John Alexander Skelton (Q4837)
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John Alexander Skelton is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | John Alexander Skelton |
John Alexander Skelton is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
John Alexander Skelton’s latest look book begins and ends with pictures in which you can make out the clothes, but only just: A pair of wanderers are seen walking down a muddy gravel pathway, the silhouettes of their fitted jackets and billowing trousers (and one jaunty hat) standing in contrast to the murky green of rolling hills in the Peak District. In the final image, we see the same duo wandering back along the same path slowly enveloped by mist.It was a suitably cinematic framing device for the collection, which took its cues from the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers, an early 20th-century walking club in the north of England that Skelton was drawn to as much for their passionate belief in the restorative properties of the great outdoors as he was for their socialist politics. (The group was instrumental in the establishment of Britain’s freedom to roam laws, allowing public access to private countryside land for recreational purposes, after participating in the mass trespass of Kinder Scout—the exact spot where Skelton’s look book was shot—back in 1932.) More specifically, Skelton honed in on a figure called Bert Ward, a Labour Party politician and activist who created illustrated guidebooks for walkers. “When he would take people rambling, he would want to educate them on the local history, or the local geology, or the local folklore,” Skelton explained. “He made it into a cultural pursuit as well as a physical one.”Of course, as a designer, Skelton was equally fascinated by the elegant outfits worn by many of the ramblers back in the day: Before the development of proper walking gear, most would take their strolls in tailoring and boots. “I was thinking about ramblers today, and the clothes are so awful it’s sort of depressing—all this neon and so much gear that’s unnecessary for what they’re doing,” he added. “I started thinking about what I would want to wear as a rambler, and that was really the basis for the collection.”Skelton’s skill as a designer lies in his ability to spin a yarn—in both senses of the term. With the brilliant (and somewhat unexpected) origin for the collection lying in sportswear, he explored a handful of new techniques that married the old-world spirit of his clothes with a romantic sense of the outdoors.
Most striking were the beautiful waxed jackets in scorched earth yellows and reds, their wonky proportions prettified with a historic technique of applying beeswax to the cotton (more sustainable than paraffin wax, and more beautiful too, with its textural craquelure effect). Shirts and tunics cut from breezy Japanese linens could be worn to climb any mountain in style, and they came stamped and embroidered with pilgrim patches sourced from the digital archives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art—many of them from centuries of worshippers traveling to Canterbury to pay their respects at the shrine of Thomas Becket—or featured those motifs on brooches created by Skelton’s regulator, the jeweler Slim Barrett.From this maelstrom of cultural references (the medieval, the religious, the Gothic) and sartorial references (tailoring, historic sportswear, forgotten corners of British craftsmanship), Skelton whizzed up something strangely chic and utterly desirable. It would be enough to make you want to put on your walking boots and hit the great outdoors immediately—even if your destination is a gloomy English morning on Kinder Scout.
21 June 2024
On a frosty Tuesday evening in the streets surrounding London’s Smithfield Market, it wasn’t difficult to spot those heading to the John Alexander Skelton show. His loyal army of fans could be seen traipsing through the lamp-lit alleyways in calf-skimming boiled wool overcoats and louche tailoring trimmed with dozens of buttons, as if having stepped straight out of a Victorian novel. The time-bending aspect of Skelton’s vision became further apparent when stepping into his venue this season: the extraordinary monument to London’s history that is the church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, with its 12th-century Romanesque arches and Gothic Revival tombs. There’s nowhere in the city quite like it, and few designers in the city make clothes that could match up to its head-turning interiors.Thankfully, Skelton is one of them. While he has spent the past few seasons showcasing his collections via exquisitely produced look books and exhibitions, no formula lets his vision sing quite like the theatrical flair of his shows. As the eerie, twinkling synths and siren-like wail of This Mortal Coil’s “Dreams Made Flesh” boomed out over the speakers and the space was plunged into darkness, a procession of Skelton’s muses—an all-ages cast of men bearing closer resemblance to extras onLord of the Ringsthan your typical runway model—circulated through the aisles and eventually down the center of the nave clutching brass candlesticks, the light flickering to create spellbinding shadows across the audience seated in the pews and the stone walls beyond. Following the collective intake of breath as the song faded to silence, you could have heard a pin drop.“Whenever I really need to concentrate, or to focus on the more creative side of my job, I put on This Mortal Coil—it’s almost like a soundtrack to my work,” Skelton said after the show. “It feels as if there’s a kind of imagined world behind the music that I wanted to capture in this collection.” Rather than head down a more literal route, Skelton’s sonic inspiration manifested in clothes that leaned towards the Gothic (as opposed to the more earthy, folksy aesthetic he’s been exploring the past few seasons). “Taking the inspiration from the music gave me a lot of freedom,” he said.
The color palette may have been dominated by deep blacks, as well as a blazing shade of vermillion that appeared across gorgeous jacquard velvet trousers and two-pieces, but the end result was something that felt dapper rather than heavy, in part thanks to the styling: playful metal crowns created by Skelton’s regular collaborator Slim Barrett, or a splash of lime green in a silk neck scarf, or the elegant leather slippers worn with every look.With the church as backdrop, the billowing full-length coats also carried a whisper of the ecclesiastical; it turned out that their shape was inspired in part by a handful of priest’s gowns Skelton’s brother picked up at a flea market in Rome. But what impressed most, as always, was Skelton’s ability to take these historical references and reformulate them into something that feels covetable right now. Even among all the bombast and drama of the show, the impeccable quality of the individual pieces shone, whether the chunky linen of a block-printed shirt or the butter-soft corduroy of a pair of high-waisted trousers. Watch the spiffily dressed men in the front row closely enough as they erupted into applause at the end of the show, and you could see them mentally earmarking the pieces for their personal orders.
13 January 2024
Given that previous John Alexander Skelton shows have taken place in the crypt of St. Pancras Church and the shadowy corners of a 17th-century Fleet Street pub, it’s easy to associate the designer with a certain brand of Dickensian gloom. But while Skelton is often inclined to spin a rich and theatrical yarn around his collections, the essence of his appeal lies in the clothes themselves—hold one of his shirts or tailored trousers in your hands, and the extraordinary craftsmanship and timeless textiles look and feel just as arresting as any of his runway spectacles.Hence why it felt especially cheering to see Skelton gravitate toward something a little lighter and brighter this season—all the better to let his star pieces shine. Across the collection were wonky polka dots, seersucker stripes, and louche silk scarves decorated with graphic thistles, while the unusually vibrant color scheme cycled through everything from punchy scarlet reds to breezy French blues. “There’s a particular mood to my clothes, which can be a bit dark sometimes,” Skelton acknowledged. “I felt the need to do something a bit more uplifting. Really, I design things because I want to wear them, and I genuinely was just thinking about what I’d want to wear in the summer.”Still, this wouldn’t be a Skelton collection withoutsomethingof a backstory. There was a throughline from the British folk history he explored in his previous collection, which took Neolithic sites in the Orkney Islands as its starting point. Here, that was translated into the gorgeous botanical wood-block prints and horticultural embroideries that spread their tentacles across shirts and cardigans. This time, though, the outdoorsy spirit was one firmly rooted in the present day, and more specifically, in the ever-growing appeal of allotments.“After last season, I kept thinking about people being connected to nature and how it might benefit society at large,” Skelton explained. “I was thinking: How is that possible in a modern context?” (The lookbook was photographed by Skelton’s ongoing collaborator William Waterworth at a community garden in the suburb of Herne Hill with sweeping views across London—a place both “peaceful and very much removed from the city,” in Skelton’s words.)Look closer, and Skelton’s topsy-turvy instincts become evident. Utilitarian fabrics that you might associate with workwear or gardening—think hardy canvases and cotton twills—are instead cut into spiffy blazers and pleated trousers.
Meanwhile, more delicate, refined fabrics—like silks and artisanal linens—are used for more practical pieces such as scarves and boiler suits. “If I’d tried to do a collection based on gardening quite literally, it would have been quite boring,” Skelton observed. “I like to disrupt things and use fabrics that aren’t for their usual intended purposes. I like that tension.” Even within Skelton’s Edenic paradise, there was something subversive at work—and in his competent, alchemical hands, it produced immediately desirable results.
20 June 2023
Whenever conventional wisdom would have told John Alexander Skelton to take a certain path, he’s gone the other way. Despite the launchpad promised by his prize-winning Central Saint Martins graduate collection in 2016, he instead chose to scale his brand up slowly and modestly, primarily working made-to-order and with a carefully-managed list of around two dozen stockists. And over the past few years, his presentations—more like happenings, in fact, involving as they have everything from a lock-in at a 350-year-old pub, to a roof-raising recital from Dylan Thomas’sUnder Milk Wood, to an eerie procession through a church crypt—have garnered him increasing buzz as an under-the-radar talent within London’s menswear ecosystem. This season, he decided to scale things back a little, opting for an exhibition of photographs and a film.Still, there was plenty of Skelton’s innate flair for storytelling (with his shaggy, shoulder-length hair and mustache, even the designer’s rakish appearance feels plucked straight out of a 19th-century novel) to be found. Staged among the crumbling plaster and exposed brick walls of the House of Annetta in Spitalfields, the intensely atmospheric images by photographer William Waterworth captured the collection on a motley crew of locals around the remote Orkney Islands, an archipelago off the northern tip of Scotland that houses some of Europe’s best-preserved Neolithic sites. In fact, the photographs were displayed in frames etched with motifs inspired by Neolithic carvings, which also cropped up across Skelton’s signature fabrics of flannels, linens, tweeds, and wools, largely sourced from across the British Isles.For while Skelton is a masterful storyteller, the clothes are always the thing. And here, in Waterworth’s crisp, moody pictures, every detail was able to fully shine. There were shirts crafted from hand-woven, block-printed Indian cottons featuring elaborate motifs inspired by books Skelton dug up on the art of Stone Age Britain, worn under cardigans of speckled Donegal wool and pulled together with swirling, cosmic metal brooches and clasps crafted by jewelry designer Slim Barrett. Felted British wool hats, lined with antique French linen, were made in collaboration with historical handicrafts expert Rachel Frost, while boots made from deadstock leather were produced in partnership with the Berlin-based zero-waste shoemaker Matthias Winkler.
Every meticulously-crafted ingredient spoke not just to Skelton’s almost scholarly approach to building a network of makers and manufacturers who can bring his exacting vision to life—alongside the small team in his studio that finishes all his pieces by hand, that is—but also just how cohesive that vision truly is.
24 January 2023
In a crypt, by candlelight. The sound of hobnail boots on cobbles. The strains of a harp being played somewhere in the depths of an unseen tunnel. The bell of St. Pancras Church tolling the quarter hour above.The spectacle summoned by John Skelton cast its fully creepy spell over the congregation who gathered to partake of his performance on a dark January night in London. Gray haired and grizzled, or younger yet made up to a vein-cracked pallor, each man pushed his own trolley containing a tungsten light to illuminate his face. Passing glimpses of Skelton’s clothing flared in the gloom: striped tailoring and swirling crushed-velvet coats, shirts stamped with British folkloric symbols—the whole thing suspended between the living and long-passed culture of the 19th- and early-20th-century English workingman.Skelton is a non-belonger in London fashion whose appearances are rarities. “I wouldn’t really say that I’m nostalgic, but there are some things that existed in the past which were really amazing,” he explained, ducking out the crypt. “It’s not so much the past as a slightly separate universe than the one that exists today, which I find really dull and mundane.”A Yorkshireman, Skelton was one of the first student dissidents—a canary in the mine—who decided while studying for an M.A. at Central Saint Martins (class of 2016) that he didn’t want to join the dysfunctional fashion system. Instead, he plowed his own furrow in low-impact, local-production-supporting garment making, building relationships with Yorkshire and Scottish mills, using deadstock fabric, and researching and reviving the proud history of lost generations of craftsmen, farmers, and factory workers. “There’s a romanticism, a real beauty in it,” he said. “It’s a magnet. I can’t pull myself away.”There’s nothing saccharine about that. In a way, Skelton stands in the long line of British fashion tradition with the likes of Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood in his resurrections of the British past, but his performances are always gritty confrontations with regional and working-class masculinities. Pre-pandemic he put on a staging of Dylan Thomas’sUnder Milk Woodin a Victorian chapel in London. The audience walked in and was confronted by the sight of sheet-shrouded bodies, which eventually rose from the dead wearing Skelton’s collection.
Before that, he pretty much made his reputation when he invited people to a drink at an old Fleet Street pub and let loose a carousing crew of 18th-century wastrels on them—obligatory audience participation, whether you liked it or not. Some of his latest crypt inhabitants were recognizable as the selfsame characters, blokes of all ages who convincingly carry off Skelton’s rough-hewn, handmade, pin-tucked, and patina-textured clothes as if born to them.This time, according to Skelton’s notes, they were channeling his research about Pollock’s Toy Museum, originally a Victorian toy shop in London. “It was my fantasized version of who Mr. Pollock was and what his wardrobe looked like.” Linking past to present, the Mr. Punch and Jumping Jack screen-printed shirts were etched in copper-plate artwork by the great-grandson of one of the museum’s owners.It’s Skelton’s 11th collection. There was a time when industry observers might have been skeptical about the commercial viability of his slow-fashion methods. He’s proved them wrong but on his own terms. Over time, he’s built a network of relationships with 30 stockists, ranging from Japan to Berlin, Vienna, and New York. “I’ve found stores that I like that sell my clothes. A lot of them sell them with antiques and furniture,” he smiled. “Not multi-brand stores.” Where there’s an alternative way, it turns out, there are men for all his seasons.
10 January 2022