season at Fashion East. “I’m not a political designer,” he said. “I’m not in the system. But I’d been watching all these sci-fi movies,Blade RunnerandAlien, and all the evil concerns in them are corporations.” It didn’t look like a dystopian future seen through the digital language of computer games, though—Bovan instead made a link between medieval witchery and rough-hewn textures, the futuristic and the ancient, to equip his tribe of survivalists. “The world is scary at the moment,” he conceded. “So I thought I’d make them even fiercer than last time.”The resulting pile-up of images, fabrics, prints, sweaters, jewelry, and bags was collaged together with some glinting remnants of his first collection in a look vaguely reminiscent of Vivienne Westwood’s early-’80s collection, Nostalgia of Mud—another period of separatist youth DIY fashion in London. Then, as now, that movement gelled (largely among students at Central Saint Martin's College of Art & Design, now Central Saint Martins, from which Bovan graduated in 2015) because “official” fashion had simply become irrelevant to young people—far out of their reach expense-wise, yet also a turnoff, not even to be looked at. It’s the era that produced John Galliano.
He’s also a hero of this new generation.
18 February 2017
Whenever things are feeling down and money’s tight, you can practically guarantee that some kid from Central Saint Martins will come along to cheer things up. Creativity against the odds is a young London speciality, and right on time that kid isMatty Bovan, who’s turned up exactly 10 years after Christopher Kane appeared from the same MA course.Bovan’s debut with Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East was a similarly doom-busting, colorful, nothing-to-lose antidote to the fashion doldrumsde nos jours, and it also included, coincidentally or not, a lot of wildly sparkly metal mesh and neon, which lit up Kane’s entrance to the fashion world. There the similarity ends, because Bovan’s cheerful, DIY, hand-printed, graffitied, hand-knitted look is literally made in his own image, from the abstract makeup to the painted papier-måché jewelry to the marker-pen-scrawled bags on down.“I just thought I’d make the sort of dresses I like to wear,” he said afterward, sporting a red jersey dress, his hair, currently lime, scrunched in a topknot, his eyebrows and eye sockets daubed a matte coral. “I’d also been thinking about Stephen Sprouse, Keith Haring, Maripol, and Nina Hagen,” he added, before loping off to greet his mom, Plum Bovan, his arty co-conspirator, whom he lives with in York. His classmates, friends, and tutor Fabio Piras cheered him on.That kind of energy, from a new generation of resourceful art-school kids, is on the rise again in London. It’s a good-natured, multigendered individuality that circulates around the Loverboy club night, run by Bovan’s classmate Charles Jeffrey (who shows his collection, on friends, in Fashion East’s men’s season) and the quirky duo James Buck and Luke Brooks, whose Rottingdean Bazaar enterprise springs from Buck’s mom’s house near Brighton. It’s a scene against the odds, cooked up by talents of many stripes who don’t fit any template of the wholesale-retail system, yet whose student-debt-ridden finances aren’t gettting them down.Lulu Kennedy, den mother of this optimistic new wave, is also supporting AV Robertson, an embroidery graduate who also hails from York, and the Irish Central Saint Martins graduate Richard Malone, who put out an accomplished collection of stripy jersey pieces in blue, white, and yellow. Kudos to her for her philanthropic overseeing of the birth of so many careers: Simone Rocha, Roksanda Ilincic, Jonathan Saunders, Gareth Pugh, Henry Holland, and many others who’ve stepped this way over the past decade.
She and the new gang were applauded to the rafters at show’s end.
17 September 2016
The fact thatMarc Jacobsmoseyed into the Fashion East show—the composite display of young talent nurtured by Lulu Kennedy—was an all-round mind-boggler. We’ll leave aside the for-whys for a minute, so as not to distract from the main point that the four designers showing under the grand roof of a gallery in Tate Britain were probably the most polished and professional-looking set of individuals who’ve benefitted from the scheme to date.To take them in order:Mimi Wade’s Girl on a Motorcycle collection is the first since she was a student. Against a black-and-white diorama of Hollywood, her red lipsticked, retro-slutty girls pouted in choppy-edged leather lingerie dresses brightly painted with B-movie–poster graphics—Devil Girl From Mars! Please Murder Me!—and one black dress that mimicked the logo for Marianne Faithfull’s appearance in the movie for which Wade named the collection. With the plastic chandelier earrings (a collaboration with Vicki Sarge) and the fur bags (fox supplied by British furrier Hockley), it was one of those very focused British collections that London girls are so good at pulling off, normally with the aid of friends and family. That ought to be exactly the case with Mimi Wade, too: Her grandmother was a TV and movie actress in the ’50s and ’60s, her parents collect movie posters, and her mom works in Vicki Sarge’s shop.Mimi seen, it was the runway show next, featuring Richard Malone and Caitlin Price, who’ve had static presentations with Fashion East before, and A.V. Robertson, who was the complete unknown of the pack—except that she is well known to Marc Jacobs because Amy Robertson, the British print designer behind the brand name, works for him as a design assistant. Robertson has her own support group around her, too, that just happens to include Katie Grand and, by extension,Edie Campbell,Georgia May Jagger, and a squad of models straight off the plane fromNew York.Richard Malone, who’s from County Wicklow in Ireland, and Caitlin Price, a proud-of-it girl from tough South London, cast their own models. Malone’s notes made hilarious mention of his “muse”—his godmother, who, according to Malone family legend, turned up at the baptism with a shaved head and a zebra-print dress cut to show her Celtic tattoos. That made for fun reading, but actually, the collection of striped jersey twisted expertly into tops, cargo pants, and dungarees looked cheerfully original.
Caitlin Price’s gang, with their face studs and slicked hair, aren’t the sort of ladies whose half-trains you’d like to step on in a dance hall. Price has been working on the frontier between sportswear and ballwear for a few seasons, expressing the forms of athletic streetwear in fabrics like duchesse satin—it looked best when she exaggerated it all at the end: There are probably people who will wear a pair of leggings with an abstract ball skirt and a cropped puffer on the red carpet. Then came A.V. Robertson’s turn—a collection in which she sprinkled her bold, floral 3-D embroideries over sweaters and narrow silhouettes tailored in pin-striped tie fabric. It had energy and a cocky glamour, which certainly marks her out for attention next season. And not just because Marc was there.
20 February 2016
Caitlin Priceis London fashion’s latest phenom. Much likeSimone Rocha, Price—who showed her second collection today as part of the Fashion East lineup of emerging designers—made her mark on the scene by inventing a new kind of girl, one with her own distinctive look and attitude. Only time will tell whether the Caitlin Price woman will prove to be as multidimensional as the one Rocha dreamed up. This season, Price has sharpened her outlines, showing new versions of the luxuriously fabricated, beautifully detailed tracksuits that she offered in her debut, and expanding her dialogue between high and low aesthetics by creating half-gown skirts and cutaway nightclubbing dresses that had the tough tone and casual mien of streetwear. The mix of silk and poly taffetas in the looks underscored the high-low theme. Price is up to something genuinely interesting, but she gave few hints here as to how she plans to augment her design vocabulary. In the meantime, though, she has gotten everyone’s attention.This Is The Uniform, a new entry into Fashion East, is the brainchild of recent Goldsmiths gradJenna Young. It’s her bad luck that she was showing with Price, inasmuch as the two cover similar territory. Young’s debut likewise toyed with ways to draw appreciative attention to and elevate the look of working-class youth. Her take was less audacious and clear-cut than Price’s, but on the other hand, more expansive. Her mix of sharp crop tops, net sweaters, A-line minidresses, and trousers slung—very inventively—below the hip hinted at a strong instinct for creating the elements of a woman’s wardrobe as opposed to a few strong headline pieces.Fellow Fashion East newcomerRichard Malonealso concerns himself with the working class. His modus operandi is more conceptual, however, than that of Young or Price. For starters, there’s his approach to fabrication: Malone’s workwear materials were sourced from overstock and other types of waste, and though he elevated these fabrics by sculpting them into rather soigné shapes, he maintained a sense of matter-of-factness by eschewing corsetry or other restrictive elements. His clothes are made to function. And the emphasis on wearability went to the collection’s overarching theme, which was a celebration of female labor, at home and in the workplace.
A high-waisted, flared jumpsuit with a ruffled halter neck didn’t at first seem like a garment that could withstand the trenches, but, in fact, it was cut precisely to stand up to a hard day’s work. Ditto a striped dress expanding in wavelike volume as it extended toward the knee. Malone’s look was intriguing, but it was his sensitivity to the user experience of his clothes that makes him one to keep an eye on.
20 September 2015
It would be hard to find two more different emerging designers than Ed Marler and Caitlin Price. Marler, showing tonight in his second outing at Fashion East, is a carnival barker in the mold of a young Galliano, one who spills a lot of ideas into his ribald clothes and favors an aesthetic of (considered) disarray. Price, on the other hand, made her debut at Lulu Kennedy's talent showcase with a collection that was narrowly focused and formally precise. There was a through-line, though: You could argue that Marler's campy hodgepodge looks and Price's embellished tracksuits and skin-baring dresses and skirts shared a fascination with class. The working class, to be exact. Both designers elaborated on the tracksuit—that most beloved ensemble of the English council estate—with Price's satin versions featuring pretty spirals of three-dimensional pleats, and Marler's coming patchworked with dotted pajama silk and gaudy tiger stripe.Sex, too, was a theme of these collections. There was no gainsaying the come-hither-ness of Price's maxi skirts, slung below the hip bones. Marler's effort was bawdy and boudoir-ish in the extreme, what with his sculptured takes on smoking robes, laced-up skintight pants, and velvet bustiers bursting with both cleavage and dotted tulle. To the degree that these collections conflated sex and working-class aesthetics, they read as a touch problematic. Marler pushed that button much harder, as was undoubtedly his intent. This one's a troublemaker—not an unwelcome thing in London these days.Mary Benson, the third designer featured tonight, was the outlier. Like Marler's, her printed-on looks traded in disarray, but to ends that were punkishly glam. Benson's signature is her stained glass-style print technique, which she deployed in intriguing graphic and figurative ways. Her collection was less immediately distinctive than that of the other two designers with whom she shared this season's Fashion East stage, but it showed a lot of promise, especially from a commercial point of view. Lulu Kennedy knows what she's doing: These are all talents to watch.
20 February 2015
The up-and-comers featured in Fashion East's Spring lineup could not have been more different from one another. The audience was presented with the grungy, tactile creations of returning designer Louise Alsop; the conceptual but wearable looks of knitwear talent Helen Lawrence (now in her sophomore season with the initiative); and the outré, vampire-themed collection of newcomer Ed Marler. There was a common thread, though, according to Fashion East founder Lulu Kennedy. "They're all very experimental," she said after the runway show. "They're each really just trying stuff out, but they've got a real focus on their own kind of girl. And I love that I can see mini versions of each designer walking down the runway."Nowhere was that statement truer than in Marler's collection. He took his bow wearing a white "bulletproof vest," as he called it, with gold baroque hand embroidery, and low-riding black trousers boasting attached boxer shorts done half in leopard print and half in a burgundy and gold spotted pattern. Apparently, that was a rather tame outfit for him.The same pieces appeared in his Spring range, which told the story of a vampire gang who had patched together their clothes from various fabrics they'd collected throughout their never-ending lives. The overall look was quite costumey, what with the codpieces, crowns, and corsets (and at times it was a little too reminiscent of Vivienne Westwood or Meadham Kirchhoff), but the clothes were well made. "At the moment, I'm just trying to establish an identity for myself," said Marler. "But I think you can break it up into more wearable things." There was no toning down a pair of lace-up leopard pants, but a sculpted black coat had some serious potential, and a romantic rosebud silk and black lace gown with utilitarian straps—notably worn by a male model—was lovely.Helen Lawrence showed unconventional outfits that were well styled on the runway, but could be broken down into uncomplicated separates, too. "I wanted a really normal girl…with a strange curiosity," said Lawrence. To drive home the "normal" point, her models carried sacks filled with corn or broccoli, as if to say, "She's the real girl! She's just been shopping in her weird clothes!" About those clothes: De- and reconstruction were the focuses here. Lawrence's approach to layering was clever, as was her use of color (yellows, greens, bubblegum pink, and baby blue were the hues of choice).
Latex accents that seemed to melt out from beneath sweaters, or provided a pop as floppy epaulets, added to the "strangeness" of it all—as did bone jewelry made in collaboration with Slim Barrett. Lawrence's little sweaters embellished with plastic and contrasting thread, knit shorts, and jackets will do well with retailers like Opening Ceremony, where, impressively, she's already stocked.Louise Alsop, meanwhile, continued her '90s kick this season with a gritty collection that combined hugely oversize silhouettes with shredded body-con dresses. Alsop's use of delicate thread to create dresses with a webbed or shredded effect brought a delicacy to her grunge aesthetic. One spaghetti-strap black slipdress had cobweb-like matted yellow strings dripping down the body. "They're kind of more beautiful when they just tangle," Alsop said. The effect was haunting. Other standout elements included an Abstract Expressionism-inspired print, which was splashed on an A-line skirt, a bra top, and a little strapless frock, as well as frayed, layered looks hand-screened with hazy streaks of black, white, and acid yellow. On the whole, it was East London cool to a T.Said Kennedy: "They're discovering their signatures and aesthetics, but I think there's a braveness in these clothes. Now is their time to work it all out. It's their time in general." So long as they use that time wisely, some of these newbies could go a long way.
16 September 2014
Fashion East had an all-female lineup this season. On the rota for Lulu Kennedy's incubator were newbie Louise Alsop, Helen Lawrence, and Ashley Williams. This was Williams' third and final shot at the Fashion East runway, and she presented an equine-themed whimsical collection. The designer's father comes from the deep American South, and she had just returned from spending a few months in a Mississippi town so small she couldn't remember its name. (Maybe she was a little distracted because the proceedings were held up for Harry Styles, only for him to be a no-show—disappointing every girl in the crowd.) Anyway, back in that nameless U.S. town, Williams was given an heirloom hat that had belonged to her great-grandmother, which became the prototype for the amusing Amish-style hats that set off the tone. Williams' kooky accessories are a talking point—she loved furry little animals well before a crazed Fendi bug came along—and this season's bags were typically adorable. There was a clutch with a horse motif (with fringing to mimic its mane), little pink piggies with pearl handles, and a snake-print bag shaped like the state of Texas. There were also multicolored cowboy boots that had camera flashes popping in the audience. The looks that came down were correspondingly youthful and purposefully lightweight: silver overalls, slouchy jeans, and sweaters with kitten motifs. Then there were leather looks with the horse theme, again with hanging fringe. It was all fun and Susie Bubble-esque until one exceptionally tailored, sleek, and expensive-looking black coat came out—it was definitely more West End than East. Even though Williams has owned the cutesy, Shoreditch-chic thing, she's also a pretty deft hand at sophisticated tailoring. All in all, it was more than OK at Ashley Williams' corral.Things went a little caveman with the rising star of knitwear, ex-Craig Green collaborator Helen Lawrence. Cutout leather and suede tops came out in a patchwork shape that one would expect to see on Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone. The effect was made even cooler by its pairing with double-brushed wool felted skirts and trousers, deconstructed coats and jackets. Lawrence continued on with last season's trick of vinyl "squiggle" embroidery—hitting the up-cycling theme of which we're seeing more and more.
The dark goth look Lawrence is normally associated with was a little tempered today: Granny Smith apple green mohair sweaters and lavender skirts lightened everything up, and the multilayered technique the designer loves appeared on cropped tops and skirts. Overall, it was a very good showing.Then there was newcomer Louise Alsop, who presented a collection that spoke to East London streets. It was mostly monochrome, except for a shot of mint green, with lots of layered chiffon and staggered hems. Alsop even put her models in laddered socks and plimsolls for a moody-teenager vibe. The designer clearly wants you to remember her name, because she embroidered it on her flowy poncho over pleated culottes, with jagged threads hanging loose from the signature. Also displayed were slogans like "hopeless" or "loveless" scrawled down trouser legs and on sweatshirts—a reference, Alsop said, to tattoos on the knuckles of street urchins. These kids are going to gigs, too, as she had printed images of crowds at concerts on T-shirts, skirts, and shorts. Then there was the milk bottle clutch, which was cool and very youthful—are Alsop's customers even old enough to drink the real stuff? Alsop herself is young, and that may explain why the collection was just a little bit timid. With the time and tutoring she'll receive from Lulu Kennedy and her team, that should get sorted out.
17 February 2014
The Fashion East young designer showcase is a revolving door—three seasons, then you're out into the world—but for Spring, the lineup remained as it had for Fall, with collections by Ryan Lo, Claire Barrow, and Ashley Williams taking their respective turns on the catwalk. Each designer has continued experimentation in his or her own individual way, something the showcase is famed for, and each is quickly building a reputation for distinct individual aesthetics.Lo showed his third collection for Fashion East, his strongest to date. There was still the characteristic cuteness; the designer cited Sylvanian Families toys as an inspiration for his women-as-woodland-animals, with their fluffy ears and tails. "PartlySylvanian Families mixed with girls preparing to be homemakers," Lo clarified. "There is the witch inHansel and Greteltransformed, picnics in the woods,The Sound of Music…all rolled into one: happy, happy, and joyful." Lo's clothes are maniacally, unrelentingly optimistic, yet the fluffiness of previous seasons has been tempered somewhat by sharper, slicker, and more complete silhouettes. He has been working with the stylist Robbie Spencer and it shows: He seems to have contained thekawaii.Lo's layered lace confections in angel-cake colors looked nicely made and now ready for consumption.Barrow is also on her third and final Fashion East outing. The designer is perhaps the most established of the trio, with her own design signature (her illustrated leathers) and successful capsule collections for the English retailer Matches. Despite that, she remains unburdened and undaunted by commercial restraint, and this season she presented a collection that was perhaps her most oblique and difficult, inspired by Kenneth Anger and voodoo. "It is about bringing together a new group of people, a new gang," Barrow said backstage. "It is more experimental, and they are into some dark shit—especially the boys." Her leathers were largely missing this time. Instead there were illustrated plastic pieces, which were the standouts of the collection.The final designer, Williams, is only in her second season with the showcase, but despite being the baby of the group, she already has momentum and star power: Harry Styles sat in the audience wearing one of her T-shirts, and Eliza Cummings opened and closed her show.
Williams is best known for her Happy Ashley prints, and this season, they were given a nautical slant, with speedboats and Gary the Snail fromSpongeBob SquarePants.("He's posh because he lives on snakeskin," Williams joked after the show.) The nautical theme pervaded throughout, but not as the usual, tired fashion standby. Here, plush toy sharks also doubled as handbags, "Dreamboat" was printed on leathers and swimsuits, and "SOS" emblazoned a royal-blue lace dress. "I wanted to break up the collection so it wasn't print-heavy, [and] mental," she explained. "I wanted the sense of something slick and the Miami of the eighties—but I also wanted people I know to be able to wear it. That's why it had to be clean and slick." And so despite Williams' reputation for prints, some of the finest looks on offer here weren't prints at all, like the blue denim apron dresses and shorts.
16 September 2013
The mundane, the heartsick, and the crushed. These were the concerns of the three Fashion East designers Claire Barrow, Ryan Lo, and Ashley Williams, who showed this season. Each one displayed the spirit of heartfelt experimentation in their own individual way, something this showcase is famed for. Above all, these were young people designing for their peers, which always makes for a refreshing change. It also made for a particularly strong lineup overall.First was Claire Barrow in her sophomore Fashion East outing. This season her focus was the mundane—something the designer made far more interesting than you might expect. "It's how I feel about fashion now," said Barrow backstage. "I just don't want to bang out clothes to a certain brief." Instead, inspired by repeatedly seeing John Constable'sThe Hay Wainin various charity shops, with its mundane view of nature and the near unpleasant setting of such stores, the designer decided to embark on this collection. Here, the bric-a-brac, thrift-store state of things was apparent: Lampshade-on-head, anyone? There was also a battered doll re-created as a leather handbag, and Billy the Bass made into a purse. This attitude also extended to the clothing, yet the crafted nature of Barrow's output lifted the collection above the borrowed and the bland, particularly in standout items such as her circle-skirted dévoré dresses and black leather evening coat. There was also a black leather bridal outfit for those who fancy a change. And there is much more promised from this designer.Ryan Lo was also on his second collection for the showcase, and this time his output was greatly improved. He took his interesting approach to textiles and sugarcoated attitude and applied them to the plight of unhappy singletons—yes, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones were the muses here, combined with the anime heroines ofSailor Moon, defeating evil with the power of love. Lo applied these codes to a cotton-candy confection of outfits that borrowed from the working girl's wardrobe and her bedtime. Here, a baby blue mohair overcoat stood out with its slouchy silhouette that could have also meant extravagant bed wear. There were pussy-bow blouses in transparent fabrics (Lo's women really shouldn't stand near naked flames, there's so much experimentation with both real and artificial fibers), which were combined with vinyl to particularly good effect. The show was purposefully sweet, but at times it could cause problems with insulin levels.
The final designer, Ashley Williams, was making her Fashion East debut. Straight from Westminster's BA fashion course—the same class as Claire Barrow, no less—Williams presented an accomplished offering that almost brought the idea of a fully fledged brand to mind: This was the sort of cute brief that labels like Hysteric Glamour used to fulfill in the nineties. Of course, Williams has grown up with a multitude of brand identities around her, so designing in such a way feels like second nature and never seems forced. "I always think about what would amuse me," said the designer after her show. "I'd wear all of it to the shops; it's about not looking out of place anywhere." Never taking herself too seriously, and dealing with the idea of a mad fan's crush on Elvis Presley, Williams presented a collection full of an almost perky preppiness that was peppered with cuddly-toy clutch bags and fun fur. There was intricately embroidered insignia of her own devising—fulfilled by a military embroiderer—that covered one of the best jackets in the collection. Williams' characteristic, graphic sloganeering prints and sharp, casual silhouettes combined to make a more than worthwhile debut.
17 February 2013
The Fashion East platform is the playpen for nascent talent in London. But what was surprising today was how mature some young designers' ideas can be without losing any of their edge.It is hard to pass judgment on designers at this stage in their careers; people who start off in one place can turn around in a few years and shock the hell out of you—both for good and for bad. But the Lulu Kennedy-run showcase has a good track record.Ryan Lo produced a candy-floss confection of looks, where the experiments in texture were fine—he is known for his fabric innovation—but the taste left something to be desired. It seemed like glam house was back again and that marabou was de rigueur; references to this period are popping up all over the place in London. Overall, the collection had a syrupy flavor, when it felt like it needed to be spiked with something stronger. Or maybe that's just this reviewer's palate.On the other hand, there was Claire Barrow, the recent Westminster graduate whose collection had a literal debt to the strong stuff: Garments were inspired by and named after tequila, bourbon, martini, gin, and absinthe. Here, there was a fifties rockabilly sensibility that actually pointed to the designer's interest in punk. "Punk looked back to this time to get those basic rhythms back," she said of her music choice. Equally, she looked back to go forward in the fashion she has been making. Skipping nostalgia for something more sinister and enigmatic, Barrow put her boys and girls in rubber dungarees, hand-illustrated leather jackets, and odd rainwear. She hoped her gang defied some easy explanation, and it worked, in a good way.After enjoying two previous seasons of Fashion East, Maarten van der Horst was the only designer to have his output on the catwalk (the other two presented in a tableau format). Not surprisingly, his work felt the most ready to leave the playpen's confines, and yet it had lost none of its youthful bravado. Much spun around the detritus of consumer corporate culture, particularly the motif of the carrier bag. And the cheap carrier bag at that—the kind you get from the supermarket or the market stall, not the designer kind. Tesco bags were a particularly prominent part of the collection. Of course, there was a debt to punk and pop here, particularly from the school of Sprouse, and yet the appropriation felt entirely contemporary, as opposed to being tinged with nostalgia.
The manic handmade screen prints, the Swarovski stickers, the ready-made workwear shapes of corporate uniforms—"I am not a big fan of hiding behind craftsmanship," said the designer—gave an honesty and democracy to the entire thing. In London this season, Fashion East really did point the way forward to something different in fashion today.
14 September 2012
As is widely acknowledged, the London fashion industry is second to none when it comes to supporting and developing new talent. Fashion East, among all the local programs for emerging designers, remains the keenest talent spotter; director Lulu Kennedy has excellent, eclectic taste. The trio of designers on the Fashion East runway this evening certainly represented a motley crew: First up was Maarten van der Horst, an accomplished tailor and a bit of a ham; next down the runway was Marques'Almeida, a brand almost dirgelike in its grunginess; the final act was Fashion East veteran James Long, a menswear designer and knitwear specialist who has definitely earned a solo spot on the London fashion week calendar next season.Van der Horst brings a lot of wit to his clothes, and a great deal of technical know-how. For this collection, his second, he put a sexy spin on menswear shirting, turning crisp poplins and striped cottons into tailored bodysuits, and setting them off with cheesy satin florals. The bodysuits weren't altogether convincing, but the satin stuff worked, in particular the collection's quilted blazer-style jackets in white-on-white and red printed florals. Van der Horst definitely has a strong point of view, but he's still in the process of fleshing it out.Marques'Almeida doesn't lack for point of view, either: Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida distress denim with a single-minded gloominess. The look is striking; this season's skate-inspired black and yellow clothes, all oversized and ripped to hell, had a kind of desolate grandeur. The collection was a little one-dimensional, but these pieces will be pulled a lot by fashion editors, and some of the more circumspect looks, like the frayed skate shorts and decayed knits and leathers, will attract shoppers. (Pieces from the debut Marques'Almeida collection for Spring 2012 were picked up by Opening Ceremony—a store that's no slouch at seeing a niche market.)James Long was taking his third, and final, turn on the Fashion East runway this evening, and the collection he showed was proof that he's used his tenancy to hone his womenswear to a fine point. This was a strong, well-made, distinctive collection, commencing with a series of hugely appealing intarsia knit dresses limbed with gold. Long showed that he can do more than just knits: His printed velvet pieces were knockouts, and the quilted leather jackets with hand-knit sleeves were both beautifully executed and a lot of fun. Onward and upward.
19 February 2012
The auspicious runways of Fashion East have seen veterans like Gareth Pugh and Jonathan Saunders, and the newly up-and-coming like Michael van der Ham and Nasir Mazhar. This season Lulu Kennedy's fashion-godmothering project moved to the Haunch of Venison gallery, where each of the three design houses—Marques'Almeida, James Long, and Maarten van der Horst—showed against the backdrop of Frank Stella's 1974 paintingLettre sur les Aveugles II(Letter on the Blind II).First up, designers Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida of Marques'Almeida cited in their show notes a "desire to capture a youth code." Their take on that was gutted and frayed denim, much of it so bleached it was nearly white. With jeans having been worked every which way and at every level of the market, it's hard to give the fabric new energy, particularly when you're speaking the language of rebellion. But the almost violent rawness in pieces that were constructed to appear gouged away did the trick.Next was menswear star James Long, taking his second crack at womenswear at Fashion East. His skinny pants and little belted biker jackets in python and filmy black chiffons with multicolored gum-ball beading were far slicker than his crafty, knitwear-heavy debut. Long is known for his knack with leather, and those biker jackets are a menswear signature that make sense to cross over. The beading was best when he piled it on.Last, giving that Frank Stella a run for its money, was Maarten van der Horst, who recently graduated from the Central Saint Martins M.A. program. It's hard to make an impression on a print-weary fashion crowd, but van der Horst's matchy-matchy ensembles of Hawaiian shirts and shorts with printed pumps perked them up. What made his new was the way he outlined edges and seams with a bright little nylon ruffle, in some cases flocking tulle onto them to suggest a bikini or bustier. He ended on a relatively quieter note with a series of sherbet-hued tuxes with cropped pants. And then the last girl turned to reveal everything backed in tulle ruffles. According to his show notes, his pot of references ranged from Lilly Pulitzer to Kid Creole. In all, they melded together quite nicely.
17 September 2011
Fashion East—the group show with the very deep-pocketed support of Topshop (check out that generous spread of free food and drinks!) and the influential pull of its founding force, Lulu Kennedy—celebrated its tenth anniversary last September and continues to barrel powerfully forward. A massive wave of a fashion crowd packed into Old Billingsgate station to see the three lucky young talents anointed this season: menswear designer James Long, now trying his hand at women's; Elliot Atkinson; and Simone Rocha, showing under the Fashion East mantle for a second season.First up was Long, whose show notes described his collection as "punk mountain style look." Primarily, he tapped into his facility with knitwear. Dresses had heavy knit tops and shredded-looking fringe skirts, with bright Peruvian-esque embroidery about the neck and waist. The best one was bright red, a sharp dose of color in his mostly ivory and black palette. But between the vaguely glamorous chiffon robes with knotted macramé trim and tough-girl fare like a bulky, fringed Aran sweater and black leather motorcycle pants, it was difficult to put your finger on Long's intention.Next was 26-year-old Atkinson, a Brit with Cypriot roots who went to school in Scotland. His ultra-skinny and ultra-mini silhouettes were meant to reference a history of American culture, from Native American embellishment to post-Depression-era tailoring. It sounds like overload, but Atkinson has a light hand, and his emphasis on an almost inhumanly attenuated (see the high-necked shirts) and tailored silhouette brought it all together. In that framework, a Western shirt with metal collar tips and bolo tie somehow worked coherently alongside an Aran knit and silk tartan mini.Lastly, Rocha gave her deconstruction a seasonally appropriate layer of depth and texture by adding shearling, fake fur, ponyskin, and thickly cabled knitwear into the spliced-up mix. In this designer's surreal work, the back of a jacket is cut away to reveal a furry panel. In fact, you had to make sure you caught a model coming and going, because backs rarely matched fronts. Rocha continued to work liberally with nude tulle, setting it into jackets for a window into what's within and wrapping it around classic pieces to suggest that, though the shapes are familiar, all is not as it seems. Perhaps it's the unavoidable consequence of working with heavier materials, but this collection lacked some of the crisp wit of her debut.
21 February 2011
You could consider Fashion East to be the Harvard for London's aspiring designers. That is to say, it's a peak that's not easy to reach, but once a young gun gets there it puts them in ambitious, talented, and successful company. If we follow the Ivy League metaphor, Fashion East's celebrated alums include Gareth Pugh, Richard Nicoll, Jonathan Saunders, Louise Goldin, Emma Cook, and Michael van der Ham. And that would make initiative founder Lulu Kennedy the dean, since she, along with an industry panel, selects three designers each season to show on the calendar. For Spring, the lineup was Heikki Salonen, who also participated last season; Felicity Brown; and Simone Rocha, daughter of designer John Rocha.Salonen showed first, building on the grungy story he started to tell last season, although this time around Birkenstocks and purposefully holey socks replaced Dr. Martens. There's a haphazardly elegant and masculine energy to Salonen's tailored looks in crinkled gauze and linen that all come with destroyed and fraying edges. But the designer, who is also a creative consultant at Diesel, added his own spin to that idea with an intricate tribal print on shirts, pants, and even that nineties accessories mainstay: the backpack.Next was Brown, whose work has just hit the shelves at Barneys New York, Liberty, and 10 Corso Como. It's easy to see why. Her cocktail-hour wares have both a sharp focus and immediate appeal, whether you're looking at an elaborate mille-feuille ruffled dress or ultrasimple, layered silk T-shirts and skirts. Both are left with raw edges to cut their preciousness, and both display evidence of a well-honed sense of color.The last up was Rocha, who showed she's not coasting on any kind of fashion legacy. Her deconstructed and witty work is pretty ambitious stuff, but this collection proves the designer is up to the task she's set herself. Rocha cleverly chose an all-white palette, which focused attention on her eye-tricking play between gauzy tulle and feminine ruffles and menswear tailoring. It also highlighted the sculpted rose headpiece that sat like a miner's headlamp. Her pieces are on sale at her father's shop on Dover Street.This season, Fashion East moved from Somerset House to Topshop's venue at the old Waterloo Terminal. The soaring space is filled with light—an apt location for bright futures.
20 September 2010
It's a measure of how inclusive London fashion week has become that the fashion council's HQ, Somerset House, has found space for Fashion East. The exact location was its vaults, fitting for what was formerly an underground group show. Georgian coal holes and dripping pipes notwithstanding, the convenience of merely tottering down a couple flights of algae-lined steps for a frisson of edge—rather than spending 45 minutes in traffic and 20 in a seething crowd, as was the case previously—can't be argued with.The thing is, though, that London isn't so edgy anymore. The renegade, aggressive atmosphere that spawned Alexander McQueen is a thing of the past. These days the city is better at producing preternaturally honed specialists, a fact reflected in this season's lineup, which includes a milliner, Nasir Mazhar; a sportswear designer, Heikki Salonen; and Michael Van Der Ham. The last's collaged eveningwear is already virtually sold out at Liberty, which took a risk on him in his first season.Of the three, Mazhar, who came to making headgear via hairdressing, is the raw newcomer—though through his association with the stylist Nicola Formichetti, he's already a favorite of Lady Gaga and Madonna. The hair-to-hat connection was easy enough to read in his opening updo of scrolled black leather "curlers" and the falls of pink nylon wig that cascaded from the back of a Tudor wimple. Some of his influences—the Rude Boys and Rude Girls he quoted in his program notes—come from his daily observations of living and working in the multicultural East End. But Mazhar is developing an artistic flair for a distinctive geometric structure (as in the peaks of his mean leather men's caps, set back on the head), and that could one day turn into a brand proposition for a smart streetwear company.Both Salonen and Van Der Ham, on the other hand, are Northern Europeans who have set up businesses in London after gaining master's degrees at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins, respectively. Salonen, a Finn, continued his straight-up-and-down tomboyish silhouette, steering it into slightly darker territory with tailored suede shifts and a great pair of black jeans appliquéd with raw-edge triangles.The Dutchman Van Der Ham was the one under the most pressure to perform. He responded by continuing in the same vein as last season, collaging fabrics into dresses and separates—with the addition, this time, of rosebud-scattered Liberty prints donated by the store.
True, he steered his collection more in the way of day-appropriate pieces and made a cautious step into patchworked knitwear, which potentially opens up a new product category for him. Still, it's the same look, and it left some questions hanging. Is the essential charm of his work the amateurism of the handmade product? Would it look better if it was made to purist standards of dressmaking skills? And is he sailing too close at times to territory Nicolas Ghesquière marked out years back? Van Der Ham's final dress—a lovely hybrid of long, flowing navy silk and crystal-encrusted beige wool—was outstanding enough to erase such worries for a second. But when the time comes for him to leave the Fashion East nest next season, he's going to find himself needing to face these issues head-on.
19 February 2010
Fashion East has a breakout star. She's Holly Fulton, a Scottish textile designer who, since her last tentative showing of a few Art Deco paillette-embroidered T-shirts, has made a stunning leap forward, emerging this season with the whole package: bright, embellished dresses and plastic and crystal neckpieces, earrings, bangles, and printed clutches. As a total summer look, zinging with yellow, orange, white, and peacock blue, it totally worked; there was nothing of the awkward student trying too hard about it, just a wearably chic yet quirky sixties-via-Deco look, with outstanding color sense and decoration loaded into every piece.Fulton, who said her collection had been triggered by an Eduardo Paolozzi work calledWittgenstein in New York, received her M.A. at London's Royal College of Art, as did the second designer on the runway, Heikki Salonen. A Finn who has worked with Erdem, Salonen's collection consisted of young, down-to-earth tailoring pieces like vests, walking shorts, and monochrome prints, the starting points of which were English tradition and Scandinavian movies: He'd been watching Ingmar Bergman'sPersona.Also making his debut was Michael Van Der Ham, an alum of Central Saint Martins, who brings the promise of a refreshing kind of glamour to the runway. Patchwork is too folksy a word to describe how he scissors away at mismatching bolts of vintage gold brocades, couture florals, and seventies Lurex and assembles asymmetric and potentially glamourous dresses from them. Van Der Ham, who is Dutch, has also won New Generation funding. Next season, let's hope he'll be back with as much polish as Holly Fulton.
21 September 2009
If there's one image that sums up the razzy side of London's energy now, it's this: Agyness Deyn, ripping down the runway in a studded patent maroon-and-mustard hot-pants set, opening Henry Holland's second show under the Fashion East umbrella. You can't hear the roars in the photograph, but the place, a scuzzy vacant East End warehouse, was packed to the paint-peeling rafters with every dressed-up club kid, tranny, and student in town—there to honor the boy designer and his best friend, the choppy bottle blonde, who in the past year has glided to international fame onVoguecovers. Note: She wasn't wearing a saucy, rhyming slogan T-shirt.Holland, in spite of his party-boy status, had actually knuckled down to some work. Nagged by members of his circle, he got the message that, after triggering a much ripped-off trend, he needed to move on. "A friend of mine went down to theVoguelibrary and found all these early nineties pictures of Stephanie Seymour and Axl Rose. I thought they looked so brilliant," he said. The words "a friend of mine" are the ones to note here, just as much as the hilarious heavy-metal theme, which produced tie-dyed, hyper-color prints for T-shirts, body dresses, and rubber swimwear bits and pieces. Holland had pulled in a backup band of London-based accessory aces—Stuart Vevers (he of Mulberry, soon to be at Loewe) on bags, Katie Hillier (she of Marc by Marc) on knuckle-dusters and earrings, Linda Farrow Vintage on sunglasses, and newcomer Atalanta Weber on wicked glossy spike-winged wedges. As a moment, it put the spotlight on the collaborative energy coming out of this city—transient, maybe, but for now, at least, rooted in a "just do it" level of professionalism that was really quite a surprise.Just out of London's Central Saint Martins' M.A. degree course, Louise Gray is a Scottish textile designer with a strong flair for color. She went to graduate school eager to blow the stuffiness out of embroidery, and for her that means experimenting with chiffon and using it in vivid combinations of lemon and turquoise, emerald and gray, cobalt and flesh, and peach and navy. Her shift dresses came with multilayered geometric decorations—discs, triangles, and squares—pinned on with cheap trinket components and hardware bought in the local DIY store. She has a look that's simple to wear (if you're not self-conscious about things dangling from your breast area) and has a ways to develop.
But as one of the new hardworking Scots who is shaking up London—after Christopher Kane and Jonathan Saunders—she's someone to watch.When you see a person with a towering pile of wig, a painted germ-protecting mask, and a shredded T-shirt reading "HAVE YOU EVOLVED?" coming at you down a runway, you know you're not in for fashion as you know it. With London's pioneer underground recycler, the "ragger" JJ Hudson, for a designer, the Noki House of Sustainability message is one of corporate rage, urban tribalism, and quite a bit of camp fun. "I'm the dark side of Green," he says. Shredded heavy-metal tour T-shirts and chopped-up superhero and Mickey Mouse play clothes are the materials, along with reappropriated Burberry-style check shirts and argyle socks with the diamonds cut out. Cheesy eighties taffeta cocktail dresses were sewn to the bottoms of tees to make travesty "evening gowns." Needless to say, this is all very editorial for a certain magazine sect, but Noki is not up for sales. What he wants, instead, is for young people to copy his work, "because everyone can do it for themselves."
18 September 2007
If London fashion week is a nursery of new talent, then Fashion East is the city's neonatal unit—a nice, warm (and free) place in which to prepare newborns to go it alone on the official runways. Louise Goldin, Danielle Scutt, and Henry Holland are currently sharing the incubator, and the reason visitors come to inspect them is that some of their predecessors, including Gareth Pugh, Marios Schwab, and Roksanda Ilincic, are now taking their first steps in their own right.Henry Holland is the splashiest and newest of the three, and—as a former writer at the teen magazineBliss—more of a rhymer, punner, and nu-rave limericksmith than a designer, per se. His naughtily worded T-shirts ("UHU GARETH PUGH," "CAUSE ME PAIN HEDI SLIMANE," and other excruciating double entendres invoking the names of international and local frock makers) come from the Northern English tradition of George Formby via eighties Katharine Hamnett and the in-jokes of today's East End clubs. Given the chance to show on Fashion East's runway, Holland ran off some more neon-bright filth about models ("WHAM BAM THANK YOU STAM" being the most repeatable), and then took a bow in a T-shirt that read "ONE TRICK PONY." Which shows he knows himself, but it also begs the question as to what happens when the joke's over. That'll be in five minutes, so if he wants to pop up next season, it'll have to be with a new device—and maybe with a friendly designer to help out with the shapes.Danielle Scutt, the second designer in the lineup, hit a wobbly patch after the strong minicollection of power-dressing she sent out last season. This time, her inspirations were Joan Collins and pedigree dog shows, but even though she'd spent months researching and designing prints derived from dog hair, and cutting ironically boxy suits in bubble-gum pink and red, the results lacked the impact of her first show.It was Louise Goldin, a knit designer, who came out top of class. Her black-and-gray harlequin intarsias, some of which came with big head wraps, read in a way like an approachable version of Gareth Pugh's freak-show antics. That earned her kudos among the young editors present, no mean feat considering it's been a couple of generations since a sweater designer has been considered capable of cool. Of the three, Goldin's the one who seems ready to toddle out on her own.
11 February 2007
Buyers and press who made the effort to struggle across London for Fashion East ended up feeling very smug with themselves. The tenth installment of this initiative (it selects two or three young designers to show per season) turned up gold.Marios Schwab, a 26-year-old half-Greek, half-Austrian designer came out with the freshest surprise of the London shows: a collection that was not only precociously well made, but also stamped with an authentic viewpoint. "It was about growing up in Athens," Schwab said. "About being young and wild." For him, believe it or not, that means the early nineties, and his collection went there with short, bra-topped jersey dresses implanted with silver metal cutouts and suspended on complex straps. The spirit—a frank homage to Alaïa, with a touch of Versace thrown in—looked nevertheless like the work of a young perfectionist with an eye of his own. Maria Luisa Poumaillou, of the influential Paris boutique Maria Luisa, left raving.If Schwab was a hard act to follow, the cropped mannish tailoring and geometrically pieced dresses of Spijkers en Spijkers, identical twin Dutch designers, showed enough polish to make the audience pay attention. Their contribution was another encouraging sign of the confident mix of European ideas that are now incubating in London. It was followed by a dose of old-school London theatrics from Gareth Pugh, a recent Central Saint Martins graduate. All one needs to know is that it involved faces covered in pink gelatinous masks, red nylon skirts buoyed up by balloons, flesh-color latex boots, and a stiffly sculpted coat-cum-art-piece that lit up in the dark. And most of it worn by transvestites. Clearly an Alexander McQueen wannabe and certainly not everyone's cup of tea, Pugh provided the second moment of the evening that felt like the optimistic early nineties all over again.
20 September 2005