Peter Jensen (Q8871)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Peter Jensen is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Peter Jensen |
Peter Jensen is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Typically, Peter Jensen will fix on movies, literature, or music to arrive at his muse of the season. This time around, she hailed from far closer to home, less a product of his aesthetic imagination than a loved and much-admired reality.“Kasja and I used to share a studio and she's done my graphics forever. She was part of the group Orbek. Her other work has included Margiela’s Line 6 back when Margiela was there, Daft Punk, The Cardigans, and so much else that I can’t remember it all. As I started sketching out this collection, I realized this is her; this is Kasja—right down to the clogs.”Without ever having met Kasja, this collection led you to envisage a warm soul steeped in disco hygge. Dresses in cotton on one side and sequin on the other—which Jensen said were literally two fully-made dresses sliced in two and then mismatched—were half house dress, half house party. Workwear suits and jackets in boiled, blue-striped cotton drill had a softened, lived in patina. A blue lambswool sweater crocheted with a halo of shivering blue thread looked duster-soft and demanded snuggle. The “Men With Their Big Shoes” phrase was taken from Shirley Jackson’s tale of Sisyphean domesticity. Homely and pragmatic, but never humorless in its comfort, this collection was perhaps best encapsulated by its fabulous sequinned clogs.
20 February 2018
Incontrovertibly fabulous as she was—and forever remains in her movies—the reason that Sandy Dennis is the first muse Peter Jensen has ever dedicated two consecutive collections to is thanks to something else entirely. He reported that retailers had suggested he segue his Resort collections into his Spring, the better to keep the narrative of his rail flowing.Thus, this second bite at Dennis carried over a few pieces from the last, such as a curved-hem split skirt recast from check into khaki cotton. Yet this sequel pushed the story forward, too. A double-fronted polka dot dress in seersucker allowed the wearer to style it in two ways, either as a shift or with the garment hanging off. A skirt and vest fronted with a froth of organdy strips on a bib of tulle, and panelled separates in colorful blasts of double viscose crepe were more abandonedly uptown than anything in Jensen’s original, but still underscored by versatile workwear-inspired pieces such as a carpenter’s coat, pants, and smocks in fine drill or brushed cotton. His asides to Dennis were sometimes explicitly literal—the T-shirts featuring the profile of Dennis’s hair inWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?or her oft repeated phrase in it, “Oh. My. God.”—and sometimes more abstracted: A goody was the micro-dimple seersucker Nehru-collar shirt featuring a flap at the right shoulder, meant to echo the handkerchief she waves in the same movie. As well asWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Jensen said he’d thought hard about Dennis inUp the Down Staircase(schoolteacher-ly regal) andThat Cold Day in the Park(twisted spinster). Like the films whose star it referenced, this was a collection that totally merited the second, redeveloped viewing the retailers cannily called for.
15 September 2017
In the East London studio hosting his lookbook shoot, Peter Jensen airily explained that because this collection—kind of—represents his 15th anniversary, he had decided to go for a greatest hits retrospective this season. So instead of one muse, as per usual, the racks around us were milling with muses, beautifully illustrated by Julie Verhoeven. “Good God!” Jensen answered defeatedly when asked for the precise muse count. Whatever the number, it included Nina Simone, Nancy Mitford, Mink Stole, Jodie Foster, and Peggy Guggenheim. Some of these past collection catalysts, said Jensen, had even been in touch: “Sissy Spacek wrote us a lovely email.” Spacek et al.’s Verhoeven portraits stared forth from mustard-framed contact sheet prints. They popped up on a sweatshirt or two and were seen on socks or in stitching on T-shirts incorporating embroidery hoops. Other Jensen buttons pressed here included wide and volumized micro-cord dresses and suiting with softly folded bow details at the collar. A lovely silk skirt in yellow with an inward dimple on the hip came revived from a 2009 collection dedicated to Jensen’s aunt Jytte, who ran a chip shop and a cab office in Greenland. A headphone brooch in black velvet whose cord was a string of pearls; chunky felt-effect coats and knits in teal, mustard, green, the palest baby blue, and washed-out pastels; and Jensen’s rabbit logo—eccentrically joined this season by SpongeBob SquarePants in a capsule with Nickelodeon—combined in distillation of this designer’s playfully sideways aesthetic.
20 February 2017
“You can imagine a dinner party where she would ignore everyone, then go into the garden to feed lobster to her roses,” saysPeter Jensenof his Spring 2017 muse, the bizarre but brilliant Lady Rhoda Birley. The late Irish beauty was the wife of the prolific portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley, and certainly one of the more eccentric British horticulturalists (yes, she actually did supplant compost with lovingly prepared lobster thermidor). “There’s this whole group of British women who lived a very free lifestyle,” explains Jensen. “They just read, gardened, drank cocktails, and had love affairs with everyone. It was wonderful.”The collection started coming together when Jensen happened upon a photograph of Birley shot in the garden of Charleston Manor, the family home in Sussex. A regular reference of photographerTim Walker, it shows her standing astride a bed of blooms, looking rather like the British version of Grey Gardens. The painter and arts patron has certainly brought out a softer, more romantic spirit in Jensen, who has created an unusually wistful series of looks. There are oversize gingham smocks, some worn over earthy-hued cropped corduroy trousers, and bucolic scenes that are cast into popping prints on knits and dresses—all, rather charmingly, worn with Rhoda’s trademark headscarves and towering straw hats. Though she was the mother of Maxime de la Falaise and Annabel’s founder, Mark Birley, it’s Rhoda’s botanical brilliance that most attracted Jensen. “I love that whole dirt-under-your-fingernails thing,” says the designer, who has spent the summer restoring the garden of his own new Leyton home. “It’s so calming, and good for the brain. It takes you to another place. We should all be doing it.” And as the models took their places among the gladioli that decorated the set—a glass-free greenhouse that had been specially transposed from a South London back garden into a Regency room in the ICA—one couldn’t help but want to join him there.
17 September 2016
Peggy Guggenheim is the eccentric art world muse inspiring Peter Jensen’s Fall 2016 presentation yesterday. Fittingly, the Danish designer unveiled a tribute to the indomitable figure he called “the grand dame of oddness” in the elegant Nash Room of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. While Jensen may not yet have seenPeggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, a recent documentary on Guggenheim’s life, he was nonetheless captivated by a vision of a twilight-years Peggy holding court in her Venetian palazzo, Bellini in hand. “She was a hard, independent woman who wanted to get away from that American heiress mold,” Jensen said. And then, with a glint in his eye: “Did you know she had more than a thousand lovers throughout her life, married and unmarried? She didn't mind. This was a woman who did whatever she wanted to do.”It was this liberated spirit that left a lasting impression on the designer, in an arty presentation that saw models perched on painted podiums in clothes that channeled Guggenheim's glamour in an eminently wearable way. He traded her giant furs for cotton and wool blend leopard prints on cover-ups that resembled frilled lab coats. It’s a little harder to imagine Guggenheim in the corduroy jumpsuits and A-line skirts he showed, but the fishnet tights that she liked to team with sensible shoes and Chanel suits were replicated and paired with black Converse. Jensen occasionally covered the Chucks with the Perspex overshoes Venetian visitors habitually wear to preserve their footwear from murky canal waters.What came through strongest was the influence of Alexander Calder’s kinetic art (still, incidentally, on view at Tate Modern). It was there in the intense color-blocked sweaters, in the delicate spiral-cut spheres on skirting, and in the miniature mobile earrings made by Becca Hulbert mimicking those that Calder once created for Peggy Guggenheim. Jensen’s true standout, however, came in the form of the artist smocks with double-layered crepe de Chine skirts, worn with knitted tank tops. Altogether, it made for a fun, creative mood that was right in step with the setting. And a clue to Jensen’s next season muse perhaps lies in the lower rooms of the gallery, where the bright, cheery ceramics of yet another grande dame of the American art world, Betty Woodman, are on display.
21 February 2016
The Martini-drinking Los Angeles stylist Shirley Kurata was the driving force behindPeter Jensen’s Spring 2016 show today. Jensen marked his 16th year in fashion and a return to the official London schedule with a no-holds-barred homage to Kurata’s Pop Art sensibility. Inspiration certainly struck from close quarters this season. The eclectic stylist, who has recently been responsible for the red carpet reinvention of Lena Dunham, has worked on Jensen’s shows for some five years, after the pair hit it off atVogue’s Fashion’s Night Out in New York City.Jensen’s enduring affection for a ’60s silhouette held fast this season. It was embodied here in a “mod secretary” look that meshed with what he explained as “a vintage ’80s vibe.” This came through first and foremost in the fabrication—with cream skirt suits and shift dresses in toweling (a throwback to the designer’s time living in Hollywood, that motherland of the velour tracksuit), but also in the cacti-stitched polo shirts. The seasonless standouts were the pretty camera-print dresses worn over shirting—and the heavily sequined white socks and visors that finished every look. Jensen took the idea of the muse to its outer reaches both with the sweater that read “Shirley, Shirley, Shirley” and the step-and-repeat print comprised of hundreds of faceless Shirleys. This homage to the Tinseltown stylist was always going to have an emphasis on fun.
21 September 2015
When Peter Jensen launched his business in 2001, he had no idea that his dream girls were in a movie theater near him. That was the year Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson appeared as Enid and Rebecca inGhost World.It wasn’t until three months ago that the designer finally saw the film and realized how perfectly Enid and Rebecca embodied the innocent yet knowing quality that has always made the Jensen girl so quietly winning. Andthosegirls got him thinking about howhisgirl might have changed with time. If his collection for Resort 2016 was any indication, the answer seems to be not much. Her naive charm remains unsullied by experience. But over the years she has acquired supreme confidence in her style, and Jensen refracted that very effectively through the sophisticated lens of everything he himself has learned since 2001. With a finely honed 18-look edit, he spun a polished story out of pastel pinks and blues, tomboyish sweats and tees, ruffled boy/girl polos and capris, drop-waisted jersey dresses, and twisted jacquards in sunflower yellow with a subtle sheen of Lurex. He drew a swirly ghost print for the simple smock silhouette that is his best-seller, but it’ll likely be the ice cream cone motif (Enid and Rebecca spent days in a diner) that will be the collection’s grabbiest. That suits the sweetness that is Jensen’s calling card.Still,Ghost Worldwas a place with a dark edge, and there’s always a tang of the sour in Jensen’s sweet. A ghost-printed crepe de chine dress with sleeves to the elbow spoke to Sherilyn Fenn inTwin Peaks.Let’s hope she’s listening.
29 May 2015
Peter Jensen's new muse is Julia Fodor, aka living legend of London nightlife Princess Julia. She's as typically deadpan as ever about the role, but her own distinctive femme fatale style—a bit of sparkle, a bit of vintage, a veil or two—sits well with the increasing sophistication of Jensen's signature quirk. Their worlds meshed beautifully in a dressy bouclé coat in a rich shade of pumpkin, with a tulle-lined skirt to match.Julia took on her title during the first heady flush of punk in the late '70s. Jensen reminded us of those days with a grabby graphic of Jayne County's eyes printed on a shift dress and embroidered on a sweatshirt. There were also prints of lipstick stains and perfume bottles on prim white blouses. The clash of style and content was a clever comment on Julia's style.That's always been the distinctive thing about her look. It's very glamorous, but it's veryproper.Which rather defined Jensen's collection. A piecrust collar? Positively pilgrim. But proper can be sly, too, like the Peter Pan-collar dress in gold lamé, all covered up until it turned to reveal a saucy slit right up the back. There was a potentially incongruous outbreak of casual sportiness in a look with a sweater knotted round the waist (Julia does yoga), except the dress was, once again, cut from lamé, and the sweater was actually a trompe l'oeil effect. Jensen did the same thing with a strapless cocktail dress. Also strapless was a jumpsuit in ivory crepe. "I'd like a wedding dress," Julia told Jensen. So that's what he gave her. Muse's prerogative.
21 February 2015
Peter Jensen's elevation of eccentric elegance reached an oddly logical way station with his Pre-Fall collection: the masked Black and White Ball hosted by Truman Capote at New York's Plaza Hotel on November 28, 1966. Jensen has always had a thing for the '60s anyway, but "the chicness and exclusivity" of the ball hold a special resonance for him. "Those things don't exist anymore," he noted, "because people are obsessed with almond milk and Kardashians."Such unusual analogies come easily to Jensen, in the same way that his last collection could be inspired by thePeanutsgang and this one by Capote. Maybe only he can make sense of such idiosyncratic progressions, but what the rest of us see is a designer who has steadily refined his aesthetic until it has reached, with his latest effort, a new peak of polish, without compromising any of the quirk that has always made his clothes so winning.The presiding sprite of Pre-Fall was '60s model Penelope Tree, muse of David Bailey and Diane Arbus. Here, she was evoked in girlish silhouettes like an abbreviated smock printed tone-on-tone with daisies, a corseted onesie in the puppy-tooth-patterned fabric from which chef's uniforms are cut, and a crepe de chine shift printed with Jensen's big-eared bunny logo. A gray jumper and bias-cut skirt set were inspired by Tree's school uniform. Some of the models sported a version of the mask she wore to the Black and White Ball; others were wearing copies of the bunny mask that Candice Bergen wore that night. A blouse printed with swans was an obvious reference to the coterie of high-society women whom Capote called his Swans. An outfit consisting of trapeze top and pencil skirt had the distinctly dressy edge of such women's wardrobes. So did the patrician color palette—black, white, pink, navy—and the bows on everything, though Jensen claimed he'd borrowed that detail from Patty Hearst's wedding dress. The Plaza itself was abstracted as a print for a pair of pants.One last detail: Jensen's models were members of a professional tap-dancing troupe, who hoofed gamely through the presentation. "I was imagining the glamorous guests at the Black and White Ball tap dancing behind closed doors, smoking furiously," the designer said by way of explanation. Yes, that makes perfect sense.
16 December 2014