Lou Dalton (Q5066)
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Lou Dalton is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Lou Dalton |
Lou Dalton is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
These days, Lou Dalton does much of her work with John Smedley, the wonderful heritage Brit-knitwear specialist that she first collaborated with six years ago. Her precise and realistic aesthetic combines finely with the 1784-founded Derbyshire firm’s ethos. Dalton’s expertise, however, does not lie in knitwear: she has a fine eye for menswear design that is especially appreciated in probably the industry’s most refined market, Japan.These days Dalton is also exercising slow fashion, presenting only one collection a year, and often referring back to her more-than-decade back catalogue in order to remove the imperative of timeliness—this business’s most damaging factor—from her equation. As she said: “It’s about looking back over what performed well, why, and how we can emulate this creatively and sustainably moving forward, whilst bringing something fresh and new to the table.”This table was laid with several handsome varieties of her suiting made in sustainable wools and check blends sourced from mills in Prato, Italy (where Brexit is giving her problems) and Yorkshire, England. Jackets were cut with action backs for movement and sartorial authenticity, while externalized pockets created an unobtrusively post-modern and avant-garde effect. There were also some of her Smedley knits for seasoning, and some cool recycled nylon and ripstop gear that would look equally as dashing on the Yorkshire moors as on Mount Street. Also fetching were the Uneek sandals by the Canadian brand Keen, which looked like an awesomely geeky fugly-tech-horti-core summer shoe (especially in other colorways): please, guys, just take my money.
8 July 2021
The appeal of Lou Dalton is in the authenticity of her approach to modern, British-sourced outdoor gear. That characteristic travels internationally—she has fans in New York and Japan—even at a time when no one’s flying around. This season, she’s made a virtue of being grounded, with a back-to-the-land promise that there are pleasant days of walking and open-air hanging out ahead of us. “Amongst these turbulent times we all need hope and something to excite us,” she says. “Although this season doesn’t necessarily pinpoint a particular place or narrative, it does tap into a sense of familiarity, something safe and secure. I’ve wanted to shine a light on the workmanship of the handful of mills and manufacturers we collaborate with, to create an uncomplicated range with a clear end-use in sight.”Not that her wide-leg, tailored shorts have anything ordinary and watered-down about them. Part throwback to World War II or scout uniform, their voluminous shape, fitted into the waist, makes a fashion statement that may have women trekking to her door for the first time. Post-gender clothing built to last—and possibly to share—is part of the path toward purposeful sustainability that young British designers were setting out on long before the pandemic hit.Purpose in the fashion industry took on another meaning during the early months of lockdown—it became about saving lives. Dalton was one of British fashion’s first responders, joining up as she did to the Emergency Designer Network formed by her London sister-designers Phoebe English, Holly Fulton, and Bethany Williams to make and distribute PPE to hospitals and frontline workers. Thanks to these women’s voluntary initiative, uncounted numbers of people in the U.K. were protected from COVID-19 when Boris Johnson’s government failed to do so. For Dalton, it created an even stronger bond with British factories and clothing workers, many of whom also got behind the effort.So this collection represents her close-knit ties with “quality manufacturers,” like John Smedley in Derbyshire, who has been making her fine-gauge knitwear since the factory opened in 1784. “I’ve been collaborating with them for five years. Long may it last!” she laughs. In reinterpreting classic polo shirts or sweaters in a kind of animal-print, camo pattern, her intention is to make sure that skilled British garment workers weather the pandemic storm, as well as kit out the modern man attractively.
“There’s been a sense of unity, a coming-together to support one another. Regardless of how big or how small your business is, we are as one, and we will get through this together,” she says, adding, “That has very much been the response from the manufacturers I collaborate with. So hopefully, what we’re doing will be enticing enough to bring boys to the door.”
18 November 2020
Entities that can be trusted, that have integrity and durability, and will protect us in a storm: At a time when we can’t find these qualities in politicians and institutions, it’s no wonder they’re being valued in clothes. Lou Dalton’s appeal to men resides in that trusted-and-true zone.Her presentation had 15 blokes sitting at a bus stop, just as she’s observed them on her hikes with her husband, Justin, in rural England. Dalton removed herself from the runaway bandwagon of seasons and constant change a while ago and decided, as she puts it, “to partner with people” in traditional British clothing manufacturing—to do business in a mutually beneficial way with factory owners. “It’s honing in and working out who we are and who they are and getting the best out of it for both sides,” says Dalton. “I’m mindful. I’ve been around a while. In light of what’s going on globally, there’s no loose change any more. I realized we don’t need to be putting out endless product.”Gloverall—responsible for the substance of her tweedy, checked jackets—is one of the companies she has a solid relationship with. They’re an outerwear brand renowned for double-face wool melton. “A lot of what you see here is deadstock that they’ve had sitting in their warehouse for some time,” she explains. “So I said, ‘I can give some airplay to this.’ And they were like, ‘Okay, Lou, great.’” But the efficiency reboot goes beyond co-branding. “In the past, I had to order minimums,” Dalton says. “Now it’s almost producing to order.”Running her tight ship means that fabrics for trousers and such come from Yorkshire mills Dalton has worked with time and again; the knitwear is made by John Smedley, the oldest knitwear company in England. What she brings as a wised-up designer is her sense of relevant proportions and a dash of characterful quirk. The cuffed pants that seem to strike a balance between an urban track pant and trad? Well, that idea goes back to her first training with Purdey clothing, “where we made shooting breeches for the gentry,” only Dalton has reconsidered them with a keen eye for what the hipster gentry on the streets of London, New York, and Tokyo wear as they mount their bicycles.Hers is a down-to-earth pragmatism that appeals on that international wavelength. It’s the opposite of trendy fashion, which is nonetheless one aspect of the growing movement toward practicing and wearing fashion in a new way.
7 January 2020
“There’s no real narrative to it,” said Lou Dalton, which wasn’t right at all. Perhaps because these clothes are so much her story that she isn’t aware of its telling, or perhaps she’s self-effacing, or perhaps it’s a little bit of both. The narrative here reflected Dalton’s careful, modest outlook and her love for “rambling”—a quaintly destinationless English variation on hiking—around the countryside with her partner, Justin. There were three military surplus German-issue pup tents in the middle of the room, and Justin and the other models stood around them or sat on old Land Rover folding stools. “After I rethought the catwalk show and started thinking hard about the business it was when we were out rambling [was when] my head really cleared; I realized what I needed to do was to make a core collection with great partners,” said Dalton.Here, again, those partners included duffle-coat specialists Gloverall, which contributed two Dalton-designed reversible coats—one a trench, one a jacket—in khaki and navy with duffle-style hoods. John Smedley tackled fine-gauge rugby shirts and polo shirts in stripes and blocks of color. The shoes were by Paraboot, all black, and styled with nerdily pulled-up black dad-vacay hosiery. A geeky check was used to great effect, rendered more so when complemented by naive-kit hats. There was a handsome faded floral—a waterproof Italian milled ripstop—on the trim of a pullover cagoule and one side of a reversible trench. The fade was meant to replicate that of a mumsy strip of fabric left forgotten for weeks in the sun. “I like the idea of it feeling a little bit lived in and relaxed,” said Dalton, who appears to have rambled her way to a place of determined purpose.
10 June 2019
This was the first Dalton presentation for a while at which the designer did not reference an autobiographical detail culled either from her Shropshire Lass upbringing or her research trips. That’s because this season her life experience was in her clothes: the men wearing them. These included her fiancé Justin Haigh (being put to work on holiday from his real job in Azerbaijan), the illustrator John Booth, the photographer Andreas Larsson, former Topman head honcho and Dalton mentor Gordon Richardson, and others: “basically the boys who have bought Lou Dalton over the years and who have supported me.”Justin was rocking a tonal brown tracksuit in recycled Italian wool with velvet side-stripes. Richardson looked dashing in foreshortened duffle coat with detachable hood designed by Dalton but produced—as many of the outerwear pieces here—with duffle specialists Gloverall. Pretty damned cool was Booth’s orange-flecked fleece tracksuit. Other highlights included an excellent reduced donkey jacket in blue corduroy with Western detailing worn above a fine pair of tapering nylon pants. The lighter knits, produced again to Dalton’s design by the peerless John Smedley, were as a fine as their gauge. The heavier pieces included Fair Isle pattern sweaters based on a piece Dalton has been producing for 16 years; this season they were irregularly patched in lamb’s wool to give a sense of darning. Whether models or friends of the designer, every man here looked deeply comfortable in Dalton’s clothes.
6 January 2019
Lou Dalton spent much of her youth on her grandmother’s farm. Like a born and bred agriculturalist she works in cycles, letting some styles and fabrications lie fallow while she focuses on increasing the yield of others. Here she revived bleach-dyed cotton jackets and pants, a decoration she last used in 2013. Oversize tailored shirts or boxy short-sleeved shirts were worn above wide, high, roomy shorts. Dalton’s models sat and manspread on a pile of hay bales—the better to evoke that down-on-the-farm feeling.The loveliest innovation in this collection was Dalton’s transplanting of the closed rectangular pleat usually seen on the front of dress shirts to act as a stripe-in-stitch running down each arm of her silk/cotton or denim Western jackets. Other pleasing details included the hand-knit naive argyle shapes on John Smedley–made sweaters and double-collared polo shirts. Dalton shows what she knows, and we reap what she sews.Props to her for using Hi-Tec: this British-founded brand is responsible for some of the most overlooked yet fugly/geeky heritage sneaker styles out there, and seems well overdue its moment of semi-ironic revival. Today Dalton’s men wore hikers—no Silver Shadows of Squash Classics sadly—the better to signal her sophisticated take on practical, appealing menswear.
10 June 2018
Lou Dalton’s models lounged, sat, or sprawled around an outcrop of moss-edged artificial rocks incongruously scattered within a shiningly new building in St James’s Market. The setup, she explained, was based on a memory of how the cool boys had hung when she was growing up in Shropshire, England, shooting the breeze, passing time, waiting for something to happen.This was fine attire to mooch in. Dalton’s ongoing collaboration with the fantastic Derbyshire knitwear specialist John Smedley bore fruit in a Guernsey-reminiscent sweater called “White Noise” for its fuzzily static-effect weave. There were gently oversize rib knits with collegiate stripes at the neck and sleeve, and a suite of big-bobble knit sweaters and beanies. Other Smedley pieces came fronted with soft-hued check mohair panels from the Huddersfield mill Samuel Tweed.Dalton applied gently fastidious tweaks to ongoing house staples. Thick gray Shetland wool was used in cotton-lined pants cut wide and straight, with tonally-adjacent velvet side stripes. Tapered leg track pants came in a fine Italian wool coated with showerproof resin and more velvet stripes. There were some rich-looking quilted overcoats and pants in dark bottle green and navy, worn with irregularly striped fine-gauge knits in yellow and burgundy. Dalton observed that she wanted this collection to have “a muted tone” before adding: “This isn’t going to scare the horses, I know that.” This should suit anyone who prioritizes wearing beautiful, painstakingly thought through clothes over startling onlookers, whatever their species.
7 January 2018
There were boys in a Jermyn Street arcade window, pretending to be shop dummies for Lou Dalton. It was a fitting setting for this designer, who’s reached a point of clarity where she’s focused on making simple things for men, which will sell. Refreshingly direct, her look relies on undemanding iterations of things she knows blokes like her partner really hand over money for: an oversize shirt, a nice sweater, chinos, jeans, easy shorts. “I’ve realized design doesn’t have to have everything and the kitchen sink,” she exclaimed. “There are just 12 styles here, which I’ve developed from former seasons.” What separates Dalton’s work from the ‘basic’ is her focus on fabrics—like the really lovely quilted cotton here. It’s the kind of considered quality, combined with her modern sense of English identity, which has brought her fans from Japan. “So, we're going to take this on tour!” She announced. “In a climate like this—I'm so happy about that!”
10 June 2017
Lou Dalton has a cheerfully unpretentious propensity for making friendships and alliances in her work. Yesterday, she was circulating at her presentation, explaining that she’d rather chat to people and show them the detail and finish of her collection in close-up than on a runway. “I just want to make clothes for boys at a good price,” she said, explaining how well her relationship with the long-established Derbyshire knitwear firm John Smedley is working out. Dalton’s charmingly bobble-decorated and cozy teddy bear–textured sweaters, accessorized with beanies and scarves, are of an easy, accessible ilk that has been selling nicely internationally. One advantage of the Brexit-related plunge in the value of the pound is that it has put designers who can manufacture in Britain on the front foot, at least for the moment.Dalton had a couple of new strings to her bow this season. The painter and ceramicist John Booth hand-decorated a couple of “gravel” bags and a splashily multicolored denim shirt, and around the corner from Dalton’s static presentation, a film was playing starring the young Brit actor Russell Tovey, dressing and undressing in her collection. “It turned out he’d been buying our things and it sort of came up naturally,” she said, laughing. It hit a sweet spot of English cheeriness on a gloomy January day.
8 January 2017
Not to come across all Charles Darwin, butLou Daltonseems to have reversed the evolutionary process expected of young design talent, and evident with her contemporaries on London’s still-young menswear scene. As others become more established, set in their ways, staid, and safe, Dalton seems to have discovered a confidence to experiment outside of her comfort zone. That comes with risks: of alienating her loyal client base, and possibly of confusing press and buyers.Dalton’s Spring 2017 offeringwasa touch confusing. It was based on hiking (Dalton used to walk with her brother), and the activity, to her, means freedom, which is something designers should try to express. Both creatively, and in terms of what they provide consumers, who want clothes that feel freeing and easy and somewhat uplifting, I’d warrant—especially when you’re not offering stuffy, buttoned-up working suits, but rather clothes to wear for leisure and pleasure.Back to Dalton’s hike-specific inspiration, though. There were none of the stout boot and sturdy tweed stereotypes you’d be forgiven for expecting. Bar, perhaps, the twinning of Teva sandals with compression socks, a geekish Ramblers Association style staple. The types who sport such stuff would, one hopes, appreciate the opening Darwin allusions.What took place above that footgear though, was unusual, and somewhat uneven: showerproof nylons in slick electric blue or black (the latter having the look of a garbage bag, albeit with a touch more sartorial appeal); lightweight bomber jackets and zip-front Harringtons, their weightlessness sometimes transposed into slope-shouldered tailoring; capacious knee-length shorts, in stripes that could mimic deckchairs, or fine boxer-short pinstripes. There were also jacquards with jagged shapes, meant to mimic bracken but resembling a jigsaw puzzle pulled apart.This collection sometimes felt the same way—lots of disparate pieces that didn’t quite fit together to make a coherent whole. It was difficult, for instance, to reconcile the quiet closing of broad stripes in masculine pastels (meaning a drizzly lemon-beige, broken taupe and a soft duck-egg blue) with the poppy Heinz Tomato Soup orange, or the garbage bag of black. Those pieces were nice in themselves, but they didn’t add up to a bigger picture about next season's man, and what he should look like.Perhaps no matter.
Imitating the much bigger bigwigs of fashion, Dalton teamed with long-term collaborator, knitwear company John Smedley, to launch a sweater style from the show for immediate sale. I’m guessing men will buy it without even knowing who Dalton is. It will simply appeal to them, their needs, their lives. Maybe that’s the best way to view Dalton’s work—as clothes, rather than fashion. And there were fine clothes here.
11 June 2016
It’s tricky to say a lot when you’re whispering, especially when everyone around you is making so much noise.Lou Daltonoften seems like the quiet one when it comes to London menswear, with her focus on noble fabrics, traditional techniques, and the kind of bog-standard garments that frequently don’t warrant a second glance, especially when up against neon sweaters, lace pantaloons, and skirts for men. Beau Brummell, that mainstay of masculine sartorial silence, would love what Dalton does. John Bull would never turn around in the street to gawp at one of her coats.But what Dalton does, when it’s really good, rises above the fuss and muss of many of her competitors. It did for Fall, where she looked to Shetland: home of the sweaters, if not of the designer herself. Although apparently she likes to visit, and likes the men she finds there. This collection was an ode to the fisherman, the farmhand, the stable boy—only it didn’t wind up camp or theatrical, but rather earthy and real, from hob-nailed boots to ruddied cheeks (the latter courtesy of MAC Cosmetics).As befits a collection dedicated to Shetland, the knitwear, intricate but not overpowering, was a strong point, as was the color palette. That’s all Dalton’s own: A memorable clashing look was a cerise shirt with oversize plaid jacket padded like a life vest, paired against a generous swathe of camel.Do they get camels in Shetland? Maybe not. They get sheep, whose markings became digital prints and whose wool was used by famed British craft knitters John Smedley to create merino polo-necks and long johns. They also get lots of rain—Dalton lacquered jerseys and used showerproof velour, a fabric that I’d never heard of either.I suspect Dalton is a covert sartorial fetishist. I don’t mean she’s into straps and whips, but rather the more interesting stuff, like an obsession with painstaking tweaks and details (dropping shoulders almost infinitesimally, widening tailoring a touch) or a fixation on those odd materials. Many look tricky to work with—tailoring that laminated jersey must be about as simple as sewing together garbage bags, say—but it’s a mark of Dalton’s proficiency that it wound up seeming easy to wear. The same couldn’t be said of teddy-bear fur, fluffed into sweatshirts (okay) and pants (not so).
The latter called to mind a line in the great 1994 Isaac Mizrahi documentaryUnzipped, when Mizrahi sensibly nixes a faux-fur jumpsuit with the immortal line: “It’s about women not wanting to look like cows, I guess.”Guess what? Men don’t want to either. They shoot cows in Shetland, don’t they?
9 January 2016
The Style Council's cover of the house classic "Promised Land" during the finale of the Lou Dalton show perfectly captured what the designer called the "euphoria" of the Hacienda scene in Manchester around 1989 to 1992. She said she wanted to revisit that positive moment and make it her own, but just like the song itself, you wondered if perhaps the collection had a melancholy tinge. Youth just can't be relived—or can it? Dalton said she remembered how sexy the guys were during the era and wanted to make her own Dalton-esque version of the Happy Mondays and the Mancunian scene. Some things were delightfully trippy, like a distorted madras check in vivid orange and blue, but the general feel was more of appropriating utilitywear for the good times. Cargo pants (and shorts) were out in force, while plastic macs added a transparent layer over the trippiness."I wanted it to be sophisticated and raw," Dalton explained after the presentation. "I lived through that time." It was clearly a very personal show, and it was all the better for it. The collection centered on Harrington jackets, which came in several iterations, often with bellows pockets, sometimes with diagonal, supersize ones. The Prince of Wales check coats were lightweight, silk-like, and with a clear A-line cut. But it was how Dalton first took familiar patterns and classic menswear details and colors and turned them into something very now that impressed the most. This could have been a nostalgic collection; instead it felt life-affirming and uplifting, proving that while youth sooner or later fades, the fun times are here to stay.
13 June 2015
Yohji Yamamoto has often mentioned how fabric speaks to him. Lou Dalton, too, seems like a designer who is in constant conversation with her materials, and also with the details in her collections. Take, for example, the ribbons attached to the collection's zippers, putting these functional necessities into relief, rather than obscuring them. Or the oversize pockets with heavy topstitching. A dusty-pink cashmere/wool mix used on sweaters and pants had been brushed and on the reverse had a gray, molten effect. It all looked precise.The collection was triggered by an old photo of Dalton's dad dressed in a boiler suit, and sure enough there were versions of it, both in dark check and classic MA1 nylon. That photo and Dalton's "feeling a bit maudlin," as she put it backstage, spawned a looking-back at the 1960s (she mentioned the Apollo project andThunderbirdscartoon strips). The garments didn't have a need for storytelling—the clothes spoke loud enough themselves. Tapered, cropped trousers had been given width and they felt on point—fresh against most men's slimmer choices. Cargo pockets were positioned askew. Inner pockets on coats and jackets peeked out, rendered in a different color and material than the outerwear itself.The focus on functionality is a recurring theme for Dalton, who here created a sense that garments were in a state of flux, with detachable arms transforming jackets into gilets, or two-in-one coats with the inner coat protruding underneath the outer one. She said that she wanted to give men a sense of control, to expose the interior, their sensitive side. It all looked desirable and wearable, and the collection also fit into men's fetishizing of the functional (what else can you do when toiling away in an office?). It's a thoroughly modern fetish and in a way, a paradoxical one; but it’s this lack of real necessity that makes these clothes fashionable.
10 January 2015
There wasn't a narrative in the Lou Dalton show this season, at least not in the way she has previously referenced and taken inspiration from farmhands and RAF air base youngsters. Instead, she declared control—of her brand, her design, and her vision of the modern man.Dalton emphasized her background in tailoring with sharp trousers and suit jackets in pink jacquard, but added references to motorcycle gear, seen on pieces like a coral-red top with heat-sealed patches in a pattern borrowed from the biker world. The collection was very clearly articulated—missing a bit of adventure, perhaps—but effectively nailing the current mix of sportswear and male tailoring.While the opening look was an all-white shorts suit (possibly a kind of tabula rasa), a closer peek revealed a camouflage relief, a detail that heralded the collection's obsession with protection and protective gear. The shoes—made in collaboration with Grenson for the second season running—took inspiration from builders' shoes, with heavy, jagged Vibram soles, but they were feminized with lacing from ghillies, a kind of dancing shoe used in Ireland and Scotland."I come from a traditional background," Dalton said backstage after the show. "I wanted to hone in on that, but update it. There's a military undertone in the collection, but not in a traditional sense. I wanted it to feel fresh, but still be masculine." In many ways this traditional masculinity is fading away in our modern society (how many farmhands do you know?), and Dalton is a designer who seeks to salvage ideas that are worth preserving, even in a contemporary man's wardrobe. She does this knowing that the first rule of menswear is that God is in the details. A technical gray coat, therefore, came with pockets lifted from a shooting vest and detachable sleeves. A navy honeycomb mesh vest was cut away in the back, and suit jackets were adjustable in the back as well, for a more controlled look. It struck just the right note between commercial and twisted.Yet all this control at some points made one long for something slightly wilder. The "distorted petals" of the knitwear added that element, providing what Dalton called "a feminine balance" but also a feeling of energy and lust for life. Modern man could do with more of that.
14 June 2014
Lou Dalton's peers could envy her upbringing. She has mined her country roots for material season in and season out: Last Spring, adapting the RAF uniforms she spotted as a child at a nearby base; this Fall, updating the garb she saw on the hired hands on her family farm. Dalton's aesthetic is never far from workmanlike, so inspiration and execution dovetailed nicely. From the opening look—a suit of sorts, with matching wide-wale cord overshirt and oversize, cuffed trousers—the collection had the rode-hard-and-put-away look of real muck-about clothes. (What passed for a three-piece suit, somewhat truer to the name, were matching track pants, a blazer, and a zip-up shirt in houndstooth wool, suggesting a farm lad's idea of sophistication, with a chavvy edge that was a world away from Savile Row. The effect was oddly charming.) Heavy denim was bleached to the edge of blankness and shown with reversed Fair Isle sweaters and Western jackets. So far, so cowshed. But Dalton stressed that this wasn't historical re-creation. "I don't want it to be too heritage," she said, a salient point in a London that's at least half obsessed with its archives. (The other half, it seems, is fixated on obliterating any connection to them.) So she did one of those denim looks in baby-doll pink, and worked with the traditional English shoemaker Grenson on thick-soled lace-up boots nicer than those you'd find in the stables.Though arguably distilled with a slightlytoolaserlike focus, the collection suggested a profitable way to both embrace and update history. It was, Dalton said backstage after the show, deeply personal. "My uncle gave up grammar school to work my grandmother's farm," she explained. But to her credit, these clothes wouldn't seem to require that level of commitment.
5 January 2014
"In Shropshire, where I grew up, there was an army camp near us," Lou Dalton recalled after her season-opening show at London's menswear collections. "Every season all these kids would turn up, and two years later they'd be gone." Dalton makes it a sort of mission to take the bully pulpit for the displaced and the rootless. It gives an odd, slightly mournful resonance to her collections. Last season she was fighting for the men threatened by the interests of ruthless business; today, taking up the cause of the lost boys of the armed forces, conscripted to roam. Here she drew on the signs and symbols of Royal Air Force pilots—the squadron codes painted on their planes, the aviators' watches that they wore, re-created with G-Shock—but turned them all inside out, often literally. Jackets were worn reversed, their insides printed with RAF insignias. They had a lived-in, fought-in patina, with their crumpled-looking fabrics and colors she called "tea-stained."All this can feel like heavy weather for a collection based so strongly on sportswear: Bermudas, jean jackets, hooded sweatshirts (even if they're occasionally worn as gilets). It made you grateful and gladdened, much as her air force men would have been, for the pieces that gave a frisson of family and home, like an unexpectedly cozy series of jacquard popovers and shorts.
15 June 2013
American oil firm sends company brass to Scotland to buy up a little village for the site of a refinery. That's the plot of Bill Forsyth's 1983 flickLocal Hero,and the less-than-likely scenario imagined by Lou Dalton's Fall collection. But Dalton's long-term boyfriend works for British Petroleum, and she's spent time herself in Scotland, sourcing wool. So, actually, the whole had a salutary, memoir effect. "It felt very personal," Dalton said after the show, "because of my relationship with my man and my time in Shetland." The personal connection may have contributed to the strength of this solid collection, though it may also have kept it to a less larky note than some in the past.The meeting of city and country was expressed in tailoring-meets-workwear, and natural-materials-meet-man-made: smart two-button woolen jackets with pockets and panels in nylon, fuzzy knits coated to oily effect. Take the theme to its logical conclusion, and naturally, a pair of petroleum cargos and a slicker were on hand to suggest spills. But unusual as the inspiration may have been, the collection kept its footing on terra firma, even in a fashion city where "weird" is often translated as "wonderful." Maybe that's why the most trad-leaning tartans packed the most punch.
6 January 2013